Saturday: Hili dialogue

October 10, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, October 10, 2026, shabbos for Jewish cats and International African Penguin Awareness Day.  Here’s a young African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) I photographed two years ago at Boulders Beach near Capetown, South Africa:

The gang:

It’s also many other holidays, including International Pinotage Day, International Save the Vaquita Day (it is this critically endangered porpoise), National Angel Food Cake Day, National Chess Day, National Metric Day, National Tic Tac Day, Squid and Cuttlefish Day, World Porridge Day, and World Day Against the Death Penalty.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 10 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Several readers have sent me articles about Pete Hegseth’s claim that the upcoming firing-squad shooting of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood murderer, will be livestreamed.  Yes, the desire and claim are brutal and shocking, but I believe that neither the livestream nor the shooting will take place.

The Pentagon said it planned to livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, a former officer who admitted to killing 13 people in a 2009 shooting at Fort Hood Army base in Texas.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an interview with a conservative news outlet aired Thursday that he had wanted to ensure “people are able to watch it” because “people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

The execution is scheduled to take place on Dec. 3 at Fort Hood.

Hegseth said it would be carried out on a Thursday at 1 p.m. Central time, which was the same day of the week and around the same time of day Hasan opened fire at the base on Nov. 5, 2009.

He called the decision to execute Hasan by firing squad a “no-brainer.”

Hasan’s execution would be the first by the U.S. military in more than 65 years. A servicemember hasn’t been executed by firing squad since 1945.

“It hadn’t been since World War II since we’ve done that. Well, I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II, which was: ‘win,’” Hegseth told Real America’s Voice.

“It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be,” Hegseth added.

Under existing Army regulation, an execution can be attended by select members of the public, including family members of the victims and members of the media. But executions aren’t witnessed by the broader public.

When asked for comment, a Defense Department official said in a statement that “it will be livestreamed” without providing further details.

As I said, given the rarity of firing squads in military executions (one was used to kill Gary Gilmore in a state execution in 1977), I am not confident that it will even take place. But even if it does, I think the livestreaming of the event would be too much for Americans to take, and would be barbaric.  Granted, if you’re going to use execution as a deterrent (it isn’t), you would want the gory details publicized as widely as possible. But it isn’t a deterrent and we shouldn’t be killing people. I am not 100% sure about this, but even when Hegseth proclaims it I am not confident that it will happen.

*In his weekly NYT op-ed column, “There’s another cockpit Israelis need to rush“, Bret Stephens opposes two strains in Israeli politics—entitlement versus service—and says that the latter strain needs to win the upcoming election (note, that does not include Netanyahu). The title refers of course to the recent Israeli prevention of the hijacking of the FlyDubai flight to Tel Aviv. (Article is archived here.)

The division inside of Israel, in the broadest sense, is between the spirit of entitlement and the spirit of service. That’s the basic choice that faces Israelis when they go to the polls late this month.

On the entitled side: the leaders of the fast-growing ultra-Orthodox population, who believe their voters are owed welfare from the government along with a categorical exemption from military service, even as the army groans under an acute manpower shortage. Also, the far-right Messianics, who are convinced they have a divine right to the entirety of the West Bank, along with an exemption from legal consequences for bullying and terrorizing their Palestinian neighbors.

Most entitled: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister has real achievements to his name, above all his willingness to confront Iran head-on instead of fighting only its proxies. But he also thinks he can stay in office forever by assembling coalitions of the entitled, seeking legal impunity, dividing the country against itself, resisting calls for an independent commission of inquiry into Oct. 7, blaming his own senior security and ministerial officers for the catastrophe and taking credit for achievements against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and other foes that remain tenuous.

On the opposite side are the service Israelis. They are the hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians, done with their regular army service but still in the reserves, who have spent hundreds of days in uniform and often in combat, away from careers and communities and families. They are the spouses of those reservists, who have raised children, gone to work, kept up appearances of normality and prayed they won’t be left bereaved. They are the Israeli passengers who last week rushed the cockpit of the almost-hijacked FlyDubai flight, unhesitatingly risking their necks for the common good. They are the thousands of Israelis who have lost loved ones in this war. That includes Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief of staff and leading opposition candidate, who spent 41 years in uniform and lost a son and two nephews in the fighting in Gaza.

The difference between the two sides is profound and potentially irreconcilable. It’s also nothing new in Jewish history. “Ancient Israel’s political collapse was spawned by internal strife, underscored by a dozen civil wars, which ultimately resulted in Israel’s loss of its power, dignity and land,” Amotz Asa-El, author of “The Jewish March of Folly,” a brilliant reinterpretation of Jewish political history, told me over drinks last week. “All these forces are now back in play in Israel.”

. . .All of which is why, with Wednesday’s third anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, stories like Avinatan Or’s and the FlyDubai passengers’ are so instructive. For Israelis to surmount the formidable challenges they face, in pursuit of both victory and peace, the spirit of service — of giving yourself, doing it yourself, taking possession of your destiny against daunting odds — must win out over the spirit of entitlement. And for Israel’s genuine well-wishers, including the good-faith critics, to push that spirit forward, they need to draw a firm moral line against those who simply want Israel gone.

At the ballot box this month, there’s one more cockpit the people of Israel need to rush.

The rush, of course, is against Netanyahu, who’s in the cockpit.

*There is nobody who can produce the Free Press‘s news-and-snark summaries as well as Nellie Bowles, but sadly she’s AWOL this week. Instead, we have as her replacement Chelsea Jacobson with “TGIF: Nudity is optimal“. But I will, as usual, steal a few of the items:

→ Cornell sex ed: While the school battles a tsunami of bad headlines, its official sex-ed materials have also been making the online rounds. Cornell student Jared Lederman shared them in a viral blog post that he adapted for us at The Free Press.

One guide is titled Sexual Pleasure: Finding the “Sweet Spot,” and it opens by declaring that “sexual pleasure is a worthy pursuit.” It directs students to “feminist porn,” whatever that is. I have never seen porn titled Stepsister Teaches Her New Bro That Human Rights Are Women’s Rights and Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, but to be fair I wasn’t looking too hard. My favorite guide, titled “Sensate Focus,” gives tips on how students can touch each other and tells them, crucially, that “nudity is optimal.” Step one is titled “non-genital touching,” where “ideally, both partners are undressed, showered, and free of watches or jewelry.” Nudity. For sex? I’ll try to remember next time.

These kids are 18 years old and self-report that they’re barely having sex. In 2024, 69 percent of Harvard students said they entered college as virgins. But Cornell still wants them filling out worksheets on their favorite sex positions. It seems like we blew past the “sweet spot” in the middle when we decided to make sex education less about the birds and the bees and more a bureaucratic exercise in risk management, with a kink manual attached. And now we’re surprised when students end up either sexless or caught in a hellish ketamine orgy. Luckily, there’s a solution: Bring back first dates.

→ Obama campaigning with El-Sayed: Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat, has a problem. Given Michigan’s liberal lean, Trump’s dismal approval ratings, the price of gas and, well, everything, he’s favored to defeat Republican Mike Rogers. But—and here comes the problem—polls show El-Sayed with only a narrow lead over Rogers in a race Democrats see as a must-win.

Why can’t he get ahead? Jewish voters, for one thing: El-Sayed is a virulent critic of Israel and campaigned with Hasan Piker, of “America deserved 9/11” fame.

But his bigger issue, from an electoral standpoint, is black voters, who make up roughly 14 percent of the state’s population and some 75 percent of Detroit’s. They tend to be more moderate than the arch-leftist Abdul, and they don’t seem much swayed by his cringey attempts to win them over. Apparently, just saying “I am both African and Arab,” as El-Sayed has done in a nod to his Egyptian heritage, isn’t enough.

So Barack Obama—still broadly popular a decade after leaving office, and particularly so with black Democrats, is swooping in later this month to bail El-Sayed out. They’re going to campaign together on October 24. Problem solved, right?

Perhaps not! For one thing, as was noted frequently throughout his presidency, Obama is very good at getting himself elected, but not so good at convincing voters to elect other people. (To use one prominent example, he led a huge rally for Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia on the eve of the 2016 election, then Trump became the first Republican in almost 30 years to win Pennsylvania.)

El-Sayed also called Obamacare “a watered-down reform that kowtows to the interests of healthcare lobbies.”

→ It is a small price to pay: While speaking to a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, about the war with Iran and the resulting high gas prices, Trump said the ayatollah can have Los Angeles. “I want to see a tremendous victory. You want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did. And again, remember, with the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high,” he said. “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.”

He went on: “They can take out a city. Let ’em take out Los Angeles; let ’em take out San Diego. That’s—this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.”

I agree, Mr. President. Los Angeles is vacuous. There is no culture, only traffic. I am a New York 7 and an LA 3. Let the mullahs have it.

Naaah, Nellie is still a gazillion times better.

*Coincident with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, largely because of her participation in finding Israel guilty of “genocide,” the Trump Administration has levied new sanctions on the International Criminal Court in an attempt to dismantle it. (The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, charging them with both war crimes and crimes against humanity. (The U.S. does not recognize the ICC nor the charter that created it.)

The Trump administration has imposed sweeping new sanctions on the International Criminal Court as part of its campaign to dismantle the tribunal over investigations into the United States and its allies, including Israel.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions Friday, after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to South African jurist Navi Pillay, a former judge at the ICC and other international courts. Trump has coveted that prize for himself.

“We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate against us,” Rubio said in a video address posted to social media. “The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC.”

The sanctions cut the court off from U.S.-based financial services, technology companies and even using U.S. dollars. They set a six-month timeline for U.S. companies and individuals that have business with the court to wind that business down.

The ICC denounced the step as an attack on the rule of law and the foundations of international order, themes that Rubio had appeared to embrace only two days ago in a speech in front of the Acropolis in Athens.

“It is an attempt to obstruct the course of justice and to prevent the court from doing what it was created to do,” the court said in a statement. “It is an assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order which strikes at the simple principle that no one stands above the law.”

Given that neither the U.S. nor Israel has signed on to the court’s jurisdiction by ratifying the Rome Statute, I don’t see why either country is compelled to support the ICC.  Nor do I see that the actions taken by the U.S. will “dismantle” the ICC, even though it may make it harder to do business.

*The Washington Post interviews Walter Willett, American’s most well-respected expert on nutrition, and of course you’ll be interested in what he eats during the day.

What is your philosophy on nutrition?

I try to follow the best evidence on diet and health. What I eat now is very different from what I ate when I was growing up in the Midwest. Back then, we ate mashed potatoes, beef and gravy. But as the evidence came in, I shifted to a Mediterranean diet. . .

What’s your typical breakfast?

I usually have steel-cut oats as a base. Then I add a cup of Greek yogurt, some nuts and fruit. I try to eat blueberries on most days as part of my fruit. In study after study, berries appear to be protective against neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. It’s an area where we need more research, but berries do seem to stand out, especially blueberries.

I also have a small glass of orange juice in the morning. There are studies in multiple cohorts showing lower rates of cognitive decline when you drink orange juice on a regular basis. Orange juice does have a lot of sugar like all fruit juices do. But I only have one small glass a day.

What do you eat for lunch?

Lunch is my plant-based meal for the day. If I’m at work at the school of public health, we have a really good salad bar. So, I’ll make a big Mediterranean type of salad with fresh greens, chickpeas, nuts, hummus, tofu, and olive oil and vinegar.

When I’m at home, I don’t have time to put a lot of stuff together. When we did the Eat-Lancet Commission report, the issue of cost and convenience came up, and I said I can make a lunch for under three minutes that costs less than a dollar. It’s basically whole-grain bread with peanut butter and a little bit of jam or a touch of honey. And a carrot.

I did the calculations. It came out to 72 cents, and it takes less than three minutes. You can see a video of me preparing it on YouTube.

What do you eat for dinner?

My wife and I will usually have fish or poultry. Yesterday my wife made a really nice Persian dish. It was whole-grain rice with saffron, and a stew with walnuts, chicken and pomegranate. It was really good. It’s a dish that I had in Tehran when I was first there.

When we want something quick, we might bake some fish with olive oil, and we’ll have it with cooked greens or veggies.

If I’m by myself, I will usually make a salad. The quickest thing for me is to go to Trader Joe’s and get their washed spring greens. I’ll add some olives and fresh vegetables. And often I’ll get a tin of oysters or mussels and put that on the salad. I can make that in under five minutes. Oysters and mussels are very nutritious, and they’re sustainable.

Do you ever snack?

I always try to have apples and carrots on hand. . .

Oy gewalt! Talk about an article that makes me feel guilty! But clearly Willett wants to live a long and healthy life, and cake, ice cream, and steak be damned! And he’s right, at least according to the most recent evidence.  But for many of us there’s a tradeoff: some of us (including me) are willing to eat some “bad” stuff because it enhances life.  But he doesn’t mention alcohol as part of his diet, and I bet he doesn’t drink any wine.  I couldn’t live like that. So sue me.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Hili/Kulka feud continues.

Hili: You have absolutely no right to lie in my spot!
Kulka: Do you really have to be so revoltingly jealous?

In Polish:

Hili: Nie masz prawa leżeć na moim miejscu!
Kulka: Czy naprawdę musisz być tak obrzydliwie zazdrosna?

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

From Stacy:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

. . . and a bonus video from Anna:

From Masih; an Iranian woman given 74 lashes for not wearing the hijab. That looks quite painful to me:

From Luana. The guy shown was arrested and suspended at Haverford, accused of stalking and threatening a Jewish colleague and his infant child in a stream of antisemitic rants posted on anonymous social-media accounts:

A Jewish American man with a message to his friends:

From Jeff Maurer:

Tw from my feed. First, cat software:

Useful knowledge on how to save yourself if you fall through ice:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Doctor Cobb. The flashing lights on the ctenophore are only visible because the submersible creates reflections:

Like approaching a giant alien spaceship…

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-10-08T22:01:22.343Z

Today’s music is “Without a Song“, composed in 1929 by Vincent Youmans, “with lyrics later added by Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu.” The jazz version is performed here by Billy Eckstine, recorded live in Las Vegas in 1960. I like it because of its swinging tempo (other versions don’t have that) and Eckstein’s rich baritone voice.  Wikipedia notes that there the earlier lyrics were racist:

Lawrence Tibbett, Nelson Eddy and Frank Sinatra recorded versions of the song with what appears to be the original lyrics, including the line, “A darkie‘s born, but he’s no good no how, without a song.” In subsequent recordings, Sinatra didn’t use the term “darkie”, and later recorded versions included the altered text “a man is born, but he’s no good no how, without a song.” The original was played in error on BBC Radio 4’s PM program on 9 April 2020, prompting an apology on the same program four days later.

. . . the version by the Carpenters is very different, but of course features one of the greatest voices of our era, and I don’t mean Richard’s.  The ending is a bit much. . .

One thought on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. For readers who may have missed your article on the nobel peace prize award yesterday which included Maarten Boudry bringing us an excellent letter countering the claims of genocide in Gaza, I want to call the letter to their attention. It is an open letter signed by 75+ retired general officers and (very likely drafted by) Maj (ret) John Spencer and at url
    https://jinsa.org/open-letter-from-military-professionals-refuting-genocide-allegations-against-israel/

    Thank you Maarten.

    Reply

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