Thursday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Thursday already: it’s October 9, 2025, and Submarine-Hoagie-Hero-Grinder Day, celebrating all the American version of a single sandwich: a long one. But, from Guinness, here’s the longest one:

The longest sandwich measured 735 m (2,411 ft 5 in) and was created by members of three teams in total. These teams were Groupe Notre Dame Hazmieh-Scouts de L’Independence (Lebanon), Municipality of Hazmieh (Lebanon)and Mini-B chain restaurants (Lebanon). The attempt took place in Hazmieh village, Beirut, Lebanon, on 22 May 2011.

The sandwich started at Notre Dame des Soeurs Antonines School and ended on Elie Street, in Hazmieh, Beirut, Lebanon. The width of the sandwich was 12.5cm and the overall estimated weight of the sandwich is 577.03kg.

The total number of participants from the three teams who were involved in the preparation and cooking of the sandwich was 136 and 639 participants filled the sandwich, which took 22 hours to make.

That is HALF A MILE OF SANDWICH! The record commercially available version is this 18-pounder sold in Connecticut, costing $200. These two dudes manage to polish it off.

It’s also National Depression Screening Day, National Sneakers Day, National Moldy Cheese Day, International Beer and Pizza Day, and, in Italy, National Polenta Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 9 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The biggest news, which you already know, is that Israel and Hamas have agreed on Phase 1 of a peace plan, though much still remains to be worked out.

Israel and Hamas on Thursday edged closer to ending their devastating two-year war, agreeing on the initial terms of a deal that could pave the way to an imminent cease-fire and bringing relief to the families of Israeli hostages and to two million Palestinians in Gaza.

The two sides were preparing for an exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners this weekend after reaching an agreement overnight, the culmination of sustained pressure from President Trump and Arab mediators. Mr. Trump suggested that he would travel to the region over the weekend, and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he had invited him to address Israel’s Parliament.

Though details were scarce, and the text of the agreement had not been made public, it promised at least a cease-fire if not a permanent end to a conflict that has set off a humanitarian catastrophe and widespread hunger in Gaza, battered Hamas militarily and left Israel exhausted and isolated internationally. It has also fueled an alarming rise in antisemitic violence across the world.

Mr. Netanyahu was convening his cabinet on Thursday to sign off on the agreement, which an Israeli official briefed on the matter said would mark the start of a formal cease-fire. The deal’s first phase requires Israel to pull back its troops to an agreed-upon line in Gaza. The Israeli military said that it was preparing to lead the operation for the hostages’ return and to “transition to adjusted deployment lines soon.”

Hamas called on Mr. Trump and others to compel Israel “to fully implement the agreement’s requirements and not allow it to evade or delay” carrying them out.

But some of the most difficult issues between Israel and Hamas appeared to have been left to a future phase of negotiations, including who would rule postwar Gaza and whether, to what degree and how Hamas would lay down its weapons.

In Gaza, where food shortages have led international experts to declare a famine in part of the territory, aid workers expressed hope that they could soon begin speeding supplies to the hungry. Hamas and Qatar, one of the countries brokering the negotiations, also indicated in statements that the agreement would allow for the entry of aid into Gaza.

Hours after Mr. Trump announced the “historic” deal, the Israeli military reminded residents of Gaza in a statement that its troops continued to occupy the territory and were still fighting a war. Explosions and smoke rose from Gaza on Thursday morning, indicating that Israeli military operations were continuing even as a cease-fire was expected to begin soon.

But this is only Phase 1 and doesn’t deal with the governance of Gaza nor the fate of Hamas (keep reading). I heard on the NBC evening news that Hamas has collected all living hostages (and presumably the remains of the dead ones, and they could be turned over to Israel by this weekend.  But I think it’s a good start.  Here are the assessments of two others:

Asked to assess whether the war in Gaza is finally over, Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., said this in The Free Press:

It may not be the end of the war—Hamas apparently still has its guns and is still embedded in Gaza—but neither is it merely the beginning of the end. It promises to be the end of the unspeakable suffering of the living hostages and the families of both the survivors and the dead. It suggests an end to the enervating and traumatic military service of tens of thousands of Israeli reservists. It holds out the hope for ending the agony and homelessness of millions of Gazans and for reviving a diplomatic horizon for the Palestinians. One end is certain—of America’s isolation and withdrawal from the Middle East. President Trump may yet achieve a lasting peace, but he has already restored the Pax Americana.

The same question was posed to Palestinian American humanitarian activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who responded this way:

The war in Gaza is far from over, even if it is tactically stopped for now. The agreement thus far is specific to Phase 1, which relates to the hostage-prisoner swap and a partial Israeli military withdrawal from the Strip. Afterward, new negotiations must commence to figure out the arguably more difficult subjects like Hamas disarmament, an international force entering Gaza, a transitional governance apparatus, and the process of neutralizing any threats emanating from the Strip, during which Hamas is expected to stall, drag things out, and create challenges for the future of the coastal enclave without the terror group. Any respite from the horrors of war is indeed welcome news, and hopefully, there won’t be a resumption after this phase is finished. Still, rational thinking and awareness require an understanding of all the challenges ahead.

The “easy” part is over; the hardest part is yet to come. But now let’s celebrate the release of the hostages and flow of humanitarian aid to those who need it. I have a feeling the road will be bumpy after the hostages are released.

*The local news reports that the Texas National Guard has arrived in our fair city, and are housed in some non-Illinois facility about 15 miles from Chicago. Our people are Democrats, and are getting ready for a big confrontation with the Guard and also with ICE, which is trying to nab any undocumented residents in Chicago. In the meantime, Trump wants our mayor and governor ARRESTED.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said the Illinois governor and Chicago mayor, both Democrats, should be jailed as they oppose his deployment of National Guard troops for his immigration and crime crackdown in the nation’s third-largest city. The officials said they would not be deterred.

The Republican president made the comment in a social media post, the latest example of his brazen calls for his opponents to be prosecuted or locked up — a break from longtime norms as the Justice Department traditionally has strived to maintain its independence from the White House.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that Mayor Brandon Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker “should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers!” It was a reference to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It was not immediately clear what Trump was objecting to.

That last sentence is hilarious. Pritzker is going to bring a suit against the government, and he may win.  I’m not sure what else he can do except order the police not to protect ICE officers, which would probably be illegal since the cops are supposed to be keeping order.  What is true is that Pritzger and Johnson aren’t going to Jail. There’s more:

Johnson, in a post on X, said, “This is not the first time Trump has tried to have a Black man unjustly arrested. I’m not going anywhere.” Pritzker, also on X, said” I will not back down. Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”

Johnson should not be playing the race card here (he’s been very unpopular as mayor), and, after all Pritzker is also threatened with arrest and he’s white (or at least white-adjacent as a Jew).

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson, when asked what crimes the president believed Pritzker and Johnson had committed, failed to identify any, but she said they “have blood on their hands” and pointed to Chicago Police Department reports that at least five people were killed and 25 shot over the weekend.

“Instead of taking action to stop the crime, these Trump-Deranged buffoons would rather allow the violence to continue and attack the President for wanting to help make their city safe again,” Jackson said.

National Guard troops from Texas are positioned outside Chicago despite a lawsuit by the state and city to block the deployment.

The troops’ mission is not clear but the Trump administration has undertaken an aggressive immigration enforcement operation in Chicago.

There’s going to be trouble, I tell you. Everybody’s riled up here and one of the University of Chicago faculty has already been arrested on two felony counts and two charges of misdemeanor.

*The prosecution of former FBI director James Comey is about to start, and it’s a retributive prosecution if ever there was one. My prediction: he’ll get off scot free. From the WSJ:

Former FBI Director James Comey pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a pair of criminal charges stemming from his testimony before a Senate committee in September 2020, making his first court appearance in a case that President Trump had sought.

Comey, 64 years old, was charged last month with making a false statement and obstructing a congressional proceeding. It marked the culmination of a frenetic White House campaign to bring a case against Comey—over the objection of career prosecutors—in the final days before the time window for charges expired. Trump sought to oust the U.S. attorney overseeing the investigation, Erik Siebert, and publicly urged Attorney General Pam Bondi in a social-media post to move quickly to prosecute his perceived adversaries, including Comey.

*Thomas Friedman’s take on the Gaza war has been pretty dire, but in his latest NYT column/interview, “The only way to solve the Israel/Hamas war,” gets him partly back on the rails again. But he still thinks that the two-states solution is that “only way”.  But at least he realizes the difficulty with two states, and that it’s going to take international monitoring to effect it:

I hope this cease-fire that President Trump has initiated will come to fruition. I’m watching every day, but it’s not going to be easy.

What intrigues me about this plan is that it contains the seeds of what I think is the only possible solution now to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is sometimes credited with saying, when you have a difficult problem, enlarge it. And in effect, that’s what we’re doing.

I think the thing that people need to understand most about the peace talks going on right now is the sheer number of actors involved. The underlying logic of this plan is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now so broken, the two sides are so traumatized, that this problem can no longer be solved with the traditional tools and at the traditional level that it was resolved before: the two sides negotiating with each other and an international mediator in between them.

I believe if we are ever going to get to two states for two people, it’s actually going to require some kind of international body to oversee both Gaza and the West Bank to assure Israelis that no threat can ever come from those areas, that they don’t have to rely on Palestinian promises to demilitarize. And to assure Palestinians that Israelis will be gone and enable Palestinians to develop their own noncorrupt governing authority.

Basically, if we want to solve this problem now, I think we have to go back to a kind of agreed-upon Arab international mandate to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza and to oversee the rebuilding of Palestinian governance in the West Bank. Only that kind of international structure that would assure both decent Palestinian governance and real demilitarization of both Gaza and the West Bank, supervised by international troops that would almost surely have to have an American component — I think that’s the only way to solve this problem now.

The biggest problem is that he wants a “reckoning” for Hamas of some sort, but it seems to be a pretty tame reckoning:

*At the Free Press, a Swedish Jewish woman, Annika Henroth-Rothstein sets the issue of Greta Thunberg’s anger in the recent history of Sweden, “Greta Thunberg and Sweden’s lost children.” Greta and her 170 fellow flotilla-ites were deported from Israel to Greeca and Slovakia, and she’s been criticized for using a photo of an emaciated Israeli hostage on a social-media designed to call attention to the supposed mistreatement of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. /A few excerpts which explains Thunberg as a natural outgrowth of Swedish society.

Thunberg is a phenomenon. But more importantly, she is a case study of what has gone wrong in Sweden and the rest of Europe over the past several decades. She is a lost child on a lost continent, both desperately seeking purpose.

But then the article goes awry, blaming all this stuff on Sweden’s growing atheism! (Bolding is mine.)

But then something happened: It met with reality. As part of its rejection of ideology, Europe rejected God. Separation of church and state became the norm; laws rooted in religious morality were liberalized; religious attendance and education collapsed; and public life was secularized. As religion was leached from our lives, humanism and universalism were offered as a trade, creating a vacuum of faith and meaning—and vacuums, as we know, long to be filled.

The country of my birth refuses to stand for anything, and therefore falls for everything, time and time again.

This happened all over Europe, but perhaps nowhere more starkly than in my native country. According to the 2023–24 European Social Survey, less than 5 percent of Swedes attend religious services at least once a week, among the lowest rates in the world. According to the Pew Research Center, 80 percent of Swedes said that “religion should be kept separate from government policies,” and only 22 percent said that religion plays a somewhat or very important role in their life, compared with 70 percent in the U.S. After decades of ideological and spiritual erosion, Sweden is now a country without a God, a national ethos, or a sense of identity.

The country of my birth refuses to stand for anything, and therefore falls for everything, time and time again. Look at the migrant crisis. In 2015, Sweden—a country of about 10 million—allowed about 163,000 asylum seekers over its borders, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Over the next 10 years, many of these immigrants failed to assimilate, causing continued social and economic upheaval. Much of that is because Sweden had no national identity to instill. You cannot teach what you do not know—this is true for raising a child and true when steering a nation.

Which brings us to Greta (also an atheist, I believe):

Faith, shared purpose, and identity are the walls that build the house that makes a nation. At this point, Sweden is little but an open tent. Thunberg is a product of this nation. For young Europeans like her, it is not about the issues themselves; it is about being part of something. It is not about doing good, but rather looking good. Where there once was faith and purpose, there is now only posturing and projection.

This gives context to Thunberg’s ideological shift, in October 2023, from climate activism to anti-Israel activism—a shift joined by thousands of others across the continent. Israel represents the very opposite of the vacuum that Europe has built. It is a proud nation-state with borders, faith, ideology, and explicit purpose and ideals. Its people, while constantly disagreeing, are united by an identity much larger than the issues of the day. Israel is everything that Europe once rejected. Its success would be proof that the European postwar shift was a failure, and still is.

But Thunberg isn’t worrying about all that. She’s too busy feeling as if she is doing something that truly matters. This is why, at the end of the day, while I feel outraged at the effects of her actions on others, I primarily feel terrible for her. Her activism should anger me, as a Swedish Jew, and it does. But more than anything, it breaks my heart. Thunberg isn’t the disease; she is an aggressive symptom of it—a symptom of the radical emptiness we now see in our streets, in our social media feeds, and in our children. It is an unraveling much like a stray rubber ball in an empty room, bouncing from side to side without aim or end.

. . . Once the war is over, Thunberg will move on to another issue—most likely the loudest, most divisive one, whatever that might be at the time. It is, after all, just a placeholder for meaning, ideological busywork in a seemingly meaningless world, a substitute God for the faithless.

Well, this is pretty misguided. Yes, we all need things to absorb us, things that we see in retrospect “give our life meaning”, but to say that Greta is Greta because Sweden rejected God is way too simplistic.  Is Rothstein saying that we need to embrace God to stave off ideology? If so, will religion replace ideology, so Swedes will be too absorbed in Christianity to keep supporting Palestine? The Free Press, it seems, is publishing article after article touting belief in God as the cure for the world’s ills (I may write about another tomorrow). But the ills of Gaza won’t cured by its residents ardent belief in Allah. And really, it’s patronizing to make people believe in God—an unevidenced God—because it will fix the world. I, for one, can’t force myself to believe in propositions for which there’s no evidence.

*The AP has a cool photo gallery of Mary E. Brunkow being awoken by her husband to hear that she’s just won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. There are lots of nice photos, but copyright prevents me from reproducing them. Instead, here’s an interview with Brunkow about her reactions to learning about getting the Big Prize. There’s also a second phone call from Sweden, and Brunkow’s reaction:

And you can see a Facebook video of her reaction here.  Finally station KOB4 lets us know that biology laureate Fred Ramsdell finally found out he’d nabbed The Big One. He’d missed the phone call as he was hiking “off the grid.”

A hike interrupted

Everyone but Fred Ramsdell seemed to know he had just won the Nobel Prize in medicine.

Ramsdell was away on a backpacking trip Monday, driving through Yellowstone National Park with his wife and two dogs, Larkin and Megan. He kept his cellphone in airplane mode as he often does on family trips.

As they drove through a small town hours later, his wife started screaming as notifications flooded her phone. She told him he’d just won the Nobel Prize in medicine alongside Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi.

“I said, ‘No, I didn’t,’” Ramsdell told the AP in an interview the following day from his car. “She said, ‘Yes, you did. I have 200 text messages that say you won the Nobel Prize.’”

Later Monday, Ramsdell drove to a Montana hotel to connect to Wi-Fi and call friends and colleagues. He didn’t speak with the Nobel committee to get their congratulations until midnight.

He said he was stunned and awed to receive the recognition. But he has no plans to change his phone habits, which he says are important for work-life balance.

A phone call from Sweden

The Nobel Committee calls the winners shortly before the formal announcement is made. Some ignore the Swedish number — like Brunkow, who assumed the pre-dawn call was spam.

When his phone rang Wednesday, chemistry winner Susumu Kitagawa was skeptical. He said he answered “rather bluntly, thinking it must be yet one of those telemarketing calls I’m getting a lot recently.”

The Nobel announcements continue with the literature prize Thursday. Will that winner pick up the phone?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili asks an impossible question:

Hili: We must stay focused on what’s important.
Andrzej: And what exactly is important?

In Polish:

Hili: Musimy się koncentrować na tym co istotne.
Ja: A co jest istotne?

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

From Meow:

Speaking of cats, this is from CinEmma:

From Another Science Humor Group:

Masih is quiet but JKR is not.  Here’s a tweet relevant to my post yesterday on sex:

A woman is someone who doesn’t need to put in any work to become a woman, because she’s already a woman. pic.twitter.com/Br6CO6lw5F

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) October 8, 2025

From Simon, who says that this has some relevance to Trump:

"Republic has no need for savants and chemists" (the political court that sentenced Antoine Lavoisier to the guillotine, 1794)*from Paul Nurse's new book

— Oded Rechavi (@odedrechavi.bsky.social) 2025-10-02T15:50:11.821Z

From Malcolm; an Aussie wood-chopping competition. I guess the object is to get to the chop and just lop off the top segment:

Wood chopping competition in Australiapic.twitter.com/CCFE85oQnM

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 13, 2025

Two from my feed: This first one is fantastic! I bet the bird thought it was an egg and is trying to crack it on the sidewalk.

This bird just found out that golf balls bounce on concrete, and he’s having the time of his life 😂pic.twitter.com/VH9mzuYvyF

— Interesting things (@awkwardgoogle) October 7, 2025

Poor possum!

Halloween decoration startles an opossum at the candy bowl

pic.twitter.com/hCS8j2cMEl

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) October 8, 2025

One I retweeted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A French Jewish Girl, age 12, was gassed together with her mother and younger sister as soon as they arrived iin Auschwitz. Every time I see these photos I imagine the fear and horror these young people experienced as they were herded, nude, into the gas chamber, and then died from cyanide.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-10-09T12:55:33.504Z

And two from Dr. Cobb, who is apparently trying to find holes in Jewish doctrine.

Genuine question for rabbis/OT Biblical/Talmud scholars: If God told the Jews not to breed mules ('You must not breed together two different kinds of your livestock' – Lev 19:19), how come Solomon rode on David's mule when he was anointed (1 Kings 1:45)? Pls RT

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-09-21T20:13:12.315Z

But the rabbis are too clever for him!

So there's this:

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-09-21T20:16:54.524Z