Welcome to a truncated version of today’s Hili. I got back from Cambridge last night and it will take me a few days to get back in harness (yes, I’m like a horse running a grinding mill, walking endlessly in a circle). It’s a Hump Day (“Ĝiba tago” in Esperanto): and the first day of October, 2025. This means that I get to post one of my favorite passages from Thomas Wolfe, an underappreciated American writer (no, not the New Journalist Tom Wolfe). A repost from last year:
I’ve put up the words of Thomas Wolfe several times on October 1 (he was born on October 3, 1900 and died of tuberculosis at just 37). This is a repost from exactly two years ago. The prose is gorgeous and evocative, and of course appropriate to the day.
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No writer has captured the color and feel of America better than Thomas Wolfe. From Of Time and the River:
Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands. The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big that you cannot say that the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails, just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up; the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling upon you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun so that you cannot say that sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground, and where the leaves. . .
October is the richest of the seasons: the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run. The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of old October.
The corn is shocked: it sticks out in hard yellow rows upon dried ears, fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania, and the big stained teeth of crunching horses. The indolent hooves kick swiftly at the boards, the barn is sweet with hay and leather, wood and apples—this, and the clean dry crunching of the teeth is all: the sweat, the labor, and the plow is over. The late pears mellow on a sunny shelf, smoked hams hang to the warped barn rafters; the pantry shelves are loaded with 300 jars of fruit. Meanwhile the leaves are turning, turning up in Maine, the chestnut burrs plop thickly to the earth in gusts of wind, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling.
Here’s the author, from Asheville, NC:
And of course we must see the October entry from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, apparently depicting the Louvre before it was surrounded by Paris.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Truncated Nooz:
*The government shut down at midnight, so many federal employees aren’t working, though Trump can still issue commands and executive orders. I was reading the newspaper on the plane home yesterday, and the guy sitting next to me asked me, “Is there any good news in there?” I of course said no. But I could have told him an old joke from my father:
Floyd: “Jerry, I have some good news and some bad news. Which would you like to hear first?”
Jerry: “The bad news.”
Floyd: “The bad news is that there isn’t any good news.”
Jerry: “So what’s the good news?”
Floyed: “That’s all the bad news there is.”
From the NYT:
The government shut down on Wednesday morning at 12:01 a.m., amid a bitter spending deadlock between President Trump and Democrats in Congress that will disrupt federal services and leave many federal workers furloughed.
It was the first federal shutdown since 2019, when parts of the government were shuttered for 35 days in a standoff between congressional Democrats and Mr. Trump over the president’s demand to fund a wall at the southern border.
This time, the dispute is over Democrats’ demand that the president agree to extend expiring health care subsidies and restore Medicaid cuts enacted over the summer as part of Mr. Trump’s marquee tax cut and domestic policy law.
The shutdown became all but inevitable on Tuesday night after Senate Democrats voted just hours before a midnight deadline to block Republicans’ plan to keep federal funding flowing.
In back-to-back Senate votes that reflected how acrimonious the funding dispute has become, each party blocked the other’s stopgap spending proposal, just as they had earlier in the month.
On a 55-to-45 vote, the G.O.P. plan, which would extend funding through Nov. 21, fell short of the 60 needed for passage. Republicans also blocked Democrats’ plan, which would extend funding through the end of October and add more than $1 trillion in health care spending, in a 47-to-53 vote.
Shortly afterward, Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, directed agencies in a memo to “execute their plans for an orderly shutdown.”
Each side will blame the other, but I suspect the Republicans will get the brunt of it because one of their unmet demands was an extension of Obamacare.
Democrats said they were resolute in their determination to continue the standoff until Republicans relented to their demands, which include the extension of Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year, as well as the reversal of cuts to Medicaid and other health programs that Republicans included in the tax cut legislation.
*The Wall Street Journal tells us what we can expect for the time being (and we don’t know how long this will last): no lapse in social security, longer lines at airports as air-traffic controllers and TSA employees might not work without pay, a continuation of ICE apprehensions, since ICE is considered “essential,” and all federal workers will get back pay for the time they’re not working. How long will it last?
What will it take to reopen the federal government?
To resolve a government shutdown, Congress must agree on a spending measure to restore federal funding, whether that be short-term funding or a full-year appropriations package. Republicans have proposed a seven-week stopgap measure, while Democrats want a four-week package that also includes hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare spending.
*The Washington Post describes a big-time return of cancel culture, and it comes from everywhere on the political spectrum: “How cancel culture came for everyone.” (Archived here.)
But now that President Donald Trump and his allies have vowed to punish speech they don’t like — the critics they accused of dancing on Charlie Kirk’s grave, the left’s “rhetorical assault on law enforcement,” the comics of late-night television and their monologues — cancel culture has split the Magasphere. On one side are those who say being fired for an offensive social media post is simply “consequence culture”; on the other, those who worry about falling down the slippery slope of censorship.
These are familiar fault lines, paths well trodden since online shaming became a cultural flash point. And they highlight cancel culture’s central truth: It tends to be cancel culture when your enemies, or perceived enemies, do it. When your team does it, it’s justice.
“Everyone cancels,” Owens said. “And everyone hates it.”
But who’s to blame for it?
For years, the American right has pointed at liberals, portraying them as humorless keyboard warriors trawling the internet for problematic posts and scolding their foes into submission (or out of their jobs).
Others, including Owens, have framed canceling as a valuable democratic tool — itself an expression of free speech. It happens when people want to address “a person, place or thing that they feel is detrimental to their way of life,” Owens said. Boycotts are an example of cancel culture, as are organized grassroots campaigns. By Owens’s definition, people have been practicing cancel culture across centuries and across the ideological spectrum.
The Target boycott that took place this year, after the retailer rescinded its commitment to diversity and inclusion policies, qualifies, according to Owens. So do the late-20th-century Christian evangelical campaigns against Hustler Magazine and the children’s TV show “Teletubbies,” both spearheaded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The treatment of the Chicks, whose careers stalled in the aughts after a conservative backlash, does too. And Trump’s crusade against former congresswoman (and fellow Republican) Liz Cheney? Also cancel culture.
Even Kirk embodied many of cancel culture’s paradoxes — making a career promoting his idea of debate while simultaneously launching a professor watch list that encouraged students to report left-leaning instructors.
Greg Lukianoff, a First Amendment lawyer and co-author of the book “The Canceling of the American Mind,” sees it much more narrowly.
“A lot of times people will say, ‘Oh, cancel culture has always existed,’ but what they mean is conformity pressure … boycotting, ostracization,” Lukianoff said. “The thing that let cancel culture exist in the form that we got to know and hate is essentially the ability to create an instantaneous appearance of a mob. And that really just isn’t possible until you actually have something like social media.”
*Ghost, the Giant Pacific octopus in a California aquarium is still alive, though she’s starving herself to death as she tends a batch of unfertile eggs. They have taken her off display and put her in a private tank, but it’s all very sad. I still think they should let people see what happens naturally to an octopus (this is the way the females reproduce), but it might traumatize the young. At any rate, the Washington Post has a good article on Ghost with nice pictures and video (it can’t be archived). And again, go watch the fantastic Oscar-winning documentary “My Octopus Teacher,” which ends with the subject dying like this. You will cry. But that’s nature!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is (can it be?) dissing atheists. But both he and Hili are nonbelievers!
Hili: Gods aren’t angels.
Andrzej: Neither are atheists.
In Polish:
Hili: Bogowie nie są aniołami.
Ja: Ateiści też nie.
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From Divy, who says that this is “rude”:
From Now That’s Wild:
One I retweeted from Masih:
The Taliban in Afghanistan promised they wouldn’t curtail girls’ education. They lied. https://t.co/yajSEvUoP8
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 1, 2025
From Jay: the new peace plan in Gazan, which seems to be an American/Israeli proposal, isn’t too bad, and if Hamas agrees (and disbands), the war will be over. But Hamas will not agree, as they will never voluntarily give up power. Qatar (our “ally”) could help by threatening to kick out the resident gazillionaire Hamas leaders.
“This isn’t just another case of Israel and America agreeing on a plan only to see Hamas say no;” Netanyahu has accepted Trump’s agreement, and now the ball is in Hamas’s court… What does this mean? Dan Perry and Ariel Oseran break down the leaders’ Washington speech. pic.twitter.com/pvHvoLb34l
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) September 30, 2025
From Malcolm, another cat who plays well with others:
Some cats are great at team sports
[📹 balloondaisy]pic.twitter.com/oo7Otz7CEy
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 13, 2025
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was six years old, and had he lived he'd be celebrating his 89th birthday today.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-10-01T12:38:57.521Z
Look at these lovely squirrels found by Cate:
A bunch of Eurasian red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris) is here to present your daily dose of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed cutenesspic.twitter.com/QMRShfTAKP
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 28, 2025
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a tardigrade perambulationg around what seems to be a Volvox:
Avez-vous déjà vu… un tardigrade faire le tour de sa petite planète de cellules d'algue Volvox ?Maintenant oui 😊Cette vidéo a été classée 4ème au concours de microphotographie Nikon Small World 2025.www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/20…cc @eloscicomm.bsky.social 😉
. . . And an event with a miniscule probability:
— 2FutArata (@2futarata.bsky.social) 2025-09-27T04:37:45.709Z
I find these “shutdowns” nonsensical. How does Congress get itself into this position over and over again. As far as I am concerned, both parties are equally to blame for maintaining a budgetary regime that can’t seem to work without stopgaps. That said, my understanding is that the spending which is due to lapse which the Dems want saved was emergency spending from Covid. They also demanded Public Broadcasting be funded again. It will be interesting, though, to see if Trump goes through with major RIFs.
As Milton Friedman used to say, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”
It does evoke an even greater amount of cynicism than usual both among the civil service and the contractor workforce. As I watched these “shutdowns” from NASA…yes your quotes are correct because those activities deemed to be essential continue even if unpaid on schedule: Life-critical workers such as those supporting orbiting astronauts on the ISS must work; at our laboratory, the guard force and fire department worked while the Director of the Lab did not. For the first few years, we assumed that we would not be paid for days away, but a friendly Congresswoman, created a precedent in which we eventually received back pay for those days once the “shutdown” was over. The whole process devalues the work of the federal workforce in general with congress cynically keeping open and operating those functions, the closure or stoppage of which, might threaten their re-election.
Thank you for your notes on Gaza
Ah, perfect timing – indeed, I printed out the Wolfe passage to read aloud as a yearly tradition – and welcome “back” weary trav’ler PCC(E)….
Ooo yeah, Hili sharp-witted as ever – IMHO careful of that Gnostic temptation to become god?… the reason I extended the old aphorism that Dawkins started using as follows :
“not all atheists go one god further”
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It is a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity. -Jimmy Carter, 39th US President, Nobel laureate (1 Oct 1924-2024)
We’ve discussed here multiple times the woke bias of wikipedia (and yesterday brought co-founder Larry Sanger’s recipe to remedy it), well, it seems that Elon Musk has plans, and that shortly there will be an alternative non-woke “Grokipedia”, all written by AI.
Bottom left in ‘Bring back our girls’: Who is it? Looks a bit like Diddy, in which case… 🙁
I agree with you and Masih Alinejad that the Taliban is treating women horribly. But what to do about it? The USSR invaded Afghanistan and failed. The US invaded Afghanistan and failed.
I suggest supporting an Iranian invasion of Afghanistan. This is in-spite of my general hostility towards Iran.
Your hostility to Iran would be well served if its leaders were ever to take up your suggestion.
One reason Iran hates the Taliban is b/c when they first took over in 1996 they murdered 12 Iranian diplomats in the Iranian consulate in Herat. In the basement.
This is a act hard to forgive.
Plus, Sunni vs Shi’a – both are the hard pointy ends of each sect.
Sadly… perhaps.. Iran has bigger fish to fry right now. (but no frier and no fish)
Even keeping the lights on in Tehran is a challenge. Dictatorships never work well, theocracies even worse. And as noted above, the Afghans are spectacularly un-controllable and uninvadable.
D.A.
NYC
ps Leslie I liked your comments lately about refugees and immigration law. Didn’t get time to actually reply, but kudos.
Iran has other reasons for hating the Taliban. Afghanistan send drugs (opiates) Iran’s way. As for invasions. The Mongols were notably successful in invading Afghanistan as were the British (after losing badly earlier).
I’m pretty sure they would get their *sses kicked.
Here in Oz we have a female Senator who is a “refugee” from Afghanistan. Instead of showing gratitude to the country that gave her refuge from Taliban oppression, and elected her to public office, she uses her position to rant against the existence of Israel, the USA, and even Australia itself. Of course she is a devout Muslim. What is wrong with such people?
What is it about Thomas Wolfe’s prose that strikes even my engineer’s uneducated ear and brain as so lovely, so light, rhythmic, and beautiful? I recall the posting two years ago and thought the same thing that morning. I grudgingly submitted myself to a year each of American Literature and English Literature, but was a terrible student, focused as I was on my math and science courses in those years. Yet Wolfe’s paragraphs on October are different and wonderful to me.
I appreciate and share Masih’s outrage over the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls.
I wonder, however, what she proposes should be done and by whom? Three modern empires have tried to control Afghanistan, none of which endeavors went particularly well. And short of controlling the country, what exactly is one to do?
Most countries, and certainly all western countries, have (or have had) strict sanction regimes against the Taliban, which have hardly helped and have arguably only made the plight of its women even worse.
I’m afraid I see no good solutions here, and haranguing the world community without offering any viable solutions isn’t really helpful.
You can keep pointing it out so people know of the problem, even if no solutions immediately present themselves.
One way to do it, though it is impossible, would be to isolate them. No country does any business with them unless they reform. That might do it.
But that could never happen. We couldn’t even get a consensus that the sky is blue, let alone work together on anything at all. The reality is, there is nothing anyone can do except the Afghans themselves. But that too will not work. It is a tragedy without end.
Ever energetic the Chinese tried recently. Didn’t go well. They had a joint venture for a (pretty small) oil extraction project in northern Afghanistan.
It was a disaster for all concerned, swamps of recrimination and bad feelings.
Seems the “investment” was kinda for show, geopolitical flex and influence rather than actual oil, of which Afghanistan has almost none.
Chinese biz men have opened a hotel or two in Kabul but that hasn’t been excellent either.
There’s nothing we or outsiders can do to “rescue” the women there, sadly. Meanwhile it stands as a billboard to say: “Yep, this is Sharia.” which is useful as civilized people – Muslims and kaffirs alike – recoil in horror at its moral squalor.
D.A.
NYC
The part of Canada where most of us live, southern Ontario as far as Ottawa at its northern edge, is not so different from Wolfe’s corner of America, albeit no mountains or seacoasts. South of Toronto we have chinkapin oaks, horse chestnuts, and hickory trees, lots of corn, grapes, pears, and apples, (and peaches, though not still in October) and many farms with red barns still keep horses more for racing than ploughing, although some Mennonites use them for transportation. Farther north, the woods turn red and gold like Maine. So our October unfolds pretty much as his did.
Thanks!
Leslie – are those Old Order Mennonites or Amish. Not that it matters 🙂
Old Order Mennonites in the Elmira-St. Jacobs region near the twin cities of Kitchener-Waterloo. (Ordinary Mennonites, too, who use modern ways and means. A Mennonite cabinet-making firm built our kitchen cupboards. Two hundred mitred corners on the fifty maple doors, drawer-fronts, and panels and they’re all perfect.) They immigrated from Pennsylvania in the early 1800s in Conestoga wagons when the region was roadless wilderness, though fertile once the forests were cleared. A freeway and a college of applied arts and technology in Kitchener, originally settled as Berlin, are each called Conestoga.
Immigration from what would become the German Empire proceeded through the 19th century, especially after the upheavals in Europe in the mid-century, when a great many came to America as well. I don’t know to what extent the “Pennsylvania Deutsch” around Berlin inspired settlement from Prussia. Waterloo, despite its name, was 80% German by the 1911 census, as was Berlin. Anti-German sentiment, sometimes violent, during the Great War led to the town agreeing narrowly in 1916 to change its name to honour the British Boer War general, Lord Kitchener, recently lost at sea. At the time Canada was a confederation of backwoods British colonies with no identity or foreign policy of its own. Ethnic Germans were actively mistrusted because many spoke against the British war effort, even though by 1916 Canada itself had pretty much shot its bolt as an enthusiastic participant in the war. Lack of interest by “German” boys in enlisting for the King to fight in Flanders against their cousins was mirrored everywhere else in Canada especially in Québec. And the worst blood-letting was yet to come.
After the war the ethnic Germans including Pennsylvania Mennonites rapidly assimilated into the growing national identity of Canada. I’m not historically aware of any similar ill-feeling during the Second World War by which time Canada as one of the “white dominions” was an independent state. German nationals who weren’t Canadian citizens were interned as elsewhere but Canadian citizens were left alone.
I’m vaguely aware of differences between Mennonite and Amish sects and to the best of my knowledge the ones who live around K-W call themselves Mennonite, not Amish.
Leslie – thanks for all of those interesting and informative tidbits. Regarding the Anabaptists in the KW region, I’m pretty sure that they are mainly Mennonites. Kitchener is the headquarters of the Mennonite World Conference organization.
Regarding the various sects – in Northern Indiana, the Anabaptists run the gamut from the very conservative and distinctive Amish to liberal Mennonites who you could not distinguish from a Methodist at the local Walmart. One group made me laugh – the Black Bumper Mennonites who had cars but painted all of the bumpers black because chrome was apparently too gaudy and worldly. 🙂
And in other news, Chunk has won the fat bear contest, despite a broken jaw! Amazing, I would have thought a broken jaw would be a death sentence for a bear.
Yay, Chunk! Isn’t that his fourth win? (or “her”–I can’t remember the sex).
Since today’s dialogue is truncated, I have always wondered about the “Hump day” – how common is the term? Do all the languages featured here have it as an idiom and use it? I have to admit I didn’t know it, definitely not in my (Slavic) language and even in English it’s possible I encountered it for the first time here.
No, only English. My translations are just a bit of a joke.
“Each side will blame the other, but I suspect the Republicans will get the brunt of it because one of their unmet demands was an extension of Obamacare.”
Not very clear. Republicans demanded significant cuts rather than an extension. In particular, they wanted cuts to Affordable Care Act (ACA) funding, and to Medicaid.
Cancel: Excommunication, shunning. It’s a feature of religion!
Or any totalitarian system which relies on thought control in addition to behaviour control. Heretics and apostates are always the most persecuted, and arguably the biggest threat.
There was a comment coming out the other day from trump that he promises to make it even more painful for Democratic interests if they don’t cave in soon.
An interesting detail heard on NPR yesterday that many Middle Eastern states are urging Hamas to accept the peace plan, since they have no real other option. Given their previous patterns, I doubt they will accept it. But … maybe they will? Events have inflection points from time to time.
Wash my mouth out with soap, but I sincerely wish iDJT well in this endeavour. I’ll even applaud him getting a Nobel if it succeeds.
Just as “only Nixon could go to China”, it seems only an erratic narcissist could have enough credibility in his threats to convince the jihadis and their backers to fold. (I hope some whistleblower tells us about the “discussions” with Qatar et al; the bribes-and-threats package must have been awesome.) “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.”
I love when you post Thomas Wolfe’s passage on October. It puts me in a pensive mood.
And the merry month of May post also.
Although it’s not beautiful but fun.
It marks the time of the year for me which goes faster than I can keep up with.
The passage by Thomas Wolfe saddened me. Lost communities, once-shared experience, consorting with nature. Winter awaits.
Re Mr Wolfe’s birthplace and lost communities, the Riverside Arts Precinct in Asheville, NC, got wiped out by the unprecedented catastrophic flooding from hurricane Helene. The future of the longstanding arts community there is uncertain; many have left and are not coming back. My sister the published poet¹ is still hanging in there, but it has been tough.
. . . . .
¹ It seems she got more of the literary alleles than I did.
It seems there were enough to go around, though.
Thank you. (For a sometimes hard-nosed SOB you can be very sweet. ☺️)
“Those who say flattery won’t get you anywhere have never had it.”
(H Kissinger)
I stumbled upon and was fascinated by Thomas Wolfe when I was a teenager, reading both “Of Time And The River” and “Look Homeward Angel”. I remember wondering if there would ever be a time when I looked back with nostalgia on former days. Little did I know!
TW was one of the earliest practitioners of the standing desk. He was a tall man, and wrote his manuscripts in longhand, often on the top of his refrigerator in the kitchen. Can you imagine? His works are not exactly thin volumes.
Refrigerators were shorter back then.
Thanks. I have to admit the refrigerator reference threw me and it was bugging me until now. Of course. Maybe even an icebox.
Some wonderful things in today’s Hili – thanks! I’m amazed that the balloon survived the cat’s team play.
The shutdown doesn’t affect ICE, but does it stymie Trump’s (likely illegal) actions in Portland, OR?
The troops can still be deployed, they just won’t be paid. I don’t know if they’ll get back pay or not.
Thanks, Mark.
Did anyone catch the disgraceful and embarrassing multi-million dollar shit-show speech Hegseth and Trump gave to the hundreds of generals and admirals at Quantico? “Enemy from within?” Just wow! Translation: “when we unleash the military on American citizens, you better obey our orders, or else.” If I were one of those generals, I’d lawyer up.
No more men in dresses in the trenches, but yeah, the prospect of turning the military loose on American streets seems like something a dictator would do.