Sunday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Sunday, May 24; the Sabbath that was made for gentile cats, and Asparagus Day.  And here’s the answer to everyone’s question about asparagus (and yes, I am one of the victims):

It’s also Brother’s Day (but which individual brother do they mean?), the Declaration of the Báb, the running of the Indianapolis 500, National Yucatán Shrimp Day, and National Escargot Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 24 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

**PEACE FOR OUR TIME?  The news is full of reports that the U.S. and Iran (and Israel, which appears not to have been consulted) are close to striking a peace deal. See the next post for more on this–and a poll.

*As the New York Times admit, it been besieged by criticism of Nick Kristof’s recent column on Israel’s sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners. They’ve published a response by Kristof and the op-ed editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, called “Your questions about Nick Kristof’s column on Palestinians and sexual assault.” As you might expect, the Times tries to completely exculpate itself. Here are a few responses:

Many readers asked: Given the volume of the critical response, do you stand by this column?

Kathleen Kingsbury: Yes.Nick built upon a growing body of evidence regarding the mistreatment of detainees in Israel. Numerous human rights organizations and reputable news outlets — including prominent Israeli media — have documented abuse by Israeli security forces and settlers. Previous accounts include reports of sexual violence and physical degradation.

Before publication, Nick’s reporting underwent a rigorous vetting process by Opinion’s fact-checking department to ensure that every testimony and anecdote he personally reported was supported by independent sources, as is the case with all sensitive pieces. The Times’s standards and legal teams also reviewed the column and offered feedback. After publication, we reviewed the factual challenges that readers and others raised, as is standard practice with any published piece. Editors found no errors.

Readers have said the allegations involving dogs abusing detainees is not only impossible but also a “blood libel” against Israel and its citizens.

Kristof: This passage provoked the most disgust and disbelief. A Palestinian journalist detained in 2024 told me he was held down, stripped, blindfolded and handcuffed while a dog was brought in and, with encouragement from a handler, mounted and penetrated him. Before he spoke to me, he confided his account to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, an Israeli human rights organization.

I thought carefully about whether to include this. In the end I did because he had told his account previously and because what he described has happened before. Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have cited reports of dogs sexually assaulting prisoners. The Pinochet regime in Chile used a dog to rape political prisoners. Peer-reviewed medical literature documents rectal injuries caused by canine penetration.

Readers will have their own take on the use of anonymous sources, biased sources, and sources who have changed their stories.  But the last sentence is garbage: the “medical literature documents” cited by Kristof on X were cases of bestiality, not forced rape by dogs.

You might want to read, as a (free) counterpoint, a fairly balanced column by Rabbi Steven Abraham called “This is who Nicholas Kristof is” (h/t Suzy). One excerpt:

So here is where I have arrived.

The abuse inside the Israeli prison system is real, and Israel must reckon with it, both because reckoning is a Jewish obligation and because the alternative is rot. Ben-Gvir is a disgrace to the office he holds. Netanyahu’s coalition is failing in its basic duty to govern sovereign power with discipline. A rabbi who loves Israel must say so, and must keep saying so, regardless of who else is in the room.

And: Nicholas Kristof’s column is a smear built on propaganda from an organization committed to Israel’s erasure. He chose those sources because they travel further than the credible, documented, Israeli-sourced indictment that was available to him. He has done this kind of thing before, against other targets, across decades. He will do it again. The Times will let him.

Both of those sentences are true. Neither cancels the other. The discipline of holding both, at the same time, without flinching from either, that is what Torah asks of us when we read.

This is who Nicholas Kristof is. The Times knows, and lets him be it. We are not obligated to pretend otherwise.

Mi-d’var sheker tirchak. Keep far from a false thing. Even when the false thing is dressed in the typography of the paper of record. Especially then.

*The Trump administration has just made green cards much harder to get., These cards allow immigrant to America to become permanent residents.

Most applicants for green cards will need to go abroad to apply for permanent residency at an American Consulate, rather than filing from within the U.S. as they do now, the Trump administration announced Friday.

Under the new policy, most foreigners—from tech workers to spouses of U.S. citizens—would need to prove they have “extraordinary circumstances” to apply for permanent residency within the U.S., or else risk being denied. Most would need to go abroad to apply at a U.S. Consulate, where they risk losing whatever legal status they held in the U.S. and being unable to return.

The change marks a shift in how the U.S. immigration system has functioned for decades, and will affect immigrants in the country illegally as well as foreign professionals sponsored by U.S. companies.

The new approach would particularly affect the millions of immigrants who are living in the U.S. illegally, but gain legal status either by marrying a U.S. citizen or having U.S. citizen children sponsor them once the children turn 21. If an immigrant without legal status leaves the country, they could face anywhere from a three-year to a lifetime ban on returning.

“This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes,” said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Zach Kahler in a statement. “When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows.”

People with green card applications currently pending may be able to complete the process without leaving the country if they are determined to “provide an economic benefit,” though others may be asked to go abroad to a U.S. Consulate, Kahler said.

This is fair reporting, without opinion. Just the facts. But on the NBC News on Friday, their entire “news” report on this was slanted towards saying how unfair it was, interviewing lawyers and undocumented immigrants who weighed in against the decision (which is clearly made to cut down on illegal immigration).  It was one of the most blatantly biased “news” stories that I have seen on major television news

*The NYT reports on how Netanyahu, and Israel, have been put on the sidelines during the discussion to end the war with Iran,

In the run-up to the Feb. 28 attack on Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was not only in the Situation Room with President Trump, he was leading the discussion, predicting that a joint U.S.-Israeli strike could very well lead to the demise of the Islamic Republic.

Just a few weeks later, after those sanguine assurances proved inaccurate, the picture was starkly different. Israel was so thoroughly sidelined by the Trump administration, two Israeli defense officials said, that its leaders were cut almost entirely out of the loop on truce talks between the United States and Iran.

Starved of information from their closest ally, the Israelis have been forced to pick up what they can about the back-and-forth between Washington and Tehran through their connections with leaders and diplomats in the region as well as their own surveillance from inside the Iranian regime, said the two officials. Like others for this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The banishment from the cockpit to economy class has potentially significant consequences for Israel, and especially for the prime minister, who faces an uphill re-election battle this year.

Mr. Netanyahu has long sold himself to Israeli voters as a kind of Trump whisperer, uniquely capable of enlisting and retaining the president’s support. In a televised speech early in the war, he portrayed himself as the president’s peer, assuring Israelis that he talked to Mr. Trump “almost every day,” exchanging ideas and advice, “and deciding together.”

He had led Israel to war in February with grand visions of achieving a goal he has pursued for decades: stopping Iran’s push for nuclear weapons once and for all. As the war began with a stunning decapitation of much of the government in Tehran, it seemed as though an even more grandiose dream might come true: the toppling of the regime.

But many in Mr. Trump’s inner circle had always viewed the idea of regime change as absurd. . . .

I’ll say it again: we will not stop Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons unless there is regime change.  Trump now seem satisfied with an Iranian promise that “we won’t pursue nukes for 15 years”. But he’s president for only 2.5 more years, and Iran has violated agreements repeatedly. If people don’t know how much Iran wants nuclear weapons, they must be deaf or blind. The report above jibes with the news about a proposed peace deal that will be the subject of the next post.

*I’ve stopped subscribing to Andrew Sullivan’s column since he went full-on anti-Zio and anti-Israel a while back. But I will still get his lucubrations until my yearly fee runs out,  And of course there are good and thoughtful bits among the bad.  In his piece this week, “The ‘Learned Helplessness’ of 2026,” he had some advice for Democrats and an analysis why they’re advancing a message that will help them win.

Yes, the polls are showing a real slide for Trump. But it’s still incredible that a president this corrupt, this incompetent, and this vile still commands 37 percent support. Yes, this week there were some tiny signs that the constitutional corpse is twitching: maybe paying off violent criminals in a giant, far-right slush fund is not so great, and maybe a ballroom fit for a Russian oligarch can wait — mutter some men pretending to be Senators. But don’t kid yourselves. This is a one-man cult, not a party. They’ll cave. They always do.

And when you look at the alternative that’s supposed to rescue us, the learned helplessness really kicks in.

The Democrats are still ideologically split, have a lame bench of candidates for 2028, and haven’t shifted an iota from the positions that lost them the last election. Their 2024 “autopsy” says nothing of any consequence, and dodges the Biden age issue and the Harris uselessness issue. Even now, with Trump at 37 percent, “70 percent of all registered voters said they were dissatisfied with Democrats. 64 percent said the same of Republicans.” Does it get any more damning than that?\

The next paragraph is a severe but true indictment of what the Democratic party seems to stand for, though it’s largely from the “progressive” part of the party.

And yet the current Dem mood is to do nothing but win the midterms by default — then use that as an excuse to do nothing again. Check out the cross-tabs in the NYT poll. Only 38 percent of Dems think they need to shift on transing children or having boys compete with girls in sports. They still love mass migration and will promise another massive influx in 2028 (as long as it’s “orderly”). “White” is still a term of abuse. Gay men and lesbians are still “queers”. Men are still women and women are still men. When you ask Democrats what they mean by moderation, it’s the exact same far-left policies as Biden’s, but delivered more nicely. Woke isn’t dead. It’s merely waiting.

. . . . So many normie friends of mine have just stopped engaging the news. Every day, another headline is like another electric shock we have become used to. If you actually care — about America, the Constitution, basic decency — the psychic impact is greater: you will be slowly ground down into the dust. There is no point resisting and so, eventually, no point in even paying attention. Reason and deliberation are irrelevant.

That’s why, I suspect, so many very online folks have become crazy caricatures. It’s the only way to survive mentally. It’s psychologically Sisyphean to try to retain intellectual honesty or complexity or a grip on truth in this environment. So many people have just put on a performative partisan mask, and pander. The alternative — to keep being assailed by both sides with brutality and venom most humans naturally recoil from — becomes too much to bear.

I have tried to resist the depression this Weimar culture engenders. It’s my job. I’ve tried to tell the truth about both extremes. I haven’t given up on liberal democracy. But I’d be a fool to believe I have gotten anywhere these past ten years of trying. Trump’s re-election really was an extinction-level event for our former way of life. I was right in 2016. We could have escaped after 2020. But then Biden shat the bed.

All the mountains of ink spilt on Trump’s malfeasance? Hasn’t changed a thing. All the arguments about immigration, crime, transing children, and “white supremacy”? The Democrats are where they were in 2015 and not budging. Only the about-to-die — like Barney — have a chance of saying anything honest, and among Republicans, only those headed for the exits. Obama? A sphinx with a giant ugly stump in Chicago, Netflix gigs, and trips on yachts with billionaires. The few ordinary folks who have stood up in office? Like Massie, they’re just play-putty for the mad king.

Like the rest of us for the foreseeable future.

I am not going to argue about Sullivan’s views on Israel, as there’s nothing novel about them. He just hates the place, and I’m tired of his rants. But ehe lesson in this week’s column is that the Democrats need to clean up their act and realize what the country really wants (and that includes what Democratic voters want).  Many voters have become news-weary, and I suspect that translates into a lack of motivation to go to the polls. I too am news-weary, but have to read it, and I will go to the polls.

*NASCAR driver Kyle Busch, one of the best there ever was, died suddenly last week at only 41. Up until now all we knew is that he called for a doctor while in a race, and was coughing up some blood. Earlier in may he reported a “sinus cold” and a caugh. He was taken to the hospital on May 21, where he died after a short while. Now it’s been revealed that he had “severe pneumonia that progressed into sepsis.”

Kyle Busch died after severe pneumonia progressed into sepsis, resulting in rapid and overwhelming associated complications, according to a statement released by his family.

Dakota Hunter, vice president of Kyle Busch Companies, said in a news release the family received the medical evaluation on Saturday.

Busch, a two-time NASCAR champion, died at 41 on Thursday, a day after passing out in a Chevrolet simulator.

Sepsis is considered a life-threatening medical emergency that occurs when the body has an extreme, overactive response to an infection, causing the immune system to damage its own tissues and organs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Typically the immune system releases chemicals to fight off pathogens like bacteria, viruses or fungi, but with sepsis the response goes into overdrive. The results can cause widespread inflammation, form microscopic blood clots and make blood vessels leak.

Busch was thought to have had a sinus cold while racing at Watkins Glen on May 10 and radioed in to his team saying that he needed a “shot” from a doctor after the race.

. . .Busch, who was preparing to race Sunday at the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, was testing in the Chevrolet racing simulator in Concord on Wednesday when he became unresponsive and was transported to a hospital in Charlotte, several people familiar with the situation told The Associated Press.

During the emergency call placed late that afternoon, an unidentified caller calmly told the dispatch: “I’ve got an individual that’s (got) shortness of breath, very hot, thinks he’s going to pass out, and is producing a little bit of blood, coughing up some blood.”

. . . Busch won 234 races across NASCAR’s top three series, more than any driver in history.

You can read about sepsis here. Busch and his wife had an 11-year old son (who plans to race) and a four-year-old daughter. It’s very sad.  Please get your pneumonia shotl, though they’re recommended mostly for young children and adults over 50.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej enlightens Hili:

Hili: History repeats itself.
Andrzej: Yes, but it stutters while doing it.

In Polish:

Hili: Historia się powtarza.
Ja: Tak, ale się przy tym jąka.

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

From Funny and Strange Signs:

From Meow Incorporated; a gentleman lizard.

From This Cat is Guilty:

From Masih: two more Iranian political protestors executed:

While all the mainstream media are talking whether Ahmadinejad is going to replace Khamenei, innocent people are being executed in in Iran every day.

The New York Times, spent this week doing political analysis on a regime that, as you were reading it, was dragging two Kurdish… pic.twitter.com/L08K99ckGp

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

From Luana. A mallard tells a bothersome girl, “Leave our kids alone!”

If the parents don’t raise her, nature will..🐾😅 pic.twitter.com/GywRb41U1M

— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) May 22, 2026

Cooking advice from Emma:

Why are young adults saying they can’t cook food?

The instructions are usually on the pack.

Pasta and basic tomato/veg sauce is fine. Boil an egg, FFS. Fry a chicken breast.

Learn to use salt and butter. That’s mostly why you think you can’t cook like your favourite Uber…

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) May 22, 2026

Two from my feed. For the first one, well, they didn’t know. . .

They thought the cat was stuck up there and organized a whole rescue operation for it 😀 pic.twitter.com/FU12edY0sa

— Cats That Make You Go Awww (@CuteAdorableCat) May 23, 2026

An antisemitic hotel desk clerk goes after some Jewish customers. He got fired.

His name’s Ryan Smith and he’s been fired from the hotel. Now he’s got a GoFundMe. Please report it for violating @gofundme Terms of Service.

Report to GoFundMe: https://t.co/uDIZWxWq0X

The link to his GoFundMe: https://t.co/tkARJPW8ve

Terms of Service:https://t.co/g0qxF1XabQ pic.twitter.com/qwQbhXjCJP

— Phil Maipita (@TouchMyFalafels) May 23, 2026

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was two years old, and would be 86 today had he lived. https://t.co/eTHTwndffs

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) May 24, 2026

Two from Dr. Cobb, who’s visiting his daughter in Norway. First, from the plane, and you can read about Brocken spectres here.

Rather poor photo of our plane as a brocken spectre (you can just make out the plane’s shadow in the centre of the concentric rainbows)

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-05-22T19:48:45.171Z

It looks nice!

Spring in Oslo

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-05-23T13:53:41.756Z