Thursday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Thursday, July 23, 2026 and National Refreshment Day.  Honoring that, I give you below the best beer I ever had, procured by a friend in Amsterdam—with difficulty (see below). It’s a Belgian beer made by actual monks in an actual monastery (Westvleteren), and you have to go there in person to get your pre-reserved and limited supply.  Wikipedia says this about the brewery and the beer:

As with other Trappist breweries, beer is brewed and sold to financially support the monastery and other philanthropic causes. Whilst the brewery is a business by definition (its purpose is to make money), it does not exist for pure profit motives and they do not advertise. The monks have repeatedly stated enough beer is brewed to run the monastery, and production volumes will not be increased to meet market demand. During World War II, the brewery stopped supplying wholesalers, and since then they only sell to individual buyers at the brewery and visitors’ centre cafe. On the opening of the new brewery, the Father Abbott said “We are not brewers. We are monks. We brew beer to be able to afford being monks.”

There is no label; the cap tells you what it is:

I drank the beer in 2019, and oy, was it good! Thick, chewy, and somewhat sweet, as all these beers are. It is not a swilling beer, but a beer to enjoy at leisure with good conversation. It is more like a meal than a drink. From Wikipedia:

• Westvleteren 12 (yellow cap) (formerly Abt), a quadrupel, 10.2% ABV, introduced in 1940.  , , , , In June 2005, when Westvleteren 12 was ranked as “Best Beer in the World” on Ratebeer.com,  news organizations followed this up and articles appeared in the international press, highlighting the beer ranking and the unusual business policies. In 2014 it was again rated best beer in the world by Ratebeer.com for the fourth year in a row

• Buyers were originally limited to ten 24-bottle crates of the beer per car, but as the beer increased in popularity, this was first reduced to five, then to three and now to two or one crates. For the Westvleteren 12 in 2009, it was limited to one case. When making an order now, the type and quantity of beer available for sale are revealed. Sales are limited to one order every 30 days per person per license plate and phone number. The beer must be reserved online through the abbey’s website, with registration weeks before the planned pick up date. The online system has replaced the “beerphone” in 2019. The monks do not sell beer to individuals who drive up to the abbey hoping to purchase beer. The reason for this is to eliminate commercial reselling, and hence give all visitors a chance to purchase the product.

  The current production is 475 kilolitres (60,000 cases) per year, and has remained the same since 1946.

My tipple (through the tulips):

It’s also National Shiraz Day, National Vanilla Ice Cream Day, and Peanut Butter and Chocolate Day (viz. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 23 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The war with Iran goes on; the latest word from Trump is that he’ll start bombing Iran’s infrastructure unless the theocracy stops monkeying with the Strait of Hormuz.

President Trump threatened on Wednesday to strike bridges and power plants in Iran if it targeted any more ships in the Strait of Hormuz, as the prospect of a prolonged conflict pushed the price of oil to its highest level in over a month.

“Any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship” in the strait, Mr. Trump said on social media, U.S. forces would hit the sites, including in or near the capital, Tehran. Deliberate strikes on civilian infrastructure could be considered a war crime under international law.

Mr. Trump has escalated his threats through weeks of rising bluster and deadly military exchanges, in which the United States has failed to either stop Iranian attacks or force the country’s hard-line leaders, who want to prolong the war, back to the negotiating table.

The threats also reflected how much the focus of the war has narrowed into a fight over the strait, a critical passage for global oil and gas, even as Mr. Trump maintains that his wider objective is preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon. The strait was open and free to transit before the war began, but Iran has proved it can effectively control traffic with threats of strikes and, in doing so, gained powerful leverage over global markets.

The latest escalation came as Iranian officials had already reported recent strikes on bridges, and as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the United States would keep waging war as long as Iran tried to control the strait. Iran’s attacks on vessels there have brought ship traffic there to a near-total halt.

While Mr. Rubio left the door open for diplomacy after another night of U.S. and Iranian strikes across the Persian Gulf, he told reporters in Manila that Iran at this point was “not serious about talks,” arguing that Tehran had violated a preliminary agreement that says it should allow ships to transit the strait.

What strikes me about the article, besides the prospect of a longer war, is how much criticism there is of the U.S. conduct here. Each of the first four paragraphs contains a subtle critique. Well, that’s the NYT’s right, but let’s not pretend they are just reporting objectively.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal explains “Why Trump gave Saudi Arabia the nuke.” (The WSJ “exclusive” on this is here.)

It’s Wednesday, July 22, and rattled by Operation Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer last June, Saudi Arabia went looking for a deterrent. Pakistan, still bruised from its May 2025 confrontation with India, was looking for the same thing. The arrangement was mutually beneficial: Islamabad acquired a wealthy patron, Riyadh signaled it could diversify away from Washington, and Pakistan’s defense minister declared that his country’s nuclear program would be made available to the kingdom if needed.

Then came February 2026, and Iranian missiles and drones began landing throughout the kingdom. Riyadh invoked the pact. Islamabad sent a foreign minister to deliver a stern warning to Tehran and flew a squadron of fighters to a Saudi air base. The lesson was not subtle. Pakistan would not be the new guarantor, and a nuclear guarantee secured by diplomacy is a considerably weaker deterrent than one whose button sits under your own finger.

That is the context for today’s Wall Street Journal report that Trump has approved a 30-year agreement providing Saudi Arabia with a civilian nuclear program and potentially opening the door to uranium enrichment on Saudi soil.

. . .The obvious truth is that Saudi Arabia needs nuclear power like a drowning man needs water. But Mohammed bin Salman revealed the real game in 2018: If Tehran got a bomb, the kingdom would follow as soon as possible. Throughout its long campaign for nuclear power, Saudi Arabia conceded nothing to the industry’s “gold standard,” a binding commitment not to enrich uranium or reprocess spent nuclear fuel domestically.

The nuclear campaign is a symptom, not a cause. Riyadh concluded years ago that the American security guarantee is unreliable, regardless of who holds the White House. On September 14, 2019, cruise missiles and drones took roughly half of Saudi production offline in a single morning. Washington attributed the attack to Iran, moved some air defense assets into the kingdom, and did nothing further. Biden completed the lesson from the opposite direction. On February 4, 2021, in his first major foreign policy address, he ended American support for the coalition’s offensive operations in Yemen, including arms sales, and the following day the State Department moved to delist the Houthis.

. . . All that changed with Trump. He detached the nuclear file from normalization entirely, having already signed an executive order in May 2025 directing the State Department to promote nuclear exports. In November 2025, Washington and Riyadh signed a Joint Declaration on the Completion of Negotiations on Civil Nuclear Cooperation, alongside an F-35 package. Now they have an agreement for U.S. firms to construct a uranium enrichment facility in Saudi Arabia if a joint American-Saudi study concludes that such a project is justified.

. . .this deal may not represent [Trump’s] hedge on a nuclear Middle East. Trump is not reconciled to Iran getting the bomb. This is not the nuclear equivalent of his statements last month about it being “unfair” to deny Iran ballistic missiles if Saudi Arabia has them. He is simply doing a deal he thinks is good for the United States—American vendors, American reactors, Russian and Chinese competitors locked out of the market.

Nor is all hope lost for normalization. Israel still has much to offer Saudi Arabia, but taking one of the largest carrots off the table does make an agreement significantly more difficult. In the future, one would hope the dealmaker in chief remembers the value of leverage.

Yep, that big carrot just rolled off the table, and, according to Segal (I am not sure I agree), it’s to benefit the American military-industrial complex. Who can fathom Trump’s mind?

*Masih Alinejad’s brief is to keep calling attention to the Iranian theocracy’s detention and execution of protestors, and she does this in a new Free Press article, “Iran’s killing machine is operating in plain sight.”

Yesterday, I woke up to a message that broke my heart. Erfan Esfandiari had been hanged. He was 18 years old, and his parents’ only child. His crime, according to reports circulated by Iranian journalists and human rights activists, was opening a door. Specifically, he opened his door to let terrified protesters in as they ran from security forces during the January 2026 uprising against the Iranian regime.

That act of compassion was enough to send him to the gallows.

On that same Sunday morning, the regime hanged Gol-Mohammad Mohammadi, a 23-year-old Afghan refugee who had fled to Iran seeking safety. His crime, according to those same reports, was identical: He opened his door for protesters fleeing bullets. He was arrested, thrown into a show trial, and forced to endure three hearings, each lasting one hour. There was no independent lawyer.

Erfan and Gol-Mohammad were two of 59 men arrested together during the January uprising, in what has since become known as the Alikhani Square case. The two of them, alongside 10 others, were sentenced to death. Last week, all 12 were moved to quarantine. That is the signal: For the 10 still alive, execution is likely imminent.

. . .On Sunday, the chess champion Garry Kasparov posted a comment on X about the executions. “How tragic that these executions became the norm in Iran and accepted as such by the Free World,” he wrote.

He’s right. The world is not paying enough attention. While diplomats negotiate, bombs fall, and flimsy ceasefire agreements are signed, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been running a quiet, systematic execution campaign against the young people who dared to stand up for their freedom. And they are using the world’s distraction as cover.

During the war, President Donald Trump publicly urged the Islamic Republic’s leaders to stop executing protesters. He even said they promised they would. But we Iranians knew better. We knew that the regime was only buying time to turn mass arrests into mass executions. That is exactly what has happened.

I know that international pressure works. I have seen it. In April, Trump shared a photo of eight women who were about to be hanged, writing, “Please do them no harm!” The regime paused. On Monday, Trump shared my post about Esfandiari hanging on Truth Social, where it reached millions. But at that point, it was too late. And Esfandiari is not alone. Since the war began on February 28, according to CNN, at least 47 people have been put to death. Hundreds more remain under death sentences. We do not know the exact numbers, because the regime puts pressure on families to stay silent.

I certainly feel for Masih, and, after all, I’ve been putting up a tweet from her about civilian deaths every day for several years.  But to get the regime to stop oppressing the Iranian people, we have to effect regime change, for the theocracy stays in power by exerting power: power through terrorizing the people, who don’t want to be executed. (Even given that, many Iranians still went out in the streets.) And the regime is succeeding by having executed 30,000 or more protestors.  I don’t know if international pressure will do much to quash that mindset.

I don’t see how we can completely ignore this stuff when we’re at war with Iran. No, we’re not the world’s policemen, but we’re at war with Iran, Trump told the Iranian people to more or less take over their government, and this is, indeed, a laudable aim of the war.

*The antisemitic anti-Zionist mayor of NYC, the odious Zohran Mamdani, has asked the federal government to arrest Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu when he is expected to come to New York in September for a UN meeting. Unfortunately for hizzoner, that arrest isn’t possible.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday night challenged the federal government to execute an international arrest warrant against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, calling him a “war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people” in a striking video statement.

The mayor said the city Law Department explored whether the New York Police Department could arrest the Israeli prime minister during his expected visit to the city in September but that the city did not have “independent legal authority” to do so.

The mayor’s announcement came days after he told Lulu Garcia-Navarro last week on “The Interview,” a New York Times show, that he had been in “active conversation” with the city’s lawyers about executing a warrant issued for Mr. Netanyahu in 2024 by the International Criminal Court.

On Tuesday, Mr. Mamdani said in the video that those conversations had led his administration to determine that it did “not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.”

Seated between the flags of the United States and New York City, Mr. Mamdani looked directly into the camera and solemnly told New Yorkers that Israel’s prime minister had no place visiting New York.

“Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large,” Mr. Mamdani said. “While we cannot end the genocide on our own, we can decide whether our silence will become another weapon, and we can examine every tool we have to defend the humanity and dignity of all people.”

There appears to be no chance of federal law enforcement arresting Mr. Netanyahu in the near future. President Trump said on Monday that the Israeli leader, whose country is a longtime American ally, would not be arrested in the United States “in any way, shape, or form.”

I’m not fan of Netanyahu, but I wouldn’t arrest him on the verdict of the International Criminal Court, which didn’t deem him a war criminal but found “reasonable grounds” to have a trial (the U.S. does not abide by the ICC’s decisions, and if Mamdani arrested him in NYC there would have to be a trial here. No chance of that!)  Are the people of NYC who voted for him stupid or what? And if they vote for him again, they’d be even stupider, for he’s shown his cards. Why would a mayor spend his time trying to arrest Netanyahu rather than running the city? You know the answer: he is doing performative actions to cater to his base, the “progressive” left, which is increasingly anti-Israel and antisemitic. He doesn’t want to piddle around running a city; he has his eye on the Big Stage. Thank Ceiling Cat that because he was born overseas of non-American parents, he could never be President.

Here’s Mamdani’s statement; a friend of mine commented that “Mamdani would expel the Jews from New York City if he could.” I think that’s true.

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. pic.twitter.com/YRezmW6YVx

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) July 22, 2026

*The NYT has a summary article about a new PNAS paper examining geometric similarities as judged by humans and monkeys (rhesus macaques and olive baboons). It turns out that the primates are as good as human preschoolers at recognizing shapes in different orientations, while adults are the best. From the NYT:

Just like people, monkeys seem to grasp the abstract qualities of geometric shapes, such as whether they are symmetrical, have parallel sides or contain right angles, according to a new study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This ability allows the monkeys — and us — to understand when two shapes are the same, even when they’ve been rotated or resized.

This finding challenges a long-held notion that humans’ geometric abilities are part of what makes our brains one of a kind. “Our hypothesis was that humans are not that unique,” in possessing this mathematical understanding, said Jialin Li, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University and the lead author of the study.

In their experiment, Ms. Li and her colleagues decided to give monkeys (a total of eight rhesus macaques and olive baboons), preschoolers and adult humans with different education levels the same geometric task. That way, if humans truly had an innate advantage, it would show up when comparing the young children and the monkeys. And if the advantage was learned, it might show up when comparing the humans who had different levels of schooling.

It was a challenge to find a task simple enough that even preschool-aged children and monkeys could reasonably complete it, but the team eventually decided to have all the study participants do a matching task. All were shown a shape with a specific size and geometric form on a screen. Then they were asked to pick that same shape out of a group of others.

“By manipulating the similarity of the shapes, we were able to look at what kinds of rules they’re using,” said Jessica Cantlon, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University whose lab conducted the study.

. . .The researchers then analyzed the results alongside those from another lab’s recent experiment, in which monkeys, young children and adults had to identify a geometrically dissimilar shape in a group.

Through this analysis, researchers realized that their participants were all capable of making connections between shapes and their angles, ratios and patterns — monkeys included.

This shared foundation suggests that our geometric intuition evolved long before humans did, which isn’t a surprise to many researchers who study animal cognition.

“These are hardly the only animals on Earth that have to deal with geometry,” said Ed Wasserman, an experimental psychologist at the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the new study.

Here are two types of tests that were done: a “which shape is the one above?” test and a “which shape is the odd one out” test. These figures are from the PNAS paper:

I’m not in the least surprised. Except for stuff like playing chess, most human abilities have their evolutionary roots in our ancestors, and those can also be seen in our relatives. Darwin was the first to realize this in The Descent of Man (1871), and looks for similar parallels in behavior, facial expression, etc.  Here’s a video about the shape experiment, its background, and its meaning:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the two enemy cats have an encounter:

Hili: Are you pretending you don’t see me?
Kulka: No, I’m thinking about social relationships.

In Polish:

Hili: Udajesz, że mnie nie widzisz?
Kulka: Nie, zastanawiam się nad relacjami społecznymi.

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

From Cheryl’s Amazingly Positive, No Politics Allowed, Interesting People Group; check it out:

From CinEmma:

from The English Language Police II. The contributor also notes that there should be a comma after “Iran.”

From Masih; a horrible incident in Iran, in which a guy hiding protestors himself gets killed for letting them into his house:

Since yesterday, people keep asking me the same question: How can someone be hanged for opening a door?

I want you to see the answer with your own eyes.

Two Iranian protesters. Both killed in front of cameras for showing compassion.

One opened a door when protesters came… pic.twitter.com/HEftBGJBDD

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) July 21, 2026

From Luana; the Canadian government and the indigenous people still haven’t dug up any bodies in the residential school grounds. Now the First Nations people don’t need no stinkin’ evidence because they can detect from the “power and energy” that there are dead bodies. It’s ridiculous. This joker says that it’s “disrespectful” to ask for evidence.

“I don’t think we should have to prove to anybody what happened to these [dead children at Kamloops] because they are there and they send us messages telling us they’re there…[@tkemlups] Chief Casimir and I went to visit the sacred site. You can tell they’re there, right?” pic.twitter.com/O7rZfoM84E

— Frances Widdowson (@FrancesWiddows1) July 18, 2026

In which Larry is held responsible for British politics:

This makes it sound like it’s me that’s making them quit… https://t.co/x7Oxos122T

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) July 21, 2026

Two from my feed. Here is a town feeding a stork:

In Vinnytsia, Ukraine, a female stork was widowed when her mate died. She is incubating her eggs and is unable to feed herself.

Local residents have started feeding her. pic.twitter.com/bZ7lDaSioU

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 22, 2026

They’re also helping this newborn elephant get to its feet:

The moment an elephant gives birth, the entire herd gathers to welcome and protect the newborn 🥹🐘❤️ https://t.co/yZvAx31ihx

— Antidepressant Content (@depressionlesss) July 22, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Norwegian Jewish woman was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was 32 years old. https://t.co/3sFhORUFLi

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) July 23, 2026

Two from Matthew. First, a stalk-eyed fly; this is due to male-male competition in sexual selection (females’ eyes aren’t nearly that extreme):

It's true, what could be better than being a fly, though? I mean, look at them

— Ainsley S (@americanbeetles.bsky.social) 2026-07-21T20:53:26.183Z

Soccer superstar Wayne Rooney calls the World Cup Finals halftime show “crap”:

😭🫡

— Emily✨ (@emilyoram.bsky.social) 2026-07-19T20:22:00.348Z