Wednesday: Hili dialogue

It’s a hump day (“Долоо хоногийн дунд үе (Лхагва гараг)” in Mongolian): Wednesday, September 16, 2026. A week from now I will have a new lens in my right eye (yep, I’m at the age for cataract surgery; wish me luck!). It’s also National Guacamole Day. Here’s Rick Bayless, a famous Chicago chef, showing how he makes it. He knows what he’s talking about. But I can’t abide cilantro, though (a common genetic mutation), and would leave it out.

It’s also Anne Bradstreet Day, Mayflower Day (the day the ship full of settler colonizers left Plymouth, England in 1620), National Cinnamon Raisin Bread Day, and World Play-Doh Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Once again at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal gives an upbeat view of the war between. the U.S. and Iran with respect to how the Iranian leadership is doing. I’ve bolded what I think are the critical conclusions below.

A very senior Israeli figure, now in civilian life, sat this week on the stage of the MEAD conference [a yearly summit between the U.S. and Middle East leaders] in Washington and recounted how, once again, the entire Iranian leadership was wiped out. A gathering of officers was set to convene on Saturday at 9:30 a.m., and then came word of a gathering of the intelligence ministry at 8:30. The problem this created was that they had to strike both at once to preserve the element of surprise — and the further problem was that the ministry meeting was slated to run one hour, meaning it would end exactly as the second meeting began. Someone came with a piece of advice: strike at 9:40, because intelligence officers everywhere always love to run long. His advice was taken, the officers ran long, and were blown sky-high in the middle of the briefing.

Conclusion: running long is not advisable. In short: in September 2024 the conference, with figures from the Gulf, the Middle East, and the US, dealt mainly with Israel’s difficulty subduing the arms of the Iranian axis. Sinwar was holding the hostages, Nasrallah didn’t know what was coming a week later, and no one talked about Iran itself. In September 2025, mid-conference, Israel tried to eliminate the Hamas leadership in Doha; the prevailing view was that someone needed to rein Israel in.

This year the conference was defined by the coalition against Iran. No disputes remained about the need to deal with it, or about subduing the regime of the ayatollahs as the single most important matter in the Middle East. The main conclusion is that the Islamic Republic is in far worse shape than it appeared when the memorandum of understanding was signed, but that its story will keep unfolding for a long while yet. Former Mossad chief Dedi Barnea estimated last year that effective sanctions would bring the Iranian regime down within a year. After roughly half a year of an American siege on Hormuz, the assessment inside the Mossad is that if the US doesn’t tire or break, the first quarter of 2027 will see Iran fall. “It’ll be a new Middle East,” a senior American promised.

Until a few months ago the consensus was that Iran had come out of the war with the upper hand, in light of what looked like a shameful capitulation by Trump and the abandonment of all the war’s aims. Almost no one still thinks so. “The supreme leader didn’t come to his own father’s funeral, his brother had to wear a mask — is that what the winner looks like?” wondered a senior White House official. It wasn’t said outright, but the assumption is that the pressure won’t ease — it will only intensify after the elections in Israel and the United States. If the Republican Party wins, Trump will feel freer than ever. If not, history teaches that presidents who’ve lost their grip on Capitol Hill and on domestic affairs tend to turn to foreign ones. Unshackled, with no more elections left in his political life, Trump could descend on Iran in a fury of wrath. What Netanyahu will be able to do, assuming he’s in a caretaker government, is a little less clear.

The Americans have other matters on their plate. A senior figure from the worlds of politics and technology warned at the conference that the whole world “is now digging its own grave through a misunderstanding of AI. In 20 years humanity could be wiped out by the combination of quantum computers.” He added that the only chance of survival is if the quantum computers conclude that they still need humans to supply them with electricity. If we’re going to be wiped out within 20 years anyway, then suddenly rebuilding Gaza and eliminating the Iranian nuclear program seem a touch less urgent.

Well, Trump could descend on a fury of wrath, but somehow I  doubt that. I do hope that we win this war, and that we don’t withdraw with our tails between our legs. And I hope the Iranian people are freed from being under the yoke of theocracy.

*Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that Trump cannot involve the government in screening ballots so that only “approved” voters could get mail-in ballots. It’s a big loss from Trump (the vote appears to have been 7-2), and he deserved it:

The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a Trump administration plan to dramatically change how Americans vote by mail in the lead-up to the midterm elections, a major loss for President Trump, who has long claimed without evidence that fraud is rampant in mail voting.

The ruling was a resounding win for Democratic-led states and voting rights groups, which had argued that the plan was unconstitutional and an existential threat to the democratic process.

The Trump administration’s efforts, they had said, would introduce chaos and confusion as early voting gears up in many states.

Still, the weekslong legal tussle over the issue may have sown its own kind of confusion, a victory of sorts for Mr. Trump as he seeks to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote in an election his party might lose.

In a one-paragraph explanation, the court’s majority wrote that the government was “unlikely to succeed on the merits” at the conclusion of additional litigation on the issue.

The majority’s order was unsigned, which is typical in emergency rulings. It gave no vote count.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, one of the court’s conservatives, wrote a one-paragraph concurrence. Writing for himself alone, he said that there was “at least a fair prospect” that new mail ballot rules issued by the Postal Service fell within its purview under federal statutes, but that allowing those changes so close to the midterms “would be arbitrary and capricious.” State and local elections officials, he wrote, would not have “sufficient time to reasonably implement” the changes.

In an eight-page dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that he would have allowed the Trump administration plan to go into effect for the midterms. Justice Alito called the legal challenge a “Hail Mary” pass that was unlikely to succeed and that he believed the administration would ultimately win the case because the Postal Service has “broad authority to regulate the mail.”

Even some Republican election officials cheered the ruling.

Ricky Hatch, the Republican clerk in Weber County, Utah, said he felt “relief.” Utah almost exclusively votes by mail, and Mr. Hatch had been preparing a contingency plan to abandon mail voting if the Supreme Court allowed the Postal Service to restrict the practic

The whole purpose of this, of course is to curb the so-called “voter fraud” that Trump pretends cost him the election in 2020. It didn’t, but he’s a big bully and is trying to throw his weight around. Fortunately, the Supreme Court—which the Democratic Socialists of America want to eliminate—curbed the bullying.

*Speaking of lawsuits, the Justice Department has found evidence that, despite the Supreme Court ruling of 2023 that race cannot be a factor in college admissions, UC Berkeley is still discriminating against white and Asian students in favor of other minorities. (The article is archived here.)

The University of California, Berkeley, discriminated against white and Asian applicants to its law school, the Justice Department and the Education Department said Wednesday.

The move expands the Trump administration’s effort to enforce its contested interpretation of a three-year-old Supreme Court ruling that struck down race-conscious admissions programs. It also escalates the government’s clash with the University of California system. All 10 of its campuses have come under federal scrutiny.

The Justice Department based its findings, in part, on applicant data provided by the law school, which it said showed that the school had a bias against Asian and white applicants and in favor of Black applicants.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil rights official, wrote in a letter to a lawyer for Berkeley that the patterns “could not reasonably have occurred by chance and provide substantial evidence of intentional discrimination.”

Berkeley fired back soon after the Justice Department released Ms. Dhillon’s letter.

“Berkeley is committed to ensuring that every student is admitted based on their merit, and not on their race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin,” the university said in a statement, adding that it would “spare no effort to provide ample evidence showing that the university complies with all relevant laws, policies and rules governing admissions.”

Everyone knew that colleges would try to get around the Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard restrictions, so this isn’t really a surprise. Harvard lost because it used hokey criteria to guarantee equity, deeming Asian students, for example, to be deficient in their personality traits. Now these data come from the law school, where it’s easier to judge merit-based admissions since the LSAT test is required.  But if Berkeley is wholly committed to merit-based admissions, why does it explicitly not ask for standardized test results like the ACT or SAT for undergraduate admissions?  And if applicannts do send those results, they are not considered. You’d think that a school that committed to merit-based admissions would want every scrap of information about merit it could get.

*Over at the Free Press, Amanda Knox is still milking her jail time in Italy in a piece on the Lindsay Clancy trial. She deals with the ludicrous conspiracy claim that Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s ex-husband, could have been complicit in the murder of their three children. And of course Know almost immediately manages to work her own case into the narrative. It starts with Patrick running the Boston Marathon to raise money for Boston Children’s Hospital, where one of his murdered kids was declared dead:

Here was a man who had lost everything, and wasn’t hiding it. At the time, strangers cheered his name along the course. But two years later, the internet, which spent this summer obsessively watching the trial for his children’s murders, dug up the footage and turned against him. Patrick Clancy was coping too well. This isn’t how someone who’s grieving should act. He should be too busy crying to train for a marathon. He must have done it.

Seeing this gave me flashbacks to the relentless scrutiny of my own behavior in the wake of my roommate’s murder in Perugia, Italy, in 2007, for which I was falsely imprisoned. There is no one “right” way to react to trauma, or to grieve, but when the lens of suspicion falls on you, everything is wrong. When I cried, they were crocodile tears; when I didn’t, I was cold and unfeeling. When I smiled at my family in the courtroom—a brief glimpse to let them know I was okay—I was a whore for the cameras.

Remember that her trial was in 2009. And notice how Knox continues to drag her own experience into the Clancy case:

It’s tempting to think conspiracy theories arise when it isn’t immediately clear what happened or who caused it, but that’s often not the case. Consider Sandy Hook, or 9/11: What happened was patently obvious. The same was true in my own case. Within two weeks of my roommate Meredith Kercher’s murder, her true killer, Rudy Guede, had been identified. His DNA was all over the crime scene, and inside her body; he’d left his fingerprints in her blood. And yet all of that incontrovertible evidence was displaced by a leery focus on my behavior; facts were ignored in favor of vibes. To this day, there are people who claim my acquittal was the result not of the collapse of the prosecution’s ludicrous case, but the secret machinations of Hillary Clinton. So it is with the Clancy case.

On January 24, 2023, Patrick’s wife, Lindsay, strangled all three of their children in their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, while Patrick was out picking up dinner and her prescription for postpartum depression. Nobody in the courtroom disputed that. Not the prosecution, not her defense lawyer, and not Lindsay herself, who pleaded insanity. Patrick was ruled out as a suspect in the first days of the investigation. The judge declared a mistrial last week, because the jurors couldn’t agree on a verdict.

But while the court of law tried Lindsay, the court of public opinion tried Patrick. Online sleuths have picked over every twitch of his face in the courtroom, every iota of footage that shows him going about his life, every decision he’s made since the death of his children. Online sleuths parsed the time stamps on his pharmacy receipt and the surveillance footage of him buying dinner, claiming that his jacket in the CVS video had a different zipper style (three-quarter zip as opposed to full zip) than the one he wore at the restaurant, and speculated that he had swapped his clothes to hide bloodstains. They theorized about the data on Lindsay’s Apple Watch, claiming it would be physically impossible for a person with a heart rate of 57 bpm to succumb to a psychotic episode. Some even consulted astrology: Lindsay couldn’t have done it because she’s a Leo, whereas Patrick’s a Gemini who almost has the same birthday as Donald Trump. Guilters seem particularly peeved with the fact that he’s remarried since the death of his children, and when paparazzi stalked Patrick and his new wife through the streets of New York, they treated every photograph as an evidence exhibit.

This is the conspiracy, in a nutshell: Patrick was having an affair. He drugged his wife, killed the children himself, and convinced her she’d done it when she survived having her throat and wrists cut and falling from a second-story window.

. . . I’ve had to deal with this unending focus on my behavior for nearly 20 years now, from the cranks on Reddit to so-called body-language experts parading their pseudoscience on YouTube and dissecting my every facial expression for signs of guilt, to best-selling and respected authors like Gladwell. It takes a toll.

Knox has nothing to add to the Clancy case; the putative guilt of Patrick Clancy has been dispelled over and over again. And we all know about Knox’s case because she wrote two books about it and has banged on about it endlessly in the media. If she truly was not guilty, then yes, she suffered a grueling and unfair ordeal and I feel sorry for her (she was in prison for four years).  But it’s time for her to move on. You might think she has, as she’s become a stand-up comedian. But what is her material? Her court case, of course, and her comedy deemed by the BBC to be “not very funny.”

*After strong criticism and the refusal of stadium owners to provide a venue, musician Ed Sheeran has dropped rapper Macklemore from his concerts. Before this kerfuffle happened, I didn’t know who either of them were, but I know now.  And the deep-sixing of Macklemore is due not to his tastelessness, but to  $$, of course.

The rapper Macklemore has been dropped as an opening act from Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour after he said “Free Palestine” onstage before performing a protest song at two concerts this month.

Macklemore, whose 2012 hit “Thrift Shop,” released with his former producer Ryan Lewis, helped the duo win four Grammy Awards, performed on Sheeran’s tour at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on Sept. 4 and 5.

“I wanted to stand up on here on stages and stadiums across America,” he said on the second night, “and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine.”

At the concert, Macklemore performed “Hind’s Hall,” his 2024 protest song against the war in Gaza, which began after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. In the song, Macklemore described Israel’s destruction in Gaza as a “genocide.” He also showed the track’s music video, which includes scenes from Gaza and student protests in the United States. “You can ban TikTok, take us out the algorithm,” he raps. “But it’s too late, we’ve seen the truth, we bear witness.”

Macklemore immediately came under criticism, including from the Anti-Defamation League and the group StopAntisemitism.

The Israeli-American Council published a petition online calling on Sheeran and the venues hosting his tour to drop Macklemore, saying that Macklemore had used “selective imagery, biased messaging and disputed claims.” The petition added, “Keep Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour about music — not political propaganda.”

Macklemore and the Messina Touring Group, the promoter of Sheeran’s tour, confirmed in statements on Monday that he had been removed from the tour.

In a statement posted online, Macklemore said that Robert Kraft, whose company owns the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium outside of Boston, where the tour is set to play, had been instrumental in his removal.

. . . “Ed also told me,” Macklemore continued, “that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.”

So it goes. Macklemore has the right to say what he wants in public, for that is free speech. But this is not public; it is a commercial venue and he can’t say anything he wants. Nor was it appropriate to criticize Jews in this venue. I’d say exactly the same thing if he criticized Palestinians. It’s a concert, not a political rally. But, as you can see below, he has some antisemitic tendencies, and if he’s going on stage dressed like Shylock, he can expect to suffer the consequences:

From the Independent via Twitter:

Macklemore’s statement apologising for his ‘anti-Semitic Jew costume’ has been accepted by the Anti-Defamation League, who work to protect Jewish people from prejudice.

The US rapper donned a fake dark wig, beard and nose for a Seattle gig last week, prompting accusations of racism.

But the 30-year-old insisted he did not intent to mock Jewish culture and that his offensive fancy dress was “random”.

“Random”?  Seriously? Can you believe that after you take a look at the picture of the Jewfaced Macklemore below? Think of it as equivalent to blackface, for which there is little forgiveness these days, no matter how long ago it occurred.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a good question:

Hili: Do bats see with their ears?
Me: Hmm, that’s an interesting way of putting it.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy nietoperze widzą uszami?
Ja: Hm, to ciekawe określenie.

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

From CinEmma:

From Silly Signs, Funny Signs, Dumb Signs, Stupid Signs:

From Wholesome Memes:

From Masih. Today is the fourth anniversary of the murder of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian beaten to death for not wearing a hijab (she’s called “Zhina,” which means “life-giving person” in Farsi. The translation of Mahsi’s tweet below:

Translation from Farsi:

We are on the eve of the anniversary of the state murder of Zhina and the start of the Mahsa Revolution, or the same uprising of “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Zhina was 22 years old when, on September 16, 2022—two days after her arrest by the Guidance Patrol—for the blows inflicted on her head, she lost her dear life. Her death became the spark of a revolution that, four years later, is still alive, and the government of the killers has still not been able to extinguish it. In memory of Mahsa, Nika, Abolfazl, and Sarina, and thousands of dear ones who sacrificed their precious lives for the freedom of Iran and its people. 💔✌🏻 #مهسا_امینی #زن_زندگی_آزادی

در آستانه سالروز قتل حکومتی ژينا و شروع انقلاب مهسا، يا همان خيزش «زن، زندگی آزادى»، هستيم.
ژينا ٢٢ ساله بود كه روز ٢٥ شهريور ١۴٠١، دو روز پس از بازداشت به دست گشت ارشاد به خاطر ضرباتى كه به سرش وارد كردند، جان عزيزش را از دست داد. مرگ او شراره انقلابى شد كه چهار سال بعد، هنوز… pic.twitter.com/W81TFBG4JM

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 15, 2026

From Luana. Harrison spoke at Williams College and Luana attended.  Healthy at any size!

Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s post-Socialism 2026 update is that he’ll be speaking at Harvard Medical School later this month on how fat bodies are “pathologized by medical professionals” and how doctors can more ethically treat fat patients. https://t.co/xB1a9jABpL pic.twitter.com/nAEYZWgTak

— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) September 15, 2026

A sad video from the Number Ten Cat on the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease:

Alzheimer’s disease is called the long goodbye. The loved ones of those afflicted with it are forced to surrender the people they love long before they die.

It’s a cruel illness that doesn’t care who you are or how much you’ll be missed and it leaves devastation in its wake.

My…

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) September 14, 2026

From Malcolm. Translation from the Portuguese:

The puppies playing peacefully until the one who really runs the house shows up and the mood changes completely.

os cachorros brincando tranquilamente até que quem realmente manda na casa aparece e o clima muda completamente pic.twitter.com/8TPVi9yaEg

— mauro henri (@xtinohenri) September 9, 2026

One from my feed. Winston is a very bad boy!

“Fuck’s sake Winston ” pic.twitter.com/FcLIKfErae

— Dyslexic_aDve (@Dyslexic_aDve_) September 15, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This french Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz. She was 9 years old. https://t.co/Og0XxRxFkz

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 16, 2026

Two from Doctor Cobb. First is his own take on space weapons:

We've just gone through the jump cut in Kubrick's 2001 where the bone hurled into the air turns into an orbiting nuclear weapon.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-09-15T13:27:52.632Z

And have a gander at these beautiful macaws:

@diche_mideros captures two red and green macaws flying side by side, their wings touching as they soar: #AGoodPlace

— Michelle says: Be kind. Always. ❤️ (@snarkysillysad.bsky.social) 2026-09-14T12:03:24.357Z