Thursday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Thursday, June 11, 2026, and it’s National German Chocolate Cake Day. From Wikipedia:

German chocolate cake, originally German’s chocolate cake, is a layered chocolate cake filled and topped with a coconut-pecan frosting. Originating in the United States, it was named after English-American chocolate maker Samuel German, who developed a formulation of dark baking chocolate that came to be used in the cake recipe. Sweet baking chocolate is traditionally used for the flavor of the cake, but few recipes call for it today. The filling or topping is a custard made with egg yolks and evaporated milk; once the custard is cooked, coconut and pecans are stirred in.

The earliest known published recipe for this cake appeared in 1956, in the Dallas newspaper The Irving News Record, where it was listed as “Summer German Chocolate Cake”. It was submitted by Daisy Pearce, who obtained the recipe from her daughter, Francis Beth (Montgomery) Tomlinson.  It used the “German’s Sweet Chocolate” baking chocolate introduced over a century earlier in 1853 by American baker Samuel German for the Baker’s Chocolate Company of Boston, Massachusetts

Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a slice for breakfast with coffee? Here’s a photo from Wikipedia:

It’s also Corn on the Cob Day, Cousteau Day (Jacques was born on this day in 1910), King Kamehameha Day (a public holiday in Hawaii, so I’m wearing an aloh shirt), and Pizza Margherita Day (it has tomato sauce, basil, mozarella, and olive oil: the colors of the Italian flag).

For King Kamehameha Day; notice the Hawaiian theme, with the official Hawaiian flag in the middle:

We had a terrible storm last night, with, they say, winds up to 80 mph. But it was over soon, and I encountered only one fallen tree on the way to work. Here’s another:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 11 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

War news: We struck Iran again.

The U.S. began a fresh wave of attacks on Iran on Wednesday, launching strikes against several targets on President Trump’s orders, the American military said.

The attack came hours after Trump said Iran was “playing us for suckers” because it hadn’t accepted U.S. terms for a nuclear deal. The Pentagon cast the attacks as an act of coercive diplomacy designed to force Iranian concessions at the negotiating table.

“If we need to negotiate with bombs, we’ll negotiate with bombs. And we’re very good at it. Nobody better in the world,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday afternoon as he visited the Tampa, Fla., headquarters of U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East.

*But Trump is making confusing statements about the U.S. and the war with Iran again. I’ll be brief:

Just a day ago, President Trump said that a peace deal with Iran was imminent. Hours later, the United States and Iran launched new attacks on each other. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said Iran was taking “too long to negotiate” peace, and later said, “We’re going to hit them hard again today.”

As Mr. Trump alternates between promising peace and threatening to return to full-scale war, neither is happening. Instead, the situation is as bewildering as ever, the two sides seeming to agree on nothing, prolonging the turmoil in the Middle East and leaving it unclear how or when the war will end.

Since a cease-fire was declared two months ago, fire has slowed but not ceased. U.S. and Iranian forces have traded occasional attacks and issued almost daily contradictory claims about blame, the fighting and peace talks.

Mr. Trump had made things no clearer, often contradicting himself about whether a peace deal is at hand, whether large-scale fighting will resume, whether the Iranians are eager to settle, and whether the Strait of Hormuz has been reopened, among other things.

*Amit Segal, in a piece at It’s Noon in Israel called “Capitulation for thee but not for me,” explains why Iran shot down the U.S. helicopter, and gives other details of the latest U.S. attack on Iran.

Donald Trump gave Iran an inch, and they took a mile.

Mere hours after a ceasefire halted the exchange of fire between Iran and Israel, a U.S. helicopter patrolling the coast of Oman was shot down by Iranian forces. Once the intelligence confirmed Iranian guilt, Trump abruptly shifted gears, declaring a U.S. retaliation an absolute “necessity.” It was quite the sudden epiphany. After spending Monday morning demanding Israel turn the other cheek, it took just twelve hours for him to discover that sovereign nations don’t survive by capitulation.

The U.S. carried out a series of strikes on air defense systems, ground control stations, and radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz. In response, the IRGC claimed to have launched strikes on 21 targets at U.S. bases in the region, including sites in Bahrain and Jordan, while Kuwait’s army reported intercepting a separate attack.

But why did Iran target the helicopter in the first place? The answer lies in how Tehran operates on both a strategic and tactical level.

Strategically, the regime clearly has no issue with using military aggression despite the supposed “ceasefire.” Recent statements from senior officials and regime-affiliated media reveal that Tehran believes it is still actively at war. They view military action as a necessary lever to improve their negotiating position and advance broader objectives. Even the supposedly “moderate” Iranian Parliament Speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, bluntly stated that military force and diplomacy are complementary tools—where violence creates favorable conditions on the ground so that diplomats can extract “legal, political and economic achievements” at the table.

Tactically, this strategy manifested directly in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. Navy relies on helicopters to intercept Iranian drones and fast-attack craft, opening the possibility of free passage through the vital waterway. By downing a U.S. gunship, Tehran is attempting to deter the U.S. from protecting commercial vessels and forcing the international community to comply with Iran’s maritime protection racket.

The retaliatory American strikes sparked a fierce internal debate in the regime. Behind closed doors, Iranian leadership seriously considered taking out their anger over the U.S. bombardment by launching a strike against Israel.

The IRGC pushed hard for retaliation, but the political echelon balked. The politicians understood that redirecting their fire at Israel could invite an immediate Israeli counterstrike—one they feared wouldn’t stop at air defenses and petrochemical facilities but place their core energy infrastructure in its sights. For the time being, the political echelon’s caution has prevailed, validating the age-old rule of deterrence that Trump only relearned on Monday night: tit for tat.

Iran really has discovered the value of the Strait of Hormuz, and now they’re playing that card as often as they can.  Surely Trump will insist as part of any cease-fire deal that free passage be allowed for everyone. It would, it seems, require the U.S. to make a lot of concessions to Iran before that country opens up the Strait again.  And remember, nobody has attacked Iran’s oil transport facilities on Kharg Island yet. The U.S. could threaten to do that, for though Kharg flows 90% of Iran’s oil.

*Over at the Free Press, the sensible Haviv Rettig Gur asks “When will the war with Iran end?” (subtitle: “The Iranian regime’s ideology compels it to keep fighting. No deal, no ceasefire, and no American administration changes that.”)

Negotiations between Washington and Tehran are under severe strain, and everyone wants to know: What does Trump actually want?

The honest answer is that it’s hard to tell—and that’s probably by design. Trump has repeatedly feinted toward peace before launching air strikes, and been loudest about escalation precisely when he was about to pull back. For a leader facing an adversary across a negotiating table, unpredictability is a genuine strategic asset. You don’t want your enemy to know where your lines are, when you’ll fold, or how far you’ll go. In that sense, the ambiguity is the point.

But there are signals worth reading. Vice President J.D. Vance and others around Trump are uncomfortable with the conflict—looking for ways to create distance from it, and in some cases, to assign blame for it to Israel. A New York Times story about alleged Israeli espionage on America, sourced to unnamed Pentagon officials, fits that pattern. A meaningful faction in Washington regards the war as a political liability and wants to find an exit.

. . .Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, is heading into a close election. A very public rupture with Trump—the kind that costs Netanyahu domestically—is the last thing he needs. But it’s not hard to imagine Trump wanting exactly that—a manufactured rupture to placate part of his base. The Lebanon ceasefire Trump imposed on Israel, after all, actually ceases fire only in Beirut, not in the Hezbollah strongholds of the south. Trump gets the distance he needs, and Netanyahu gets cover for the continued dismantling of Hezbollah infrastructures and capabilities. It’s the kind of transaction that wily politicians make, and these two are nothing if not that.

But now that Trump appears to have bluntly ordered Israel to stand down from a major military response to Iran’s latest missile attack, we must ask: How serious is the rupture? Will it be short and limited, or are we on the cusp of a fundamental strategic divergence?

The truth is nobody outside Trump’s inner circle knows whether he is genuinely pivoting away from Israel or just needs to appear that way.

This is a good article, and there’s a lot more to read if you can access it, but here’s Haviv’s conclusion: it’s gonna be a long, tough fight, but he thinks that in the end Iran will be the loser, perhaps with the government even overthrown by the people.

. . . . None of this resolves quickly. If the analogy to the Nasser years holds, we are somewhere in the middle of a confrontation that has already lasted 20 years and may last 20 more. The blows to Iran are accumulating—its nuclear program set back significantly, proxy infrastructure degraded, and direct military capabilities exposed—but the regime’s ideological structure makes it incapable of drawing the conclusions from those blows that a secular or democratic state actor would draw.

What changes the equation, if anything does, is not a deal, not a ceasefire, not an American administration cycling through. It will be the regime’s internal exhaustion and the Iranian people’s eventual ability to force a reckoning with what has been done to their country. That’s a long game, measured in decades, not news cycles.

In the meantime, the battles will continue. Each one looks, from the outside, like a sudden crisis. Each one, from the inside—in Tehran, in Jerusalem, in Beirut—is just the next round of the same long war.

*The distasteful Graham “Totenkopf” Platner, a Democratic  Senate candidate whose faults are being massively excused by Democrats (does he bring us “joy”?), won the Democratic primary for one seat in Maine.

Graham Platner, the progressive oyster farmer who toppled Maine’s political establishment even as a series of unsettling revelations about his past rattled his party, won the Democratic nomination for Senate on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. Platner’s victory, long expected after Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign in April, puts him in a general-election contest against Senator Susan Collins, a five-term Republican with a history of frustrating Democratic attempts to oust her.

In a victory speech that took aim at Ms. Collins, Mr. Platner declared that his political movement would “take back our power” in November and subsequently enact a raft of progressive legislation, including codifying abortion rights and passing a single-payer health care system known as Medicare for all.

Mr. Platner dismissed the news reports about his past as immaterial to the coming general election.

“In trying to so hard to understand me, they failed to understand that this is not about me at all,” he said. “This is a movement about us, about the far too many working far too hard and struggling far too much.”

The Collins-Platner contest is expected to be one of the most expensive, hardest-fought Senate races in the country, and the stakes could hardly be higher. Maine is the only state with a Republican-held Senate seat on the ballot this year where President Trump lost in 2024. Democrats must flip at least four Republican-held Senate seats in November to win a majority in the chamber.

As I said several times, I am glad I don’t have to vote on this one. And several readers have pointed out that while Collins talks a good game, in the end she usually votes with the other Republican Senators.  Although I am not sure how much advantage flipping the Senate will give to Democrats (Trump can still veto anything), I suppose I’d hold my nose and vote for Platner were I a Mainer.  But really, is this the best the Democrats can do? Just because someone has a blue-collar background will not guarantee that he’ll be a good Senator.

*There have been several responses to Sam Harris’s piece about why he won’t debate critics of Israel (see here); among them are the expected critical piece by the Jewish Israel hater Peter Beinart, who writes for the NYT, but puts on his Substack “A reply to Sam Harris“, and a reply to Beinart by the Elder of Ziyon, “Sam Harris asked a question. Peter Beinart spent 3,000 words to avoid answering it”  (h/t Danny.) And finally there’s the “The moral clarity of Sam Harris” by Frederick Alexander at The Gadfly (h/t Loretta). I’ll give a couple paragraphs to each.

Beinart, whom I’ve always disliked. This is the transcript from a video:

The first thing he claims is that you should understand the conflict in Israel-Palestine as a struggle between a free society, Israel, and jihadism. So, let’s take the first part of that equation: the idea that Israel is a free society. Sam Harris offers no evidence for this. He doesn’t quote any human rights organizations, he doesn’t quote any laws, anything, he just asserts it, ex cathedra: Israel is a free society.

Okay, well, imagine you’re reading that, you’re sitting there in the West Bank. The West Bank has been under Israeli control since 1967. You’re a Palestinian. You’ve lived your entire life without citizenship in the state in which you live. A government that has life and death control over you does not give you the right to vote. You live under military law, with a 99% prosecution rate, even though your Jewish neighbors enjoy full due process as Israeli citizens. You need military permission to travel, even though they can travel freely, and you’re also subject to something called Military Order 101, which says that you need military permission if you want to congregate with 10 or more people for a political purpose, even in a private home. Even in a private home, you can’t congregate for a political purpose with 10 or more people without military permission. This is what Sam Harris says, without any evidence, he describes as a free society. I suspect for that West Bank Palestinian, it doesn’t feel all that free.

The second part is the idea that you can understand Palestinians and Palestinian politics in the Israel-Palestinian conflict through the prism of jihadism. This is what Sam Harris writes. ‘The problem in the Middle East’—actually not just Israel-Palestine, the entire Middle East—’is not, and never has been the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam, or whatever words you want to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.’

So, for Sam Harris, Muslims and Palestinians are synonymous, and the problem is that too many of those Muslims are jihadis. There’s no evidence that Sam Harris has ever heard of a guy named George Habash, for instance. George Habash, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the most radical Palestinian organizations in the 1970s. It was responsible for some of the most spectacular and terrible acts of violence, of armed resistance, including against civilians.

. . . And this idea that Sam Harris has, that it was antisemitic to start calling for a ceasefire, and criticizing Israel’s attack, assault on Gaza on October 8th, October 9th, right, evidently forgets the fact that we had a pretty good idea, as early as October 8th and 9th, that Israel’s response in Gaza was going to be absolutely horrifying, right? I don’t know, again, if Sam Harris is familiar with this quote from Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, where he says, there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly, right? This is one of the things cited by the International Criminal Court in indicting Yoav Galant.

Beinart uses one quote, made in a hot moment, to say that we knew how Israel would respond to Hamas’s attack. Of course Sam knows that quote, but it was useless for prediction. I blame the damage in Gaza to Hamas’s tactics.

The Elder of Ziyon (read for free):

Recently, Sam Harris wrote an essay, “Why I won’t Debate Critics of Israel,” which has been widely cited and quoted. It boils down to one question: What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted? If Hamas had that power, it would carry out a genuine genocide, a project it has announced repeatedly and acted on when it could. If Israel had it, the war would already be over. Harris said the histories are irreconcilable and that no amount of relitigating 1948 will change what the two populations want and are willing to die for today, so the only honest test is the one applied to the present.

Peter Beinart’s reply runs almost three thousand words and never answers the main question. That omission is the whole story.

Beinart is a careful writer who knows exactly what Harris asked, and he declines to engage it because the answer cuts against him: Palestinians want the Jewish state destroyed, full stop. This applies to Muslims and Christians, religious and secular. Every poll shows that Palestinians overwhelmingly support specific terror attacks against Jews. Beinart cannot answer Harris’ question because he knows Harris is right.

Instead, Beinart reopens every historical and legal sub-debate Harris specifically set aside, then frames Harris’s refusal to be dragged backward as intellectual cowardice. Harris declined to argue the past because the present is dispositive. Beinart spends three thousand words proving him right by refusing to discuss the present at all.

And from Alexander’s piece (with a bonus video):

Long before progressive ideology had trained polite society to treat moral clarity as indecent, Harris understood that liberalism cannot survive without the ability to criticise dogma. The left had been explaining away extremism since Salman Rushdie went into hiding for writing a novel, but 9/11 ushered in a remarkable new settlement on the part of the cultural and political establishment. Islam, we were told, was somehow deserving of special exemptions from scrutiny. We learned that criticism of Islam as a set of ideas was equivalent to hatred of Muslims.

To see that moral confusion play out, we can turn to a fascinating cultural artefact: the exchange between Ben Affleck and Harris on Real Time with Bill Maher.

Note that Nicholas Kristof makes a few points to add to the moral confusion. He will defend the ideas of Islam down to the wire:

Affleck, standing in for polite society everywhere, simply cannot compute the moral logic Harris is offering. All he’s got is indignation. All he hears is bigotry because he’s soaked up the relentless messaging that honest discussion of political Islam is somehow a form of racism, even though Islam is obviously not a race but a set of ideas. “It’s gross, it’s racist”, says Affleck, echoing a sentiment an entire class has marinated in for a quarter of a century. Affleck isn’t stupid, by the way, nor do I think he’s dishonest. He’s just confused somewhere between becoming Batman and performing the duties of a conscientious Hollywood liberal. Like so many well-intentioned and busy people, he’s absorbed something from the surrounding noise, the way some people pick up an accent. The real dishonesty belongs to the people who feed it to him – the ones who know it’s a category error and reach for it anyway, because admitting it would lose them the argument. Such has been the political culture of our time, with truth a secondary consideration to the demands of the tribe.

. . .Which brings me finally to Israel and why I’m writing this piece today. In a recent essay, Harris wrote about an issue that has convulsed the culture in a way that has brought together every terrible idea of the modern era: moral relativism, anti-Western masochism, Jew-hatred, TikTok geopolitics, luxury-belief activism, and endless victimism.

Against this noise, Harris presents a simple test. What would each side in the Israel-Palestine conflict do with absolute power? If Israel laid down its weapons, what would happen to the Jews? If Hamas and its supporters laid down their arms, what would happen to the Palestinians?

It’s a clarifying question, which is exactly why it attracts a particular kind of clever objection. [Alexander quotes Andrew Sullivan’s critique.]

. . .The fact is, we know exactly what Hamas and its enablers would do because they’ve been telling us since their founding charter of 1988. Israel, on the other hand, contains within it the possibility of coexistence because it has already subscribed to the liberal project. The population of Israel is roughly 18% Muslim (in Britain, it’s roughly 6.5%), and some of those occupy civic positions; some are even judges. It’s not perfect, but it’s held to a standard demanded of no other country, a point completely lost on the critics who hold it there.

The evils of October 7 were so painfully, desperately obvious to me that I just assumed all rational, decent people would readily accept what happened, would look at the footage Hamas gleefully produced for us, and show immediate and unwavering concern for the people of Israel. When those things didn’t happen, or came with terms and conditions, I couldn’t quite believe it. And yet of course this is exactly how it would turn out.

. . . In the end, this is why Sam Harris matters. He’s maddening at times and occasionally gets stuck on repeat. But he’s not a performer. He’s the antithesis of those commentators for whom the issues of our day are just raw material for the attention economy – the Tucker Carlsons and Hasan Pikers of the new media landscape – rather than questions of genuine moral seriousness. He never surrenders to his audience, and anyone who’s been listening to him these last two decades, as I have, knows he would adjust his position the moment the evidence pointed him in a different direction. He has that rarest of traits in public life, the one no price can be put on: a commitment to intellectual honesty.

Amen. You can be intellectually honest, or you can be an apologist for bad ideas held by Muslims, as are Kristof and Affleck in the classic exchange above.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili doesn’t want Szaron drinking from the upstairs dog’s bowl. When I asked Andrzej why, he responded, “I don’t know. Hili is drinking from this bowl. But she chased Szaron away fom it.”  Cats! 

Andrzej: What are you doing?
Hili: Making sure Szaron isn’t drinking water from the dog’s bowl.

In Polish:

Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Pilnuję, żeby Szaron nie pił wody z psiej miski

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

From CinEmma:

From Terrible Maps:

From Meow Incorporated:

From Richard Dawkins. I think he’s confusing “terror” with “ideologically-based terrorism“, though:

https://t.co/j58CYkil13
Man attempts to behead another man in the street.

“No evidence of terror at this stage, say police”

If that isn’t terror, what is? How much more terrifying does it need to be to qualify as terror?

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 9, 2026

From Emma on class:

Twenty years ago, I went to dinner in a “smart” restaurant with a woman who wore faded jeans, trainers, a Fido Dido T-shirt covered in dog hair and diamond earrings.

She cut her food up then fork switched 😮

She didn’t need to signal class or wealth. It oozed off her… https://t.co/Hm5ZiSjFWy

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) June 7, 2026

From Bryan, who didn’t get this and had to look it up. I got it, but it’s because I’d seen a similar one before (not with humans, though):

Took me a while 🤣 pic.twitter.com/8W8LAm0hDc

— Dad Jokes (@Dadsaysjokes) June 9, 2026

The Number Ten Cat has a trenchant comment on the World Cup:

Note to America: The World is a necessary component of a World Cup https://t.co/WXbSWOwuDX

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) June 9, 2026

I’m sure I posted this before but it’s so good I had to post it again:

This woman was recording a vocal performance when her cat interrupted, stepped in front of the camera, and started singing in the exact same tone like, ‘Don’t forget who’s the real star here.’ pic.twitter.com/GFoRavsOtD

— Puspa (@mutyapuspa) June 9, 2026

360° vision!

The chameleon’s eyes provide 360-degree vision due to their unique anatomy and the ability to switch between monocular and binocular vision pic.twitter.com/tgdjhfZvEg

— Nature Unedited (@NatureUnedited) June 10, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

x

And one from Dr. Cobb, who’s on hols. He took this one in Paris:

Fawn taking a selfie

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T12:55:39.652Z