Monday: Hili dialogue

September 28, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the last Monday in September: September 28, 2026 and it’s National Drink Beer Day.  Here’s a helpful hint from the page:

HOW TO OBSERVE DRINK BEER DAY

The best way to celebrate is by enjoying a glass of beer.

I wouldn’t have known!  But here’s a good tipple (quaffed in Amsterdam):

And a beer that’s been drunk, sent to me from England by my friend Andrew Berry. He knows that Landlord is my favorite session beer, and was trying to taunt me:

It’s also Family Day and National Strawberry Cream Pie Day.

There will likely be no Hili (and probably no posting) tomorrow as I have a doctor visit.

And there’s a Google Doodle celebrating the Anniversary of Google. Click on the screenshot to go to the celebratory question (I answered correctly):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 28 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The White House produces more waffles than does Waffle House.  Now our “president” has changed his tune when it comes to the Kennedy Center after they took his name off it. Once he said it was refurbished and nearly done; now he calls it “dilapidated and dangerous.”

President Donald Trump stood on the red carpet at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in December and declared his mission to fix the building, to “make it beautiful,” all but accomplished.

“It was falling apart, and now it’s pretty much back,” Trump told reporters as he stood beside FIFA President Gianni Infantino ahead of the World Cup draw. “We’ve done a really great renovation job on it,” he added, predicting that remaining work would be complete within three or four months.

By Trump’s telling, it was the culmination of a transformation he had set in motion shortly after returning to office when, vowing to end “woke” programming, he purged the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees and became its new chairman.

But less than two months after Trump’s victory declaration — after his name was added to the building, artists balked at performing there and income dropped further — his assessment of the center’s condition soured.

In late January he hosted a starry red carpet premiere for the documentary “Melania” but days later announced that the center was so “tired, broken, and dilapidated” that its main building would need to close for two years. The building was “sort of dangerous,” he added that week, though it was deemed safe enough for Trump and the first lady to catch a performance of “Chicago” about two months later. By the end of April, executive director Matt Floca was testifying about dangerous roofing conditions and electrical equipment that he said posed a risk of fire or, in the worst case, explosion.

Over the following months, the descriptions grew more dire. Trump said people entering the building were in “serious danger.” The center’s lawyers called it “structurally unsound” and “fundamentally unsafe.” This month, after a section of ceiling plaster fell in the Grand Foyer, Trump described the building as being in a “virtual state of collapse” and said the incident could have “killed” people.

Yet many of the underlying physical problems cited by management were documented years before Trump took control — when Kennedy Center officials and their engineering consultants were planning to repair the aging building while continuing to stage performances.

A dozen current and former Kennedy Center staff members interviewed by The Washington Post described a building that needed substantial repairs and routine maintenance but said they had not experienced conditions that led them to believe the building as a whole was unsafe.

Truth be told, I never thought of the Kennedy Center as a particularly attractive building, inside or out, nor a fitting tribute to JFK. If nobody wants to go there, or perform there, perhaps it should be allowed to die. But that’s different from Trump’s changing description about a building based on whether his name’s on the outside.  All this behavior resembles that of a small, petulant boy. I suppose someone has pointed that out, but his whole Presidency resembles juvenilia.

*Oh, Lord, another despoliation. This time it involves a major league ballgame being held into a National Park. Guess who wants it? Yes, according to the WaPo, Major League Baseball approached the Trump administration to host a standalone game in a National Park. This may well not happen, and it shouldn’t, but a Park Service official is scouting locations in Grand Teton National Park.

Major League Baseball has approached the Trump administration about hosting a game at a national park, officials from the White House and MLB confirmed Saturday.

The administration has scouted locations in Grand Teton National Park to build a baseball park to host an MLB game, according to two other people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Grand Teton is the country’s eighth-most-visited national park and is famous for its breathtaking views of the Teton Range of the Rocky Mountains. National parks are among the country’s most protected federal lands, and constructing a sports facility at Grand Teton could set a new precedent for the use of vast national park land in the Western United States.

An MLB official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the league approached the administration after the success of MLB’s other stand-alone events, such as the recurring Field of Dreams game in Iowa. The idea of playing a game in a national park is one of several that MLB is exploring.

The White House said in a statement that MLB asked the administration “if it was possible to host a game at a national park, similar to the Field of Dreams game.”

“This is not a Presidential directive, nor is it being directed by the White House. It’s also not being driven by the Department of Interior,” the statement said. “Therefore, this is not a White House or Administration priority.”

The White House said MLB has not made any decisions and the Park Service has not granted any permits. “If the MLB wants to go on site visits of national parks, that is their prerogative,” the statement said.

It referred additional questions to MLB.

National Park Service Deputy Director Frank Lands visited Grand Teton National Park in recent days and looked at three potential locations for a baseball park within the park’s boundaries, the two people familiar with the matter said.

Now wait a tick! You don’t have to build a permanent stadium there, but there will have to be some kind of stadium that holds many people, and that shouldn’t happen in a National Park. That’s not what those Parks are for! But if I know Trump, he’ll want to build a permanent grandiose facility there and call it Trump Teton Stadium.  I’m hoping these plans fall through completely.

*If you thought the Free Press was objective in its news coverage—and you really shouldn’t have—you’ll be learning that it is soft on religion, putting it on the front page, like this (click to read if you subscribe). Yes, the lead story of yesterday’s FP was how two Princeton philosophy students, one an atheist (Joe Schmidt) and the other a lukewarm Christian (Noah McKay), while both are vegans, came to wholly embrace Catholicism. “What,” I asked myself, “Is the point of this.” The author, Suzy Weiss, a nepoemployee, write about culture for the site.

I’d taken the train to Princeton because I wanted to find out what’s in the water in New Jersey. I assumed philosophy was a field where reason trumps faith, and that anyone who thinks about it long and hard enough, in the halls of the progressive Ivy League, will come to the conclusion that there is no Creator. I thought postmodern academia had made everyone believe in nothing. Did these grad students study their way into believing in God, or was the intervention more divine than that? And does it have something to do with America’s much-vaunted “Catholic boom”?

Both these gentlemen were clean-cut—polos, khakis, a leather messenger bag—and clearly brilliant. They talked fast and opined on the finer points of magisterial doctrine from the 18th century, between bites of vegan corn ravioli. They’ve both been studying and debating apologetics for years, and met each other a few years ago at a conference, before they were students at Princeton together.

When McKay and Schmid met—it was in October 2022 at the Rutgers Philosophy of Religion Conference, also in New Jersey—they discussed what arguments might actually convince them to become believers, and they were in agreement: miracles. They weren’t talking about finding the image of the Madonna in a slice of toast. What they wanted to find was “strong empirical evidence” for miracles, and instances of “medical documentation, X-rays, hundreds of thousands of witnesses, including skeptical and hostile witnesses.” So, they got to work.

They studied the Marian apparitions, like the one in Fátima, Portugal, where three shepherd children reported seeing “a Lady more brilliant than the Sun.” They studied the miraculous healings at Lourdes, in southwest France, where the waters are said to have cured more than 7,000 people in the last 150 years or so. (The Pope is visiting this weekend.) The Catholic Church has verified 72 of these healings, and McKay was impressed with their rigor—anyone healed at Lourdes goes back each year for reexamination—and the canonization process, in which a Catholic considered for sainthood has to have at least two miracles attributed to them. “I still think miracles are rare, and I still think most miracle claims are false,” said McKay. But by the end of 2025, “I believed that Catholicism was true.”

For Schmid, the tipping point was studying Padre Pio, a Catholic saint who died in 1968, and was said to exhibit stigmata: wounds that appear on the same parts of the body where Jesus was nailed to the cross. “Naturalistic explanations don’t seem to account for their persistence, their character,” said Schmid. He was working on the case of Padre Pio with Ethan Muse, a philosopher at Rutgers, who had likewise been convinced that Catholicism is the one true faith, after spending years as an atheist, by studying miracles. (“This New Jersey corridor between the Princeton philosophy department and the Rutgers philosophy department is very sympathetic to philosophy of religion,” said McKay.) Muse had begun seriously considering Catholicism around Easter 2025, after studying the Shroud of Turin, and had enrolled in the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults program.

There are alternative explanations for Padre Pio’s stigmata (some have evidence behind them), but the fact is that we don’t understand how they got there, and we can’t test them now. Curiously, no existing priests have stigmata that could be tested. At any rate, the miracles did the trick.

Then, in early January, Schmid was sitting in the gym, when “a feeling in waves” came over him, and he got the message “You could be a saint” over and over again. “I just sort of was like, Okay, I give up, I’ve lost, God has won, and I’ve got to become Catholic,” said Schmid. A month later, on February 7, he went to a general confessional—because Schmid’s family is Catholic, he had been baptized and confirmed as a kid—and considered himself officially converted. “Big news. God exists. Christ is Lord and he established the Catholic Church,” Schmid told his followers, in a video he posted to his YouTube channel, Majesty of Reason, where he’d previously made arguments against the existence of God. In the video, Schmid added, “I’m not kidding.”

This kind of stuff is all too frequent in the Free Press, yet we never read about how someone became an atheist or gave up faith. And I don’t think we ever will.

*Tomorrow we may learn if Lindsay Clancy will get a new trial after her last one resulted in a mistrial.

After her triple-murder case ended in a mistrial, Lindsay Clancy will appear in court Tuesday for a status conference that should signal how the controversial case will proceed following a month of uncertainty.

At the hearing, prosecutors and the defense are expected to address pending motions from Clancy’s attorney to stave off another trial, the defense’s attempt to obtain more information about the holdout juror and – if prosecutors decide to retry Clancy – the schedule for a new trial.

Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in the divisive case on September 4 after the jury sent several notes saying they were deadlocked and that a single juror was preventing the panel from unanimously finding Clancy not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility for killing her children.

At trial, Clancy admitted to killing her children – Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months – but argued she was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she fatally strangled them and then attempted suicide in January 2023.

Prosecutors have not announced whether they will retry Clancy, but experts said both sides are likely considering whether another jury would reach the same conclusion, largely siding with the defense. At least one of Clancy’s jurors believes they would.

“If they tried the trial again the way they did, nine times out of ten, I think a jury would come back with not guilty by reason of insanity,” juror Nick Dargie told ABC News. “No doubt in my mind.”

I suppose that’s the verdict I’d find, for Clancy, if she was truly mentally ill (and it seems that way), should be given a chance for psychiatric rehabilitation, though I wouldn’t want to see her walk free in a year or so (that, of course, is a possibility). What I don’t understand are those people who want her found “not guilty”, period. It’s almost as if she’s become a hero for the murders. At any rate, it’s unlikely that the prosecution and defense can find a compromise solution that will avoid a new trial, as the defense wants no resolution that will result in jail time. This is a tough one.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, it’s raining, Hili is outside, and Kulka’s occupying the inside windowsill. That means trouble. As you know, these cats hate each other.

Kulka: I have a feeling it’s raining.
Hili: I’m about to chase you out of that spot.

In Polish:

Kulka: Mam wrażenie, że pada deszcz.
Hili: Zaraz cię z tego miejsca wypędzę.

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

From Things With Faces, a sad alarm clock:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Kitty Litterposting (I haven’t looked). You are looking not for the cat but for Waldo, who looks like this:

From Masih. This Iranian woman is going to be lashed 74 times because she sang.

From Luana; fingernails and indicators of white supremacy:

Here’s Netanyahu’s speech at the UN last week (h/t Jez). The Times of Israel comments (not always favorably) on this speech, including this bit:

 there were surprising omissions from the address, omissions that reinforce the sense that Israel does not have a clear and viable plan right now for countering the central threat to its national security: Iran’s nuclear weapons program, its ballistic missiles, and its rapacious, tenacious regime.

Several people have told me the speech is good, and I will watch it, but of course approving of anything Netanyahu does is like approving anything that Hitler did.

Two from my feed:

I’m still baffled by the ubiquity of antisemitism in Ireland:

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Matthew. First, the amazing reaction time of springtails:

Nature photographer 'pendra100legs' does these amazing macro shots of tiny bugs.This one is delightful (I'll link below to the full thing).It's a globular springtail in genus Sminthurides. These insect-relatives can launch themselves 60 times their height in 1.6 MILLISECONDS.*Voomp*. Gone.

— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2026-09-27T17:44:08.582Z

Matthew’s in Seattle, went whale-watching, and saw an orca!

Success! Bigg’s Killer Whales

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-09-26T23:51:06.414Z

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2 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I don’t know if I am bothered or not by a baseball game in a National Park. What would irk me is if the Federal government paid one cent of the cost for preparing for the event (including building the field), running the event, or remediation after the event. MLB should pay everything.

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  2. Some readers are usually interested: Big SpaceX Starship planned launch to orbit for first time now scheduled for 7:48CT. Live coverage should be at url

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