Monday: Hili dialogue

Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s back to work we go.  Yes, it’s another Monday and the beginning of the “work” week for those who take weekends off; to be precise it’s August 17, 2026 and National #2 Pencil Day, celebrating the only pencil worth using. (I cannot abide mechanical pencils.) Here’s how they’re made, but the process is the same for the unusable #1 and #3 pencils, too. This ten-minute video is quite informative, showing that the pencil number depends on the ratio of graphite to clay in the pencil’s core.

It’s also Baby Boomers Recognition Day, Cupcake Day (in Australia), National Black Cat Appreciation Day (if you have one, the first person to send me a photo will have it posted here), National Pineapple Juice Day, National Vanilla Custard Day, and World Eggplant Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 17 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal describes the toll that constant fighting is taking on the IDF. The piece is called “The price of showing up.”

It’s Sunday, August 16, and “I met a young conscript during reserve duty who told me he could not see any future,” said Ori Oberman, a reservist and one of the authors of a new Taub Center study examining the expected impact of prolonged service on reservists and their families. “The young soldier knows that once he is discharged, he will be called up for reserve duty again and again. He cannot see his future.”

It’s been over 1,000 days since October 7, and for many, the time has been marked by days back and forth from reserve duty, some serving as many as 400 days—more than a year. The average reservist, who served 233 days, is expected to lose nearly 5 percent of their salary in the long term, the report reveals. Among reservists who are fathers and served between 290 and 320 days—a population the researchers said numbers more than 100,000 people—the expected salary loss is about 6 percent. Under more severe estimates, the damage to wages could reach about 20 percent. These are prime working years, drawn from the most productive stretch of a working life.

Among salaried spouses, 30 percent reported a hit to their pay and 3 percent were simply fired. Among the self-employed, 73 percent said their business suffered. And non-employment among reservists’ spouses jumped 40 percent between the autumn of 2023 and the spring of 2025—while the comparable figure for women whose partners stayed home didn’t move at all.

Roughly 70,000 students served in 2024/25. Among Jews and others, enrollment dropped below its 2018/19 baseline for the first time—and it fell hardest on women aged 22 to 24 and men aged 25 to 29, the very ages that set the academic and professional track for life.

. . . Underneath it all sits Israel’s version of the “affordability” issue—a pressure most families are feeling that politicians believe will be the hinge issue of the election; fitting for a country in which cost of living has always been secondary to security in voting priorities. Every party, with the notable exception of the ultra-Orthodox, has signaled toward easing the burden: financial compensation, housing benefits, promises of Haredi service. The war on all fronts will likely not be changed by the election, but the conditions of service likely will be—regardless of who wins.

. .  After many of America’s recent wars, the question that greeted returning soldiers was how to relate to those who had sacrificed for a conflict that was deemed unnecessary or was simply unpopular. Israel’s question is simpler and harder: how to keep asking for sacrifice without breaking the people who answer.

How often do people wonder about the conditions under which the IDF works, including the requirement that reservists have to serve if needed? On top of that, they are demonized everywhere they go outside of Israel. At least Israel should make the ultra-Orthodox serve, as there is no excuse for making the hyper-religious exempt from defending their country. You don’t defend it by reading the Torah.

*The NYT asks the now-tedious yet distressing question, “Is the Democratic Party having a Tea Party moment?” (Article archived here.)

A movement of young, progressive outsiders has stormed Democratic politics this year, sparking a wave of contentious primary contests across the country and fueling a fraught debate over whether these new, left-wing candidates are remaking the party in their image.

But as primary season winds to a close, the results reveal not only the strength but also the potential limitations of this insurgent movement.

In Minnesota last week, Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor, won a Senate primary by a double-digit margin, pressing a fiercely progressive message to defeat a more moderate opponent. Just a week earlier, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a left-leaning Democrat, won a Senate primary in Michigan despite being vastly outspent. And Francesca Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, came close to winning a primary for governor in Wisconsin, falling short by less than one percentage point.

The results marked a new level of political strength for candidates affiliated with a resurgent, activist left, showing that their movement can be competitive in statewide primaries, well beyond deep-blue House districts.

. . .Yet while a vocal group of strategists, activists and college-educated voters have raced to embrace these pugnacious, boldly liberal — and in some cases untested — candidates, some of the voters who have historically been most crucial to the party’s fortunes remain skeptical.

In Michigan and Wisconsin, both pivotal battleground states, the progressive candidates appeared to have struggled to sway voters who have long been the backbone of the party — including Black, more moderate and older Americans who vote reliably.

As left-wing candidates have notched victories in primary after primary, many progressives hope they will be able to move the Democratic Party further to the left—mirroring, in some ways, how the rise of the Tea Party movement nearly two decades ago pushed the Republican Party much further to the right. But the results raise questions about whether these candidates can piece together a broad enough coalition of Democrats, independents and moderates to win general elections in swing states that could determine whether Democrats are able to regain power in Congress and, eventually, the White House.

. . . The candidates share some unifying principles: Support for “Medicare for all,” opposition to A.I. data centers, a commitment to ending corporate money in politics and a view that opposition to American support for Israel is a moral litmus test, fueled by a belief that the Gaza war amounted to a genocide.\

Not really much new here: progressives have won a surprisingly large number of races, but many of those are primary races. I’d vote for most progressives over nearly all Republicans, but I’d rather not hold my nose when I vote.  I tend to adhere to what’s near the end of this article:

“People are less willing to trust the political class and what we think is electable,” said Lauren Hitt, a Democratic strategist who has worked for candidates across the ideological spectrum. “They’re looking for people who break the mold, but if you break the mold so much that you’re eccentric, that’s not the solution either.”

*At the Free Press, Jed Jed Rubenfeld (a professor of law at Yale), claims that “Mangione pleaded guilty to stalking. He’s still on the hook for murder,” something that people here have argued about. (The federal and state charges are said by some to constitute prohibited double jeopardy.) So can there be a state trial for second-degree murder?  Rubenfeld says the answer may be “yes”:

Technically, while Mangione admitted stalking resulting in the death of Thompson, he did not plead guilty to killing him, because that was not the charge he faced in federal court. (There were murder charges in the original federal indictment, but those charges were dismissed on technical grounds back in January.) Instead, Mangione pleaded guilty to “stalking” Thompson with the intent of killing him.

We don’t know yet what sentence Mangione will receive. What we do know is that Mangione’s New York state court murder trial is set to begin on September 8. The timing of the surprise federal guilty plea strongly suggests that Mangione’s lawyers intend to argue that the state trial is now barred by double jeopardy, and according to some reports, they have already filed motion papers on this basis seeking dismissal of the state charges. “One plus one is two,” Mangione told reporters last February. “This is double jeopardy by any common-sense definition.”

It’s a little complicated, but I think this argument is a loser.

Rubenfeld then discusses Mangione’s “fawning supporters,” a group that is utterly despicable. He’s got thousands of love letters from women, and Rubenfeld doesn’t think Mangione’s guilty plea will turn them off. After all, the evidence against him seemed pretty strong.  At first it looks as if Mangione has a good case against double jeopardy:

The U.S. Constitution’s Double Jeopardy Clause protects people from being convicted twice for the same offense. On its face, that might seem to apply to Mangione.

But as a constitutional matter, Mangione’s federal guilty plea has absolutely no effect on his New York trial. This rule is called the “dual sovereignty” doctrine. Because the United States and New York are different governments—different “sovereigns”—federal crimes and state crimes are different offenses for constitutional purposes, and the Double Jeopardy Clause therefore does not apply.

But Mangione has another, stronger argument—under state law. States are allowed to give people more protection than the federal Constitution does, and New York happens to have an unusual double jeopardy statute that does so. Under New York’s statute, the dual sovereignty doctrine does not apply. If a person pleads guilty to a crime in federal court, the state can’t prosecute him for the very same crime in a state court.

The argument is a bit convoluted:

But wait—Mangione is set to be tried for murder in state court, and he didn’t plead guilty to murder in federal court. He pleaded guilty to stalking resulting in death, which is not the same crime. It’s not crystal clear whether those crimes should be considered separate under New York law. The question under New York’s statute will probably boil down to whether the crimes he’s charged with in the state prosecution are “designed to prevent very different kinds of harm or evil” as compared to the crime he pleaded guilty to in federal court. And murder seems pretty clearly to be a harm or evil very different from stalking—even stalking with intent to kill.

There’s a wrinkle though. The federal stalking statutes permit a much more severe sentence—life imprisonment—if the victim dies, and as a result, Mangione’s lawyers will probably argue that the “harm” the federal stalking statute is aimed at is not only stalking, but also killing. It’s conceivable a state judge might buy this argument, but I doubt it.

The death-of-the-victim provision in the federal statute is a penalty enhancement. The underlying crime—the crime to which Mangione just pleaded guilty—remains stalking, not murder, and stalking remains a “very different kind of harm or evil” than intentional murder. For this reason, the judge in Mangione’s state prosecutioncan—and in my opinion should—hold that Mangione can still be tried for murder despite his guilty plea in federal court.

And there’s more in favor of a state trial:

. . .Putting aside the state murder charge, there are other charges that can almost certainly still go forward in state court. Mangione’s state indictment accuses him not only of murder, but also of a host of gun crimes as well as forgery of a driver’s license. These crimes carry various possible sentences, which, if imposed consecutively, could amount to decades to prison.

In other words, even if the state murder charge were dismissed as double jeopardy (which in my opinion would be a mistake), Mangione still faces serious legal jeopardy in his state court prosecution.

There you have it: from a lawyer’s mouth.  One way or another, Mangione will probably spend the rest of his life in prison, and the love letters will be received behind bars.

*St. Louis Cardinals rookie outfielder Josh Báez did something amazing yesterday, and a first for Major League Baseball: he hit three home runs in his first three times at bat in his debut game, something never accomplished before in the big leagues. And he’s with my favorite team (I was born in St. Louis and inherited my love of the team from my dad.) He hit them against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. It’s a rare accomplishment for any player to hit four homers in a game (and that’s the single-game record, but we haven’t seen three in a row for a rookie debut! I don’t know of any other player who set a MLB record in his first game.  From ESPN:

Cardinals outfielder Joshua Baez smashed the first pitch he saw in the majors about 450 feet then flashed a grin to the St. Louis dugout as he began his home run trot.

“There was a calmness and a smile, like, ‘I’m here,'” Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol said. “It’s rare for me to pick my head up to enjoy parts of it. He didn’t exactly give us an option but to actually take a step back and enjoy the heck out of what was going on there.”

There has never been a show quite like it.

Baez, 23, became the first player to hit a home run in each of his first three at-bats in the majors, leading St. Louis to an 8-4 victory over the Chicago Cubs on Saturday.

Called up from Triple-A Memphis before the game, Baez had 30 family members in attendance at Wrigley Field. The traveling party, which included his mother, Yris, gathered on the field for photos afterward despite rain.

“It’s just unreal,” said Baez, the fourth-ranked prospect in the Cardinals’ system and No. 93 overall, according to ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel. “To not only get a hit but three home runs? It’s crazy.”

He did it with flair too.

The first came on the first pitch he saw from Matthew Boyd and landed an estimated 449 feet away in the left-center bleachers. It was the third-longest homer in a player’s MLB debut since ESPN began tracking home run distances in 2006. Only Jason Heyward (476 feet) in 2010 and Aaron Judge (457 feet) in 2016 had longer shots.

Baez’s next at-bat ended with a solo shot down the left-field line, and the third, on his ensuing at-bat, went the opposite way, giving him five RBIs.

“He hit three different pitches for home runs. He had a great game. He beat us, for sure,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said.

Thirty family members in attendance! You can’t be happier than that, can you!  I wish Báez luck in helping my Cardinals, whose performance this season has been so-so.

Here’s the feat:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s remembering her friendship with the late d*g Cyrus:

Andrzej: Penny for your thoughts.
Hili: I was remembering the walks Cyrus and I used to take to the river.

And do you remember Carol Piller’s polka/klezmer song, “Hili and Cyrus”, first posted here. and put below. It’s a fabulous song—with photos:

In Polish:

Ja: Grosz za twoje myśli.
Hili: Przypomniały mi się spacery nad rzekę z Cyrusem.

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

From Kitty Litterposting:

From the Dover Public Library, which has a great sense of humor:

From Meow Incorporated:

From Masih: yet another young protestor killed by the state in Iran:

I am sorry, Shahram. Until they hanged you this morning, I didn’t know your name. I didn’t even have your photo.

That is exactly what the Islamic Republic wanted.

This is Shahram Sadeghi. A young protester from the January uprising. Arrested. Tortured. Hanged at dawn, after the… pic.twitter.com/vxlRxLj41g

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) August 16, 2026

From Jay, and I think it’s real. Uncle Lynx is a bit portly, though!

When uncle lynx comes to visit pic.twitter.com/MVD99NRdvh

— Nature Unedited (@NatureUnedited) August 14, 2026

From Jeff Maurer. How about one that says, “We eat chalk”?

Outstanding designs! Can you make one that says “Great At Slogans, Shit At Policy”? https://t.co/HLPgTdj08W

— Jeff Maurer (@JeffMightBWrong) August 16, 2026

From Malcolm. Oy!:

Dozens of fishermen have lost fingers (and worse) to wolffish… even after the fish was dead and decapitated.

The head can still bite down hard for a long time thanks to powerful jaws and lingering neuromuscular reflexes. pic.twitter.com/E4mGLV9Dp9

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 28, 2026

Two from my feed. First, Ibram Kendi defends the late Jason Arday, but McWhorter calls Kendi out (see Kendi’s article here):

No engagement with the arrant lies, the massive plagiarism, the airy public addresses. Kendi thinks all of that is okay if you’re Black (and have dreadlocks) and that Arday was still a legitimate academic seized upon because of his color.

Kendi thinks Blackness exempts one from… https://t.co/BvUtVe2M1B

— John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) August 16, 2026

Is this “genocide”?

On This Day — August 15, 2005

Israeli soldiers and police began forcibly removing the last Jewish residents from Gaza under Ariel Sharon’s Disengagement Plan.

Almost 9,000 Jews from 21 communities were evacuated. Families were carried out of their homes. Synagogues were… pic.twitter.com/77OPzWQE3m

— Captain Allen (@CptAllenHistory) August 15, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was eight years old. https://t.co/dfpXW9o11k

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) August 17, 2026

And one from Doctor Cobb: a beautiful video of rays swimming:

The way the morning sun's rays lit up this pair of big, beautiful Spotted Eagle Rays yesterday at the beach near Clearwater, Florida. #nature #animals #wildlife #rays #florida

— See Through Canoe (@seethroughcanoe.bsky.social) 2026-08-16T12:08:39.263Z