Saturday: Hili dialogue

August 16, 2025 • 5:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, August 16, and shabbos for all Jewish moggies. It’s also National Bratwurst Day, a sausage best eaten on a good roll with hot mustard and plenty of sauerkraut. But this plate from Münster, served with potatoes, is a good substitute (but where’s the beer and kraut?):

Rockhsp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also International Homeless Animals Day, World Honeybee Day, National Rum Day, and True Love Forever Day.  Marking the last, here’s a photo of Andrzej and Malgorzata taken on January 4, 2014 on our stroll down to the Vistula River.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Reports of Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska yesterday (here and here) show that it was pretty much of a washout. Nothing was agreed on, but what did happen suggests that Putin has the advantage:

In ordinary times, the failure of the leaders of the world’s two largest nuclear powers to reach agreement on ending a brutal, three-year conflict at the heart of Europe might be cause for despair.

But to the Ukrainians and their European neighbors, the breakup of talks between President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin after less than three and a half hours contained an element of relief.

Desperate as they are to end the death and destruction, their deepest fear was that Mr. Trump would give in to the Russian president’s territorial demands, and force President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine into a painful choice between giving up more than 20 percent of his country or rejecting a peace accord that he fears is a poison chalice.

Mr. Zelensky may yet have to make that choice. But Mr. Trump lifted off from Alaska, ahead of schedule, without having achieved the most basic first step: a temporary cease-fire that would allow further negotiations to take place. It was exactly the outcome, he told reporters earlier on Friday, with which he would not “be happy.”

, , , and

President Trump said early on Saturday that he and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had discussed working toward a full peace deal in Ukraine instead of first agreeing to a cease-fire, a move that would give Russia an advantage in the talks.

After returning from a summit in Alaska with Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social that he had spoken by phone to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and European leaders and that “it was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up.”

But European leaders issued a statement that did not echo Mr. Trump’s claim that peace talks were preferable to a cease-fire. In the statement, leaders of Britain, France and Germany and others welcomed Mr. Trump’s efforts to stop the war but threatened to increase economic penalties on Russia “as long as the killing in Ukraine continues.”

Mr. Trump confirmed Mr. Zelensky’s announcement earlier Saturday that the Ukrainian president would visit the White House on Monday. If that visit goes well, Mr. Trump said, he would schedule another meeting with Mr. Putin.

In the end, it looks like Russia may not be punished with additional sanctions, while more of Ukraine is gobbled up by Russia. Although Putin is not Hitler, his unilateral annexation of land on the ground of ethnic affinity sure resembles what Hitler did right before WWII. Remember this:

*Along with insinuating the National Guard into Washington, D. C. part of Trump’s plans to “take over” the city (and yes, it’s ridden with crime, though it’s decreased) has involved taking over the police themselves as well as putting in Trump’s hand-picked police commissioner. Although the mayor has softened on the National Guard thing, she and the D.C. attorney general are suing Trump on the Big Takeover plans:

D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb has sued President Donald Trump over his executive actions asserting control over the D.C. police department and attempting to install an emergency police commissioner, one of the most extraordinary exertions of federal power in the city’s half-century of home rule.

The lawsuit came hours after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered sweeping changes to law enforcement policies in the city and said a Trump administration official should assume all duties and responsibilities of the police chief, drawing immediate legal pushback from Schwalb and Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D).

Schwalb called it the “gravest threat to Home Rule that the District has ever faced.”

“By declaring a hostile takeover of MPD, the Administration is abusing its limited, temporary authority under the Home Rule Act, infringing on the District’s right to self-governance and putting the safety of DC residents and visitors at risk,” Schwalb said in a statement. “The Administration’s unlawful actions are an affront to the dignity and autonomy of the 700,000 Americans who call DC home. This is the gravest threat to Home Rule that the District has ever faced, and we are fighting to stop it.”

. . . .Schwalb is asking a federal judge to find that Trump and Bondi’s actions are unconstitutional and exceed limits on federal power in the 1973 D.C. Home Rule Act. Schwalb asked the judge to block Bondi’s order and keep control of police with the mayor and police chief. He is seeking an emergency temporary restraining order Friday. A hearing is scheduled for 2 p.m.

D.C. Police Chief Pamela A. Smith said in a sworn declaration in U.S. District Court on Friday that Bondi’s attempt to strip away her authority represented one of the most “dangerous” directives she had ever seen.

“If effectuated, the Bondi Order would upend the command structure of MPD, endangering the safety of the public and law enforcement officers alike,” Smith’s declaration said. “In my nearly three decades in law enforcement, I have never seen a single government action that would cause a greater threat to law and order than this dangerous directive.”

To me this looks like an illegal action on Trump’s part, but what do I know? Only the Supreme Court will get to decide this one. Congressional Democrats are introducing bills to try to stop this takeover, but, given the composition of House and Senate, these are unlikely to pass, and of course even if they did, which is impossible, Trump could veto them.

*As always, I’ll steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark summary at The Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: Life of a Showgirl” (that’s the title of Taylor Swift’s new album).

First, one from my school:

→ U of Chicago is paring down departments: The Arts & Humanities Division of the University of Chicago is downsizing some departments amid “historic funding pressures.” Partly due to Trump administration’s cuts, whose impact on the university could grow to $40 million in the next year, but part of it is that the university spent too much on elaborate construction projects. And so our great universities—which take taxpayer money to train people to hate taxpayers—might have to balance the books a tiny bit. Faculty say it feels like DOGE has come to their campus. I hear they may have to cut down the hours at the 24-hour nigiri-focused cafeteria.

Also, per the campus newspaper: “Some graduate programs may face minimum enrollment and ‘net’ tuition inflow requirements—mandating the program make a certain amount of money per student—to continue operating, according to an individual with knowledge of the plans.” You’re telling me that departments need students enrolled in them? That if there are no students, they might pare down the funding and close the department? That’s disgusting. That’s transphobic and racist and sexual assault and also violence. When I pay taxes, I think: I hope this is going to a University of Chicago professor who has no students and is paid to do nothing but who still absolutely hates his life. Dreadful here at the University of Chicago, isn’t it? This is Trump’s America.

→Elsewhere in Canada, Toronto International Film Festival organizers rescinded their invitation to the film The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, a film about an Israeli man saving his family on October 7, 2023. No one protesting the movie can tell the truth (that they think the slaughter that day is a super great thing! A “hero” Israeli man is actually a villain for not letting his family be killed too!), so the festival organizers instead said they can’t show it because the film uses Hamas’s proprietary footage of the attacks. The rights to the footage had not been cleared by the terror group. Seriously. Like, those GoPro livestreams posted to Facebook of the killing of random Israeli families are Hamas’s intellectual property—and the comms team there hasn’t gotten back yet. They’ve been busy.

Amid outrage, organizers are now apparently working on screening it.

In a final Canadian update: A hip young man—Sergio Yanes Preciado, 23—randomly beat up a Jewish father wearing a kippah, and now it looks like he could go free for it. From theMontreal Gazette, the judge in the case noted that Sergio had “delirious ideas linked to his actions.” And that “the hot weather experienced in Montreal on the day in question may have played a role in what happened.” It was just so hot. Sergio, who has a pleasant smile and looks to be of sound mind in that he has a nice haircut, simply couldn’t help himself. It’s a scorcher out there, folks! Make sure to wear sunscreen, and just to be safe, remove all religious symbols. Speaking of summer heat. . .

→ Delete your emails: This week, amid water shortages and drought conditions throughout England, UK Environment Agency officials told members of the public to delete old emails in order to conserve water. This is real: “Simple, everyday choices—such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails—also really help the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife,” said Helen Wakeham, the agency’s director of water. I guess the thinking here is: It takes a significant amount of water to cool data centers. Helen, you don’t want to see how much water I use on ChatGPT every night. I’m posing questions that require ChatGPT to slurp water directly from the mouth of a baby seal. I’m saying run the numbers again just to see that ticker tape of words.

Taking this seriously, the director of Effective Altruism D.C. (Andy Masley) made a helpful graph to show just how unhelpful deleting old emails would be, compared to doing things like fixing leaky toilets.

*Here’s a WSJ article striving to derive meaning from the works of Tolstoy which, of course, were T0lstoy’s way of presenting meaning. The piece is purely literary, and thus unusual for the op-ed section, “Leo Tolstoy’s search for the meaning of life.” (Sadly, the author mentions Anna Karenina and War and Peace but leaves out the masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilych., which deals with questions similar to thos below. An excerpt:

Long before Tolstoy experienced the psychological crisis that led to his decadeslong effort to rethink Christianity, he was concerned with spiritual questions. Anyone who has read his two great novels, “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina,” will recall how their heroes wrestle with the same questions that beset the author: Is there something beyond the material world? Does death, which turns our efforts to dust, make life absurd?

. . . . Tolstoy wanted readers to ask, as he asked himself: What would you think of someone who needed some “general principle” to decide whether to fling down a child in one’s arms? Levin’s problem is that he assumes, as intellectuals often do, that truth is a matter of theory that one applies to particular circumstances. That is how mathematics works, but questions of meaning and ethics are different. They require unformalizable wisdom, which arises from sensitive reflection about specific cases, and demand we trust our experience with particulars. Theory, rightly understood, is simply a set of tentative generalizations from practice.

This insight dawns on Levin when he asks a peasant why he doesn’t rent a certain plot of land, as another man does. The peasant replies that you can make the land pay only if you squeeze the life out of workers, which is wrong because you must live for your soul and for God. As if struck by “an electric shock,” Levin realizes that our fundamental knowledge of right and wrong isn’t derived from theory but is simply “given.” “I and all men have one firm, incontestable knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by reason—it is outside it, and has no causes and can have no effects.”

In saying goodness has no causes, Levin means that why we have come to think certain things are good—say, the way some evolutionary biologists explain altruism as good for group survival—is a different question. What is good is good regardless of why we’re able to think so. By the same token, “effects” are beside the point because to do something good to be rewarded, in this life or the next, would simply be an economic bargain, like saving for retirement.

Though goodness can’t be explained by cause and effect, Levin thinks, we all know it. “I watched for miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle that would convince me. And here is a miracle . . . continually existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it!” Levin reaches the beginning of faith and is ready to take further steps. He realizes that in his quest for a theory, he had been looking in the wrong place.

One directly senses the meaning of existence by living rightly. It isn’t a proposition or philosophy that can be taught. All one can do is indicate the sort of thing meaning is by showing how someone found it—exactly what Tolstoy’s great novels do.

Tolstoy became more religious after Anna Karenina (one of my absolute favorite novels, perhaps the favorite), and that faith shows in Ivan Ilych, which could be seen as touting faith in God as the way to live. But he never fully accepted that, and was tortured about life’s meaning his whole life. Now if you think there is “truth” in literature, what is the “truth” in, say, all three of these novels, which give varying views on life’s meanings? That different people have different conceptions of what a meaningful or “good” life is? If that’s the truth, it’s trivial, and we don’t need a novel to know it. No, the books are good because they show people wrestling with various questions, making us ponder the same questions, and do so in wonderful prose and plot.

*Finally, from the reliable AP “Oddities” section, we learn that a semitropical bird, the wood stork, has been seen in Wisconsin. This is a big deal for birders, and, apparently confused, the bird flew off with a flock of pelicans.

A very rare and apparently very confused subtropical wood stork somehow found its way to the wilds of Wisconsin.

A hunter scouting for deer first sighted the bird Sunday in a remote section of the Mud Lake Wildlife Area in Columbia County, about 35 miles (56 kilometers) northeast of Madison, the state’s capital, said Horicon Marsh Bird Club President Jeff Bahls.

The hunter snapped some photos of the stork and sent them to Bahls, who doubles as a wildlife technician for the state Department of Natural Resources. Bahls confirmed that the bird in question was indeed a wood stork.

He said it was likely a juvenile that may have hatched this spring since its bill was light-colored. Adult wood storks’ bills typically turn black as they mature, he said.

. . . . It hasn’t been seen since Tuesday morning, when it was spotted flying northeast with a flock of pelicans, Bahls said.

. . . . Wood storks are typically found in Gulf Coast states and Central and South America. They’re listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. They’re the only stork species that breeds in the United States, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Wood storks typically grow as long as 35 to 45 inches (89 to 114 centimeters) with wingspans reaching around 5 1/2 feet (1.7 meters). Their heads and upper necks are covered with scaly gray skin rather than feathers. The only sound they can produce is a hissing noise.

Climate change and habitat loss have been forcing birds north. Immature wood storks have no territory and typically explore during the late summer, Bahls said. The one that visited Wisconsin probably just got lost, he said.

Here’s a Mycteria americana from Wikipedia:

Googie man at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0,, via Wikimedia Commons

Its range (also from Wikipedia), with the caption, “Range map of Wood stork.   Orange – Breeding  Purple – Year-round  Blue – Nonbreeding.” Note that it does not include Wisconsin!

Cephas, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is in the shade and refuses to go inside:

Hili: It’s terribly hot.
Me: It’s cooler in the house.
Hili: That’s true, but I like it here.

In Polish:

Hili: Strasznie gorąco.
Ja: W domu jest chłodniej.
Hili: To prawda, ale mnie tu dobrze.

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

From Cat Memes:

From Animal Antics:

From Ginger K.:

Here’s a tweet by Masih, but what I don’t understand is why if there’s a missile warning, a man would don a hijab. How would that protect him?

J. K. Rowling review’s Nicola Sturgeon’s book on her (Rowling’s) website. You can find the review here, and it’s got everything: a take on Scottish independence, the inevitable words on trans-identified men, and some more-than-usually restrained snark.

One from my feed:

From Malcolm; cat drama:

From Simon:

— (@randy39.bsky.social) 2025-08-13T18:45:24.834Z

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Polish woman barely lived for a month in the camp before she died.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-08-16T10:00:34.901Z

Two from Dr. Cobb. Gary Larson, the biologists’ favorite cartoonist, turned 75 on August 14:

Happy Birthday, Gary Larson.Cat fud.Cow tools.Car!Bummer of a birthmark, Hal.Anatidaephobia.Thagomizer.Roger screws up.Fair is fair, Larry.Midvale School for the Gifted.Let’s get this baby off the ground.

— Lev Parikian (@levparikian.bsky.social) 2025-08-14T11:06:52.023Z

This is great:

This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.

— JohnXuandou (@johnxuandou.bsky.social) 2025-08-13T06:06:20.777Z

20 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    It is fortunate to be of high birth, but it is no less so to be of such character that people do not care to know whether you are or are not. -Jean de la Bruyere, essayist and moralist (16 Aug 1645-1696)

    1. I agree. The lovely photo, the JK Rowling review (brilliant), the response to the electric bill. A great start to my Saturday.

        1. This was a choice opening:

          “I know I’m stating the obvious, and I’ll probably be one of countless reviewers making the same point,…”

  4. If everyone on earth would delete their no longer usefull emails that might be a lot more than a billion in total, I would think.
    Still, better fix a running toilet…

    1. Yea, people should definitely check their toilets – if not for the sake of the environment, for the sake of their wallets. I once had a leaky flapper in a never-used toilet in my basement that I only learned about when I got a water bill for nearly a thousand dollars.

  5. I saw a New Yorker style cartoon with a lot of troops on the streets and military Humvees. A by-stander is saying: “Boy! I bet there really must be something hidden in those Epstein files!”

  6. Re men in hijabs for missile alerts, from Masih. Could it be that women (proof of which being the hijab) are allowed into the bomb shelters first? The regime might not like women much, but wombs are precious.

    1. This isn’t widely known but Iran (also) is in deep demographic decline.

      NOT 40-50 years ago though. When you have a large bunch of young men you can do punk-ass things like overtake embassies, fight a million-men-killing war with your neighbor and cause all kinds of revolutionary trouble.

      Now… with that demographic advantage declining, better to outsource that evil to proxies like the Lebanese or Houthis. Evolution selects for Yemenis y’know: Yemenis (and Nigerians). No kidding.

      D.A.
      NYC

  7. I hope that that TikTok of the man bemoaning his electric bill in Faulknerian language inspires other people to post videos of themselves bemoaning their own mundane life tragedies in the language of famous authors. That would be trend I could get behind.

    I’m trying to understand the legal logic behind the idea that Hamas has copyright of its films. If a criminal films his rape or assault of another person, doesn’t the fact that he was committing a crime in the film sort of negate his legal right to it? I mean, it’s a legal principle that wrongdoing negates a person’s rights to things like his freedom. So why shouldn’t it negate a person’s right to videos he makes of his own effing crimes?

    Of course, I could easily see some people arguing that Hamas didn’t commit any crimes when they slaughtered children and torched families because they were just acting in self-defense.

  11. I’ve a lot of catching up to do on WEIT, but I must respond to the oh so lovely and heart tugging photo of Malgorzata and Adrzej. If that’s not love I don’t know what is. I’m sure you cherish that one, Jerry.

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