Thursday: Hili dialogue

September 10, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, September 10, 2026, and National Hot Dog Day, celebrating Chicago’s most famous foodstuff. As all Chicagoans know, the best version is the one called “dragged through the garden”, as this short video explains (you don’t have to make them yourself: they’re on sale at many places). The dogs are made by Vienna Beef with natural casings, and the buns are Rosen’s poppy-seed buns. The “sport peppers” are small hot peppers. The combination of meat and vegetables (and MUSTARD, never ketchup) is ethereal.

It’s also National Port Wine Day and TV Dinner Day, celebrating those pre-bought dinners in partitioned aluminum containers that you ate on individual fold-up tables while watching television. I had many of these as a kid; here’s a Swanson TV Dinner ad from 1963 (unfortunately, it lacks dessert). If you’ve eaten one of these, you’re old; I don’t even know if they have them any more.

1950sUnlimited, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 10 Wikipedia page.

Oh, and Sue Gould pointed out, in yesterday’s Hili, this fantastic video showing the Democratic Penguins Republic filling the gap in Canada left by the dumb Trumpian tariffs (look at the other videos on the site. too—they’re devilishly clever):

Da Nooz: (lotsa nooz today; skip if you wish)

*The Times of Israel reports that the UAE told Netanyahu days before the October 7 attack that Hamas was “planning war”, but Bibi ignored it (h/t Norman). Israel denies it all:

Some 10 days before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was personally warned by the leader of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major offensive move against Israel, but did not update Israeli security leaders and did nothing with the information, according to a report on Tuesday.

An Emirati source familiar with the conversation confirmed the Haaretz newspaper’s report to The Times of Israel later Tuesday, and said the warning came during a phone call between the two leaders.

The UAE itself declined to confirm or deny the report, issuing a statement that noted “open lines of communication” with Israel through which “all relevant intelligence has been and continues to be communicated.”

Netanyahu’s office issued a statement Tuesday evening saying that “the press reports are false. No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates before October 7. If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries.”

The Haaretz report cited a new book, “Kidnapped: 843 Days of Abandonment,” by journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, based on interviews with dozens of sources including senior officials in Israel and around the world. It said three senior foreign officials were updated on the contents of the 45-minute phone call at the end of September, and it cited a Palestinian adviser to Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed who emigrated from Gaza to the UAE and had direct knowledge of the conversation.

But over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal dismisses this, in an article called “What did Bibi know?”, as an unfair indictment of the Prime Minister.

But let’s assume every word of this dramatic report is correct—who cares?

People excited by more ammunition to fire at Netanyahu forget that the problem was never a lack of information. The Hamas plan—kibbutzim, hostages, GoPros and all—was captured the year before; three months before the attack, an army analyst warned her superiors that Hamas had rehearsed precisely that over a full day. At the fence, the observation-post soldiers, the infamous tatzpitaniyot, had spent months reporting the drills but were similarly ignored. Most illustrative of all, on the night itself, the Shin Bet detected dozens of Israeli SIM cards activated simultaneously inside Gaza—and made the decision to send in the Tequila team—a small counterterror element meant to repel small raids, not an invasion.

The fundamental problem was never a lack of signs, but a lack of understanding.

The overused but precise term for this is conceptzia—a rigid, overriding paradigm, shared by political and military leadership, that traps them into thinking the status quo is immutable. Before October 7 it referred to the prevailing atmosphere preceding the surprise attack of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Those familiar with the history might recall that 11 days before that war, King Hussein of Jordan did significantly more than call: He helicoptered in secret to a Mossad safe house near Tel Aviv and met Golda Meir, warning her that Egypt and Syria were planning a joint attack. The day before the war, Israel learned that Moscow—patron of both Syria and Egypt—was pulling the families of its officers out of Damascus and Cairo—and did nothing. Meanwhile, a junior intelligence officer in Southern Command put in writing that the Egyptian deployment was preparation for a real war, not a drill. Israel’s leadership read the reports and then dismissed them—after all, Egypt wouldn’t dare attack the militarily dominant Israel; besides, why risk escalation or a false alarm, especially when mobilizing the reserves would paralyze the economy?

In 2023, Israel had even more information, and faced virtually no cost to blunt the threat. Any of the security chiefs could have picked up a phone at any point and told a battalion: listen, something is moving, get ready, there might be a war tomorrow. Not one did, including Netanyahu.

So spare me the search for the single leader who ignored the obvious signs or the one warning that would have changed history. From the chief of staff to the prime minister, all were trapped in a conceptual prison guarded by their own presumptions and upkept by groupthink that none escaped.

In late October Israeli voters will choose the members of the parliament (the Knesset), and that vote will determine who becomes Prime Minister. Netanyahu has said he’ll be in the running again, and it remains to be seen whether this latest report, which I haven’t seen in American MSM, will affect any votes. But if he’s deposed, I predict that the worldwide hatred of Israel, often based on Netanyahu’s presence, will not lessen.

*There’s endless psychologizing of President Trump with respect to what he is trying to do in Iran, and Middle East expert Michael Doran weighs in at The Free Press with his view (a siege) in an article called “Trump is charting a new course on Iran.”

Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump agreed on the objective: an Islamic Republic stripped of its nuclear program and of the power to hold the region hostage. But they frequently disagreed about how to make Tehran yield. Graham never wavered. More force, he recommended.

Three weeks into the war, the senator revealed the advice he had given the president: “Keep it up for a few more weeks, take Kharg Island. . . [and] let this regime die on the vine.” In May, he put the theory plainly: “Hurt them more. Maybe they’ll make a deal if you hurt them enough.” And in June, three weeks before his death, he predicted that if Iran contested the Strait of Hormuz, “We will obliterate them.”

Since last Easter, Trump has repeatedly threatened Tehran in accordance with the late senator’s advice. During the summer, the U.S. military prepared what reportedly would have been the largest strike of the war. At the urging of regional allies, however, the president again gave the military the order to stand down. Graham did not live to accept that rejection, but many of his political allies, my friends among them, reached what they considered to be an obvious conclusion: Trump had lost his nerve.

. . . [Trump’s] actions reveal a president steering between what he considers to be two wrecks. The first is George W. Bush’s regime-change war in Iraq. Trump called that war possibly the “worst decision” in presidential history and promised his voters never to repeat it. The second is Barack Obama’s Iran policy. After Iraq, Obama concluded, America’s only remaining course was to retreat, pay Tehran for quiet, and call it peace.

. . . Trump’s critics can imagine only these two headings, so each camp accuses him of steering toward the one it hates. But the president is attempting something harder: He is applying enough force to change the calculus of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) without tipping into the war of conquest toward which the dynamic of the conflict is pulling him. The bombing has proved insufficient, so he is tightening an economic siege in its place. Whether that middle course can succeed is the real question of the stalemate. Answering it begins with the military balance, which Graham’s theory took for granted.

. . .Graham’s theory held that enough bombardment would eventually produce capitulation. Six months on, Trump appears to have found another way to apply the pressure he prescribed: not simply by escalating the bombing, but by shifting the contest onto terrain where American advantages are greater. Iran created local overmatch in the Strait of Hormuz. The United States is answering with naval power, economic warfare, and control of the global financial system.

The stalemate has therefore changed shape. It is no longer a question of whether a course exists between Bush’s war and Obama’s retreat. Trump is attempting to create one: suppress Iran’s disruptive capabilities enough to keep Gulf commerce moving, deny Tehran the same privilege, and use America’s global economic power to impose costs that airpower alone could not. Whether this strategy will compel Iran remains unknown. Five days of financial warfare do not settle a six-month war. But the experiment is now underway. Graham wanted to hurt Iran until it wanted a deal. Trump is trying to do precisely that.

In response to this I can only utter the immortal words, “We shall see.”

*Tomorrow will be the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist airplane attacks in the U.S., and the news is preparing a big spate of articles. This one, in the Washington Post, and by former Justice Department prosecutor David Raskin, is very good: “The 9/11 trial that never happened“, with the subtitle, “President Obama’s wavering and Congress’s fear killed the court case Americans deserved to hear.” (You can see the article archived here.) The trial, of course would have been that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the main architect of the plane attacks. Mohammed has been held by Americans since 2003, and then was transferred to Gitmo, where he’s spent the last two decades.  A trial date in the U.S. is scheduled for June, 2028. From the article:

As the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks approaches, I still think about the case that never happened.

In 2009, I was preparing to help lead what would have been the most important criminal prosecution in American history: the trial in a federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators for orchestrating the murder of 2,977 people. It would have been a civilian trial, in open court, before a federal judge, held only a few blocks away from where the twin towers once stood.

Had it gone forward, it would have been the Justice Department’s finest hour.

The case was to be tried before Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York, a no-nonsense jurist with deep experience handling complex, high-profile terrorism cases. Kaplan presided over the 2010 trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantánamo detainee charged in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. From arraignment to sentencing, that case took a little more than a year and a half.

I can imagine how Kaplan would have responded had Mohammed tried to grandstand in court — with swift, unsentimental control, enforcing the rules of his courtroom without theatrics or indulgence. It would have been orderly and dignified. The public deserved to see such a trial, the victims were entitled to see it, and the Justice Department could rightly have taken pride in delivering it.

The evidence would have spoken for itself. Critics of civilian trials in the case warned that jurors could not bear to relive the horror of Sept. 11 or that classified evidence could not be handled safely. That was wrong. Federal courts had already convicted dozens of terrorists — including Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, and Zacarias Moussaoui, once called the 20th hijacker — using lawful, tested procedures designed to balance the public’s right to see powerful evidence, the defendant’s right to a fair trial and the nation’s interest in protecting intelligence-gathering sources and methods.

In the Mohammed case, we would not have relied on statements tainted by torture. Unlike the military commissions underway at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which planned to use so-called clean team FBI interrogations conducted after years of abusive detention until a military judge recently suppressed them in Mohammed’s case, a civilian prosecution would have had no need to flirt with legal gray zones. The admissible evidence was overwhelming. It included financial records, communications, co-conspirator testimony, physical evidence, Mohammed’s own uncoerced admissions and some surprises that have never been made public.

That trial would have ended in conviction long ago, as the evidence demanded. The defendants might have received death sentences, or they would have been condemned to spend the rest of their lives in the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. I have been there. It is the last place on earth any convict wants to end up.

But none of this happened.

The moment Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November 2009 that Mohammed would be tried in Manhattan, a chorus of opposition erupted. Some critics insisted that Sept. 11 was not a crime but an act of war, and that the perpetrators therefore deserved the “rough justice” of a military commission, not the protections of the Bill of Rights. Others spun up security fantasies, generating ridiculous fears the New York police commissioner used to justify an outlandish estimate of security costs. Still others complained about the inconvenience of it all, lamenting the burden of street closures and traffic jams.

Shame on all of them.

They did not understand how broken the military commissions already were. Our push to move the case to federal court was not ideological. It was about getting the job done. The commissions were a brand-new, untested system, plagued by endless litigation over their legality and procedures. And, ironically, they turned out to be more defense-friendly than civilian courts, reflecting the military justice system’s traditional role in protecting the rights of accused U.S. service members. Far from being the instruments of swift justice many envisioned, the commissions became a defense lawyer’s dream.

Nor did critics understand the detention conditions at Guantánamo. Mohammed and his co-defendants were not desperate to leave. Pretrial detention at the now-closed Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan was far less appealing. Yet the White House wavered. President Barack Obama, who entered office pledging to close Guantánamo and end the commissions, announced in May 2009 that instead they would continue, albeit with reforms. That equivocation proved fatal. It signaled weakness and emboldened opponents of civilian trials in Congress and elsewhere.

At the height of the backlash, what was needed was a clear, unequivocal statement from the Oval Office: “Knock it off. I stand by my attorney general. We are doing this.” But that never came. Congress stepped into the breach, eventually barring the transfer of Guantánamo detainees to the mainland for civilian trials. The plan to try Mohammed and the others in New York faded.

The trial, says Raskin, will never occur: “I predict there will never be a completed military commission trial for Mohammed and the other Sept. 11 defendants. The case is now before its fifth judge. ” But he’s secure in the knowledge that the perp will never be free, incarcerated according to military rules.  The problem, says Raskin, is that the “law of war” detention lasts only as long as we’re at war with al-Qaeda, while the verdict of American justice is permanent. As Raskin concludes:

All Americans must reckon with the fact that the Justice Department missed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to demonstrate the strength of American law. That failure haunts me. And it should haunt the country.

Amen. This case should never have been put into the hands of the military, and now it’s too late to undo that. And Gitmo is far more comfortable, I’m told, than where Mohammad is likely to end up if he’s tried here: an American Supermax prison.

*The Free Press reports on “The Civil War inside the DSA” (Democratic Socialists of America).

The latest sign of the organization’s growing clout came Monday, when likely 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsom became the latest Democratic establishment figure to welcome the DSA into a prominent role in the party. The California governor told Politico he’s “not alarmed” by the rise of socialism and that “it’s where a lot of the energy in the party is.”

As one DSA member joked to me this summer: “How insane is it that we’re in a political moment where the Democrats are so discredited that a knucklehead organization like DSA. . . is getting courted by all these national politicians because our brand is so good?”

But the DSA’s sudden success has also inflamed its long-standing internal debates. The struggle is between avowed Marxist-Leninists who want to abolish the Pentagon and refuse to condemn Hamas, and a more practical kind of socialist who believes prioritizing police and prison abolition is the wrong way to go about amassing electoral power.

One side of the fight—call it the pragmatic wing—is betting that socialists will succeed by continuing to rack up victories in Democratic Party primaries and gaining influence within that old husk. This approach requires the DSA party faithful to let candidates make occasional compromises on policy and put up with sometimes out-of-step officials like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former beau ideal of a socialist lawmaker who has drifted somewhat from the DSA over her four terms in office.

The other side, the purist wing, views any efforts to meld the socialist project with the Democratic Party as a betrayal of the coalition’s revolutionary roots. Their goal is to overthrow the two-party system, not to partake in it and risk their own corruption.

How this tension resolves in coming months may determine whether the DSA carves out a durable political presence on the mainstream left or reverts to what it’s long been: a fringe movement more interested in ideological purity than winning power.

As far as I’m concerned, the DSA is in no way beneficial for the Democratic Party. If it’s successful, the Party becomes woke and extremist, as well as more antisemitic. The DSA platform is largely insane, though there’s no way Americans are going to get rid of the Presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the cop, or that will open our borders fully. But besides corrupting the Democratic Party, they’re also splitting it, making it harder to beat Republicans. All they have to do, with a candidate like AOC or Mamdani (who, fortunately, is ruled out as President), is to quote some of what they’ve said.

*The WSJ describes how the CBS News show “60 Minutes” is trying to right itself after a shake-up (accompanied by several departing correspondence) caused largely by the appointment of Bari Weiss as the CBS News editor.

Many veteran correspondents and producers left or were ousted during a shake-up in which some departing talent accused Weiss of putting a political thumb on the scale. Weiss denied those charges.

Since then, [60 Minutes head Nick] Bilton and his team have been rebuilding its roster of correspondents and lineup of stories. His leadership faces its first test when the show returns Sunday for its 59th season.

CBS leadership gave Bilton the option to wait to premiere the new season until October, according to people familiar with the matter. But he decided to go ahead. “We’re ready,” he told the network, the people said.

Technology, particularly artificial intelligence, will be a theme this season, people familiar with the matter said. Bilton sees AI as the kind of defining story “60 Minutes” tackled in previous eras, including the Vietnam War, the fight against Big Tobacco and the Sept. 11 attacks.

He has also promised a renewed emphasis on original investigations, long a hallmark of “60 Minutes.”

People close to the show say that 35 stories are being shot or edited and 60 more are in development.

I just haven’t watched the show for ages, and this doesn’t make me want to start. Seriously, AI as a “defining story”? I’m so sick of AI stories, and there’s a lot going on in the world besides the rise of AI.  I just don’t have the interest any more.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is getting quite philosophical while Andrzej retains his sense of humor:

Hili: The present fades away, the future is unknown, the past is nothing but a story now.
Andrzej: Even an atheist will sometimes say – amen.

In Polish:

Hili: Teraźniejszość mija, przyszłość jest niewiadomą, przeszłość jest już tylko opowieścią.
Ja: Bywa, że i ateista mówi czasem – amen.

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

From Meow Incorporated; I think this is a real photo of a cat loose on a playing field:

From Stacy:

From Funny and Strange Signs:

From Masih; in Iran, a woman is refused medical care because she’s not wearing a hijab.  This is one of the reasons that America should prioritize changing the Iranian regime.

From Malcolm: some cats that have been imprinted on d*g behaviors:

From Luana. The comment is right on—how can you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone did not have an episode of mental illness when they committed a crime? The burden of proof should be on on the person who asserts that his/her crime is the product of mental illness.

From Jeff Maurer:

One from my feed. Sand cats (Felis margarita) are gorgeous small cats and well adapted to a very arid environment, getting most of their water from their prey.

TWO I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial; one who survived and one who did not.

And two from Doctor Cobb.  Look at this cunning bird!

A #bird following a #stingray to catch #fish startled from their hiding place in the sea grass as the stingray passes over them. Cormorants also follow kayaks & paddleboards in this part of #florida to catch fish startled from their hiding places by the kayaks shadows. #nature #animals #wildlife

— See Through Canoe (@seethroughcanoe.bsky.social) 2026-09-09T13:26:52.361Z

And look at this pink fish!

A pink scorpionfish #gili #giliislands #lombok #diving #scuba #trawangan #diveandstay #giliair #pets #ocean #sealife #marinelife #padi #fish #scorpionfish

— Terumbu (@terumbudivers.com) 2026-03-23T18:22:22.000Z

2 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  2. I have spent much of the last few years trying to understand the Israel/Arab situation through significant reading. One of the books, recommended by a reader on this site and that I now also recommend is “The Yom Kippur War” by Abraham Rabinovitch (2004, 2017). As I read about “The Concept” (that after the hugely victorious six-day war, the overwhelming superiority of the IDF and IAF over Egypt would continue forever) showed what turned out to be not just incredible chutzpah but a failure to see a new Egyptian leadership learn from its mistakes. Corrections included the early 1970’s included importing Russian technologies including new anti-tank weaponry, new longer range SAM missile capability to nullify the IAF advantages in the Six Day War, and training and recruiting a better grade of soldier along with new senior staff military leadership. As I read those pages, I wondered even more how such a massive event as Oct 7 could take Israel by surprise….yet again!

    Oh and on a lighter note, thanks for the Swanson tv dinner reminder. I think that I shall see if I can find a three-course Salisbury steak tray for tonight…just for old times sake.

    Reply

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