Sunday: Hili dialogue

August 30, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, August 30, 2026: Sabbath for goyische cats and the sixth weekiversary since Miss Duck and her brood came to Botany Pond. Here are the babies on July 20, the second day after they came to the pond (they presumably hatched one day before Pond Entry Day). There are few animals more adorable than a baby mallard.

And here they are sex days ago. In two more weeks they’ll be eight weeks old, and about ready able to fly. They may hang around a while, but they may also leave quickly, and then I’ll feel like a parent whose kid goes off to college—except I’ll never see most of the kids again. They’ll be out in the real world, having obtained jobs as Being Mallards.

It’s also National Mai Tai Day, International Whale Shark Day, and National Toasted Marshmallow Day (I like them burnt black).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 30 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Well, the U.S. finally got some benefit from leaving a political heir of Maduro, Delcy Rodríguez, in power in Venezuela. Now we can take their oil!

President Trump confirmed late Friday that the U.S. reached a deal with Venezuela to secure control of a big chunk of the Latin American country’s oil reserves.

“At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer,” the president said on social media.

The country’s oil industry has fallen into widespread disarray following years of mismanagement during the regimes of the late Hugo Chávez and former President Nicolás Maduro.

Since ousting Maduro in January, Trump has pushed U.S. oil companies to plow money into the country in a bid to shore up oil production. But many have been hesitant to do so.

Friday’s deal would give the U.S. a foothold in some of the most promising oil-and-gas fields. The country says it has some 300 billion barrels of proven reserves, the largest in the world. In comparison, the U.S. has about 46 billion.

Trump also said the agreement would substantially lower gas prices for all Americans. He and his team have been trying to shore up energy security in the Western Hemisphere while the Iran war has locked a big portion of the world’s oil and gas behind the Strait of Hormuz.

Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, has granted a private company—a joint project of the U.S. government and a private operator in Venezuela—a 100-year lease for the oil fields, a U.S. official said. The entity would be the world’s second-largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco.

This of course is a way for Trump to try to boost support, as surely rising gas prices are one reason why Trump’s approval rating has fallen, and why Republicans are in trouble for the midterms.  But oil experts on the news last night said it would take months to years before this agreement would reach the gas pumps to lower prices. But I’m sure that Nobel Peace Prize laureate (2025) María Corina Machado, wherever she’s living (she dare not return to Venezuela for fear of assassination), is looking on in horror.

*The First Amendment doesn’t just apply to American citizens, but to people legally in America. That was the basis of a new ruling by a federal judge in California who said that the Trump administration violated the law when it sought to deport foreign students who criticized Israel (article archived here).

A federal judge in California ruled that the Trump administration violated the constitutional rights of international students when it sought to deport them for criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza.

In a 90-page ruling, Judge Noël Wise found that the key legal foundations that the Trump administration had relied on to arrest and deport foreign students were unconstitutional, because Trump officials had wielded them to target students who used their freedom of speech to express opinions that the government did not like.

“In the United States,” Judge Wise wrote, “free speech, including the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength.

“That strength is diminished when members of our society — citizens and noncitizens alike — must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation,” she wrote. “This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognizes our right to speak freely. Here you can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it.”

Judge Wise, who was appointed to the Northern District of California by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., effectively declared that a section of immigration law frequently invoked by the Trump administration violated the First and Fifth Amendments, reasoning that the provision was vague and allowed the secretary of state to remove noncitizens for speech and other activities protected by the First Amendment.

Conor Fitzpatrick, the chief supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which brought the lawsuit, celebrated the ruling.

“Today’s ruling proves that free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child,” he said in a statement.

Yay for FIRE, and YAY for the appropriately named Judge Wise. I’m wondering whether the government will appeal this to the Supreme Court, but there’s nothing in the First Amendment that limits free speech only to Americans who are citizens:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

*We all know that Dolly Parton refused to say anything about politics; she maintained that she was an entertainer and not a politician, and she didn’t want to alienate her fans. But Fox News shows how deep her resistance to taking public stands went (Ricky Gervais would be happy):

“I don’t like to get involved in politics, because first of all, I have as many Republican fans as I do Democrats,” Parton told USA Today. “I don’t want to offend anybody, I have a right to myself.”

“Like God gave us free will, America gave us free speech, but you’ve got to be responsible for anything you say and do,” she added.

Two years earlier, Parton was repeatedly pressed about Trump during an interview with ABC’s David Wright, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel.

“I have a lot of fans out there, and I don’t want to offend anybody,” Parton said.

When Wright attempted to draw a parallel between Trump and the sexually abusive boss in Parton’s 1980 film “9 to 5,” she refused to bite.

“I’m not addressing that,” Parton said. “I learned a long time ago, keep your damn mouth shut if you want to stay in show business. … I’m not in politics, I’m an entertainer.”

When Wright pointed out that Parton was also a role model, she responded: “Yes I am. That’s why I don’t talk about people.”

Her aversion to political camps did not mean she kept quiet about everything she believed.

“I know whatever I say, people are going to listen, and they’re going to make more of it than maybe what I meant. So I have to be careful,” Parton told People in 2021. “Of course I have my opinion, but I’m not an opinionated person as a rule. You’re allowed your own beliefs and your own faith, but you don’t have to use it like a weapon when it could be a tool.”

Parton’s political neutrality was something she could joke about.

“My daddy was a Republican, my mama was a Democrat, and I’m a hypocrite!” Parton famously quipped, pronouncing “hypocrite” as “hypo-crat” in her iconic Tennessee drawl.

I’ve seen several posts on social media however, that Parton’s refusal to take political positions constituted her own “dark side,” an accusation that began in 2021 in a Vox article by Constance Grady called “How Dolly Parton became a secular American saint.” Grady’s claim was that you have to take sides in a “post-Trump America,”  To wit:

Dolly Parton is beloved because she has devoted her career to standing for love. And, usefully, she is willing to be ambiguous about what exactly that love means and how much it includes people that those on different sides of the political aisle consider their enemies. But in a post-Trump America, is Dolly Parton’s love enough?

. . .“I say this with humility and as someone who is not a believer,” Dolly Parton’s America host Jad Abumrad told Billboard in 2019: “There’s something very Christ-like about her.”

But America in the 21st century is no time for a secular pop saint. And there’s a dark side to Dolly’s ability to appeal, Christ-like, to all people at all times.

Well, I have no time for this kind of stuff.  Parton did speak out in favor of LGBTQ rights, and rather than taking performative stands, she helped people: giving them money after natural disasters, and handing out books by the millions. I have no time for people now who are going after her for being nonpolitical.

*Daily Jew Hatred, and this time it’s directed to, of all people, Dolly Parton. The Jerusalem Post reports that as soon as Dolly Parton died, e-vandals slapped antisemiti content all over her Wikipedia page.

Dolly Parton’s Wikipedia page was allegedly targeted by vandals with antisemitic content and offensive modifications within an hour of the public announcement of her death at age 80 on Tuesday.
As millions around the world mourned the loss of the legendary cultural icon, social media users shared screenshots of modifications to her profile.

Here’s one tweet:

More:

The alterations included replacing her profile photo with an image of a Nazi swastika, changing her name to “Jew lover,” and altering her display title to reference Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that claimed the lives of 20 children and six adult staff members.

One screenshot shared on X/Twitter captured a Google search result listing her Wikipedia page title as “Dolly Parton – Adam Lanza was a hero.” The edits were quickly identified and reversed using Wikipedia’s revision history safeguards, restoring the page to its proper state.

And another tweet:

As far as I know, Parton never said anything about Jews or Israel, though she had at least one close Jewish friend. It’s a sign of the times that the worst thing you can say about a beloved American icon after she died was that she was a “Jew lover.”

*Finally, reader βPer sent me this: “A CBC editor has responded to the ‘terrorism’ kerfuffle with a blog post and I think you may find it interesting” with the reader noting that I may find the final six paragraphs edifying.  Indeed! (Remember that the CBC has been criticized recently for refusing to use the word “terrorist” and “terrorism” without attribution, saying the words were “loaded” and “controversial.” The CBC editor defends his organization’s position (the bolding is mine). Here are the final paragraphs:

And we intend to mark the forthcoming 25th anniversary of 9/11 with extensive, special coverage that will continue to respectfully and thoughtfully reflect on the monumental nature of this tragedy.

CBC’s reporting on terrorism, wherever it occurs, has always been guided by the principle of attribution, and like other major news organizations, it has been our practice for decades. The reason for the extreme care around the use of the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” was detailed in this earlier editor’s blog.

But to be clear, CBC News has never said what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, was not terrorism, as some commentators have stated in recent days. We have reported fully and accurately on the reasons and motivations for those attacks as determined by police, governments and an independent commission. We’ve just made sure to do it with attribution.

Clarity and understanding are at the heart of our journalism. The leaked excerpt without context or explanation has raised more questions for the public that we must now answer.

After reviewing our current language guidance, we have decided to adjust it to clarify that direct attribution is not required for describing the historic events of 9/11 as terrorism. 

We are doing so to remove what has unfortunately (and unintentionally) become an impediment to clarity and public understanding. 

At the same time, as new acts of politically or ideologically motivated violence occur in our world, we will continue to follow the journalistically sound practice of attributing causes and motivations to officials and experts.

So now 9/11 is terrorism, but only that one event. Are the perpetrators of 9/11 still not “terrorists”? I don’t buy it; this is a woke language prohibition to avoid stigmatizing people who kill noncombatants for ideological gain. My reader added this:

I think, reading between the lines, this may be the editors trying to rein in their woke reporter’s unprofessional tendencies to inject their personal beliefs in hot-button issues.  For example, a reporter casually describing a murderer as a ‘psychopath’ instead of doing the journalistic basics of seeking out a professional’s opinion of the murderer’s mental state.  In particular, I wonder if the editors have been frustrated by their reporters showing their pro-Palestinian tendencies by using ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ incorrectly.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Kulka, bitter enemies, are acting like Israel and Palestine, with Kulka playing the role of Palestine (Hili is a Jewish cat):

Hili: You again?
Kulka: Yes, I propose a ceasefire on my terms.

In Polish:

Hili: Ty znowu tu?
Kulka: Tak, proponuję zawieszenie broni na moich warunkach.

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

From TherionArms:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Animal Antics:

J. K. Rowling on Dolly (JKR has a great sense of humor):

And from Simon:

From Luana; a really bad chemistry accident at MIT.

This is what happens when you get two drops of the stuff: on a gloved hand! It goes right through latex gloves and then takes months to kill you.

 

The Number Ten cat goes after Trump (the Torygraph article is real):

From Malcolm; a d*g interrupts important cat bzns:

One from my feed; featuring a post by Trump (are we taxpayers footing the bill for someone to make these posts?):

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Dr. Cobb; a beautiful trailcam catch, and the snow leopard makes the flehmen response:

Snow leopard on a trail camera: #AGoodPlaceSource: http://www.reddit.com/r/NatureIsFu…

— Michelle says: Be kind. Always. ❤️ (@snarkysillysad.bsky.social) 2026-08-27T10:53:59.334Z

4 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  2. On CBC and the appellation “terrorism”, help me out Canadian readers, what words have the CBC used to describe the (utterly nonexistent) “unmarked graves” of indigenous kids at residential schools?

    Might they have used words like “genocide” to describe the fact that, in a radar survey, a former orchard shows indications of serried ranks of … err, tree roots?

    Reply

  3. Socialism is a political and economic system where the community or the government owns and controls the major means of production, such as factories and resources, instead of private individuals.

    The Wall Street Journal reports the U.S. government plans to take a 35% stake in Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt’s North American Blue Energy Partners. The U.S. also will secure preferential rights to purchase 20% of that company’s production at cost. Trump attacked Venezuela to get its oil. The U.S. government also now owns 10% of Intel, 7.5% of MP Materials, 5% of Lithium Americas, 8% of Westinghouse, and other companies.

    Trump and MAGA attack Democrats as “socialists”, which seems ironic.

    Reply

  4. CBC: Providing “cover” for Islamists flying hijacked planes into my old office… grinds my gears.
    Writing my column next week about 25 years since 9/11 as a NYer. I’ll post here.

    Love Trump and the geese! He is nothing if not entertaining. I do wish he’d stop monstering our closest friends though.

    The methyl mercury story was… terrifying. That’s a good youtube btw, lots of weird scientific stuff.

    D.A.
    NYC

    Reply

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *