Thursday: Hili dialogue

March 12, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, March 12, 2026, and National Milky Way Day, celebrating my favorite American candy bar. From the link:

There are actually two versions of the Milky Way. The Milky Way known in the United States is sold as the Mars bar around the world, while the global Milky Way bar is similar to the American 3 Musketeers bar and doesn’t have the caramel topping. There also have been a number of variations besides the original Milky Way, such as Milky Way Midnight (previously Milky Way Dark) and Milky Way Cookie Dough. The original Milky Way and its variations are celebrated and enjoyed today on National Milky Way Day!

I have had a deep-fried Mars bar (battered and fried in fish oil) in Edinburgh, and it was good! Here from the Wikipedia entry is a comparison of the U.S. (left) and global (right) Milky Ways with different fillings:

Milky Ways were advertised as appetite-curbers to eat between meals, resulting in a famous ad:

Once marketed as a snack food that would not intrude on regular meals, modern marketing portrays the Milky Way as a snack reducing mealtime hunger and curbing the appetite between meals.

A widely known advertisement was debuted in 1989, featuring a red 1951 Buick Roadmaster and a vehicle that resembles a blue 1959 Cadillac Series 62 (lacking its dual headlights) racing, with the former eating everything in sight and the latter eating a Milky Way. The advertisement ends with the bridge to Dinnertown being out and the now fat red car being too heavy to jump the gap while the blue car makes the jump. The advertisement returned albeit edited in 2009, removing the claim that the Milky Way is not an appetite spoiler.

The ad:

It’s also National Alfred Hitchcock Day (neither his birthday nor deathday), Girl Scout Day (the organization was founded on this day in 1912 in Savannah, Georgia, where I’ll be travelling shortly), National Baked Scallops Day, and Popcorn Lovers Day (that’s all of us).

Remember this intro to the Hitchcock television show? If you do, you’re a geezer!

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 12 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

First a discussion by NYT writers you may want to read (it isn’t archived yet, but click on it if you have a subscription):

*And here’s the top front page of the NYT from yesterday afternoon, highlighting its biggest stories, and I can see nothing but opprobrium towards the U.S.  Yes, we now are pretty sure that the U.S. screwed up and hit a girls school, killing many children, but I swear that the NYT seems almost gleeful about that, at least about it being the fault of the U.S. and not Iran. (Would it have been the headline story if it were a misfired Iranian missile?). Click page to enlarge. If you want any articles and don’t subscribe, go here , click on an article, which you won’t be able to read, and then look for its URL on one of the archive sites.

Here are the op-eds, all of a similar tenor. Can you spot the heterodox column? See the next item.

I swear that on my grumpier days I see the NYT as a useful idiot for progressives who hate America, and in the case of the war I have a dark fantasy that the NYT newsroom would erupt with glee if Trump’s attack on Iran wound up not accomplishing anything.  Today is one of those days.

*Okay, here’s an excerpt of Bret Stephens’ column, which you can also find archived here: “How does this end? Four scenarios for what comes next with Iran”.  Here are Stephens’s four scenarios (bolding is mine):

Regime change is the most optimistic one. Some imagine it will take the form of the resumption of the mass demonstrations that the regime bloodily stamped out in January — millions of Iranians marching in dozens of cities, joined by police officers and soldiers and commanders from the conventional army, emboldened by American and Israeli air support, rising to tear down their rulers’ enfeebled apparatus of repression.

Nobody should discount this scenario, especially if Iran continues to be battered militarily and politically, perhaps with the loss of additional echelons of leadership. Nobody should count on it, either, at least not in the short term. . .

Regime modification — that is, a regime that stays in place but complies with U.S. and Israeli demands — is another optimistic scenario. It’s doubtful that Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, will agree to surrender Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and cease support for regional proxies like Hezbollah. But the new Khamenei’s reign may be very short-lived. And whoever runs the regime next will have to come to grips with its vulnerability and isolation.

That isolation will be especially pronounced if U.S. forces seize Kharg Island, 15 or 16 miles off the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf, which serves as the terminal for roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports. American control would give the administration the whip hand over most of the regime’s remaining revenues, including its ability to pay salaries for soldiers and civil servants alike.

But perhaps the regime refuses to yield and the war carries on in much the same way for another two or three weeks before some sort of mutual cease-fire declaration, probably before President Trump’s planned visit to Beijing on March 31.

In this third scenario, all sides declare their own sort of victory and none of them quite believe it. . .

Reality, however, will catch up. The sanctions that have already crippled the regime economically will not be lifted. It’s hard to imagine the war ending before the United States and Israel attack Iran’s remaining nuclear sites, including its buried (but accessible) stores of highly enriched uranium. And any efforts by Iran to conduct spectacular terrorist attacks in the vein of Libya’s 1988 Lockerbie bombing, or to mine the Strait of Hormuz, will only result in another war. The era in which Iranian leaders thought themselves invulnerable is over.

This scenario has an ugly cousin: not regime change, but state collapse. The most worrisome form it could take would resemble Syria during its 13-year civil war, in which the regime would survive in some areas of Iran, fall in others, invite foreign intervention and lead to killing on an epic scale. Along with that killing would come waves of refugees throughout the Middle East and into Europe and Australia.

And Stephens gives his recommendation about what we should do:

What, then, should the Trump administration do? My prescription: Seize Kharg Island. Mine or blockade Iran’s remaining ports. Destroy as much Iranian military capability as possible over the next week or two, including a second Midnight Hammer operation to destroy what’s left of Iran’s nuclear capacity and know-how. And threaten the regime with further bombing if it massacres its own citizens, mounts terrorist attacks abroad or returns to nuclear work.

That constitutes the most realistic path to victory at the lowest plausible price in lives, risk and treasure. And for all its admitted dangers, it gives Iran’s people their best chance of winning their freedom. Not bad for a one-month war its critics warned would be another Iraq.

I am a fan of Stephens. He may be labeled as a conservative, but I think both his analysis of wars  (both Iran and Gaza) and his recommendations are sensible. Of course, he’s Jewish, probably, like me, of the secular variety. There is, however, one problem with his recommendations above: how can we tell if Iran returns to nuclear work? Will there be unannounced inspections? Otherwise, his recommendations seem solid.

*Every night on NBC the lead news is, as it should be, about the war with Iran. But very quickly the latest news turns into a report on how the price of gas is going up. Granted, this affects nearly every price in America, because everything is delivered, but there are lives, freedom, and the fate of the Middle East at stake. I know I don’t use much gas, but I do buy stuff, and still I can’t really worry about price increases (farmers, of course, can). Still, it’s in all of our interests, as Stephens recommends above, that the Strait of Hormuz be open for transport of oil (it carries 20% of the world’s oil). Bombing Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf, as Stephens recommends above, will raise oil prices even more, for 90% of Iran’s oil flows through pipelines to that bit of land.

And as I write this on Wednesday afternoon I see that three commercial ships have been attacked in the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran is laying mines there. From the WSJ:

Three commercial ships were struck around the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday as Iran stepped up its efforts to halt traffic through the critical oil conduit.

U.S. forces said they had destroyed 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels. The head of U.S. Central Command said that its focus remains on destroying Iran’s missiles and drones and degrading its ability to interrupt shipping in the strait.

The International Energy Agency said its member countries would release 400 million barrels of oil, the largest reserves distribution in history.

Other news tacked onto the above by the WSJ:

  • French President Emmanuel Macron is hosting a video conference call with leaders of the Group of Seven advanced economies to discuss ways to mitigate the energy crisis.
  • The U.S. told Israel that it was “not happy” with recent attacks on Iranian energy facilities and told Israel not to do it again unless approved by Washington.
  • Citigroup evacuated several buildings in the U.A.E. on Wednesday, after Iranian authorities said banks linked to the U.S. and Israel in the region were now targets.
  • One of the seven members of the Iranian women’s soccer delegation who were granted humanitarian visas by Australia has changed her mind.

*More from The World Hates Jews Department: Reader Bill sent some data from The Polarization Research Lab about Americans’ reactions to a Jew being killed for being a Jew, and the data aren’t pretty (bolding is theirs):

For six weeks our national polarization tracking survey included an item measuring public support for an explicitly antisemitic murder—an act motivated by a victim’s Jewish identity. Our data include 6,000 interviews from YouGov (May-July 2025).

Direct support for antisemitic murder is low but meaningful at 2.8%–a level comparable to what we measure for political violence. However, the key finding is the alarmingly high level of public indifference. Our study shows that 8.3% of Americans are indifferent to an explicitly antisemitic murder. This figure is four times larger than the indifference we observe toward other types of political murder. Together, 11.1% of Americans either support or are indifferent to the murder of a Jew simply because the victim was Jewish.

. . .The results presented in this report on support and indifference for antisemitic violence reveal that polling simply on support for political violence may mask deeply concerning patterns of indifference for hate-based violence. Our results are similar to those found in recent work by the Anti-Defamation League, where polling found that 87% of Americans disagree with recent acts of antisemitic violence and 85% disagree that violent acts were necessary. These data highlight the importance of asking unambiguous survey questions about political violence so that we can collect the most accurate data on what is driving hate in America and allocate resources with precision.

Survey design

The survey item was designed according to best practices for measuring political violence, ensuring high-quality data by confirming that:

  1. The crime’s motivation was unambiguous.
  2. The perpetrator had been adjudicated guilty, removing any doubt about the facts of the case.

Data were collected from high-quality samples using attention checks to ensure data integrity.

Survey question: “Alan Whitle was convicted of murder. He was arrested by police after surveillance footage was found showing him stabbing a prominent member of the local Jewish community to death. Whitle targeted the victim because the victim was Jewish, driven by opposition to the war in Gaza. Do you support or oppose Whitle’s actions?”

Reader Bill, who sent me the link to that report. , added in his email, “”I can’t believe this. . . .well perhaps, I can”

I told you that nobody likes the Jews! (Which reminds me of a joke that I’ll spare you right now.)

*And some light news (with a video) from the UPI’s “odd news” section: Four cheetah cubs were just born in the San Diego Zoo.

The San Diego Zoo Safari Park announced the births of four male cheetah cubs, the first of their species to be born at the facility since 2020.

The zoo said first-time mother Kelechi gave birth to the cubs on Jan. 24.

“Just as they do in native habitats, Kelechi and her cubs are bonding in a private, behind-the-scenes den at the Carnivore Conservation Center,” zoo officials wrote in the announcement. “The cubs are now emerging from their den, giving guests an opportunity to see them as part of an Ultimate Safari.”

The zoo said cheetah mothers are very attentive to their babies.

“During these vital early months, Kelechi spends much of her time grooming her cubs and keeping them close. As they continue to grow more curious and active, they play and climb all over her as she keeps a close eye on them, chirping to call them closer when needed,” the announcement said.

The brothers are expected to form a lifelong bond.

“Male cheetahs, like these four brothers, form groups called ‘coalitions’ that will hunt and travel together for life, a unique trait for this primarily solitary species,” officials said.

Here’s an adorable video. Listen to those babies squeak (adult cheetahs don’t roar, but chirp:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej have an amusing interchange:

Hili: When chaos starts to prevail, we need stable points of orientation.
Andrzej: Some search for the path by looking at the stars, others by inspecting the bowls.\

In Polish

Hili: Kiedy chaos zaczyna dominować potrzebujemy stałych punktów orientacyjnych.
Ja: Jedni szukają drogi patrząc w gwiazdy, inni sprawdzając miseczki.

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

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Things With Faces:

Jango is in love with Hili, but the Princess spurns him:

From Masih: an Iranian official threatens all potential protestors. Oy!

From Colin: another journal falls by the wayside:

From Emma, going after an anti-HPV-vaxer. Christ on a bike, indeed!

Two from my feed.  First, another great post from Science Girl:

This is not abnormal in Istanbul. If you’re a cat lover, you must go there! English translation:

In Istanbul, cats aren’t “strays”—they’re full-fledged citizens.  There’s an unwritten law of collective care where shops and restaurants welcome them as part of the family. This little kitten isn’t begging for scraps; it’s savoring its rightful place at the table. A shining example of coexistence for the world! 

Or, “I’m Mehmet and I’ll be your server tonight.”

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Dr. Cobb. Take this first color test (I did 0.015, better than average):

For those who want to test their perception of colour, I made a little game called "What's My JND"www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd…

— Keith Cirkel (@keithamus.social) 2026-03-10T09:58:08.322Z

. . . and weasel words:

This is hilarious.Also, completely enraging.

— Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 (@joshuaeakle.com) 2026-03-11T01:56:44.249Z

44 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

    1. 0.003 for me, once I went back and actually read the instructions. Wiping off my screen also helped…

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    2. 0.0098 for me. I suspect my vision defects actually assisted with this one, though I couldn’t see the little tracking cross so I had to use my mouse pinger to be sure I was pointing at the vertical line!

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      1. Yes, I got 0.0065 on my laptop earlier today. I tried it now on my phone and got 0.0033. Not sure if it was the device, the brightness level of the screen, or the shift in lighting in my room. Maybe it’s the coffee that has now kicked in. Maybe it’s random noise.

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        1. Probably all of that. OLEDs (which practically all mobile devices use nowadays) also seem to have a higher saturation than LCD screens.

          I repeated the test on my older phone (because it has a larger screen than my current device) and did much better than on my laptop. However, it already has a few burn marks which led me astray a few times.
          Then I used my newer phone and got 0.00060. Suspected me of cheating but I didn’t.
          Although, some panels (~4) were really hard to discern and I had to stare quite a bit to see a difference.

          My eyes are really crap but at least my color vision seems to be top notch.

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          1. I did the test 3 times, with a factor of 3 between best and worst results. I need to see some experimental results with adequate statistical power before crediting this test to signify much of anything. My first result was the best, even with a couple of misses from inadvertent clicks (what in my schooldays would have been called “spaz moves”, which I suspect would be “hate speech” today. Anyone know the current euphemism? “Dyskinesia move”? “Motoneurodiverse move”? “Kinetically challenged move”?). I also suspect there are confounding factors such as receptor fatigue and complementary-colour afterimages.

            A lot of fun, though.

          2. Oy, I don’t know what the woke kids call that nowadays but I guess “spaz moves” could get you into hot water. But yeah, back then we also used “spaz” a lot 😬

            Anyway, I didn’t have much of a problem with mouse coordination. Most of the panels I could recognize in under a second and the spot I clicked was actually pretty accurate (maybe just a few pixels off); on the other hand, when I didn’t see any difference and had to guess, I was always off by quite a lot (sometimes on the opposite side of the screen).
            The most challenging were the very bright panels.
            In my last attempt I let my eyes adapt for a few seconds and then all of a sudden I could barely see a faint line. Judging by how accurate I could pinpoint the divide, I guess I could really see something and didn’t just luck out. The one panel I did get wrong in that last try, was again off by quite a margin.

            I think it depends a lot on the conditions under which you perform the test (e.g. ambient lighting, homogeneity and gamut of the display). The last try where I only missed one panel, I did under pretty much optimal conditions: no background light (i.e. in the dark) on a relatively new device with an OLED display (my older phone with the larger display had some issues with “shadows” or phantom images [you don’t notice them when looking at photos but on an almost uniform background it’s a different matter]).

            A lot of fun, though.

            Yepp, maybe I should try it on my nieces when they visit on Easter 😁

      1. I also scored .0044. I’m assuming that’s a good score going by the comment generated after the test? No eye surgery for me (only 64 years on ’em) but my screen is a bit grubby.

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      1. If my wife is anyone to extrapolate from, not only is her colour perception better but she knows the different names of the two colours in each panel.

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        1. Maybe you need some personally relevant mnemonics. For example, teal is (or was) the colour of Makita power tools. Puce is close to the colour of bloody puke. I once read a book on mnemonic techniques, found that they worked, knew that practice was essential, but got too bored by it. Please don’t ask me what those techniques were….

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    10. Firstly, I was initially using Firefox, and all I could see was a pure white screen. I reckoned something was wrong so opened the website on MS Edge, and suddenly I could see the colours.

      Secondly, I got 0.0065. Better than expected, considering I have red/green colour deficient vision.

      Edit: Just realised I have the deuteranopia colour filter set to “on” on my laptop. Don’t know if that helped.

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    11. 0.0065 using a good display, which surprised me. So much damage to my eyes over the years (corneal scarring, lens yellowing) I figured for worse. Certain pairs I absolutely could not see at all (high blue content)

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    12. 0.0085, got more of them than I was expecting as my colour vision is pretty lousy.

      Often had more problem seeing the cursor than seeing the line.

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    13. Interesting. First try, on my 11yo colour-calibrated laptop with a dirty screen – 0.0065. Then I tried it on my 2yo uncalibrated laptop with a clean screen – 0.0055. Finally, on my 3yo Samsung Galaxy smartphone – 0.0030. I think practice counted more than equipment.

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  2. I like Bret Stevenson a lot also, plus his taste in (ex)wives, Pamela Paul, is excellent.

    On why so much antisemitism… I attempted to answer that in my column, posted here on I think Tuesday, in TheModerateVoice, Jewish World, some other places and herein, my fave “Jihadwatch.”
    https://jihadwatch.org/2026/03/why-is-the-media-and-mob-so-anti-israel

    The short form is “cool terrorism” from the 60s and 70s “selling” the Soviet creation of “Palestine” to the Western academy/media which has been handed down the generations. And Islam.

    D.A.
    NYC

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    1. I’m a big fan of Pamela Paul, too. Anna (Krylov) and I had dinner with her last week at the Hoover Institution, a fact I mention only because I wanted to namedrop both Pamela Paul and the Hoover Institution. (I guess I could throw in that I’m posting this from Davos.)

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        1. HAHAH. Me also Jim. I know Jay (not personally, unfortunately).

          What great dinner parties he gets invited to!

          D.A.
          NYC

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  4. Yes, I am a geezer. But I don’t need anyone to tell me: I take pride in the fact.

    The idiot Hollywood antivaxxers are infuriating. That jackass wouldn’t know a T cell from his tuchus, or a B cell from his buttocks. Yet somehow he feels qualified to opine about immunology….

    There was a time when actors were regarded as somewhat disreputable people. Now they are regarded (especially by themselves and each other) as experts on every subject from war to science to medicine. And why not? Society rewards them (at least the so-called “A-listers” (I know what the “A” stands for)) far more than anyone with real expertise.

    JND score: 0.006

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  5. Indifferent to the murder of a Jew? I am tempted to tease out the demographics, but a 176 MB excel sheet is beyond my capacity while waiting for the first cup of coffee (again, black!) to kick in.

    Stephens is labeled a conservative. Sensible takes over the last decade-plus have a way of doing that to a person.

    Color test: 0.0065. Does that mean the new prescription for my computer glasses is fine?! Those salmon shades were a bear.

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  7. Some journalists and commentators hate Trump so intently that they are willing to use the school tragedy to undermine the war effort. It seems that they would rather discredit Trump than win the war.

    On the other side are those who hope that President Trump doesn’t end the war too soon (me included)—that is, before regime change or collapse takes place or, minimally, before neutering for 100 years Iran’s effort to build a nuclear weapon.

    Conditions in the Strait of Hormuz necessitate that the war continues. I agree with Bret Stephens that the U.S. should seize Kharg Island and restart trade through the Strait. Yesterday I posted a link to a map of Iranian targets along the coast, repeated here: https://understandingwar.org/map/iranian-military-base-in-the-strait-of-hormuz-november-14-2025/. The world cannot afford an Iran that can hold the world hostage by being able to turn the oil spigot off and on at will.

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  9. The hissing baby cheetohs slew me. I died of cuteness.

    (I got better.)

    0.0083 on the color test.

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  10. Given the comments about indifference to Jewish death and the NYT, I would like to draw attention to the Michigan ramming and shooting attack on the Reform Temple and school. One can find stories about the attack on many news sources, including the Free Beacon and the New York Post. But, as of this writing, not the NYT. While it is true that we don’t yet know much about the incident, one might think that the fact that it occurred is news. Not for the Times. My hypothesis is that they don’t know what kind of spin to put on the story—and spin is what counts for news in outlets like the NYT. Once they release the name, affiliation, and ideology of the terrorist, the editors can make up their minds.

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  11. 0.0054
    Edit: I’m thinking PCC(E) did so well because the need to see all those variations in colour of fruit-fly eyes in order to be a highly successful biologist selected for the ability.

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