Wednesday: Hili dialogue

August 26, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Аҳамп амш” in Abkhaz): Wednesday August 26, 2026 and Women’s Equality Day, which, as the site says (my bolding)

. . . commemorates the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibits denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. Prior to its adoption, women were not guaranteed the right to vote on the national level. The first time an amendment dedicated to women’s suffrage was introduced was in 1878, and similar amendments were introduced numerous times over the next 41 years until the House and Senate both approved the amendment in 1919. Then it needed to be approved by two-thirds of the states, and it was lobbied for by suffragists. On August 24, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state—and final state needed—to ratify it. On August 26, 1920, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed a proclamation that added the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

You can see the time line for this amendment, beginning in 1848 with the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, here.  And here are the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments that came from that convention, with the prime movers among “ladies” listed first:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CKXzBSKWwAEzQT8.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Cherry Popsicle Day, National McChicken Day (I’ve never had one), National Toilet Paper Day, and National D*g Day. (I thought the dog days ran from July 3 to August 11)

The Google Doodle is again a subtle gif about the national parks of America; click image to see where it goes:

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

Da Nooz:

*An intriguing title at the Washington Post, “I was a U.S. diplomat for 20 years. Now I see how the war in Iran could be won.” The author is Ludovic Hood, identified as “a former U.S. diplomat and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute,” and the article is archived here.

Twenty years of experience as an American diplomat has made me realize that no amount of diplomatic ingenuity can contain Iran. The United States should keep pushing until it gets the best outcome for American interests, the region and the Iranian people: the shattering of the illegitimate regime in Tehran.

Earlier in my career, in 2008, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah urged U.S. officials to “cut off the head of the snake” by attacking Iran’s nuclear program. The more I learned about the region, the more I agreed with the king’s characterization: The regime in Tehran bears overwhelming responsibility for the mayhem and misery in the Middle East since 1979, and its hold on power is a dire threat to regional stability.

. . .During my next assignment as the “Iran watcher” in Paris, I was privy to the Obama administration’s determined — and at times desperate — effort to sign a nuclear accord with Tehran. Iran’s negotiators were (and remain) savvy and cunning interlocutors who extracted U.S. concessions that concerned our French counterparts. My experiences in Paris and the Persian Gulf made me see the logic of Trump’s exit from the nuclear agreement and, during postings in Qatar and in the White House on the staff of Vice President Mike Pence, I witnessed the benefits of the president’s “maximum pressure” campaign. However, a variety of diplomatic considerations tempered the efficacy of the campaign, and the policy failed to yield to new talks, let alone a comprehensive deal. Uranium enrichment and missile production carried on.

Iran continued to sow havoc in the region. The mullahs might not have orchestrated Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, but IRGC know-how and hundreds of millions of dollars of funding over two decades enabled the rampage across southern Israel that killed more than 1,200 people, including 46 Americans. The Hamas attack marked an inflection point in the Middle East’s evolution: It ended tentative moves by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others to improve relations with Israel, and it transformed long-standing tensions in the Levant and Persian Gulf into inexorable and overlapping cycles of violence.

. . . The current showdown in the region is an inevitable result of the Iranian regime’s efforts to dominate the region through bullying, blackmail and terror. Iran’s rulers have shown time and again they will not accede to an arrangement that constrains their hegemonic aspirations.

The best outcome for the region — and for core U.S. interests — is the regime’s collapse. The Islamic republic is in terminal decline: Iran’s economy is in free fall, its leadership is in disarray, and the government does not have legitimacy with the people. A patient, sustained campaign of economic and military pressure, coupled with hard-nosed diplomacy supported by our regional partners, can strike a mortal blow to a regime that grows more brittle with each passing day.

But the American people don’t want a “patient, sustained campaign of economic and military pressure,” nor do our regional partners agree even with the diplomacy we’re supposedly exercising. The problems with this op-ed are twofold. First the American people don’t want a strategy like this and Trump doesn’t either given its effect on the midterms. Second, how do we exercise “military pressure”? Boots on the ground? That won’t work, so an important way of exerting leverage is out. Yes, I think this is a just war, but the U.S. strategy appears to do things that help Trump rather than bring down the Iranian theocracy and free its people.

*A group of grocers has sued New York City over Mamdani’s plan of low-price city-subsidized grocery stores, saying that it will actually hurt an important group of relatively poor people:

A local business group sued New York City and Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday over the mayor’s plan to open five government-owned grocery stores around the city.

The Multicultural Business Coalition, a nonprofit that represents supermarkets, grocery stores and bodegas, filed the lawsuit in the New York County Supreme Court, arguing that the plan would introduce unfair competition to a struggling local industry already dealing with slim profit margins. The coalition says that the plan will particularly harm immigrant- and minority-owned businesses.

Many members of the coalition “cannot compete with the municipal grocery stores, and therefore, will be put out of business,” the complaint reads.

At a news conference, the mayor said the subsidized stores reflect a cost-of-living crisis that has seen grocery prices increase by about 30% over the past few years.

“I am confident both in the legality of this, that it will stand up in court, and the importance of delivering it,” Mamdani said.

Mamdani floated the stores on the campaign trail as a part of his affordability agenda, arguing that subsidized supermarkets focused on cheap, healthy foods would help New Yorkers adapt to rapidly rising food costs. The stores, run by external operators but overseen by the city, would offer a core basket of staples at a 30% discount to market rates. Operators would get free rent and subsidies.

“For many, that 30% discount is the difference between an evening spent around the dinner table with family or working another double shift to make ends meet,” Mamdani said last month as officials announced the details of the proposal.

The mayor has allocated $70 million toward the stores. The city’s Economic Development Corporation says the city has roughly 1.5 square feet of grocery space per capita, compared with roughly 5-10 square feet elsewhere in the country. Mamdani says the plan might save New Yorkers $1,000 a year.

The plan has drawn a stream of criticism as concerns mount over the mayor’s relationship with the business world.

Officials are soliciting proposals from operators willing to run the stores. Applications are due in October, and the city has been leading tours of the facilities.

This is not good optics for Mayor Mamdani, what with the reasonable claim that they are going to put minority-run grocery stores out of business. What he is proposing is a form of grocery socialism, and he has not responded convincingly to that claim.

*In a Quillette article called “The beautiful and banned,” Josh Allen points out the difference between “the banned books promoted by celebrities and genuinely transgressive and provocative writing.” The celebrity he has in mind is singer/songwriter ua_Lipa.

. . . According to the American Library Association, “A book is banned when it is entirely removed from a collection in response to a formal or informal challenge.” The trouble with this definition is that it is generously inclusive; all it takes for a book to be classified a victim of institutional censorship—and for pundits across the world to raise a chorus of condemnation—is for it to be removed from one school library, as we saw in the case of a secondary school in Manchester late last year. The ALA definition does not include texts that booksellers refuse to stock, or the publication of which has been halted or made impossible by social pressures. Nor does it account for all the bold, daring, “unborn books” that will never see the light of day owing to the risk-averse—if not outright censorious—nature of modern publishing. In reality, book-banning in schools is generally an (ill-judged) attempt at safeguarding, not dissimilar to age-gating films, video games, or social media. That is very different to making a book unavailable to adults and children alike. By shifting the blame on to governments and educational authorities, publishers and bookshops are deflecting from their own role in narrowing the range of “acceptable” literature.

Dua Lipa’s latest project, the Manifesto Library, appears to perpetuate a similar misunderstanding of “banned books.” The collection is a partnership between Service95, Lipa’s online book club, and Livraria Lello, the bookshop in Porto where a hundred selected books will be displayed and sold. The Manifesto Library is described as:

[A] space that brings together titles that have been subject to public debate, some that take censorship itself as their subject and others that have provoked sustained, uncomfortable debate about race, gender, identity and political power.

Banned books are only one part of the collection, but the definition of a banned book manages to be at once hopelessly expansive and conveniently restrictive, including books that “have been prohibited from publication, stripped from school curricula or removed from library systems in an attempt to stop someone, somewhere from reading them”. So while One Hundred Years of Solitude has sold over 50 million copies and been translated into forty languages, its removal from a handful of libraries in America earns it the status of a “banned book.” The same goes for The Catcher in the Rye (65 million copies), Animal Farm (twenty million copies), and The Handmaid’s Tale (eight million copies), all of which were once banned by someone somewhere but are now taught on school syllabi and sit atop bestseller lists.

Have a look at the books at the link, many of which I’ve read, and they simply don’t fall into the class of books that have been widely banned and removed from many libraries.  At the Quillette link, there’s a photo of Dua Lipa looking like a cat that swallowed a canary (and making a “fish face”), holding up a copy of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale  (go see for yourself).

Did I really expect to see Dua Lipa pose for a selfie with The Camp of the Saints clutched in her hand? Or Renaud Camus’s Le Grand Remplacement? Or William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook? I didn’t, no. I would be surprised to see books like these within a mile of an anodyne collection like this one, compiled for casual readers and pop aficionados. The problem is not that Lipa is not promoting genuinely subversive material; it is that she is claiming to. The publishing world has always been proscriptive, as Vladimir Nabokov, D.H. Lawrence, and Henry Miller—all absent from Lipa’s list—would attest. The difference today is that it likes to pretend it isn’t.

Now this may be making a mountain out of a molehill, but I think the author has a point.  What banned books should represent is a widespread violation of the First Amendment: prohibition of books because they say something that “offends” people.  The bestsellers above can hardly be said to fall in that class.

*At least two of my friends will no longer watch professional football because they consider it too brutal. And it is, especially with the new announcement that at least a quarter of NFL players get CTE, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy: a progressive degenerative brain disease (article archived here).

Since the degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E. was first scientifically linked to football about 20 years ago, and as hundreds of former professional football players have been diagnosed with the disease after their deaths, a haunting question has lingered:

Just how many N.F.L. players will end up with C.T.E.?

New data provides a sobering indication: At least one in four of all the people who have played in the N.F.L. might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, according to a study of hundreds of cases over a recent six-year period.

Researchers considered every former N.F.L. player who died from 2016 to 2021. There were 878. Some died in their 20s, some in their 80s, most in between.

The study’s main finding was simple math: At least 215 of those 878 former players — 24.5 percent — had C.T.E.

The actual prevalence could be far higher. The roughly 25 percent rate does not consider the 643 brains that were not examined. Some of those, maybe many of them, likely had C.T.E. too.

C.T.E. is a progressive neurological disease caused by repeated impacts to the head. It can be definitively diagnosed only by examining the brain after death.

Studies have shown that the rate of C.T.E. in people who have not sustained repeated impacts to the head is nearly zero.

If the new study’s statistics were applied to today’s players — 1,696 on the league’s 32 regular-season rosters, not including more than 500 members of practice squads and those ineligible due to injury — at least 400 of them would be diagnosed with C.T.E.

. . .“We know what’s causing it,” said Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, the lead author of the study, the chief of brain injury rehabilitation at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. “It’s a neurodegenerative disease where we know and have complete control over the risk. And understanding the extent of that risk is one of the steps into making sure that we can mitigate and decrease that risk.”

Dr. Daneshvar said that the biggest predictor of C.T.E. is the cumulative force of hits to a head over a lifetime — including those sustained before reaching the N.F.L.

“We can change that cumulative force without changing the game of football,” he said, suggesting that children refrain from playing tackle football and that teams at all levels eliminate hits during practices.

I don’t know how they can change the cumulative force unless they eliminate head hits during games, not just in practice. Better helmet? Perhaps, but I don’t know which ones. Sadly, players now know the risk but go ahead and play, as many love the game and all love the money in the NFL. (It’s also a problem in rugby.) What’s the solution to the deadly side effects of a game that many Americans love to watch? I don’t know.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is serving as a reminder:

Hili: Don’t forget that you have to be at the doctor’s.
Andrzej: Okay, remind me tomorrow.

In Polish:

Hili: Nie zapomnij, że masz być u lekarza.
Ja: Dobrze, przypomnij mi o tym jutro.

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

From Stacy:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Give Me a Sign:

Dolly Parton’s nephew announces her death:

From Masih, two Kurdish women flogged and imprisoned for protesting:

From Larry the Cat, a sequel to “Hello, Dolly”:

From Malcolm, an AI video that people love. I don’t get all the cultural references, so perhaps someone can explain a few to me. (I know the Titanic ones.)

Jeff Maurer on the new White House bunker:

One from my feed; Dolly on Johnny Carson’s show singing an appropriate song:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Doctor Cobb; a crazy snake. Who knew?

HahahahahahaThe small end is the headThese sea snakes poke around crevices in reefs so their pinheads are excellent for getting at hiding fish. But they also look ridiculous.Hydrophos melanocephalus📷 Arne Redsted Rasmussen

— Krista Koeller (@kristalerista.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T20:11:21.906Z

One thought on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Band Books :

    Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga
    Stephen Davis
    William Morrow & Co
    1985

    Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana
    Michael Azerrad
    Doubleday
    1993

    Brothers
    Alex Van Halen
    Harper Collins Publishers
    2024

    Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd
    Nick Mason
    2004

    The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics
    Houghton Mifflin Macdonald
    1969

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