Monday: Hili dialogue

August 25, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to another damn work week: it’s Monday, August 25, 2025, and National Banana Split Day.  You can get the biggest one in existence at Margie’s Candies, an iconic Chicago ice cream store. (The photo below is of a regular split.)

David B. Gleason, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

And look at the big sundae with 25 scoops of ice cream! (Starts at 1:14.)

It’s also Instant Ramen Day (in Japan), something I lived on in college, and National Whisky Sour Day, celebrating a drink I greatly enjoy (if it’s not too sweet).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 25 Wikipedia page.

Hazel the duck wasn’t here yesterday, and I fear that she’s gone for good. I am asking Ceiling Cat to send her back, perhaps along with some friends.

Da Nooz:

*I don’t like this—not one bit. I thought America was going to help Ukraine in its fight against Russia, that is until Trump started schmoozing with Putin and using both hands when shaking hands with the dictator. Then he seemed to cool on Putin and warm on Zelensky. Now, according to the WSJ, the U.S. has refused to allow Ukraine to use U.S.-made long-distance missiles against Russia.

The Pentagon has for months been blocking Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to strike inside Russia, U.S. officials said, limiting Kyiv from employing a powerful weapon in its fight against Moscow’s invasion.

A high-level Defense Department approval procedure, which hasn’t been announced, has prevented Ukraine from firing any U.S.-made long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems, or Atacms, against targets in Russia since late spring, the officials said. On at least one occasion, Ukraine sought to use Atacms against a target on Russian territory but was rejected, two officials said.

The U.S. veto of long-range strikes has restricted Ukraine’s military operations as the White House has sought to woo the Kremlin into beginning peace talks.

Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, developed the “review mechanism” to decide on Kyiv’s requests to fire long-range U.S.-made weapons as well as those provided to Ukraine by European allies that rely on American intelligence and components.

The review gives Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth final say over whether Ukraine can employ the Atacms, which have a range of nearly 190 miles, to strike Russia.

“President Trump has been very clear that the war in Ukraine needs to end. There has been no change in military posture in Russia-Ukraine at this time,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Secretary Hegseth is working in lockstep with President Trump.”

. . and in the meantime Russia continues to launch gazillions of drones at Ukrainian civilians, while Ukraine goes after military targets. Limiting the use of our missiles is not fair, and, in fact, could help Ukraine from ceding more territory to Russian conquerers.

Trump has explicitly admitted as much:

In a social-media post Thursday, Trump said Ukraine couldn’t defeat Russia unless it could “play offense” in the war, which has lasted longer than three years following Moscow’s invasion.

“It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking” the invading country, he wrote. “There is no chance of winning!”

Well, maybe he’ll change his mind. After all, he’s a mercurial man narcissist.  It’s time that the U.S. and Europe get together and come down hard on Putin. Otherwise, he’ll just pull this stunt with other countries.

*The Times of London indicts academics rather than students for  the fulminating wokeness of universities in the U.S. and U.K.: “Academics are to blame for the woke wreckage at universities.”

When a satire of the modern-day woke university finally appears, it is likely to make its villain the kind of intolerant, blue-haired, placard-wielding undergraduate who has so shamelessly cast themselves as the protagonist of the past decade’s culture war. The more we have seen of university life, however — as undergrads, then PhD students and finally teaching — the clearer it has become that the damage being done by woke ideology is not confined to student skirmishes, but has infected academia at every level: taught content, research, disciplinary norms and even institutional design.

In fact, the conventional emphasis on the menace of woke student activism risks getting things backwards. There is indeed an important generational component to the malaise gripping universities. But the culpable figures are not students. They are those academics in positions of authority and secure employment who have negligently allowed the culture to be trashed, leaving a mess for the next generation to clear up

Above all, the adults in the seminar room have aided and abetted the spread of destructive errors under the guise of behaving with political neutrality. Incredibly, some even flatter themselves that standing idly by as bad ideas flourish is a way of exercising mature restraint in the marketplace of ideas.

No cause illustrates this dysfunction better than trans ideology. Within our own discipline, philosophy, it has warped the intellectual environment. Most famously, Kathleen Stock was hounded from her position at Sussex for defending women’s rights against encroachment by adult males who claim to be women. When her work was presented in scholarly forums, other academics objected to being “non-consensually co-platformed” with her: an impressively obtuse complaint from the folks who insist that women have no business worrying about the presence of men in their spaces.

. . . Elite academia in America now faces a reckoning. Advocacy groups have used lawsuits to expose its illegal hiring practices. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that methods of positive discrimination used by elite universities in admissions were, as many had long suspected, racist and unconstitutional. More recently – maliciously, indiscriminately and in many cases, to the detriment of good science – the Trump administration has forced universities such as Harvard and Columbia to the negotiating table by withholding their vast federal research budgets. Much of the insurgent right, on both sides of the Atlantic, has revelled in seeing its philistine agenda put into practice. But elite universities are responsible for putting themselves in a position in which their own culpable failures can be so credibly exposed.

. . . What has gone wrong? Simple: academia is biased. And though the indulgence of the disturbing demands of trans activism may provide the most vivid expression of this bias, the problem is far more general. Outside economics, many academics indulge poorly evidenced, anti-capitalist posturing to an incredible degree. Identify yourself as a socialist, or openly sympathise with the objectives of murderously oppressive left-wing regimes, and no one will blink. The academic publisher Routledge has a 114-book series on Fascism and the Far Right, whose “scope includes anti-fascism, radical-right populism, extreme-right violence and terrorism”. It has no comparable series on communism and the far left.

and the final paragraph:

There are many lessons to draw from academia’s sustained indulgence of woke ideology. Any serious government should curb the funding of EDI bureaucracies. Subsidies that have been used to inflate the demand for college degrees, depressing standards, should be wound down. Tenure, a form of job security often justified on the grounds that it liberates academics to speak their minds, has proven doubtfully effective in that respect. Its unfortunate effect now may be to allow some of the worst proponents of a bankrupt ideology to continue to haunt their institutions long after the excesses of woke are banished from the rest of public life. The past decade has shown that wokeness disables academia from promoting knowledge and furthering the good in myriad ways. Perversely, but unsurprisingly, one of the things that bias precludes, for those in the grip of it, is its own discovery and correction. Steering universities towards this realisation should be the aim of academia’s real progressives.

I can’t say I have a lot to criticize about this long article, except to say that Trump’s way of rectifying the problem is overly brutal, and holds to account people (mostly scientists) who didn’t create this problem, which emanates largely from the humanities. Also, it’s not just tenure, though that is a problem (I still think we should keep it). It is the tendency of woke academics to hire others of their kind, so that in the end many “studies” departments are not places to teach students, but to propagandize them.

*Well, Chicago’s crime is down, but Trump wants to pull a L.A./D.C.-like move on our fair city and take over law enforcement. My question is WHY?

The Pentagon has for weeks been planning a military deployment to Chicago as President Donald Trump says he wants to crack down on crime, homelessness and undocumented immigration, in a model that could later be used in other major cities, officials familiar with the matter said.

The planning, which has not been previously disclosed, involves several options, including mobilizing at least a few thousand members of the National Guard as soon as September to what is the third most populous city in the United States.

The mission, if approved, would have parallels to the polarizing and legally contested operation that Trump ordered in Los Angeles in June, when he deployed 4,000 members of the California National Guard and 700 active-duty Marines despite the protests of state and local leaders. The use of thousands of active-duty troops in Chicago also has been discussed but is considered less likely at this time, said two officials who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The Chicago effort would further expand Trump’s use of military force domestically, even when state and local authorities call the idea unwelcome and unwarranted. Administration officials have defended such deployments, arguing that they are taking necessary steps to bring back law and order.

. . .Trump on Friday touted his ongoing National Guard intervention in D.C., where more than 2,200 Guard members have been deployed in what he has cast as an overdue effort to crack down on crime. He zeroed in on Chicago as the next target.

“Chicago’s a mess. You have an incompetent mayor. Grossly incompetent,” Trump said, in remarks that were immediately dismissed by Chicago’s leaders as unfounded. “And we’ll straighten that one out probably next. That’ll be our next one after this. And it won’t even be tough.”

Indeed, our mayor, Brandon Johnson, is not only woke, but incompetent, and I’d bet big bucks he won’t get re-elected.  But another reason may be that Chicago has a huge immigrant population, largely Hispanic.  It may be that Trump’s trying to kill 2 birds with one stone by filling the city with people who can sweep up illegal immigrants.  But, as a Democratic city, there will be plenty of pushback.

*American “influencer” Ethan Guo illegally flew to Antarctica, and was detained by Chilean scientists after landing in June. As far as I can see, he’s still there, unable to leave because of the temperature (it’s winter there) and because, although charges against him have been dropped, he hasn’t gotten authorization to leave:

Charges against an American influencer and teen pilot who has been stranded on a remote island in the Antarctic since June have been dropped.

Ethan Guo, 19, is alleged to have illegally landed his plane in Chilean territory after embarking on a solo trip to all seven continents to raise money for cancer research, according to local authorities.

They accused him of providing false flight plan information to officials who detained him and opened an investigation.

A judge has ordered him to leave the area, pay a $30,000 (£22,332) donation to a children’s cancer foundation and is banned from re-entering Chilean territory for three years.

Mr Guo made headlines last year when he began an attempt to become the youngest person to fly solo to all seven continents and collect donations for research into childhood cancer.

Having already visited six of seven continents, in June he flew his small Cessna 182Q aircraft from the city of Punta Arenas, near the southernmost point of Chile, to King George island off the Atlantic coast, which is claimed by Chile and named after the UK’s King George III.

He was taken into custody after landing on the island, which is home to a number of international research stations and their staff.

Authorities said he submitted a plan to fly over Punta Arenas, but not beyond that, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

He was charged on 29 June with allegedly handing false information to ground control and landing without authorisation, but these were dropped by a judge on Monday.

“I remain in Antarctica awaiting approval for my departure flight,” Mr Guo told the Associated Press (AP) news agency following the judge’s ruling on Monday. “I sincerely hope they give it to me soon so that I and my plane can continue with my original mission.”

Mr Guo has been staying at a military base on the island for the last six weeks, AP reported. He was told he could travel to other parts of Chile but because of frigid temperatures was unable to leave the island, it added.

According to the NYT, Guo says it’s “isolating and lonely”, and the paper adds this:

Breakfast consists of bread and a teaspoon of butter. For lunch and dinner, it’s beans, lentil soup or pasta. Home is a single room in a Chilean air force barracks, with a spotty Wi-Fi connection. He has only been outside, he said, for an hour over the last six weeks, and he has lost 20 pounds.

I can’t work up a lot of sympathy for Guo, as he knew his flight was illegal. He’s lucky charges were dropped, and even luckier that he can get Wi-Fi.  He’ll be home soon enough, and he still has his record and his “influence.”

*Is this a cure for my insomnia? The NYT suggests that not just kids, but even adults may sleep more soundly with a stuffed animal. (h/t Nicole)

Although I can’t be sure how common this is, I’m probably not alone: In a 2017 survey of US adults commissioned by Build-A-Bear (so, yes, possibly biased), 40% of respondents who own, or once owned, a stuffed animal said they still slept with one. But before writing this article, I couldn’t name a single other grown-up who shared this part of my bedtime routine. Maybe that’s because I was too reticent to divulge it: Talking with friends and coworkers about mattress toppers or humidifiers is easier than discussing the childlike whimsy of a stuffed polar bear.

Once I asked them, however, I was flooded by enthusiastic responses and tender insights into people’s stuffed seals, amoebas, pickles, and hedgehogs (even robots). For my part, since rediscovering that polar bear, I’ve settled into rotating a cast of salvaged childhood favorites and a lightly weighted, heatable Warmies cow I bought for myself.

Though there is no robust scientific literature on the effect of stuffed animals on adult sleep, several studies have shown that plush companions can help adults self-soothe. A 2016 study observed that holding a stuffed animal during group therapy allowed college students to better comfort themselves. The act of hugging has also been associated with stress relief, and a 2013 study found that interacting with a huggable communication device lowered stress hormones in blood and saliva. Maybe that’s why I reached for that polar bear during a stressful time.

Stuffed animals have improved my sleep in the long term by establishing a calming bedtime routine, which Goldschmied emphasized is “probably the single most important thing in getting a better night of sleep.” She encourages patients to embrace any practice—from reading to using sheets they love—that teaches them to associate bedtime with comfort and relaxation instead of with anxiety.

Over time, the brain will come to expect that these rituals lead to sleep, and that performing them can help transition the body into a restful state. In my case, putting down my book or phone and picking up my stuffed animal creates a boundary between sleep and other activities, prompting me to unwind. Even though I often violate the advice to use one’s bed only for sleep, once my stuffed animal comes out, I know it’s time to doze off.

I can’t end with a specific stuffed animal to recommend, or any guarantees, but I can extend to you my permission to indulge in some childlike comfort. Maybe it’s as simple as taking your old teddy bear off the shelf or raiding your child’s bedroom.

Toasty, my beloved bear, in 2002. I got him the day I was born, so he’s exactly as old as I. He is still in my office (I do not sleep with him). I love Toasty, but I prefer a book to a bear.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is getting ready to fight:

Andrzej: What are you up to here?
Hili: I’m regaining energy for the struggle ahead.

In Polish:
Ja: Co tu robisz?
Hili: Zbieram siły do dalszej walki.

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

From Animal Antics:

From The Dodo Pet:

From CinEmma:

Masih isn’t posting much again, and she posted something misleading, so I’ll defer again to her substitute pitcher, J. K. Rowling. Luckily, Rowling reposted a tweet supporting another group of women oppressed by a Muslim theocracy:

From Luana: a HUGE distortion based on ignorance of statistics:

A cute tweet from Malcolm:

Two from my feed. This is a good one:

Poor dad!

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial site:

Ths Polish Jewish woman would have turned 100 today had she lived on after Auschwitz. But, like nearly everyone in the camp, she died. That was the Nazi's intention.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-08-25T10:23:35.728Z

Two posts from Herr Doktor Professor Cobb, still on hols. First, a lovely pod of dolphins:

A short video of White-beaked Dolphins off the coast of the south Mainland of Shetland this week. Amazing to watch!#MarineLife #MarineMammals #CetaceansUK #UKWildlife

— Hugh Harrop (@hughharrop.bsky.social) 2025-08-24T16:01:07.498Z

. . . and a lovely fly:

Happy Fly-day! We made it.Oblique streaktail hoverfly(Allograpta obliqua)These little hoverflies are gardeners’ friends, helping to reduce the pesky aphid population.#flyDay #macro #photography #diptera #flies #native #insects #bugs #bugsky #entomology #gardening #gardens #nature #pollinators

— Gray (@grays.art) 2025-08-22T06:45:48.665Z

23 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun. -Martin Amis, novelist (25 Aug 1949-2023)

  2. You gotta admit, the story of the guy who flys solo to fucking Antarctica and then complains of it being isolating and lonely is hilarious.

    1. Yep and young Mr Guo clearly did not file a flight plan for the airbase he landed at across what appears to be 600 miles or so of open ocean…ocean that Jerry has shown us in his photos from his trip to Antarctica to be unforgivingly stormy at times. Had he gone down en route, he would have triggered a search and rescue mission from aircraft and ships that would have put the searchers at high risk. It is 800 miles to where he landed, much of it over open water…impossible to mistake it for a local flight over Punta Arenas. Finally, the nominal range for a Cessna 182 is about 1000 miles…no way was this 800 mile one-way flight across 600 miles of ocean an accidental event. FAA should pull his license, requiring him to arrange and purchase commercial travel home. And forbid him from getting a pilot’s license for at least ten years…when he might be mature enough not to abuse it.

  4. JKR does a lot to support Afghani women. She donated a LOT of money to help fly professional women out of Afghanistan as they were in danger from the Taliban.

    People are free to gather together to discuss any topic or nation, there is no obligation to discuss all things at all times.

    Another example of this whataboutery is the amazing Hibo Wardere, a Somali campaigner against female genital mutilation. She used to campaign on twitter, but men kept on jumping onto her threads to complain that she wasn’t discussing male circumcision. We kept telling them to go and start their own threads, but they preferred to stay and hassle women. Sadly she seems to have left twitter, but her book is still available.

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cut-Womans-Fight-Against-Britain/dp/1471153983

      1. Worrying about starving Sudanese, children won’t get them coverage in the media. Neither will worrying about kids going hungry in the USA or UK. Virtue signalling is more important to them than saving the lives of children.

    2. I wrote an article about (male) circumcision (generally in favor of it) once and was surprised by the blow back from circumcision activists. They exist and are pretty bonkers. They even had a “march” of sorts in Brooklyn where they put big red stains on the crotches of their white pants. Quite a scene.

      That said…. I’d expect TRActivists – whose grip on biology is tenuous at best – to equate female and male circumcision. So deeply stupid.

      D.A.
      NYC

  6. Hazel the duck gone? Say it isn’t so!

    Twenty-five scoops of ice cream? Oooh that looks good! (Good to the eye but not so good for the stomach.)

    My babyhood stuffed animal, Sooty (a d*g), lost all its stuffing decades ago. But I still have it, displayed inside a Riker display case—a museum-quality display box with soft cushiony stuffing and a glass cover. Visitors ask what it is, as it looks more like a rag than like a stuffed animal. Sooty is a celebrity in our house.

  7. Wouldn’t sleeping with a live animal help your insomnia? I haven’t had a wife to lean up against in many years; so my big orange cat is happy to substitute. Although he does wake me up at dawn; so I put him out and then go back to bed for a couple of hours.

      1. Especially on cold winter nights. I used to call my kitty my “little heater”. On cold nights she demanded to be let under the covers.

  8. Oh and though uncle elon seems to be distracted and to have lost interest in his SpaceX Mars mega rocket, a heads up for folks who continue to follow this stuff, that there is a test flight 10 scheduled for a one-hour launch window tonight beginning at 7:30 EDT. Last night’s attempt was scrubbed about 30 minutes before scheduled launch due to “ground systems issues” and rescheduled for tonight. I usually find a live video connection via space.com.

    1. This is the guy’s live stream resonates the most with me. Scheduled start is 23:30 CET

  9. I certainly agree that Trump’s cutting research funding for universities’ science departments is a gross and dangerous form of overreach, but I have little sympathy for those scientists who complain about these cuts while having been silent about the hateful and destructive antics of the their woke colleagues in the humanities (and social sciences); i’ve encountered quite a few of these sorts. To paraphrase, Silence=Complicity.

      1. That’s right. A man’s first duty is to provide for his wife and children. An autistic incel can sacrifice all for a cause tilting at windmills. So can someone who can make a good living doing just about anything where he makes his own rules. Married women should have considerable freedom to act because they should know their husbands are the sort that will backstop them, which is why women should marry up. But for the rest of us, one’s children need to be fed and educated, and one’s wife needs to have her predictable widowhood supported in generous comfort. What happens in the humanities department takes a distant second barely on the radar screen. It’s not cowardice. It’s duty.

  10. Reading a book will not help me fall asleep. I always get so involved that I continue to read long past any reasonable bedtime.

    Usually I stop reading when I notice that our Sun is up.

    Instead I just watch something boring on TV — CSPAN is good for this — until I start to doze.

Comments are closed.