Monday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to the first Monday of the month: it’s November 2, 2026, the last day before the Midterm Elections, and Plan Your Epitaph Day. I’m going to be incinerated, so I won’t have one, but have a look at the gravestone of Mel Blanc as shown in Wikipedia.  As Wikipedia notes:

[Blanc] later expanded to animation, providing the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, Wile E. Coyote, Speedy Gonzales, Marvin the Martian, Foghorn Leghorn, the Tasmanian Devil, Pepé Le Pew and numerous other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical cartoons.^[7] Blanc also voiced the characters Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd after replacing their original performers, Joe Dougherty and Arthur Q. Bryan, respectively, although he occasionally voiced Elmer during Bryan’s lifetime as well.

Note the stones on top of the tombstone, signs of affection and respect places there by Jewish visitors.

If you don’t know where the epitaph comes from, here’s Blanc’s voicing of Porky Pig’s closing of Looney Tunes cartoons:

It’s also All Souls’ Day and National Deviled Egg Day. And the leaves are falling:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 2 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*It’s somewhat ironic that the “progressive” NYT broke the story about how Democratic candidate for Senate Mary Peltola was apparently part of a nefarious scheme to undermine her Republican opponent, incumbent Dan S. Sullivan, by recruiting another candidate, Dan J. Sullivan, Jr., in an attempt to confuse voters. (Although readers say this is legal and has done before, it’s still being investigated for possible violation of the law.) At any rate, there’s now a measure on the Alaska ballot that would eliminate the voting system that allowed this, and, further, the NYT, beating its chest, has a separate article on how it broke the story. From the first article:

Organizers of a ballot measure that would end Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system say the effort by Democrats to boost Mary Peltola’s Senate bid by stacking Tuesday’s ballots in an attempt to confuse voters should be the system’s death knell.

Since Alaska voters approved open primaries and ranked-choice general elections in 2020, opponents — most of them Republicans — have argued the system is too confusing for the average person.Now it’s been tainted by scandal involving the recruitment of a challenger with the same name as the incumbent. That has led to federal legal action, a Justice Department investigation and a separate state investigation.

. . . A similar referendum two years ago lost by 737 votes.

. . .Under current law, candidates for state and federal office in Alaska compete in one open, nonpartisan primary, with the top four advancing to November. Voters rank them in order of preference. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place finisher is eliminated and those votes are redistributed according to voters’ next choices. The process repeats until someone wins a majority of the remaining votes.

Ballot Measure 2 would return Alaska to primaries open only to voters registered to a particular party. That would be followed by a traditional general election where voters choose just one candidate.

I find the ranked-choice option confusing, and so would vote to repeal the system. After all, anybody can still run if they’re registered with a party (any party) and get the requisite number of signatures.  Below is from the second article, with the NYT so proud of itself.  Questions (in bold) are from NYT deputy editor Amy Gardner, answers are from the reporter, Kellen Browning:

Ballot-stacking is generally considered legal. Republicans have used the tactic in Alaska. What was newsworthy about the effort that led us to write an article?

Amy: It’s not unprecedented for campaigns or major parties to find decoy candidates with the same name as a major-party contender. But it is rare, and that’s what made the candidacy of Dan J. Sullivan unusual. We’ve also written extensively about other ballot-stacking efforts, by both parties — including in Alaska this year. Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy also became a subject of interest in the Alaska political world and beyond, and questions were being raised when he barely campaigned. There is also the fact that the Peltola campaign so vigorously denied it, for so long. That made it a bigger story, in the end.

I’d add: Dan J. Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher who lives in a remote village accessible only by plane or boat. He has a Che Guevara magnet on his fridge. He gave money to a past campaign of Mary Peltola. It’s just a great story all the way around.

Kellen: Yes, Democrats have made the point that Republicans have done this, which is true. That doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t write about particularly glaring or interesting examples of it. And in this case, we were able to pull back the curtain and take readers inside the plan in an unusually detailed way.

I suppose Democrats will criticize the NYT for singling out Alaska, but I think Kellen’s response is okay, though past examples by Democrats of this kind of chicanery should have been mentioned. I can’t be arsed to go back and see if they were.

*Andrew Sullivan appears to have made the transition, at least for this election cycle, to supporting the Democratic Party. At least that’s the message in his latest column, “You know what to do” (subtitle”: It’s our last chance to show that Americans have not forgotten who we really are.”  Although I no longer subscribe to his site, the link appears to give his full article. Some quotes:

“Pretend I’m on the ballot!” the president insists, as if there is any other Republican on the ballot. It’s been two years of governance without a Congress — the lifeless body effectively passes one bill a year while deferring in every other single respect to the cult leader — so voting for a Republican congressman or senator is, quite simply, a vote for Trump. And an endorsement of his de facto suspension of constitutional balance.

So vote for anyone other than a Republican next Tuesday. Or if that’s too compromising for you, don’t vote at all. We need to send a deafening message to bring the republic back to some kind of balance — loud enough that the remaining sane Republicans hear it, and emphatic enough to render Trump’s inevitable attempt to delegitimize it futile.

Trump’s second term is, after all, a near-perfect illustration of why the Founders were smarter than he is. Economic policy has been conducted by presidential whim, not by Congressional deliberation. Tariffs can maybe work if they are raised gradually, and stably — but not when they change from rate to rate and country to country from minute to minute. Foreign policy follows the same monarchical structures so that a full-scale war, initiated by a foreign government, was launched without the American public or the wider Congress even being informed in advance. And because power is concentrated so thoroughly around one deeply unethical man and his cronies, and because the Congress is controlled by his cult, corruption is at stratospheric levels.

Yes, the war was and is a terrible idea. Yes, prices for almost everything are higher, and the president has helped make them so through war and tariffs. Yes, economic security feels out of reach for everyone on the brink of the AI revolution, with an executive obviously a mere plaything in the hands of unaccountable moguls. Yes, immigration control, however needed, has been marred by brutality, mindless enforcement, and abrogation of constitutional rights. Yes, the president has broken every minimal norm of decency, ending his campaign with jibes against jihadists and faggots and freaks, as if slurs were all he had left against El Sayed and Talarico.

But these are all downstream of the constitutional collapse: an executive branch staffed by clowns and led by a madman with no countervailing force. The answer to that is simple: a Congress that can function again as the central political body in our democratic system, so we can finally draw a line under Trump’s kleptocratic idiocracy. That can’t happen overnight, but a demonstration that the constitution still lives can be seen by the world next Wednesday morning.

. . . Voting for Harris in 2024 was an excruciating decision to put resisting a deranged despot ahead of my ideal policy goals. I feel no such conflict now. I don’t have a huge amount of confidence that the Dems will use their power wisely, but any use of Congressional power to push back on the tyrant will do for now

This was not hard for Sullivan to right, and I am pleased that he did. He even promotes a Congressional investigation of Trump’s pardons, thinking that we may need a Constitutional amendment to prevent the abuse of pardons to reward your friends.

*I’ve learned that on any subject where there’s an accepted “progressive” point of view, Wikipedia will adopt it, rendering the “people’s encyclopedia” biased and misleading. This is certainly true for the history of Israel and of conflicts between Israel and its enemies. Quillette has an informative essay on Zionism called “How Wikipedia rewrote Zionism,” a distressing example of bias (you can find Wikipedia’s article here).

Before 7 October 2023, the English-language Wikipedia article on Zionism opened by describing a movement that emerged to “espouse support for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.” Since then, the opening has been reworded to say that this homeland was to be established “through colonization,” immediately followed by a new sweeping claim: “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” The sentence is backed by an unusually large bundle of 17 citations, drawn from historians including Benny Morris, Rashid Khalidi, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé, and to the casual reader it looks like the settled verdict of scholarship. It is not. The editor who introduced it in August 2024 has since been banned from the entire Palestine-Israel topic area for non-neutral editing. Yet the sentence survives, and for a year Wikipedia formally barred its editors from even discussing whether to remove it.

That matters because Wikipedia is widely regarded as a generally reliable source of information, and its influence extends far beyond the millions of people who consult it directly: it has also been incorporated into many of the datasets used to train artificial intelligence systems, thereby shaping the information those systems subsequently reproduce. That reputation and reach rest in large part on one of Wikipedia’s foundational principles—presenting a “neutral point of view.” Wikipedia articles are supposed to summarise what reliable sources say without taking a position of their own. This principle is particularly important on controversial subjects, and few subjects are more contentious than Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more broadly.

The sentence is only the most visible symptom of a much larger change. Over the past three years, Wikipedia’s coverage of this topic has undergone an extraordinary transformation, best exemplified by the Zionism article itself. I recently conducted a quantitative analysis of the article’s revision history and found that since 7 October 2023, about 80 percent of the article has been completely rewritten, and only about 20 percent of the pre-October 2023 text has survived.

More importantly, this dramatic, measurable change reflected a fundamental shift in the topics emphasised by the article. For example, the volume of material associated with colonialism rose roughly two-and-a-half-fold, and coverage of ethnic cleansing roughly doubled. At the same time, discussion of antisemitism and persecution—the primary historical drivers of the Zionist movement—was cut approximately in half, while the return to the historic Jewish homeland went from the most prominent of the four topics to the least.

. . .Similarly, the scale of this rewriting cannot be explained by any recent fundamental shift in the underlying scholarship. For example, the most cited author in the article is Benny Morris, who published Righteous Victims in 1999, the substantially revised The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited in 2004, and 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War in 2008, drawing extensively on Israeli and Western archival material that had become available over the preceding decades. The same holds for the broader academic literature on the subject: the key works on which the article relies had all been published long before the page underwent its wholesale rewrite. In other words, there has been neither substantial new evidence nor a major historiographical shift since 7 October 2023 that could plausibly explain why four-fifths of a mature encyclopedic article suddenly needed to be replaced.

The explanation lies instead within Wikipedia itself—specifically, in the editorial choices determining which sources were foregrounded and how they were represented. An encyclopedic article is not supposed to reflect the political preferences of its editors, but to fairly represent serious scholarship on the subject. The post-October 2023 rewrite did exactly the opposite. Rather than neutrally presenting the actual range of views found among historians, the article moved towards a simplistic, partisan account, dominated by the perspective of Zionism’s political adversaries. Nor was the partisan editing limited to deciding which parts of the scholarship to foreground and which to push aside. It also repeatedly distorted what the scholarship actually said.

The article shows how the changes were effected largely by cherry-picking quotes from scholars like Benny Morris, changing their meaning. As the article argues,

The real issue, then, is not simply bias. It is bias introduced in the guise of neutral, scholarship-based synthesis—and nowhere is that clearer than in the opening paragraph of the article, where a sentence introduced by an editor banned for non-neutral editing still tells readers what Zionism is.

Don’t expect any change in the article, though. Those who want to eliminate the bias will be steamrollered by assiduous antisemites who hover over the article to keep it biased. That’s the way that all this ideological slant is produced in Wikipedia.

*Over at The Spectator, Douglas Murray contemplates the damage done to the City of Light in recent demonstrations, and asks “Will we always have Paris?” (archived link).

Two worlds met in Paris last week. Thanks to the presence of Art Basel, some of the world’s most valuable art that wasn’t already in the city was shipped there. It arrived just in time for Paris to go up in flames. Most of the art fair went ahead as planned at the Grand Palais, but the final weekend was cancelled.

. . . Unfortunately reports from the front line all confirm a pre-existing prejudice of my own – which is that almost no group is more detached from society than those who call themselves ‘artists’. A particularly fine example came courtesy of a woman called Louisa Buck, who writes for the Art Newspaper. Reviewing the carnage in the city, as well as the contents of Art Basel, Buck (the daughter of the late Conservative MP Sir Antony Buck) twittered admiration not for the art but for the vandalism.

Taking to Instagram, she wrote: ‘For me the most powerful artwork encountered in the last 48 hours was the defaced sculpture under lowering skies in Place de La République passed on my way off to Gare du Nord that speaks volumes of the fury and disappointment felt at uncaring governments and savage policing – and it’s not just restricted to France.’ She continued to trill about the beauty of the black graffiti that made it look almost as though the figure of Égalité was ‘weeping black tears… (or maybe her eyes put out altogether)’.

Of course to voice such sentiments, any person – especially an art critic – must have had their brains fall out altogether. The monument in question is one of Paris’s landmarks, with the 19th-century sculpture centring around a statue of Marianne, the symbol of France. But the art world has long been dominated by an elite of ‘anti-elitists’. So much so that the daughter of a Tory MP and knight of the realm thinks nothing of celebrating the despoiling of France’s national monuments because of the need for justice, progress or some such.

. . . In other words, it isn’t just France’s new culturally enriching population who believe burning things down can be good. Some of its home-grown best are up for it too. One French woman, Bettina Zourli, a sociology lecturer, was caught on camera last week arguing with a beautiful young Parisienne who had been threatened with rape by the rioters. Zourli appeared to have no sympathy for the victim, and explained to the younger woman that she was simply ‘collateral damage’. She has since apologised for her ‘clumsy’ words.

Like so many other French activists and thinkers, Zourli spoke her truth. France’s best include people who believe – to use the old cliché – that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. But they never do make their omelette. They just leave every-one else with a bloody, burned-out mess.

The omelette making has spread to Italy and Spain, and I’d expect, as a result, to see Europe voting for hard-right candidates in the next year. But Paris will recover, as it always has, though it is slowly changing.

*The AP reports that a Brit named Karl Bushby is about to come home, after 28 straight years of walking.

Karl Bushby has spent 28 years walking home, but as he approaches the finish Monday, it’s not clear he’s ready for the audacious journey to end.

Pushing a cart loaded with camping gear up a busy country road in northern England about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the finish line, Bushby was uncertain of the future, anxious about the prospect of living in his mom’s basement and facing an identity crisis.

“My purpose and reason for living is about to end,” he said. “It’s going to be difficult … trying to blend back into a society that you just don’t know anymore.”

Bushby, 57, was just shy of 30 when he entered the unknown at the tip of South America on Nov. 1, 1998. Since then, he has walked 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) across four continents, navigated shifting ice over the Bering Strait and swam — a generous description of his technique — across the Caspian Sea and English Channel. He has battled almost every type of element and terrain imaginable through 30 foreign countries to get back to where he started half a lifetime ago.

Swampy jungle, scorching desert and frozen tundra slowed him down, but mountains of red tape helped turn what was supposed to be a 12-year trek into the epic he has dubbed the “Goliath Expedition.”

It’s taken nearly three times as long for Bushby to return to his mother, Angela, in Hull, as it took the hero in “ The Odyssey ” to make it back to his wife, Penelope, in Ithaca.

“Odysseus was a bit of an amateur,” Bushby quipped. “But, you know, I’ll cut him some slack — I haven’t met any giant Cyclops.”

The route, with the green part left to go. From yahoo! life courtesy of Karl Bushby:

. . . and an AP video. He is supposed to be home today, but there’s another video him having arrived in southern England. Thgt video also shows him crossing the Darnien Gap, the Bering Strait, and the English Channel (using the backstroke).

I am not sure that this trek is a good “reason for living,” but when you think of other people’s “reasons,” it doesn’t seem so outré.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is not comfortable. In fact, she is not doing well at all, and Andrzej fears the worst.

Hili: This armchair isn’t the most comfortable.
Andrzej: Come on, let’s lie down together somewhere else.

In Polish:

Hili: Ten fotel nie jest najwygodniejszy.
Ja: Chodź, poleżymy razem w innym miejscu.

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

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices

From CinEmma:

From Clean, Funny, and Cute Animal Memes:

And, as a treat, Khadija Khan shows us that Cenk already is blowing an artery!:

Masih shows some Iranians celebrating Halloween–in Iran!

Halloween in Iran…

The Islamic Republic calls Halloween a “Western vice” and tries to ban it. But young Iranians have a message for the ayatollahs: You don’t get to decide how we live, dress, dance, or celebrate.

While the new “supreme leader “ and other mullahs hide in fear, the young generation is out there celebrating their own lifestyle.

The regime wants to turn Iran into a graveyard. This generation is determined to turn it into a dance floor.

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) November 1, 2026

From Luana; a spoof of the Cenk/pro-El Sayed ad:

It was an honor to be a part of this video by the brilliant @cenkuygur for @AbdulElSayed . It is so important to go out and vote! #makeamericadeerborn https://t.co/5FqIGBeCdj

— Lyle Culpepper (@ShutupLyle) October 27, 2026

From Malcolm; neurons connecting. This is not only how learning takes place, but how memories are made:

Neurons establishing relationships with each other.

Fundamentally what happens when you are learning. https://t.co/xr5BIHbAl8

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 22, 2026

From Larry, who hasn’t learned the mantra, “Healthy at any weight”:

No fat cats here!

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) October 31, 2026

From FB; Michael Che makes a tasteless joke about Israel on Saturday Night Live:

“This week, a record number of people voted in Israel’s election — which is great to see, regardless of if you’re on the right side, or the left side, or the genocide.”  See for yourself at 2:09 below.

Weekend Update with Colin Jost and Michael Che! https://t.co/gPYlZQs1dN

— Saturday Night Live (@nbcsnl) November 1, 2026

One from my feed, showing cat wrestling:

If wrestling is fake then explain this… https://t.co/EDB0JxMuXF

— Donnie K “Trucken Marine” (@TruckenUSMC) October 31, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was five years old and would have turned 90 today had he lived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-11-02T12:11:24.431Z

And one from Doc Cobb, who saw the Fremont Troll in person:

Seattlers will know where I am

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-09-27T21:03:54.823Z

Music:  Here’s Barbra Streisand, who along with Karen Carpenter was one of the two great female pop singers of our time. Here she’s singing “Somewhere,” written by Leonard Bernstein (music) and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) for the musical “West Side Story.”  This is from Streisand’s 1986 “One Voice” concert, given at her home in Malibu, California.  What more is there to say except that there’s a long introduction by Robin Williams along with comments with various notables, and the singing starts at 3:20?