Monday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to another “work” week: it’s Monday, August 10, 2026 and World Lion Day.  There is only one species of lion, Panthera leo, though it has a disjunct distribution, living in sub-Saharan Africa and the Gir Forest of India (habitat destruction undoubtedly led to this distribution).  Here’s a short video showing a young female cub joining the crèche of her pride and meeting her dad:

It’s also National Duran Duran Appreciation Day (count me out), National S’Mores Day (count me in), and Smithsonian Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 10 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Israel has rejected Trump’s 15-point plan for a cease-fire in Gaza, a key element of the overall peace plan (see the 15 points here).

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected President Trump’s plan for disarming Hamas, a key plank of the Gaza peace process that also requires Israel’s gradual withdrawal from the enclave.

The Israeli leader issued a statement in a government meeting Sunday spelling out his rejection of the plan, in an unusual public break with Trump. The move risks angering the president, who hailed what he called “a historic agreement” to disarm Hamas late last month.

Netanyahu faces uphill elections in October and has come under domestic criticism from his hard-right coalition partners who accused him of misleading them over the terms of the plan, which would see the decommissioning of Hamas’s weapons in exchange for phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

“Israel rejects the 15-point document. The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed. And when I say the disarmament of Hamas, I mean heavy weapons, less heavy weapons, light weapons, all the weapons,” Netanyahu said in a video statement released by his office at the opening of an Israeli cabinet meeting, using an acronym for the Israeli military.

When Trump announced that a deal had been reached between Hamas and his Board of Peace, a body he created to oversee Gaza’s postwar transition, he said Israel was very happy with it.

But Israel and Hamas are deeply distrustful of each other, and major disagreements about the 15-point plan’s details have since emerged, such as the sequencing of disarmament and Israel’s withdrawal.

The Gaza plan arrives at a sensitive moment for Netanyahu with polls showing he is likely to fail to secure a ruling majority in the coming general election. While the U.S. would like to see Israeli troops withdraw from what Israel calls buffer zones in Gaza, as well as Lebanon, these moves are likely to be very unpopular with the Israeli prime minister’s right-wing voter base who see Israel’s presence there as important to their country’s security.

Netanyahu’s announcement comes despite intense pressure, including from the U.S., for Israel to agree to the plan, according to two people briefed on the matter. The Gaza plan was raised by U.S. officials in a recent meeting between Netanyahu and Trump in late July, according to one of the people briefed.

It only makes sense, given the mendacity of Hamas, to condition Israel’s withdrawal on the complete demilitarization of Hamas.  And yes, Netanyahu will lose support from his right-wing base if he bows to the plan. But I dislike every move that Israel makes like this being attributed to Netanyahu’s desire to be re-electerd.  Maybe the motivations are 100% correct, but maybe part of them is due to not endangering Israel in the future. I agree that Hamas should completely disarm as step #1 of the plan. There is no place for Hamas—armed or not—in a reconstructed and peaceful Gaza.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal discusses what the U.S. (and Israel) might do vis-à-vis Iran now that America is running out of missiles.

It’s Sunday, August 9, and “I will fight tooth and nail, if necessary,” Netanyahu declared when President Biden imposed a weapons embargo on him. But what, exactly, will the United States fight with? Even without an embargo, its own arsenals are approaching the red line fast. The commander of United States European Command warned the Pentagon that there aren’t enough resources to defend against the coming confrontation with Iran while protecting both Israel and American forces—they will have to choose. Reuters reported that the U.S. Army has nearly exhausted its entire stock of precision missiles. In Israel, it was reported that the bunker-buster bombs of the kind dropped on Fordow last year are also nearly gone after a single night of strikes, making an attack on Pickaxe Mountain difficult.

And all this after just a few weeks of fighting a failing Middle Eastern dictatorship—torn from within and teetering on economic collapse. What happens if Russia stages a provocation somewhere else in Europe? Or if China decides to push forces toward Taiwan? The state of the U.S. military brings to mind the IDF on the eve of October 7: an imposing image that, in practice, delivered failure after failure, draw after draw. Its only clear victory since the end of the Cold War was over Saddam Hussein, a quarter of a century ago.

The whole world is now watching Trump. Will he end the war with Iran still controlling the Strait of Hormuz, the regime still standing, and its army merely licking its wounds?

Two absurdities. The first: the American—and especially Republican—trauma of a ground operation and a bloody quagmire is the very thing that has kept the Iranians alive. Almost any ground operation—to seize uranium, take Kharg Island, or capture senior officials—would likely have triggered a dramatic upheaval of the regime. The second: it is precisely the fear of a dramatic collapse in American standing that stops Trump from ending this conflict the way Washington ended Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. Walter Russell Mead, a prominent American conservative commentator, proposed years ago that the United States finish off Iran—the small, weak, estranged son of the Sino-Russian-Korean axis, and the only one that doesn’t yet have nuclear weapons. The message, he wrote shortly after October 7, would land well in every capital that loves evil—even if the message is that the United States can no longer win.

I fear that this conflict will end the way Vietnam did, withdrawal and ending with nothing accomplished. I opposed the Vietnam War in the first place, as we had no business being there and losing 50,000 American lives in vain.  But we do have business being in Iran; it’s just that Americans, as Segal said, have no stomach for ground troops on Iranian soil.  This is, in my mind, a just war on two counts: it has the potential to free the Iranian people from an oppressive and murderous theocracy, and Iran, unlike Vietnam, is already engaged in spreading terrorism throughout the world.

*At his website Critical Mass, physicist Lawrence Krauss describes what he sees as the greatest threat to modern society.  No, it’s not nukes or AI—it’s Islam. This may be only part of his website, as I don’t have a subscription:

I have been thinking for some time what may be the greatest threat to modern civilization. While a lot of attention is given to AI, I don’t think that is it–at least yet. AI will change everything, but so did writing, and we survived, and in fact flourished as a result. We have to be vigilant, but I know a lot of smart people who are working on AI safety, so at least it is not being ignored.

Obviously nuclear weapons exist as as sword of Damocles hovering over civilization, and the dangers of nuclear conflagration are increasing with time. I was Chair of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin Atomic Scientists for a decade, following on heroes like Einstein, Oppenheimer, and my immediate predecessor Leon Lederman, so I know first-hand that the dangers of nuclear war are something that should never be taken for granted. I am particularly concerned about the lack of active effort in nuclear arms control amongst the nations with nuclear weapons right now. That concerns me as much as worries about proliferation in Iran, North Korea etc.

But, perhaps surprisingly, I think the most immediate and least hypothetical threat to modern society may be the rise of Islam. This religion not only has a growing base of adherents, it imposes itself on all aspects of people’s lives, and its scripture demands both complete adherence and urges punishment for apostasy. Thus, it has built in ‘anti-virus’ protection, as a computer scientist friend of mine put it.

As a result, Islam may not easily evolve over the centuries like the older and now more comfortable religions such as Christianity or Judaism, where most adherents don’t take their scriptures literally, and instead pick and choose what they like so they can use their religion as a crutch when needed.

Needless to say, all the three religions are based on similar false myths, but to the extent that they don’t interfere with day to day life in a secular society that can be largely (but not always) innocuous. Unless we can figure out a way to de-fang Islam, encouraging secular muslims who identify as muslims but at heart are non-believers, like so many Christians and Jews, and who can coexist with other secular ‘people of faith’, as well as atheists, I think Islam has a reasonable chance of destabilizing modern civilization in this century.

Lawrence has a point about “defanging” Islam, and it’s the subject of a book by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. It was a good book, but at the time I remarked that it was impossible to implement her recommendations since many Muslims won’t voluntarily be defanged. I just hope Krauss watches his back, as Hirsi Ali has bodyguards 24/7. and you know what happened to Salman Rushdie.

*It looks as if Andrew Sullivan has made his latest weekly Dish post, “Will the two cults finally fall?“, free, as I no longer subscribe but can see it. The two cults he’s referring to are that of the far Right and far Left—namely, Trumpism and wokeness.

There are two complementary cults in America today, it seems to me: the cult of Trump and the cult of Woke.

They exist alongside but also currently control the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. And they have a sick, mutually perpetuating and advantageous relationship. By “cult”, I mean a collective embrace of a compelling figure or dogma, the worship and protection of which dominates everything else. (I presaged this almost a decade ago now: “America’s New Religions.”)

That our politics will not recover until these two cults are unraveled is in some ways the core conviction of The Weekly Dish. And the good news, I think, is that it’s finally happening. Cult leaders, however charismatic, are usually sociopaths when they aren’t simply sexual abusers, and so cults tend to implode when the leader’s flaws emerge beyond any denial. Fixed dogmas can also collapse when the lies required to sustain them simply become too absurd, too huge to believe, when the avatars of the system are exposed as frauds and liars. And to my eyes, the emperors’ clothes on both sides are now unmistakably falling.

Why the Trump cult is ending:

Out. Of. His. Mind. The reporter who has followed Trump most closely, Maggie Haberman, tells us that around 70 percent of the president’s mental bandwidth is now occupied by his various cockamamie — and grotesquely kitsch — construction projects around DC. If the Democrats were not completely useless, this presidency would be over.

And who in the world takes anything Trump says seriously anymore? Every definitive statement is abandoned in days, if not hours. No deal is ever finished. Major gambits, like the tariff wars, collapse under the weight of incompetence. The sheer fecklessness of the Iran War has undermined deterrence everywhere. China has eaten Trump’s lunch on trade. The IRGC treats him as a mere noise machine. Pretty soon, a supermajority of Americans will be there too.

And by November, if the cult is emphatically rejected at the pols, the Trump era could be done.

But he doesn’t tell us why the woke cult is ending; in fact, Sully says it’s going strong:

The cult of woke is far less easily defenestrated because it’s not just one unhinged man. It is an elaborate, networked edifice of lies and power grabs, with deep tribal appeals to the worst of human nature, sustained by an elite overwhelmed with self-regard and incapable of self-reform.

Some argue that wokeness is over, and they talk about vibes and shifts. But they never point to actual legislative or institutional change — because no such change is happening. Women still have dicks, America is still a “white supremacy,” all gays are queers, all cops are suspect, borders are racist, and oppression is omnipresent. These lies are still held as sacred truths by every major institution in America.

And with the case of Jason Arday, we have the apotheosis of this moral and intellectual rot.

. . . I’ve spent the last decade tilting against [these cults] — and it has seemed pointless half the time, as the Trump faction has doubled down on its hero at the expense of our Constitution, and the woke have kidnapped the culture at the expense of our liberalism. But lies always fail in the end. And in the quiet these days, you can hear them dying. Our task now is to ensure that whatever follows both of these noxious, illiberal cults is something rooted in empirical truth, everyday English, and constructive solutions to our common problems.

His confidence (“know hope,” he says unconvincingly) is that wokeness is build on lies and lies always fail.  Well, it may take a while. . .

*The NYT has a lovely article on salticids (jumping spiders), with lots of movies and photos that I can’t reproduce, nor can you see the videos in the archived article (here).

Jumping spiders — a common variety of spider that lives on every continent except Antarctica and includes at least 6,000 species — have become social media’s tiniest and unlikeliest animal celebrities. Their popularity as pets has been fueled by their appeal on social media, where they appear in close up shots, perched on a human’s manicured fingernail, staring intently with eight penetrating, beady black eyes.

These arachnid social media stars have cute names like Bambi, Ivy, Juniper, Pumpkin and Flower. They do adorable things: tilting their heads to one side quizzically, curling up in their little web hammocks, waving their front legs above their heads as if hailing a taxi, crawling around miniature bakeries and supermarkets and watching mini toy TV sets while munching on live worms.

Their fans call them spooders, spoods and web puppies.

Some of these spider fanatics were once frightened of the animals they now lovingly live with. “I was terrified of them,” said Olivia Ontkean, 34, a dance teacher in Portland, Ore., who became “fully addicted” to spiders after conquering her phobia.

She now has close to 250 adult spiders in her home, and countless baby spiders, which she sells through her business, Dances With Spoods. Another spider convert, Joleen Hernandez, 39, a stay-at-home mother of five in Oakley, Calif., said social media changed her perception of spiders as scary and gross, and inspired her to get her own jumping spiders.

“My friends and family thought I was crazy,” she said. Common responses were “why” and “ew,” she added.

Spiders, long maligned as creepy or terrifying, have undergone a remarkable reputational makeover. It’s partly because, their fans say, they’re just such good content.

In an era when so much social media content is repetitive, trend-driven or sponsored by brands, the spooder-boomlet delivers a jolt of something different: a tiny fuzzy friend crawling across glittery gemstone nails, a spider no bigger than a coffee bean doing “uppies” (raising its front arms like a toddler asking to be picked up), then leaping onto a person’s hand.

. . .Spider aficionados say jumping spiders are the perfect arachnid ambassador: They’re small, curious and observant, and can often adapt to being handled by humans.

“People are really just discovering how clever and charming these animals are,” said Nathan Morehouse, an ecologist and associate professor at the University of Cincinnati, who studies jumping spiders. “If you as a person are interacting with them as a pet, you quickly begin to realize they’re paying attention to you very closely.”

I’d love to have one of these, but they don’t live all that long and I wouldn’t want to get attached to something that dies too soon. I’ve put a video of a pet salticid below, but if you’re considering getting one, also watch this video of the pros and cons of having a salticid.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, it’s the same old-same old for Hili’s and Andrzej’s lunch:

Andrzej: Are we repeating yesterday’s lunch today?
HilI: This is beginning to look like an epidemic of plagiarism.

In Polish:

Ja: Robimy dziś powtórkę wczorajszego obiadu?
Hili: To zakrawa na plagę plagiatów.

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

From Divy:

From Funny and Strange Signs:

From Things With Faces: not a cow!

From Masih; they’re coming for women’s legs in Iran. “And put your headscarf on, too.”

A woman waiting at bus stop in northern Iran. Her crime? Wearing shorts.
A hijabi woman attacks her. Police arrive and force her to put on pants in the street.

They cannot keep the hijab on Iranian women’s heads. Now they’re coming for their legs pic.twitter.com/wwabOzc9Fh

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) August 9, 2026

From Luana. I’ll highlight the Atlantic review later today, along with other reviews.

The Atlantic reads Jason Arday’s memoir, and finds his life story was even more inspirational than we thought

He was beaten so badly as a teen he became an epileptic. When the boys who did this were caught, he magnanimously told the judge he didn’t want them to go to prison.… pic.twitter.com/RsJaVd7AOz

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) August 6, 2026

The Number Ten Cat gets petted:

Everything is right in the world when you’re stroking a cat https://t.co/3LAS7xSA10

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) August 7, 2026

From Malcolm, a lovely fountain (the sphere has to be pretty spherical, though):

A kugel fountain is a water feature or sculpture where a sphere sits in a fitted hollow in a pedestal, and is supported by aquaplaning on a thin film of water. pic.twitter.com/miZxHGxzqa

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) August 1, 2026

One from my feed, and this is new to me:

This is fore-edge painting: a scene hidden in a book's gilded edge, invisible until you fan the pages just right. Here it meets Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

— Digital Brain (@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social) 2026-08-09T13:41:50.000Z

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz. He was 12 years old. https://t.co/u8lDDHYHtH

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) August 10, 2026

And two from Herr Doktor Professor Cobb. First, one skunk chasing another:

More from my trail camera 🤣🦨🦊 youtube.com/shorts/mtvJh…

— Wildmaven (@wildmaven.bsky.social) 2026-08-08T23:52:39.011Z

Of this Doktor Cobb says, “Look at that snoot!”

Snack time with Tilli the aardvark! 💖📹: Animal care staff Alex

— Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium (@ptdefiancezoo.bsky.social) 2026-08-08T00:47:37.144Z