Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “stop,” is a Friday flashback that’s 14 years old. I believe that in Faith Versus Fact I discuss the willingness of people who say both that they know about the nature of God but also that we can’t know anything about God. How do we know is he kindly rather than vicious? But of course the atheistic barmaid is right: we have no evidence for a god, so why even bother to discuss it?
Ephraim Heller sent us a passel of lovely brown bear photos (and, oddly, one of an elephant), all save the pachyderm taken in Alaska. (They are of course also known as “grizzly bears”.) Ephraim’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
I traveled to Lake Clark National Park in Alaska to photograph its famous coastal brown bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) as they clammed and fished along the coast of Cook Inlet. I stayed at a remote lodge on the coast. It was a mixed experience. During the week I was there I saw only a few individual sows and cubs, far fewer than expected (the boars tend to stay inland at this time of year). However, the sows loitered in the area, so there was plenty of time with them. When it was just the bears, the guide, and a few other guests, the photography was spectacular. Unfortunately, that was seldom the case. The few bears were more often mobbed by folks on bear-watching tours arriving from other lodges, small planes, and boats. At times, I counted up to 35 people watching a single bear. In crowds that large, you put your camera down and just enjoy watching the animal.
Now that I’m done with the kvetching, let’s get to the photos. For those who care about such things, all the photos were taken with a Nikon Z8 or Z9 camera and either a Nikon Z 70-200 lens + 1.4X teleconverter or a Nikon Z 24-120 lens.
When there were no crowds and I saw a bear approaching from afar, I made my first attempts at using a remote trigger. This involved: putting my camera and wide-angle lens on a low tripod at a location where I thought the bear was likely to pass; stepping away to a distance of about 30 feet; and triggering the camera with a remote shutter release. Most of these attempts ended in failure, as the bruin chose a different path. But occasionally, it worked:
Brown Bear at Lake Clark:
At other times, I just lay down in the mud and hoped that an approaching bear would walk nearby. It was quite safe, as there are so many clams and salmon to eat that they aren’t interested in eating me. I would certainly not do so with bears from the interior, who are typically hungrier and more aggressive:
A sow out for a stroll on the beach:
Ninety percent of the shoreline is made up of salt marsh, sand, and mud. Multiple rivers flow into Cook Inlet, creating a habitat containing three distinct food sources: protein-rich salt-marsh sedges, intertidal clams, and late-summer salmon. Park biologists have counted as many as 219 brown bears in a 54-square-mile coastal block. Those densities are possible because the food is concentrated and the bears have learned to tolerate one another.
Here’s a sow patrolling along a salmon stream. These two shots were taken with a remote trigger:
Taking a load off her feet:
Coastal and inland bears in the park are the same subspecies, but they live different lives. Inland animals travel farther for scarcer resources and remain more solitary. Coastal bears grow larger because marine-derived protein is available for months.
Another shot taken with a remote trigger:
This bear is looking for salmon at a river mouth at low tide. The following photos were taken as I in the mud flats. My waders kept me mostly dry, albeit mud-covered:
After den emergence in April–May, lean bears head first to salt marshes. These wetlands occupy less than 1 percent of the park yet supply Ramensk’s sedge (Carex ramenskii), an early-season protein source. Bears graze for hours like cattle.
When the sow spots a fish at the river mouth, she rushes over to seize her prey:
A few yards seaward, the intertidal flats hold clams, particularly Pacific razor clams (Siliqua patula). These are a year-round protein source that bridges the gap between spring vegetation and summer salmon. The tides were over 20 feet when I visited, and at low tide the exposed mud flat stretched out for hundreds of yards:
Clamming is a learned skill. Cubs watch their mothers. Novices dig randomly, excavating large, unproductive craters and then crunching whole shells. Experienced bears read siphon holes and slight depressions, work specific slope and sand textures at the lowest tides, and extract dozens of clams in a single low-tide window. The most efficient animals pry shells open with claws rather than crushing them and slurp the meat. Different individuals invent slightly different techniques.
Here’s a sow digging for clams in the mud flats. I don’t include many photos of bears clamming because photos of bears with their noses stuck in the mud just aren’t that interesting or pretty:
The Jesus bear subspecies walks on water. Or, perhaps, the mud flats extend for hundreds of yards at low tide:
By July and August the rivers fill with sockeye and other salmon. Park-wide sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) runs have ranged from 150,000 to more than 3 million fish. Bears shift from meadows and flats to stream mouths and shallow riffles. Techniques range from patient standing to explosive pounces. Experienced animals may catch dozens of fish a day and often eat only the most energy-dense parts (brain, roe, skin) before discarding the rest. This sow has caught silver or coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch):
I’ve written Ephraim for a replacement photo, but in the meantime enjoy this elephant picture:
If you visit, remember to carry bear spray. Bears like the pepper flavor:
Note: That was not my bear spray!
Welcome to Friday, September 11, 2026, and the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in which 19 people hijacked four aircraft, two hitting the World Trade Center towers and bringing them down, cone rashing into the Pentagon and the last, after passengers attacked the terrorist pilots of United 93, crashed into the ground. There were 2,977 innocent victims on top of the 19 terrorists.
Here’s a video of the second plane hitting the South Tower while the first is on fire, and then both buildings collapsing. You may not want to watch it if it evokes strong feelings:
It’s also National Emergency Responders Day, National Hot Cross Bun Day, and National Women’s Baseball Day.
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins at sundown tonight and extends to sundown on Sunday.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 11 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*An article in the Free Press by Daniel Kokotajlo, who worked at OpenAI, says that AI may really destroy all of humanity. I did not take such scenarios seriously until I read this article and found that this possibility is openly discussed in AI firms.
On Tuesday, AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic in a mega-viral post on X: “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic,” he began. (Pretraining is an important part of the training process for AI models like Claude and GPT-6.)
He continued: “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. . . . These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. . . . The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
He’s right. I know this because I worked at OpenAI for two years, forecasting AI progress internally and working on model evaluations and alignment research, and because I still talk with friends at OpenAI and Anthropic.
But you don’t need insider knowledge to understand where Jacob and I are coming from. The argument is straightforward:
- Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to train self-improving AIs, ultimately superintelligent ones—meaning models that exceed the cognitive capacity of humans—as fast as they can. (This is not a secret. They talk about this in interviews and on their websites.)
- If they actually succeed at training self-improving, superintelligent AIs, that would be a reckless gamble with our lives. (This part is fairly obvious, but has been explained at length by many people over the years, including the world’s two most-cited living AI scientists.)
- They may actually succeed soon.
Many people doubt the third premise. AI companies have an incentive to overhype their products. After all, it’s common for tech companies to overpromise and underdeliver, so why should we trust their forecasts?
To that I say: We shouldn’t. Instead, we should look at publicly available evidence and forecasts made by independent experts. Unfortunately, that evidence base supports the third premise.
. . .The recent rogue AI cyberattack—in which AI agents in a controlled OpenAI experiment escaped of their own volition and hacked the company Hugging Face—illustrates these realities. OpenAI tried to spin the incident in a self-serving way. (Go watch their presentation at the Black Hat USA conference; they basically use the cyberattack as a reason to encourage customers to buy their AI protection services.)
But should we therefore conclude that the whole thing was a setup, a conspiracy by OpenAI to make their product seem scary and therefore powerful? No. OpenAI didn’t want their models to attack another company. It happened anyway, due to inadequate alignment and security practices at OpenAI. And the Hugging Face affair isn’t an anomaly. Smaller-scale incidents have been happening at other companies (and third-party evaluators) for months.
. . .Once the frontier AI companies have fully automated the AI research process, things will start moving very quickly. AI will get rapidly smarter than us in a variety of different ways, oversight of AI will be itself delegated to the models, and it will be all too easy for things to go wrong in a way that we can’t recover from.
The U.S. military is planning to integrate AI into many aspects of its operations. Businesses are planning to use AI for many things, including to design new technologies and run robot factories that build more robot factories. Superintelligent AI wouldn’t even need to take over by force; the current plan is essentially to put it in charge.
If Kokotajlo thinks it’s possible, well, it’s possible, as I know almost nothing about this. But some human malefactor would have to be behind a wholesale attack on humanity. Kokitajlo’s solution is transparency and oversight forced upon AI companies, for “These companies cannot control their own AIs today, and should not be trusted to do so in the future.” All of us are ignorant about this, but if the doomsayers are right, we should at least pay attention.
*Mirabile dictu (again): the Supreme Court upheld a Missouri Supreme Court decision invalidating a redistricting of the state that favored Republicans.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday once again prevented Missouri from using a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an advantage in the midterm elections.
It was the second time this week that the Supreme Court waded into a dizzying legal fight over Missouri’s congressional map, and it came just two months before a general election in which the state’s voters could determine control of the House.
The court’s brief order did not include any reasoning, as is often the case when the justices respond to emergency requests. There were no noted dissents.
The ruling left up in the air how Missouri would conduct a general election in November, given that the courts have now invalidated the map the state used to conduct primary elections last month.
Holding a general election with a different map than what was used in the primary is rare legal territory, with no specific guidance so far from the courts on how nominees should be selected.
Thursday’s ruling landed just as a hearing about remapping was about to begin at the Missouri Supreme Court in Jefferson City.
That court’s judges were considering whether to hold the secretary of state, Denny Hoskins, in contempt for not following their order to use the previous House map, which would position Democrats to retain a seat in the Kansas City area.
Before Thursday’s order from Washington, Missouri Republican leaders had been insisting they would stick with their preferred map for the general election.
In Jefferson City, a lawyer from the Missouri attorney general’s office, William J. Seidleck, said the secretary of state’s office was “evaluating next steps.”
No matter what, logistical and legal barriers seem likely to keep emerging. The deadline to finalize Missouri’s ballot was Tuesday.
This is an unholy mess, but I’m tired of a gazillion things each said to determine whether Democrats or Republicans will control the House and Senate. I just want the midterms to be over.
*There’s a new report in our student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, noting that the proportion of males admitted to the school is at its highest rate in decades: 58%. (I would have thought that the proportion of women (42%) would exceed that of men. Further, the proportion of black and Hispanic students has dropped pretty substantially since 2022, with black admissions being halved: from 10% to 5%.
The share of incoming students in the College identifying as Black fell for the third consecutive year in academic year 2025–26, while the proportion who were male increased to its highest level in decades, according to detailed UChicago enrollment data released last week.
The University reports data on its first-year classes annually in the Common Data Set (CDS), a standardized survey that asks institutions nationwide to disclose student demographics, high school academic performance, and financial aid awards, among other statistics.
The College enrolled just 71 Black first-year students last year, down from 97 in 2024 and over 150 three years ago, the University reported in the CDS. The number of white students showed a corresponding slight increase, while enrollment among other demographic groups stayed roughly unchanged year over year. Black students made up about five percent of domestic students of known race in the Class of 2029.
. . .The CDS release comes two admissions cycles after the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that colleges and universities could not explicitly factor applicants’ race into their admissions decisions, effectively banning affirmative action policies favoring historically disadvantaged demographic groups. The University had submitted a brief in the case opposing an affirmative action ban.
Without affirmative action, many selective universities have admitted fewer Black and Hispanic students and more white and Asian students, though those shifts have been uneven across institutions. At UChicago, white and Asian shares of domestic first-time enrollment have climbed by about three percentage points each since the decision took effect, while Black and Hispanic enrollment shares have dropped by three and four points respectively.
The number of new first-years who did not report their race to the University jumped sharply last year, from 52 to 126, or seven percent of the Class of 2029.
You can see the change for race below; the vertical line marks the legal prohibition of race-based admissions:
The College also continued a years-long climb in male enrollment, the CDS release showed: more than 58 percent of the Class of 2029 identified as male, a three-point jump from the previous year and up from 52 percent for the Class of 2025. That weight toward male students persisted even as the College reported nearly 5,000 more female applicants than male ones.
UChicago had not welcomed an incoming undergraduate class with as high a proportion of male students since fall 1987, according to National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data.
The University is an outlier when it comes to gender breakdown. Nationally, women comprised 57 percent of undergraduates in fall 2022. The only other Ivy Plus institutions with more male than female first-year enrollees last year—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, and Dartmouth College—also had more male than female applicants. Even so, none had a higher share of male first-year enrollees than UChicago.
The decline in Hispanic and black students is surely connected with the Supreme Court ruling, though it can be circumvented in various ways. But schools are afraid of being sued like Harvard was. The increasing number of male applicants, and the increasing disparity between the sexes here is mysterious to me. (Note that the Maroon says the numbers of “genders” is two, and what they really mean is sexes.)
*The British Museum has opened its exhibit of the Bayeux Tapestry, a project that’s been in the works a long time. I’ve longed to see this 70-meter embroidery of the Norman Conquest of England (dated to the 11th century), but never got to Normandy to see it.
It’s a blockbuster almost 1,000 years in the making.
On Thursday, the British Museum opened its exhibition of the Bayeux Tapestry — the first time the priceless 220-foot-long 11th-century embroidery has returned from France to the country where it is believed to have been made.
And while most museum blockbusters attract only art lovers, this show, which runs through July 11, has gripped the wider imagination of the British public.
Michael Lewis, the exhibition’s curator, described the fervor as “Bayeux mania.”
When the first tranche of tickets went on sale this summer, over 80,000 people at a time waited online to buy them, the museum said. Such was the clamor to see an object that depicts William the Conqueror’s invasion of England of 1066, a foundational moment in the nation’s history.\
. . . Now, members of the public who were lucky enough to secure tickets can enter the show’s darkened exhibition hall, where the tapestry is laid flat in a display case. Its 58 scenes, which historians believe were stitched by English women in the 1070s, culminate in a bloody battle and victory for the invading Norman army, led by William the Conqueror.
Here, from the tapestry, is the death of King Harold of England, apparently struck in the eye by an arrow or spear. The legend says (Hic) Harold rex interfectus est, “[Here] King Harold was killed”. The King is apparently the unmounted figure in the middle, holding onto the spear or arrow. But some people say he’s the figure on the right, also apparently struck by a sword. We do not know.
Halley’s Comet also appears in the tapestry, and we know it showed up in 1066, the year Harold was crowned King of England but also died at the Battle of Hastings. Here’s the comet in the tapestry: people are looking at it with the caption, in Latin, “These men marvel at the star,” while Harold gets the news of the phenomenon.
*The WSJ reports that two people (Roland Fryer and Bill Ackman) are giving a million-dollar award to scholars who have the courage to tell the truth about “taboo” topics.
One of us (Mr. Fryer) released a study in 2016—later published in the Journal of Political Economy—finding that police aren’t more likely to shoot black Americans than white Americans, after accounting for the relevant context. Colleagues who read the draft warned him not to publish: “You’ll ruin your career.” The paper was denounced on social media within minutes of release, and Mr. Fryer needed armed protection for more than a month. Privately, scholars who read the study called it rigorous, honest work. Publicly, many of the same scholars said nothing. No single study settles a question this large—but silence isn’t how science advances.
That silence is the problem—a cultural and an economic one. When the professional cost of publishing an unwelcome finding exceeds the cost of suppressing it, rational scholars suppress it. The result is that social-science literature reflects what researchers are permitted to say rather than what they actually discover. The scope of the problem is difficult to measure, because its most important effects are invisible—though the data we have suggest it is getting worse. In a 2024 survey of more than 6,000 professors by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, 35% said they had toned down their written work for fear of controversy—roughly four times the share of social scientists who admitted the same at the height of McCarthyism.
Mr. Fryer raised the alarm about suppression of inconvenient findings in a November 2024 Wall Street Journal essay. He called for something like a MacArthur Fellowship or an X Prize for academic truth-telling. The prize should be large enough to matter, prestigious enough to serve as a public credential for scholars who were right when it was costly to be right. Shortly after that piece ran, we found each other and decided to launch the Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage.
The prize awards $1 million each to as many as five social scientists a year who have demonstrated intellectual independence, published findings that were attacked rather than answered, and been validated by the evidence—despite the professional cost. The selection criteria are designed to distinguish courage from contrarianism: Nominees must show a sustained commitment to following logic and evidence regardless of pressure, a willingness to ask questions others avoid, and work that has shifted academic debate, public discourse or policy—often despite being misread, mischaracterized or vilified at the time of publication.
The inaugural prize is limited to the social sciences; in future years we hope to broaden it to additional disciplines and to add a category for institutional leadership. Nominations are open through Nov. 1, and the first winners will be announced in early 2027.
Well, good for them. The prize is enormous (up to $5 million per year, and must reflect the money or fundraising of billionaire Bill Ackman, as Roland Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard. They emphasize in their editorial that the prize will not be partisan; it will reflect simply those who publish credible findings that are considered taboo. In the end, of course, this will largely involve findings demonized by the Left.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is ethnically cleansing her territory:
Hili: Let’s try to settle this diplomatically.
Kulka: What do you mean?
Hili: Go back to your home.
In Polish:
Hili: Spróbujmy to załatwić dyplomatycznie.
Kulka: Co masz na myśli?
Hili: Wracaj do swojego domu.
*******************
From Stacy:
nchanged: Unchanged:
From The Non Sequitur Assemblage of the World:
From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:
From Masih: a mother talks about her daughter murdered and mutilated for protesting. The mother (sans hijab) vows to take revenge for her daughter. This is heartbreaking.
Translation from the Farsi:
What a nightmare these people lived through. What crimes did the Islamic Republic commit during those two days to cling to power, and the full extent of it remains hidden. Listen to the harrowing words of Javidnameh’s mother, Maedeh Moradi-Kian. The 22-year-old bride whose wedding was just one week past. On the 19th of Dey, when the people of Iran took to the streets in Qaemshahr for freedom, agents of the Islamic Republic fired a military bullet into this girl’s head. The little bride of Iran fell to the pavement. Her mother says that when they found Maedeh’s body, one of her hands had been severed with a machete, and her body was missing a hand. We still don’t know if they cut off her hand before shooting her in the head or after. What we do know is that this crime, this mutilation of the body of this young woman who had come to the streets empty-handed, was the work of Khamenei’s thugs. Her mother lit a candle by her daughter’s grave and said, Maedeh is my hero. I won’t find peace until I take revenge for her. Mother, we hear your voice. She is the hero of us all, and you are not alone. We will carry the story of this atrocity and Maedeh’s brutal killing to the entire world.
چه کابوسی را زندگی کردند این مردم. چه جنایاتی جمهوری اسلامی در آن دو روز مرتکب شد تا در قدرت بماند و ابعادش هنوز پنهان است.
صحبتهای تکان دهنده مادر جاویدنام مائده مرادیکیان را بشنوید.
نو عروس بیست و دو ساله که فقط یک هفته از عروسیاش گذشته بود.نوزدهم دی، وقتی مردم ایران برای…
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 10, 2026
My repost (and riposte) to Steak-Umm, whose account Jeff Maurer touts as “The Standout Philosopher of Our Time”. Bosh!
This is totally bogus. Which one you choose is determined by the laws of physics.
Steak-umm is a lousy philosopher. https://t.co/ypvzE0jUm9
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 10, 2026
From Luana; how DNA analysis helps us reconstruct human history:
Here’s a better map tbh using both Qpadm and G25 https://t.co/vmbM6uaABb pic.twitter.com/JUlvJIvVL6
— SuN (@SuN_BR0NZ3) September 8, 2026
A good and surprising video about suicide prevention posted by the Number Ten Cat:
Every 90 minutes, someone in the UK or Ireland dies by suicide.
Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. Suicide is not inevitable. You can interrupt someone’s suicidal thoughts. You could save a life.
I’ve shared this video before; it’s message remains as important and powerful…
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) September 10, 2026
From Malcolm: Cat yoga!
The cat 🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/jnhIxp0X3t
— Rob (@_ROB_29) September 8, 2026
One from my feed; and a sad one:
🕊 The missing Twin Towers returned to New York for a few minutes
A light show was held on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
The drones first rose into the night sky in a spiral, then formed the outlines of the destroyed World Trade Center towers.… pic.twitter.com/obSuNKuAX0
— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) September 10, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auchwitz. He was four years old and would be 89 today had he lived. https://t.co/3K68Fmx3Xb
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 11, 2026
Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a cat “tattoo” that may be AI. Who knows?
Le chat a un tatouage de son ex.
— Johnney (@johnneygirard.bsky.social) 2026-09-10T01:24:13.636Z
. . . and the world’s tallest horse. He’s a big ‘un!
everyone, meet Hugowww.bbc.co.uk/news/article…
— The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) (@themerl.bsky.social) 2026-09-10T13:54:20.024Z
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has issued its yearly free-speech rankings of American colleges and universities, and I’m happy to say that, after a few years of hovering below the top rank, the University of Chicago is back at #1 among the 261 schools surveyed. We get an overall “green light” for free expression. The bad news is that the “grade” assigned to my school is a paltry “B-“. (No school got an “A”.) When I asked Grok why we got such a low grade, the bot said this:
FIRE’s composite score combines student survey responses (~63,000 students), written policies, and how schools handle controversies. Student perceptions of the climate carry heavy weight, which makes an A extremely difficult.
The drag [our B- grade] comes from student attitudes and culture, which FIRE measures in components such as self-censorship, comfort expressing ideas, disruptive conduct, and political tolerance. Even at the top school these remain well short of an ideal:
- 35% of Chicago students said they self-censored at least once or twice a month.
- 72% said shouting down a speaker is acceptable at least in rare cases.
- 29% said using violence to stop a speaker is acceptable at least in rare cases.
- “Disruptive Conduct” is a relative weak spot (mid-pack nationally).
- Absolute letter grades on several student-perception components are modest (D+ on comfort expressing ideas and self-censorship) even when the school ranks well relative to peers.
Nationwide, students report difficulty discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and abortion. FIRE treats the overall student climate as the main limiter: excellent policies and a clean controversy record cannot produce an A when a large share of students still self-censor or condone disruption. Chicago’s administration and formal commitments outperform almost every peer, but the survey data on student culture keeps the composite score in B- territory.
Those statistics on Chicago bespeak a country-wide problem. Shouting down a speaker or using violence to stop a speaker are never acceptable practices, and are inimical to free speech. Yet 72% of our students thought that shouting-down is okay, and 29% said that violence to stop speech can sometimes be okay. Both of those figures should be o%
You can read the whole article with links to specific schools, their ratings, and FIRE’s written summaries, by clicking on the link below:
The searchable database is here. You’ll want to look up your school. As for my college and graduate schools, William & Mary gets a respectable rank of #28 and Harvard ranks #74, up a hundreds points for its score last year when it was rock bottom, the worst school in the lot.
The best and worst schools:
The highest-ranked colleges for free speech:
1. University of Chicago
2. Claremont McKenna College
3. Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus
4. Michigan Technological University
5. Vanderbilt University
6. Dartmouth College
7. Purdue University-Main Campus
8. Appalachian State University
9. University of Virginia-Main Campus
10. George Mason UniversityThe lowest-ranked colleges for free speech:
252. Howard University
253. University of Miami
254. Loyola University Chicago
255. Boston College
256. Indiana University-Bloomington
257. Rutgers University-New Brunswick
258. Northeastern University
259. Texas State University
260. University of Washington-Seattle Campus
261. New York University
From their announcement:
Here is some more information from FIRE:
One hundred and twenty-one of the 261 schools ranked got an F for their speech climate, while only 24 schools received a speech climate grade of C or higher. The lowest-rated schools have restrictive speech policies and some of last year’s most shocking anti-free speech moments. Several incidents cited in the report include:
. . . Encouragingly, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s seventh annual College Free Speech Rankings found the percentage of students who said it was acceptable to shout down a speaker, block entry to a campus speech, or use violence to stop a campus speech declined slightly from last year’s record highs.
Here’s the graph, over the last seven years, of the percentage of students who think it’s okay to impede or stop speakers they don’t like. It’s pretty depressing, as all three forms of impediment are unwarranted if you favor freedom of speech. And they’ve all gone over this period, with the okaying of violence rising nearly ten points: from 18% to 30% nationwide.
Self-censorship is also way too high, but of course students are timorous, so I’m less likely to criticize a monthly rate of 35% self-censoring than I am to criticize any approval of blocking, shouting down, or using violence against speakers. But remember, the same factors that make students think it’s okay to impede speakers are the factors that make students reluctant to express opinions on difficult topics.
It is the chilling of student and University speech that prompted the University of Chicago to become the nation’s first school to make a policy of institutional neutrality—as embodied in our Kalven Report of 1967. The number has grown a lot recently, and now 50 schools follow a version of the Kalven principle. Since there are 5600 higher-education schools in the U.S., however, that is only 1% of all schools. And among the Kalvenists you won’t find Williams College, whose President refuses to adopt a policy of institutional neutrality, something I’m always harassing Luana about.
A week ago I wrote a critique of a really misguided (and unsigned) editorial in Nature, blaming the death of Jason Arday on his hounding by a racist press as well as “systemic racism” in academia. You can see that editorial by clicking the screenshot below:
The “deep reflection” that Nature demands involves us examining our souls for our complicity in Arday’s death, as well as realizing the harm caused by the press’s reporting of the Arday affair, as well as by Cambridge University’s announcement that they were investigating accusations against him. (That announcement itself was said by Nature to violate Arday’s confidentiality, perhaps also leading to his suicide. But if you read the actual announcement, it’s nothing that’s sp unusual when a university announces a public accusations.)
Perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of the Nature piece is that it almost completely ignores the lies, fraud, and fabulism issued by Arday, as well as the palpable fact that a man with almost no qualifications, and a background of duplicity (including probable research theft and fraudulent assertions on his c.v.) was appointed and lionized as a full professor of sociology at Cambridge. What Nature construes as “racism” is really “antiracism” by Cambridge: putting Arday’s ethnicity and claimed disability above his merit. If there’s any silver lining to the Arday tragedy, is that the outrageous claims by Arday touted have now made it okay to discuss how race-and-disability-based hiring can conflict with merit—that the term “inclusive excellence” might be an oxymoron. (There are of course very good black scholars, but Arday wasn’t one.)
At any rate, it was both misguided and even shameful for Nature to advance such a dumb argument, and I took it apart in my post. That post caught the eye of folks at The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE), and they asked me to rewrite it for publication on their site. I did that, with the help of an excellent editor, and it was published yesterday. You can read it by clicking on the screenshot below. (You may have to “subscribe” by giving the CHE your email, but they do not send out promotional emails, and you can read a couple of articles a month for free.
I will not reproduce the whole piece I wrote there, but have put a few excerpts (indented) below. I should be able to put it somewhere free, and in toto, next week. (I also see that it’s archived here for free.)
A few excerpts:
One of the more distressing changes in science is its infection by politics and ideology, a change visible in what I call “journal creep.” Until recently, the primary function of scientific journals was to disseminate research. Now, however, many journals have adopted an additional mission: promoting ideological, moral, or political positions. This newer mission, which endangers not only the reputation but also the practice of science, is seen clearly in a recent editorial in one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, Nature.
The Nature editorial centers on the tragic story of Jason Arday, a sociologist who at 37 became the youngest Black full professor ever appointed at the University of Cambridge. In July, it was revealed that Arday had plagiarized significant portions of his Ph.D. thesis at Liverpool John Moores University. This in turn prompted extensive investigations by the press. What they found was not pretty: more evidence of plagiarism, falsified research, fabricated claims on his curriculum vitae, and, most striking, a breathtaking record of biographical fabulism.
. . . Nature’s editorial is titled “The Death of Jason Arday Must Prompt Deep Reflection.” Unfortunately, the reflection Nature demands does not involve asking how someone with such a thin academic record and a history of exaggeration and lying managed to secure such a prestigious position. Rather, Nature is concerned with assigning blame for Arday’s downfall and death, and the blame falls on everyone but Arday himself.
Most at fault, says Nature, was “persistent media attention” largely fostered by racism. Cambridge also deserves blame both for participating in the “systemic racism in academia” that supposedly made Arday’s life intolerable, and for announcing that they would investigate him, which, says Nature, was a violation of “confidentiality.” But all Cambridge announced was that it was investigating Arday’s “academic qualifications and honorary appointments” as well as allegations of “academic misconduct”— nothing more. Since the media was already intensively focused on Arday, announcing an investigation without giving details doesn’t seem out of line. American universities do it all the time, saying things like: “We are not commenting pending an investigation of these accusations.”
Oddly absent from Nature’s editorial is any serious acknowledgement of Arday’s apparent fabulism, plagiarism, errors, and lies. Nor is there any attempt to grapple with the fact that Arday’s decision to publish a memoir with a major commercial publisher further drew the media’s spotlight.
. . . Disparaging merit in favor of equity, shifting research funding towards progressive topics, misrepresenting science by skewing citations towards researchers having approved backgrounds, censoring papers, controlling language, and distorting accepted science so that it conforms to certain narratives while proscribing research on topics considered taboo — such symptoms of ideological pollution are present in journals across the sciences. Here are three examples, all involving Nature journals.
. . . A scientific journal, like a university, should remain ideologically and politically neutral, with the possible exception of matters that directly affect the mission of the journal itself. Pinning blame for the death of Jason Arday on the press and on the University of Cambridge, and flippantly characterizing science as ridden with “structural racism,” are not issues within the remit of Nature. Although Arday was the author of his own tragedy, Nature asks all of us to search our souls for traces of the racism that, they claim, make us coauthors:
It is incumbent on all of us in the media and academia to reflect on our roles and responsibilities. Both research and media organizations have an obligation to communicate information fairly and accurately — and to avoid causing harm to the people they employ or report on. We can and must learn from this tragedy.
Sadly, Nature has learned the wrong lessons.
Welcome to Thursday, September 10, 2026, and National Hot Dog Day, celebrating Chicago’s most famous foodstuff. As all Chicagoans know, the best version is the one called “dragged through the garden”, as this short video explains (you don’t have to make them yourself: they’re on sale at many places). The dogs are made by Vienna Beef with natural casings, and the buns are Rosen’s poppy-seed buns. The “sport peppers” are small hot peppers. The combination of meat and vegetables (and MUSTARD, never ketchup) is ethereal.
It’s also National Port Wine Day and TV Dinner Day, celebrating those pre-bought dinners in partitioned aluminum containers that you ate on individual fold-up tables while watching television. I had many of these as a kid; here’s a Swanson TV Dinner ad from 1963 (unfortunately, it lacks dessert). If you’ve eaten one of these, you’re old; I don’t even know if they have them any more.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 10 Wikipedia page.
Oh, and Sue Gould pointed out, in yesterday’s Hili, this fantastic video showing the Democratic Penguins Republic filling the gap in Canada left by the dumb Trumpian tariffs (look at the other videos on the site. too—they’re devilishly clever):
Da Nooz: (lotsa nooz today; skip if you wish)
*The Times of Israel reports that the UAE told Netanyahu days before the October 7 attack that Hamas was “planning war”, but Bibi ignored it (h/t Norman). Israel denies it all:
Some 10 days before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was personally warned by the leader of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major offensive move against Israel, but did not update Israeli security leaders and did nothing with the information, according to a report on Tuesday.
An Emirati source familiar with the conversation confirmed the Haaretz newspaper’s report to The Times of Israel later Tuesday, and said the warning came during a phone call between the two leaders.
The UAE itself declined to confirm or deny the report, issuing a statement that noted “open lines of communication” with Israel through which “all relevant intelligence has been and continues to be communicated.”
Netanyahu’s office issued a statement Tuesday evening saying that “the press reports are false. No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates before October 7. If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries.”
The Haaretz report cited a new book, “Kidnapped: 843 Days of Abandonment,” by journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, based on interviews with dozens of sources including senior officials in Israel and around the world. It said three senior foreign officials were updated on the contents of the 45-minute phone call at the end of September, and it cited a Palestinian adviser to Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed who emigrated from Gaza to the UAE and had direct knowledge of the conversation.
But over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal dismisses this, in an article called “What did Bibi know?”, as an unfair indictment of the Prime Minister.
But let’s assume every word of this dramatic report is correct—who cares?
People excited by more ammunition to fire at Netanyahu forget that the problem was never a lack of information. The Hamas plan—kibbutzim, hostages, GoPros and all—was captured the year before; three months before the attack, an army analyst warned her superiors that Hamas had rehearsed precisely that over a full day. At the fence, the observation-post soldiers, the infamous tatzpitaniyot, had spent months reporting the drills but were similarly ignored. Most illustrative of all, on the night itself, the Shin Bet detected dozens of Israeli SIM cards activated simultaneously inside Gaza—and made the decision to send in the Tequila team—a small counterterror element meant to repel small raids, not an invasion.
The fundamental problem was never a lack of signs, but a lack of understanding.
The overused but precise term for this is conceptzia—a rigid, overriding paradigm, shared by political and military leadership, that traps them into thinking the status quo is immutable. Before October 7 it referred to the prevailing atmosphere preceding the surprise attack of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Those familiar with the history might recall that 11 days before that war, King Hussein of Jordan did significantly more than call: He helicoptered in secret to a Mossad safe house near Tel Aviv and met Golda Meir, warning her that Egypt and Syria were planning a joint attack. The day before the war, Israel learned that Moscow—patron of both Syria and Egypt—was pulling the families of its officers out of Damascus and Cairo—and did nothing. Meanwhile, a junior intelligence officer in Southern Command put in writing that the Egyptian deployment was preparation for a real war, not a drill. Israel’s leadership read the reports and then dismissed them—after all, Egypt wouldn’t dare attack the militarily dominant Israel; besides, why risk escalation or a false alarm, especially when mobilizing the reserves would paralyze the economy?
In 2023, Israel had even more information, and faced virtually no cost to blunt the threat. Any of the security chiefs could have picked up a phone at any point and told a battalion: listen, something is moving, get ready, there might be a war tomorrow. Not one did, including Netanyahu.
So spare me the search for the single leader who ignored the obvious signs or the one warning that would have changed history. From the chief of staff to the prime minister, all were trapped in a conceptual prison guarded by their own presumptions and upkept by groupthink that none escaped.
In late October Israeli voters will choose the members of the parliament (the Knesset), and that vote will determine who becomes Prime Minister. Netanyahu has said he’ll be in the running again, and it remains to be seen whether this latest report, which I haven’t seen in American MSM, will affect any votes. But if he’s deposed, I predict that the worldwide hatred of Israel, often based on Netanyahu’s presence, will not lessen.
*There’s endless psychologizing of President Trump with respect to what he is trying to do in Iran, and Middle East expert Michael Doran weighs in at The Free Press with his view (a siege) in an article called “Trump is charting a new course on Iran.”
Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump agreed on the objective: an Islamic Republic stripped of its nuclear program and of the power to hold the region hostage. But they frequently disagreed about how to make Tehran yield. Graham never wavered. More force, he recommended.
Three weeks into the war, the senator revealed the advice he had given the president: “Keep it up for a few more weeks, take Kharg Island. . . [and] let this regime die on the vine.” In May, he put the theory plainly: “Hurt them more. Maybe they’ll make a deal if you hurt them enough.” And in June, three weeks before his death, he predicted that if Iran contested the Strait of Hormuz, “We will obliterate them.”
Since last Easter, Trump has repeatedly threatened Tehran in accordance with the late senator’s advice. During the summer, the U.S. military prepared what reportedly would have been the largest strike of the war. At the urging of regional allies, however, the president again gave the military the order to stand down. Graham did not live to accept that rejection, but many of his political allies, my friends among them, reached what they considered to be an obvious conclusion: Trump had lost his nerve.
. . . [Trump’s] actions reveal a president steering between what he considers to be two wrecks. The first is George W. Bush’s regime-change war in Iraq. Trump called that war possibly the “worst decision” in presidential history and promised his voters never to repeat it. The second is Barack Obama’s Iran policy. After Iraq, Obama concluded, America’s only remaining course was to retreat, pay Tehran for quiet, and call it peace.
. . . Trump’s critics can imagine only these two headings, so each camp accuses him of steering toward the one it hates. But the president is attempting something harder: He is applying enough force to change the calculus of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) without tipping into the war of conquest toward which the dynamic of the conflict is pulling him. The bombing has proved insufficient, so he is tightening an economic siege in its place. Whether that middle course can succeed is the real question of the stalemate. Answering it begins with the military balance, which Graham’s theory took for granted.
. . .Graham’s theory held that enough bombardment would eventually produce capitulation. Six months on, Trump appears to have found another way to apply the pressure he prescribed: not simply by escalating the bombing, but by shifting the contest onto terrain where American advantages are greater. Iran created local overmatch in the Strait of Hormuz. The United States is answering with naval power, economic warfare, and control of the global financial system.
The stalemate has therefore changed shape. It is no longer a question of whether a course exists between Bush’s war and Obama’s retreat. Trump is attempting to create one: suppress Iran’s disruptive capabilities enough to keep Gulf commerce moving, deny Tehran the same privilege, and use America’s global economic power to impose costs that airpower alone could not. Whether this strategy will compel Iran remains unknown. Five days of financial warfare do not settle a six-month war. But the experiment is now underway. Graham wanted to hurt Iran until it wanted a deal. Trump is trying to do precisely that.
In response to this I can only utter the immortal words, “We shall see.”
*Tomorrow will be the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist airplane attacks in the U.S., and the news is preparing a big spate of articles. This one, in the Washington Post, and by former Justice Department prosecutor David Raskin, is very good: “The 9/11 trial that never happened“, with the subtitle, “President Obama’s wavering and Congress’s fear killed the court case Americans deserved to hear.” (You can see the article archived here.) The trial, of course would have been that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the main architect of the plane attacks. Mohammed has been held by Americans since 2003, and then was transferred to Gitmo, where he’s spent the last two decades. A trial date in the U.S. is scheduled for June, 2028. From the article:
In 2009, I was preparing to help lead what would have been the most important criminal prosecution in American history: the trial in a federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators for orchestrating the murder of 2,977 people. It would have been a civilian trial, in open court, before a federal judge, held only a few blocks away from where the twin towers once stood.
Had it gone forward, it would have been the Justice Department’s finest hour.
The case was to be tried before Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York, a no-nonsense jurist with deep experience handling complex, high-profile terrorism cases. Kaplan presided over the 2010 trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantánamo detainee charged in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. From arraignment to sentencing, that case took a little more than a year and a half.
I can imagine how Kaplan would have responded had Mohammed tried to grandstand in court — with swift, unsentimental control, enforcing the rules of his courtroom without theatrics or indulgence. It would have been orderly and dignified. The public deserved to see such a trial, the victims were entitled to see it, and the Justice Department could rightly have taken pride in delivering it.
The evidence would have spoken for itself. Critics of civilian trials in the case warned that jurors could not bear to relive the horror of Sept. 11 or that classified evidence could not be handled safely. That was wrong. Federal courts had already convicted dozens of terrorists — including Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, and Zacarias Moussaoui, once called the 20th hijacker — using lawful, tested procedures designed to balance the public’s right to see powerful evidence, the defendant’s right to a fair trial and the nation’s interest in protecting intelligence-gathering sources and methods.
In the Mohammed case, we would not have relied on statements tainted by torture. Unlike the military commissions underway at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which planned to use so-called clean team FBI interrogations conducted after years of abusive detention until a military judge recently suppressed them in Mohammed’s case, a civilian prosecution would have had no need to flirt with legal gray zones. The admissible evidence was overwhelming. It included financial records, communications, co-conspirator testimony, physical evidence, Mohammed’s own uncoerced admissions and some surprises that have never been made public.
That trial would have ended in conviction long ago, as the evidence demanded. The defendants might have received death sentences, or they would have been condemned to spend the rest of their lives in the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. I have been there. It is the last place on earth any convict wants to end up.
But none of this happened.
The moment Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November 2009 that Mohammed would be tried in Manhattan, a chorus of opposition erupted. Some critics insisted that Sept. 11 was not a crime but an act of war, and that the perpetrators therefore deserved the “rough justice” of a military commission, not the protections of the Bill of Rights. Others spun up security fantasies, generating ridiculous fears the New York police commissioner used to justify an outlandish estimate of security costs. Still others complained about the inconvenience of it all, lamenting the burden of street closures and traffic jams.
Shame on all of them.
They did not understand how broken the military commissions already were. Our push to move the case to federal court was not ideological. It was about getting the job done. The commissions were a brand-new, untested system, plagued by endless litigation over their legality and procedures. And, ironically, they turned out to be more defense-friendly than civilian courts, reflecting the military justice system’s traditional role in protecting the rights of accused U.S. service members. Far from being the instruments of swift justice many envisioned, the commissions became a defense lawyer’s dream.
Nor did critics understand the detention conditions at Guantánamo. Mohammed and his co-defendants were not desperate to leave. Pretrial detention at the now-closed Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan was far less appealing. Yet the White House wavered. President Barack Obama, who entered office pledging to close Guantánamo and end the commissions, announced in May 2009 that instead they would continue, albeit with reforms. That equivocation proved fatal. It signaled weakness and emboldened opponents of civilian trials in Congress and elsewhere.
At the height of the backlash, what was needed was a clear, unequivocal statement from the Oval Office: “Knock it off. I stand by my attorney general. We are doing this.” But that never came. Congress stepped into the breach, eventually barring the transfer of Guantánamo detainees to the mainland for civilian trials. The plan to try Mohammed and the others in New York faded.
The trial, says Raskin, will never occur: “I predict there will never be a completed military commission trial for Mohammed and the other Sept. 11 defendants. The case is now before its fifth judge. ” But he’s secure in the knowledge that the perp will never be free, incarcerated according to military rules. The problem, says Raskin, is that the “law of war” detention lasts only as long as we’re at war with al-Qaeda, while the verdict of American justice is permanent. As Raskin concludes:
All Americans must reckon with the fact that the Justice Department missed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to demonstrate the strength of American law. That failure haunts me. And it should haunt the country.
Amen. This case should never have been put into the hands of the military, and now it’s too late to undo that. And Gitmo is far more comfortable, I’m told, than where Mohammad is likely to end up if he’s tried here: an American Supermax prison.
*The Free Press reports on “The Civil War inside the DSA” (Democratic Socialists of America).
The latest sign of the organization’s growing clout came Monday, when likely 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsom became the latest Democratic establishment figure to welcome the DSA into a prominent role in the party. The California governor told Politico he’s “not alarmed” by the rise of socialism and that “it’s where a lot of the energy in the party is.”
As one DSA member joked to me this summer: “How insane is it that we’re in a political moment where the Democrats are so discredited that a knucklehead organization like DSA. . . is getting courted by all these national politicians because our brand is so good?”
But the DSA’s sudden success has also inflamed its long-standing internal debates. The struggle is between avowed Marxist-Leninists who want to abolish the Pentagon and refuse to condemn Hamas, and a more practical kind of socialist who believes prioritizing police and prison abolition is the wrong way to go about amassing electoral power.
One side of the fight—call it the pragmatic wing—is betting that socialists will succeed by continuing to rack up victories in Democratic Party primaries and gaining influence within that old husk. This approach requires the DSA party faithful to let candidates make occasional compromises on policy and put up with sometimes out-of-step officials like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former beau ideal of a socialist lawmaker who has drifted somewhat from the DSA over her four terms in office.
The other side, the purist wing, views any efforts to meld the socialist project with the Democratic Party as a betrayal of the coalition’s revolutionary roots. Their goal is to overthrow the two-party system, not to partake in it and risk their own corruption.
How this tension resolves in coming months may determine whether the DSA carves out a durable political presence on the mainstream left or reverts to what it’s long been: a fringe movement more interested in ideological purity than winning power.
As far as I’m concerned, the DSA is in no way beneficial for the Democratic Party. If it’s successful, the Party becomes woke and extremist, as well as more antisemitic. The DSA platform is largely insane, though there’s no way Americans are going to get rid of the Presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the cop, or that will open our borders fully. But besides corrupting the Democratic Party, they’re also splitting it, making it harder to beat Republicans. All they have to do, with a candidate like AOC or Mamdani (who, fortunately, is ruled out as President), is to quote some of what they’ve said.
*The WSJ describes how the CBS News show “60 Minutes” is trying to right itself after a shake-up (accompanied by several departing correspondence) caused largely by the appointment of Bari Weiss as the CBS News editor.
Many veteran correspondents and producers left or were ousted during a shake-up in which some departing talent accused Weiss of putting a political thumb on the scale. Weiss denied those charges.
Since then, [60 Minutes head Nick] Bilton and his team have been rebuilding its roster of correspondents and lineup of stories. His leadership faces its first test when the show returns Sunday for its 59th season.
CBS leadership gave Bilton the option to wait to premiere the new season until October, according to people familiar with the matter. But he decided to go ahead. “We’re ready,” he told the network, the people said.
Technology, particularly artificial intelligence, will be a theme this season, people familiar with the matter said. Bilton sees AI as the kind of defining story “60 Minutes” tackled in previous eras, including the Vietnam War, the fight against Big Tobacco and the Sept. 11 attacks.
He has also promised a renewed emphasis on original investigations, long a hallmark of “60 Minutes.”
People close to the show say that 35 stories are being shot or edited and 60 more are in development.
I just haven’t watched the show for ages, and this doesn’t make me want to start. Seriously, AI as a “defining story”? I’m so sick of AI stories, and there’s a lot going on in the world besides the rise of AI. I just don’t have the interest any more.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is getting quite philosophical while Andrzej retains his sense of humor:
Hili: The present fades away, the future is unknown, the past is nothing but a story now.
Andrzej: Even an atheist will sometimes say – amen.
In Polish:
Hili: Teraźniejszość mija, przyszłość jest niewiadomą, przeszłość jest już tylko opowieścią.
Ja: Bywa, że i ateista mówi czasem – amen.
*******************
From Meow Incorporated; I think this is a real photo of a cat loose on a playing field:
From Stacy:
From Funny and Strange Signs:
From Masih; in Iran, a woman is refused medical care because she’s not wearing a hijab. This is one of the reasons that America should prioritize changing the Iranian regime.
This is what enforced hijab looks like.
In a clinic, a woman refuses to provide medical care to another woman because she is not wearing a hijab.
“I’m in charge here. You have to wear a hijab,” she tells her.
The woman refuses, drops her appointment number, and walks out.… pic.twitter.com/1fYD82hYvd
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 9, 2026
From Malcolm: some cats that have been imprinted on d*g behaviors:
This is what happens when cats and dogs grow up together 😂 pic.twitter.com/G46kb27pP9
— smooth (@Smoothfund) September 7, 2026
From Luana. The comment is right on—how can you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone did not have an episode of mental illness when they committed a crime? The burden of proof should be on on the person who asserts that his/her crime is the product of mental illness.
This is opposed to federal law, which puts the burden on the defendant to establish insanity by clear and convincing evidence.
This… pic.twitter.com/4mgPrdOHXX
— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) September 9, 2026
From Jeff Maurer:
So no one on this REPUBLICAN staff knows baseball enough to say “Sir, you swing like an old lady with rickets trying to swat a spider web with a broom”? https://t.co/01kYyz8QOI
— Jeff Maurer (@JeffMightBWrong) September 9, 2026
One from my feed. Sand cats (Felis margarita) are gorgeous small cats and well adapted to a very arid environment, getting most of their water from their prey.
In Morocco’s, remote Sahara, wildlife photographer Rémi Vacher, encountered one of the world’s most elusive wild cats: the sand cat.
[📹 remivcr] pic.twitter.com/xwHCPoFlt9
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 8, 2026
TWO I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial; one who survived and one who did not.
This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed when she arrived in Auschwitz. She was four years old, and would have turned 86 today had she lived. https://t.co/aoetTuH70X
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 10, 2026
One who survived, and is celebrating a birthday today. https://t.co/qojYhdkRFI
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 10, 2026
And two from Doctor Cobb. Look at this cunning bird!
A #bird following a #stingray to catch #fish startled from their hiding place in the sea grass as the stingray passes over them. Cormorants also follow kayaks & paddleboards in this part of #florida to catch fish startled from their hiding places by the kayaks shadows. #nature #animals #wildlife
— See Through Canoe (@seethroughcanoe.bsky.social) 2026-09-09T13:26:52.361Z
And look at this pink fish!
A pink scorpionfish #gili #giliislands #lombok #diving #scuba #trawangan #diveandstay #giliair #pets #ocean #sealife #marinelife #padi #fish #scorpionfish
Over the years I’ve posted several of what I call “Coyne’s Rules for Life”, giving advice that I’ve learned can be useful. Here are two I remember (I haven’t written the list down anywhere):
1.) Most people think that they’re a little bit crazy (in a good way). What I mean is that everybody thinks that they have one or more lovable eccentricities or peccadillos. Nobody wants to think they’re normal and boring, which is why people have this self image. My observation is that the “eccentricities” that people think make them adorable are often either mundane or seriously disturbing. If you want an example of someone who reveals an adorable craziness on a regular basis, I give you Sarah Silverman.
2.) Most people think they have a good sense of humor. Again, humor is a much appreciated characteristic in people—just look at the personals ads, which show you that everyone wants someone like that. People without a sense of humor are seen as mundane, serious, solemn, or even dour—in other words, people who are no fun to be with. However, most people do not have a good sense of humor. They may have a sense of humor in that they try to makes jokes or they laugh at other people’s jokes, but they’re not people who make you laugh regularly. The apogee of a good sense of humor is seen in people like Robin Williams.
3.) Nearly everyone thinks they’re a nice person. In other words, nobody thinks they’re a bad person, a jerk, or an asshole. How often have you heard somebody say, “You know—I’m a real jerk” and mean that. they are a real jerk pretty much all the time? (Larry David plays a real jerk on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”)
Of course nearly everyone is capable of being nice or a jerk on occasion, but I’m talking about real jerks—the people you avoid being around because they’re constantly annoying. Because almost nobody thinks they’re a jerk but observation shows that the world has plenty of jerks, we are forced to conclude that there’s a lot of self-deception going on. (See Robert Trivers’s book The Folly of Fools for more examples.)
Needless to say, I fancy myself falling in all three categories, but is it true? Who knows? That’s why I’m prone to introspection about my interactions with others and tend to beat myself up if I think I’ve acted badly.
Please add other “rules of life” if you have some.