Bret Stephens on Mamdani

October 10, 2026 • 10:30 am

If you’ve kept track of NYT Mayor Zohran Mamdani since he was elected less than a year ago, it’s not hard to conclude that, though he pretends to dislike bigotry, his statements and actions add up to a man who is not fond of Jews, and who wants Israel gone and replaced by a Palestinian state. His “official” statement on October 7 of this year, was thin on sympathy for Israel and touted the three Big Lies of antisemitism: Israeli apartheid, genocide, and colonialism.  To top off the day, Mamdani had dinner at a Palestinian restaurant, showing that he not only lacks the empathy he pretends to have for murdered Israelis, but also a man who in effect spits in the face of his Jewish constituency.

Of course I can’t write about this stuff nearly as well as the NYT’s op-ed columnist Bret Stephens, who yesterday posted what I see as one of his best and most penetrating columns. It’s about Mamdani’s moral obtuseness, and you can read it by clicking the link below or seeing the archived version here. I couldn’t resist spouting off myself (flush left) after bits of Stephens’s text (indented):

I was going to give some quotes, but I found I quoted the entire column, and I hope Stephens and the NYT forgive me. It is, as Darwin described The Origin, “one long argument,” and the parts are inseparable.  I’ve bolded my favorite parts:

Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, set off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”

In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.” In fact, it’s a moral obscenity. Let me count the ways.

It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The paragraph above shows not only the power of simile in calling out hypocrisy, but also how morally obtuse Mamdani really was, and how oblivious and/or insensitive he is to the feelings of people devastated by Hamas’s attacks on October 7.  He couldn’t keep his gob shut for just one day without condemning Israel.

It is obscene because many of the Jews murdered on Oct. 7, living in kibbutzim with conspicuously left-leaning politics, had been at the forefront of the peace movement, volunteering, for example, to drive sick Palestinians for treatment at nearby Israeli hospitals. Hamas wasn’t just killing and terrorizing the innocent; it was eliminating the good.

It is obscene because Hamas didn’t just kill its victims in pursuit of a strategic objective. It tormented and slaughtered them like an army of serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims. Corpses of Israeli women were described by one coroner as “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others appeared to have been raped so violently that their pelvises were broken. Parents were killed in front of their children; children were murdered in their beds. A fieldworker was beheaded with a garden hoe. I know this because Hamas filmed itself doing this and I forced myself to watch the film. I know because that same month, I visited the bedrooms where the kids had been murdered, their mattresses still soaked in blood.

Although Mamdani gives lip service to the horrors experienced by Israeli civilians on October 7, not once have I seen him blame Hamas for the “genocide”, nor, indeed, say anything about the fact that explicitly genocidal aims are espoused not by Israel but by Hamas. That organization is responsible for the devastation that followed their invasion of Israel, as are the Palestinians who enable and approve of Hamas’s actions.

Mamdani does not mention that the kind of warfare practiced by Hamas guaranteed more civilian deaths. Indeed, Hamas’s late leader, Yahya Sinwar, approved of the deaths of Gazan civilians, asserting that they were actually beneficial to Hamas. Read what he said and you’ll realize that Hamas didn’t value the lives of Gazan civilians nearly as much as did Israel. Israel tried to protect Gazan civilians; Sinwar’s attitude was “the more of our civilians die, the better for our cause.” While the movie “Naza” faults Israel for killing civilians as a necessary byproduct of eliminating Hamas, the IDF tried to prevent that, while, in contrast, the “necessary sacrifices” of Gazan civilians were something that Sinwar (and Hamas) wanted and facilitated (why else would they put military facilities in and under schools and hospitals?) Stephens continues:

It is obscene because, whatever else you may think of the war in Gaza, on the eve of Oct. 7 the border of Israel and Gaza was governed by a cease-fire. It was Hamas that chose to kick off the violence, just as the Japanese did in 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Whether in fistfights between people or wars between states, whoever throws the first punch forfeits the right to throw the last.

It is obscene because Mamdani is being misleading when he speaks as if his prime objection to Israel is what it did after Oct. 7. In fact, the mayor has been an anti-Israel zealot at least since his college days, when, as a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, he broke off collaboration with the left-leaning Jewish group J Street, which advocates a Palestinian state, because it also recognizes the rights of a Jewish state. He’s written a rap professing “love” for five men convicted in a U.S. court of funneling money to Hamas. The day after Oct. 7, he issued a brief statement that said nothing about Hamas but immediately denounced Israel. Put simply, this is a mayor who first condemned Israel as guilty and then went about collecting evidence.

It is obscene because, however much the genocide allegation against Israel is mindlessly repeated by people too lazy or prejudiced to understand the difference between war and genocide, that allegation is as false as it is sinister. False, because genocide is about killing whole classes of people for who they are rather than for what they did — and if Israel wanted to kill Palestinians as Palestinians it never would have bothered mobilizing hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers for the war, and losing hundreds in high-intensity urban warfare. Sinister, because the political purpose of the genocide allegation is to trivialize, if not erase, the attacks of Oct. 7 by making them seem minor in comparison to the Palestinian casualties that tragically, but all-but inevitably, followed.

It is obscene because Hamas’s intentions toward Israel really are genocidal. Its leaders have often and publicly vowed to perpetrate future Oct. 7s. Had the group not been stopped by force that day, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have kept up its orgy of slaughter on its way to Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. Yet one searches in vain for anything from the mayor except perfunctory, pro forma condemnations of Hamas.

I often ask those who accuse Israel of killing too many Palestinians what they would do were they in charge of Israel or of the IDF. Would they stop after killing, say, 3,000 Hamas members (and about 6,000 civilians assuming a 2:1 ratio)? Given that Hamas said they’d continue slaughter and kidnapping, why would Israel stop short of wholesale elimination of the terrorists? I’ve never heard a critic explicitly say what they think Israel would have done other than what it did to eliminate the existential threat that Hamas posed.

It is obscene because there’s an even more wretched purpose to the genocide charge against Israel, which long predates the recent war in Gaza. It is a specimen of Holocaust erasure: not the dumb kind, which seeks to deny Nazi Germany’s murder of six million Jews, but a more sophisticated version that accuses living Jews of genocide as a way of ending the historical Jewish claim to a long and ongoing history of persecution and near-annihilation that accounts for its need for a sovereign state capable of defending its people.

In my view, people like Mamdani, and other Jew haters, dislike the Jews even more because of the Holocaust, which of course arouses sympathies for what Jews experienced. That’s why they either deny the Holocaust or accuse Jews of enacting the same thing in Gaza—a bit of lunacy that many have bought into.  The next paragraph is sheer brilliance:

Finally, it is obscene because Mamdani is the mayor for about one million Jewish New Yorkers, many with close relatives in Israel, who deserve better on a day of grief than to be offered the equivalent of an “All Lives Matter” homily. This is yet another of the double standards through which modern-day Jew hatred manifests itself: Whenever antisemitism is mentioned in progressive circles, it is inevitably accompanied by nods about Islamophobia or other bigotries.

It would be better to have a mayor who, if only on Oct. 7, can say: Jewish Lives Matter. Israeli Lives Matter. Full stop. The lectures about Gaza can come some other day.

אָמֵן

Caturday felid trifecta: Cat tweets; American cats catching up to dogs; Tokyo’s cat festival; and lagniappe

October 10, 2026 • 9:15 am

Yes, it’s time for another Caturday Felid post, the feature hanging on with its front claws.

First, BuzzFeed has 28 animal tweets, but of course I’ll reproduce only the ones featuring cats. Here are a few.

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This Washington Post article (click to read, or find it archived here) shows that, relatively, cat ownership is outstripping dg ownership in America, mainly because cats are holding steady while dog ownership is declining. Nevertheless, pet stores and other “mech” places offer far more goodies for dgs than for cats.

The author is Robert Granadar.

Excerpts:

According to statistics from my research firm Packaged Facts, for the first time since the data began being tracked, more U.S. households own kittens than puppies. In 2014, there were 1.8 households with a dog under 1 year old for every one household with a cat the same age. That ratio reached parity in 2025, and this year, it declined to 0.94 to 1. Fewer puppies today means fewer dogs in the future.

This isn’t a story of cat ownership booming, however. It’s one of dog ownership declining. The number of American households with dogs has dropped 5 percent since 2019, while cat ownership has held relatively steady. Dogs still dominate America — roughly 71 million households have dogs compared with 53 million that own cats — but that is changing quickly.

Here’s a graph of popularity of the two mammals, with fish a distant third:

. . . . roughly half of cat owners feel as though pet product marketers and retailers aren’t catering to cats.

Meanwhile, in most pet stores, dog owners are greeted with a wide assortment of food and treat options, toys, enrichment products, travel accessories, apparel, training equipment and seasonal merchandise. Grooming, boarding, training and other pet services remain overwhelmingly dog-centric. There are dog parks, dog beaches, dog-friendly hotels, dog-friendly restaurants, dog bakeries and even dog airlines. Cats are largely left out. They get leftover boxes from Amazon deliveries.

Pet companies treat cats like the Ken to dogs’ Barbie. So, what’s behind Americans’ move away from dogs?

Mostly, practicality. Cats are quieter, easier to leave by themselves and better at living in smaller spaces. A dog can turn your Saturday into a logistical exercise. A cat barely notices you’ve left the house.

But the trend reflects the state of the economy, too. Home buying, a traditional trigger for adding a dog to the family, has been stifled by a combination of elevated real estate prices, sluggish real wage growth and higher mortgage rates. The homeownership decline has taken some of the steam out of the dog market, as homeowners are almost twice as likely as renters to own a dog, according to our data.

Here are the data from the article, state by state, on the relative popularity of cats vs. d*gs. Note that the five states with more households having cats than dogs are nearly all in the NE, with the exception of Idaho (?): Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Illinois and Louisiana, in stark contrast show fewer than 20% of the households with cats:

And look! Cats cost almost half of what dogs do!

Demographic shifts are also putting downward pressure on overall pet ownership. Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies projects that household growth will be concentrated among older adults and minorities — groups that historically have lower pet ownership rates.

The decline in dog ownership is alsoa product of the way people live and work post-pandemic. Americans have smaller households, are more likely toown apartments, travel more and incur higher costs. With the U.S. facing tighter economic conditions, dogs can be prohibitive. Packaged Facts estimates that owners spend an average of $1,300 annually on dogs, compared with roughly $750 on cats.

. . . This isn’t a story about cats replacing dogs. It’s about Americans becoming more like cats: living in smaller spaces, valuing independence and preferring to be left alone.

Go cats! This article neglects to explain one fact that baffles me: why the Internet is far more dominated by cats than by d*gs.  You’d expect that because d*gs are more expressive and active, as well as more popular, they’d dominate the Web. But they don’t. Any explanations?

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Do you know about the Cat Festival held every year in Tokyo? It celebrates the Bakeneko, a supernatural demon cat. Here’s a bit about it from Wikipedia:

The bakeneko (ばけ猫, “changed cat”) is a type of Japanese yōkai, or supernatural entity; more specifically, it is a kaibyō, or supernatural cat.[2] It is often confused with the nekomata, another cat-like yōkai.[3] The distinction between them is often ambiguous, but the largest difference is that the nekomata has two tails, while the bakeneko has only one.

There are legends of bakeneko in various parts of Japan, but the tale of the Nabeshima Bakeneko Disturbance in Saga Prefecture is especially famous.

The reason that cats are seen as yōkai in Japanese mythology is attributed to many of their characteristics: for example, the pupils of their eyes change shape depending on the time of day, their fur can seem to cause sparks when they are petted (due to static electricity), they sometimes lick blood, they can walk without making a sound, their wild nature that remains despite the gentleness they can show, they are difficult to control, their sharp claws and teeth, nocturnal habits, and their speed and agility.

Here’s a picture of a demon-cat from the Wikipedia article, with the caption, “Ume no Haru Gojūsantsugi (駅) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. A kabuki play that was performed in 1835 (Tenpo 6) in Ichimura-za. It depicts a cat that has shapeshifted into an old woman, a cat wearing a napkin and dancing, and the shadow of a cat licking a lamp.”

Part of the legends of the bakeneko is that they like to lick lamp oil!

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But every year about this time the demon cats are celebrated in a Tokyo Festival, and people dress up in cat outfits and do catlike things. The video below shows the festival from last year. The description:

Step into the whimsical world of Tokyo’s Kagurazaka Bakeneko Festival (化け猫フェスティバル) where the streets come alive with cat-themed costumes, traditional dance, music, and joy! 🐾✨ Every year, cat lovers from across Japan gather in Kagurazaka, Tokyo, to celebrate the mysterious Bakeneko (化け猫) the legendary “ghost cat” of Japanese folklore. From adorable feline cosplay and creative makeup to lively parades and local treats, it’s a must-see event that blends Japanese tradition, folklore, and kawaii culture!

Location: Kagurazaka, Tokyo

The time stamps for part of the Cat Festival:

00:00 Intro
00:24 Start
00:34 Costume highlights
07:18 Parade march
09:17 Close-ups & reactions
10:45 Grand finale

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Lagniappe:  Jen, the Good News Girl, describes Powell Cat, a beloved cat that was popular at UCLA, where she went to school:

Here’s a brief remembrance of Powell Cat at a student website at UCLA; click to read:

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?

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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. . .

Nobel Peace prize goes to Navi Pillay, promoter of the Israeli genocide blood libel

October 9, 2026 • 9:30 am

Well, the only thing that consoles me about this year’s grotesque award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay is that the same Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat.  But in some ways this Prize is even worse, for Pillay got it for ““for her efforts to promote peace and international law,” or, as the Nobel Prize page notes:

At a time of existential challenges – including more wars and conflicts than the world has seen in a long time – international law is no longer just a supplement to peace and security. It is an absolute necessity.

In historic international court cases, Navi Pillay has shown that legal measures can help prevent acts of war and violence. She has also contributed to strengthen the institutions of international law. Her independence, expertise and steadfastness have made her one of the most respected international jurists of our time.

What did she do to prevent acts of war and violence? She promoted the idea that Israel committed genocide, without saying a word about the explicitly outlined genocide of Hamas.  (She did condemn Hamas for war crimes, but, as you see below, that’s not why she got the Nobel Peace Prize.) As the NYT reports:(all bolding henceforth is mine):

Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer and international judge, was announced on Friday as the recipient of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize for what the Norwegian Nobel Committee called her efforts to uphold a system of international law that is increasingly under attack.

The committee said that Ms. Pillay had been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.” Formerly the United Nations’ top human rights official, and a judge at the International Criminal Court and on an international tribunal investigating the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she is “one of the most respected international jurists of our time,” the committee said.

“Let me dedicate this award to all the survivors of international crimes as well as to practitioners and defenders of international justice,” Ms. Pillay said at a news conference in Germany.

Last year, a United Nations commission led by Ms. Pillay determined that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a finding that the Israeli government rejected. The decision to honor her added to the growing global blowback against Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., told The New York Times that honoring Ms. Pillay “would not only damage the credibility of the Nobel Committee, but also tarnish the legacy of the distinguished laureates who have received this honor throughout history.”

Though the committee did not explicitly mention Gaza in its statement honoring Ms. Pillay, its chairman, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, told reporters that her work on the U.N. commission was “an important part of the reasoning why she received the prize.”

There you have it.  But there were some problems with the “determination that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians”. I’ve already discussed the ludicrous “genocide” accusation against Israel as one of the war’s Big Lies, but Maarten Boudry did a better job in his Substack article, “They don’t believe it either.”

And one take from Grok:

What is the problem with the UN’s finding that Israel committed genocide?

The claim is not a finding by “the UN.” It comes from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (the Pillay Commission), a body created by the UN Human Rights Council. In a September 2025 report, the three commissioners concluded that Israel had committed four of the five acts listed in the Genocide Convention against Palestinians in Gaza, with the specific intent required for genocide, and that President Herzog, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and former Defense Minister Gallant had incited it. The UN as an institution has not adopted that conclusion. The International Court of Justice case brought by South Africa remains unresolved on the merits; written pleadings run into 2029, and the Court’s earlier provisional-measures orders found only that certain Palestinian rights under the Convention were “plausible” and at risk—not that genocide had occurred.

The problems with the Commission’s conclusion are structural, methodological, and legal.

The Human Rights Council maintains a permanent agenda item directed solely at Israel and has long produced a disproportionate share of its country-specific resolutions against it. The Commission’s members entered with public records of hostility toward Israel. Miloon Kothari had spoken of the “Jewish lobby” controlling social media; Chris Sidoti had dismissed concerns about antisemitism; Navi Pillay had a documented history of partisan statements on the conflict. Israel has refused to cooperate with the body since 2022 on grounds of bias. The resulting reports rely heavily on the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry (which does not separate combatants from civilians), unnamed witnesses, NGOs, and outlets such as Al Jazeera, while giving minimal weight to Israeli operational data or the documented embedding of Hamas forces.

The report largely erases Hamas as a fighting force. It does not seriously engage the scale of the tunnel network, the systematic use of civilian sites, the diversion of aid, or the October 7, 2023 attack that killed roughly 1,200 people and took hostages—the casus belli. Statements by Israeli officials are parsed selectively (“human animals,” biblical allusions) while wartime context and explicit targeting of Hamas are discounted. UN Watch’s detailed rebuttal and other legal analyses describe the evidentiary base as one-sided and the inferences of intent as conjecture.

Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, the decisive element is dolus specialis: specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, as such. High civilian casualties in urban warfare against an enemy that operates from within the civilian population do not establish that intent. Reported deaths (Gaza Health Ministry figures in the mid-to-high 70,000s by late 2026, including combatants) have not reduced Gaza’s population to anything approaching destruction; estimates remain around 2.1 million. Demographic breakdowns of identified fatalities show men of fighting age heavily over-represented relative to their share of the pre-war population. Israel issued evacuation warnings, opened corridors, and facilitated large volumes of aid—conduct difficult to reconcile with a policy of physical annihilation. Some advocacy groups that reach a genocide conclusion have acknowledged they are applying a broader standard than the Convention’s text and existing jurisprudence require.

The same bodies have not applied comparable scrutiny to Hamas’s charter language and explicit aims, or to far larger death tolls in other recent conflicts. The Commission’s finding therefore functions more as an amplification of a pre-existing political narrative than as an impartial legal determination. The only forum that can issue a binding ruling on the state responsibility question is the ICJ, and it has not done so.
As for some of Pillay’s statements on Israel before she was even appointed to the committee, much less before October of 1983, Grok says this:

Before [Pillay] was named to investigate Israel, she had already applied the apartheid label and backed sanctions:

  • In a November 2017 interview she said apartheid means enforced segregation on racial lines “and that is what is happening in Israel.”
  • In June 2020 she signed a South African BDS Coalition petition titled “Sanction Apartheid Israel!,” which called for an arms embargo, an end to military-security cooperation, and suspension of free-trade agreements, and equated Israeli policy with South African apartheid.
  • In May 2021 she described Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as “inhuman” and again compared it to apartheid South Africa.
  • On 14 June 2021, weeks after the May 2021 Israel–Hamas fighting, she signed a joint letter to President Biden decrying Israel’s “domination and oppression of the Palestinian people” and “ever-expanding discrimination and systemic oppression,” and characterizing clashes at Al-Aqsa as aggressive actions against peaceful protesters amounting to forced dispossession.

As for the 2026 Nobel Prize contest , we have a winner, but not for the Peace Prize, as nobody was dumb enough to guess Pillay. The winner is Renée Szostek, who guessed Carson for the literature prize. If you are Szostek, please get in touch with me so we can get you your boook.

Finally, a tweet from Maarten Boudry; you can see the letter, signed by U.S. military personnel, here.

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 9, 2026 • 8:15 am

One generous contributor has come forward with some wildlife photos: mathematician Abby Thompson from UC Davis. Abby’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

This is a grab-bag of photos from Northern California from the summer (with one exception).

Cervus canadensis nannodes. A particularly contented Tule elk from the Point Reyes preserve:

Cornu aspersum (garden snail)- As a gardener I abhor them but looked at closely they are beautiful. They were introduced to California in the 1850s to be made into escargot, and now plague gardeners up and down the state:

Brodiaea terrestris from Point Reyes:

Once the extreme tides of the summer pass and there are no “good” low tides, I start looking through a microscope at bits of riffraff collected from the beach. It’s astonishing how many different creatures can live in a cubic inch of washed-up kelp holdfast.

Thetis vagina (twin-sailed salp). One of the seemingly endless types of blobby transparent things drifting around the ocean. Lying on the sand it looks like a scrap of Saran Wrap. Once revived in some sea water and under magnification the ghostly internal structure appears.    From google AI:  “Despite their jelly-like look, salps belong to the subphylum Tunicata (sea squirts), making them chordates that are evolutionarily more closely related to humans and vertebrates than to actual jellyfish.”  Cousins!

Phragmatopoma californica (California sandcastle worm). The worm is the curly orange thing on the left, which connects to the pink tentacles on the right underneath the structure with purple flecks, which is all that’s left of the tube the worm calls home (it’s ok, they can rebuild):

Close up showing the worm’s operculum – the “lid” of the tube, which the worm pulls down to close off the top of the tube when it retreats inside. I’ve posted a picture of this species before; my excuse is that this one’s tube, usually just made of sand,  has an interesting feature:

A close-up of the tube remnants, showing some Foraminifera, amazing 1-celled organisms.   The white ones in the center that look kind-of like a snail shell are Haynesina depressula (thanks inaturalist expert!) and there are several other types in there, harder to pick out.    I think the purple bits are pieces of sea urchin spines.     An artistic sandcastle worm!:

Genus Elphidium– another foram. This one was tangled in a shred of bryozoan.  It’s hard for me to believe this is a single cell, but I guess life is complicated:

Class Ostracoda – the things with little white dots. These are tiny crustaceans, mere specks.  There’s a foram in this photo, too:

Another ostracod- from 2025, not a great photo, included because it’s the first ostracod I ever saw. At first I thought I was looking at an infant mussel.    Then it sprouted legs and started running around like a crazy cartoon mussel. Quite a shock:

Genus Corambe (nudibranch, a baby), surrounded by its bryozoan prey. I think this ID is correct- its coloration is not typical of the genus. The nudibranch is so small that it looks slightly like it’s going to be attacked by the bryozoa, rather than vice-versa:

Sunset over the water:

Most photos taken with an iPhone precariously clamped to the eyepiece of an antique microscope.

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.

Mamdani booed for his October 7 statement—by supporters of Palestine

October 8, 2026 • 9:30 am

UPDATE:  In what can only be a gesture of anti-Israel defiance, Mamdani ate dinner on October 7 at an ideologically-themed Palestinian restaurant (h/t Wayne):

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani dined at a Palestinian restaurant chain blasted for being “openly genocidal” against Jews on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel.

Hizzoner ate dinner at Ayat Hinds Hall on the Upper West Side — part of a chain whose sister restaurant in Brooklyn was blasted for featuring a menu section entitled “From the River to the Sea,” in the wake of the 2023 attacks.

The restaurant is named after Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian child who was killed by IDF forces in Gaza in Jan. 2024, and also pays homage to the anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University, who renamed Hamilton Hall “Hind’s Hall” when they took over the building.

A tweet:

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

Yesterday, New York City’s Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, issued a statement commemorating the October 7, 2023 attack of Hamas on Israel. The problem for me and many others was the the commemoration was more about the depravity of Israel than of Hamas, and more sympathetic to the Palestinians to the Israelis.  Here’s the statement as given by the Mayor’s Office:

This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.

The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them—all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.

Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.

To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.

There you have it: 49 words devoted to Hamas’s attack, and 163 words on the crimes of Israel, including an erroneous statement about the death toll as well as inclusion of the Three Big Lies about Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide.

And it’s not that different from the statement he made on October 7 of last year:

Yesterday’s small-beer “commemoration” was decried by Jews and Jewish organizations, but what is surprising is that Mamdani was booed for it—by supporters of Palestine! When I first saw the headline below in the NYT, I thought, “Well, of course the Jews harbor anger and bitterness”about the statement, but then I learned that, no, it was supporters of Palestine who were angry and bitter. Click to read, or see an archived version of the article here:

An excerpt, and I have to say it brought me a frisson of pleasure:

It seemed inevitable that the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks would touch off tensions for Zohran Mamdani, a longtime critic of Israel and the first Muslim mayor of a city that is 12 percent Jewish.

But Wednesday erupted with such anger and emotion that it seemed to overwhelm any efforts to solemnly mark the deadliest day in Israeli history.

Mr. Mamdani began the day shortly before 9 a.m. by issuing a statement that was meant to acknowledge the Oct. 7 anniversary but almost immediately caused an uproar among some Jewish leaders, who said it minimized Israeli suffering in the Hamas-led attacks.

It took a turn roughly 12 hours later at a vigil organized by Israeli peace activists in Union Square in Manhattan, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators disrupted the event to jeer the mayor. He appeared ashen and upset as he left, without addressing the crowd, flanked by his security detail as he walked to a waiting S.U.V. at 8:50 p.m.

The events raised questions about whether Mr. Mamdani, who energized his campaign with his embrace of the Palestinian cause and ardent criticism of Israel, can now, as mayor, unite New Yorkers whose emotions remain inflamed over the issue.

“This is a moment when people are looking to see if we have the kind of leadership that brings people together, lowers the temperature and makes everyone feel respected,” said Mark Treyger, the chief executive of the Jewish Community Relations Council. “And today was just not it.”

The mayor, who is known for his broad, effervescent smile, seemed especially stung by the opposition to him expressed by the pro-Palestinian crowd in Union Square, given his consistent support of their cause.

During the vigil, he stared stone-faced, and at times looked crestfallen, as the activists chanted in support of Hamas, called for the deaths of Israeli soldiers and denounced him as a “traitor,” many citing his meetings with President Trump or his efforts to build ties with Jewish leaders.

“Zohran, you coward!” someone yelled from the crowd, which numbered in the hundreds. Others yelled, “Zohran is a sellout!”

The chickens have come home to roost: now Mamdani, who’s tried to walk a fine line between the Jews and Muslims, is being booed by his own ilk—and it bothers him.

I have no doubt that Mamdani is not only anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian, but also suspect he’s an Islamist and may even be anti-Semitic.

There are more Jews than Muslims in NYC: Grok estimates about 960,000 Jews and between 250,000 and 700,000 Muslims.)Yet about a third of Jews who voted for Mayor in 2025 voted for Mamdani.  Granted, they may have been “progressives” taken in by Mamdani’s promises of free daycare, free public transportation, and subsidized grocery stores, but in the end they’re like chickens voting for KFC. You just know that when Mamadani goes home at night to his antisemitic wife Rama Duwaji, they don’t sit around and praise Israel!

Here’s a news clip showing some of the booing at the candlelight vigil.