Wednesday: Hili dialogue

July 29, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“የሃምፕ ቀን” in Amharic): Wednesday, July 29, 2026, and we’re moving quickly towards August (and the Big Nap). And it’s International Tiger Day, celebrating the world’s most beautiful large cat, Panthera tigris (there’s 0nly one species).  Here’s a year in the life of a rescued baby tiger:

It’s also National Chicken Wing Day (I prefer thighs: the best part of the pullet), and National Lasagna Day.

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

Da Nooz:

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal prognosticates about “Lucky meeting number eight,” which is the number of times Trump has met with Netanyahu.

It’s Tuesday, July 28, and in a rare move for Donald Trump, his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu will be held away from the cameras. That says a lot.

There was real anxiety in Netanyahu’s office about another episode of what Trump called “great television”—a Zelensky-style confrontation, a blowup staged for the cameras. I don’t detect much grief from the prime minister’s office over the absence of footage.

The truth is that this is not a gotcha meeting, nor is it a Bidenesque “come to Jesus” moment. Since Trump called Netanyahu “f***ing crazy” in early June, things have improved—partly, at least, thanks to Iranian attempts to strain the allies’ connection to the point of breaking the MoU. The negotiations confirmed what Netanyahu told Trump on the eve of the memorandum of understanding: he doubted it would work, but if Trump wanted to try, he was behind him. A strategy not everyone in his Cabinet was willing to back, but one that has clearly been validated.

Netanyahu wouldn’t dare say it to the president explicitly, but the message is quite simple: I told you so.

Which leaves the question of what comes next. The image some will undoubtedly sketch—Trump dragging his feet on a return to war while Netanyahu tugs at his sleeve to go back in—is likely wrong. That movie already played. Five months ago, Netanyahu sat in the White House Situation Room and hard-sold precisely this war: a slide deck and a video reel of the leaders who would inherit a fallen Tehran, the missile program gone in weeks, a popular uprising, the ayatollah decapitated, a secular successor cued up. It didn’t work out, but neither did Trump’s plan once Bibi’s was abandoned. However good a salesman, Netanyahu doesn’t think he can—or particularly wants to—pull Trump into another confrontation.

Worth noting here: the clip Yair Netanyahu’s aides published on Instagram, in which Sara tells her husband she wants Trump to strike Lebanon as well. Netanyahu talks her down, gently. [JAC: I have been unable to find this clip.]

The American position is that Iran is the priority. That is the mission. The question is how to pursue it. Israel will lay out two options. One: go back in, and this time strike Iran’s energy infrastructure and its remaining enriched uranium with full force. The other, if that road isn’t taken: hold the line—a blockade. No deal, and no war.

Assuming Trump has the patience for an inconclusive confrontation may be a mistake. He has had plenty of opportunities to slip into such a status quo, and at every one he has opted to twist the dial of escalation hard to one side or the other.

Netanyahu surely has his preferences. But I have no doubt he can work with either outcome.

*Thomas Friedman, who I barely read in the NYT any more, just had a clickbait (for me) column, “Mamdani’s Netanyahu stunt was a waste of his talent and our time” (archived here).

I don’t know what kind of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani will turn out to be, but he’s already proved to be a real disappointment as a statesman. New York is the only city in the world in which at least 750,000 Jews and Muslims apiece live side by side. Rather than being a constructive bridge builder between them, Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, has chosen to be a bridge destroyer — using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as his ax. It is such a waste of a truly charismatic political talent.

Consider Mamdani’s recent stunt: threatening to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel when he comes to New York City for the United Nations gathering in September. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in 2024, alleging he committed crimes against humanity in Gaza. Though Mamdani eventually acknowledged that the city had no such legal authority — and instead called on the federal government to execute the warrant days before the Israeli leader’s visit to Washington — it was just the kind of thing Netanyahu will use in his campaign to get re-elected on Oct. 27. I can write Bibi’s campaign commercial myself: “The only safe place for Jews is Israel. Just look at what’s going on in New York. The only leader who can protect Israelis is me: Bibi.”

And this is why I stopped reading Friedman:

Mamdani does not call for a two-state solution, either. He argues that Jews are not entitled to self-determination in a state of their own — a Jewish state in their biblical homeland in that same region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. But more than seven million Jews also live in that space, and they, too, are not going away or relinquishing their right to a Jewish state — no matter what Mamdani and other democratic socialists say. So, they are also effectively promoting a forever war.

What if Mamdani actually wanted to be a bridge builder between Israelis and Palestinians, a role for which he has the unique capacity and talent? If he did, he would declare his intention that on the day Bibi arrives in New York City for the U.N. General Assembly, he would convene a seminar at his office and invite Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Jewish experts to discuss the only just and stable solution: how to forge two separate states for two peoples living in that area between the river and the sea.

. . .He would invite Saudi representatives to discuss the Arab Peace Initiative, which was launched in this column in 2002 by the Saudi crown prince, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud. He would invite Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and George W. Bush to each talk about their respective plans for two states for two peoples. He’d invite Palestinian leaders like Salam Fayyad, the former Palestinian Authority prime minister, who did so much in his tenure to build Palestinian institutions for a Palestinian state next to Israel, to discuss how they would revive that effort today.

Most important, he would invite representatives of Jewish-Arab organizations trying to forge two states for two peoples, like the Abraham Initiatives.

. . .Imagine if Mamdani, instead of engaging in a useless stunt of publicly mulling the arrest of Netanyahu, convened all these Israeli, Palestinian, Arab and American advocates of two states for two peoples and then invited Netanyahu to address them. Let Bibi be the one to say: “No, I don’t want to have anything to do with Israeli, Palestinian, Arab and American advocates of two states for two peoples.”

It would at least send the message to the Israeli center-right, center and left voters that the world doesn’t hate them, that the mayor of New York City isn’t out to get them and that all the international community wants is for Israelis and Palestinians to be constructive partners ready to explore the only realistic alternative to a forever war.

I have no idea if it would help. But I know for sure that what Mamdani is doing is just minting voters for Netanyahu among Israelis who think Bibi is their only protector, his hard-line stance their only salvation.

Yes, Mamdani could promote comity and peace, but Friedman has always been a sucker for an immediate two-state “solution,” something that apparently only he thinks is both possible and doable. It isn’t. That’s why I used to call him Thomas “I am Dumb” Friedman.  Oh, and he wants to invite Natalie Portman to address the gathering, too.

*In her NYT column about the new Homer, movie, “Nolan’s Zero-Eros ‘Odyssey’“, Mo Dowd gripes about the movie, especially its lack of eroticism.(Article is archived here.)

Nolan told Stephen Colbert that he used every trick in the book to achieve his stunning visual effects. (The Mediterranean was ready for its close-up!) Yet the director failed to capture the essence of the man of tricks and twists, Odysseus, who delighted in storytelling and feigned identities.

Much of the moral ambiguity has been drained to make Matt Damon’s protagonist more likable. Except for a few mournful appearances by Zendaya’s Athena, who seems more like Odysseus’s conscience than his shape-shifting partner in deception, Nolan doesn’t depict any of the major meddling gods from the story. Besides being rich, fascinating characters, the gods are the framework for everything that happened in the ancient world. If you take the gods out of the picture, you just have people struggling within themselves. You lose the depth and force of the epic.

Nolan’s nearly three-hour masterwork, the classicist Mary Beard noted, does not have Homer’s “elusive sexiness.” In keeping with Gen Z’s waning interest in sex, the poem’s famous sex scenes have been excised, sapping erotic power from the female characters. As a headline in New York magazine wondered, “Is No One Horny in ‘The Odyssey’?”

. . .Emily Wilson, whose popular modern translation of “The Odyssey” inspired Nolan, said the director turned Odysseus into an all-American hero weighed down by anxieties foreign to the ancient Greeks.

“He’s traumatized Jason Bourne,” she said of Damon’s portrayal on Derek Thompson’s podcast. “He’s an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero. He’s not that complicated. Unfortunately, he’s not ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ in this film. The Odysseus of the Greek poem is complicated.”

Nolan did not want his Odysseus betraying Penelope and enjoying his sojourns with other women. The director completely cut out the young princess Nausicaa, whom Homer’s Odysseus has a flirtation with, and neuters the text’s sexual encounters with Circe and Calypso.

. . . Nolan whitewashes Odysseus’s infidelity here by turning Calypso — played by Charlize Theron — into a fashionable beach therapist who gives him mood-altering lotus flowers to help with his PTSD. In Homer, Odysseus has no need to forget. He cries once over the human cost of the war when he hears a song about Troy’s fall, but mostly he’s proud of his war exploits. And the “scalawag,” as Calypso calls him, doesn’t partake in the lotus; his men become addicted lotus-eaters on a different island.

Homer did not portray a world turning against violence. He limned a profoundly martial universe — interspersed with lots of magic and sex and cavorting, conniving immortals. If you smooth it out and modernize it too much, you lose what made it so important to begin with. And you’re just left with a guy finding his way home.

So it goes. Not enough sex, and not enough realistic eroticism. I don’t think I’ll see this movie.

*A Democratic Socialist, Wisconsin state representative, and part-time bartender (shades of AOC!) is the favored Democratic candidates for governor, and has a lot of promises to change the state the way Mamdani promised to change New York.

Francesca Hong, a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has establishment Democrats rattled ahead of an Aug. 11 primary for governor that has showcased the party’s division and disarray.

Hong, a 37-year-old state representative and part-time bartender, leads in the most recent Marquette Law School primary poll. She is outpacing a former lieutenant governor, a former top state administrator and several other more-prominent Democrats.

The race is one of three heartland Democratic primaries in early August offering insights into the party’s direction. The other two are U.S. Senate contests in Michigan and Minnesota.

Hong’s bid will also test whether Democratic socialists, a rising faction within the party that has won in deeply blue cities and districts, can win statewide primaries in purple states.

Hong, Wisconsin’s first Asian-American state legislator, is solidly on the side calling for a vast expansion of government into virtually every corner of life, from free child care and mass transit to publicly run grocery stores and the elimination of all college debt.

Hong backers at Wisconsin Democrats’ 2026 convention in Madison last month. Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images for WisDems

She backs legalizing marijuana to fund high-speed broadband and supports a state-run development bank, Medicare-for-all, a 32-hour workweek with no pay cut, abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, restoring voting rights to felons and the eventual elimination—or at least reduction—of prisons and police

. . .Asked how she would pay for the additional benefits she is suggesting, Hong said she would push for higher taxes on the wealthiest and the elimination of business tax credits.

“The money is there,” she said in an interview. “It’s how we’ve allocated it and also who is not required to pay.”

This sounds exactly like Mamdani, and good luck to Wisconsin if she becomes governor. Presumably the state legislature has a way to curb her excesses.

*Casey Babb at The Free Press reports that “Jews are leaving Canada in droves.”  It starts with Gad Saad’s announcment that he’s leaving Canada for several reason, but mainly because of the country’s increasing Jew hatred:

Saad said basically the same thing on Joe Rogan’s podcast in May. “I’m now leaving in large part because it became difficult for me, if not impossible, to be a high-profile Jewish professor who supports the right of Israel to exist.” Saad had already taken a leave of absence from Concordia University in Montreal and will continue working as a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.

. . .Saad’s decision made it even more painfully obvious that Canada has an antisemitism problem. As of mid-July, B’nai Brith had documented 27 violent antisemitic incidents so far this year, compared with 10 during all of 2025. As The Free Press’s Rupa Subramanya reported in June, Jews account for about one percent of Canada’s population of 41.6 million, but were the targets of more hate crimes reported by police in 2024 than all other religious groups combined.

Over the weekend, two locations of Jewish-owned Kiva’s Bagel Bakery in Toronto were attacked, including one with gunfire. Last week, police charged a pro-Palestinian demonstrator who encouraged terrorism and “harm against members of the Israeli and Jewish communities” at protests in Toronto in 2024, alleging that he was associated with Hamas.

. . . From renowned physicians and educators to entrepreneurs and community leaders, Canada is losing some of its most extraordinary citizens because they no longer feel welcome or safe in the place they called home. Jews from Canada and several other countries recently asked the U.S. State Department to allow them to immigrate as refugees or under another form of protected status, though no decision has been announced. Aaliyah from Canada rose 51 percent between 2023 and 2025, reaching a record high, according to the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem.

An average of more than 10,000 Canadians are leaving the country every month, the highest level of emigration in Canada’s recorded history, according to the federal government. Those numbers are not broken down by religion or other groups, but many of those who are leaving are well-paid and highly educated.

. . . And while most of the antisemitic incidents in Canada and elsewhere fall below the threshold of terrorism, there remains a deep sense of unease within the country’s Jewish community due to the quieter forms of hatred and bigotry that pervade daily life: shootings of Jewish institutions; vandalism of Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and synagogues; and assaults, acts of intimidation, and various other hate crimes.

Canada can’t afford to lose its Jews, and the government and people better bloody well do something to stop the antisemitism. They’re even moving to the U.S., which also has rising levels of antisemitism, but they haven’t yet approached Canada’s level.  O Canada!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili feels neglectedL

Hili: Am I still the editor-in-chief of Listy z naszego sadu?
Andrzej: Of course.
Hili: Then why are our conversations on Substack only in the Notes?
Andrzej: Because a good editor-in-chief stays in the background, making sure everything runs smoothly

In Polish:

Hili: Czy ja nadal jestem naczelną „Listów z naszego sadu”?
Ja: Oczywiście.
Hili: To dlaczego nasze rozmowy są na Substacku tylko w notatkach?
Ja: Ponieważ dobry naczelny pozostaje w cieniu pilnując, żeby wszystko działało sprawnie.  *******************

From Kitty Litterposting:

From The English Language Police:

From CinEmma:

From Masih; the cranes are used to hang people in public:

The Number Ten Cat had an encounter with a police dog:

From Colin Wright; you should read the article (pdf is here):

From Luana; some confused individuals.  English translation:

Pride Amsterdam; more Hamas flags than rainbow flags.

In Gaza, gays are tortured to death or hanged.

Speaking of the DSA, this is from Jeff Maurer, who should have more followers:

One from my feed; red pandas like it cold:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial; a priest who made the ultimate sacrifice for another prisoner:

And one from Dr. Cobb, showing, a gorgeous skunk:

I've never seen a skunk with a pure white tail before. What a beauty! 🦨 🦊

— Wildmaven (@wildmaven.bsky.social) 2026-07-28T12:43:18.098Z

One thought on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Re the priest who volunteered his life to save that of another man – just to be crystal clear – he was killed with a concentrated solution of carbolic acid injected through a large-bore needle directly into his heart after being held down. A deliberately painful murder which likely cost more than a bullet to the head.
    Effing Nazis.

    Reply

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