Wednesday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Dina Punuk” in Javanese), Wednesday, September 2, 2026, and National V-J Day, celebrating the surrender of Japan in WWII, ending the war for good. When I was in Hawaii in 2018, I visited the ship U.S.S. Missouri where the surrender document was signed. Here’s a photo of the spot where the war ended, along with the ship itself (you can walk around the living quarters on your own) and a photo from the ship of the surrender:

Here’s a short video of the surrender, showing the ceremony at the end:

It’s also National Blueberry Popsicle Day, National Grits for Breakfast Day (do not eschew the tasty grit), and World Coconut Day, which we’ll celebrate with a very short clip:

. . . and it’s going to be a hot one in Chicago, with a predicted high of 93°F or 34°C. It was hot and humid yesterday, too, and the ducks don’t like it. They had little appetite and were resting in the shade (remember, they’re wearing permanent down jackets). The squirrel were prostrate, too. Here’s one of my sciurid friends flattened under a banch:

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

Da Nooz:

*By a vote of 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the liberal justices on the losing side, the Supreme Court decided that Trump can continue demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build his ridiculous ballroom (archived article here).

A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed construction to continue on President Trump’s luxury White House ballroom, which has been steadily rising to replace the East Wing the president tore down last fall.

In a 5-to-4 vote, the court said the preservationists who challenged the construction of the planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom did not have legal grounds known as standing to bring their lawsuit because they were not directly harmed by the project, estimated to cost $400 million.

The majority emphasized that its order was not addressing the legality of the project and instead the question of who could sue to try to block it. But in practical terms, the order was a significant setback to the most serious legal challenge to the project, meaning the president seems likely to be able to complete construction. Halting the project now would probably require a fresh lawsuit from an individual or group with standing, such as Congress, which would be a nonstarter while Republicans control the House and Senate.

In an unusual lineup, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal justices dissented, saying the construction was “likely unlawful.”

The White House is “an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture,” the chief justice wrote in a lengthy dissent that quoted from Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt. “All the more reason to ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”

Monday’s order reversed lower-court rulings that would have halted aboveground construction because the judges found that the administration had exceeded its authority by moving ahead with major changes to the White House campus without congressional approval.

It’s effectively all over; by the time this gets adjuciated with the plaintiffs having genuine “standing,” the ballroom will be built. And don’t all Americans have standing, as the White House is owned by the government: us? Aren’t we harmed by our representatives not having a say in this demolition and reconstruction project?

*The jurors in the Lindsay Clancy case have been unable to reach a verdict.

The jury in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial did not reach a verdict Tuesday and was instructed by the judge to return to court Wednesday for a fifth day of deliberations.

The jury requested to be excused for the day hours after telling Judge William Sullivan that it was deadlocked and could not reach a unanimous decision. Sullivan had told the jury to continue deliberating.

After returning to the courtroom briefly just after 3:30 p.m. ET, Sullivan excused the jury.

Clancy, wearing a green top, looked at the jurors as Sullivan thanked them for their work in the case.

Under Massachusetts law, Sullivan can encourage the jury to go back to the jury room, but not more than twice unless the jury consents to it. If the jury still cannot reach a unanimous verdict, the judge can declare a mistrial.

. . .The jury is weighing whether to convict Clancy of first-degree murder after she was accused of using exercise bands to strangle her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — in the basement of their Duxbury home in January 2023. Her then-husband, who was running errands at the time, found her outside underneath a second-story window following a suicide attempt that left her paralyzed from the waist down.

. . . The jury also has the option to convict her of lesser charges, including second-degree murder and manslaughter, or absolve her of the crime or deem her not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility. If the jury finds her not criminally responsible, that means that jurors believe she could not control her actions because she was in psychosis.

If there is a mistrial, the state then has to decide whether to give up or ask for another trial, which will be as long and laborious as the first one.

*The WSJ announced that two oil tankers were hit by rockets as they tried to transit the Omani-controlled waters of the Strait of Hormuz.

Two tankers carrying Saudi oil were hit by rockets and other munitions within minutes of each other while trying to make a midnight crossing of the Strait of Hormuz, maritime security firms said.

Vanguard said a Liberian-flagged tanker was hit by three rockets off the coast of Oman. Eight minutes earlier, a Saudi-flagged vessel also took multiple hits, Marisks said.

Both were traveling through the southern reaches of the strait along a corridor the U.S. has set up to break Iran’s chokehold of the waterway. Iran began attacking ships in the corridor just weeks after signing a preliminary deal with the U.S. in mid-June to reopen the strait.

“The near-simultaneous incidents represent a further escalation in the threat environment within the Omani corridor,” Marisks said. “The incidents also further undermine any assumption that the Omani corridor represents a reliably protected or lower-risk passage.”

The targeted vessels, Liberian-flagged Senegal Prosperity and Saudi-flagged Sidr, both loaded 2 million barrels of crude from the Saudi port of Juaymah near Ras Tanura a few days ago, according to commodities-data provider Kpler.

No one claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Iran has been firing regularly at ships to assert its hold on the waterway, a crucial conduit for energy exports, which Tehran has crimped since the beginning of the war.

. . .The U.S. says it is shepherding several ships a day through the strait to help ease pressure on global oil supplies. The ships typically cross at night with their transponders off to make them hard to track.

Iran is continuing to strike ships nonetheless. It hit a Kuwaiti tanker last week, among more than a dozen fired at during August.

The Liberia-flagged Senegal Prosperity is managed by a unit of Sinokor Maritime of South Korea, according to its safety-certification provider, Bureau Veritas. The Saudi-flagged Sidr is owned and operated by the national shipping carrier of Saudi Arabia, Bahri, according to the company’s website.

I’m not sure why Saudi Arabia, which owns one of the tankers, isn’t really ticked off, and why Oman, whose territorial waters were being traversed, isn’t equally angry. These would seem to be war crimes, and for sure they’re Iran’s proclamation that they think they control the Strait of Hormuz. We really should bomb Kharg Island now, as this dribbling out of attacks serves no clear purpose.

*The Washington Post gives a list of 15 college and universities that charge undergraduates over $100,000 per year for tuition, housing, books and fees (article is archived here). The University of Chicago is #3, and several schools charge between $99,000 and $100,000 (they’re apparently like stores that give sticker prices like “$4.99”).

With remarkable speed, more colleges and universities are crossing a new threshold: charging undergraduates over $100,000 for tuition, housing, books and fees. Fifteen schools cost six figures now, whereas a year ago there were only two, according to the Princeton Review.

At least nine other colleges are on the cusp of joining the $100K club, and higher education experts say the trend will only continue.

But how much does that matter? And what does it say about the state of college affordability?

The prevalence of six-figure institutions seems to give credence to the sentiment that higher education has become unaffordable, but college pricing is far more nuanced than the numbers suggest. In fact, research shows that while the cost of attendance is going up, the actual amount students pay has stagnated or even ticked down a bit for most families.

Sticker prices — the total cost of attendance — are published and widely circulated, but they are not the best indicator of what many families will pay because colleges offer scholarships and grants based on financial need or academic merit that reduce the cost.

One of the best ways for families to figure out whether they can afford a college is to check out the net price — what students pay after grant aid is applied. Net price calculators create estimates based on family income and other financial details.

Some of the most expensive schools provide some of the most generous financial aid to students from low- and middle-income households.

Take the University of Chicago, where the sticker price is $103,821 for the 2026-2027 academic year, but the average need-based scholarship for undergrads is $78,651. The university also covers tuition for families earning less than $250,000 a year — a growing trend among prestigious (and expensive) schools. A Washington Post analysis found nearly 1,000 colleges and universities that offer free tuition (see the list here).

Here’s the chart below; note that all colleges reduce that fee substantially based on need, but, as far as I know, foreign students have to pay the full fare. For others, the highest out-of-pocket price apepars to be at Fordham University, at a bit more than sixty thousand dollars per year. That’s still nearly a quarter of a million dollars over four years.

Elizabeth Weiss, writing at Skeptic Magazine, argues that “Repatriation and reburial of sht needs to be stopped.” Yes, she means actual human feces (why the asterisk?), and gives another example of ridiculous sacralization of Native American “relics” (h/t Luana).

Through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA),¹ the U.S. Department of the Interior’ National Park Service at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado plans to repatriate bags of human feces to tribes for reburial.

NAGPRA was passed in 1990 to assist federally recognized modern tribes in claiming affiliated human remains, funerary objects, sacred entities, and materials of cultural patrimony from federally funded institutes, such as museums, national parks, and universities. Human remains and these specific types of artifacts insufficiently linked to a modern tribe through a preponderance of evidence, which included historic documents, biological evidence like DNA, archaeological data, geographic links, and oral histories, were to remain at the institutes for further research and exhibition.

Artifacts and other materials found at sites that were not funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony, regardless of the links to modern tribes, were to remain in institutions for research and exhibition. The definitions for these categories are clear. Funerary objects are “objects that, as a part of the death rite or ceremony of a culture, are reasonably believed to have been placed with individual human remains either at the time of death or later.”² Thus, for an item to be a funerary object, the object had to be placed in the grave intentionally, for an individual deceased person.

Prior to 2024, these decisions were made by archaeologists based on the archaeological record, historic documentation, and ethnographic data. Then, tribes were consulted about repatriation of the materials determined to fit into these categories.

The consultation first system has led to a list of absurdities. The latest of which include a notice of inventory completion from Colorado that identifies “bags of human feces” as “funerary objects” and, thus, subject to repatriation.⁴ From Mesa Verde National Park, Montezuma County, Colorado:

At site 5MV640 (Spruce Tree House) “[t]he 148 associated funerary objects are 91 human-chewed fiber quids, one bag of human feces, and 56 animal bones.”
At site 5MV650 (Square Tower House) “one bag of human feces” was listed as a funerary object.
At site 5MV1200 (Long House) “46 lots of human feces” were listed as funerary objects.
At site 5MV1452 (Badger House) “one bag human feces” was listed as a funerary object.

. . . One may wonder whether Native Americans really did intentionally bury their ancestors with feces. Are feces funerary objects? No archaeological evidence of this practice exists in the Americas. There are many articles on coprolites, paleofeces, and feces in the archaeological literature, but none of them point to evidence that feces were funerary objects in the Americas.

. . .Regardless of the reason for the increase in repatriation of feces, there’s clear evidence that feces–whether human or other species–are not funerary objects. By accepting the repatriation and reburial of feces, archaeologists are opening the door to even more absurd repatriations. The field will be lost to activists–if it has not already been lost. Narratives about America’s past will be controlled by those with no interest in the truth.

When all the collections–from human remains to feces–are reburied, our ability to truly understand the past–and, therefore, our shared humanity–will be buried too.

You can read about all this mishigas, in which the sacralization of Native Americans keeps objects out of the realm of scientific and historical study, in Weiss’s book Reburying the Past: The Effects of Repatriation and Reburial on Scientific Inquiry. Needless to say, she’s been drummed out of her job because of her stand. 

*Clickbait for me: ducks and insomnia together! Here’s a book that just came out, and though the author is E. B. White (1899-1995), it’s a children’s book based on a poem that White wrote. Click on the cover to go to the publisher’s page:

The publisher’s notes (their bolding):

Even the most restless reader will find peace and quiet in this breathtakingly illustrated book about the magic of nature, nighttime, and a duck who can’t sleep, based on a poem by the renowned E.B. White which was published in The New Yorker in 1928 and now appears for the first time in book form.

How surprised I was to see

A duck as wide awake as me.

Long past bedtime, two creatures sleeplessly wander around and around the reservoir in New York’s Central Park. What woes and wonders keep them awake so late?

Based on a poem originally published in The New Yorker by the legendary author E.B. White, and marvelously illustrated by two-time Caldecott Honoree Melissa Sweet, the book you hold is a love letter to nature in unlikely places, a testament to the power of imagination, and a balm to restless readers everywhere.

The poem was called Natura in Urbe (“Nature in the City”) can be found at this site, but only if you have a New Yorker subscription.  I’d love to see it!

From an archived article in the Portland Press Herald:

White’s latest book, published some 40 years after his death, is called “The Duck Can’t Sleep.” The text is a poem he wrote for The New Yorker magazine in 1928 called “Natura in Urbe,” with new art by Portland author and illustrator Melissa Sweet. It’s full of whimsical wonderings about a sleep-deprived duck and what might be keeping him awake. It goes on sale Sept. 1.

Martha White, who lives in the Midcoast, rediscovered the poem and thought it would make a good children’s book, with its fun rhymes and vivid images. The duck swims around New York’s Central Park reservoir long after dark, while the rest of the natural world is in slumber, his “head a-wobble” and his “tail a-bobble.” In the poem, White seems worried about the duck and what was weighing so heavy on his mind.

“I wondered if he’d left his kind / Because of something on his mind / A midnight sail to clear his vision / And help him reach some duck decision.”

The duck is a male, of course; nobody has any respect for hens.  Remember that White wrote both Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web.

. . . “The Duck Can’t Sleep” includes a two-page foreword by Martha White, tracing her grandfather’s love of waterfowl back to childhood trips to Belgrade Lakes, where his family rented a camp on Great Pond. He raised squabs at the family home in Mount Vernon, New York, and later, after buying his farm in Brooklin, Maine, in the 1930s, he raised “gray geese for the table and Muscovy ducks for fun.”

She explains that her grandfather was a young bachelor living not far from The New Yorker offices and the Central Park reservoir when he published the poem in 1928. In his own journal, he had written about having trouble sleeping, and walking around the reservoir to figure things out. On one walk he debated whether to quit his job. The New Yorker is now well known for its writing and wit, but at that time it was just three years old.

“Like the small duck in this poem, White was a man who worked out his word tangles or life’s conundrums by perambulating, and he was never a sound sleeper,” Martha White wrote. “He’d once had a mattress delivered from the Algonquin Hotel (in Manhattan) to his place in Maine because he had enjoyed an unusually good night’s sleep while there for work.”

Sweet decided to write her book about White after illustrating several picture book biographies. She was fascinated with how White wrote three children’s books that, in her mind, were masterpieces: “Charlotte’s Web,” “Stuart Little” and “The Trumpet of the Swan.” As a children’s book writer herself, and a fellow Mainer, she wanted to know how he did it.

This book would make a great Christmas (or Hanukah or Coynezaa) present for a duck lover.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej have a cuddle:

Hili: You finally tore yourself away from the computer.
Andrzej: Yes, because I have to do the dishes.
Hili: But you picked me up.
Me: Because it puts off a less pleasant task.

In Polish:

Hili: Nareszcie oderwałeś się od komputera.
Ja: Tak, bo muszę pozmywać naczynia.
Hili: Ale wziąłeś mnie na ręce.
Ja: Bo to oddala mniej przyjemne zajęcie.

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

From CinEmma:

From Cheryl’s Amazingly Positive, No Politics Allowed, Interesting People Grouop:

From Funny and Strange Signs:

From Masih: Another death sentence from Iran for nothing serious, only closing a curtain shop and going to a protest.

Death sentence for joining making this video.

Look at this video. What could possibly be more peaceful than this?

Ali-Asghar Peyghambari simply closed his curtain shop and joined a bazaar strike protesting Iran’s devastating economic conditions. He filmed this peaceful act of… pic.twitter.com/MMwSaZ9oBi

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 1, 2026

From Luana; another day, another made-up story from Jason Arday:

NEWS: Jason Arday Lied About Having a Masters From Birkbeck University

I filed a freedom of information request to Birkbeck University to check the claim Jason Arday made in the video below in 2022 that he had a masters in psychodynamic practice from the university.

Birkbeck… https://t.co/0UTAFMx4Cq

— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) September 1, 2026

From Loretta, a captcha:

I will fail this CAPTCHA 100000% of the time. pic.twitter.com/MHkDe1zonI

— The Redheaded libertarian (@TRHLofficial) August 28, 2026

From Anna; Canada is poaching the wrong academics, and hiring for equity rather than excellence is costing Canada a lot of money.

Canada just spent half a billion dollars poaching 64 academics, three-quarters of them from the U.S., and then CTV put the most revealing quote on TV

Talia Bettcher (trans philosophy / gender studies) is leaving Cal State LA for a taxpayer-funded chair at Waterloo because, in… pic.twitter.com/CqN1PjoPU5

— cbcwatcher (@cbcwatcher) August 30, 2026

Two from my feed. First, cygnets!

This is so beautiful pic.twitter.com/YJwqzfUzo8

— Science girl (@sciencegirl) August 31, 2026

And then, religiously based immorality:

This girl is only 11, but the foul old man who owns her has gotten her pregnant anyway. This is a child, and if by some miracle she survives the birth, she’ll be pregnant again before she turns 13.

And what do liberal “feminists” do? They put on hijab when they speak to Muslim…

— Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ (@sappholives83) September 1, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This man, Paul Kremer, was a German doctor who was a war criminal. Tried at the Auschwitz Trials, he was sentenced to death, which was commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in 1958. Nearly all the people arriving at this transport were gassed to death, as Kremer… https://t.co/HUctKwRV7F

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 2, 2026

One from Doctor Cobb; the Nepal deluge:

The sheer force and scale of the Nepal landslide is far beyond anything I've seen before. New footage from @ pilulaespacial on IG.

— Dave Vetter (@davidrvetter.bsky.social) 2026-08-30T18:54:53.563Z