Tuesday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Tuesday, the Cruelest Day and also September first. Yep, we’re into another month, starting with National Acne Positivity Day. Given the demographics of our readers, I doubt that acne is a pervasive problem, but if you have it, embrace the face you have.

Here’s the depiction of September from the 15th-century manuscript Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, along with the beautiful illustration. In the foreground is the grape harvest and in the background is the Château de Saumur, which still stands in altered form. As Wikipedia notes:

The page for September in the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry depicts the Château as it looked in 1410. It states that René of Anjou lived there until his death in 1480. The castle changed hands several times until 1589 when the Protestant King Henry IV (of France and Navarre) gave the castle to Duplessis-Mornay.

The Chateau originally had 4 wings that enclosed the courtyard; one of the wings fell apart in the 1600s. The courtyard also has a source of groundwater for its inhabitants during the Chateau’s occupancy period.

In the Très Riches Heures, note the peasant showing his butt:

And the Château today; you can see that the towers in the illustration are pretty accurate:

It’s also American Chess Day, Emma M. Nutt Day, Ginger Cat Appreciation Day, National Cherry Popover Day, National Tofu Day, and National Gyro Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 1 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The on-again-off-again war between Iran and the U.S. is on again, with the U.S. attacking Iranian missile launchers aimed at re-mining the Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. forces attacked two Iranian rocket launchers attempting to disperse sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, U.S. Central Command said on Sunday.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said early Monday, local time, that it had fired missiles at American fighter jets at air bases in Jordan in response to a U.S. attack on Iran. Several thousand U.S. military personnel are stationed at bases in Jordan.

The Jordanian military said it had intercepted eight missiles that violated the country’s airspace at dawn on Monday. It did not report any injuries or damage. A person familiar with the Iranian attack, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly, said that all of the Iranian missiles fired toward Jordan had been intercepted.

The U.S. attack was the first by the United States against Iran in a month and appeared to be limited rather than a resumption of large-scale American bombing. But the back-and-forth raises the risk of a new round military strikes by both sides.

Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for Central Command, said that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps forces had been observed preparing to launch rockets armed with mines from Larak Island into the waters of the surrounding strait, a vital shipping waterway for oil and gas.

As of last week, U.S. forces had cleared the mines that Iran had planted in the strait, according to Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of Central Command.

. . . The Trump administration has urged commercial vessels to make the passage, with the U.S. Navy guiding them through the southern part of the strait in Omani waters.

Iran has promised retaliation, of course. The Strait of Hormuz still has nowhere near the traffic it had before the war, with about five ships going through per day compared to roughly 100-150 before the war.  Trump hasn’t accomplished that aim, either.

*According to Amit Segal at It’s Noon in Israel, “The [Iranian] Regime is running out of gas,” both literally and figuratively.

. . . . according to a senior intelligence source, amid economic upheaval senior Iranian officials are eyeing their escape from a rapidly deteriorating Islamic Republic.

While my sources report major unrest, expect a resumption of protests in the near future, and note that several officials are considering escape, you don’t need intelligence connections to see the strain on the Islamic Republic.

Mojtaba Khamenei recently issued a statement warning officials against “disappointing speech” and artificial binaries such as “war or negotiation” and “compromise or warmongering.” That is an interesting directive. It appears that, despite the pressure, rather than returning to war or the negotiating table, they see stabilizing the neither-war-nor-peace status quo as the best path for regime survival.

Meanwhile, on the ground, gas stations across Iran are facing miles-long queues, with people waiting for hours only to find the pumps closed after stations run dry. Motorists report engine trouble after refueling and suspect that authorities are cutting supplies with water and excessive methanol to stretch what little fuel remains. The shortages are one symptom of a broader reckoning: the Iranian rial now trades at over 2 million to the dollar, point-to-point inflation runs near 88 percent, and even regime-friendly media concede that most families can no longer afford basic goods. Most frightening to the regime, they can no longer afford the gas subsidy and allotments. They remember how the 2019 gasoline price hike and rationing triggered what was then an unprecedented nationwide uprising, when security forces killed roughly 1,500 unarmed protesters under a total internet blackout. Both the economic distress and the regime’s brutality have grown far more severe since.

Mojtaba’s statement was directed at the regime’s own officials who are increasingly revealing their rapidly deteriorating hand. Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani claimed authorities cannot publish some poverty statistics because of “security considerations,” while Ghalibaf warned that the Islamic Republic “will not last” if public hardship persists. Police Chief Ahmad-Reza Radan cautioned that economic decline could fuel renewed unrest. Leaked audio has captured security forces discussing preparations for fuel-related protests, and units are already being deployed preemptively across major cities—with the security services quietly prioritizing their own access to fuel even as ordinary Iranians go without.

. . . Protests are inevitable, and the Islamic Republic is cracking down preemptively to restrict their scale.

. . . People will come out into the streets, and when they do, they will meet implacable resistance from a regime intent above all on its own survival—one with a recent track record of massacre. That resistance has to be met by an equally earnest will from the Americans: material support, air cover, and ensuring the internet stays on. It may be eight months late, but Trump still has the opportunity to make good on his promise to “have the back” of the protesters.

The last round of protests saw over 30,000 people killed, and I don’t think that’s going to happen on such a scale (Iranians aren’t suicidal). Also, Segal always seems very optimistic about the downfall of Iran. This kind of stuff has not been reported in the legacy media, and I’m wondering if Segal has better sources than, say, the New York Times. At any rate, we should know, from Masih and others, whether people really do “come out into the streets.” Perhaps Segal harbors an unwarranted optimism.

*The jury is still deliberating (since August 27) the verdict in the case of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman who killed her three young children and then jumped out a window, apparently trying to kill herself (she’s paralyzed from the waist down now). She is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity (“postpartum psychosis”). Over at the Free Press, Jed Rubenfeld argues that, by a quirk of Massachusetts law, “The law is inadequate to judge Lindsay Clancy.” (The subtitle is “What makes the case impossible for a jury is that Massachusetts law only allows for bad options when ruling on an insanity defense. The one sensible solution, voluntary manslaughter, is off the table.”)

But if you’re wondering what the law actually says about Clancy’s case, well, let me cut to the punch line: Because the case is being tried in Massachusetts state court, the law offers surprisingly little help in arriving at a just response to what Clancy did.

In fact, due to peculiarities of Massachusetts law, the Clancy jury is almost certain to come out the wrong way—no matter what the jurors decide.

The initial problem—and it’s a big one—is that Massachusetts law is weird when it comes to cases in which the defendant pleads insanity. In most of the country—and in federal prosecutions as well—when criminal defendants plead insanity, it’s up to them to prove it. But in Massachusetts, the state has to prove that Clancy was not insane, and it must do so beyond a reasonable doubt.

Think about that: If there’s any reasonable doubt about her sanity, Clancy must be acquitted. And how could there not be reasonable doubt about Clancy’s sanity? The psychiatric “experts” who are testifying sharply disagree about it. All across the country, Americans sharply disagree about it.

What’s more, Massachusetts’ definition of insanity is barely comprehensible. Under the law, Clancy must be considered insane if, due to a mental disease or defect, she could not distinguish right from wrong or lacked a substantial capacity to conform her conduct to the law when she killed her children. The meaning of every significant term in that definition can be (and has been) prolifically argued about. I’m a law professor who has taught criminal law for decades, and I have my doubts about how to apply that definition to a case like Clancy’s.

As a result, a complete acquittal is quite possible, simply on the ground that the jurors have doubts about her sanity. Which would be a travesty.

. . .So when is insanity a proper defense to a criminal charge?

The insanity defense is appropriate when a defendant’s psychotic delusions prevent him from understanding what he’s doing. If a person actually believes his neighbors are space aliens who are plotting against humankind, he’s not guilty of murder if, in his derangement, he kills them. Murder is the intentional killing of another human being, and he doesn’t know that he is killing a human being.

Similarly, some mentally ill people uncontrollably attack anyone who comes near them; that’s why they’re put in straitjackets. Those people too—the “stark, raving mad”—should be acquitted when they injure or kill, because they have no control over their actions.

But Clancy’s case is not like either of those. It seems indisputable that she knew she was killing her children, and she demonstrated very considerable control over her situation, including by persuading her husband to get takeout food from a restaurant far enough away that she would have time to do the terrible deed.

No matter how horrifically depressed and troubled Clancy was, she deliberately took the most innocent of lives—with at least one of her three children having to watch as she killed the first one. There must be criminal consequences for that.

And here’s the rub:

There is a crime that fits this dreadful bill. It’s not murder. It’s called voluntary manslaughter. As Massachusetts courts themselves have put it, voluntary manslaughter is an “unlawful homicide arising not from malice, but ‘from the frailty of human nature.’ ” No phrase in criminal law better captures a case like Clancy’s. If convicted of voluntary manslaughter, Clancy could serve up to 20 years.

But under Massachusetts law, the jury doesn’t have the option of convicting Clancy of this crime.

But what is “the frailty of human nature”, for crying out loud? Even for a determinist like me, this is a tough one.  Clearly she had no “choice” here, but given that she was physically responsible for the deed, what is the proper treatment? Incarceration seems to be what Rubenfeld wants, as he sees confinement in a mental institution as “care, not punishment,” and he appears to want “punishment” for reasons he doesn’t specify. The three reasons for incarceration that I see as valid inslude deterrence of others, sequestration of a bad person from society, or rehabilitation. Which of these does Clancy need? The first two don’t seem appropriate.

*This editorial-board op-ed in the Washington Post, which tells us something we should already know, is really an excuse to show the video below. The.op-ed is called “Trump’s tariffs aren’t reducing the trade deficit” (article archived here):

The trade deficit doesn’t matter, but even if it did, tariffs aren’t an effective way to reduce it.

In July, the monthly trade deficit in goods hit its highest level since March 2025, the Commerce Department revealed on Thursday. That was the month before President Donald Trump’s announcement last year of massive tariffs on products from nearly every country in the world.

The Supreme Court’s February ruling against Trump struck down only tariffs he imposed under one law. He has imposed import duties under other laws before and after that ruling. They remain in effect. The average tariff rate is currently about 11 percent, which is more than four times higher than it was when Trump started his second term.

A key argument the administration made to the justices was that the trade deficit is a national emergency, and tariffs are necessary to reduce it.

Intuition suggests tariffs could bring down the trade deficit. Tariffs are a tax on imported goods, and taxing something more means people will buy less of it. Fewer imports with the same amount of exports would therefore lower the trade deficit.

Absurdly, the Trump administration simultaneously claims that tariffs aren’t taxes and don’t raise prices.

The problem for the Trump team is that imports and exports often move together. In other words, reducing imports also reduces exports, so the difference between them — the trade deficit — hardly changes.

. . .Another reason that a fall in imports did not cause a significant reduction in the trade deficit is that Americans were stocking up before the tariffs came into effect, so imports fell to their normal level when they did.

A figure from the article:

If tariffs worked as the administration would have had the Supreme Court believe, imports should have fallen well below their 2023 to 2024 levels as Americans switched from buying foreign goods to domestic ones.

Instead, there was more total trade but roughly the same deficit. In the past few months, exports have fallen while imports have remained high, leading to the higher deficit in July.

Tariffs are never good, and the consumer always suffers. What Trump has done is madness.

Here’s a cute video about the U.S./Canada “trade war,” which began when Trump recently imposed 50% tariffs on a range of Canadian goods. The beaver Mounties are awesome:

*An exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum highlighting John Galliano, a renowned fashion designer,  has been called off by the designer himself after a public outcry called attention to his racist and antisemitic comments (article archived here). In 2011 he had been convicted of a hate crime in France for those remarks.

Facing an intense backlash, the influential fashion designer John Galliano has taken the unprecedented step of withdrawing from a planned exhibition in his honor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“After much reflection and discussion with all those involved, I have decided, with great sadness, that it is best for the exhibition not to take place at this time,” Galliano wrote in a statement posted to his Instagram page.

He also expressed “profound and enduring” gratitude to the museum’s leadership, and acknowledged the pain his past words had caused.

“I do not want the debate surrounding me to place the Met in a difficult position or distract from the remarkable work of the Costume Institute,” he wrote. “I also recognize and respect that an exhibition honoring my work would be painful for some.”

In a statement on Monday, Max Hollein, the director of the Met, said, “Following thoughtful discussions with John Galliano, we have together decided not to proceed with the exhibition.”

The offensive act:

In 2011, a French tribunal ruled that Galliano had made hateful remarks about Jews and Asians in two incidents at a bar near his home in Paris. At roughly the same time, a video circulated showing Galliano saying “I love Hitler” and telling appalled patrons that “your mothers, your forefathers” would all be “gassed.”

He was fired from his job as the creative director of Dior, a post he had held for 15 years, when the video surfaced. In 2014, after Galliano had gone through a stint in rehab and discussed Judaism and its history with rabbis and the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, he became the creative director of Maison Margiela and was re-embraced by the fashion world.

Galliano does not have free speech here, as the Met is a private and not a government organization, and has the right to call off an exhibition. Fortunately, Galliano pulled the exhibit himself, which must have been a big relief for the Met. However, if the exhibit had been at the Smithsonian or similar government venue, they could not have canceled it as it would violate Galliano’s rights. His speech was odious, and illegal in France, but would not have been illegal in the U.S.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is back on board with science. And look at her lovely photo!

Andrzej: According to experts, cat hair in food is unhealthy.
Hili: That’s an argument from authority, you need to test it.

In Polish:

Ja: Zdaniem ekspertów kocia sierść w jedzeniu jest niezdrowa.
Hili: To argument z autorytetu, musisz to przetestować.

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

A Thing With Faces from Peggy, who found this face-like rock in Canada and said, “A winking face – we found it this way, we did not add the moss:”

This was posted on FB by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

From Cole & Marmalade:

From Masih; a man defends a woman who is kept out of the bazaar by the black-clad Morality Police because her hair isn’t covered.  Yay for both of them!

Breaking: The same morality police whose enforcement of compulsory hijab led to the killing Mahsa Amini in 2022 are back on the streets of Iran.

This video was filmed at one of the entrances to Tehran’s Grand Bazaar. Hijab enforcers are blocking a woman from entering simply… pic.twitter.com/TWyjcR6vvL

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) August 31, 2026

From Simon; Trump caught using AI (and that tray looks way too full, and note that the pecan pie is in the same compartment as the shrimp):

Who knew you can grow extra fingers when eating this good? 🙄 pic.twitter.com/5rOS04fwP5

— Nurses Against Dick Pics. 🪷🇺🇦 (@ClaudetteGGibs1) August 31, 2026

From Luana. This is a long tweet but worth reading; it shows an English university trying to chill the speech of a faculty member who is discussing assisted dying online.

🚨BREAKING: CAF has instructed a leading employment law firm to act for an Emeritus Professor after his University warned him to “reflect carefully” on his lawful online interventions on assisted dying — leaving him fearing that further public comment on an issue directly related… pic.twitter.com/31BeonVGRP

— Committee for Academic Freedom (@ComAcFreedom) August 29, 2026

From Malcolm; cats be breaking everything:

A normal day in a cat household 😂 pic.twitter.com/GePDgMe2kf

— smooth (@Smoothfund) August 11, 2026

One from my feed; and the story appears to be true:

In 1939, a graduate student named George Dantzig arrived late to his statistics class at UC Berkeley. Two problems were already written on the blackboard when he walked in.

Assuming they were the night’s homework, he copied them down and went home to work through them. It took… pic.twitter.com/rCMkn5bJcF

— The Fourth Musketeer (@IV_Musketeer) August 31, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish woman was gassed to death, together with her infant daughter, as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. The woman was 19 years old. https://t.co/BKqpPBY5Tx

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 1, 2026

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, Lola came home!

And one that Matthew tweeted. “Michael” was Linus Pauling’s son, away at boarding school. “Rosalind” is Franklin, of course, and “Sydney” is Sydney Brenner.

Crick’s diary Nov 19541 – Tea at home (Rosalind rang)3 – Rosalind (early) stayed to supper4 – Pauling (Nobel Prize) Party. Up late7 – Rearranged books in new bookcase20 – Visited Michael. Climbed tree. Back same day23 – Sydney arrived24 – With Sydney25 – Talked with Sydney28 – Sydney left

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-08-31T16:56:21.197Z