Friday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to the tail end o’ the week, for it’s Friday, August 21, 2026, and National Senior Citizen’s Day.

Below you can see a senior citizen spending the night with an orphan duckling in 2022, as the rehab people couldn’t take the duckling until the morning.  I couldn’t put it in a box with food and water as when I did that it peeped constantly for its mother, so I spent a sleepless night with the duckling on my chest (I covered it with my hand as that resembled a mother’s wing) or in my armpit.  And of course I got no sleep because I was afraid of crushing it. This is a selfie, and I’m exhausted, unshaven, and need a haircut. (Duck tending is an exhausting and dangerous job.)

And here are my ducks (or rather Miss Duck and her brood) yesterday morning, waiting for a senior citizen to feed them. Look at them! Four weeks ago they looked just like the duckling above. They are now no longer ducklings, but adolescent ducks:

It’s also National Kool-Aid Day (originally called Fruit Smack, it was put in powder form in 1927) National Spumoni Day, National Men’s Grooming Day (see above to learn what to avoid), National Sweet Tea Day, and National Brazilian Blowout Day, which is this:

The process involves washing hair with a clarifying shampoo to remove buildup, applying product, blow drying hair, and sealing the product with a flat iron. By doing this, a protective protein layer covers the shafts of hair and amino acids help repair damage. The whole process takes about ninety minutes to complete.

There’s even a Wikipedia page on the process, also called “Brazilian Hair Straightening”.

This is post #32,000 on this site, as when I tweaked the draft this morning, I noticed this on my dashboard:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal discusses the threat Syria and Turkey now pose to Israel, and one that Israel has begun addressing with weapons.

For the first time since March, Israeli jets struck deep inside Syria on Tuesday, cratering the Abu al-Duhur airbase to head off a Turkish deployment. Israel and Turkey had reached an understanding in Azerbaijan, drawing a line—physical and qualitative—past which Turkey wouldn’t move its forces. When Turkey looked set to cross it, Netanyahu says he sent Damascus a one-word message: “Don’t.” Unlike Biden, who aimed the word at Iran and watched it ignored, Israel attached consequences.

. . . . Both strikes hit two Islamists with one bomb. When Assad fell in December 2024, Israel was wary of the former al-Qaida member’s connections to Turkey, and of al-Qaida itself. The bombing campaign and the expansion of the security zone that followed were intended to blunt the capabilities of any future force on the northern border, Turkish or Syrian.

Neither has given much reason for confidence since. Just this week, Syrian army soldiers assembled outside the historic Damascus Citadel were filmed chanting: “I am coming for you, Jew … I will make your blood flow in rivers.” Not encouraging—and it overlapped with the first flight of Syrian fighter jets earlier this month. This is to be expected from a military built out of former terror-group members and foreign fighters, many of whom took part in the massacres of minority populations in 2025. Al-Sharaa has tried to balance his radical elements with a moderate face and integration into the international system. Whether his heart bleeds for a new, less radical Syria, or it is simply cover for the restoration of a caliphate, varies from pundit to pundit.

A similar situation holds in Turkey, whose President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been calling for the liberation of Jerusalem, accusing Israel of multiple genocides, and was reportedly on the verge of joining Operation Epic Fury on the side of Iran before Donald Trump talked him down. Turkey is determined to maintain a long-term presence in Syria. It is the primary engine rebuilding the Syrian army—reportedly set to supply UAVs, air defense systems and training—all the while inching closer and closer to Israeli territory.

Al-Sharaa said last month that Damascus is “actively working to reach a security agreement with Israel,” with several countries involved, and hopes it could be a gateway to comprehensive peace. Those talks are likely ongoing—but they have a silent third party: Turkey. U.S. envoy Tom Barrack has signaled he is working on a Turkey-Syria-Israel deconfliction framework, and while that is a start, a hotline to abort an unnecessary confrontation doesn’t change the facts on the ground. Israel will not allow Turkey to restrict its freedom of action; Turkey wants very much to do exactly that. There is no framework that easily squares those two.

George Bush famously said that after meeting Putin he had “looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy … I was able to get a sense of his soul.” He was wrong, but Israel does not run a similar risk with al-Sharaa or Erdoğan. It is not interested in parsing the souls of its enemies, only in what is in their hands. So long as new and dangerous capabilities arise on the northern border, the proxy war in Syria will continue. Israel’s geography guarantees that the threats you don’t deal with abroad, you will soon be fighting at home.

I have no idea why we seem to regard Turkey as an ally, or why it is still in NATO. It is becoming more and more an Islamist state, and though it does control vital routes (the Bosphorus and Dardanelles), it refused to help the U.S. in the war against Iran. And many, including me, don’t trust Erdogan at all.

*The Washington Post reports on how secularism and nonbelief are growing in Congress (h/t Andrew;’article archived here). It’s pretty good news:

When Rep. Jared Huffman came out publicly in 2017 as a “nonbeliever,” he was only the second member of Congress in modern times to do so — even though a quarter of U.S. residents identified as nonreligious.

Things have changed since for the secular cause on Capitol Hill.

The Freethought Caucus, which Huffman launched in 2018 to promote church-state separation, has grown to 37 members — more House lawmakers than the uber-conservative Freedom Caucus (32) or the Congressional Prayer Caucus (34), according to the platform LegiStorm.

And the percent of lawmakers who choose not to give a religious affiliation or say the unspecific “other” has more than doubled in the past decade, from 16 to 40.

Along the way Huffman, a Northern California Democrat who is a Humanist, has become a kind of national spokesperson for promoting a secular government. And as some data shows many Americans increasingly displeased with the way religion and politics are mixing, he sees an opportunity for his cause, and for his party.

“I think the game has changed,” Huffman said. “Republicans have made a losing bet. Democrats need to understand that and be ready to connect.”

The data is somewhat more complex. Chip Rotolo, senior researcher at Pew Research, said growing majorities of Americans want congregations and pastors to stay out of partisan politics but also approve of some unspecific religiosity having influence in public life.

“It does seem people are more reluctant to see [organized religion] engaging with politics.” Rotolo said. “But at a national level they’d like to see ‘religious values,’ broadly spoken, incorporated.”

But incorporated in what? If it’s in any arm of the government, it’s a violation of the First Amendment, which privileges nonbelief as much as any specific belief. I was happy to see, though, that there is a Freethought Caucus in the House, though that’s only 8½ percent: a third of the percentage of Americans who are “nones.” As always, it doesn’t help politicians to declare that they’re atheists; better to say you “don’t have a religious affiliation.”  Although Trump pretends to be religious, I bet dollars to wafers he’s really an atheist.

*Bret Stephens at the NYT has an op-ed column called “Yes, Woke 1.0 was crazy. Now where’s the accountability?” (article archived here). What kind of accountability is he talking about. He explains:

“Woke 1.0 was crazy,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said this month, quoting a far-left New York City councilman. Given the congresswoman’s own record — she previously insisted that some groups “have no choice but to riot,” called for defunding the police and “prison abolition” and used the demeaning term “menstruating person” to describe a woman — the crazy that she speaks of was also her own.

Good for A.O.C. for acknowledging mistakes. Now can we have some accountability for the vast damage that Woke 1.0 did, not to mention the damage that Woke 2.0 continues to do?

“Mistakes”?  AOC’s “mistakes” were about as real as a convicted criminal trying to get a lighter sentence by admitting he made a “mistake.” AOC (see below) is trying to get more popular support because she’s ambitious. But I digress. Here’s some of the damage and the reparations that Stephens wants:

Wokeness, as it commonly came to be known at the start of this decade, wasn’t just an Orwellian linguistic fad or a tedious set of corporate training sessions in cultural sensitivity or wacky policy ideas about addressing racial and socioeconomic inequities. As it was experienced by those on the wrong end of it, it was a system of enforced ideological conformity, policed by social bullying and institutional coercion (or cravenness), which damaged and sometimes even ended reputations, careers and at least one man’s life.

Restitution, if only in the form of honest contrition and perhaps even a public apology, is in order.

I’ll give two examples where Stephens thinks restitution is in order, but the article is archived and you can read all of them at the link above:

Restitution for authors, like my friend Richard North Patterson, who has 16 New York Times best sellers to his name. When he wrote a novel that dealt with racial discrimination and had a Black woman as a leading (and wholly sympathetic) character, roughly 20 major imprints rejected it, with several making it clear it was because he was white. Restitution for every aspiring young fiction writer with the misfortune of being white and male and therefore quietly but efficiently cut out of the game of literary prizes and publication opportunities. As Jacob Savage noted last year in Compact magazine, his research found that at the time, “not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.”

Remember that my children’s book, Mr. Das and His Fifty Cats, wasn’t even shown by my agent to publishers because she decided that a non-Indian guy like me had no business writing a book about India, though it was definitely positive about India. (Is there a publisher out there?) More:

Restitution, also, in academia.

For Jason Kilborn, a University of Illinois, Chicago, law professor, who was barred from campus and placed on administrative leave after he had used the first letter of two slurs in his civil procedure exam, an affront the Black Law Students Association described as “mental terrorism.” For Ilya Shapiro, a legal scholar about to start a position at Georgetown Law School, who had to endure a 122-day university inquest for the crime of a clumsy tweet betraying a conservative worldview. For Carole Hooven, who was railroaded out of Harvard after a TV appearance in which she said that the terms “male” and “female” were scientifically essential even as she insisted that “facts about biology” shouldn’t “prevent us from treating people with respect.”

As noted above, Stephens doesn’t suggest monetary compensation, which would be impossible to determine, but “honest contrition and perhaps even a public apology.” Wokesters don’t have honest contrition, but at least can tender a public apology. Here’s how Stephens winds up his op-ed:

If liberals want to be serious about standing up for liberty, they have a particular obligation to acknowledge and reject the illiberalism that swept so much of the left in recent years. Any politics of moral certitude and promiscuous demonization — whether it comes from MAGA on the right or wokeness on the left — isn’t just unfit for a free society.

He’s right about that, and, if wokeness really is disappearing (I’m dubious), it’s time for people to apologize, and not in the dishonest, careerist manner of AOC.

*Speaking of which, this goes in the category of Articles That Should Not be Written as They Could Cause Substantial Harm. It’s from Mark Halperin at the Free Press, and is called “How AOC could win the Presidential nomination.”

For some time now, the smart money has said that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will pass on a White House run in 2028. Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat will beckon in two years, but the 36-year-old AOC, with a millennial’s ingrained desire for a proper work-life balance, may sit that one out too. It would be understandable, even rational, for her to wait another quadrennial cycle to make her next big move.

But in a Democratic field that lacks a front-runner—a field that might not settle on a favorite until late winter 2028—there is now a useful exercise to game out: What would a successful run for the Democratic nomination look like for this massive political talent?

Two mistakes right there, one in each paragraph.  Just because AOC froze her eggs doesn’t mean she has an ingrained desire now for a proper work=life balance. In fact, the longer she waits to unfreeze them, the less chance they will produce a fetus, and the more need there will be for a surrogate mother. Second, how on earth can AOC be deemed a “massive political talent”. Her talent lies in self-promotion via social media, and she’s accomplished little in Congress and completely lacks foreigh-policy experience. But again I digress. Here is Halperin’s “advice”:

Add to the mix the updated nomination calendar, the rise of the democratic socialists, the likely lineup of Democratic candidates, and AOC’s own recent professional and personal moves, and voilà—Ocasio-Cortez might have the cleanest and clearest path to the nomination of any Democrat. That’s in no small part because of a twin reality: Even as the super progressive wing of the party is ascendant and powerful, it paradoxically lacks an obvious presidential candidate to carry the banner. Besides AOC, the other two prospects are 84-year-old Bernie Sanders, viewed by most as too old to be a viable candidate, and California’s Ro Khanna, a House member with some appeal and a penchant for making news, but nothing like Ocasio-Cortez’s dazzling charisma and national following.

Let’s stop right there. AOC does not have dazzling charisma. Or rather, she may have it when she’s speaking from a script, but not when thinking on her feet or answering reporters’ questions:

AOC boasts three indispensable factors for a successful presidential race: national name recognition, the capacity to raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and insatiable media interest. Many other Democrats are so daunted by these needs that they decline to run or drop out early when they fail to achieve them. Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom are two potential candidates who have these advantages as well, but almost no one else in the field has even a single one. AOC would arrive at the starting gate with all three assets already in hand.

. . .AOC’s pragmatism has extended to a subtle retooling and refinement of her brand facade. She has dropped some of her more polarizing and outdated affectations, including the pronouns on her X account bio and her previous support for defunding the police. She tried to clear the decks with her recent merry catchall denigration of political correctness by characterizing “Woke 1” as “crazy,” casually shucking off a once-trendy and defining mantle that now has become constrictive and démodé.

I can barely manage to copy and paste this stuff. I see her behavior not as “pragmatism” but “careerism.” I’ll reproduce a bit more and quit:

This is where the AOC proposition gets much more complicated. Ocasio-Cortez has a set of principles, a political identity, established positions and passions. What she has not yet demonstrated is a theory of presidential leadership. Barack Obama had one. Bill Clinton had one. Ronald Reagan had one. Donald Trump has one. What AOC has so far is slogans: economic populism, generational change, and breaking the power of entrenched institutions. That is a pretty good basis for a symbolic movement, but not necessarily for a governing philosophy and the enactment of national laws and global decisions. Or for convincing fellow Democrats you are up to the task.

AOC’s recent “Woke 1 was crazy” comment revealed this flaw. Lightly dismissing woke as “crazy,” as if she vaguely observed the movement occurring far away on another planet, does not erase the truth. She was one of the most prominent political figures of the era. If some of those ideas were crazy, when did she decide that? Why? What did she learn? Which of her old positions does she still believe? Which ones doesn’t she? Those are not gotcha questions. They are questions voters will want to know the answers to.

The danger for Ocasio-Cortez is if her answers reveal that she is a more conventional politician than the AOC brand suggests—that, for instance, she is simply someone with a knack for pinpointing where spectacle and trends are in her party, and moves there with them. Authenticity is AOC’s main currency. She can’t afford to have it dented.

Now Halperin is on the rails, but he errs in thinking that AOC differs from being a “conventional politician”, someone able to morph into the flavor du jour. She has always been a conventional politician, but one dedicated to Democratic Socialism and able to wield social media. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing now. Trued, we should not totally dismiss AOC given the disasters being elected as Democratic candidates in other places, but read the comments on this FP article to see what people think about the piece (answer: not much).

*Two former NBA (National Basketball Association, a men’s league) have declared that they are women and want to be eligible for the draft of the WNBA: the Woman’s National Basketball Association. This is clearly a stunt to test the WNBA’s nonexistent definition of a “women” in the stipulation that “only women are allowed to play in the WNBA”, and the failure of the WNBA to come up with clarification at a recent meeting. (That failure is not surprising given public ignorance and the annoying tendency of the Left to characterize sex as a “spectrum.”)Over at his Substack Reality’s Last Stand, Colin Wright discusses this in a piece called, “Can the WNBA define a woman?”

What’s going on with women’s basketball?

Within the span of about a day, two former NBA players announced that they intend to enter the 2027 WNBA draft. Yes, the “W” NBA, where the W stands for “Women’s.” The first to announce his intentions was Enes Kanter Freedom, a 6-foot-10, 250-pound center who played in the NBA for 11 seasons and averaged 11.2 points and 7.8 rebounds per game. Then, on the heels of Freedom’s announcement, Royce White, a 6-foot-8, 270-pound former Houston Rockets first-round pick, announced similar plans.

Were these men struggling internally for years before feeling safe enough to announce their true female identities? Pride Month in June would have been an optimal time to do that. No, these men are instead making a timely political point. Freedom, in a video posted on X, said that after reviewing the eligibility guidelines, he was declaring himself a WNBA draft prospect. White was even more explicit, telling Fox News, “I’m just having a blast in my feminine era.”

The WNBA fracas was exacerbated by the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham, whose honesty (and bravery) I admire:

. . . By then, ESPN had already interviewed Cunningham for a lengthy feature. The viral finger-pointing episode had elevated her profile and turned her into one of the WNBA’s most recognizable personalities. The interview was released on July 21 and included Cunningham’s never-before-known views on males who identify as women competing in women’s sports. Cunningham wanted to “protect young girls” who should not be forced to compete against “biological men.” She harbored no hatred of transgender people, she said, but believed we can treat people with kindness while still being honest about sex differences. The following day, after her response had been officially drafted into the culture war, reporters gave her an opportunity to walk back or soften her remarks. “I said what I said,” she told them, while adding that her position was “common sense.”

Indeed, and a big majority of Americans agree with her. But journalists and academics (and apparently the WNBA) don’t want to say it out loud.  Ergo Royce and Freedom are going to test the system. In response, the WNBA must have a definition of “woman.”

Cunningham immediately transformed into one of the most prominent athletes calling to protect women’s sports. Her remarks set off a fight that the WNBA had mostly managed to avoid.

And the “stunt”, which is useful in this case:

All of this led to enhanced scrutiny over the WNBA’s eligibility criteria. Many sports organizations such as the International Olympic Committee, World Athletics, and World Rugby have tightened up their rules with explicit language after experiencing significant controversy with male athletes vying for inclusion. The WNBA is, obviously, supposed to be a women’s league. Its collective-bargaining agreement says that “players who are women” are eligible, though it contains no additional language about whether “women” refers to sex, gender identity, or a natural or medicalized physiological state. This is likely because the WNBA has yet to face a serious test case—until now.

On declaring himself eligible for the 2027 WNBA draft, Enes Kanter Freedom said, “If simply declaring who you are is all that’s required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA.” Royce White, since his announcement, has been describing himself as a “sometimes identifying transgender woman” and even a “Black trans lesbian with a penile aesthetic.”

It’s easy to call for inclusion, or feign ignorance about what a woman is, or claim not to know the purpose of women’s sports when presented with abstract hypotheticals. But the WNBA has just been presented with two very real, very large, and very male test cases.

Their declarations have been dismissed by many as “stunts.” And in one sense, of course, they are stunts. Neither Freedom nor White genuinely believes he is a woman with sudden desires to come out of retirement and play professional women’s basketball. They are deliberately creating a spectacle.

But stunts can be effective in highlighting absurdity and forcing clarity—in this case, about where the WNBA truly stands on transgender inclusion. Either the league blocks these men from playing, revealing that it understands what a woman is and why excluding males is necessary, or it lets them in, likely prompting a backlash so extreme that indifference on the “What is a woman?” question won’t be sustainable.

. . .In response to the announcements by Freedom and White, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert convened a task force of team presidents and general managers to discuss eligibility rules on August 12. The meeting apparently did not produce any clarification; discussions will continue over the “coming weeks and months,” the league says. However long that may take, the WNBA can no longer respond to concerns by asserting that only women are allowed to play in the women’s league. Everyone knows what the W stands for. The question—for some people, anyway—is how to define “woman.”

Most of us already know the answer. We’ll wait to see if the WNBA does.

If, as Kat Grant asserted on an FFRF essay, “A woman is whoever she says she is”, then how are they going to stop these men, clearly athletically qualified to play in the WNBA, from playing?

Here’s Cunningham, speaking intelligently and bravely about this “controversy”. Her remarks start one minute in:

And here’s Royce White advertising his new feminine side:

Royce White shared a photo of his new wig 😭 pic.twitter.com/5ypyOMWgPd

— BrickCenter (@BrickCenter_) August 9, 2026

*Finally, contrary to my expectation, Jason Arday’s autobiography Great and Unfortunate Things , published postmortem by Simon and Schuster on August 11, is neither selling that well nor is getting high ratings.  As of yesterday morning it ranked 2,704 among all books, which is hardly a best-seller, and the spectrum of reviews is below.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili claims to be working “at home”:

Hili: I love working remotely.
Andrzej: I can see that.

In Polish:

Hili: Uwielbiam pracę zdalną.
Ja: Właśnie widzę.

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

From Stacy, a useful figure:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Give Me a Sign:

From Masih, who points out the difference between nuns and women who “choose” to wear the hijab (really under compulsion):

STOP comparing Afghan women in burqas and Iranian women under compulsory hijab with Christian nuns.

This really isn’t complicated.

A nun chooses to become a nun. Her vow applies to her. She doesn’t take the vow and suddenly every woman in Italy has to cover her hair.

And if… pic.twitter.com/moX9qxJsU7

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) August 20, 2026

From Luana: Ghent University (where Cofnas, who revealed Arday’s plagiarism, moved to after leaving Cambridge) is investigating him for “discrimination.”

I am under investigation by my university for discriminating against Arday pic.twitter.com/mOyUPh2Y0B

— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) August 20, 2026

And Maarten’s sarcastic response (Boudry used to be at the University of Ghent):

Excellent work by @UGent. Now that a serious case of academic fraud has finally been exposed, it’s only fair to open an investigation into the only academic who had the audacity to blow the whistle, despite all the legal threats. “Ghent University has decided to take appropriate… pic.twitter.com/c0sQNNo9p2

— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) August 20, 2026

And again from Luana

I still can’t believe these lunatics. They really believe this. The professors are absolutely melting down. They have gone completely psychotic. pic.twitter.com/JPMHNbHiS9

— Kevin Bass (@kevinnbass) August 19, 2026

From Larry, who’s actually jealous of this skillful cat:

Big deal, I open my own tins sometimes https://t.co/NHsU1IqrbT

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) August 19, 2026

One from Malcolm. Sound up for this lovely, three-minute video:

Golden retriever puppy heals rescued kitten in just three days..🐕🐾🐈🥺😊 pic.twitter.com/XYF2LNvPMl

— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) August 5, 2026

One from my feed; I’m not sure why the crow would want to turn the water off after drinking, but perhaps it thinks that turning off is part of the whole process necessary to get water.

English translation of the French:

Crows are excellent at associating a specific action with a useful result. Once they discover that the movement of a handle produces water, they can remember the mechanism and repeat the behavior later. This crow even remembered the final step: turning it off when it was done.

Les corbeaux sont excellents pour associer une action spécifique à un résultat utile. Une fois qu’ils découvrent que le mouvement d’une poignée produit de l’eau, ils peuvent se souvenir du mécanisme et répéter le comportement plus tard. Ce corbeau s’est même rappelé la dernière… pic.twitter.com/hRAqAZcGkq

— 🇨🇵 Patrick 🇮🇹 ✨️✨️👀🌿🌿 (@UltraLevure83) August 19, 2026

And one I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Yugoslavian Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was almost two years old, and would have been 84 today had he lived. https://t.co/C9EeC9rLPO

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) August 21, 2026

Finally, one from Dr. Cobb, beavering away on his next book; flying peacocks:

Just some pretty peacocks to brighten your day: #AGoodPlaceSource: http://www.reddit.com/r/NatureIsFu…

— Michelle says: Be kind. Always. ❤️ (@snarkysillysad.bsky.social) 2026-08-20T15:11:03.307Z