Monday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to the last Monday in January; it’s January 26, 2026, and Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day. Who among us has not popped the stuff?  Here’s a 3½-minute video about how they make the stuff:

Here’s the weather forecast from Chicago with temperatures (high and low for each day) given in degrees Fahrenheit. My nose is frozen. We will not be above freezing for at least a week, and more snow is on tap.

It’s also National Green Juice Day, National Peanut Brittle Day, and, for masochists, Dental Drill Appreciation Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

NOTE: I will remind people what I wrote about ICE yesterday, since I am getting anonymous emails from trolls accusing me of being in favor of Trump and white supremacy. After reporting the NYT’s analysis of the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, I said this.

The upshot: all signs so far are that Pretti was killed by ICE agents, and though he had a weapon, he was not brandishing it in a way that would justify killing him (there are police protocols on how to deal with armed people, and these were violated). This has all the signs of a murder, with the administration blaming the victim.  I do not trust the government accounts, nor do I trust DHS to conduct an objective investigation of the killing.  I think it’s time for ICE to get out of Minnesota, as what they are doing is not only ripping the country apart, but seems palpably illegal, like the armed response of a dictatorial regime.  I do not know how immigrants with criminal records should be apprehended, as local law enforcement won’t help ICE, but right now it’s more important to stop the violence than continue ICE operations.  The treatment of Pretti by federal agents is both thuggish and incomprehensible.  He seems to have been a good guy, doing a valuable job, and his death is a tragedy.

The government is pushing back on views like mine, and there is no sign that ICE will leave, so more trouble is in store. If what I wrote above is not enough for you, there are other websites completely devoted now to ICE, some even blaming their brutality on Israel.

*The NYT has a long multimedia editorial-board piece called “The great American cash grab,” and the grabber is Trump, who apparently has enriched himself by more than a billion dollars during his Presidency (article archived here).  Bolding is the paper’s

President Trump has never been a man to ask what he can do for his country. In his second term, as in his first, he is instead testing the limits of what his country can do for him.

He has poured his energy and creativity into the exploitation of the presidency — into finding out just how much money people, corporations and other nations are willing to put into his pockets in hopes of bending the power of the government to the service of their interests.

A review by the editorial board relying on analyses from news organizations shows that Mr. Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion. We know this number to be an underestimate because some of his profits remain hidden from public view. And they continue to grow.

A hotel in Oman. An office tower in western India. A golf course on the outskirts of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. These are a few of the more than 20 overseas projects the Trump Organization is pursuing, often requiring cooperation with foreign governments. These deals have made millions for the Trumps, according to Reuters. And the administration has sometimes treated those same governments favorably. One example: The administration agreed to lower its threatened tariffs on Vietnam about a month after a Trump Organization project broke ground on a $1.5 billion golf complex outside of Hanoi. Vietnamese officials ignored their own laws to fast-track the project.

Amazon paid far more for the rights to “Melania” than the next highest bidder — and far more than the company has previously paid for similar projects, according to The Wall Street Journal. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chairman and one of the world’s richest people, has many reasons to curry favor with the administration, including antitrust regulation, Amazon’s defense contracts and his space company’s federal contracts.

Mr. Trump’s sale of crypto has been by far his biggest moneymaker, according to Reuters. People who hope to influence federal policy, including foreigners, can buy his family’s coins, effectively transferring money to the Trumps, and the deals are often secret. One that has become public: A United Arab Emirates-backed investment firm announced plans last year to deposit $2 billion into a Trump firm — two weeks before the president gave the country access to advanced chips.

Nowadays President often get rich in office, simply by putting their assets in a blind trust, but many, like the Obamas, continue to accumulate millions, which I’m not that keen on.

When President Harry Truman left office in 1953, he did not even own a car. He and his wife returned to Missouri by train and lived for a time on his Army pension. He refused to take any job that he regarded as commercializing his public service, explaining, “I knew that they were not interested in hiring Harry Truman, the person, but what they wanted to hire was the former president of the United States.” Mr. Trump has said that when he leaves office, he plans to take with him a $400 million Boeing 747 that was a gift from Qatar, and to display it at his presidential library.

 

This tally focuses on Mr. Trump’s documented gains. The $1.4 billion figure is a minimum, not a full accounting. It is probable that Mr. Trump has collected several hundred million dollars in additional profits from his cryptocurrency ventures over the past year. The Trumps have acknowledged as much. When The Financial Times asked Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, about its estimated value of the family’s crypto gains, he said they were probably even larger than the news organization thought.

Total enrichment of Trump, according to the paper: $1,408,500,000. That’s about 17,000 times the median American household income.  And we’ve got three more years to go. The lesson? We already know it: when it comes to policy decisions, cui bono?

It is impossible to know how often Mr. Trump makes official decisions, in part or entirely, because he wants to be richer. And that is precisely the problem. A culture of corruption is pernicious because it is not just a deviation from government in the public interest; it is also the destruction of the state’s democratic legitimacy. It undermines the necessary faith that the representatives of the people are acting in the interest of the people.

*In an article called “How Iran crushed a citizen uprising with lethal force,” the NYT pronounces the protests in Iran dead in the water (excuse the metaphor).

On Friday, Jan. 9, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered the Supreme National Security Council, the body tasked with safeguarding the country, to crush the protests by any means necessary, according to two Iranian officials briefed on the ayatollah’s directive. Security forces were deployed with orders to shoot to kill and to show no mercy, the officials said. The death toll surged.

Despite Iran’s shutting down the internet and disrupting phone service, some Iranians managed to evade restrictions to share witness accounts and hundreds of videos, many of which The New York Times was able to collect and authenticate.

The Times has verified videos of security forces’ opening fire on protesters in at least 19 cities and in at least six different neighborhoods in Tehran in early January.

These videos show the breadth and ferocity of the regime’s crackdown. So do the testimonies of doctors and a nurse working in hospitals in Iran, and photographs shared by a witness and authenticated by The Times of hundreds of victims taken to a Tehran morgue.

The Times also interviewed two dozen Iranians in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Rasht and Ahvaz who had attended protests, as well as relatives of people killed. Protesters, residents and medical staff interviewed for this article all asked that their names or full names not be published for fear of retribution.

By Monday, Jan. 12, the protests had largely been crushed.

As more information emerges from Iran, the death toll has hit at least 5,200 people, including 56 children, according to the Washington-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based group that also monitors the situation in Iran, has confirmed at least 3,400 killed. Both organizations say that the numbers could prove two or three times as large as verification continues.

Iran’s National Security Council said in a statement that 3,117 people had been killed, among them 427 of its security forces. Officials, including Ayatollah Khamenei, have blamed terrorist cells tied to Israel and the United States for the uprising and killings.

“This is not merely a violent protest crackdown,” said Raha Bahreini, a lawyer and an Iran researcher at Amnest

. . .Across the country, hospitals swamped by thousands of injured protesters were unprepared for the scale of the gunshot wounds they were seeing, according to interviews and text messages with eight doctors and one nurse in Iran.

Gun violence is rare in Iran, and private citizens are not allowed to own weapons. The doctors and the nurse sharing their experiences in Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan and Zanjan described scenes of chaos: medical staff frantically trying to save lives, white uniforms drenched in blood. They said patients lay on benches and chairs, and even on bare floors, in the overcrowded emergency rooms.

They said hospitals were short of blood and searching for trauma and vascular surgeons. The internet shutdown prevented medical staff from checking patients’ names and medical histories, they said.

It’s surprising to me that Americans aren’t protesting this kind of violence, one committed by a theocracy against its own people, who are pining for freedom. The people are almost completely unarmed but brave enough to take to the streets—until that became a lethal exercise.  The next item deals with the possibility that the U.S. and Israel may cooperate in a second attack on the country, this time not to impede its production of weapons-grad uranium (though that will surely be one goal) but to oust the regime. There are, of course, problems with that; see the next item.

*Despite Iran being quieter than a few weeks ago, there are signs that the U.S. and Israel may mount a second attack on the country. The Times of Israel reports:

Commander of the United States Central Command Adm. Brad Cooper was in Israel on Saturday for meetings with senior officials, The Times of Israel learned, as US President Donald Trump indicated he was maintaining the possibility of strikes on Iran amid its crackdown on protests.

Cooper met with IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir at the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv. Intelligence Directorate chief Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder and Operations Directorate chief Maj. Gen. Itzik Cohen also participated in a meeting with the military chiefs.

In a statement Sunday, the IDF said Saturday’s meetings between Cooper, Zamir and other top Israeli military officers enhanced the “close strategic relationship” between the sides.

The military did not specify the topics of the meetings, but Cooper’s visit to Israel comes amid heightened tensions with Iran and a reported disagreement between Israeli and US officials over the next steps in the Gaza ceasefire. The IDF has been also been on high alert and has carried out preparations in recent weeks after Trump threatened military action against Iran.

Cooper and Zamir first held an “extended one-on-one meeting,” which was followed by one with other Israeli generals, the IDF said.

“This engagement serves as another expression of the relationship between the commanders and constitutes an additional step in enhancing the close strategic relationship between the IDF and US military and in strengthening defense cooperation between the two nations,” the statement said.

US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were also in Israel on Saturday to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, mainly to discuss Gaza, two people briefed on the matter told Reuters.

Trump has threatened military action if Iran carried out mass executions of prisoners or killed peaceful demonstrators, but he recently backed away, claiming Iran halted the hangings of 800 detained protesters. He has not elaborated on the source of the claim, which Iran’s top prosecutor called “completely false.”

However, Trump appears to be keeping his options open, saying Thursday aboard Air Force One that his threatened military action would make last year’s US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites “look like peanuts” if the government proceeded with planned executions of some protesters.

He added that the United States had an “armada” heading toward Iran, including an aircraft carrier group and its thousands of troops, but hoped he would not have to use it.

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and three accompanying destroyers left the South China Sea and began heading west earlier this week, a US Navy official said. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military movements, said Friday that the Lincoln strike group was in the Indian Ocean.

Iran, however, is making threats and presumably preparations for a strike:

The commander of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which was key in putting down recent nationwide protests in a crackdown that left thousands dead, warned that his force is “more ready than ever, finger on the trigger,” as U.S. warships headed toward the Middle East.

Nournews, a news outlet close to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, reported on its Telegram channel that the commander, Gen. Mohammad Pakpour, warned the United States and Israel “to avoid any miscalculation.”

I go back and forth on the wisdom of strikes on Iran. On one hand, they could finally topple the regime, which is what the people of Iran want. On the other hand we have to think about the U.S. interfering in internal affairs of another country (Iran, though, is posing a threat to both Israel and U.S. forces), and there’s the not insignificant problem of who will run the country if the theocracy is brought down.

*Rock climber Alex Honnold, famous for free-soloing the face of El Capitan in Yellowstone National Park, successfully completed his climb of Taiwan’s 1,667-foot-tall skyscraper Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building from 2004 to 2009. The climb was streamed live by Netflix with a 10-second delay, presumably because he was free-soloing the building, and they could cut the feed if he feel.

From Climbing Magazine:

After wet weather in Taipei City necessitated a rain check, Alex Honnold began climbing around 24 hours after originally scheduled. A possible rain delay had long been part of the event planning process. Wet conditions would considerably raise the difficulty level of the climb, creating unnecessary risk that Honnold wasn’t willing to take.

After clear skies allowed the glass and steel surfaces of the 1,667ft skyscraper to dry out, Honnold officially began his climb at 6:12 p.m, Mountain Time on January 24.

The climb took Honnold approximately one hour, 31 minutes, and 34 seconds. His own crew, including Brett Lowell, the cinematographer behind The Dawn Wall and The Alpinist, filmed his ascent for live broadcast. More friends, climbing partners, and family also joined Honnold in Taiwan for the event. Pro climber Emily Harrington, who recently starred in the documentary Girl Climber, provided live commentary during the Netflix special.

When Honnold and Netflix first claimed that Taipei 101 would represent the “biggest urban free solo ever,” we initially questioned the veracity of this claim. The night before the event, Climbing sent Alain Robert, the unequivocal GOAT of urban free soloing, a few questions over WhatsApp to verify Honnold’s claim. According to Robert himself, the highest building that he has ever scaled without a rope was one of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which stand 1,483ft (452m) tall. Robert reached the top of the Petronas in 2009. Taipei 101 rises 1,667 feet (508m). That’s 184 feet (56m) taller than the Petronas Towers. No other climber has free soloed a taller skyscraper, according to our research.

The payday from ABC 10:

“If you put it in the context of mainstream sports, it’s an embarrassingly small amount,” he told the New York Times before the climb. “You know, Major League Baseball players get like $170 million contracts.”

Though the number isn’t in the millions, and was less than his agent aimed for, Honnold said he would have done it for free.

“If there was no TV program and the building gave me permission to go do the thing, I would do the thing because I know I can, and it’d be amazing,” he said. “Just sitting by yourself on the very top of the spire is insane.”

Alex Honnold taking a selfie at the top of Taipei 101 after free soloing the skyscraper.

UNBELIEVABLE!!! #SkyscraperLIVE pic.twitter.com/czuxYkoVpY

— Netflix Sports (@netflixsports) January 25, 2026

*Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania has written a new memoir dealing with how he was vetted as the VP candidate by Kamala Harris’s team. It is not pretty. It also suggests that Shapiro may be a Democratic candidate for President in the 2028 election.

Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a prominent Democrat who was a top contender to serve as former Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024, offered his most detailed accounting to date of the vice-presidential search process in his new memoir, which was obtained by The New York Times.

In short: He suggests that it was far uglier than is commonly known.

In Mr. Shapiro’s book, “Where We Keep the Light,” the governor is measured in describing his interactions with Ms. Harris herself. But Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, details a contentious vetting process in which Ms. Harris’s team focused intensely on his views on Israel — so much so that at one point, he wrote, he was asked if he had ever been an agent of the Israeli government.

“Had I been a double agent for Israel?” wrote Mr. Shapiro, describing his incredulous response to a last-minute question from the vetting team. He responded that the question was offensive, he wrote, and was told, “Well, we have to ask.”

“Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?” the questioner, Dana Remus, a former White House counsel, continued, according to Mr. Shapiro, who recounted, “If they were undercover, I responded, how the hell would I know?”

Mr. Shapiro wrote that he understood that Ms. Remus was “just doing her job.” But the fact that he was asked such questions, he wrote, “said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”

Ms. Remus and a representative for Ms. Harris did not respond to requests for comment on Sunday night.

The vetting process unfolded as emotional debates over the Gaza war convulsed the Democratic Party, threatening to tear it apart.

Mr. Shapiro, an outspoken critic of what he saw as antisemitism on college campuses amid the Israel-Hamas war, wrote that he faced skepticism of that record during vetting. When Ms. Harris asked if he “would be willing to apologize for the statements I had made, particularly over what I saw happening at the University of Pennsylvania,” he replied that he would not, he wrote.

“I believe in free speech, and I’ll defend it with all I’ve got,” he wrote. “Most of the speech on campus, even that which I disagreed with, was peaceful and constitutionally protected. But some wasn’t peaceful.”

It’s telling that Shapiro, a Jew, was dumped for Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota who has now said he won’t run again. It’s worth nothing that Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker, who has been an excellent executive for my state, is also Jewish, and has been touted as a Presidential candidate. Would Americans vote for a Jewish President? According to a Gallup poll from 2019, they would, but atheists, socialists, and Muslims would have a hard time (see below).  Of course how people answer polls and how they really feel may not be the same:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are hanging out, and guess what they’re thinking of. Any excuse for noms!

Hili: I feel like history is rushing forward so fast it doesn’t even notice red lights.
Szaron: Maybe so, but I have no idea which way it’s rushing.
Hili: Then maybe we should get something to eat?

In Polish:

Hili: Mam wrażenie, że historia pędzi tak szybko, że nie zwraca uwagi nawet na czerwone światła.
Szaron: Być może, ale ja nie wiem, w którym kierunku ona tak pędzi.
Hili: To może byśmy coś zjedli?

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

From The Language Nerds, an incorrect correction:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih, another Iranian woman killed for protesting.

Hello, Prime Minister @GiorgiaMeloni,
Meet Raha, a brave Iranian woman killed for the “crime” of protesting.
She loved life. She studied the Italian language.
She was murdered by the IRGC a terrorist force.
Yet Italy has still not designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization.… pic.twitter.com/Udtxpyws1J

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 25, 2026

The Number Ten cat decked out for Burns night:

Wishing a happy Burns Night to all my friends around the world celebrating the immortal bard #BurnsNight pic.twitter.com/Wn7YlRbfz2

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) January 25, 2026

From Emma, who calls herself a “niche internet micro celebrity”. I don’t agree with her about cold tortillas.

Tortilla. https://t.co/AlDA7zmVYZ

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) January 24, 2026

Two from my feed. First, a heartwarmer:

The dogs at the shelter are choosing their new owners. It’s a very emotional moment. 🤗🥰

pic.twitter.com/Z9uOYPPsJp

— Tansu Yegen (@TansuYegen) January 25, 2026

Clearly real! The translation: “All these AI cat videos are really getting on my nerves. Thank God this one here is real.”:

Diese ganzen KI-Katzen-Videos gehen mir total auf die Nerven.

Gott sei Dank ist das hier echt: pic.twitter.com/VOpCcRlRSF

— Dr. David Lütke (@DrLuetke) January 25, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was ten years old. https://t.co/LILm2hmOFF

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) January 26, 2026

Two from Matthew. First, his cat Harry, a “break from the horror”:

A break from the horror.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-01-25T09:30:16.565Z

A mutant pink grasshopper. I wonder if a predator will get it:

Ever seen a pink grasshopper? A genetic mutation called erythrism (overproduction of red pigment) leaves some individuals looking pretty in pink! Though these rare insects are beautiful, their vivid coloring makes hiding from predators more difficult.Photo: Back from the Brink, CC BY-NC 2.0, flickr

— American Museum of Natural History (@amnh.org) 2026-01-21T15:08:27.895Z