Monday: Hili dialogue

May 25, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Monday, May 25, 2026: it’s Memorial Day, a holiday in America. From Wikipedia:

Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for mourning the U.S. military personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. It is observed on the last Monday of May. It is also considered to be the unofficial beginning of summer.

Memorial Day is a time for visiting cemeteries and memorials to mourn the military personnel who died in the line of duty. Volunteers will place American flags on the graves of those military personnel in national cemeteries

One of those graves is at Arlington National Cemetery, where my father is buried (he was a retired Lt. Col. when he died, and had served twenty years.) Here’s a photo of the graves at Arlington, and a photo of my dad, inscribed to my mother (I think this was before they were married).

Remember, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

There’s a Google Doodle honoring the day (click icon below to see where it goes); the folded flag, which covered a coffin, is given to a deceased soldier’s wife or relatives after the funeral.

It’s also National Wine Day and National Tap Dance Day. Here’s one of my favorite tap performances: Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth dancing to the “Shorty George”. Watch the whole thing. The dance if from the 1942 film “You Were Never Lovelier“.  Info from YouTube:

You Were Never Lovelier was Rita’s third and last film released in 1942 and her second time as Fred Astaire’s dancing partner. Except for “The Shorty George” number, all their dances were rehearsed in the attic of a funeral parlor! They had to stop every time a funeral procession came through and couldn’t start up again until all the mourners had left. But if those conditions disrupted rehearsals, it didn’t show on-screen. The results were fabulous. Rita later called this movie one of her favorites, but it was also memorable to her for another reason. During rehearsals of “The Shorty George”, Rita experienced one of her “most embarrassing” moments when she fell down during the dance and knocked herself out cold! The film is set in what was one of Hollywood’s favorite locales at the time, Buenos Aires, and also features Xavier Cugat and his Orchestra to add to the Latin flavor of this memorable musical.

and from the Wikipedia entry on the movie:

A synthesis of American Swing or Jive with virtuoso tap dancing is performed by Astaire and Hayworth, both in top form and exuding a sense of fun in an arrangement by Lyle “Spud” Murphy. The title refers to a popular dance step of the time, attributed to George “Shorty” Snowden, a champion African-American dancer at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom and reputed inventor of the Lindy Hop or Jitterbug dance styles. Here, as in the “Pick Yourself Up” and “Bojangles of Harlem” numbers from Swing Time, Kern belied his claim that he couldn’t write in the Swing style.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 1 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT reports that the U.S. and Iran have agreed in principle to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran has said it will get rid of “highly enriched uranium.” But the details have yet to be nailed down.

The United States and Iran have agreed in principle to a deal that could wind down the war in the Middle East, but the final approval by leaders of both sides could take days, a senior U.S. official told reporters on Sunday.

The deal would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and commit Iran to disposing of its highly enriched uranium, but how Tehran would do so was still being negotiated, said the U.S. official, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak publicly. President Trump has insisted that the United States seize the material as part of his vow to curb Iran’s nuclear program.

Iran’s leaders and official state media have not publicly commented on what is in any potential agreement or what is being discussed. Officials from both countries have said any agreement would be an initial framework that would lead to further negotiations, rather than the last word.

News of a possible deal came after a roller-coaster few weeks, with Mr. Trump at times threatening to restart attacks on Iran, and at others saying there was progress in last-ditch negotiations to stave off a return to full-scale war — all while offering few details. Then, on Saturday, the president announced on social media that the two countries had “largely negotiated” a memorandum of understanding “pertaining to PEACE.”

On Sunday, however, he said he had ordered his negotiators “not to rush into a deal.”

If a deal were certified, Mr. Trump said in his social media post on Sunday, the United States could end its blockade of Iranian ports, which it had used to pressure Tehran to reopen the strait.

Over the last 24 hours, both American and Iranian officials have emphasized the concessions they hoped to secure.

Three Iranian officials said on Saturday that a potential deal would stipulate only that nuclear matters would be negotiated within 30 to 60 days. Like the U.S. official, they spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The possible deal does not address Iran’s supply of missiles, nor does it stipulate a moratorium on enrichment, the U.S. official said on Sunday. Those issues would be addressed in future negotiations, the official said. In previous rounds of negotiations, the United States has sought at least a 20-year commitment.

Everything is being put off, as usual.  What will happen, I think, is that Iran will retain its abilities to make a nuclear bomb, the people will remain oppressed, and Iran will keep accumulating missiles to fire at Israel and the Gulf States.  Even in nascent form it’s a bad deal.

*Readers seem to agree that whatever deal is hammered out won’t work.  As of this morning, here are the totals for the poll about Iran I posted yesterday. As you see, 90% of those responding don’t think the war will wind down completely within two months. I voted “no” as well.

*As the peace process in Gaza has stalled, and the country refuses to disarm, Israel has expanded the proportion of the territory that it controls, from 53% to 59%.

Israel’s military has deepened its hold on the Gaza Strip, significantly expanding the territory it controls under the seven-month cease-fire and fortifying the line that separates it from areas controlled by Hamas.

Israel now holds around 59% of the enclave, up from 53% at the start of the U.S.-brokered cease-fire in October, people familiar with the matter said. The increase came as Israeli troops moved the so-called yellow line, which marks the division of territory, deeper into Hamas’s zone of control, the people said. In at least one spot, Israel moved the line forward a few hundred yards to intersect with Salah al-Din Road, Gaza’s main north-south artery.

In addition, in central Gaza, the Israeli military has been fortifying the line with a deep trench and high sand berms along its length, satellite images show. Similar earthworks can be seen in areas of northern and southern Gaza, but the fortifications through the center, where much of the population lives, are longer, more continuous and designed to be harder to breach since the area is more vulnerable to attack, Israel’s military says.

Satellite images show the line is now dotted with at least seven new outposts, each protected by sand berms. Some are paved with asphalt and host more than a dozen buildings. They beef up Israel’s position on the line and add to dozens of outposts scattered throughout its side of the enclave.

The fortifications show how the division of Gaza is hardening amid a logjam in President Trump’s peace process, as Hamas resists pressure to disarm its fighters and Israel continues to attack them. The situation means extended limbo for Palestinians who are still living among the ruins, and has created a no-man’s-land inside the enclave, a territory that Israel has long denied it wants to occupy permanently.

. . .As long as Hamas remains in control of part of Gaza, Israel insists it won’t withdraw its troops, and many Arab governments say they won’t fund reconstruction of the enclave. The U.S.-led Board of Peace is pushing to get on with the task of reconstruction, including erecting new housing developments on the Israeli side of the line for Palestinians—a step some Arab governments as well as Hamas are resisting, according to Nickolay Mladenov, the diplomat leading the Trump-brokered effort to end the conflict.

“The more we stabilize the status quo, the more that status quo becomes difficult to remove,” Mladenov said in mid-May, warning of a situation in which Gaza becomes permanently split in two.

Asked about the movement of the yellow line, Israel’s military said it was operating on orders from the country’s political leadership. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Gaza Peace Plan of Trump et al, which is an unholy mess, decreed that the strip should be disarmed in Phase 2 (beginning last January) and Hamas should give up power as well as its weapons. But you know it won’t do that: its latest excuses are that it won’t do that until a) there are two states in place and b) Israel withdraws from Gaza.  The a) bit simply ain’t gonna happen, and the b) bit won’t happen until Hamas disarms.  I’m pretty sure that if it did disarm, Israel would withdraw—after all, Hamas is tying up IDF troops needed elsewhere.  So, the conclusion is that the line will stay, though I don’t see why Israel shouldn’t say why they moved it further south.  But the Trump Peace Plan is prety much DOA.

*Jonathan Kay has been reporting on the apparently fictitious burials of indigenous children at the First Nations Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia. As you may know, it was pretty much the Scandal of the Year in Canada (over several years), carrying the implication that indigenous children had either died or been killed secretly, and were buried on the grounds of the school. But so far they haven’t found any graves, nor are they looking for them. Kay reports in Quillette that “Canada’s newspaper of record asks: ‘What if they ultimately find nothing?’”  The answer is pretty much, it wouldn’t matter. 

A month ago, I offered some predictions about how Canadian journalists would cover the five-year anniversary of the country’s infamous “unmarked graves” social panic, which began on May 27, 2021. On one hand, this kind of important landmark would be difficult for news outlets to ignore. (After all, this was considered the Canadian “Story of the Year” at the time.) On the other hand, any intellectually honest retrospective that these outlets produced would require at least some passing explanation as to why the entire Canadian media establishment had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a story that turned out to be fake—something that most journalists have so far proven unwilling to do.

On Wednesday, it will have been exactly five years since the Kamloops First Nation in British Columbia claimed it has found 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of the community’s former residential school. In the weeks that followed, gullible reporters transformed the narrative into a kind of horror-movie script, complete with mass murdering priests and midnight burials.

It all turned out to be complete nonsense. In five years, not a single actual grave has been found.

The only evidence that had been offered in support of the original claims consisted of a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the former residential school grounds. As reporters (belatedly) learned, GPR technology merely detects sub-surface soil dislocations—not actual graves. These dislocations canbe associated with graves, but also with pipes, rocks, tree roots, and a dozen other common subsurface artifacts. To truly identify actual graves, one must dig—something that the Kamloops First Nation leaders who originally advanced these false claims have conspicuously failed to do; despite having received more than $12-million from Canada’s (equally gullible) government for search activities.

In polite Canadian society, it is still considered ideologically outré to admit frankly that none of these supposed “unmarked graves” have been found, or even to suggest that evidence was ever necessary to prove their existence in the first place. From the start of the social panic, these (unidentified) children were cast as sacred martyrs, and their grim fate was attested to by (equally sacred) Indigenous elders who’d claimed to have experienced some kind of mystical “knowing.” The whole movement quickly became an ersatz religious movement for Canada’s upper middle-class lawn-sign set.

. . . In that aforementioned April 21 column, I tried to imagine how Canadian media outlets would square this circle. And this is what I came up with:

We’ll get a lot of studiously vague interview pieces, illustrated with photographic portraits of [Kamloops First Nation chief Rosanne Casimir] or other Indigenous figures staring morosely into the middle distance. These pieces will feature an early passing reference to the original unmarked-graves announcement from Kamloops—that moment of moral ‘reckoning,’ according to the usual stock phrase—but then segue hurriedly to emotional laments about the ‘unfinished work’ of reconciliation. This will be followed by carefully worded references to the ‘doubts’ that some Canadians have about the existence of unmarked graves, and then a substantial section about the scourge of ‘denialism.’

Yesterday, the Globe & Mail—sometimes referred to as Canada’s “newspaper of record”—published its big fifth-anniversary spread, giving me an opportunity to put my predictions to the test. And it turned out that I got things mostly right. Indeed, the words “doubt” and “denialism” are right there in the Globe & Mail’s sub-headline (“Five years after a grim announcement in B.C., uncertainty gives rise to doubt and denialism.”) National “reckoning” gets a shoutout, too. And the Globe & Mail photo pool supplied readers with the obligatory image of a Kamloops First Nations “knowledge keeper” staring resolutely out into space.

. . . But the article also served up a few surprises, which are worth exploring in some detail. The “unmarked graves” farce is arguably the greatest journalistic scandal in Canada’s history. Over the last half-decade, several outlets have (grudgingly, in most cases) admitted that they got the original story wrong—including the National Post, New York Times,and, more surprisingly, the CBC. But many others, including the Globe, had never (to my knowledge) explicitly done so—whether out of embarrassment, fear of being labelled an enemy of Indigenous “reconciliation,” or, more likely, some combination of both. The new Globe article offers clues as to whether the newspaper(and similarly herd-minded legacy media outlets) will ever fully pivot to a genuinely truth-based approach to the subject.

And here’s the “it doesn’t matter” bit:

In paragraph eight, the writers try a second motte-and-bailey gambit. We are informed that “regardless of what they find [in Kamloops], the fact remains that more than 3,500 children are named on the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation‘s registry of students who died as a result of the residential school system, which operated in Canada for more than 160 years.” This is absolutely true. But it’s also completely irrelevant. No one disputes the information published by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, which, unlike the Kamloops hysteria, was based on careful research. In that case, researchers had names, dates of birth, and other identifying details for the victims. None of that exists in the case of the Kamloops story.

The Globe’s implicit argument here is that it doesn’t really matter all that much if those 215 children actually existed or not, since we have the names of 3,500 other children that can be trotted out for the same purpose—so, at worse, we’re still batting 94% on dead-child statistics.

And so they probably won’t dig up the “graves”, which probably are artifacts and not dead bodies. It is to Canada’s (and its media’s) eternal shame that this has become a sacred story that cannot be contradicted, especially by evidence. The default answer is, as Kay notes, that it doesn’t matter because the story still instantiates the fact that First Nations people were discriminated against, though they are not sacred.  And the discrimination was true, but you can’t simply accept stories that are right there waiting to be either falsified or verified.

This reminds me of Wilfred Reilly’s book Hate Crime Hoaxes, in which he shows that a number of, say, black “hate crimes” on campuses and elsewhere (e.g., the placing of nooses, graffiti using the “n-word”) were actually perpetrated by members of the group supposedly attacked. Why would a black person write anti-black graffiti? Well, to get personal attention (while remaining anonymous, of course), but also to keep alive the idea of their group being persecuted.  And most places, especially campuses, buy into this, for when a hate crime is revealed aas a hoax, the college rarely reveals that, or says, like Canada, that it doesn’t really matter because bigotry remains a problem.  This is no way to seek the truth.

*Some people grouse when a black actor takes on a “white” role, as is going to happen in a new movie of “The Odyssey”, but it seems verboten to have a white actor play a “black” role, like Barack Obama or Martin Luther King.  Well, I can see why the latter holds, since the significance of both Obama and King rested on their connection with being black, but in his latest column, John McWhorter gives three good reasons supporting this asymmetry—at least for the time being.

The director Christopher Nolan has confirmed that in his film of “The Odyssey,” Helen of Troy — the mythical figure who launched a thousand ships — will be played by the dark-skinned actress of African parentage Lupita Nyong’o.

Some people have implied this is a denial of history, a performative woke gesture. Would we tolerate white actors playing Black historical figures, they ask? “Casting a Black woman to play a White woman in a foundational work of European literature is no more right than casting a White man to play Shaka Zulu!” Elon Musk objected. The “End Wokeness” X account has pitched in to the outrage with a tableau of hypothetical movie posters of films with white actors playing various Blacks in Wax, such as Anthony Hopkins cast as Nelson Mandela.

. . .The people who think it’s wrong to cast Nyong’o because Brad Pitt shouldn’t be Shaka Zulu pretend there is no diachrony involved in how we judge such things. Never mind that Helen of Troy was a mythical character. There are perfectly good reasons white actors should not be playing Black characters in our moment.

For one, Black actors don’t have as many opportunities as white actors. They should at least be the default choice for playing characters of their own race. It is true that opportunities for Black actors are opening up: a Black military commander in “Game of Thrones,” a Black Little Mermaid, and Black characters in the Regency romance series “Bridgerton.” However, it has only been this way for about 10 minutes, and Black actors still work under limitations. No one would say that a Black young actor, regardless of hotness or talent, could most likely have the opportunities that Timothée Chalamet or Sydney Sweeney has.

The critics also ignore power relations. If Mark Wahlberg played Muhammad Ali, as End Wokeness’s mock-up has it, Wahlberg would be taking a role from actors in a not so powerful group. If Michael B. Jordan played John F. Kennedy, it would be punching up.

Plus, white actors playing Black figures in “blaccents” of various degrees would verge on minstrelsy. It’s one thing that Black British or African actors such as Idris Elba and Thandiwe Newton do American blaccents in roles (and uncannily well). But Reese Witherspoon or Steve Carell? Um — no.

. .  In some future time we should have no problem with a talented white man playing the lead in “A Raisin in the Sun,” a white woman cast as Representative Barbara Jordan, or white people singing in “Porgy and Bess.” I didn’t say tomorrow — but sometime.

These three answers convince me that McWhorter is right, but I can see that all the points are arguable. Yes, there are fewer black actors, but should you go for race over talent in an affirmative-action move to create equity? The “power” reason is to me the least convincing. It’s a postmodern variant of a), and “punching up/down” arguments never convince me (they’re used in sciencc, for example, to try to get powerful professors to avoid criticizing assistant professors, but nobody’s beyond criticism). I’m not sure that white actors playing blacks have to assume a black accent or argot, so the minstrel argument isn’t too strong, either. But taken together, all three seem okay to me, though there are probably some black people who could be played by whites right now, like Matthew Henson, a black man who explored the Arctic with Robert Peary.  Insofar as his blackness wasn’t instrumental in his accomplishments, would it be so bad if he were played by a white, Hispanic, or Asian?  But yes, there are some black people now who could be played credibly only by black actors.

For a much longer discussion of this issue, which in the end agrees with McWhorter (but at daunting length), read Cathy Young’s “Homeric Heresies” at Quillette.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is overworked, as usual (he’s just written a book):

Hili: You said you were taking a break.
Andrzej: Yeah, except I forgot how to actually do that.

In Polish:

Hili: Powiedziałeś, że robisz sobie urlop.
Ja: Tak, ale zapomniałem  jak się to robi.

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

From Meow Incorporated:

From Things With Faces; a happy cup:

From Give Me a Sign:

From Masih, who’s obviously angered at Trump trying to forge a peace with Iran and not giving a fig about the freedom of the Iranian people:

From Luana. Here’s Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico saying about anything he can that will hurt his candidacy. God is nonbinary, there are six sexes, etc. Is this “progressive”? (Talarico won the Democratic primary and will face the former governor of Texas for an open Senate seat). It reminds me of the ad that took the wind out of Kamala Harris’s sails:

The Number Ten cat in a Trumpophobic mode (which is always):

Reposted by Emma Hilton. She does look undernourished; I see no muscles:

One from my feed. Remember this one? The best video ever. But I don’t know what happened to the cat.

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, Bob Dylan at 20:

Bob Dylan — Ted Russell, 1961.

— Nothings Monstered (@nothingsmonstrd.bsky.social) 2024-12-17T19:42:30.126Z

Can you spot the ski jump? This is clearly from Norway, and Matthew can tell us:

Spot the ski jump!

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-05-24T13:53:59.449Z

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