Tuesday: Hili dialogue

September 15, 2026 • 6:08 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, September 15, 2026, and Double Cheeseburger Day. Here’s an ad for one I photographed in St. Petersburg. Can you read the Russian?

It’s also National Cheese Toast Day, National Crême de Menthe Day, National Linguine Day, and World Afro Day.

There’s a Google Doodle on voting today (thanks to yesterday’s decision by the Supreme Court, we can still vote by mail). Click to see where it goes:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 15 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Kennedy Center has warned that it will go bankrupt unless Trump’s name, previously removed by a federal judge’s order, is restored to the building (archived article here).

Officials at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts have warned in documents that the institution faces “certain fiscal collapse within weeks” unless President Trump’s name is added back to the building in some fashion.

The warning, contained in a draft resolution ahead of a board meeting scheduled for Tuesday, appears to be part of an effort by Trump-allied officials to convince a judge that the institution’s financial health hinges on placing a tribute to the president on the building’s facade.

The judge, Christopher R. Cooper, ruled months ago that the president’s name should be removed from the building because Congress needed to have approved its renaming as the “Trump-Kennedy Center.”

The draft resolution shared with trustees says the center is at risk of bankruptcy and of missing payroll — but that Mr. Trump has “offered to step in and raise the necessary funds” to save the center. The draft resolution presents 10 options for how to add Mr. Trump’s name below the main signage on the front of the center.

“The board understands that without such appropriate recognition it is unlikely that President Trump will provide the fundamental oversight of the renovation of the main building and lead the fiscal rescue of the center,” the draft resolution says.

This is blackmail, pure and simple. Perhaps the Kennedy Center was in financial trouble before they added “Trump” to the name (I have no idea), but the notion here that if Trump’s name is put back on, he will somehow bail out the Center—and that is the act of a petulant child.  No act is too petty if it concerns Trump slapping his name over everything.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal describes an anti-Israeli film that won, with standing applause, the Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival (Wikipedia description here). The standing ovation was 24½ minutes long, also a record. Segal calls the film a “blood libel”.

It’s Monday, September 14, and rather than the typical smiles and gratitude, self-important solemnity greeted attendees of the Venice Film Festival as Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor accepted the Special Jury Prize for their new anti-Israel film NAZA. The title is the Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage, and the resemblance to another word is not one the filmmakers appear to have worked hard to avoid.

The critically acclaimed libel is the Israeli far left’s contribution to a steadily growing genre: anti-Israel propaganda, what might be called Hague bait. From the people who applauded the historical revisionist epic Palestine 36 and the directors behind the false frontier western No Other Land comes the sci-fi dystopia NAZA.

In the world of NAZA, Israel is Skynet, using AI to identify and eliminate threats in Gaza. Framed around the anonymous testimony of 24 people who claim to have served in intelligence Unit 8200, the film paints a picture of target lists generated from data scraped off thousands of hacked phones, and an interface where an officer clicks a rooftop and reads off how many people inside will die, with no column separating the infants from the adults. One interviewee recalls an approval for a strike with 500 expected civilian casualties.

The laziest provocation should be dismissed first. NAZA uses AI the way it is used on lazy grant applications and doctoral theses: a buzzword covering a lack of substance. AI in military applications is naturally unsettling to many, but let us be clear about what it is. A tool, one that has existed in earlier forms for nearly 20 years and is integrated into every modern military, and, in targeting and tracking, one that saves lives and improves military effectiveness. In the right hands, better data means fewer civilian casualties and more Hamas ones.

NAZA alleges that the IDF’s hands are soaked in blood, but let us break the claim down. Unit 8200 is the largest single unit in the IDF; finding 24 people to “confess” slivers of information, then arranging those slivers to look like an indictment, is not exactly a bulletproof case against the State of Israel. That they are anonymous, faces blurred and voices distorted, certainly makes the country look more malicious, but it also leaves open whether they served in the army at all, in what role, or whether they had any involvement in the events they describe. The self-identified junior soldiers would have no access to national or military strategy, and some of the accounts refer to situations outside Unit 8200’s role altogether.

Segal has more criticisms, but you can read them for yourself.  He ends this way:

But all you need to know about this film’s essence is the record-breaking standing ovation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously described a Moscow conference in 1937 where the applause for Stalin’s name ran on because no one dared be the first to sit. They managed 11 minutes. Few things testify to the power and intolerance of the ideology NAZA belongs to quite like the fact that Venice managed 25.

This YouTube video, which has English subtitles, is labeled as the trailer to NAZA.

For a response to this by an Israeli who hasn’t seen it, and a categorial denial of the main allegations by the IDF, see the articles at the Jewish News Service and the Times of Israel, and especially the official IDF response, which denies the use of AI in fighting Hamas. I expect there will be more on this in the coming days, and I will follow up.

*Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier, who used to be our provost here, recounts the pushback received by a report on the state of academia he commissioned. His op-ed in the Washington Post is called “A report exposed a crisis in academia. The response was telling.” (Article archived here, and you can see my post about the report here.)

The committee’s central finding in its report released in June was nuanced. It emphasized the continued importance of the humanities and found rigorous scholarship in every field it studied. But the committee also found serious problems across the board, including “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity.”

The group, however, noted uncertainty about how much these problems affect the disciplines, cautioning against hasty interventions without thorough assessments.

The reaction to this report has been lively. Some responses challenged its conceptual foundations. Some criticized its evidentiary basis and how it was produced. Others said it should have proposed more reform steps. That is how scholarly debate should work.

But others ascribed sinister motives to those involved or asserted that the report had been commissioned to advance a broader political agenda. A joint statement from members of the American Association of University Professors at Vanderbilt and Washington University called the document a “pseudo-intellectual pretext” for administrators to strip faculty of the power to govern their own departments and asked us to rescind the report. Others alleged guilt by association after the U.S. secretary of education cited it in an open letter in August — a letter published nearly a year after the report had been commissioned.

Ascribing motives without providing evidence or rejecting findings because they are also supported by political opponents are odd arguments to make when criticizing a report’s accuracy.

Some examples of the ideological invasion of the humanities:

To get a better sense of the evidence provided, it is worthwhile reading the field-specific reports on literary studies, sociology and history. We can debate what evidence would convince us that scholarly standards are being subordinated to political agendas. But what do we make of the fact that professional associations and many departments explicitly endorse such goals?

Consider the following examples. The president of the American Anthropological Association told the group’s members in 2021 that anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.”

The president of the American Sociological Association in his 2021 presidential address called for an “emancipatory sociology” centered on white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy and other determinants that traditional European and “white American sociologists” had omitted from their accounts.

The English department at Michigan State University states that its “teaching, scholarship, and service are explicitly committed to advancing equity and justice and questioning established power structures.” Twenty other English departments and programs identified in the appendixes to the literary studies report issued similar statements.

. . .There are encouraging signs. In sociology, scholars are engaged in a serious debate about the relationship between activism and scholarship.

That is the response this report deserves. It needs to be read and debated. And where it is right, faculty need to publicly support it — even if someone in Washington has said so, too.

This is not scholarship but activism. I can’t believe, given the proliferation of “studies” and evidence that class syllabi are biased in “progressive” directions, that people can’t see that there’s a big problem with the humanities in this respect (and, as Luana and I showed, in science, too).

*In his latest column, of which I get a summary in a newsletter (I no longer subscribe to The Weekly Dish), Andrew Sullivan declares that he’s staying away from writing about Trump and American politics for the next year. I quote:

. . . I found myself asking: what else is there to say about our national politics at this point? We are a decade into the Trump era and everything is the same and much worse. The midterms could change the general mood, but Trump — as his Castro-length speech to his “convention” showed — will never change. His ability to shock with new lows and new depravities is undimmed. How many times can I say in so many words what Kevin Williamson righteously unleashed this week?

Trump is a habitual liar who has made his political career on the support of people, often dumb and mostly angry, who enjoy being lied to. J.D. Vance is a schmuck, a spineless yes-man without honor or integrity … Trump is surrounded by a team of cretins, incompetents, nepotism beneficiaries, drunks, degenerates, and sundry clueless clowns. Their political goal is tyranny and the displacement of the American constitutional order by a Trump-fronted mafia state.

That’s about right. Try looking at the president’s social-media feed: disgusting, deranged, dangerous, delusional. Or his dumb-as-a-post war that is not a war. Or his mindless tariff escalation with Canada. Or his hideous Arc de Trump. Categorizing and detailing his daily absurdities and obscenities for over a decade has been important work. But another two years of thinking and writing in depth about this monster and his madness? I found myself buckling with nausea at the thought.

Equally, I realized I’m exhausted trying to find something new and interesting to say about the feckless Democrats, who still appear to be either woke fanatics or conviction-free liberals, and who now apparently believe that warmed-over socialism is what the country is begging for. You know what I think they need to do, and I’m not sure there is much point in my repeating it ad nauseam. My last column on the two cults summed up a lot. The Dems have some talent and I have some hope, but I’m not sure I have that much new to say until we have actual candidates and policies for the post-Trump era. That’s when we’ll be able to assess, start over, and think constructively again. Same with the GOP. Anyone is saner than Trump.

At the same time, of course, I reflected on the huge questions remain: the fate of liberal democracy after the mad king, the rise of neo-fascism in Europe, the unknowable consequences of AI, the resurgence of Chinese nationalism, the resilience of religion, the challenge of demographic decline, the postmodern assault on truth, and an international order clearly shifting from one largely peaceful era to another, far more dangerous one. And I don’t want to walk away from any of this. I want to focus more on it — on deeper themes and bigger issues than Trump’s latest excrescence.

. . .So for the next year or so, I want to shift the Dish away from weekly political columns and focus more on podcast explorations of history, philosophy, culture, religion, science, and psychology. That means we’ll lead with the Dishcast each week, not the column. Yes, I’ll continue to write bloggy posts to supplement it. And if a real moment occurs, of course I’m going to write about it. But not a full-length column every week.

Familiar features from the column newsletter will remain: the View From Your Window, the Window Contest, Money Quotes for the Week, Dissents of the Week, Mental Health Break, and a guide to other substacks. (And we’re adding a polished transcript for each episode.) We’ll no doubt experiment some more a bit. But I won’t be writing a long column each week until we have some actual choices and a real debate about what’s next in the wake of this disaster of a presidency. Which is about a year away.

Then there’s the other reason for the shift. I really want to write my spiritual memoir.

Well, I don’t have a spiritual memoir in the offing, so I’ll write about those politics that interest me, foreign or domestic.

*Over at the Free Press, historian Niall Ferguson envisions a number of ways the AI apocalypse can take place, though they all seem to involve a human starting the process. Even asking the bots themselves shows a not negligible probability of this happening:

In short, even the models themselves admit that p(Doom)—that is, their probability of wiping us all out by 2036—lies somewhere between below 10 percent and above 50 percent. It’s a wide range, I know, but would you do anything that had such a potentially high probability of killing you inside 10 years? And I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that Claude, Grok & Co. are incentivized to understate p(Doom), not overstate it.

. . . In short, even the models themselves admit that p(Doom)—that is, their probability of wiping us all out by 2036—lies somewhere between below 10 percent and above 50 percent. It’s a wide range, I know, but would you do anything that had such a potentially high probability of killing you inside 10 years? And I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that Claude, Grok & Co. are incentivized to understate p(Doom), not overstate it.

Here are examples of what’s already happened:

In June, Anthropic revealed that “malicious actors are using AI in ways that make them more dangerous, such as “in the later, more complex stages of their cyber operations.” “Cyberattacks,” it added, “are becoming more autonomous.” OpenAI admitted that users were asking its models to help them make bioweapons. For example, ChatGPT was asked how to aerosolize pathogens, modify the measles virus to make an outbreak resistant to the measles vaccine, and make ricin, a highly toxic poison banned under the Biological Weapons Convention (more on that later). The chatbot obliged, though OpenAI then closed the accounts involved.

Even more disturbing was the unprompted, concerted attack by OpenAI’s agents on Hugging Face in July. I wrote about that two weeks ago, but we’ve since learned more from an August 26 report from METR, a nonprofit that measures the potential harm of AI systems. We’ve also learned that, two months before the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI had already launched the “GemStuffer” cyberattack against RubyGems, an online service for coders.

In the Hugging Face incident, roughly 1,200 agents meant to be isolated from one another found a way to communicate and coordinate on an unauthorized message board, sending more than 70,000 messages and files over six days (July 7–13). Around 700 of the agents went on to participate in the attack on Hugging Face. These agents named themselves, cheated, and colluded, and then went to great lengths to cover their digital tracks.

Ferguson goes on to name China and Russia as those most likely to go after the West (China’s already used AI to go after groups), and especially fears the use of AI to launch attacks with biological weapons. Like most readers, I don’t know how to weigh these threats, but one has to pay attention when the heads of AI companies like Anthropic are calling for a pause.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is surprised at a quotidian event:

Hili: The sun is going down behind the line of trees.
Andrzej: Yes, that’s its everyday habit.

In Polish:

Hili: Słońce zachodzi za linię drzew.
Ja: Tak, to jego codzienny obyczaj.

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

From Reader Tim McLean, who saw this angry camp chair at the Three Dog Winery in Picton, Ontario.  

From Bad Spelling and Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From The English Language Police:

It’s hard to believe that Mahsa Amini was killed four years ago, and it was her death that really got the protests against the Iranian theocracy rolling (you may recall that it was likely she was beaten to death by the morality police for not wearing a hijab).

From Luana; words of wisdom from Kamala Harris:

From Malcolm. I could use this kitten!

From Jeff Maurer; J. D. Vance taking cheap shots at Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico:

From my feed, a feel-good video:

Another from my feed. Translation from the Russian:

This kitty has loved lying in the sink since kittenhood, but then he grew up, and the sink didn’t 😾

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Doctor Cobb: Leaf miner zoomies!

Leaf miner zoomies

— Matt P (@bertolicus.bsky.social) 2026-09-13T08:57:54.819Z

 

One thought on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Most important line: “ In the right hands, better data means fewer civilian casualties and more Hamas ones.”

    This means collateral damage assessments are being made and taken seriously. It is not zero, but there can be an attempt to minimize with proper sensitivity analyses and good data. While I still hate ai, I accept it as a tool in the box with other, more human-centered analyses, that can aid in doing best assessments.

    And as far as the petulant three-year old and his apologists, I suggest taking JFK’s name off the building and leaving tRUMPS until the executive office changes hands and programming that is appropriate to the Kennedy legacy returns.

    Reply

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