Monday: Hili dialogue

August 4, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Monday, August 4, 2025, and National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day.

Here is a ranking of 16 store-bought chocolate chip cookies. The five worst are (in order from worst to less worse):

Mightylicious
Keebler’s Chips Deluxe
Great Value
Homestyle
Grandma’s

And the five best, starting with the best and going down:

Chips Ahoy! (BEST ONE)
Famous Amos
Newman’s Own
Pepperidge Farm Farmhouse
Cybele’s Free To Eat

These were invented as recent as 1938; I much prefer the soft ones, preferably freshly baked. Some history:

The most notable chocolate chip cookie recipe was invented by American chef Ruth Graves Wakefield in 1938. She invented the recipe during the period when she owned the Toll House Inn, in Whitman, Massachusetts. In this era, the Toll House Inn was a popular restaurant that featured home cooking. A myth holds that she accidentally developed the cookie, and that she expected the chocolate chunks would melt, making chocolate cookies. That is not the case; Wakefield stated that she deliberately invented the cookie. She said, “We had been serving a thin butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream. Everybody seemed to love it, but I was trying to give them something different. So I came up with Toll House cookie.”

Andrew6111, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National White Wine Day and Assistance D*g Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*David French has a NYT column in which he calls out Israel for engineering a humanitarian crisis in Gaza and, what’s more constructive, offers a solution to the crisis. (Bolding is his.)

I know that Israel had the right under international law to destroy Hamas’s military and to remove Hamas from power after the massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7. In other words, Israel had the right to respond to a terrorist force like Hamas the way the United States and its allies responded to a terrorist force like ISIS after ISIS launched its terrorist campaign across the Middle East and across Europe.

So, yes, I consider myself a friend of Israel. But now its friends need to stage an intervention. The Israeli government has gone too far. It has engineered a staggering humanitarian crisis, and that crisis is both a moral atrocity and a long-term threat to Israel itself.

Civilian casualties were inevitable when Israel responded to Hamas, but the suffering of Palestinian civilians is far beyond the bounds of military necessity. The people of Gaza, already grieving the loss of thousands of children, now face a famine — and children once again will bear the brunt of the pain.

French’s evidence for this crisis is largely a NYT report last week, and while I’m dubious about the NYT’s slant against Israel, I have not blinded myself to the possibility that yes, Israel has made some mistakes in how it conducted the war—most notably in not taking care of the civilian population in areas it occupies. At any rate, here’s French’s accusation and solution:

The dominant power in Gaza is Israel, not Hamas, and Israel, not Hamas, is the only entity with both the power to control aid distribution and the ability to obtain and distribute aid in the Gaza Strip. There is no way for Gazans to feed themselves. They are utterly dependent on Israel, and Israel removed the United Nations from the aid distribution network without replacing it with an effective alternative.

. . .So why is Israel giving Hamas what it wants?

Hamas should lay down its arms. It should release every hostage. But Hamas’s war crimes — including its murders, its hostage taking and its concealment among civilians and civilian buildings — do not relieve Israel of its own moral and legal obligations.

There has always been a better way to defeat Hamas, and no one knows this better than veterans of the Iraq war. We’ve watched Israel make the same mistakes we made early in the war, when we repeatedly attacked and destroyed terrorist cells but the terrorists always came back.

We played a deadly and destructive version of Whac-a-Mole, reducing neighborhoods and streets to ruin, only to bomb the rubble weeks and months later when Al Qaeda returned. The only way to stop the cycle was to seize ground, hold it and protect and secure the civilian population until we could hand control over to local authorities.

That approach has a double virtue. It’s not just kinder to civilians; it’s far more effective militarily. I’m not just saying this. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of American forces in Iraq during the surge — when we turned the tide of the Iraq war in part by protecting the Iraqi population — has made this argument over and over and over again since Oct. 7.

My one beef with this is who are the “local authorities” that Israel is supposed to let rule? It would have to be either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. The PA is a no-go because Hamas won’t let it rule, and letting Hamas have Gaza back is, of course, a recipe for terror.  And so I largely agree with French’s conclusion:

One of the most frustrating aspects of our political discourse is the expectation that once you’re identified on a side, you are somehow betraying your side if you speak up when it goes terribly wrong. Partisans are used to ignoring their opponents, but there might be a chance they will listen to their friends.

Israel’s friends must speak with one voice: End the famine in Gaza. Drop any talk of annexation. Protect the civilian population.

Defeating Hamas does not require starving a single child.

I say “largely” because how can we defeat Hamas without hurting civilians, since the former is embedded among the latter?But I add that yes, Israel should be ensuring distribution of food and humanitarian aid to civilians in areas that it occupies.  It’s just that it’s hard to determine the extent to which that’s happening.

*I am a bit disturbed, though, at people going after Israel and basically forgetting the war crimes committed by Hamas, including not only kidnapping but killing hostages. This week there was another distressing video: one of an Israeli hostage, very emaciated, forced to dig what seems to be his own grave.

Emaciated and pale, Evyatar David, a 24-year-old Israeli hostage, was filmed by his Hamas captors digging his own grave in a cramped underground tunnel, one of a series of videos that Palestinian militants have released in recent days of emaciated Israeli hostages.

David and another hostage, 21-year-old Rom Braslavski, also shown emaciated and weak, beg to be freed in the videos, warning that their deaths are near. They criticize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for ignoring their plight.

The U.S.-designated terrorist group released the videos as talks with Israel for a temporary cease-fire broke down last week, and as international pressure rises on Israel to end the war. Gaza has been gripped by a hunger crisis that has spurred several Western allies, including the U.K. and France, to pledge to recognize a Palestinian state.

The videos have shocked and enraged Israelis. Stills from the video of David ran on every front page and are fueling calls for the government to strike a deal with Hamas for the release of all the remaining hostages.

Ofir Braslavski, father of Rom Braslavski, speaking Saturday night at a rally in Tel Aviv for the hostages, asked Netanyahu to “end the war and bring everyone here.”

“Two days ago, I saw my son—and I didn’t recognize him. My Rom is hungry for bread, thirsty for water, sick, physically broken and mentally shattered,” Braslavski said. “I address you, Mr. Prime Minister: Enough!”

Here’s are some shots of David from the Hamas propaganda video:

It sounds callous of me to say so, but when the hostages were taken, I immediately thought that, psychologically, we should regard them all as doomed. I of course didn’t wish for that, but getting them back may in the end lead to more deaths of Israeli and Western civilians, for it would involve the release of many Palestinian prisoners in eschange. Remember that Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas who engineered the October 7, video, was one of 1,027 Palestinian terrorists released in exchange for a single Israeli soldier. Israel got one life back, but then lost 1,200 people because of that.

*This is about as unethical as the Trump administration gets: having ICE snatch up and try to deport Afghanis who helped the U.S. in our war effort there, and then given refuge in America, as they should have been. But it didn’t matter to ICE.

One former interpreter for U.S. forces in Afghanistan was detained by immigration agents in Connecticut last month after he showed up for a routine green card appointment. A second was arrested in June, just minutes after attending his first asylum hearing in San Diego.

As the administration seeks to fulfill President Donald Trump’s pledge to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, attorneys for the men say their clients — Afghans who fear retribution from the Taliban for their work assisting the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan — have found themselves in the crosshairs of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The attorneys provided The Washington Post with military contracts and certificates, asylum and visa applications, recommendation letters and other records that described both men’s work on behalf of U.S. forces during the war.

After Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021, President Joe Biden’s administration moved to resettle Afghans who had worked for the U.S. government through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program, which grants lawful permanent resident status and a pathway to U.S. citizenship. As of April, about 25,000 Afghans had received an SIV, and another 160,000 had pending applications, said Adam Bates, an attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Program who analyzed State Department data.

But the Trump administration is rolling back programs created to assist more than 250,000 Afghans — including the allies who worked for U.S. forces and other refugees who fled after the Taliban takeover. And while administration officials say SIV processing will continue, advocates for Afghans who served with U.S. troops fear the curtailment of programs they depend on, along with Trump’s ambitious deportation plan, jeopardizes those still vying for SIV protection.

Let those people go! They were legally admitted, and certainly those who helped U.S. troops must be allowed to stay permanently, for fear of what they’d face were they returned to their home country.

*This is not a good time for Democrats. According to the AP, an AP/NORC poll showed that Democrats are depressed about their party, much more so than are Republicans. (But is that a surprise?):

Many Democrats see their political party as “weak” or “ineffective,” according to a poll that finds considerable pessimism within Democratic ranks. Republicans are more complimentary of their party, although a small but significant share describe the GOP as “greedy” or say it is generally “bad.”

The poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in July reveals warning signs for both major U.S. parties as the political focus shifts to elections in New Jersey and Virginia this fall and the midterm contests next year.

Respondents were asked to share the first word or phrase that came to mind when they thought of the Republican and Democratic parties. Answers were then sorted into broad categories, including negative and positive attributes. Overall, U.S. adults held a dim view of both parties, with about 4 in 10 using negative attributes, including words such as “dishonest” or “stupid.”

But nearly nine months after Republican Donald Trump won a second presidential term, Democrats appear to be harboring more resentment about the state of their party than do Republicans. Democrats were likelier to describe their own party negatively than Republicans. Republicans were about twice as likely to describe their own party positively.

. . .Overall, roughly one-third of Democrats described their party negatively in the open-ended question.

About 15% described it using words like “weak,” or “apathetic,” while an additional 10% believe it is broadly “ineffective” or “disorganized.”

Only about 2 in 10 Democrats described their party positively, with roughly 1 in 10 saying it is “empathetic,” or “inclusive.” An additional 1 in 10 used more general positive descriptors.

Only 20% of Democrats describe their party positively? That’s depressing! But I’m a Democrat and I’m depressed, too, for we lack leadership, and our party is riven with disputes between left-centrists (of which I’m one) and “progressives,” who I think helped us lose the last election.  So it goes.

*I’ve always wanted to go to Bali, especially Ubud, which I’m told is beautiful. Or “was” beautiful, as I now hear it’s been taken over by tourists. And now the resident macaques of its “Monkey Forest” have begun stealing valuables from tourists, only returning them when they get a treat of high value. Oy! (h/t Debra):

On the southern tip of the Indonesian vacation hot spot known for its beaches, tourists flock to Uluwatu Temple for traditional fire dance shows and panoramic views at sunset with the Indian Ocean crashing below. The Balinese Hindu site dates back to at least the 11th century and the roughly 600 monkeys that inhabit it are considered by locals to be sacred guardians of the temple.

Primate researchers have found that the macaques steal belongings to use as currency to trade with humans for food. Some monkeys can distinguish between objects we highly value (smartphones, prescription glasses, wallets) and those we don’t (hats, flip flops, hair clips)—and will barter accordingly, according to a University of Lethbridge team that spent years filming the macaques and analyzing hundreds of hours of footage.

In other words, the monkeys have “unprecedented economic decision-making processes,” the researchers wrote in a 2021 academic paper. Talk about monkey business.

When Hammé arrived at the temple with his wife, his tour guide handed him a stick, saying he would need it to fend off the monkeys.

“I said, ‘What do you mean?’” recalled Hammé, 64. “I thought he was giving me a stick because he thought I was too old.”

The stick was no use. While Hammé was admiring the vista, a monkey jumped on his back, snatched his favorite sunglasses off his face and vanished.

He found it in a tree playing with his sunglasses. A different tour guide handed him some Oreos and Hammé waved the cookies at the thief. It jumped down, grabbed the Oreos and tossed the sunglasses. They were bent.

“I didn’t expect that the monkeys would be operating like a gang taking everything,” he said. “It was like—have you seen ‘Oliver Twist’?”

Many cases require the help of the temple’s monkey handlers, called “pawang,” who negotiate with the furry hostage-takers. They offer fruits such as bananas, mangos, rambutan and mangosteen in exchange for the stolen items. In rare cases, they use raw chicken eggs, highly coveted by the monkeys.

Ketut Ariana, a 52-year-old who has been working for the temple as a monkey handler for two decades, said the animals steal dozens of items a week, including five to 10 smartphones a day.

. . .One of those victims was Taylor Utley, 36, from Louisville, Ky., who visited Uluwatu Temple last year on a wellness retreat for women. While she was walking along the cliff, a monkey grabbed her phone out of her hand and hopped onto the ledge of a barrier separating the walkway from the cliff’s edge. She searched her bag for anything that could catch the monkey’s eye. It wasn’t interested in her scarf, so it began to scurry further down the ledge.

That’s when a handler tossed the monkey a bag of fruit. The monkey held on to the phone. The handler gave it another bag, then another, and another. Finally, when the monkey couldn’t hold all the fruit, it dropped the phone.

Utley was relieved, but she and the other women had enough. They left without seeing the fire dance show.

“I was taken aback,” she said. “It’s like a criminal enterprise of monkeys.”

Here’s an Attenborough video from “Planet Earth” on “The Bartering Monkeys of Bali”. It’s fricking hilarious!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili continues to document the activities of Andrzej (“The Administrator”).  It is a sad dialogue. . . .

Hili: The Administrator is cleaning out the Augean stables. He grumbles that it can’t be done in a single day, because he’s no Hercules. Says that as a mere mortal, he needs a month. The first wave caused chaos – papers everywhere. He won’t let anyone touch either his desk or Małgorzata’s. He’s constantly searching through piles of scattered printouts, digging through photographs. He writes notes on colorful sticky pads, then later frantically looks for them. I often jump onto his lap and try to figure out what’s going on. I feel lost in all of this.

In Polish:

Hili: Administrator czyści stajnię Augiasza. Marudzi, że w ciągu jednego dnia to się nie da zrobić, bo nie jest Heraklesem. Mówi, że jako zwykły śmiertelnik potrzebuje miesiąca. Pierwsza fala spowodowała zamieszanie, wszędzie pełno papierów. Nikomu nie pozwala dotykać ani swojego biurka, ani Małgorzaty biurka. Ciągle czegoś szuka w stertach powyciąganych wydruków, Grzebie w fotografiach. Robi notatki na kolorowych karteczkach, których potem gorączkowo szuka. Często wskakuję mu na kolana i próbuję się zorientować, co się dzieje. Czuję się zgubiona w tym wszystkim.     

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

From Jesus of the Day:

From Things With Faces, a Godzilla tissue:

From Apollo Kitty Kat:

Masih is quiet, so here’s something retweeted by J. K. Rowling:

From Luana, one reason why France suspended its policy of giving asylum to all refugees from Gaza (read the whole thing):

From Barry, a melanistic tiger:

From Malcolm; girl finds temporarily lost puppy:

One from my feed:

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

Finally, two from Matthew.  First, a duck family:

Big family of blue-winged teals out for a cruise #birds

— Janet Hill (@saskajanet.bsky.social) 2025-08-03T14:13:08.457Z

A humpback buffet:

Five humpbacks lunge feed in unison. This is not the famous “bubble net” feeding behavior practiced by another population, but they’re definitely working together. 🦑

— Jon Robinson (@jonr1183.bsky.social) 2025-08-03T00:07:19.022Z

31 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    Appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another, telling people that order and security will be restored if it weren’t for those who don’t look like us or don’t sound like us or don’t pray like we do, that’s an old playbook. It’s as old as time. And in a healthy democracy it doesn’t work. Our antibodies kick in, and people of goodwill from across the political spectrum call out the bigots and the fearmongers, and work to compromise and get things done and promote the better angels of our nature. -Barack Obama, 44th US President (b. 4 Aug 1961)

    1. Since I dropped my subscriptions (and attention) to any and all national-level media such as nyt, wapo, msnbc, network news, tfp, I pretty much exist in a vacuum other than what weit and its readers call to my attention. I love President Obama’s sentiments in this quotation. Does anyone of national consequence still talk like that in 2025?

    2. Happy Birthday President Obama! And since he still has lovely Michelle, he won’t need to speculate like the character in a particular Beatles song. 😉

      And thanks for the astute quote…

    3. I disagree. I think that order and security will be largely restored when those who believe that the path to paradise is to kill infidels (and especially Jews and gays) are no more, or at least confined to their own goateffistans.

      Here in Australia we recently were treated to the spectacle of 90,000 people marching for Hamas across the iconic Sydney Harbor Bridge, waving Hamas and ISIS flags as well as portraits of the Ayatollah. Not a single Australian flag in sight, other than one that was burned.

  2. Re the Gazan scholar in France.
    Few countries want to admit people from Gaza, even handfuls of them into national populations in the several scores of millions, because they are so radicalized. Imagine how 8 million Israelis feel, with 2 million of them leaning against their border fence.

    Maybe each of 16 Western countries should accept 250,000 girls and women each. Then Israel cou

    1. [Internet glitch.]
      Then Israel could deal with the (aging) men of military age left behind.
      The women and children would have to apply voluntarily for resettlement, of course, — no forced marches or expulsions — which they should do without cavil since who suffers more in war than women and children? Who has a clearer case for refugee status?

      1. If it’s only women and children it would be less than 2 million and even if it were 2 million, 16 countries would be 125,000 per country. So less pie in the sky I guess. 🤔

        1. Thanks. The Internet must have known I was in the middle of making an arithmetic error and tried to stop me….

    2. That Gazan “scholar” in France disproves the Obama quote cited above.

      I voted for Obama twice but he did get some things wrong.

  3. Well, I can’t be cynical about chocolate chip cookies! Interesting that Chips Ahoy ranked at top of commercially distributed brands. I like Chips Ahoy, but consider them well inferior to even a mediocre homebuilt model. I remember what my grandmother baked as “Toll House” cookies in the 50’s as the best and the iconic flavor and texture for chocolate chip cookies.

    1. Yeah, to me, Chips Ahoy and Chips Deluxe are more or less identical. It’s strange to see the disparity in rating. But they are all, as you say, inferior to homemade.

    2. For us, it’s Pepperidge Farm, no question. The Wife, who is Not To Be Debated, was quite disdainful about the Chips Ahoy ranking.

      1. I agree with your wife. Chips Ahoy? Nope.

        But I only eat factory cookies on rare occasions of desperation. None of them can compete with home made.

  5. A few years ago I worked for a cookie manufacturer that exported their products to the United States. The U.S government enacted regulations that required the export documentation to include special codes to describe the product. I had to match their codes to our products and could not at first find a code that covered chocolate chip cookies until I realized that I had to use the code for Toll House cookies. No one in the company was familiar with that name.

  6. Wow! Toll House cookies (home made) are da best! I now make them sans egg and baking soda, and spread them thin on the baking sheet so that they come out sort of like a brittle. Delicious. I also use really dark chocolate chips.

  7. The monkey bartering is fascinating. Something similar happens here in Ecuador with capuchin monkeys in a town called Misahualli in the Amazon. These have also learned to use tools, to break nuts with rocks and to snag underground bee larvae using sticks, like the famous chimpanzees using thin sticks to snag underground termites.

  8. The videos of the two suffering Israeli hostages are heartbreaking. This is Hamas’s point. They—or what’s left of their leadership—choreographed the videos as a ploy to pressure Israel into accepting a truce that keeps them in power. They know that the Israeli public and the hostage families will demand that the government capitulate to save these hostages from starving to death.

    With famine reportedly emerging in Gaza, Hamas had established a second leverage point in addition to that provided by the hostages: world condemnation. Now, thanks to France, Great Britain, and Canada, they have three. By threatening to recognize a Palestinian state, France, Great Britain, and Canada have put the idea into the heads of Hamas that they have the license to hold out for statehood. This is the third leverage point: statehood—a promise to Hamas from the west. True to form, Hamas is now saying that the war will not end unless they are rewarded with a state.

    Israel has little power to eliminate two of the three leverage points. Rescuing the hostages while they are still alive is a fading hope, and convincing France, Britain, and Canada of their folly is a long shot. But, Israel may be able to blunt the third point of Hamas leverage, public condemnation, by vigorously pouring aid into Gaza. They need to do this without equivocation or delay.

    It seems to me that prospects for a truce are waning. By giving Hamas encouragement, France, Britain, and Canada aren’t helping.

    1. Unless I’ve missed something, Hamas has never been ok with statehood that exists alongside Israel.

    2. Are there other examples of a belligerent advertising their cruelty the way Hamas does? Aren’t such torture techniques usually hidden? And I agree with you, Norman. Israel needs to pour aid in if for no other reason that to “blunt”, as you say, public condemnation.

      1. Debi, maybe the belligerents in other wars knew that the governments of their enemies could not be manipulated by domestic public opinion to put recovery of prisoners on a par with, or ahead of, military victory, so there was no point in public torture. Rather recovery of surviving prisoners is a happy bonus of victory, not a compensation you seek for giving up. Some of the longest-held Allied prisoners of the Second World War were the (mostly) Canadians sent to the doomed defence of Hong Kong, which surrendered in Dec 1941. Many died from disease and mistreatment. But listening to families who might have called for us to negotiate any kind of separate peace with Japan to get them home early was just not on. They were liberated after V-J Day along with everyone else when their camps, abandoned by their guards, could be discovered. And many American aviators shot down over North Vietnam during Rolling Thunder were in captivity even longer. Now yes many of the Israeli hostages are civilians torn from the homes of their families, but there are tragically very few truly non-combatant civilians in the Middle East.

        Some Israeli commenters, they might have been hawks in the Knesset, opined that the Government ought to have rounded up the families of hostages on Day One and kept them incommunicado, so that their representations could not have influenced the war policy unduly. Israel of course is not the kind of country that would do such a thing. So here we are.

        Canada is a long way from Israel but my wife and I have attended several rallies, marches, public meetings and donation campaigns in support of Israel and our Jewish friends here. I can tell you that even from the early days, there was audibly only lukewarm support for the idea expressed by some rabbis that the obligation to free captives had to be a first priority of the Israeli war effort. This support has waned further as the war has ground on and the IDF takes casualties. I think many had even then written off the hostages as lost to humanity. There has been quiet dismay at the lopsided trades of criminals for the few that have been exchanged. “Bring them home!” is no longer a chant, and when it was, it implied, Bring them home by vanquishing Hamas. “Cease-fire for them now!” is not a good slogan to get the blood up.

        Then there is the possibility that Hamas are simply not like other belligerents. No sophisticated strategy to manipulate Israeli public opinion. They torture publicly because they get off on it….and they know that the international community of cowardly state-recognizers will never hold them to account.

        1. I was hoping you’d respond to this, Leslie. I always appreciate your opinionated wisdom. It’s interesting you use the word “cowardly” in your final sentence.That is was Hamas is. A band of cowards.

  9. Yesterday you posted a story about the Governor of Utah telling his constituents to fast and pray to end a drought. Why doesn’t he just have two frogs get married? It would be just as effective.

  10. I had my sunglasses stolen about 15 years ago by a monkey at that very Balinese temple! Our guide had warned us to take off our sunglasses, but the sun was brutal, the path was windy and there were no monkeys in sight, so I soon slipped them back on. Just a minute afterward, a monkey jumped onto my shoulder and grabbed my glasses and bounded away within mere seconds. The monkey then sat dangling the glasses (expensive prescription of course) over a cliff, staring directly at us. The bartering ensued (including payment to the guide for his help). I still have those sunglasses with monkey chew marks on the lenses.

  11. These Hili monologues are moving tributes to your friends. I have to remind myself that they’re written by a person not by a cat. Are they written by Andrzej himself, or Paulina or someone else? Thanks for posting them.

  12. To what extent does Israel actually “control” any territory in Gaza? I don’t know. I’m asking. Does the IDF have enough soldiers to garrison any part of Gaza, much less pacify it? Israel certainly lacks the soldiers to mount an Iraq-style surge-stay-and-hold operation and can’t tolerate the casualties in the numbers the enormously larger American military seemed willing to accept. How can it be responsible for aid distribution when no one seems to want it to? David French wants Israel to abandon any idea of annexing Gaza, yet wants it to base enough soldiers there to police the place and deliver food indefinitely, in cooperation with the imaginary local authorities. That requires a security situation that to my knowledge doesn’t exist. Does he know what he’s talking about?

    The IDF can’t afford to take any casualties in feeding people who hate them. This is not like the situation in Germany 1945 as the Allies crossed the Rhine and started pushing the collapsing Wehrmacht back. The imagined Volkesturm that would rise up to fight the Allied armies irregularly never materialized as the German people were by then glad to see the backs of the Nazis. Once the uniformed German soldiers surrendered the Allies took them as PoWs and that was the end of it for that piece of now-occupied territory. They put the Germans to work delivering food and clearing the rubble from the streets, secure that there would be no attacks from the rear.

    Same in Japan. The people, military and civilian alike obeyed the orders of the Emperor to lay down their arms (as part of the unconditional surrender he agreed to) and express no hostility to occupying American forces. No one in authority is telling the people of Gaza to do anything like that. Until they surrender and cease hostilities, Israel can’t afford to see they get fed. It can let in aid (after inspecting it for contraband) but if none of it gets down to the women, children, and old men because tough, well-nourished young men grab it all, tough beans. If Hamas knows that “famine” is a new pressure point to apply against Israel, it will happily conjure a famine into existence.

    One thing is for sure. The world will stop condemning Israel only when it ceases to exist. Even if it disarms and capitulates, as it did locally and temporarily through terrible error on Oct. 7, the world will still vilify it so as to feel good about the resulting slaughter. “Well, they did have it coming, …own worst enemies you know.”

  13. Are black tigers a mutant form of regular tigers? Or are they a different species? I really have no idea.

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