Thursday: Hili dialogue

February 19, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursaday, February 19, 2026, and Iwo Jima Day, marking the American invasion of that Japanese-held Pacific Island on this day in 1945.  Four days later, five marines climbed Mt. Surabachi (the island’s high point) and planted the American flag on top.  You all know the classic photo by Joe Rosenthal, which won the Pulitzer Prize for that year and was made into an iconic statue that sits in Virginia across the Potomac from Washington D.C.  Several of the soldiers shown below did not survive the battle:

Photo by Joe Rosenthal, public domain

But did you know there was a movie filmed by Sergeant Bill Genaust at the same time that Rosenthal was snapping his photo? Here it is. (I find it amazing that this iconic moment was captured by two people.) The crucial moment is about 29 seconds in.

It’s also International Tug of War Day, National Arabian Horse Day, and Natioonal Chocolate Mint Day. 

There’s a Google Doodle for women’s figure skating at the Olympics today. U.S. women haven’t won a medal in that event since 2006, but the news says there are several candidates this year. Click to see where this goes:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 19 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*You could see this coming!  Probably unable to pass his “wealth tax” on NYC residents, as that would drive the wealthy out of the city, Islamist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is now threatening to impose a 9.5% property tax on many residents, and not just the rich.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday proposed to raise property tax rates in New York City by nearly 10 percent, a measure he is preparing as a “last resort” to be deployed if he cannot persuade Gov. Kathy Hochul to raise income taxes on the wealthy.

The suggested 9.5 percent increase would affect more than three million single-family homes, co-ops and condos and over 100,000 commercial buildings, Mr. Mamdani said as he delivered his preliminary spending plan.

The mayor acknowledged that his proposal would not merely force the wealthy to pay more taxes, but would also be a “tax on working- and middle-class New Yorkers,” and stressed that this was not his first choice.

But he noted that New York City mayors had little authority to raise taxes without the governor’s and Legislature’s acquiescence, and said that a city property tax increase — combined with raiding the city’s reserve funds — was the only way to address a looming budget deficit projected to reach $5.4 billion over two years.

“If we cannot follow this first path,” he said, referring to his proposed income tax hike on wealthier New Yorkers, “we will be forced onto a much more damaging path of last resort — one where we have to use the only tools at the city’s disposal: raising property taxes and raiding our reserves.”

“The second path is painful,” he added. “We will continue to work with Albany to avoid it.”

If other options surface, Mr. Mamdani may yet water down or abandon the proposed tax increase as the June 30 city budget deadline draws closer — a possibility that Ms. Hochul alluded to on Tuesday, as she played down the likelihood of city property taxes rising.

“That’s their prerogative to look at that as an option,” she said, suggesting that cost-cutting measures and updated accounting might make such an increase unnecessary. “He’s required to put options on the table; that does not mean that’s the final resolution.”

Is this a surprise? Of course not! The budget was in trouble before Mamdani took office. What is new is that Governor Hochul now seems less willing to levy a new tax on the rich.  In the face of this budget crunch, Mamdani’s promises, which got him elected, may well come to nought.

*Colin Wright’s new post on his Substack site discusses a distressing side effect of “affirmative care” applied to adolescents: permanent sterility. The article suggests that many who choose this option, and are even told of its consequences for fertility, nevertheless still hope to have their own children in the future. They won’t.  And this is a sad irony.

Over the past decade, pediatric “gender-affirming care” has been adopted widely in clinical settings despite a remarkably weak evidence base. Systematic reviews from several countries have consistently found that the research supporting puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and related interventions in minors is of low quality, lacking reliable long-term data on physical or psychological outcomes. Meanwhile, the severe and often irreversible side effects of these treatments are well documented. Chief among them is the loss of fertility.

Because of this risk, clinical guidelines recommend that adolescents be counseled about infertility and offered fertility preservation before beginning medical transition. In theory, this gives them the choice to protect their ability to have biological children in the future. In practice, however, only a vanishingly small number of “transgender and gender-diverse” (TGD) adolescents actually pursue fertility preservation, even when counseling is provided.

This creates an odd set of seemingly contradictory facts. Survey-based studies show that while few adolescents choose to preserve their fertility, a significant number hope to become parents later in life. Follow-up studies of adults who began medical transition as teenagers confirm that the desire for children often increases with age, leaving many to deeply regret not preserving their fertility when they had the chance.

. . .A new retrospective cross-sectional study published in the Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology helps clarify this issue by tracking patients from their first counseling visit through referral, specialist consultation, and—if it occurred—completion of a fertility preservation procedure.

The study followed 311 “transgender and gender-diverse” patients between the ages of 10 and 24 who presented for initial gender-related medical evaluations at a pediatric gender clinic between 2020 and 2023. During the intake process, patients were asked about their “fertility goals” and how important biological children might be to them in the future.

The attrition rate was steep. Of the 311 patients, 25 (8 percent) agreed to a referral to a reproductive endocrinology and infertility (REI) specialist. Nineteen of these 25 actually attended the REI consultation, and only eight ultimately completed fertility preservation. In total, this is roughly 2.5 percent of the entire group.

But the most revealing detail is who those eight patients were. All were biologically male, opting for sperm cryopreservation. Not a single female patient underwent egg or embryo preservation. As the authors note, this disparity “likely reflects the relative simplicity and lower cost of sperm cryopreservation compared with oocyte preservation.”

. . . . The literature on fertility preservation exposes a central flaw of the pediatric “gender-affirming” model. Interventions are aggressively promoted despite low-quality evidence, highly uncertain long-term benefits, and increasingly well-documented harms. The model also operates on the pseudoscientific premise biological sex is mutable, can meaningfully conflict with a person’s “brain sex,” and can be medically altered to resolve that conflict. The difficulty adolescents face in preserving fertility is not an incidental side effect of this model but a predictable consequence of it.

Puberty blockers cause sterility while they’re being administered, but often that effect is reversible if blockers are stopped without further treatment. But if blockers lead to cross-sex hormone treatment, as they often do in “affirmative care”, sterility cannot be reversed.  This is one more reason why gender transitioning should be delayed until the transitioner is of age to consent and fully apprehend the consequences. This article shows that patients often don’t grasp those consequences.

*The White House has rejected the latest proposal from Democrats to put limits on ICE agents, and, in the absence of an agreement, the partial government shutdown continues (ICE itself won’t shut down, as it has billions of dollars), but imporant aspects of the government will not be funded until the Democrats and Republicans forge a compromise on ICE:

The White House on Tuesday rejected the latest offer from Democratic lawmakers on proposed new constraints on federal immigration officers, the latest sign that there would not be a quick resolution of the stalemate that has left the Department of Homeland Security without funding since Saturday.

A White House official who provided a statement on the condition of anonymity to describe private negotiations said the two parties were still far apart, adding that President Trump’s team remained interested in continuing good-faith talks to resolve the impasse.

In response, aides for the Democratic leaders in Congress said that Republicans had largely ignored the guardrails the public was demanding, and urged them to start negotiating in good faith as they said their side had been doing.

Both White House officials and Democrats on Capitol Hill have kept largely confidential the specifics of their offers to end the standoff that allowed funding for the agency to lapse as of 12:01 a.m. Saturday.

The outlines of the Democratic demands, however, are well known: limits on masked police, an end to random sweeps, new requirements for judicial warrants, putting “sensitive locations” such as churches, schools, hospitals and polling places off limits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement among them. The offer was given to the White House Monday evening but brushed aside by the White House less than 24 hours later.

“These are common sense,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said Sunday on CNN about the Democratic proposals. “Police departments across America use them. We have a rogue agency. Why don’t we rein them in? That’s what the American people are asking Republicans.”

It seems to me that there is room for compromise here, as several of the Democratic demands make sense for any law enforcement (e.g., no masks, strict requirement for warrants), while the Democrats could compromise on, say, areas where ICE agents aren’t allowed.  So long as both sides dig in their heels, though, there will be no compromise and no funding for TSA, the Coast Guard, or FEMA.  This has apparently become a hill to die on for both sides, but the people who will suffer are us—the average Americans.

*Two UK men were jailed last Friday for concocting a plot that would have killed “hundreds of Jews.”—a massacre that could have been worse than Australia’s Bondi Beach shooting. The plotters were given life sentences, while the brother of one of them was sentenced to six years for not disclosing information about terrorism.

Two men have been jailed for life after attempting to stage one of the UK’s deadliest terrorist attacks before it was thwarted by an undercover operative.

Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, who had sworn allegiance to Islamic State (IS), planned a marauding firearms attack targeting Greater Manchester’s Jewish community.

On Friday, the pair were sentenced at Preston crown court after being found guilty of preparing acts of terrorism between December 2023 and May 2024.

The prime mover in the plot, Tunisian-born Saadaoui, of Abram, Wigan, was ordered to serve a minimum of 37 years.

Hussein, of no fixed address, was ordered to serve at least 26 years.

Saadaoui’s younger brother, Bilel Saadaoui, 37, of Hindley, Wigan, was sentenced to six years in prison for failing to disclose information about the plan.

All three had denied the offences in a trial lasting almost three months last year, in which jurors were told they were Islamist extremists with a “visceral dislike” of Jewish people.

Walid Saadaoui, a former Italian restaurant owner and hotel entertainer, arranged for the purchase and delivery of semi-automatic rifles, conducted reconnaissance and identified targets, but the man supplying them with the weapons was an undercover operative.

The operative, known to them as Farouk, had infiltrated jihadist social media networks and convinced Saadaoui that he was a fellow extremist.

Saadaoui was arrested in a counter-terror strike involving more than 200 officers as he attempted to take possession of two assault rifles, a semi-automatic pistol and almost 200 rounds of ammunition in the car park of the Last Drop hotel in Bolton on 8 May 2024. The weapons had been deactivated.

The court heard that Saadaoui hero-worshipped the IS terrorist Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who orchestrated the 2015 Paris terror attacks in which 130 people were killed and hundreds more injured in gun attacks.

Saadaoui and Hussein planned to disguise themselves as Jews and attack an antisemitism march in Manchester city centre before heading to suburbs north of Manchester city centre that are home to one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities.

These plotters are truly evil, and thank Ceiling Cat that their plot was stopped in its tracks.  And kudos for “Farouk”, a brave man who risked his life to pose as an extremist—and probably saved the life of many Jews. He must have been a convincing terrorist, and it’s very lucky that the plotters didn’t get hold of some real extemists with fully activated weapons.  But, for a Jew, it’s tiresome to see this kind of stuff day after day.  It’s not like Jews all over the world are plotting to slaughter Muslims, you know. And it’s clear that the target wassn’t Zionists, but Jews.  As one of my friends said, “‘Globalize the intifada’ is here.”

*And from the WaPo news summary:

  • For the past two nights: Colbert has roasted his own network, saying that lawyers stopped him from airing an interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico  [a Democrat]—watch here.
  • The disagreement: Colbert said the segment was blocked because of FCC rules requiring broadcasters to provide equal opportunity to candidates. CBS has disputed his account.

The first mention:

CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert rebuked his own network Monday night, claiming that lawyers for parent company Paramount Skydance prohibited him from airing an interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico (D), a U.S. Senate candidate, over concerns it would violate the Federal Communications Commission’s equal-time rule.

“You know who is not one of my guests tonight?” Colbert asked his audience. “That’s Texas state representative James Talarico. He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast.”

In response, the studio audience booed.

“Then I was told, in some uncertain terms, that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on,” Colbert continued. “And because my network clearly does not want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”

Colbert launched into a segment about the FCC’s equal-time rule, which requires broadcasters to provide equal opportunity to political candidates. News and talk show interviews have traditionally been exempt from the mandate. But in January, the FCC issued a public notice saying that daytime and nighttime talk shows would have to apply for exemptions to the equal-time rule for each of their programs.

. . . and the second:

Late-night host Stephen Colbert laid into executives at CBS and its parent company for the second night running Tuesday, rebuking his bosses for their handling of his interview with a Texas Democrat.

In an on-air segment, Colbert suggested the network was caving to pressure by trying to apply the Federal Communications Commission’s equal-time rule, which requires broadcasters to provide equal opportunity to political candidates but has traditionally not applied to news and talk show interviews.

On Monday, Colbert accused lawyers for the network’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, of blocking his interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico (D), a U.S. Senate candidate, over concerns it would violate the equal-time rule.

CBS pushed back against that account in a statement Tuesday, suggesting its executives hadn’t prohibited the interview but instead had informed Colbert of legal guidance that it could trigger the FCC equal-time rule.

. . . and the video:

That is one strong video; kudos to Colbert. I doubt that he would have delivered such a monologue had he not already planned to leave the network.  Why did this happen? Possibly because the network, CBS, has named Bari Weiss as the Editor-in-Chief of the news, and she is enforcing a strict doctrine of “equal time.” (She didn’t do that when Charlie Kirk’s wife appeared.)  But, as Colbert notes, that policy not apply to late-night talk shows.  But Colbert was even prohibited from mentioning the name of guests that weren’t allowed to be invited!  That seems to be crossing the line into network censorship.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej has worked himself too hard, but he says it’s a mild flu.

Hili: Better cook enough for a few days.
Andrzej: Why?
Hili: The flu is catching up with you.

In Polish:

Hili: Lepiej zrób obiad na kilka dni.
Ja: Dlaczego:
Hili: Zaczyna ci się grypa.

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

From Stacy, a story that appears to be true  Only in America!

From Terrible Maps. Oy vey!

From Cats, Coffee, and Chaos:

From Hillel Neuer, head of UN Watch, showing Masih giving a powerful speech. But do note the “Community Note”:

This meeting in Geneva was held by UN Watch, a private group not affiliated with the UN. Its name and setting often mislead audiences. The board’s claim here is deliberately false—these remarks were not read at the UN and carry no official legitimacy.

The speech (NOT at the UN); I’m not clear why Hillel Neuer would say that. Still, Masih’s words are stirring:

From Malcolm: very talkative cats:

From Bryan, 3D photos (here’s a video on how to view them without special glasses):

This is a pretty dire story, as the tweet notes:

An adorable one from my feed:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

. . . and two from Dr. Cobb.  First, the history of Aylesbury ducks (yes, they are a real breed):

What's with all the ducks?

— Buckinghamshire Archives (@bucksarchives.bsky.social) 2026-02-17T13:03:33.565Z

As far as I know, this is a real Trumpian statement:

Yes, this is a real thing posted by the deranged lunatic today.It must be so embarrassing to have to try to defend this nutjob

— Mark Lemley (@marklemley.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T02:17:00.780Z

5 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. The description of the Colbert issues is off slightly. The FCC did not cancel the segment. The FCC reminded CBS of the Equal Time Rule, and CBS decided not to air the segment. To be clear, as well, the Equal Time Rule applies only to political CANDIDATES, not to any person who is partisan. This became an issue because Talarico is an active candidate for U.S. Senate from Texas. Not only did Colbert not plan to have the Republican candidate on, he had no plans to have the other Democratic candidates for that seat on.

    Reply

    1. The FCC changed its interpretation of the rule, something different from “reminding”. There is a pretty long history of treating talk shows as within the bona fide news exception. The timing of the change in interpretation is relevant.

      Reply

  2. The Talarico campaign raised $2.5 in 24 hours after the YouTube video. The number of viewers was approximately twice the number of a typical Colbert show.
    Earlier this month Talarico was behind Jasmine Crockett in name recognition. I’m guessing he has caught up.

    Reply

  4. Have people on that side of the pond been following the Chagos Islands saga? Short summary:

    Britain has sovereignty over the Chagos Islands (in the middle of the Indian Ocean) on which is the stragegically important Diego Garcia US/UK military base.

    (Note, Chagos Islanders were pushed out to make way for the base, which was bad, though the islanders population only dates back to about 1880, before that the islands were uninhabited as too remote from anywhere.)

    Keir Starmer, wanting to virtue signal how decolonialist he is, wants to hand sovereignty over the Mauritius (who have no better claim to the Islands than the UK does). He then wants to pay Mauritus billions to lease back the islands to maintain the military base.

    Everyone except that pathologically woke think this is a dumb idea, costing billions for no gain other than “look how anti-colonialist I am!”. (Note that the displaced Chagos Islanders are also against Mauritius having sovereignty.)

    Note that Mauritius is very much in the pocket of the Chinese, who also might like the idea of having the base for themselves after Starmer’s 99-yr lease expires.

    The deal needs the OK of the US, under the terms of the US/UK deal over the Diego Garcia base.

    Starmer has invested huge effort in lobbying to get this approval from the US, and also in pushing it through Parliament. It is really, really important to him to be able to flaunt those anti-colonialist credentials! Everyone else in the UK has been lobbying Trump, asking him to can the deal.

    As of yesterday, Trump seems to have finally woken up to how dumb this deal is, and is threatening to veto it.

    My solution, if Britain really can no longer stomach having the sovereignty of some islands on the opposite side of the globe, is to sell them to Trump for $1, and thus solve the problem, and also get in Trump’s good books.

    Starmer, of course, doesn’t want to be in Trump’s good books, he wants to signal how much he hates Trump and how de-colonial he is.

    Reply

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