Tuesday: Hili dialogue

November 10, 2026 • 6:45 am

Hili dialogues are back today, at least for a while, as Andrzej has resurrected a bunch of the cat’s philosophical musings. See below.

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, November 10, 2026 and National Vanilla Cupcake Day, which shows what a blah day it is. But it’s also the Báb’s Birthday (see below), honoring ʻAlí-Muḥammad Shírází (1819-1850), also know as “the Báb”, founder of Babism and one of the central figures of the Baháʼí Faith, which teaches that sequential prophets will occur, including Jesus, Muhammad, and, of course, the Báb.  He was executed for apostasy at the age of 30, but there are still 7-8 million followers of Bahái.

But the Báb was really born on October 20, so it’s unclear why his birth is celebrated today.

Here’s what Wikipedia calls “a historical depiction of the Báb”, and I’m not sure if its a drawing or a drawn-over photograph.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

It’s also Area Code Day, the Birth of the Báb,

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

Da Nooz:

*There’s an op-ed by Megan McArdle in the WaPo that has a clickbait title, “Democrats won the midterms. Republicans may have won something bigger.”  WHAAAT?  The subtitle gives one part of the answer: “Social Security and Medicare will force painful choices for the party in control.”

Democrats have been celebrating since Tuesday, and well they should. They swept safe seats and won long-shot races, racking up win after win in the reddest of red states. It was the most resounding victory for the party in 50 years, and it was also a victory for the country, which thoroughly repudiated the chaos and corruption of the Trump administration.

But the biggest win may have been for the Republican Party. Now look, guys, I know it doesn’t feel that way. You not only took an epic thumping; you’ve probably lost any hope of holding the presidency in 2028. That doesn’t feel great, especially because Democrats are already murmuring about retribution. So I don’t blame you for failing to look on the bright side. But there is a bright side. In fact, there are two.

For one thing, you have a chance to rebuild your party around something other than Donald Trump. That needed to happen. At 80, Trump has neither the energy nor the actuarial lifespan to lead the party into the future. But Trump didn’t want that to happen, and until now, he has had the power to prevent it, by ruthlessly purging anyone who tried to build an independent Republican identity.

. . .Yes, I know: In the meantime, Democrats will have the House and the Senate. They will use them to do things you hate. I can’t erase that pain, but perhaps I can ease it by pointing out that if they win the trifecta by capturing the White House in 2028, they will almost certainly end up holding the bag for the looming entitlement crisis.

In the last quarter of 2032, the Social Security trust fund dedicated to retirees is scheduled to run out of money. (There is another trust fund for disability insurance, which is better funded but comparatively small.) At that point, by law, benefits are supposed to be cut to match outflows to inflows, which would mean an across-the-board cut of over 20 percent. Six months later, the Medicare hospital insurance program will deplete its trust fund and is scheduled for an 11 percent cut in reimbursements.

You’ve been hearing about it for decades, but the day when the trust funds are exhausted is almost upon us. If Democrats are in charge when it happens, that will be on them, not you.

McArdle points out that several suggested solutions—raising the cap on payroll taxes and raising the retirement age—will tick people off and the Democrats will get blamed. Her solution is for Democrats to tackle this question NOW, but Trump will be President for two more years. I suspect that the next President will be a Democrat, so the party better get its act together now.

*The NYT reports that Joe Biden won’t be very active in promoting his new biography as he has metastasized prostate cancer (article archived here).

Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Sunday that his health would prevent him from making as many public appearances to promote his forthcoming memoir as he had hoped.

The former president, 83, whose health has faced scrutiny since his time in the White House, was diagnosed last year with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that spread to his bones. Mr. Biden underwent radiation therapy and surgery to remove skin cancer lesions, and his son Hunter Biden said in an interview over the summer that his condition was worsening and causing him pain.

Mr. Biden said he had started writing the memoir, “Promise Me, America,” which covers his years as president, when he received the diagnosis. He indicated afterward that he felt intense pressure to finish quickly as he battled the disease, saying he was “working like hell” with his publisher.

Now, he says his cancer will also affect his ability to promote the book.

“Some days are better than others. It hasn’t stopped me. But sometimes it slows me down,” Mr. Biden wrote Sunday in a post on X. “What that means is, unfortunately, I won’t be able to do as many conversations about my book as I’d hoped.”

He added, “My doctors continue to be encouraged by how I’ve responded to treatment.”

Mr. Biden’s age and health set off an intense debate during his final year in office. Mr. Biden ended his re-election bid after a disastrous June 2024 debate performance against President Donald Trump, during which Mr. Biden repeatedly lost his train of thought.

Hunter Biden said on a podcast in July that he believed his father was unknowingly suffering from cancer during that debate. (Medical experts who were not involved in Mr. Biden’s care said it was unlikely that his debate performance was affected by the cancer diagnosed months later.)

This looks pretty much as if Joe doesn’t have that long to live, especially because he had to rush completing his book.  Although I’m not happy when anybody is suffering, Democrat or Republican, and I voted for Biden, we should prepare for his death, as I’m sure the NYT obituary section is doing.

*Texas voted Democratic (“blue”) in the midterms, but the Free Press claims that what went through Texas was a “purple tornado.”

Texans like [Suzanne] Bellsnyder have always had an independent streak, and the pent-up frustration that had been building for years toward establishment Republicans and the status quo finally reached a breaking point last week.

Abbott was swept out after three terms, James Talarico became the first Texas Democrat to be elected to the Senate since 1988, and Democrats won control of the state House for the first time since 2003. It was the first time any Democrat has been elected to statewide office in Texas in over 30 years.

While many pundits are calling what happened in Texas a blue tsunami, it was more like a purple tornado: a shift among moderate voters weary of extremism, cronyism, and corruption. Every single county in Texas—and there are 254 of them, the most of any U.S. state—swung toward the Democrats, but that doesn’t mean traditionally conservative Texans were swept away by the promises of the party’s ascendant left.

“Democrats didn’t necessarily win rural counties, but there was a shift in a lot of counties that made all the difference,” Bellsnyder said. “Rural Republicans have served as a firewall for the party for the last couple of decades, and the Republican Party lost their insurance policy last Tuesday.”

Much of Texas still appears solidly red on maps that show the election results based on which party earned a simple majority of the votes. Still, the results also show rising shades of purple in even the reddest and most conservative rural counties. An analysis by The Texas Tribune concluded that turnout increased by a lower amount in rural counties than in urban and suburban ones. The swing toward Democrats in some of the reddest counties was dramatic.

. . .What will political life in Texas look like now that Democrats have swept the state? Bellsnyder welcomes the return to a bipartisan Texas government, with Democrats in the governor’s mansion and in control of the board of education and state House, but Republicans still in charge of the state Senate.

. . . .“Whether it is the Republicans or Democrats, single-party rule isn’t healthy for democracy,” Bellsnyder said. Newly elected Democrats and other party leaders in Texas hopefully realize that they must deliver the bipartisan results that they campaigned on, because “if the blue doesn’t do what they said they were going to do, then I guarantee we’re going to go back red.”

Well, that’s clear, and if there’s any lesson for Democrats from the midterms, they are going to have to unify to some degree and deliver—and by that I don’t mean allowing men to participate in women’s sports or create free public transportation.  Somehow I sense the Democrats are going to have a big dust-up over their priorities, at least for a while.

*If the pro-Palestinian and anti-“Zionist” bike rally intended to shake up Jewish businesses, it was a miserable failure.

Massive crowds of counterprotesters waving Israeli flags and holding signs condemning antisemitism responded Sunday morning to a bicycle “boycott ride” targeting Philadelphia businesses that organizers said were owned by supporters of Israel.

State and local leaders widely condemned the bikers’ demonstration, saying it was targeting six Jewish-owned businesses. The cyclists on Sunday were met by what appeared to be hundreds of people protesting the ride, sparking some verbal confrontations in Pennsylvania’s largest city.

“Show your faces!” one counterprotester shouted as he flipped off a group of bikers in Rittenhouse Square in the heart of Philadelphia’s Center City neighborhood. Many of the bikers were wearing disposable face masks, helmets and sunglasses. Several bikers held Palestinian flags and were draped in keffiyehs.

Michael Balaban, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, decried the scene.

“When people come to attack the Jewish community, we want to meet those attacks tenfold, a hundredfold with people,” Balaban told CNN affiliate WPVI. “Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love and we want to make sure it stays that way and get the haters out of here….Don’t protest us because we’re Jewish.”

On one side of the road on Walnut Street downtown, a woman quietly held a sign above her head reading: “HATE is not Brotherly LOVE.” A few dozen feet away on the same side, a man held one that said: “Money loving Zionists.”

The protest was organized by Philly Bike On Your Left, a group describing itself as “anti-Zionist.”

The group has rejected the criticism, saying it was “grossly misrepresented” and is “firmly against racism and oppression of all forms, including fascism, antisemitism, islamophobia, and colonialism.”

“Ride around Rittenhouse with us as we show these zionist business owners that we see them for the disgusting humans they are,” the group said in its original October 30 Instagram post announcing the ride.

You’ll want to see it, of course, and there’s a long and boring video on YouTube, but I’ve put a short Here’s a short news video of the demonstration.  There seems to have been very little violence, although of course there was animosity on both sides.  Fortunately, in the main the peace was kept, and the restaurants were apparently packed. Note the trop of “Money loving Zionists”, which of course really means “Money loving Jews”: an obvious blood libel. And the cowardly protestors were largely masked, and you know why (I didn’t see any masked counterprotestors!):

I love this screenshot I took from one video, showing Jewish self-deprecating humor of the protestors:

*At It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal details the countdown to form a government coalition in Israel.

It’s Monday, November 9, and for all the frenzy in the country, the electoral process is far from instant. Last night, Gadi Eisenkot was handed the mandate, and a 91-day timer began.

Thirteen weeks. That’s how long coalition negotiations could drag on: six weeks for Eisenkot, four for Benjamin Netanyahu and three more for the rest of the Knesset.

“No one will be able to meet all the commitments they made,” Eisenkot declared last night at the President’s residence. “And all of us will be required to compromise.” “We must form a national emergency government” he added, “this will require creative and unconventional political steps.”

Eisenkot made three promises at the outset of this election: no Arabs, no Haredim, no Bibi. Last night’s speech gave little indication of which commitments he will meet and which will require compromise and creativity.

For months before the election Eisenkot signaled a creative approach to the Arab parties. His original plan for a “national emergency government” was, in reality, binational, resting on 19 Arab votes from parties that reject Israel’s Jewish statehood and refuse to label Hamas a terrorist organization.

That was until Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Lieberman pulled a sharp 180 and proposed a softer form of anti-Zionist support: the ultra-Orthodox. For reference, imagine the Democratic Party conceding a national abortion ban in exchange for evangelical support to oust Donald Trump. The man who triggered Israel’s political crisis in 2019 over his refusal to sit with the Haredim has chosen to don a shtreimel rather than a keffiyeh to defeat Netanyahu, in effect challenging Eisenkot to a game of chicken.

Eisenkot has already broken one promise; he would like to avoid breaking a second on the chance he is thrown into further elections.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog appointed Eisenkot (former head of the IDF and head of a centrist party) to try forging a consensus. Eisenkot ruled out using the Arab and ultra-Orthodox parties to do that, but it may not be possible, and he’d have to choose one, and it look likes he’s leaning on putting the ultra-Orthodox into a ruling coalition. But of course the ultra-Orthodox are at odds with the government because, in violation of government decree, most of them refuse to serve in the IDF or in alternative service; they think that Israel should honor their desire to spend their time studying the Talmud. As a formally secular state, Israel should not allow that, nor give the group a stipend for their religious labors.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej has just collected a bunch of old Hili posts in a Substack section called (in Polish) “Philosophy on four paws”, so let’s have one bit of wisdom a day for a while. Today she shows off her learning.

Hili: Horace was right.
Andrzej : About what?
Hili: Almost everything.

In Polish:

Hili: Horacy miał rację.
Ja: W jakiej sprawie?
Hili: Prawie w każdej.

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

From Kitty Litterposting:

From Science Humor.  Whenever I see a Facebook post starting, “I’m honored to. . .”, I know some bragging will ensue.

From Give Me a Sign:

From Masih, who introduces Iranian protestors in the German Parliament (in the tweet with a Farsi title, Masih speaks in English):

From my feed: The Italian Prime Minister and her cats:

From Luana. Colossal is plowing old ground with the “woolly mice” because, I get, their progress on making Woolly Mammoths and dodos is slow. Look how they tout these mice, not saying that more than half of the edited changes came from mutant mice and not elephant or mammoth genomes. Let’s see them make an elephant look like this–and then add big tusks, physiological tolerance, and a surrogate mother!

From Malcolm, interspecies love:

A Diwali post from the Number Ten Cat:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial: a survivor who turns 97 today:

A survivor of Thesienstadt, Mauthausen, and Auschwitz, this Czech Jewish woman turns 97 today. She's one of the few survivors who is still with us.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-11-10T11:49:49.071Z

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, office safety. I can’t say I squealed with laughter, but it was funny. Another tweet gave its source: “It’s a 1991 Barr Films instructional video from the ‘Excellence in Training’ series, I don’t think any of the actors are famous.”

“Office Safety”If you don’t squeal with laughter five seconds into this you may be clinically dead.

— David J (@damjef.bsky.social) 2026-11-08T12:33:58.545Z

A murmuration:

saw some starlings

— Lev Parikian (@levparikian.bsky.social) 2026-11-07T19:14:33.113Z

Music, from reader Bryan, who calls this rehearsal video “Best rare Beatles I’ve heard for a long time!” The song is by Harrison and it’s “For You Blue” from the Beatles’ Let it Be album.  

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