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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31 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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    1. Update: IN ORBIT! Though there were a couple of nits like one of the 33 booster engines quitting early and one of the Starship’s six engines quitting early, the team decided they still had enough capability to get to orbit and , most importantly I think, deorbit properly for a planned splashdown later today. They have just launched a set of functional Starlink satellites. I do not know whether they will still run the full mission through six orbits or not.

      So this is very good. In their act quickly/break things engineering approach, this is good that they have robustnestness to still get to orbit and will have a long on-orbit test of systems and recording of data from today’s test.

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        1. Mark, I will risk getting yelled at for an over-commenting da’ roolz violation to mention that at a nominal 90 min/orbit, and six orbits, we might start tuning in for start of the de-orbit sequencing, re-entry, and splashdown in the Pacific, west of Chili around 5pm ET…. Though I plan to query SpaceX a couple of times throughout the day for any authoritative updates.

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        2. At noon ET, Ship has splashed down in Northern Pacific just now. Pretty successful mission it appears: launch to orbit; deployed a bunch of Starlinks into orbit; Ship completed two orbits it appears which is short of full mission six, but was apparently a planned contingency with recovery ships properly placed; deorbit and landing burns appeared to be fine with soft splashdown followed by big explosion….hopefully we will see a terra firma landing try by Ship on next test.

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          2. Thanks! I watched the launch and the splash-down of the booster. Sorry that I got you in trouble, though!

    2. According to AI google and a post on substack.
      “SpaceX’s Starship has faced persistent challenges regarding its payload capacity, remaining significantly overweight and falling short of the initial payload-to-orbit mass goals promised by Elon Musk.Current Payload Challenges Weight and Capacity Constraints: The current iterations of the Starship vehicle are reportedly too heavy, which restricts the actual payload mass it can carry to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and eats into critical landing fuel margins. I’d add, profitablity.
      It goes on but in one article it was very critical of Musk. Who went all DOGE for the US Federal Govt. but not on Space X. In fact, received more funding.

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    1. It’s not hard to find in the UK, and I’ve heard of it in bottles in the U.S., but I wouldn’t trust bottles. Otherwise, you need to go to the UK, and find a pub where the cellarman knows how to keep ales.

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  5. I’m losing track of the ways that I’ve been re-defined as a right-winger. First it was my opposition to allowing trans-identified men into women’s spaces and sports. Now it’s my fingernails? Also, I’m somewhat confused, because previously the fact that I keep mine short and bare meant to some people I must be a lesbian. Somewhere someone would insist I am simply a right-wing lesbian in denial.

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  6. Miracles have always seemed to me to be a weak apologetic for the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, pervasive Ground of Being capable of creating universes. Give the nature of the claim, they amount to parlor tricks, if that.

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  7. After reading about the Ivy-League Catholic Philosophers and then the Nail Art, I wonder if now might be a good time to launch a marketing campaign to make stigmata trendy again?

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  8. Ireland is a shame and a disgrace. I’m boycotting the country, but people with much more public standing than me need to do so, too, to send a message to that benighted country. And poor Boy George. He’s an Irish Catholic and is being crucified in Ireland because he had the temerity to speak out publicly in support of Jews. Give his classic song a listen to help it get to 1 billion views and to give a finger to the antisemites.

    Here’s a niche bit of history: the reason that Vietnamese women dominate the nail salon business in the US today is directly attributable to the actor Tippi Hedron’s efforts to help Vietnamese refugees who came to the US in the 70s. Since the women loved her colorful nail polishes, she got the idea to help them make a living by getting them training in nail care. The grads of the first few classes went into business and recruited other refugees, and voila – today, half of all salons in the US are owned and staffed by Vietnamese people with ties to a small group of refugees in the 70s.

    There’s a lesson here: cultural markers are due to the transmission of an idea among networks of people who socially interact. That’s why black women love getting fancy manicures–the practice took off among a group of black women one day and it spread outwards from there. And that’s why white women aren’t as enamored with fancy manicures–the idea just never took off. In other words, it isn’t racism, you BBC f*ck faces. It’s the social transmission of a practice.

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    2. Something tells me that if white women started doing the fancy manicures like black women that they’d be accused of cultural appropriation.

      Interesting about Tippi Hedren’s influence in the nail profession – I had no idea!

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  9. Trump is such a strange character. First, he has his actual job as President, which I here will put to one side without further comment. Then there are his vanity projects: Trump Teton Stadium, the Reflecting Pool on the Mall, the Kennedy Center, the White House Ballroom, the Arch, the gilded White House interior, the need to put his stamp on everything and his name or visage on most. He can’t help himself. He’s a living and breathing refutation of free will.

    I watched Netanyahu’s speech live. It was good. My only criticism is that it could have ended on a positive note with some reference to a peaceful and prosperous future for all. But, alas, Netanyahu was angry and not in the mood for soaring rhetoric.

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    1. Stalin himself probably did not suggest every single statue of himself and every location named after him: these tributes were most likely suggested by the network of toadies who constructed the Stalin cult of personality as their career gimmick. Likewise, I have no doubt that the profusion of Trump vanity projects are often first suggested by the toadies around the Donald—he of course modestly agrees with each such proposal. So a ubiquity of vanity projects indicates the character of the individuals in the apparatus around a Big Boss, and how they entered the apparatus.

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    2. It was restrained and he didn’t rain bombs down on Beirut DURING THE SPEECH like last time. 🙂
      Nasrallah: Hi Jihadi, bye Jihadi.hehe

      Holding up a pager was the most boss move I’ve ever seen at the UN.
      best to you my friend,

      D.A.
      NYC

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  10. I think that Trump should just declare a new national park (named after himself of course). He could use eminent domain to put it next to Mar-a-Lago, and build the biggest and best golf course ever next door, as well as a Trump National Park lodge, where folks could stay, play golf, and hope to catch glimpses of the celebs coming and going from Mar-a-Lago. And he can build a stadium there as well. And he can even build a faux Teton Range next door, à la Las Vegas.

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  11. The depth of Irish anti-semitism continues to mystify me, and it is clear that it is being encouraged by the current Irish government. Ironically, it is validating Zionism, because the Jewish community in Ireland is seeing the writing on the wall, and many are looking for an exit.

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  12. “When [the vegan Catholic philosophers of Princeton] met…they discussed what arguments might actually convince them to become believers, and they were in agreement: miracles.”

    The miracle is that they didn’t discuss veganism.

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  13. Yes, the Free Press is biased (who isn’t?) but they’re not even on the same planet as the MSM (aka LFHs*) which is why I still subscribe to the FP and pay precisely 0.0% attention to anything the MSM reports. And at least the FP are honest as they freely admit that their politics are centre right so you’ve gotta admire their honesty. As for their osculation of religion, whenever I see such articles, I simply ignore them. Life’s too short.

    *Liars Frauds Hypocrites.

    Reply

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