Sunday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to the Sabbath for gentile cats: Sunday, May 17, 2026, and also National Pack Rat Day.  Pack rats are really, according to Wikipedia, “any species in the North and Central American rodent genus Neotoma.”  You can see where they get their name in the short video below.

@joemyheck

Hidden treasures in pack rat nest #pest #rat #pestcontrol

♬ original sound – Joemyheck

It’s also National Cherry Cobbler Day, National Mushroom Hunting Day, National Pinot Grigio Day, National Walnut Day, and National Baking Day. I used to hunt mushrooms (the ones that can hurt you are easily identifiable and avoided), but I haven’t seen many in Chicago lately.  WARNING: Do not do this unless you know your mushrooms!

Here are some edible mushrooms on sale in the UK, including slices of the delectable giant puffball, which you can fry up in butter like fungal steaks.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 17 Wikipedia page.

I had a dream last night, which I remembered as I kept waking up. In the last bit, I was walking through a devastated post-apocalyptic city with a beautiful blonde girl, who must have been my girlfriend as we were holding hands. There was background music from Billie Eilish.  At some point she gestured at a half-destroyed skyscraper and said, “That looks like an Edward Hopper painting,” but then proceeded to tell me the differences between the building and a Hopper. It also became clear that she was going to kill herself. It was a sad dream.

Posting will be light today as I’ll be out and about doing chores.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT reports that Trump is using a planned sale of weapons to Taiwan as a bargaining chip with China; in other words, he could withhold that sale to the island democracy to curry favor with Xi (article archived here).

President Trump has described a potential multibillion-dollar weapons sale to Taiwan as a “negotiating chip” with China, raising new doubts about the pace and scale of American military support for the island democracy.

Taiwan’s government has been waiting for months for Mr. Trump to sign off on a $14 billion package of missiles, anti-drone equipment and air-defense systems intended to fortify the island against Beijing’s military threats.

Mr. Trump himself had pressured Taiwan to spend more on its own defense. Now he is using the very arms his administration had pushed the island to buy as leverage with China, the United States’ main adversary.

Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One after leaving China on Friday that he had discussed the weapons package with China’s president, Xi Jinping, during their summit this past week in Beijing. He was asked in an interview with Fox News whether he would approve the Taiwan deal.

“No, I’m holding that in abeyance and it depends on China,” he said in the interview, which was recorded in Beijing but aired after he left. “It depends.”

“It’s a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly,” he said. “It’s a lot of weapons.”

He did not go into details about what he wanted in return, but Mr. Trump has pushed China to make major purchases of American airplanes, ethanol, soybeans, beef and sorghum.

His comments appear to undermine the assurances to Taiwan from some in his own administration that U.S. support for the island is steadfast and nonnegotiable. Before the summit, a bipartisan group of senators had urged against letting support for Taiwan become a bargaining chip with China.

I didn’t expect this move from Trump and I think it’s a bad one. Taiwan, like Israel, is a small democracy seen as illegitimate by large and nearby authoritarian powers. We should be supporting such democracies, not threatening to withhold weapons from them. Remember China is grumbling about taking over the island. How many soybeans is a democracy worth?

*The BBC, however, says that Taiwan still insistence on its political independence.

Taiwan has insisted it is a sovereign, independent nation, after US President Donald Trump cautioned it against formally declaring independence from China.

Trump’s remarks came after a two-day summit in Beijing, after which he said he had “made no commitment either way” about the self-governing island – which China claims as part of its territory and has not ruled out taking by force.

After talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump also said he would soon decide whether to approve an $11bn ($8bn) package of weapons to be sold to Taiwan.

The US administration is bound by law to provide Taiwan with a means of self-defence, but has frequently had to square this alliance with maintaining a diplomatic relationship with China.

Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te has previously stated that Taiwan does not need to declare formal independence because it already sees itself as a sovereign nation.

On Saturday, presidential spokesperson Karen Kuo said it was “self-evident” that Taiwan was “a sovereign, independent democratic country”.

She added, however, that Taiwan was committed to maintaining the status quo with China – in which Taiwan neither declares independence from China nor unites with it.

Many Taiwanese consider themselves to be part of a separate nation, though most are in favour of maintaining their current status.

Washington’s established position is that it does not support Taiwanese independence, with continued ties with Beijing being contingent on its acceptance that there is only one Chinese government.

In an interview with Fox News after meetings with President Xi, Trump reiterated that US policy on Taiwan had not changed, while making it clear he did not seek conflict with Beijing.

I’ve learned that the politics of Taiwan are complicated, overshadowed by China’s repeated statements that it wants to absorb Taiwan. The Taiwanese, of course, who live in a democracy that has considerable freedoms, don’t want that, though a few minor political parties do favor unification (and about 5%-10% of Taiwanese don’t oppose its occuring in the forseeable future). Trump, however, seems to think he has the right to not only turn countries more democratic (viz., Cuba) but also less democratic, as with Taiwan.

*The Wall Street Journal reports that Israel has killed the military head of Hamas in Gaza after having done away previously with his predecessors—Yahya and Mohammed Sinwar.

Israel killed Hamas’s military leader in Gaza, eliminating a long-sought target as it continues to hunt down militants linked to the Oct. 7, 2023, attack despite a continuing cease-fire.

Ezzedin al-Haddad, a Hamas veteran who took over as military commander after his predecessor was killed, died Friday evening in an airstrike in Gaza City, Israel said. He had helped plan the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that left 1,200 dead and around 250 as hostages in Gaza, and Israel said he was working to rebuild the group’s military capabilities when he was killed.

*Although universities across the US have ratcheted down their DEI initiatives, often it is is in name only, sometimes just eliminating the “E” from the acronym.  The City Journal reports that at the University of Wisconsin at Madison DEI is going as strong as ever (h/t Luana).

Universities across the country have wound down their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in recent years, following criticism of the programs’ patterns of racial discrimination and compelled speech. In some cases, DEI roles were not removed but simply renamed and moved to other departments. In fact, a recent Inside Higher Ed survey found that 43 percent of universities have rebranded their DEI initiatives. The names change; the agenda remains the same.

Minnesota parent Matthew Stanton saw what this rebrand looked like firsthand at the University of Wisconsin–Madison when accompanying his daughter for a school visit in April. UW–Madison’s School of Education is the nation’s top-ranked education department—a big draw for Stanton’s daughter, who wants to be an elementary school teacher. But when Stanton arrived at the School of Education, he was met with a “disturbing exhibit” in the building’s main concourse.

A red sweatshirt read, “All White People are Racist.” One sign said, “UW’s Free Speech = White Supremacy,” accompanied by the school’s badger mascot wearing a KKK hood and holding a noose. Student publication The Madison Federalist also found a sweatshirt showing the severed heads of Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

The exhibit was entitled “Da Hoodzeum presents: In Direct Action—A decade of Activist Art at University of Wisconsin–Madison.” It was part of the university’s annual Line Breaks festival, hosted by the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiative (OMAI) from March 20 to April 24. OMAI was originally in the university’s former DEI division, parts of which were moved to the Division for Teaching & Learning last year.

Michael Davis, Da Hoodzeum’s curator and a UW–Madison education doctoral student, compiles artifacts that focus on a “radical aspect of history.” (Davis did not respond to a  request for comment.)  A description of the April 24 exhibit said that it shows “how activist art at UW is . . . part of an ongoing tradition of creativity as action, care, and collective struggle.”

University spokesman John Lucas told City Journal via email that the “display did not represent the views of UW–Madison or its School of Education, which support free expression,” that the university “did not receive complaints” about the display, and that “no university funding was provided to the exhibit.”

But the exhibit was part of a public university-sponsored event. In such events, “the university has the power to determine what art is displayed,” according to Zach Greenberg, Director of Faculty Legal Defense at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. OMAI’s festival consisted of “invited professional artists” and students selected into the university’s First Wave full-tuition Hip-Hop & Urban Arts scholarship program.

As an administrative unit, OMAI also can’t claim the same protections of academic freedom that an academic department could. “We’re not talking about a case where a professor says something controversial in class,” Manhattan Institute Constitutional Studies Director Ilya Shapiro said. “Instead, it’s about viewpoint discrimination by a public school that’s bound by the First Amendment not to play favorites among political positions.” That seems to run contrary to UW–Madison’s institutional neutrality policy, which it adopted in 2024.

You be the judge: does this violate institutional neutrality given that OMAI is is an “administrative unit”.  To me this looks like free speech, though it’s certainly not free speech that promotes inclusion.  “All White People are Racists” comes straight from Kendi or DiAngelo, and is itself racist. And no, free speech does not equal white supremacy; this very exhibit disproves that.

*I’m a sucker for lists like the Guardian’s new compilation of  “100 greatest novels of all time“. You can tick off the ones you’ve read here, and nominate your top three novels here.

Here is my score: not impressive but not bad, I think, for a scientist:

From the intro:

As Stephen King points out, compiling a list of the greatest novels of all time is an impossible task. King is one of more than 170 novelists, critics and academics the Guardian polled for their top 10, ranked in order, which we tallied to compile an overall 100. But, as he argued, 10 books is “not enough!” On King’s list there is, he’s sorry to say, “not a single Dickens”; he wishes he’d found space for David Copperfield or Oliver Twist.

One Day author David Nicholls’s choices are “definitely skewed towards novels I read at an impressionable age”, he says. Bernardine Evaristo listed “some of my all‑time favourites, including several classics of the past 100 years”. Salman Rushdie, Anne Enright, Yiyun Li, Elif Shafak, Ian McEwan, Maggie O’Farrell, Colm Tóibín, Lorrie Moore, Katherine Rundell and many more have all cast their votes.

Never has such a list been more needed. Dwindling attention spans, screens, Netflix; whatever we blame, reading for pleasure is a dying pursuit. Half of adults in the UK say they never read, and levels among children and young people are at their lowest in 20 years. This year has been declared the National Year of Reading to address this crisis. “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all,” Henry David Thoreau advised. We are here to help.

. . . Our list includes any book published in English, but originally written in any language. It is still partial – all lists are. Neither can we make a claim to being definitive – this is literature, not science. Is the best novel one that changes the genre, society or the individual? One that captures the zeitgeist, or has an afterlife far beyond its pages. Or a novel that scorches itself so deeply into your soul you can remember exactly when and where you were when you first read it? None of these criteria on their own is enough. My Proustian madeleine will be your raw potato. My Mrs Dalloway your Mrs Bridge. But we hope that in asking those who devote their days to the craft and understanding of fiction from around the globe, the result is as authoritative, ambitious and far-reaching as possible.

Here are the top ten novels with the lowest number being the highest rank (there’s a “see the full list here” link).

1. Middlemarch
2. Beloved
3. Ulysses
4. In Search of Lost Time
5. Anna Karenina
6. War and Peace
7. Jane Eyre
8. Pride and Prejudice
9. Madame Bovary
10. The Great Gatsby

I have read all of these save one–the wearying book book by Proust (#4). I took it to Paris years ago but couldn’t even get through the first volume—and that was in the English translation.  The highest-ranking book by a living author is Salman Rusdie’s Midnight’s Children.

If you want to participate, do go to the site and tick off the books you’ve read, and then put the number below. I’m sure many will beat me, but I still claim that scientists are better read in literature than nonscientists are about science. How many nonscientists have read On the Origin of Species or even A Brief History of Time?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is mournful, in search of lost time:

Andrzej: Are you asleep?
Hili: No, I’m thinking back to the good times.

In Polish:

Ja: Śpisz?
Hili: Nie, wspominam dobre czasy.

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

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices. Oy!

From CinEmma:

From Things With Faces, a ghoulish lamp:

Masih points out the people who, like her, have fled Iran against their will to find freedom and preserve their lives. The translation from Farsih:

When a person is forced to leave their homeland to save their life, future, and freedom, migration is no longer a “choice”; it is a narrative of exile, fear, instability, and the struggle to survive. Thousands of Iranian refugees and students abroad live every day amid psychological pressures, residency issues, discrimination, insecurity, and separation from family; lives that are often unseen, yet real. In this live conversation, we will discuss the hidden suffering of forced migration, the crisis of Iranian refugees, the situation of students abroad, and the responsibility the global community has toward these individuals.

With: Saba Alaleh, Mousa Borzin, Nazi Seddiqi, Shilan Bahrami, Nafiseh Norad, Hanieh Nemattollahi.  Host: Mozhgan Keshavarz

وقتی انسان مجبور می‌شود برای نجات جان، آینده و آزادی‌اش وطنش را ترک کند، مهاجرت دیگر «انتخاب» نیست؛
روایتی‌ست از تبعید، ترس، بی‌ثباتی و تلاش برای زنده ماندن.

هزاران پناهجو و دانشجوی ایرانی خارج از کشور، هر روز میان فشارهای روانی، مشکلات اقامتی، تبعیض، ناامنی و دوری از خانواده… pic.twitter.com/m25Co6d5GS

— United Against Gender Apartheid (@UAGApartheid) May 15, 2026

From Luana; a parallel:

After losing World War II, Germany lost 25% of its territory and 14 million Germans were ethnically cleansed from Eastern Europe.

And yet there hasn’t been a single case of Germans hijacking planes, blowing themselves up, or committing terrorist attacks like Palestinians. pic.twitter.com/3Bt6dZAPnu

— Dr. Maalouf ‏ (@realMaalouf) May 13, 2026

From Larry the Cat via Simon, who notes, “How does anyone tolerate the “tarts boudoir” esthetic? It’s just so tacky.”

Majesty and Travesty pic.twitter.com/8JD6KkLnAA

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) April 29, 2026

Two from my feed. The first has always been a great idea: allow violent prisoners to take care of homeless cats. Watch the video! Both the staff and the cats are better off:

Prison violence dropped 300%
all because of cats 🐱 pic.twitter.com/YobgCF472Y

— Farm Girl Carrie 👩‍🌾 (@FarmGirlCarrie) May 16, 2026

This is apparently legal, but it’s hateful.  In NYC, Muslims say their prayers right outside a Jewish school.  Perhaps Mayor Mamdani could have a quiet word with the pray-ers, but he won’t:

This is an ALL GIRLS Jewish school in my district. I’m all for prayer and free speech, but why do a bunch of GROWN MEN need to do this right outside of a school full of little Jewish girls??? Is not this what MOSQUES are for? Is this intentional? Mayor Mamdani @NYCMayor any words… pic.twitter.com/iFRPnGVblQ

— Councilwoman Inna Vernikov (@InnaVernikov) May 15, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Norwegian Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was 7 years old and would be 91 today had he lived. https://t.co/DHiFinswOx

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) May 17, 2026

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, theodicy in SMBC!

Brought to you by the All Theodicy compilation of SMBC, coming 2035.COMIC ◆ http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/infini… PATREON ◆ http://www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm…STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

— SMBC Comics (@smbccomics.bsky.social) 2026-04-15T22:30:09.398Z

. . . and a Muscovy duckling (sound up):

Not so little Tatu the Muscovy duckling enjoying the outdoors

— Chris and his farmily of forever farm friends (@caenhillcc.bsky.social) 2026-04-14T14:47:01.216Z