Monday: Hili dialogue

August 17, 2026 • 6:45 am

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.

Here’s the first photo in: Kira’s black cat named “Gitel”:

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 prosecution can—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:

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

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

From Malcolm. Oy!:

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

Is this “genocide”?

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

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

28 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. In utterly depressing news from the UK, a retired policeman has been convicted of a criminal offense and fined £1000 for re-posting a joke on Facebook. (link)

    The criminal words were: “Fun facts about Bacon!” People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!”

    [Someone posted on X/Twitter that Elon Musk should buy the UK to restore free speech here; he replied by asking how much it was. Personally I’m all in favour.]

    Reply

    1. I hope his appeal is successful, though it’s shocking that anyone in the west would be convicted in the first place.
      Also troubling is the fact that the person who complained about it to police in the first place was his non-Muslim neighbor, with whom he had previously had an unrelated disagreement.
      Dangerous territory.

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    3. Oh for cryin’ out loud.
      What in the name of sanity is happening in the UK?
      In theory, this joke could also be considered antisemitic, as bacon is also forbidden for Jews. So… as a Jew, am I offended? Given all the real problems of antisemitism, worrying about something like this is downright stupid, and criminalizing jokes and speech, when there are very real problems, is a sign of societal dysfunction. Especially when one considers that a man died recently because of police dysfunction (because of “racial sensitivity”) caused by political direction.

      Reply

        1. That is, as we say, a whole ‘nother level.
          As far as I know, there is only one religion whose members riot over presumed slights to their religious figures. Imagine, for example, the response if a Michelangelo would make a sculpture of Muhammad as opposed to one of Moses? Do you think that said sculpture would survive for hundreds of years?

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  2. NY’s Double Jeopardy rule is indeed strange, but he’ll still go “up the river” for a long time.

    With Luigi M., when you do a crime like he did there are numerous jurisdictional hooks than can hoist you on your own life sentence.

    Did he use a phone or internet? You can have fed jurisdiction then: “Interstate commerce” nexus.

    Who arrested him, State or Feds? Often nabbing the dirtbag ensures jurisdiction.

    The Drivers License forgery can bang him up for awhile. And in NY the gun crimes will wreck him. We’re not a pro-gun state. I used to groan whenever a gun was involved.

    Once I had a client who stole a police car in a fit of youthful excitement, as you do.
    The biggest charge was a firearms one b/c cops keep shotguns in their trunks. That borrowed a decade of his life upstate.

    Similarly, if you steal a purse and there’s a credit card in it, the card is an “access device” and sentences can get very serious then.

    Hopefully they bury that man under a granite mountain somewhere far from us!

    D.A. (J.D.)
    NYC

    Reply

  3. My mother once bought a box of number 3 pencils by mistake. The poor woman never heard the end of it.

    What a thrill to see Baez hit three homers on his first three at bats. It’s a marvel how the Dominican Republic punches so far over its weight when it comes to baseball. And the funny thing is that he moved to Boston when he was 12. In fact, the only thing that could have made his debut any better would have been if he’d been picked up by the Red Sox. Boston would have lost its mind.

    Reply

    1. And they pitched to him on his fourth and final at bat. Maybe not taking the rookie seriously. But he made good contact, hitting a line drive out to left field.

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  5. Just this year, I was converted from long dedication to Ticonderoga pencils to Paper Mate mechanical pencils with 0.7mm lead. The entire pencil experience is simply better, imo.

    Reply

    2. I was coming down here to comment about pencils, as well.

      While I used to buy somewhat fancy mechanical pencils in my younger days, I realized I was forever misplacing and losing them, so I instead started buying those cheap disposable Bic ones. Honestly, they still write just fine. And I don’t worry at all if I lose one, or run over one with the rollers of my chair.

      I do favor 0.5 mm for normal writing. I write small, and 0.7mm is just too fat. However, I do have a pack of 0.7mm for handyman projects. Sturdy enough to make marks on wood. And always sharp, unlike the carpenters’ pencils my dad used to use. (And even more prone to accidental breakage than my office pencils – so I definitely want the cheap ones, there.)

      Reply

  6. Other notable records set or tied in an MLB debut include:
    Most strikeouts in a debut (tied): 15, by Karl Spooner (Sept. 22, 1954) and J.R. Richard (Sept. 5, 1971).
    Most RBIs in a debut: 6, by Starlin Castro (May 7, 2010).
    No-hit debut: Bumpus Jones (Oct. 15, 1892) is the only pitcher to throw a complete-game no-hitter in his absolute major league debut.

    Reply

    1. I don’t know but sometimes I think your debut is your best chance at some of these individual performances, because the other teams don’t have a book on you yet…nobody knows your weaknesses to exploit them in your first appearance.

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  7. Kendi writes: “The death of Jason Arday hit so close to home…”

    That sounds like a confession of fraud.

    Reply

    2. I am going to say I agree with that, but also that this kind of fabulism is definitely not confined to people like Arday.

      I stumbled across an ongoing investigation in the portion of the online classical music community that looks into obscure composers to see if their music was any good.

      One of these was Hans Franke (1882 – 1971) a Dresden area composer who claimed to have composed over 800 works, most of which had been destroyed when Dresden was bombed in 1945.

      In 2024 it was discovered that two orchestral works recorded in 2008 were in fact stolen from other obscure composers. Instigating these has led to the suspicion that not only are most if not all of the 97 compositions he claimed to have survived the Dresden bombing the work of others but that the composer biography published in the 1990s and based on statements made by the composer as relayed through his descendants is largely fictitious.

      The parallels with Arday are obvious, but this guy never got into a position to do real damage just humiliated his descendants and created a big mess to be sorted out by others.

      Reply

      1. Caught! But not in his lifetime.

        Nowadays, fakers will be using AI. It’s already a big problem in books.

        In an article on AI in books someone wondered if AI will eventually get good enough to write, say a romance novel that people would actually like.

        Reply

        1. An AI-generated romance novel would probably be more like the classic spoof “Naked Came the Stranger” (which was followed by the sequel “Naked Came the Manatee”)!

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    3. The angst felt by Kendi is not because he is worried about accusations of plagiarism. It is because he is worried that the field of study that he pioneered and popularized (looking at the world through the single lens of racism) may well be on the way to being delegitimized. If one of the stars of that field could not produce anything original, what does that say about the subject itself? Perhaps Western society is not based exclusively on racism? Perhaps Kendi’s body of work, glorified by academia, is no more valid than Arday’s?

      Reply

      1. IMO to avoid provoking yet more dubious Racism accusations, instead of discarding the Kendian anti-racism field just move it over to Divinity School or somewhere else where once-unquestioned dogmas are still taught. Maybe do the same for a lot of cultural anthropology subfields, and for the current identitarian crapola.

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  8. I do think of the IDF soldiers, how (most) Israeli young adults serve in the IDF and how they remain ready to serve at a moment’s notice.

    In The Genius of Israel, Dan Senor and Saul Singer discuss how military service in Israel functions to help build a people who are practical, cohesive (despite their political differences), have a shared identity, and are committed to something larger than themselves—the defense of the State of Israel. The book offers a very interesting perspective on how the value of military service in Israel extends well beyond the obvious.

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  9. Jed Rubenfeld is the husband of Amy Chua. She is a legend (at least to me) for writing “World on Fire” and “Tiger Mom”. She was a mentor to J.D. Vance. She is the daughter of the very famous (to me) Len Chua. He helped to invent transistor theory.

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  10. “Is this “genocide”?”

    No but it’s “forced displacement” so still a war crime according to Amnesty, HRW, Oxfam, etc.🤦🤦🤦

    Reply

  11. “boldly liberal”??? “Bold” maybe, but the self-styled “progressive” Islamo-Socialist alliance is not the least bit “liberal”.

    Reply

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