Sunday: Hili dialogue

January 11, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats: Sunday, January 11, 2026, and National Hot Toddy Day. Here’s one, followed by some informative text from Wikipedia:

Patrick Truby, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Some etymology:

The word toddy comes from the toddy drink in India, produced by fermenting the sap of palm trees. Its earliest known use to mean “a beverage made of alcoholic liquor with hot water, sugar, and spices” is from 1786. It is often referred to as a ‘Hot Toady’. However, a few other sources credit Robert Bentley Todd for his prescription of a hot drink of brandy, canella (white cinnamon), sugar syrup, and water.

It’s also National Milk Day, National Sunday Supper Day, No Pants Subway Ride Day, and Learn Your Name in More Code Day.

Here’s my name in Morse code: .— . .-. .-. -.– / -.-. — -.– -. .     You can learn yours at the site, too.

. . . and the “official” announcement of the 17th Annual No Pants Subway Ride:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 11 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first: the death of Bob Weir, guitarist for and founding member of The Grateful Dead, was announced yesterday. He was 78 (article archived here). Although I wasn’t a Deadhead, I did like several of their songs, especially “Friend of the Devil,” which wasn’t written by Weir. The NYT lists “10 essential songs” of Weir: ones he co-wrote or sang lead on, including “Sugar Magnolia” and perhaps the band’s most famous song, “Truckin'”, which I’ll put below (song article archived here). From the NYT:

Bob Weir, a guitarist and songwriter who was a founding member of the Grateful Dead, which rose from jug band origins to become the kings of psychedelic rock, selling millions of records and inspiring a small nation of loyal fans, has died. He was 78.

His family announced the death in a statement on Saturday, saying that Mr. Weir had “succumbed to underlying lung issues” after receiving a cancer diagnosis in July. The statement did not say when or where he died.

The band, which was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965, blended rock, folk, blues and country, with mellow ease and a gift for improvisation that became its trademark. In a rock milieu that was still based on short songs and catchy hooks, the Grateful Dead created a niche for meandering, exploratory performances that each seemed to have their own personalities.

The band became the pied pipers of the wider hippie movement, providing the soundtrack for 1960s dropouts and LSD dabblers.

Here’s a live version of “Truckin'”, performed by the Dead in 1972; Weir sings lead. The NYT take:

With its lyrics by Robert Hunter and music written by Garcia, Weir and Lesh, the slippery shuffle “Truckin’” was a group effort all around. Hunter’s lyrics take the listener on a tour of various Dead misadventures, including a bust in New Orleans, but it’s Weir’s disbelieving delivery on the verses — navigating tricky couplets like “Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street” — that is the glue that holds the song together.

*The media has started reporting more about Iran as the protests go into their second week and more people get killed. Unfortunately, the regime seems to want to tough this one out.

Iran’s army vowed Saturday to join the crackdown on protesters, one of a number of stepped-up warnings from the country’s security services as demonstrations against the regime continue to grow and the death toll mounts.

The army said Saturday it would “firmly safeguard national interests, strategic infrastructure, and public property,” blaming Israel and what it called terrorist groups for the unrest and vowing to “thwart the enemy’s plots.”

The military’s pledge to intervene represented an escalation by authorities that had initially taken a more conciliatory tone with protesters. The early demonstrations mainly aired complaints about the country’s economic crisis but are now demanding an end to Iran’s theocratic system itself.

Until now, only the police and paramilitary security forces had been involved in cracking down on the protests. The regime faces a difficult calculation in responding to their growing intensity. It has little ability to address an economic crisis brought on by crippling sanctions, but President Trump has warned several times this week that he will intervene to stop a bloody crackdown.

Trump administration officials have had preliminary discussions about how to carry out an attack on Iran if needed to follow through on Trump’s threats, including what sites might be targeted, U.S. officials said.

One option being discussed is a large-scale aerial strike on multiple Iranian military targets, one of the officials said. Another of the officials said there wasn’t a consensus on what course of action to take, and no military equipment or personnel had been moved in preparation for a strike.

Iran has also enforced an internet blackout so that the outside world doesn’t get news of what’s going on (a futile attempt!) and that the protestors can’t communicate with each other or hear how the protest is playing in the rest of the world.

Again, this is an internal matter and I don’t think Trump should be attacking Iran, even to overthrow a blatantly oppressive theocracy. If we’re going to do that, we should be attacking North Korea (of course that would lead to the destruction of South Korea). But the principle remains that we shouldn’t use our military to resolve disputes that are purely within another country. However, if Israel and the U.S. wants to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities given that they’re certainly resuming production of bombs, that might be enough to tip the country into democracy.  Many chants by protestors, though, are calling for the return of Iran’s Crown Prince, Reza Pahlavi, and there’s no guarantee that he wouldn’t run the country like his father (the last Shah)—as a dictator.

*Trump’s narcissistic renaming mania is highlighted in the Washington Post’s morning newsletter (no link):

I don’t have the right credentials to get into the real reasons President Donald Trump adds his name to things. But he has a long business history of doing just that — notably buildings but also products and even a for-profit real estate seminar called Trump University.

Here in the D.C. area, he has a golf course in Virginia and had the Trump International Hotel, near the White House, during his first presidential term. The money-losing hotel changed hands (and names) after he left office.

Since moving back into the White House nearly a year ago, Trump has taken a more aggressive approach to putting his stamp on the city and, more broadly, the federal government.

And we’re only one year into Trump’s term. I can’t figure out which is the worst—either the Trump coins (I don’t think a living President has ever been depicted on money) or making Trump’s birthday a free-free day at National Parks while deep-sixing Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

*The Dispatch contemplates a J. D. Vance Presidency (possible now that Trump doesn’t look well and is still scarfing down burgers) in an article called “A Demagogue’s Demagogue.”

The nicest thing one can say about the vice president is that he’s not the worst or even second-worst person in the White House, and that will remain true as long as Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are on the job.

Which is a problem for him politically.

J.D. Vance is supposed to be the answer to the question, “What does Trumpism look like without Trump?” Postliberal intellectuals adore him because his ascension to the presidency portends an “America First” agenda unburdened by Trump’s demented, erratic, off-putting viciousness. Imagine having a fascist leading the country who can resist the impulse to celebrate the murder of Rob Reiner.

With a disciplined man like that in charge, there’s no telling what marvels MAGA might achieve.

The potential hiccup for authoritarian technocrats is that it’s not clear Republican voters share their priorities.

. . .And so you can see the problem for J.D. Vance [This is Trump’s repeated claim that “MAGA is me.”] If MAGA is Trump, and if what it chiefly prizes in him is his ruthless will to dominate his enemies rather than any specific agenda, a 2028 Vance campaign premised on professionalizing postliberalism will not make the right-wing heart flutter.

That’s not to say he’ll lose a primary—a sitting VP is nearly unbeatable, especially if he earns the president’s endorsement—but it risks inviting a challenge from some charismatic upstart who speaks demagoguery as a first, not second, language. And if Vance does land in the White House, it suggests his support among Republican voters won’t be nearly as “sticky” in office as Trump’s has been.

To make right-wingers fall in love, not just fall in line, J.D. Vance needs to be the biggest fascist scumbag he can be. And that’s tricky, since he happens to hold the one job in the administration with practically no duties. Apart from casting the occasional tiebreaking vote in the Senate for some grossly unfit Trump nominee, he has few opportunities to demonstrate ruthlessness through official actions.

All he can do is talk. So, on Thursday, that’s what he did. As part of his ongoing effort to impress the MAGA faithful, he went out in front of the White House press corps and was the biggest scumbag he could be.

And that was his strong, unevidenced, and rather cruel statements about the death of Renee Good, when he, like most of us, should STFU and simply wait to see what an investigation reveals—if there is an investigation.

But yes, to return to the point, the VP was passionate at the podium on Thursday. Specifically, he was passionate about smearing Renee Good, the woman killed by the ICE agent, as a terrorist in league with radicals whose death was “of her own making.”

“I’m not happy that this woman was there at a protest violating the law by interfering with the law enforcement action,” Vance added. … “We’re not going to give in to terrorism on this and that’s exactly what’s happened.”

Vance also asserted that the media has failed to cover that Good was “part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.”

“I think it’s really irresponsible for you guys [in the media] to go out there and imply or tell the American people that a guy who defended himself from being rammed by an automobile is guilty of murder,” he said. “Be a little bit more careful. We’re going to talk about toning down the temperature, which I know the president wants to do, and I certainly want to do. One of the ways we tone down the temperature is to have a media that tells the truth. I encourage you all to do that.”

Well, yes, Good is part of such an organization, as the tweet below shows, and some of the recommended actions are illegal. But the issue is not these instructions, but whether the ICE agent was acting recklessly and murderously when he shot her.

from the article again:

If you haven’t watched one of the many videos of her death, do so now so that you can appreciate the filthiness of the vice president telling a national audience that Good tried to “ram” the ICE agent with her vehicle. What she tried to do is pull away and flee—but couldn’t without momentarily pointing her car at the agent, who had positioned himself in front of the SUV in violation of standard procedure. That led to her being shot through the windshield; as for why the agent felt entitled to fire twice more at her through her side window after he was already clear of the front of her car, neither Vance nor anyone else in the administration seems to care.

“If you happen to be killed by a federal agent, your government will bear false witness to the world that you were a terrorist,” Adam Serwer wrote, identifying a key takeaway from the press conference.

ICE protestors aren’t terrorists, even when they’re engaged in illegal activities: they are protestors breaking the law.  It could be construed as civil disobedience, but right now I am engaged in STFUing, though I have to say that I’m bothered by the two seemingly gratuitous shots through the window, and the agent saying, “Fucking bitch” after he shot Good. Right now, Vance should STFU too instead of hewing to the government line. Yes, he will run, and likely he will win, and we’ll have another four (or even eight) years of misery. Maybe i should take up knitting.

*Over at the Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan calls the Trump administration’s foreign incursions examples of “A Viking foreign policy”, with the subtitle, “The logic of Trump’s entire approach: deploy superior force to plunder the weak. Repeat.” His first quote, from Trump, bothers me a lot:

“Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” – Donald Trump, asked about any limits on his war powers.

In one way, the last couple of weeks have been clarifying.

Ten years ago, I went back to Plato to try and understand Trump’s meteoric rise in our decadent polity. The essay remains unnervingly prescient in its portrayal of late-stage democracy’s yearning for tyranny, and more accurate about Trump’s second term than the first. But one key thing was always missing from seeing Trump as a tyrant in Plato’s schema. For Plato, tyrants always, always, always go to war. And yet, as I noted last year, in a piece that now seems a touch naive, Trump “lacks a core feature for every tyrant: he doesn’t seem interested in launching wars.”

Score another one for Plato, I guess. But his analysis doesn’t quite work. For Plato, the purpose of war for a tyrant is domestic control: “The first thing he will do, I imagine, is to be constantly stirring up some war or other, so that the people will need a leader.” But Trump doesn’t need a foreign enemy to rally support. He already has that enemy at home: leftists, illegal immigrants, trans people, Rosie O’Donnell, et al. His base hates the other half of America more than any foreign power.

Nonetheless, Plato’s psychological grasp of the tyrant still holds. The core drive is for disinhibited domination, and this is true of Trump. He is only comfortable if he controls everything and everyone in his domain. Equal co-existence without subordination is simply beyond his understanding — hence his sincere bafflement at the Constitution.

And the analogy:

In other words, Trump is a pagan. Two millennia of Christian ideas about war and peace, virtue and wisdom, individual dignity and morality, have passed him by entirely — which is why liberalism of any kind is incomprehensible to him. If you want to find the nearest analogy to his mindset, you have to reach back to a world where Christianity was entirely absent. The Vikings come to mind — resisting morality and Christianity up until the eleventh century. The 2022 movie, The Northman, was brilliant in its utterly unapologetic portrayal of this Viking mindset, with no moralizing at all. If you want to see the id of MAGA in full throttle, check it out.

The Vikings in their prime years had just recovered from a sixth and seventh century population collapse (climate change), followed by a period of widespread anarchy and warlordism that rendered any kind of civil society impossible. The warlordism that became endemic at home soon became warlordism abroad. The goal was relatively simple: use violence and the threat of violence to invade, murder, and plunder. The goal was lucre, which gave them more power to seek more lucre, which led to more glory. There was nothing in their worldview that would ever give them moral pause, even as Christian Europe was incubating the idea of moral restraints on state violence.

. . . In this Viking rubric, there’s no mystery why Trump attacked Venezuela and kidnapped the president and his wife. He did it for the thrill of domination — man does he relish parading his enemies in a perp walk — but mainly for the lucre. He has told us this explicitly — shamelessness is one of his pagan virtues — long before and immediately after the fact.  The idea that he is interested in Venezuelan democracy is ludicrous. He’s a mob boss — that’s all. And a protection racket has now descended over the entire Western Hemisphere, called the Donroe Doctrine. This is what America now is: a global Tony Soprano.

. . . . The only question remaining is a simple one. Who’s next? And how much is he gonna steal next time?

“My own morality”???? What kind of morality is that? And on what grounds should it override the law, especially since Trump (twice) has taken oaths to defend the Constitution. The thought that Trump’s own morality is his only impediment is the scariest thing I’ve heard come out of his mouth. I really should take up knitting. . .

Finally, UPI posted an “Odd news minute” (it’s actually two minutes. Get a load of that escape-artist dg!:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is once again wheedling for beef:

Hili: My energy’s dispersed.
Andrzej: Off you go, I have to fix the bed.
Hili: A promise of meat could give me just enough strength to reach the kitchen.

In Polish:

Hili: Energia mi się rozproszyła.
Ja: Uciekaj, muszę posłać łóżko.
Hili: Obietnica kawałka mięsa może mi pozwolić na dotarcie do kuchni.

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

From The Dodo:

From Comics Kingdom via Stacy:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih; another protestor killed (hundreds have died already).  Mehdi Zatparvar was a weightlifter.

From Luana; Alexander Van der Bellen, the idiotic president of Austria, envisages all women wearing hijabs to combat Islamophobia. Oy!

From J. K. Rowling, who really has tried to get arrested, but they won’t do it because she’ll become an über-martyr:

From Malcolm, an adorable pair of trained swans and their cygnets. This has to be either learned each generation from watching other swans or picked up de novo.

One from my feed:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

A Czech Jewish girl, born on this day in 1939, was almost certainly gassed to death with her brother and mother upon arriving at Auschwitz, as the children were young. Vēra was just four years old and would be 86 today had she lived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-01-11T11:08:39.566Z

. . . and two from Dr. Cobb, emeritus. First, a largely camouflaged ptarmigan. Sound up to hear it cry, “A werewolf!”

A male rock ptarmigan (Lagopus muta) in winter plumage.Ptarmigan is from Gaelic 'tarmachan' meaning "croaker". The p- was added when people mistakenly assumed it was a Greek word.A bird forever warning people: "A werewolf!" (just in case of werewolves).

— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2025-12-06T13:46:58.117Z

A reading and speaking moggy!  (Matthew tells me that “Malm” is an Ikea type of furniture.)

@deborahmcdaid.bsky.social

— Hello, it's Dan McDaid (@danmcdaid.bsky.social) 2026-01-10T17:29:03.097Z

17 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. -William James, psychologist and philosopher (11 Jan 1842-1910)

    Reply

  2. Agree(d) that we shouldn’t be sorting out other countries’ messes (particularly Iran now, it’ll just harden them against us/unify), but Venezuela, Ukraine, recognizing Somaliland, helping Israel OVER Iran.. all fine w/ me.

    My old anti Iraq/Afghan war stance changed in the past 20 years as circumstances change. Back then Russia was on its back, China “busy” and no major threats.

    Geopolitics has changed since then – a new world. We, as the good guys, need to counter evil selectively. Change positions as circumstances change around you.

    D.A.
    NYC —- or rather Florida for this month – escape winter. PCC(E) could do with a tropical sabbatical to avoid his occasional “icecapades” and wind walking in Chicago. And Hawaiian shirts are very cool down here 😉

    Reply

    2. I’m gathering from a bit on NPR this morning that the prime motivation behind Venezuela is to collapse Cuba by shutting off their oil. Maduro was trading oil for Cubans to protect his regime.

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  3. Fred “Freda” Wallace, the trans-identifying man trying to get JKR arrested, is an absolute idiot. He was on an Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) panel debating with Helen Joyce and made an absolute fool of himself.

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  4. . . . and the agent saying, “Fucking bitch” after he shot Good.

    Or after she tried to run him over. People seem particularly upset by this. I have to say, though, if a woman were to try to run me down with her car, I’d probably say some thing along those lines.

    As for Vance, I agree that people should not rush to judgement on these things. However, the Usual Suspects are working overtime to make this seem like another George Floyd (or more properly, make it another George Floyd), and it would be wrong for people to try to counter the ideological narrative with countervailing facts.

    Reply

    1. “Or after she tried to run him over.”

      Reasonable people have very different interpretations of the actions in the videos. The ICE agent stepped in front of Good’s car as she was trying to drive away, and she turned the wheel to the right to avoid him. He fired a shot, then stepped out the way and fired two more shots. ICE apologists are pushing the “tried to run him over” line because there would be no other justification for him to shoot her — driving away (after being told to do so) is not an offense for which the death penalty is prescribed. But that’s just my take.

      Reply

      1. “because there would be no other justification”

        The second one I’ve heard offered is that he was protecting his colleague, whose hands were inside the car as she drove off. (The earlier incident in which the shooter got dragged down the road was like this — attempting to grab the keys, I think.)

        “ICE agent stepped in front of Good’s car”

        That doesn’t seem like a good description. He was to the right of the car when it started moving in reverse, and this movement swung the nose of the car to point towards him. When it started moving forwards, he was in front, and in the end the nose swung right to miss him.

        The shooting seems like it could have been avoided in many ways. Surely there could be a better protocol to arrest a driver in much this situation, without risking injury, although I’m not exactly sure what that procedure would be.

        Reply

    2. It’s not true that the agent stepped in front of the Honda as the driver was trying to drive away. Pawel’s description is correct, and obvious from at least two different video recordings available online. Before the driver backed up the Honda and changed its direction toward the first officer, the driver had already been clearly instructed by a second identifiable federal agent to stop the car and get out. Instead the driver responded to her wife’s shout to “Drive, baby, drive” and gunned the Honda toward the first officer. He shot her in response. I think ~none of this is questionable given all the video available. What’s not known to me is who is legally responsible for the death. Under Minnesota law it might be the officer but IDK because not a lawyer and know nothing about Minnesota laws. But many folks online are claiming that it’s clearly the fault of the officers and that the driver’s death was a murder. I think it’s reasonable for others (even folks like me who are not American and have no skin in this game) to disagree with that claim rather than STFU. But I agree with our host it would be better if no one was jumping to conclusions about the legal liabilities.

      Reply

  6. “But the principle remains that we shouldn’t use our military to resolve disputes that are purely within another country. ”

    This is not a normal country, and this is not a mere “dispute”. This is the most dangerous and effective terrorist group in the world for the last 50 years, which has already attacked and killed hundreds of Americans. It threatens every day to obliterate the US and Israel, has spent billions to make this happen, and is terrifyingly close to achieving at least one of these ends. Must I remind us that their enriched nuclear stockpile has remained in their hands for months?

    They are also hanging on by a slender thread, so it would be easy to accomplish their downfall. And the Iranian people are begging us to help.

    I seem to recall the Republicans stating confidently that “9/11 changed everything”. That terrorism would not be tolerated. I guess empty words and cowardice are the rules of the day.

    Reply

    1. Bombing them could also strengthen the regime. It sounds to me like everything will depend on enough insiders changing sides. Who the critical insiders are, and how they would view western bombing, seems like the critical question. I certainly hope the CIA has more insight into all this than I do.

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  7. “Aks”? Good’s group may be promoting civil disobedience, but they can’t spell. And it’s “effect” not “affect”. Jeez. Bad grammar and of course it finishes with a racist trope.

    An aside; I also wonder how many ICE agents are here illegally themselves.

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  8. The operational directives of trained activists can be recognized after reviewing the extensive training literature (see examples below).

    Activists are trained in concealment generally, and of the hostile intent of their mid-level violence, e.g. saying “I’m not mad at you.” on record. The training uses the language of hostile conflict, e.g. “target” (see below), for activists to carry out their duties of conscience set in a background of Leftist narratives:

    [begin excerpts]
    “Put your target in a decision dilemma.

    Design your action so that your target is forced to make a decision, and all their available options play to your advantage.

    If you design your action well, you can force your target into a situation where they have no good options: where they’re “damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.” This is known as a decision dilemma.”

    https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/tool/put-your-target-in-a-decision-dilemma

    “Escalate strategically

    Since a target rarely gives in after one action, it is often necessary to strategically increase the pressure on them in a step-by-step escalation that draws upon a diverse mix of tactics.”

    https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/tool/escalate-strategically

    [end excerpt]

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  9. Just going to brush past all the heavy stuff this morning, as it’s just too much…

    As for ‘no pants day’ – why in January? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have it in, say, July? Or maybe that’s the point. Brave the wary looks of strangers on the subway, and the cold.

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  10. “Score another one for Plato, I guess.”

    Plato wasn’t hot on democracy either, at least not as it was understood at the time. His aristocracy would probably be thought of now as a government by the elite.

    We are happily stuck with an unstable sort of stability, which is how Sir Humphrey put it 🙂

    Reply

  11. ” . . . Trump is a pagan. Two millennia of Christian ideas . . . have passed him by entirely . . . The Vikings come to mind — resisting morality and Christianity up until the eleventh century.”

    From a cursory online search I see that the Vikings and their descendants participated in the several Christian Crusades. I wonder if their motto was similar to that of the Confederacy in the U.S. civil war, “Deo Vindice.” Both undertakings refulgent with great moral rectitude, the latter of a Protestant kind. (Regarding resisting morality and Christianity, two of the Vatican’s favorites, Giordano Bruno and Galileo, come to mind.)

    I reasonably take it that Trump fancies himself on something of an ongoing crusade. Pagan that Trump may be, not a few of his subordinates (and the vast majority of MAGAs), possessed of iron spines and high morals, presume to make noises about being good Christians.

    Reply

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