Sunday: Hili dialogue

October 25, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, October 25: the Sabbath for goyische cats and National Greasy Foods Day. Below you see your choice of meat in the back room of Black’s BBQ in Lockhart, Texas, the finest establishment of its kind in America.  Starting at the left and going clockwise: brisket, ribs, link sausage, and giant beef ribs. This food has plenty of Vitamin G (grease). You tell the guy what and how much you want, and he hacks off the requisite portion.  You get sides before you get to this room.

Many will be repelled by this photo. Those people will, on average, live longer than I, but I will be the one who’s eaten like a king. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now.”

It’s also National Tight Ends Day (it’s football season!), World Pizza Makers Day, and World Pasta Day. Here’s the famous white clam pizza served at Frank Pepe’s in New Haven, Connecticut. I requested to be taken here after I gave a talk at Wesleyan, and my friend Fred Cohan (a prof at WU) took me.

Pepe’s white clam pizza is perhaps America’s most famous pie (as I said, I eat like a king), and here’s a short video about the place. As you’ll hear and see, the clam pie is made with freshly shucked clams, and sometimes they run out.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 25 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*As expected, the riots that started in France have spread to other countries in Europe this weekend: 

While protests in France have claimed most international attention, large demonstrations also rocked many European cities Saturday from Milan to Rome to Madrid, Lisbon and Tirana.

In Milan, huge crowds of mostly young people gathered as night fell, chanting insults to Meloni and holding aloft banners such as “No to lies of the state.”

. . . . A separate anti-war march took place in central Rome. Organizers sought to distance themselves from potential unrest, urging participants to keep their faces uncovered and hands visible.

But it was these marchers who briefly clashed with police near the Piazza della Repubblica, even as organizers were trying to hold the crowd back using batons and tear gas. In the end, the protesters pulled back when a water cannon was turned on. They retreated to a location about half a kilometer (mile) away.

. . . In Albania’s capital Tirana, riot police used water cannons on large groups of protesters, some of whom set government buildings on fire and threw projectiles at police. Authorities said 2,500 officers patrolled the streets Saturday.

Looting, however, was far less frequent than it was last weekend. Stay tuned.

*To her credit, Melania Trump has apparently brokered a cease-fire deal that will allow people in a Ukrainian city captured by Russians (and cut off from the rest of Ukraine)  to move back to Ukraine as a whole (article archived here).

Melania Trump, the first lady, said on Friday that she had brokered a cease-fire between Russian and Ukrainian forces in Oleshky, a southern Ukrainian city that is occupied by Russia and whose citizens are cut off from food and medical aid.

Mrs. Trump said the cease-fire would allow residents of the frontline city to leave “through a designated safe passageway.” The city, in the Kherson region of Ukraine, has been occupied by Russia since it began its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

“It was abundantly clear that without my intervention, the possibility to bring humanitarian aid into the city and to evacuate the elderly would be impossible,” she said in a statement, adding that the “localized cease-fire” would begin on Thursday. Pope Leo XIV also lobbied Vladimir V. Putin for a cease-fire in recent days, calling the Russian leader from his hospital bed after undergoing lung surgery.

David Arakhamia, the head of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s party faction in the Ukrainian Parliament, said in a statement that the cease-fire would begin in “the near future,” with the goal to establish “permanent humanitarian corridors for the safe evacuation of civilians and the delivery of aid.” He offered “sincere gratitude” to Mrs. Trump and the pope.

Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, said in statement that the Russian military was “working on agreeing upon the timing of a cease-fire in that area to enable this humanitarian mission.” The first lady “made a significant contribution” to the negotiations, he said.

The unusual announcement by the first lady, who has tried to position herself as an intermediary between the warring sides, underscored the Trump administration’s freewheeling and unorthodox approach to diplomacy. It came as Ukraine and U.S. allies try to head off a turn toward Russia by President Trump that they fear could alter the course of the war.

In recent days, Mr. Trump has defended Mr. Putin and demanded that the Ukrainians replace Mr. Zelensky. He has also arranged to purchase diesel from Moscow and insisted to reporters that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” even as Russia attacks civilians with missiles and drones.

Earlier this week, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, called Mr. Putin a “humanitarian” for releasing an American held for more than four years on what the State Department called fabricated charges.

Now Melania would not have been empowered to conduct these negotiations without the President’s assent—the very President who is coming down on Ukraine and praising Putin. And I have no idea whose idea this was.  I suspect it’s Melania’s, in which case she deserves even bigger props for helping Ukrainians in a way that got praise from both that country and Russia. I doubt the idea was Trump’s: what does he care if a city in Ukraine gets cut off? After all, it doesn’t affect the price of diesel.

*Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for Ohio’s governorship, has ignited a controversy because he put out a ludicrous and insulting attack against his Democratic opponent Amy Acton, highlighting her estranged mother’s calling her a “liar.”  As the NYT revealed earlier, the estrangement resulted from Acton having accused her stepfather of sexual molestation, and thus being removed from the home. Now Ramaswamy is using the “liar” characterization as fodder for his candidacy.

In the ad, Donna Arthur, Dr. Acton’s mother, says, “Don’t let her become your governor. If you think she’ll make your life better, you’re fooling yourself.”

Now the ad itself has divided Republicans, as it’s such a low blow (Ramaswamy spent $4 million to air it, and is still airing it).

The most explosive advertisement of the midterm elections has split Republicans and again posed the question of what is fair game for campaign attacks in American politics.

In the days since the leak of the ad from Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, many fellow G.O.P. politicians have denounced, disavowed or distanced themselves from the spot. Yet President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have defended the ad, a remarkably ruthless one even by the standards of modern political campaigns.

The ad features the estranged mother of Mr. Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, calling her daughter a liar and urging Ohioans not to vote for her. Ms. Acton has said that she has not spoken to her mother since she was 12 years old, when she was removed from her mother’s custody after her stepfather was arrested and charged with raping her.

The outrage over the ad’s dark backstory has left Mr. Ramaswamy, a billionaire entrepreneur who exemplifies the anything-goes, attack-at-all-costs ethos of Trump-era politics, at the center of a self-created political firestorm.

The Republican disagreements over the ad show that major figures in the party can still become divided over the rules and red lines of political warfare in the Trump era. And they set the stage for high drama on Election Day in Ohio, a state that has trended solidly Republican in recent years but now has outsize importance in the midterms. The overarching political question is: Will a potential backlash to Mr. Ramaswamy hurt other Ohio Republicans in competitive races, especially Senator Jon Husted, who is trying to fend off a well-known Democratic rival in a vital race for Senate control?

There is now a degree of unpredictability in the state. Campaigns in both parties do not know how voters will react.

Crikey! I was going to say that at least some Republicans have ethical standards about campaigns, but it looks as if they’re mainly worried about how this hamhanded ad will affect their candidate. Their concern appears to be more on the “did it work?” side than  the”is it underhanded?: side.   I couldn’t find the full ad on YouTube, but here’s a news report that shows part of it.

*The WaPo describes what seems like an out-and-out medical scam, with patients being charged high “hospital fees” for procedures done in doctors’ offices—without ever having set foot in a hospital (article is archived here).

As U.S. hospitals buy up a growing portion of the doctors’ offices in the United States, patients are paying a steep cost: Routine medical care is often being billed at the much more expensive rate for hospital care, instead of the lower cost for procedures in a doctor’s office.

The higher rates along with hospital “facility fees” — tacked on even when patients never step into a hospital — can lead to bills 10 times costlier or more, according to research on patients’ bills.

“The numbers are staggeringly large,” said Blue Cross Blue Shield Association CEO Kim Keck, citing her organization’s estimate that hospitals would bill $500 billion less over the next decade if they were federally banned from charging higher rates for the same service offered through a hospital system rather than an independent physician’s office.

Doctor’s offices tend to say there is nothing they can do. It’s the hospital systems they are part of that charge hospital rates to insurance companies and therefore to patients.

Hospital systems, meanwhile, justify higher rates for doctor’s office procedures by saying the charges are necessary to subsidize the enormously complex round-the-clock care that happens at their hospitals. Limiting their ability to charge those fees would undermine their overall finances, potentially leading to reductions in services, they said.

Insurers and lawmakers are looking into ways to curb the practice of charging hospital rates for routine care or tacking on hospital facility fees for care that was not in hospitals. But it’s been going on for years with little progress made to stop it, and it is only getting more common as hospitals acquire more medical practices, now consolidating nearly half of all physicians in the U.S. into hospital systems, up from less than 30 percent in 2012.

This “we need to subidize other care” excuse won’t wash, at least in for-profit hospitals, which have a median profit of about 5.5%, but could be justifiable in nonprofit or government hospitals, which either are close to breaking even or are losing money. The solution would be to make it illegal for procedures in a doctor’s office to be charged at hospital rates, but we know that isn’t going to happen, as doctors themselves make more money when they are rembursed by insurance like Medicare at higher rates if they are affiliated with hospitals and thus allowed to add “facilities fees” to their bills.

*Voters in two blue states are set to vote on a ballot measure that would ban trans-identified men and boy from women’s sports, and supporters are confident that the ban will pass.

Colorado and Washington are reliably Democratic states where elected officials have rejected moves to ban transgender women and girls from female sports competitions. Now activists have gone around lawmakers to put proposed bans on both states’ ballots.

At a time when some Democratic leaders nationwide are recalibrating their approach to transgender issues, particularly sports, and polls show Americans generally back the bans, supporters are optimistic they will pass and open the door to similar efforts in other places where lawmakers have blocked bans.

Though the issue has been debated in many legislatures, this is the first time it’s going to voters.

“What is happening in 2026 is a testing ground for the future,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which supports LGBTQ+ rights.

Twenty-seven states — including all where Republicans control both the legislature and governor’s office — already have such laws.

. . .The efforts are billed as a way to protect women and girls and keep separate spaces for them, tapping into a concern that’s gained momentum. President Donald Trump has taken steps to roll back transgender rights. The Supreme Court has upheld state sports bans.A June poll from Quinnipiac University found that about 7 in 10 registered voters think transgender women and girls should not be allowed to play on female sports teams. About one-quarter think they should. Democrats are divided, with about half saying transgender women and girls should be allowed and about half saying they should not.

Robert Preuhs, a professor of political science at Metropolitan State University of Denver, said the absence of public polls on Colorado’s ballot measure, which also covers college sports, makes it hard to predict whether it will pass. “It’s probably going to get more support than some of the Republican candidates that will run,” he said.

Overall, Americans are opposed to trans-identified men competing in womens sports, and the “rights” of these males have to be balanced against the rights of women to compete fairly. As I’ve written repeatedly, the latter trumps the former, as the first right carries more unfairness.  At any rate, if a law simply said that men and women could compete with each other until age ten or so, I wouldn’t have as much objection to that, as the differences in athletic ability are greatly enhanced at puberty. But I’d still object in general because I think a ban creates a better climate to keep the sexes separate at greater ages (stuff like dodgeball in elementary school might be excepted since it’s not a team sport). In general, and I must say this again, sports is one of the very few areas in which trans “rights” have to yield to other rights.

*The new film about Elizabeth Holmes, “You can see everything“, has become wildly popular, with its opening being the biggest regular documentary since Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” in 2004. In the WSJ, John Jurgensen and Ben Fritz discuss the factors making the film so popular. (See also the absorbing hourlong NYT videocast, “Why no one can look away from Elizabeth Holmes,” which features ohn Carreyrou, the journalist whose book began the exposé of Homes. ) An excerpt from the WSJ piece:

For nearly three years, fewer than 10 staffers at the New York-based indie film studio A24 knew that their 300-person company was making a genre-bending documentary about convicted Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes.

Keeping “You Can See Everything” off the radar, a minor miracle in an industry where leaks are routine, was intended to prevent any interference for directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim as they worked.

The secrecy around the film, the studio soon realized, could also be its most potent marketing weapon.

In June, A24 executive Nicolette Aizenberg texted the director of the Telluride Film Festival: “Have something…of note to talk to you about.” Though the Colorado festival’s lineup was almost locked, they hatched a plan to unveil “You Can See Everything” there. On Sept. 6, 650 people filled a theater and locked up their phones in Yondr pouches without knowing what they were about to see.

It was a major gamble for a movie company. A24 knew it had a notorious subject, surprise twists and, in Fielder, a filmmaker who was cult-famous for his attention-grabbing stunts. But was it enough to flip the switch from silence to buzz?

The ripple effect of ecstatic reactions set the tone for a sprint to theaters nationwide just over a month later. “It destabilized everything in the best possible way,” said Julie Huntsinger, the Telluride director. The movie teaser, dropped at the same time as the Telluride debut, was instantly viral, spawning memes of Holmes and Fielder locking eyes.

. . . . Last weekend, the film opened to $15 million in domestic ticket sales and more than 3,000 sold-out showings. It was the biggest box-office debut for a non-music documentary since Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” in 2004. Some 70% of ticketbuyers were under age 35, according to the studio. It will expand to 2,600 movie theaters this weekend—on par with wide releases from major studios.

The insatiable reception has already reconfigured the race for awards that will play out in the coming months. A24 plans to mount a campaign for best picture at the Academy Awards, where “You Can See Everything” could become the first documentary in Oscars history to be nominated for that top prize.

Most movie studios are valued on their record of hits and flops. A24 has built something rarer and more valuable: a brand identity. Young audiences trust that an A24 release will be as relevant for them as a Disney movie is for families. Fans of the studio buy its merchandise, subscribe to a membership club and use “A24” as an adjective to describe an edgy-yet-artful aesthetic.

“I’ve never seen anybody say ‘Let’s go see a Warner Bros. movie, let’s go see a Paramount movie, let’s go see a Sony movie.’ Young people are saying, ‘Let’s go see an A24 movie,’” said David Permut, who produced A24’s psychosexual relationship comedy “The Invite.”

I guess I’ll have to see this movie.  Other A24 movie hits include “Marty Supreme” (I thought it was good but not great, “Backrooms,” and “The Drama”. If you’ve seen “You Can See Everything,” please weigh in below.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pretending that Ancdrzej is prey:

Hili: I’m gonna pounce on you any second now.
Andrzej: Fine, but then we’re going home.

In Polish:

Hili: Zaraz na ciebie napadnę.
Ja: Dobrze, ale potem wrócimy do domu.

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

From Cats that Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From CinEmma:

It is characteristic of Masih to bring the blinded Iranian protestors onstage in Poland with her to show what the Islamist regime is doing. She is getting an award, but insisted on sharing it with the victims for whom she fights incessantly.

From Luana; this appears to be a real ad aired in Ireland, intimating that it’s a form of abuse when your grandma hugs you. The ad caused a big backlash and has been pulled.

The Number Ten Cat has some great advice:

Two from my feed.  I love the first woman! “I bought loads of Israeli goods. .  thanks for inspiring me.”

I love these guys, too:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Dr. Cobb, describing a venerable Oggsford tradition (this can only be done when the time falls back). Click to go to original post:

Some music. One of the greatest jazz duo songs I know: Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins alternate solos on the Rodgers and Hart song “It Never Entered My Mind“. Oscar Peterson is on the piano; the song was recorded as late as 1957.

A combination of the two greatest sax players of their era (note the difference in tone and style) and a beautiful song. Ben Webster starts off, and they switch to Hawkins at 2:25. It’s one verse repeated and improvised over and over.

One thought on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Conservative commentator Erick Erickson calls Ramaswamy’s ad political malpractice, in that it forces other Republican candidates to address an issue that is morally repugnant to their voters, at a time when they should be making their closing arguments before midterm elections. Instead, both the President and Vice-president have endorsed this ad. This should mean something to Republicans who have a sense of decency. So both morally wrong and bad political strategy. What were they thinking?

    One version I read says this was a test market video sent to a limited audience that escaped into the wild.

    Reply

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