Friday: Hili dialogue

We have made it through the work week intact: it’s Friday, May 22, 2026 and World Paloma Day, celebrating a cocktail that I haven’t had, much less heard of.  It sounds good: a mixture of tequila, lime, and either grapefruit soda like Squirt, or grapefruit juice.  Here’s one from Wikipedia:

It’s also Canadian Immigrants Day, Harvey Milk Day (Milk was born on this day in 1978 and assassinated in 1978; he was the first openly gay man to hold public office in California), International Day for Biological Diversity, National Vanilla Pudding Day, World Goth Day (do they even exist any more?) and the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. It is of course celebrated with food:

Special meals are eaten, consisting of dairy products. Common foods include cheese blintzes, quiches, and casseroles. Jews do not work on the day, although Jewish custom says that cooking, baking, carrying objects and equipment, and transporting fire are permitted. Jewish confirmations sometimes take place around the same time as the holiday.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 22 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first, and this time, sadly, for Barney Frank, who died on Tuesday. The NYT has a long memoriam and celebration of his life.

Barney Frank, the brassy, lightning-quick former Massachusetts representative who for decades was the most prominent gay politician in the country and who was an author of the most significant overhaul of the nation’s financial regulations since the Great Depression, died on Tuesday at his home in Ogunquit, Maine. He was 86.

His friend James Segel confirmed the death. Mr. Frank said last month that he had entered hospice care with congestive heart failure.

Mr. Frank, a liberal Democrat who represented a diverse suburban Boston district for 32 years, starting in 1981, was the first gay member of the House to come out voluntarily; others had been outed in scandals. His public declaration of his sexual orientation in 1987 — spurred by a fear of being outed, by the death of a closeted colleague and by his own determination to show that homosexuality was nothing to be ashamed of — helped normalize being openly gay in public life.

“Prejudice is based on ignorance,” Mr. Frank told The Boston Globe in 2011, as he prepared to retire. “And the best way to counterbalance it is with a living example, with reality.”

A Harvard-trained lawyer, Mr. Frank bristled with intellectual firepower, acidic turns of phrase and a zest for verbal combat.

His shivs were often cloaked in wit. Referring to the Moral Majority, the conservative Christian organization that opposed abortion but also opposed child nutrition programs and day care, Mr. Frank said in 1981: “From their perspective, life begins at conception and ends at birth.” Of the flawed intelligence behind the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that led to nearly a decade of combat, he said the problem “is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.”

In Washingtonian magazine’s annual poll of Capitol Hill staffers, he was frequently voted the “brainiest,” “funniest” and “most eloquent” member of the House.

Here’s a two-minute memorial to Frank showing some of his own words:

*Two votes involving were canceled or questioned  in Congress. First, the vote to force Trump to go to Congress if he wished to continue the war in Iran:

House Republicans on Thursday abruptly canceled a vote on a resolution directing President Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Iran or win approval from Congress to continue the war, after it became clear they lacked the votes to defeat the measure.

The retreat was a striking setback that exposed fractures within the G.O.P. over the conflict at a moment when the party has begun pushing back forcefully on Mr. Trump and his agenda.

And in the Senate, Republicans are peeved at Trump’s self-aggrandizing deal with the IRS, which could prevent him from ever being audited and compensate his friends who were “unjustly” treated by the law, like the insurrectionists of January 6.  In response, they canceled a vote approving an immigration crackdown.

When Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, arrived at the Capitol on Thursday to meet with Republicans questioning the Justice Department fund that President Trump has said he wants to use to pay people who claim to have been unfairly targeted by the government, he may have expected a few strident complaints.

Instead, what unfolded in an ornate room just off the Senate floor on Thursday morning was a two-hour blowup in which dozens of Republican senators vented their anger and concern about the president’s fund at Mr. Blanche.

They questioned its legal basis, whom it would pay and how the process would work. And they made it clear they wanted no part of the plan, the product of a deal struck between Mr. Trump’s lawyers and his own administration to use money that Congress does not control to pay off purported victims of government mistreatment, potentially including some of the rioters who violently assaulted their workplace during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.

By the end, Republicans were so livid that party leaders scrapped planned votes on the party’s top priority — a $72 billion immigration crackdown measure it had planned to muscle through before Memorial Day — punting action for fear of having to cast votes on the fund.

It’s strange: Trump is showing muscle in getting his approved Republican candidates winning in primary elections, but the Congress is showing strong disapproval of his policies.

*The Department of Justice has indicted Raúl Castro, Cuba’s former President, charging him with murder.

The Justice Department announced charges on Wednesday against Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old former president of Cuba, accusing him of murder and a conspiracy to kill American citizens stemming from the fatal downing 30 years ago of two planes over waters off the coast of his country.

The indictment, issued in Federal District Court in Miami, was an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s multifaceted pressure campaign against Cuba’s Communist government at a moment when President Trump has been seeking to topple it.

The charges brought to bear on Mr. Castro, the brother of Fidel Castro, the vast powers of the U.S. criminal justice system, saddling him with a possible maximum penalty of life in prison. They also raised the possibility that the United States could be paving the way for its military to remove him from the country through a means similar to how U.S. Special Operations forces used an indictment against Nicolás Maduro, the former leader of Venezuela, to swoop into Caracas in a brazen operation in January and capture him.

The indictment, which also accused five fighter pilots involved in the attack on the planes, was secretly returned last month by a federal grand jury and built on earlier charges, first filed in 2003, against one of them.

At a news conference in Miami, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, and Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, accused Mr. Castro and the pilots of killing four people when the Cuban military shot down the planes on the afternoon of Feb. 24, 1996. The planes were operated by Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban exile group that often scoured the seas for Cubans fleeing the country.

Fidel Castro took responsibility for downing the planes shortly after they were brought from the sky, claiming that the organization had been dropping anti-regime leaflets over Havana in earlier flights. The indictment said that Raúl Castro was also responsible because he and his brother were “the final decision makers” in the Cuban military chain of command.

The wife of one of the men killed in the February 24, 1996 attack was on the news last night, saying that her husband was an American citizen (her point was that this supported the murder indictment against Castro). I don’t think the U.S. should be invading other countries and removing their leaders, as they did with Maduro, but if I were Raúl Castro, I would go into hiding.  Given the ability of U.S. intelligence to use precise intelligence to capture people, as they did with Maduro, though, perhaps there is no safe place to hide. Whether you think attacking Cuba to apprehend a 94-year-old man is worthwhile is another question. There are other cases in which Americans unjustly executed on foreign soil have not been avenged in this way.

*I knew that Israel went after all the Israeli-killing Black September terrorists involved in the Munich Olympic shooting in 1972, but I didn’t know (but should have guessed) that Israel is now trying to take out the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre of Israelis. The details of this campaign are given in a new WSJ article, “Inside Israel’s high-tech campaign to kill or capture every Oct. 7 attacker.” And apparently the list of targets is very long:

Noa Argamani, who was seized less than a week before her 26th birthday, spent 245 days captive in Gaza. After she was freed in a rescue mission, two men seen in the video holding back Argamani’s boyfriend were tracked down by Israeli intelligence officials and killed in separate airstrikes.

The men were crossed off a list of thousands of names kept by an Israeli task force created for one job—to kill or capture all who planned or joined in the Oct. 7 attack, said current and former Israeli officials. Hundreds have been struck from the list, in one of the most personal and highly technical targeting campaigns in the history of warfare. The campaign continues amid the demands of the war with Iran and a cease-fire agreement in Gaza.

No participant is deemed too insignificant—down to the man who drove a tractor through a border fence that day. Nearly two years after he breached the border, the tractor driver was identified, located and blown up in an airstrike as he walked a narrow urban street in Gaza, according to footage released by Israel’s military.

The campaign spans the rank-and-file to Hamas’s top leaders. On Friday, Israel killed Ezzedin al-Haddad, one of the last living senior militants from the group’s military leadership that planned the Oct. 7 attacks. He had been Hamas’s military commander in Gaza since 2025.

“The IDF will continue to pursue our enemies, strike them and hold accountable everyone who took part in the October 7th massacre,” Israel’s military chief Eyal Zamir said Saturday after Haddad’s killing was confirmed.

Militants who videotaped their Oct. 7 exploits on phones or GoPro cameras to share on social media, or those who phoned home to brag, learned too late the degree of Israel’s surveillance acumen and desire for retribution.

Security forces mark men for death without trial if they find at least two pieces of evidence showing they took part in crimes during the Oct. 7 attacks, according to current and former Israeli security officials. Agents from military intelligence and Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, pore over militants’ videos posted on social media, these officials said.

Agents run the images through facial recognition programs to sift for names, the officials said, and comb through intercepted phone calls. They view location data from cell tower logs and interrogate Gazan detainees to uncover who did what.

Despite the October cease-fire with Hamas and release of the last surviving hostages, names continue to be crossed off the list. Israel says it kills targets who allegedly pose a threat, such as approaching the front lines or planning an attack.

. . .Israeli agents, after failing to prevent the Oct. 7 attack, approached the head of Shin Bet to set up a task force they named NILI. It is a Hebrew acronym for the words, “The Eternal One of Israel Doesn’t Lie.” The name, first used by a band of World War I-era Jewish spies, signified that no one identified in the attack would be forgotten.

The campaign is centered in Gaza but has struck Hamas leaders in Lebanon and Iran. It echoes Israel’s assassinations of a dozen or so Palestinians responsible for killing 11 of its athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

“The clear message to all future enemies is to think again about the price of a terrorist operation like that,” said Shalom Ben Hanan, a former senior official in Shin Bet.

The issue, of course, is whether this is a deterrent given that many jihadis apparently want to be martyrs, and may not be deterred by such Israeli revenge.  (It’s another issue whether Israel should be killing these people instead of capturing them and trying them; one problem with that is that prisoner swaps often dramatically shorten long sentences.)

*Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” finishes up this week, ending 33 years of the show’s run. This, says the WaPo, portends a general decline on the late night multi-guest format.

While the show’s cancellation carries the stench of suspected political interference for many fans and viewers, its conclusion also comes at a moment of seismic changes for the classic television format.

“Like all broadcast television, it was cultural glue. We all fed from the same cultural trough at the same time,” said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of television and popular culture. “That is gone and only remains in a few pockets, and those pockets are falling one by one. When Colbert leaves, another one of those important pockets will have fallen.”

. . .We no longer choose from a handful of late-night hosts to get our fix of breezy celebrity interviews; there’s a seemingly endless supply of video podcasts for that. And airing in Colbert’s place starting Friday? A decidedly non-topical comedy show, “Comics Unleashed,” that CBS isn’t even paying to make. In fact, CBS is being paid to air it.

It’s quite the conclusion for “The Late Show,” a program that debuted in an era when late night was so important to network television that the ratings rivalry was dubbed a “war.” The program premiered in 1993, born out of a beef between Letterman and Jay Leno over who would inherit Johnny Carson’s vaunted perch as host of “The Tonight Show.” Letterman got passed over, went to CBS and started a rival program with a hefty contract.

When Colbert took over from Letterman in 2015, the late-night show still reigned supreme — in part because of renewed cultural relevance after Jon Stewart began hosting “The Daily Show” and turned late-night into urgent political satire. (He also introduced most of America to one particularly deadpan correspondent: Colbert.) A rash of similar shows premiered across networks and streaming services.

A host “getting up, telling a bunch of jokes, sitting down at a desk and interviewing people is the fussiest, most old-fashioned thing in the world,” Thompson said. “The paradox is that, starting in 2000, the late-night talk show completely transformed itself.”

Hosts’ monologues and jokes were constant internet fodder, and celebrities still needed to go on the talk-show circuit to promote new movies. Colbert, on “The Late Show,” found his footing with funny and unexpectedly profound interviews, but also by getting political. It was the first Trump administration, and there was no shortage of material in skewering the first reality TV star turned president.

But as the years went on, people increasingly turned to the internet for entertainment and away from linear television. Broadcast audiences declined, including for late night. Colbert would top the ratings among his peers, but the overall pie was much smaller. Meanwhile, video podcasts have boomed. This is the new late night: stars sitting for multiple celebrity-hosted podcasts during the same press tour, and on each show, having the whole episode to themselves.

I have to admit that when I want to watch celebrity interviews and the like, as when I’m going down rabbit holes on YouTube, I wind up listening to Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel and regular late-night t.v. hosts rather than podcasts. The interviews are shorter and sharper, and the hosts were simply damn tood at their jobs. And, frankly, since I spend a lot of the day reading the news (which includes mockery of politicians), that’s the last thing I want to hear to relax.  This is the kind of stuff I prefer to podcasts:

*Speaking of podcasts, readers know, I’m not a fan and hardly ever listen to them (I can read much faster than listen).  Over at the Free Press, Liel Leibovitz likens them to a faith in “The strange religion of the American podcast.” (Maybe that’s why I’ve avoided them!)

As you read these lines, the single greatest event in American history has already unfolded: Candace Owens has interviewed Hunter Biden on her podcast, in an episode that will drop on Thursday. Hookers, blow, shady deals with Ukraine—there’s no telling what we’re going to learn.

All right, so perhaps the interview isn’t exactly the single greatest event in American history—the Battle of Yorktown is a slightly better fit for the title—but many of us no longer live in America. We live in the People’s Republic of Podcastistan, where Candace is queen and every new revelation is just the greatest, the wackier the better.

In case you’re new to our fantasyland, here, in no obvious order, are a few gems shared recently by our most popular podcast hosts: Charlie Kirk was a literal time traveler who predicted his own death (Owens); Joseph Stalin was a great man whose birthday we should all be celebrating (Nick Fuentes); Israel manipulated America into fighting the war in Iran (Dave Smith); officers at the highest ranks of the military are telling their soldiers that the ultimate goal of the war in Iran is to usher in the return of Jesus Christ (Joe Rogan).

I could go on. After all, these hosts frequently sit down to bounce their outlandish theories off each other. Just this Monday, we were gifted with a three-hour conversation between Dave Smith and Nick Fuentes himself.

What ought we to make of this torrent of mind-bendingly, earth-shatteringly stupid pronouncements? Ask the medium’s many critics, and you’ll hear one of two prognostications.

The first is that the Era of the Podcast is over, done with, finished. Media malignancies metastasize rapidly these days, this argument goes, and podcasting as a medium spread so quickly and aggressively that it eventually killed its host body. Now, podcasting has become just a bunch of hotheads chatting with one another and competing to see who can come up with the most outrageous conspiracy theories—so people have simply stopped taking the medium seriously.

Not so fast, argues theory No. 2: Podcasts are still popular.

. . . . So, which of these theories is true? Is Podcastistan growing stronger, or is it collapsing in on itself?

The answer, sadly, is both.

Pay close attention, and you’ll see that your average superstar podcast host is busy building a theological universe for the social media age.

They borrowed the cadences and clout of religious fervor to deliver something new and intoxicating—a hermetically sealed universe where nothing is true and everything is permitted.

No one, alas, does it better than Owens. Her insistence that Charlie Kirk was actually, literally, and physically a time traveler was met with much derision—look at that nutjob Candace!—but it was actually extraordinarily sophisticated. People, Owens realizes, are innate believers. Tear down their churches and their synagogues, tell them the faiths of their fathers are bad and oppressive and passé, and they’ll merely look for something else to believe. In telling her listeners that Kirk was a time traveler, that he always knew he would die young, that he was “marked since he was a child,” Owens turns Kirk into that “something,” cloaking his life and death in the kind of religious language that inspires rabid devotion. Call it the law of spiritual thermodynamics: Spiritual energy never dissipates, it just searches for a different form.

Other examples of religiously tinged performances abound. Theo Von, for example, has transformed himself from a dudebro par excellence into something like a St. Augustine with a mullet, regularly engaging in teary on-air confessions about faith, shame, and trauma. And after Joe Rogan riffed on Von’s mental health on a recent episode, saying Von’s use of antidepressants “freaks” him out, Von responded, “Sad to see this kind of stuff”—compelling Rogan to apologize publicly with an earnest, lengthy mea culpa exploring friendship, loyalty, and love.

The religious element of this second interaction is evident less in the language than in the collaboration itself. That Rogan spends so much time talking about—and to—Von is no coincidence. The principals of Podcastistan love having each other on their shows not because theirs is a tiny and airless bubble, but because they realize that there’s nothing more appealing to an audience than feeling you’re being let into a small and persecuted circle of courageous truth-tellers. . . .

This is all Greek to me, as I don’t watch these things. I can’t see any reason to watch Owens save to marvel at her insanity, canny or not, and I can take only about a minute of Rogan.  Perhaps, when it comes to podcasts, I’m an atheist.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has no time for persiflage:

Sharon: I need to tell you something.
Hili: Not now, I’m thinking about serious matters.

In Polish:

Szaron: Muszę ci coś powiedzieć.
Hili: Nie teraz, myślę o poważnych sprawach.

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

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Things With Faces:

From Meow Incorporated:

From Emma, who disdains the muscular beefcakes:

No. Just no.

Big muscles wrapped in too-low body fat is uncomfortable to cuddle, and means the fella is gonna be counting not just his but your calories/macros, obsessively.

No thanks. A strong, squishy man is cool. https://t.co/Uf8cAuVJuC

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) May 20, 2026

From Captain Ella (really a Lt. Col.), the official Arabic spokesperson for the IDF (yes, she’s a Muslim).   The translation from the Arabic is below:

On the eve of the blessed Eid al-Adha, I toured the various fronts to listen to the latest field assessments, and there I met the sons of the Israeli community—Muslims, Druze, Christians, and Jews—standing shoulder to shoulder in defense of humanity and the home.

From the south of #Lebanon to the #Gaza Strip, I saw our youth in the field… the guardians of this country, and the watchful eye that never sleeps.

May this Eid bring with it goodness, security, and peace of mind for all.

Wishing you all a happy Eid

قبيل عيد الأضحى المبارك، تجولتُ في مختلف الجبهات لأستمع إلى آخر التقييمات الميدانية، وهناك التقيتُ بأبناء المجتمع الإسرائيلي، من المسلمين والدروز والمسيحيين واليهود، يقفون جنبًا إلى جنب دفاعًا عن الإنسان وعن البيت.

من جنوب #لبنان إلى قطاع #غزة، رأيتُ شبابنا في الميدان…حماة هذا… pic.twitter.com/HlQeABwvWc

— Lieutenant Colonel Ella Waweya | إيلا واوية (@CaptainElla1) May 21, 2026

From Luana. Remember that correlation is not causation, but it may be in this case:

The impact of AI in four charts pic.twitter.com/rmiRkGG9Ql

— Marc Porter Magee 🎓 (@marcportermagee) May 20, 2026

Larry the Cat follows footie. The PM’s team is clearly Arsenal, and the Prince of Wales favors Aston Villa, which won the Europa League final.

Yesterday the Prime Minister’s team won the Premier League for the first time in two decades, today the Prince of Wales’ team won a trophy for the first time in three decades; anyone know who King Charles supports? https://t.co/yvHA8FvWFO

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) May 20, 2026

One from my feed; such trust!

😺: could you please look after my babies while i go and take a nap? pic.twitter.com/oJzkEZUmSY

— Kitty Cat Empire (@KittyCatEmpire) May 21, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Italian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was six years old and would be 89 today has she lived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-22T09:30:07.241Z

Two from Dr. Cobb. Look at this M.C. Hammer bee!

Hooray, it’s happy #worldbeeday !For 10 points can anyone tell me why these bees are called Pantaloon bees 😂😂😂😂Canon R5 and Sigma 150mm SS1/2000 F8. ISO8000Natural light handheld while laying down 👌🏿#bee #bees #macro

— @macro_action (@birdzandbees.bsky.social) 2026-05-20T19:41:00.263Z

Matthew says, “This and linked post have a vid of 3 tradesmen from around Manchester in a van cooking spaghetti carbonara.”

Saving this as reference for the next time the Brits get frisky about accurate assessments of the dire state of British “food”. (1/2)

— George Pearkes (@peark.es) 2026-05-18T01:48:59.455Z

Part 2/2

— George Pearkes (@peark.es) 2026-05-18T01:48:59.456Z