Friday: Hili dialogue

October 9, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the tail end of the week: Friday, October 9, 2016, and Submarine-Hoagie-Hero-Grinder Day, and that’s all the names of America’s beloved long sandwich. But here’s a Mexican version I had in Puebla in 2018.  It was part of a multicourse meal.

It’s also International Beer and Pizza Day, National Moldy Cheese Day, National Polenta Day, and World Egg Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 9 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The WSJ reports on the possible Democratic agenda should that party take back the House of Representatives during the midterm elections. Were that the case, it says, Hakeem Jeffries is likely to become the next Speaker of the House.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats would move swiftly to reverse Trump-era cuts to healthcare spending and bring down households’ costs, expressing confidence that his party would win a majority during President Trump’s final two years in office.

The New York Democrat, speaking with a group of reporters, laid out some of his key priorities Wednesday should his party win back control of the House in November’s midterm elections, while also nodding toward planned investigations of GOP “crooks” but giving few details.

Jeffries said he was “very confident” the party will win enough seats to regain a majority, while cautioning it “remains to be seen what that looks like in terms of the number of seats.”

Democrats need a net gain of three seats to win back the House, which would put Jeffries in a strong position to become the nation’s first Black speaker. A large majority could give him more ability to keep Democrats’ agenda on track and push back against any small group of holdouts in the party.

Current House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) has predicted that Republicans will defy historical trends and keep the majority, despite the party of the president almost always losing seats in the midterms. He has cast Democrats as wanting to roll out socialist policies that will hurt voters. Election watchers currently see Democrats as favored to take the House and having a good shot at winning back the Senate as well.

Asked about working with Trump as a potential House speaker, Jeffries said, “We will cross that bridge when we get to it, based on what happens on Nov. 3, and then it will fall into the hands of the caucus to determine who is put in position to help lead us forward.”

Jeffries said a Democratic-led House would tackle Trump’s sweeping 2025 tax-and-spending law that cut taxes and slashed more than $1 trillion in healthcare spending. He said Democrats would be united around reversing cuts to Medicaid and restoring expired enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits “right out of the gate.”

Any legislation would face a possible filibuster in the Senate and Trump’s veto pen, setting up possible policy showdowns headed into the next presidential election.

It looks pretty likely that Democrats will capture both houses of Congress in November, and I’m happy with what Jeffries says are Democratic priorities. Further, Jeffries is one of the few Democratic Representatives who openly supports Israel,but not without criticism.  Remember, though, that Trump still has veto power over a Democratic Congress, and he won’t hesitate to use it.

*The WaPo tells us that the U.S. B-1 bombers removed from a British airbase were the target of an Iranian drone attack.

Pentagon commanders abruptly evacuated a fleet of long-range B-1 bombers from a British air base over the weekend when fears spiked of a potential Iranian drone attack against planes and personnel at the facility, according to two people familiar with the decision and a British official.

The two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters, said about a dozen B-1 bombers were moved from Royal Air Force Fairford in response to multiple streams of intelligence warning about possible attacks. Particularly concerning was the possibility of a swarm drone attack similar to one Ukraine launched against Russia in June 2025.

In that attack, known as “Operation Spiderweb,” Ukraine smuggled more than 100 small armed drones into Russia concealed in cargo trucks and stationed near air bases; the operation destroyed an estimated one-third of Moscow’s long-range bomber fleet.

Concerns for the security of the U.S. bombers began to rise in late September, when police arrested five men in white vans outside of RAF Fairford, although they found gasoline, not drones or explosives. Top U.S. and British officials said Iran might have paid them, but to do what is unclear. All five, as well as a sixth suspect detained later, were released on bail.

British police said Tuesday that they had made a seventh arrest in the case, detaining a 22-year-old British national in London on suspicion of planning an act of terrorism.

. . .The people familiar with the decision to move the aircraft noted also that the long-range conventional bombers could still launch from U.S. bases as needed in operations against Iran.

Britain has faced dozens of plots traced to Iran in recent years, but no details have surfaced from these cases to suggest that Iran is capable of orchestrating a sophisticated swarm drone attack on a high-security military bases used by American bombers.

Attacks attributed to Iran in recent years have mainly been low-level sabotage operations or violent plots involving proxies recruited from criminal networks on social media platforms. Even the arrests near RAF Fairford ended with the release of suspects after no explosives or other weapons were detected.

But if Iran was behind the massing of suspicious vehicles and personnel at the very edge of the air base, it may have been sending signals that it is capable of taking at least “the initial steps” of such an operation in British territory, even it stops short of carrying them out, said Ali Vaez, deputy Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group.

Military drones can now travel up to 2500 km (about 1500 miles), about the distance from Turkey to England, so they would have had to have been launched from either within England or from some European country.  As for the “warning shot” scenario, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: you don’t need to get a bunch of your people arrested just to show that you are serious, particularly if you cant even carry out the threatened act.

*I haven’t thought of the journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine as a particularly heterodox journal, but the latest issue (ahead of print) is entirely about the politicization of science, with most of the articles being critical of that trend, but some approving of some mixture of science and politics, but prescribing limits. Click on the cover below to go to the list of free articles, and I’ll put the contents (with links) below. You’ll have heard of a few names:

Playing Field, or Sidelines? Should physicians engage in politics?

Donald M. Berwick

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.0.a1002386

 

The Intersection of Politics with Medical Practice, Education, and Research

Jeffrey S. Flier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.0.a1002387

Kudos to CUDOS: Resurrecting Mertonian principles to remedy politicized science

Medhini Urs, Cory J. Clark

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.0.a1002388

Incorporating Social Justice and Activism in Medicine and Medical Education

Harold L. Manning, Richard M. Schwartzstein

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.0.a998133

Ideological Restrictions in Research Funding

Jessica Flanigan

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.0.a995377

Sex, Medicine, and Moralization

Carole Hooven, Alex Byrne

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.0.a995378

Whiplash: Politicization and Counter-Politicization in Research Funding

Anna I. Krylov, Jay Tanzman, Evan D. Morris, Julia Schaletzky, Elena Atochina-Vasserman, Igor R. Efimov

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.0.a995379

Against Incorporating Politics into Medical Professionalism

Thomas Huddle

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.0.a993982

Science Journalism and Advocacy: disseminating, facilitating, defending, shaping, terrorizing, or usurping science?

John P. A. Ioannidis

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.0.a993983

Social Justice and Politicizing Psychotherapy

Richard J. McNally, Sally Satel

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.0.a993984

The Fourth Estate in Medicine: medical journals and politics from 1797 to the present

Scott H. Podolsky

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.0.a993985

*I can’t say that this headline at the Free Press made me happy, but it didn’t surprise me: “Ross Douthat: I’m writing a column for the Free Press.” Douthat is a conservative, of course, which doesn’t violate the FP’s stand of being centrist, but he’s also way religious, and the venue. like many MSM sites, is getting softer and softer on religion. Frankly, I’m tired of seeing superstition presented unquestioningly in the NYT and the Washington Post, and the FP is following the trend.  I can’t remember reading any article espousing nonbelief in these venues in donkey’s years.  Here, let Ross speak. And now he’s a correspondent for 60 Minutes!

 . . . . here I am, six years later [Douthat had discussed the possibility of a centrist site with Bari Weiss back then], about to start a column for a thriving general-interest magazine with a remarkable cast of writers and an independent perspective on the world. And it’s a privilege to be here.

When Bari and I had our conversation, I had just published a book entitled The Decadent Society, which argued that Western civilization had slipped into an age of repetition, drift, and uncomfortable stagnation.

Because God likes to amuse Himself at my expense, the book appeared just as the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the world and the artificial intelligence revolution began in earnest. The decadent patterns I had described in that book haven’t disappeared: Human beings are still having ever-fewer children, political futility still grips the United States and Europe, superhero sequels still bestride the movie box office. But they coexist with more hopeful and more apocalyptic trends—with technological breakthroughs and signs of artistic and religious and political ferment, but also with growing extremism, mounting fears of human obsolescence, and dark post-human trends.

My hope is that my writing here will help make sense of all these developments, in a landscape where both cultural renaissance and total dystopia seem more plausible than they did when The Free Press was just an interesting media idea.

This is not my day job. I am a newly minted correspondent for 60 Minutes, where the goal is to ask probing questions, not sling political hot takes. If all goes well, this column will complement that work, staying a little bit above the partisan fray while giving readers useful frameworks (or, sometimes, truly eccentric frameworks) through which to understand our strange-and-getting-stranger century.

I think that aspiration is in keeping with the larger mission of The Free Press: an independent-minded vantage point on a world that defies simplistic categories, tidy ideological expectations, and easy certainty about what is normal and plausible and real.

I look forward to exploring all this complexity with you every week in these pages.

All this sounds okay except that at the NYT he wrote about religion constantly, and, as a pious Catholic, believes literally in the Nicene Creed, which asserts that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. Here: from a 2025 essay by Douthat:

When I say the Nicene Creed, I mean it. I am open to hidden complexities and unexpected syntheses, but in the end I think that God has acted in history through Jesus of Nazareth in a way that differs from every other tradition and experience and revelation, and the Gospels should therefore exert a kind of general interpretative control over how we read all the other religious data. I think the New Testament is just clearly different from other religious texts in a way that stands out and demands attention, that the figure of Jesus likewise stands out among religious founders, that together the sources and the story and the Nazarene Himself all seem God-touched to a degree unmatched by any of their rivals. So where there is uncertainty, tension, a wager to be made, I make my bet on Jesus.

Christopher Hitchens once asked me in the kitchen of a house in D.C.: “If Jesus did rise from the dead, what would that really prove?” The easy answer is that it should at least make someone like Hitchens a lot more interested in the truth claims of religion. But really I think one can go much further than this, for reasons connected to the assumption that God is not trying to trick us, that if the universe offers us clues to its purpose we should follow them with confidence, that the path to truth may be extremely hard, but it shouldn’t be deceptive or impossible.

Given that Douthat has touted Christianity in at least two pro-Christian pieces for the Free Press (here and here), we can expect him to crank out more of them as a regular columnist. If the FP really wants to be an objective news site, it’s incumbent on them to give voice to nonbelievers. After all, the evidence is on their side, not Douthat’s.

*If you’re in the mood for sleuthing, the NYT has an AI-generated photo (below) that is hard to tell as a fake, but there are a few subtle clues. If you subscribe,click on the photo below to see them, or see the clues without details at the archived version:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the gang at Listy is still lazy:

Andrzej: We need to get moving because we’re falling behind with our work.
Hili: That’s what happens when you’re lazy and spend so much time walking the dog.

In Polish:

Ja: Musimy się zmobilizować, bo mamy zaległości w pracy.
Hili: Tak się mści to twoje lenistwo i długie spacery z psem.

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

From Stacy:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Meow Incorporated:

From Masih; this Iranian girl needs both better food and some medical attention:

From Luana; once again biological women are forced to compete in sports against biological men. But this pair decided not to compete, as their principles were more important.

From Malcolm; somebody loves their squirrels:

From Bryan. Individual monarch butterflies can now be tagged and traced, and oy, do they fly far!

Larry really does need his own banknote (the other three species are the Atlantic puffin, the barn owl, the buff-tailed bumblebee):

One from my feed; a performance report on a d*g:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Dr. Cobb; an amazing pulsar:

This thing is insane. The Cannonball Pulsar is travelling at 1127 km/s and has moved 53 light years from its formation supernova. It will eventually leave the galaxy. It is currently 6,500 light years away in Cassiopeia, rotating 8.6682 times a second and has a 13 light year wake tail!

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-10-07T14:59:08.652Z

Here’s another pop hit rendered only with voice and guitar: “Eternal Flame,” written by Tom Kelly, Susannah Hoffs, and Billy Steinberg, and here performed by the lead singer of the Bangles, Susannah Hoffs.  The song was released in 1989, topping the Billboard charts as well as charts in many other countries.  It’s a lovely song, with the lyrics by Hoffs—the object of every young Jewish boy’s desires in that era. I have no idea who the guitarist is, but perhaps a reader knows.

I prefer the live and simpler version to those by the Bangles; this one comes from 1996, when Hoffs was 37.

3 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  2. Late chiming in, but please keep up the daily WEIT posts. I read them every morning and always find something here to share, today the monarchs, and the science and politics links which I will read later. Thank you for the daily work.

    Reply

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