Monday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to the last Monday in April: it’s April 27, 2026 and National Babe Ruth Day, celebrating the man who many people consider the greatest baseball player of all time (Shohei Ohtani, who also both pitches and hits, may take his place!). It was on this day in 1947 that Ruth, dying of cancer, made a farewell appearance at Yankee Stadium,  Here’s a recording of his words on that day; the ravages of throat cancer is clear in his gravelly speech:

It’s also International Crow and Raven Appreciation Day, Marine Mammal Rescue Day, National Devil Dog Day (a cream-filled oval cake that my late friend Kenny used to get after dinner every night at William and Mary), World Tapir Day, National Prime Rib Day, and National Gummi Bear Day.

Here’s the world’s largest Gummi Bear. It weighed Weighing a total of 1728 kg (3810 pounds), and AI says, “This record-breaking candy measures approximately 2.2 x 2 x 1 meters and is equivalent to about 850,000 standard-sized gummi bears.”

Finally, I saw two bunnies on my way to work today. With eight rabbits’ feet in view, I thought it might be a lucky day, but the only thing I want is for my ducklings to return, and that ain’t gonna happen:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*It’s Noon in Israel suggests that Qatar, long a refuge for members of Hamas, isn’t going to put up with the terror group any more:

Traveling abroad comes with a standard set of anxieties: missed connections, lost luggage or, if you’re Israeli, a regional war erupting just before the holidays. But spare a thought for Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’ chief negotiator, who left his five-star exile in Qatar for what was intended to be a quick diplomatic trip to Cairo. After summarily rejecting a U.S.-backed disarmament proposal that offered a staged Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, he received a text message notifying him that he had been evicted from his luxury lodgings and was officially barred from re-entering the country. It is every vacationer’s worst nightmare.

It appears that Hamas’ latest bout of intractability has finally broken its patron’s back. After 20 years, Qatar is pulling its investment in the terror group. According to my sources, Doha will no longer play the role of host and negotiator, and most of Hamas’ leadership has already departed the country.

After two decades, the obvious question is: Why now?

The decisive turning point wasn’t Cairo, nor was it October 7—if anything, the latter represented a major appreciation of Doha’s investment. The breaking point was Operation Roaring Lion. After 16 agonizing days of silence, torn between their two patrons, Hamas ultimately issued a statement defending Iran’s “right of self-defense,” but asked Tehran to refrain from targeting “neighboring countries.” For Qatar, a nation whose sovereign territory was actively being struck by Iranian missiles, this relatively weak, delayed condemnation from the group they had been funneling cash and support to for decades was not endearing.

This isn’t just about moral clarity or hurt feelings. In exchange for their luxury accommodations, Hamas provided Qatar with a highly marketable service: terrorist mediation. Alongside their shared ideological alignment, this mediation is precisely why Qatar reached out to Hamas after the group’s 2006 electoral victory when the rest of the world cut contact. Doha cornered an unserved market. But the value of that service is in steep decline—not only because a new status quo is settling over Gaza, but because the primary consumer of Qatar’s service, the United States, has developed a distaste for such intimate terrorist ties.

About time, I say.  And perhaps this portends a lessening of all the encampments and pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the West. Don’t forget that at least a majority of Palestinians support Hamas, and they support the group over Fatah, the political party of Mahmoud Abass and the Palestinian Authority. This means that supporting Palestine means, by and large, supporting a territory whose inhabitants favor terrorism.

*Although people like P. Z. Myers have suggested that the attack at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was purely a set-up by Trump to cast him as a martyr and to tout his new White House ballroom, the evidence doesn’t support that at all.

Investigators were still working to determine the motive in the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner that sent Secret Service agents rushing President Trump from the stage inside a Washington hotel, the acting attorney general said on Sunday. But a preliminary review indicated that members of the administration, “likely including the president,” had been the target, he said.

Mr. Trump told Fox News that the suspect had written what he described as a “manifesto,” without offering details. The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” earlier Sunday that investigators gathering evidence about the suspect “know there were some writings” but cautioned that the analysis of his motivation could change.

The suspect, identified by two law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity as Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, Calif., was taken into custody after the police said he ran through a security checkpoint and exchanged gunfire with the authorities inside the Washington Hilton on Saturday night. Officials said he did not reach the ballroom, where Mr. Trump, top administration officials and hundreds of journalists had gathered.

Late Saturday night, federal authorities in the Los Angeles suburbs surrounded a two-story home where records show Mr. Allen lives. Residents gathered nearby on darkened sidewalks as police helicopters circled overhead and law enforcement vehicles with flashing red and blue lights blocked the street.

The suspect was armed with knives, a shotgun and a handgun, the interim Washington, D.C., police chief, Jeffery W. Carroll, told reporters on Saturday night. Mr. Blanche said the man had purchased the two weapons he was carrying “within the last couple of years.”

There were no metal detectors set up at the hotel’s entrances on Saturday, and a secure perimeter was only established closer to the ballroom. Mr. Blanche defended the security at the event, noting that the suspect did not enter the ballroom where Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance and cabinet officials were among the guests.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The 31-year-old suspect in the shooting outside the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is a Caltech grad who recently won a “teacher of the month” award.

Cole Allen, of Torrance, Calif., has been identified as the man suspected of opening fire Saturday night near the ballroom where President Trump was in attendance, according to two law-enforcement officials briefed on the investigation. Allen was armed with a shotgun, handgun and knives and was a guest at the Washington Hilton where the dinner was taking place, police said. One law-enforcement officer was wounded in the attack.

I doubt this is a setup. If the shooter was in on it, why would he risk the certainty of years in jail? And what if he actually killed the law-enforcement official rather than hitting him in a bullet-proof vest? No, you have to be nuts to broach a conspiracy theory like that.

*An athlete from Kenya ran the first official marathon under two hours, though unofficial sub-two-hour marathon had been achieved before:

Sabastian Sawe made history on the morning of April 26, 2026, when he crossed the finish line in a time of 1:59:30 at the 2026 London Marathon. Sawe, a 31-year-old from Kenya, became the first person to ever run under 2 hours for a marathon … officially.

The term “officially” is important here. Sawe isn’t the first runner to break the 2-hour barrier for 26.2 miles. That distinction belongs to Eliud Kipchoge, the most decorated—and arguably the greatest—marathoner to ever live.

In 2019, Kipchoge, 34 on race day, ran 1:59:40 at the INEOS 1:59 Challenge in a tree-shaded park in Vienna, Austria. At the time, it was the fastest marathon ever run. But it didn’t count as a world record. That’s because standard competition rules for pacing and fluids were not followed.

Here’s a news report on the Marathon, showing Sawe’s victory and his reaction to the win (which also shaved 56 seconds off the world record):

*Canada is high in the standings for Wokest Nation in the World. From Canada’s National Post:

An Ontario town has been fined $10,000 and its officials ordered to complete mandatory “human rights” training after it refused to celebrate Pride Month.

Emo is a township of about 1,300 people located in the far west of Ontario, along the border with Minnesota.

In a decision handed down last week, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario ruled that Emo, its mayor and two of its councillors had violated the Ontario Human Rights Code by refusing to proclaim June as “Pride Month.”

The town was also cited for failing to fly “an LGBTQ2 rainbow flag,” despite the fact that they don’t have an official flag pole.

The dispute began in 2020 when the township was approached by the group Borderland Pride with a written request to proclaim June as Pride Month.

Attached to the letter was a draft proclamation including clauses such as “pride is necessary to show community support and belonging for LGBTQ2 individuals” and “the diversity of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression represents a positive contribution to society.”

Emo was also asked to fly an “LGBTQ2 rainbow flag for a week of your choosing.”

Borderland Pride then asked Emo to “email us a copy of your proclamation or resolution once adopted and signed.”

Although symbolic proclamations are standard fare in larger municipal governments such as Toronto or Hamilton, this didn’t happen all that often in Emo.

“The record indicated the Township did not receive many requests for declarations or proclamations or requests for display of a flag,” the subsequent Tribunal decision would read. In a single 12-month period they received only four — two of which were from Borderland Pride.

Tribunal hearings would also reveal that Emo doesn’t really have a central flag pole, aside from a Canadian flag angled over the front door of the Emo Municipal Office.

Nevertheless, Borderland Pride’s draft proclamation was tabled before a May 2020 meeting of the Emo Township Council, where it was defeated by a vote of three to two.

The claim of discrimination ultimately hinged on a single line uttered by Emo Mayor Harold McQuaker. When the proclamation came up for consideration, McQuaker was heard to say in a recording of the meeting, “There’s no flag being flown for the other side of the coin … there’s no flags being flown for the straight people.”

As Human Rights Tribunal vice-chair Karen Dawson wrote in her decision, “I find this remark was demeaning and disparaging of the LGBTQ2 community of which

Clearly the town is being punished for the whataboutery of Emo’s mayor, which may reflect bigotry, ir it may not. It may just reflect ideological neutrality.  Whatever the cause, a town should not be compelled to celebrate any sex or gender diversity and then fined if it doesn’t. O Canada!

*The WSJ reports on the ubiquity of AI videos these days, many of them using Chinese programs.

In a scene from Amazon’s biblical series “House of David,” human actors portray fallen angels and mortal women. The surrounding landscape—a moody tableau of steel-gray skies and jagged mountains—is the work of AI.

Of the 850 visual-effect shots in the show’s first season, 73 were built using generative artificial intelligence, including a tool developed by one of China’s most popular social-media sites. That saved money on expensive on-location shoots, according to Wonder Project, the studio behind the series.

From Hollywood productions to short social-media videos, video makers are increasingly using AI to create content that once required sprawling crews.

“As production costs fall, it becomes more affordable for creators to experiment and test new ideas,” said Zeng Yushen of Kuaishou, the Chinese company whose AI model was used in “House of David.”

China plays a big role in this business, though it wouldn’t be obvious to most Americans watching television or scrolling through videos on their phones. Chinese labs claimed seven of the top 10 spots for video-generation models on rating platform Artificial Analysis, competing with those from Google and Elon Musk’s xAI.

This month, a video-generation model called HappyHorse went viral after beating American rivals in blind quality tests. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba later disclosed the model was its own.

And Seedance 2.0, the latest AI video generator from TikTok parent ByteDance, won attention earlier this year for its ability to turn script prompts into realistic short-movie scenes. ByteDance’s Douyin, the Chinese sibling of TikTok, competes with Kuaishou’s video-sharing app, which has hundreds of millions of users in China.

Such platforms “naturally have large volumes of labeled short-video data that can be used for training,” said Tilly Zhang, a technology analyst at research house Gavekal. “This creates a data barrier that most companies cannot easily replicate.”

I don’t mind people using AI in movies or videos, but I think it’s incumbent on them to tell us when it’s used. It’s not like animation in which you know that it’s not reality. Instead, AI sometimes either represents itself as reality or could be mistaken for reality.  There outghta to a law, if not an ethical rule. I think the day will come when nearly all video made by professionals (and a lot by amateurs) will involve AI, and that’s a bit sad. They’re already resurrecting dead actors and putting them in movies.

*In 1990 the biggest art heist in history took place: in the wee hours of March 18, over $500 million worth of paintings were rem0ved at night from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.  Wikipedia totes up some of the stolen works:

The stolen works were originally procured by art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) and were intended for permanent display at the museum with the rest of her collection. Among them was The Concert, one of only 34 known paintings by Johannes Vermeer and thought to be the most valuable unrecovered painting in the world. Also missing is The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Rembrandt‘s only seascape. Other paintings and sketches by Rembrandt, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Govert Flinck were stolen, along with a relatively valueless eagle finial and Chinese gu. Experts were puzzled by the choice of artwork, as more valuable works were left untouched. As the collection and its layout are intended to be permanent, empty frames remain hanging both in homage to the missing works and as placeholders for their return.

The theft is unsolved. I’ve been to the Museum and have seen the empty frames. A missing Vermeer is totally sad.  Now the AP reports that there’s a book that says that the thieves have been identified, along with o0ther details of the heist (see the book here):

In 2013, the FBI said it knew who was responsible for the Boston museum heist but declined to name them, fueling speculation that persists today.

A former FBI agent who led the investigation for more than two decades is now offering the first detailed account of how investigators reached that conclusion — and publicly identifying the men he believes were involved. In a new book, Geoff Kelly traces how the artworks moved through criminal networks, where violence took the lives of key suspects and witnesses, and challenges long-circulating theories by revisiting key details.

. . . In the decades since the robbery, several people believed to have ties to the heist were killed, and another died under suspicious circumstances.

Robert “Bobby” Donati, a Boston mob associate long suspected in the case, was found stabbed to death in 1991, his body left in the trunk of a car after his home had been ransacked.

Years earlier, Donati visited the Gardner with another known art thief, Myles Connor, to scope it out for a robbery and said that if he ever took the museum’s Napoleonic finial, it would be his “calling card.” Years later, a jeweler told investigators Donati tried to sell a finial from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum but backed off, saying it was “too hot.”

A separate line of evidence centered on George Reissfelder, who investigators believe owned the getaway car.

Kelly tracked down Reissfelder’s brother, a retired military officer who had initially not believed his brother was involved. He broke down after being shown Manet’s “Chez Tortoni,” saying he recognized it as a painting he himself hung above his brother’s bed.

Reissfelder later died under suspicious circumstances. When investigators searched his home, the painting was gone.

Both men had ties to TRC Auto Electric, a Dorchester shop linked to Charles “Chuck” Merlino’s crew.

Kelly personifies the missing artworks and describes them as “perfect fugitives.”

“They don’t go to the doctor. They don’t get stopped for speeding. They don’t leave fingerprints,” he said. “They can just disappear.”

Unlike human fugitives, he said, artworks can also be copied.

Over the years, that has meant chasing down false leads — including paintings spotted in a Reno antique market, hanging in private homes and even one that appeared in an episode of the TV show “Monk.”

Because the works are so recognizable, it’s nearly impossible to sell them publicly.

“Stealing the artwork from the museum, that’s the easy part,” Kelly said. “Profiting from it, that’s the difficult part.”

He imagines the paintings will surface one day — outliving those who carried out the heist.

“I have no doubt they still exist,” he said

Of course they still exist, either hidden by the thieves or in some rich private collector’s hands. You don’t pull a job like that and destroy $500 million worth of paintings. Here’s “The Concert,” the Vermeer painting that was stolen:

And here’s the missing Rembrandt, which is a good one:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s acting like a mom:

Hili: You should throw that shirt away by now, the collar is worn through.
Andrzej: But I like it very much.

In Polish:

Hili: Wyrzuć już tą koszulę, ma przetarty kołnierzyk.
Ja: Ale ja ją bardzo lubię.

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

From Now That’s Wild:

From The Language Nerds:

From Strange, Stupid or Silly Signs,   I got no points here as I’ve done them all.

From Masih; Iranian officials and their offspring enjoy luxury while protestors get shot and blinded (sound up, and translations from Spanish welcomes):

Just yesterday and again today, they executed another Iranian while they send their children abroad to enjoy safety and luxury.

This is the son of another Islamic Republic of Iran official who served as a diplomat of the Islamic Republic in Venezuela.

We Iranians want freedom,… pic.twitter.com/pqAvFBVX1K

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 22, 2026

From J. K. Rowling. Biological men don’t belong in women’s prisons:

The Scottish government is responsible for this sexual assault. The Supreme Court has confirmed women’s right to single sex spaces, a ruling the SNP continues to flout. If the victim wishes to sue, https://t.co/iyohnrgVZN can assist with all costs. https://t.co/rnyKbWXhj5

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 24, 2026

Hasan Piker manages to excuse Hamas: it’s all about the “context”:

𝐇𝐀𝐒𝐀𝐍 𝐏𝐈𝐊𝐄𝐑 𝐒𝐀𝐘𝐒 𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄’𝐒 “𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐗𝐓” 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐌∗𝐑𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐇𝐔𝐍𝐃𝐑𝐄𝐃𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐄𝐄𝐍𝐀𝐆𝐄𝐑𝐒 𝐀𝐓 𝐀 𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐈𝐂 𝐅𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐀𝐋

Watch this exchange and understand: 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡.

A… pic.twitter.com/Pu4LsGsA0S

— M.A. Rothman (@MichaelARothman) April 25, 2026

From Luana, and you can read the original story here. Do you suppose it will appear in the NYT? It seems to have been ignored by the MSM despite documentation.

This one is brutal, but a must read.

The Daily Mail just published testimonies of Gazan children being raped by Hamas-affiliated clerics at local mosques — and then threatened into silence by the Qassam Brigades.

A nine-year-old describes being led to mosque restrooms by a… pic.twitter.com/CH6jxGVuNw

— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) April 26, 2026

One from my feed; the “community note” says that pelicans like this are common in Greece, but this one isn’t 37 years old:

A pelican, around 37 years old, shows up every day at a Greek restaurant to get its portion of fish. The bird has become a well-known local figure along the seafront pic.twitter.com/FqHAAANMag

— Nature Unedited (@NatureUnedited) April 26, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was four years old. She would be 88 today had she survived. https://t.co/VqBPPZHwAF

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 27, 2026

Two from Dr. Cobb. I like this first one:

Meanwhile at the grape factory… 🤣by Christopher Boffoli#art #FoodArt #tiny #vegan

— HansKI (@hanksi-art.bsky.social) 2026-04-26T13:43:08.239Z

And a sad tale of the death of Florida’s citrus industry. I used to collect Drosophila in Florida, concentrating on orange groves where flies were common:

Totally off-topic, but did y'all the know the Free State of Florida's citrus industry is basically dead??This is quite a story:slate.com/business/202…

— T. Greg Doucette (@gregdoucette.bsky.social) 2026-04-22T05:58:05.216Z