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.
We have the usual three items today plus a bit of lagniappe.
Reader Peter found the mother lode of cat videos: MelodyMeowsic, which is a bunch of AI videos featuring jazz-playing cats and, I think, AI-composed music. But it’s worth a look anyway, and since the videos are often an hour long, you can use them as background music (with an occasional glance at the moggies) or as music to fall asleep to. Here’s their description:
Welcome to a world where modern jazz meets feline elegance. ✨
Melody Meowsic is an elegant modern jazz cat band bringing smooth, sophisticated sounds to every moment. Our music blends the warm tones of acoustic guitar, soulful saxophone, expressive piano, gentle soft drums, and deep upright bass into a beautifully relaxing experience. 🎹🎸🎷 🎶
From calm mornings and productive work sessions to cozy cafés, late nights, reading, studying, relaxing, or simply enjoying life — there’s always a place for our smooth jazz. 🎧
Premium sound. Cinematic visuals. Timeless melodies. Every video is crafted with our highest commitment to audio and visual quality, creating an immersive lounge experience you can return to anytime.
You can go to the site by clicking on the link below. I’ll add two videos.
Yes, they’re not perfect (the music is sometimes out of synch with the cats’ playing, and the cats have human thumbs!), but imagine the work that went into videos like these.
Autumn jazz. Be sure to notice the cats in the audience:
Lakeside jazz:
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If you click on the link below, you’ll go to a Nice News article about a California couple with a wonderful dream, one that’s nearly fulfilled. They want to photograph every one of the forty species of wild felids on Earth,
An excerpt:
A married California couple has made it their mission to photograph all 40 wild cat species on Earth — and they only have one more to go. The stunning images serve to raise awareness about the animals, many of which are vulnerable or endangered.
So far, Sebastian Kennerknecht and Rachel Tobias have traveled to 33 countries across five continents and photographed 39 species in the Felidae family, often using camera traps in forests, deserts, and grasslands where the elusive cats roam.
The San Francisco-based duo has captured images of a cheetah in Tanzania, a tiger in India, and an ocelot in Panama. The only species they have yet to cross off the list is the northern oncilla, found in Central America. It’s a rarely seen animal, and one of smallest wild cats in the Americas.
Kennerknecht, 41, has been photographing cats since college: He studied ecology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to understand animals and became particularly interested in bobcats. Tobias, 37, grew up loving wildlife and was always drawn to the ocean and photography. The two met online, and they instantly connected over their love of nature. Fittingly, their first date was searching for bobcats.
This is a couple after my own heart.
In 2024, Kennerknecht realized he had photos of 30 of the world’s wild cats, so he and Tobias decided to go for the full 40. In addition to photography, the couple run cat expeditions together, taking out small groups to observe the felines in their natural habitat and learn how to photograph them.
They’ve raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through their work. One photo of a Borneo Bay cat brought in $120,000 for conservation efforts, and they collected around $70,000 per year for five years to protect lion species in Zambia’s Kafue National Park. They are partnered with Panthera, the world’s leading wild cat conservation organization.
. . .Kennerknecht told Talk to the Press that the couple’s work is “99% frustration and 1% joy,” noting that they’ve seen elephants crush their expensive camera traps, insects get into them, and humidity fog up lenses, rendering images unusable.
“We set up a studio in the forest,” Tobias explained, adding: “In Malaysia, we set up six traps; we had to sleep in the jungle full of bugs and carry 60 pounds of gear.”
Despite the project’s challenges, the couple is dedicated to ethical photography. They don’t use any bait or lures to attract the cats towards the cameras, so they can observe their natural behavior. “It’s much more successful for telling a story about the species,” said Tobias. “Telling a story between the viewer and the animal is really powerful for conservation.”
Here’s they are on the “pumapix” Instagram site, which documents their travels and pictures. The big cat conservation group Panthera is well worth supporting (I have done so).
Here’s a short video showing their travels and some photos and videos:
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There’s a new cat-related book that you might want to see, espcially if you have a literary bent: it’s called Great Writers and the Cats Who Owned Them by Susannah Fullerton (Amazon link here, where you can read a pretty long sample).
Version 1.0.0
The Wall Street Journal has given it a positive review that you can see by clicking on the screenshot (if you have a subscription).
An excerpt:
Popular authors are often found lurking in the pages of newspapers—they publish excerpts of their books, write reviews and provide quotations. Sometimes they even place advertisements for their missing cats. When Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, lost track of a feline friend named Bambino in 1905, he wrote in to the New York American, urging readers to keep an eye out for “a distinguished looking cat” with “intensely black” and “velvety” fur. In the following days, hundreds of cats were delivered to Twain’s Manhattan residence by owners hoping to meet the novelist. The real Bambino, meanwhile, didn’t require chauffeuring; he eventually returned home of his own accord, unaware of the lengths to which humans had gone to retrieve him.
Bambino’s story is one of many amusing anecdotes recounted by Susannah Fullerton in “Great Writers and the Cats Who Owned Them,” a charming catalog of felines who have helped shape Western literature. Ms. Fullerton, a lecturer and literary historian, applies an impressive degree of scholarly precision to her subject matter, using the antics of cats such as Bambino to shed light on the private lives of authors ranging from Samuel Johnson and Robert Southey to Dorothy Sayers and Doris Lessing.
Cats, Ms. Fullerton explains, are ideal companions for men and women of letters, whose “lonely occupation” may be alleviated by furry injections of playfulness and curiosity. Remarkably observant creatures, cats demonstrate “intelligence, insouciance and inscrutability,” along with a certain defiant streak. There is a reason why Ms. Fullerton repeatedly refers to cats who “condescended to live” with their humans; surely no self-respecting feline would ever allow himself to be commodified.
“Great Writers” paints portraits of the mewling kittens, dexterous mousers and lazy lap cats who happen to have witnessed the birth of some of humanity’s favorite texts. Among others, we meet Mysouff I, who “escorted” Alexandre Dumas to work every morning; Friendless, who learned to drink whiskey and milk alongside the tippling Hemingway; and Lowpatia, a companion of a young Margaret Mitchell, who could salute as well as any Civil War general.
Full of endearing quirks, the cats in Ms. Fullerton’s book serve as crucial wells of inspiration, encouraging authors to exercise their talents in unexpected ways. Muriel Spark, best remembered for her sophisticated and witty fiction, tried her hand at verse-writing with a series of poems about Bluebell the kitten. The author also enjoyed reviewing literature that featured cats. “Sensible cat books,” Spark once said, “are devoted to praising the cat for its catness.” No doubt she would have given high marks to Ms. Fullerton, whose book finds merit in catness of all varieties.
Lagniappe: I saw this photo and caption on Facebook, but for the life of me I can’t find any other mention of these frustrated surveyors in Kansas. It may be “fake news”!
And reader Ginger K., who has contributed many items over the years for Caturday posts, has an announcement:
Today, Saturday, October 24, is my baby Stella’s birthday. She was born in a shelter, so her records contain her actual birth date.
I adopted Stella on July 4, 2023, from her original human mother. Mama had too many cats in her one-bedroom apartment. Not a hoarding situation, but Original Mama had eight cats and Stella was overwhelmed. Stella doesn’t like other cats. So she lives with me as my only cat.
Stella is a wonderful cat. She keeps me safe from bugs, is an attentive watch cat, and loves to sit in my lap.
I’ve attached a photo. Stella helps me make my bed, and she’s sitting on her favorite sheets.
In this week’s “Real Time” segment, Bill Maher, pointing to the unrest in France, dons his curmudgeon’s mantle to discuss socialism—or rather, the socialism of the aged, and that includes both French and Americans. He explains why socialism is so popular with the young: “They see the government paying older folks to sit around all day and they say, ‘Hey! Where’s my monthly check for doing dick?’.” In other words, American young are socialists because older people have it (Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid) but the youngsters don’t. As Maher says, “If you’re a senior citizen, you’re already living like Mamdani is President.” Where are my subsidized groceries and free public transportation?
But Maher adds that both France and America are overpaying the elderly, redistributing income to a group of senior citizens that was much smaller in 1940 than now. On the other hand, far more young people are now living with their parents, claiming a portion of that redistributed income.
The solution is curmudgeonly: we need to put more money back into circulation by stopping paying “moochers” who get money by, says Maher, claiming disabilities. This kind of mooching is, he says, rife in the U.K. and making its way to the U.S. Of course not all of that is “mooching”, as there are lots of people who can’t work or can’t find jobs, but Maher argues that many of those who claim mental disabilities are just defeated by “what we call ‘Life’.”
The panelists you see are: Steve Hilton (author and Republican candidate for California’s Governor) and Andy Beshear, Democratic Governor of Kentucky. Not shown is the panelist, former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and I can’t find the discussion with her. However, both Variety and The Daily Beasthave attacked Maher for cozying up to and “fawning” over Leavitt, though in an earlier show he “brutally humiliated” her.
This is a bit more ranty than most of Maher’s bits, and his solution to the problem seems poorly formulated, though we’re gonna have to do something when Social Security runs out of dough in six years.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, October 24, 2026, shabbos for Jewish cats and Food Day, during which you’re suppose to think about stuff like a healthy diet, starvation in parts of the world, animal welfare, and so on. Here are some crab cakes we had not long ago in Georgia. They were good. All local crabmeat with just enough stuff added to hold the meat together. The other food is healthy.
First produced in 1893 by the Quaker City Confectionery Company in Philadelphia, it is now made by The Hershey Company. Good & Plenty’s memorable Choo Choo Charlie commercials first aired in 1950. They featured Choo Choo Charlie the train engineer powering his locomotive with Good & Plenty, shaking a Good & Plenty box in a circular motion, and singing a jingle based on “The Ballad of Casey Jones.”
Here’s one of those commercials:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 24 Wikipedia page.
Iran’s message is stark: If the U.S. and Israel restart their air campaign, Tehran will respond with strikes not only on American bases and warships but on airports, pipelines and other civilian targets in the neighboring countries of the Persian Gulf.
The warnings, issued publicly and in private diplomatic communications, are clearly aimed at deterring any attack with tough talk. But they also signal a real threat. Iran retains significant missile and drone stocks and the ability to use them.
Analysts estimate Iran has hundreds to thousands of ballistic missiles, and U.S. and regional officials believe it has resumed production of ballistic missiles in limited numbers using stockpiled components and working in underground facilities.
In the opening phase of the war, Iran inflicted significant damage on U.S. air bases, embassies and the headquarters of the U.S. 5th Fleet in Bahrain. It also hit energy and industrial facilities in the United Arab Emirates, a major gas plant in Qatar and airports in Dubai, Kuwait and Bahrain.
Tehran says it would seek to cause more pain in any new round, at a time when stockpiles of the air-defense interceptors the U.S. and Arab militaries need to absorb any attack have been running down. Israel’s interceptor supplies have also been under pressure.
. . .Raising the ante in any new fight would expose Iran’s infrastructure to attack when its economy is teetering. Its missile arsenal and launchers were battered by U.S. and Israeli attacks early in the war—the Pentagon said in September the U.S. had destroyed up to 90% of Iran’s drone, ballistic missile and naval industrial base—limiting its ability to sustain a long exchange.
Still, analysts believe it would run the risk.
“The consensus in Tehran now believes that deterrence requires imposing immediate, sustained and substantial costs on its adversaries,” said Sina Toossi, an Iran expert at the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank.
I suppose the object is to make Iran surrender without putting U.S. troops on the ground. Perhaps even bombing Kharg Island, which I’ve suggested, might be intolerable to the U.S. because, while destroying Iran’s ability to export oil, it could raise U.S. gas prices by $2-$3 per gallon even though we get virtually no gas from Iran. And that price rise is not acceptable to Americans. If this attack doesn’t make Iran surrender—and I don’t think it will—the U.S. and Israel will have failed.
*Speaking of Iran, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh, two experts on foreign relations, tell us in the WaPo “Why Trump is failing to make Iran flinch” (article archived here). The answer is not obvious from the text. A few excerpts:
Locked in a war of attrition with the United States, the Islamic republic has clear objectives. President Donald Trump’s recent decision to send another aircraft carrier to the region and threaten the resumption of a significant bombing campaign after the midterms won’t alter these aims. The ruling clerics and the commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seek to create a new tributary order, imposing tolls on ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz and severing security ties between the United States and the Arab Gulf states.
The regime also wants to find a means to deter Washington and Jerusalem from attacking. Until Tehran can revive its nuclear weapons program, domination of the Persian Gulf — having the capacity to control or destroy its hydrocarbons — is the only way to possibly checkmate the country’s primary foes. Any diplomatic compact that ends this war — and despite Iran’s awful economic state, Tehran seems in no rush to find a diplomatic solution — must, from Tehran’s perspective, bring about American capitulation. Indeed, this is how the Iranian regime saw the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding — the interim peace agreement signed on June 17.
The Iranians have given up on neither their proxies nor their atomic aspirations. We can’t gauge how serious the regime’s current nuclear efforts are, but it is engaged in “high levels of activity” at important bombed sites, according to the Institute for Science and International Security. The IRGC’s arguments for nukes as the ultimate deterrent are no less convincing just because alternative strategies — pressure on Hormuz and attacks by its proxies — have proved so useful against enemies.
With its proxies, Tehran has reshuffled its priorities to focus more on Saudi Arabia. Iran’s Yemeni Shiite allies, the Houthis, have become its most effective foreign asset. Their clarion call — “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse Be upon the Jews, Victory to Islam” — shows a movement deeply imbued with Tehran’s spirit. As important, the Houthis have successfully deployed Iranian-designed and -manufactured missiles and drones to bedevil Saudi oil shipments and spread terror in Saudi cities.
. . .it’s Iran’s internal problems, even more than Trump’s economic coercion, that most concern the Islamic republic. The theocracy’s priorities — proxies, missiles, drones and nuclear weapons — reflect this internal weakness: The regime can no longer stir a faithful nation to spread the revolution. Militant foreigners and technology have to save the regime’s sense of purpose.
The Islamic republic’s aspirations have always revolved around the challenge of how to do more with less. If the regime can survive Trump’s attempt to strangle it and provoke an uprising, the theocrats and guardsmen just might figure it out.
I suppose the point is that the U.S. assumes that military and economic pressure would compel Iran to surrender or stop its nuclear program. But the authors appear to argue that that won’t happen: all that’s occurred is that Iran has cracked down on its populace. But this gives not a clue about how we’re supposed to make Iran flinch.
Palestinian gunmen opened fire on Israelis in the West Bank on Friday, prompting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to threaten a major offensive in the Israeli-occupied territory days before a pivotal national election.
The Israeli military said that two soldiers had been killed and that its forces had shot dead two Palestinian assailants near Hebron, the most populous city in the West Bank. Three other people were wounded in the attack, according to Magen David Adom, Israel’s ambulance service.
Mr. Netanyahu visited the site of the attacks and said Israel would carry out a major operation in a neighborhood of Hebron, where he said the attackers had come from. “We are going to implement the successful and aggressive model that we employed in the refugee camps,” he said, referring to the Israeli military’s offensive in camps in the northern West Bank.
And from Segal:
The [Israeli] families whose Shabbat preparations turned into hospital vigils already know how this story ends: quietly. New York politician Brad Lander will not jump halfway across the world to escort Israelis to work and back. No delegation of diplomats will tour the junction or express outrage over constant Palestinian violence. Those families also are all too familiar with what Lander himself observed this week: “violence unfortunately is never far away.”
The reasoning for this blindness is simple, if morally bankrupt. Israeli presence in the area is seen as illegitimate, and so violence against Israelis is treated as justified, though such things are not said in polite society, merely implied. Never mind that men who intended to bypass the checkpoint are unlikely to be fussy about where the international community draws its borders. Ironically, that justification is the same logic that drives the nationalist violence those same voices are so fond of condemning.
If it was not entirely self-evident, I will state it clearly: You do not discourage violence by deciding whose lives are expendable.
An eloquent exposition of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
*As always, I’ll steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: the Deepfake of the Deepfake.” First, the title item:
→ The flag really was upside down: Nafisa Fai, a Washington County, Oregon county commissioner, gave a talk in Minnesota where she was speaking with an American flag behind her—but it was upside down. Footage of the event went viral, with people pointing out the major flag faux pas. Quickly, proper media companies and some Democrats ran with a story about how the footage was a racist deepfake. That it was fake news.
Here’s the Oregon Democrats’ official X statement: “The racist deepfake video of Washington County Commissioner Nafisa Fai circulating on social media is abhorrent. This is one more reason Al needs to be regulated, to prevent bad actors from causing real harm through misinformation.” Here’s Congresswoman Maxine Dexter: “This is a racist, disgusting attack and yet another example of how misleading and malignant Al deepfakes can be.”
There was even footage published, credited to Nafisa Fai’s team, showing that the flag was correctly hung.
The candidate now denies circulating the fake image of the flag hanging properly, even though news sources say they got the image from her. I just love it all.
Remember that Bari Weiss is editor of CBS News:
→ Perfect headline:
Scuffles! Scuffles about high school student grievances (they later deleted the post). Right. That’s what’s happening there. Gotta say, I love my wife’s new job. She’s a normie lib running a completely normie lib news operation, yet is held up as the World’s Great MAGA leader. What I humbly suggest: It’s time for me—me and the 15 most active members of the TGIF comments section, and you know who you are—to run CBS News. I want 60 Minutes to be doing a long meditation on whether voting should require a fitness test. That’ll give the media blogs something to really sink their teeth into! I want a deep dive into the first moon landing and what exactly happened there. They say she’s doing evil propaganda for the Jews yet all I see are stories about West Bank settlers, my sweet, gentle wife. The kids need more of your time, honey. We can do this power transfer with dignity. Just leave the laptop open when you go to sleep, and I’ll know it’s your sign for me to take a swing at it.
→ In defense of stoning: An Oxford-educated pediatrician and NHS trainee, Abdul Qader Ismail, created the “Palestine poppy” pin, borrowing the memorial symbol from Britain and citing the some-12,000 Arab Palestinians who he says fought for the Brits during WWII. He also says the poppy is the national flower of Palestine. That’s nice.
But did you know he’s also an author? He wrote a series of helpful books for young adults called An Introduction to Challenging Topics for Muslim Teens. He tackles some challenging topics in the books, like when to crucify or stone people, or when you should just cut their hands off. From the UK Times this week:
Let’s dive a little deeper: “In the first volume, Ismail defends hudud punishments, which include stoning, whipping, crucifixion, hand amputation, and the cross-amputation of diagonally opposite hands and feet.” Crimes worthy of these punishments: “stealing something valuable, highway robbery. . . fornication or adultery (having sex before marriage, or with someone other than your husband or wife), accusing someone of fornication or adultery without proof, drinking alcohol.” All the major religions have crazy punishments in their history, so I’m not calling this out specifically, but it’s rare to see someone educated arguing for this type of penalty in the present. Anyway, watch out when you go to the NHS and they ask about your sexual history.
A good week for Nellie.
*Finally, a take on the changes in the pick-your-own apple outing. When I was a kid living in Indiana, my parents would take us to the orchards for an outing like this, and it was always big fun. (I’m not sure why; perhaps it’s the mistaken notion that you’re getting the apples for almost free, and ones that you choose.) But things have changed, as WSJ reporter Ellen Gamerman tells us. Before reading, can you guess how they’ve changed? Well, here you go:
The first sign of trouble at the apple orchard wasn’t the state troopers directing traffic, the guy in the neon vest sending us to park in a far-off field or the enormous battalion of portable toilets. It was the woman in the crowd by the entrance, leaning on a rustic fence post, barfing up a whole lot of apples. If Hieronymus Bosch went apple picking, this would be his spot.
I don’t remember when apple picking turned into such an unleashed expression of autumnal id. Are we overindulging our manic search for connection in an orchard of earthly delights? Could we be making up for all our screen time by commanding group bonding between the Idareds and the Golden Delicious? Breathe deep, we say. Isn’t the air crisp?
Apple picking has become for families what “leaf peeping” is for new couples on their first weekend away: A high-stakes quest for joy that simultaneously raises a host of not-as-advertised realities. Yes, it is a maker of family memories and a key revenue source for small farms. And yes, the line is too long for the cider doughnuts, you do need to pay extra for the corn maze and your apples are growing heavier by the minute, if not in your bag, then at least in your mind.
Dispatches from the orchard front include complaints of apple theft that have required searches at the exits. Last year, Lynd Fruit Farm in Pataskala, Ohio, warned visitors it would call the sheriff’s office on offenders who hid their pickings at checkout, reporting apple thefts of $80, $160 and $400 at a time. On social media, the orchard described a car riddled with stolen apples tucked under seats and blankets, in the glove compartment and “under/behind the man’s wife.” Alex Patton, a co-owner of the farm, said he’s seen wives sitting on $20 worth of produce. “From their shoulders to their butt, it’s just apples,” he said.
. . . Going apple picking today, at least in the pale of New York, can feel a little like lunging for a seat on a crowded subway. Two families eyeing the same tree. Who will get there first? How quickly can we walk without looking like we are sprinting? Get your own tree, my eyes have said more than once. This one’s mine.
Oy! Well, her solution is not to go apple-picking at all—just buy apples at the groce
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s been reading Jared Diamond:
Hili: Are humans really the third species of chimpanzee? Andrzej: I have no doubts about that.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy ludzie naprawdę są trzecim gatunkiem szympansa?
Ja: Nie mam w tej sprawie żadnych wątpliwości.
Several people blinded by Islamic thugs, including Salman Rushdie, will be with Masih at a “Games of Freedom” conference held in Łódź, Poland, On October 23-25. Here Masih makes the announcement again:
Salman Rushdie lost sight in one eye in a Islamist terrorist attack. Three brave women from Iran and Afghanistan were blinded under Islamism. I survived three assassination plots of the Islamic Republic on U.S. soil.
Now we stand together in Poland with one question: Why??
The moment I learned that I would be receiving an award in Poland and sharing the stage with Salman Rushdie, I reached out to the organizers with one request: Please allow me to bring women who were blinded under Islamic Ideology onto that stage. Because the real award belongs to them.
Farideh Salavatipour lost both eyes to pellet gunfire during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.
Kosar Eftekhari lost one eye when the Islamic Republic shot her in the face with pellets for demanding freedom. And Fahimeh, from Afghanistan, was blinded when her husband threw acid in her face for defending women’s rights.
I want the world to look into their eyes and understand the true cost of normalizing the Islamic Republic, the Taliban, and violent Islamist extremism.
Oppression begins with compulsory hijab, lashes, prison cells, and the systematic humiliation of women. It escalates into torture, mass killings, and executions and public lashes or public hanging. And it does not stop at national borders. These regimes and their networks have also threatened, hunted, and plotted to assassinate their opponents abroad.
Salman Rushdie is a living symbol of how Islamist terrorists reaches far beyond the borders of dictatorships. He was brutally stabbed on American soil and lost sight in one eye. I have survived three plots to kidnap or assassinate me on US soil and I can testify firsthand that the Islamic Republic and other authoritarian regimes use transnational repression to hunt down and silence their opponents abroad.
That is why tonight, I will dedicate my award to brave Freedom Fighters especially these women who were blinded for freedom.
Tomorrow, these extraordinary women will have something rare: an entire one-hour panel to tell their own stories. I will have the honor of interviewing them. Too often, the world speaks about survivors. This time, the world must listen to them.
We also visited Auschwitz together. Standing there, surrounded by the evidence of unimaginable crimes, one truth became painfully clear: “Never again” must never become an empty slogan. We cannot honor the victims of yesterday while turning our backs on those facing atrocities today.
And our solidarity must cross borders.
I have also invited a woman from Africa to stand alongside the women of Iran and Afghanistan, to remind the world that sexual violence is still being used as a weapon of war and repression. Different countries, different forms of brutality, but one shared struggle for dignity, equality, and freedom.
We cannot expect women facing prison, bullets, acid attacks, rape, and execution to defeat these systems of oppression with their bare hands while the rest of the world stands aside.
And here is my message to the world:
South Africa’s apartheid did not fall because its victims fought alone. It fell because courageous people inside the country resisted, and the world joined their struggle.
In the history Poland gave the world Solidarność. Now the women of Iran Afghanistan and Africa need the world to live up to that word.
If the world could unite to help end racial apartheid in South Africa, and end tyranny in Poland, it can unite to end dictatorship everywhere.
The time for solidarity is not after the atrocities. It is NOW.
An advisory from the Number Ten Cat. And don’t forget the snacks!
CAT ADVISORY: Storm Austen has brought strong winds and rain to Wales and the South of England. Cats are advised to find the cosiest spot in the house and stay there. Humans are advised to bring them snacks.
Music: A fantastic video of Stevie Nicks (accompanied by her sister-in-law) spontaneously singing “Wild Heart”—a song she wrote—to a recorded background, all while she was being made up for a Rolling Stone photography session. I know of no better video showing extemporaneous singing of rock music. You won’t find this version on any recording or album.
Although John McWhorter may have been taken on board the New York Times as a reliably “heterodox” columnist (remember his bestselling critique of wokeism Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America?), he occasionally comes up with something that’s pretty woke in itself. One example is his recent article favoring land acknowledgments. Click below to read it if you subscribe, or find the piece archived here.
McWhorter is a smart and thoughtful man, and I wouldn’t dare accuse him of producing pieces like this just to keep his job. But my “J’accuse” here is the weakness of his argument and his tendency to leave out counterarguments. As you’ll see, his primary argument for giving land acknowledgments is because it “feels to him like the right thing to do.” He gives a few other benefits of these acknowledgments, but doesn’t talk about the problems, including the fact that many indigenous North Americans oppose acknowledgments and the issue of exactly who displaced who is often a problematic historical question.
Note that McWhorter says in the title below that land acknowledgments are both woke and right, but it was McWhorter himself who turned “woke” into a pejorative word, meaning (in my view) “something that purports to effect social justice but doesn’t do so, being largely performative.” His whole book, in fact, is an argument against the “woke” nature of much antiracism, including that of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Is McWhorter now trying to reverse the meaning he gave to the term? (Note that “woke” originally was not pejorative but denoted awareness of racism and bigotry.)
Now I have no objection to land acknowledgments if they’re just meant to teach history, but you know very well that this is not their purpose. Their main purpose is to expiate the guilt of people who see themselves as “displacers”. It is generally a performative exercise that accomplishes nothing and can, as noted below, even be counterproductive, reducing interest in indigenous cultures. Many of the people who have to suffer through these exercises had no part in the oppression of Native Americans but are cast as oppressors anyway. (My ancestors, for example, were in Eastern Europe fighting off Jew haters, and didn’t arrive in America until the early 20th century.)
But let me quote McWhorter, who deals briefly with the “performative” stuff and dispels it by saying that “some response is better than none”:
. . . . I think the land acknowledgments are wonderful.
Statements often also say that the original inhabitants were parted from their land by treachery, violence and European disease, and also note that their descendants survive and remain stewards of the land.
Events at Yale University, for example, sometimes begin with this acknowledgment:
“Yale University acknowledges that Indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.”
As for the performative aspect, McWhorter says this:
Many find these acknowledgments an inauthentic way of genuflecting to injustice without having to actually do anything about it. But institutions often treat the acknowledgments as one of many strategies for supporting the local Indigenous groups. Yale now grants a certificate in Native American and Indigenous studies. Its joint project with N.Y.U. supports Native American tribal sovereignty through legal advocacy and educational initiatives.
Yet obviously any efforts can repair only partly. Most of the descendants of the Lenape who originally inhabited Manhattan now live in Oklahoma and Wisconsin (and Ontario), their ancestors having been forcibly relocated there by whites in the 1800s.
But some response is better than none, and to sneer at land acknowledgments as performative nonsense is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
People often put land acknowledgments in the same basket as calling the soft bigotry of low expectations “D.E.I.” and calling for the defunding of the police. But trashing land acknowledgments because of these other woke shibboleths is like dismissing paved roads because the Romans built them but also espoused slavery, sexism and violence as spectacle. “Look at what the Romans were like — no aqueducts for me!”
This is a bogus argument: land acknowledgments do not improve society the way paved roads do. In the vast majority of cases, organizations who deliver the land acknowledgments (henceforth “LAs”) do not do anything to help the displaced peoples: they do not give money as reparations, return the land, or otherwise help the displaced people (more later on “displacement”).
McWhorter does give a couple of examples of nonperformative LAs. This one, involving bigotry decades ago, has little force:
My grandmother was a seamstress for a rich white family that would give their staff a luscious rustic week each summer on their island in Maine. She brought my family along in the summer of 1975. You could drink the lake water, it was so clean and clear. Dinner nightly was big lobsters. All you had to do was dip your rod in the water, and you’d be sure to pull up a bass. The cook made splendid blueberry pie with the local berries. The dogs were cute. In our “cottage,” there was for some reason not a piano but an organ; I loved learning how to work it.
The Polaroids of all of this just shine to this day with what a simple, unalloyed joy that week was. Except that late at night, I heard the white staff, always so warm and friendly around us, talking fiercely about the local Native Americans — I’m guessing they were the Passamaquoddy — as if they were less than human.
Apparently, the week in Maine is the equivalent of a land acknowledgment, but I’d rather have that and lobster dinners than empty words. And you can be sure that the staff were not Native Americans but African-Americans, and slavery and its sequelae are not the same thing as Native Americans displaced from their land.
McWhorter also cites, to his credit, something he did as reparations:
Later, I participated in a program helping restore Native Americans’ languages to them (Leanne Hinton’s pioneering Breath of Life). For one of the languages, a set of flash cards was one of the few records of its key words, and it had gone missing. The cards happened to turn up at my house, where one of the other assistants had accidentally left them after a gathering. When I gave them back to one of the group’s members, I will never forget her tears and the sincerity of her long hug. These people lost so much, and it still hurts.
There he put his money where his mouth is, but I have to say that giving back a pack of flash cards is not much reparations—not compared to giving back money or land.
But what does McWhorter leave out? Here are four issues:
Land acknowledgments can be detrimental. I mentioned that many people who deliver or hear LAs had no part in “stealing” land. He also leaves out that land acknowledgments can, on the whole, be detrimental. Here’s a paper this year in Nature Human Behavior showing how:
The abstract relates that LAs can make people aware of “local indigenous groups” but also reduce interest in the culture and heritage of such groups. The conclusion is that LAs are pretty performative, serving mostly to elevate the reputation of organizations that make them rather than effect social justice. They are, in a word, performative:
Land acknowledgements—formal statements recognizing Indigenous custodianship of land—are widespread in Australia, where they originated, and have been gaining traction in the USA. Proponents argue they raise awareness of Indigenous histories and build support for reparations, but causal evidence is limited. Here randomized experiments on non-Indigenous populations in Australia (N = 1,724) and the USA (N = 1,773) find that exposure to land acknowledgements increases awareness of local Indigenous groups but can reduce interest in Indigenous culture and heritage. We find no significant effects on a range of political attitudes, including collective guilt and support for reparations. Additional experiments (N = 3,638) suggest that the adoption of land acknowledgements provides small reputational benefits to institutions facing public scrutiny. Costlier practices—such as financial compensation and Indigenous participation in decision-making—have significantly larger effects. These findings suggest that land acknowledgements primarily improve organizational reputation rather than generate sociopolitical change.
Many indigenous people oppose land acknowledgments. Below the fold I’ve given what Grok told me (with references) when I decided to ask it if any indigenous people opposed LAs. Grok spat out a pretty long list, with indigenous people citing the performative nature of LAs as means of flaunting one’s virtue and expiating white guilt. LAs are also said to sometimes be historically inaccurate (see below), patronizing, and unable to provide “concrete benefits” for Native Americans. In the cases I’ve heard, the LAs are delivered by white people, descendants of immigrants who didn’t drive anybody off their lands.
McWhorter doesn’t mention this. He just says that some acknowledgment is better than none. The article above suggests that this isn’t correct, especially if the LAs are quickly forgotten, as they often are. In that case, what “good” is done except for the LA announcers feeling good about themselves?
The history of North America is complex, beginning 20,000 years ago when Asians crossed the Bering Strait to colonize America. They subsequently split into many different populations as they spread south and east. Those populations sometimes cohered within themselves as “tribes,” and there’s a long history of intertribal warfare among Native Americans, with tribes displacing other tribes from their land and killing off or assimilating them.
McWhorter doesn’t mention this, but the history is long, and very often a historically accurate LA would indict Native Americans tribes in sequence, valorizing only the last group that was displaced.
I’ll give two examples that can stand for many. First, the Comanche systematically forced the Apaches off “Apache land” (note that the concept of land ownership differed from what we have today); see here and here.
Likewise, the Lakota “were pushed onto the northern Great Plains during the seventeenth century by conflicts with the Anishinaabe and Cree; after adopting horse culture around 1730, they crossed the Missouri River and established themselves in the Black Hills by the 1770s as the spiritual center of their territory.” The moving and expanding Lakota then pushed out the Cheyenne “tribe” as well as other groups like the Crow and Kiowa. You’d need a very long acknowledgment to detail all this, and of course it would indict, along with white colonists, the Cree and the Lakota themselves. You can’t just give a performative LA indicting the present white “settlers,” for you’d be neglecting the nefarious conquests of the Lakota by the Cree and of the Cheyenne and Kiowa by the Lakota. Is only the last group guilty? This also makes the question of reparations intractable: would a modern member of the Lakota apologize for displacing the Cheyenne, and offer reparations?
And of course all of these displacements trace back to the original users of land: the descendants of the H. sapiens who crossed into North America 20,ooo years ago.
Land Acknowledgments that indict only modern white people involve a form of “race essentialism”. This was suggested by Greg, who said this to me in an email:
There is race-essentialism inherent in LA’s. Some particular people of various ethnic groups displaced other particular ethnic groups. You (Jerry) are guilty because you are white– none of your ancestors were here at the time of the Indian wars, but yet you are guilty, because some other white people defeated some Indians, and all Indians have the same essence.
The question of LA is thorny and tortuous, but none of these issues are raised by McWhorter. There are far more LAs given than real attempts to “atone” for displacement, and we all know that the vast bulk of LAs are performative. Yes, McWhorter can defend them as being “the right thing to do”, but if McWhorter is going to lecture white colonists on what is “right to do”, shouldn’t he also be lecturing the Lakota, the Cree, and dozens of other Native Americans groups who were “displacers”?
[Addendum by Greg Mayer. Jerry and I were discussing this while he was composing his post, and he asked me to add some more thoughts, so here goes. The entire concept of indigenous is not at all straight forward. In biogeography, the word “indigenous”, as applied to plants or animals, has a relatively clear meaning– not transported to a place by man. (There are some terminological issues when dealing with recent natural dispersals.) But that doesn’t work for people– all people were brought by people! The term seems to mean “whoever was there when the first Europeans got there”. But why start “indigeneity” at that time point? Most places on Earth have been inhabited by people for a long time, and there have usually been numerous displacements, often by people who were culturally, linguistically, and ethnically distinct. What makes some of the later groups indigenous? About the only places that we know who the first people there were are remote islands that were discovered by Europeans (and the first inhabitants were thus those very Europeans, e.g., Bermuda), or which were discovered so recently that a relatively complete archeological record documents the history of occupation (e.g. much of Polynesia). We know the Sioux displaced the Crow, but we can be pretty sure the Crow had not lived there for 14,000 years, so who is indigenous?
Until the post-World War II settlement of the world order, the conquest and occupation of land was the main theme of human history. There were all sorts of laws and principles about these things, beyond brute force– What is a terra nullius? What is effective occupation? (the latter still sort of an issue in the Falklands). It was only after WWII that it was generally agreed that borders can’t be changed by force, but only by negotiated agreements. Thus Czechoslovakia split peacefully, but most of the world condemns the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.
Land acknowledgements in northern Italy would have to have the current Italians apologize to the Lombards (Germans), who would apologize for taking it from the Byzantines (who were legally Romans but mostly Greek), who would apologize for taking it from the Western Romans, who would apologize for taking it from the Celts (the preceding is a huge simplification). Beyond the Celts, the historical record is meager, but I’m sure the Celts got it from somebody else.]
Examples of indigenous people opposing land acknowledgments are given below the fold (click “continue reading”)
Welcome to Friday, October 23, 2026, with November coming on fast. And it’s National Mole Day, celebrating not the animal but the unit of measurement. Note that the holiday is time-specific, spanning 12 hours, and has already begun.
National Mole Day
More specifically, the celebrations take place between 6:02 AM and 6:02 PM. In the U.S., the time and date are written 6:02 10/23. The time and date are derived from Avogadro’s number. Avogadro’s number is approximately 6.02×10^23. Hence, defining the number of particles (atoms or molecules) in one mole of a substance, one of the seven base SI units.
From Wikipedia:
The Avogadro number is an exact number equal to the number of constituent particles in one mole of any substance (by definition of the mole), historically derived from the experimental determination of the number of atoms in 12grams of carbon-12 (12C) before the 2019 revision of the SI, i.e. the gram-to-dalton ratio, g/Da.
Here’s the Italian scientist Amadeo Avogadro, from whom the constant comes. He looks a bit scary:
Uploader: Anton at German Wikipedia., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
On or around October 23rd, the Day of San Juan, the swallows gather in a swirling, breathtaking mass before departing for their winter home—a 6,000-mile journey to Goya, Corrientes, Argentina. Then, with what seems like clockwork precision, they return to the exact same spot in San Juan Capistrano on or about March 19th, St. Joseph’s Day, to the delight of locals and visitors who gather to welcome them home.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 23 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The NYT hasn’t yet sided with Putin in the Ukraine/Russia war, and in fact they’re still criticizing both him and, of course, Trump, who seems to be courting the Russian dictator. In a new headline called “Putin Nears a Prize: Restoring Ties With the U.S. While Giving Up Nothing” (subtitle “Russia has sought to separate the war in Ukraine from potential business deals and diplomacy with the United States. Its efforts now appear to be working”), Putin is clearly cast as the overall winner. It gets goodies and its war with Ukraine isn’t impeded. (The article is archived here.)
Now, exactly a year after the oil sanctions, Mr. Putin has never been so close to his goal of normalizing relations with Washington without having to make any compromises on Ukraine.
Over the past week and a half, Mr. Trump has set aside years of U.S. foreign policy by openly embracing Mr. Putin and easing the economic pressure on the Kremlin. At the same time, Mr. Trump has vilified President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the putative American ally trying to defend his nation against a Russian invasion.
On Oct. 9, Mr. Trump announced that the United States would buy Russian diesel, asking for no concessions from Mr. Putin in return. The Trump administration went on to pressure Ukraine to stop striking oil refineries — Kyiv’s most powerful lever — and suspended Russia sanctions that Mr. Trump had just signed into law. Mr. Trump declared that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine.”
The diesel deal was in part a political calculation by Mr. Trump before the midterm elections, as he tries to lower fuel prices. But that action and others that followed also reflect the president’s long-evident affinity for Mr. Putin, which the Russian leader has assiduously cultivated even while continuing the war and denying Mr. Trump a coveted prize.
Ever since Mr. Trump returned to office, Russia has sought to separate the conflict in Ukraine from potential business agreements and closer diplomatic ties with the United States. The Trump administration held back, even as it slashed aid to Ukraine, largely continuing a Biden administration policy of refraining from economic deals with Russia until Mr. Putin stopped the war.
. . .“In my personal view, victory has already been achieved,” the pro-Putin journalist Marina Akhmedova wrote on social media on Wednesday. “It is not just a matter of the 20 to 25 percent of territory we have liberated,” she added, referring to Russian-occupied land in Ukraine. “It is also about how the United States now engages with Russia.”
Many analysts call the economic incentives offered by Mr. Trump the wrong solution to a war being waged over political and security questions. Still, during his visit to St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday, Mr. Witkoff said that the diesel deal was “another example of what we can achieve by working together.” Mr. Putin, in turn, suggested a deal on Russian fertilizer.
I don’t see how the U.S. can ethically separate helping a dictatorship from the fact that the dictatorship invaded a democratic country that is (or was) our ally. It’s like Churchill giving economic aid to Hitler after he invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia.
*The field of “fat studies” has become polluted by an ideology arguing (misleadingly) that being obese carries no health penalties. (The mantra is “Healthy at Any Size.”) This, at least, was the message of a panel discussion at Harvard Medical School and described by the Free Press.
Obesity isn’t unhealthy. Medical paperwork is violence. We’re living under fascism for fat people. All these arguments have been asserted not in an uber-woke Reddit thread—or, not only there—but at a panel sponsored by Harvard Medical School.
“Against the Pathology of Unruly Bodies” took place on September 30, and I had the pleasure of attending, via Zoom. The event featured a research-based criticism of established obesity medicine from a series of qualified experts and scientists. Just kidding. It was, instead, a bizarre panel conversation of far-left, Covid-mask-wearing activists seeking to promote—at an elite medical school—an alternative version of reality. It was also a disturbing reminder that, in some of our most powerful institutions, progressive activism is still freely eroding well-established fact.
The event was hosted by New York Times contributing writer and famed left-wing author Roxane Gay, evidently in her capacity as a visiting professor and artist-in-residence at Harvard Medical School. (I wasn’t aware medical schools employed artists-in-residence.) She was joined on the panel by the socialist writer Da’Shaun L. Harrison, a biological male who identifies as transgender and uses they/them pronouns, and whose scientific credentials include authoring the book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for transgender nonfiction. Harrison is perhaps best known for going viral in September after claiming at the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago that GLP-1 medications like Ozempic are part of a “genocide” against fat people.
The other “expert” on the panel was activist and consultant Ragen Chastain, whose day job is essentially telling medical providers that the assumption that obesity has severe negative effects on overall health—which is the consensus of U.S. and global health authorities—is wrong. This is a core tenet of “fat positivity,” the movement that united to reframe obesity not as a disease but as another laudable identity in the diversity rainbow. Partly in response to the brutal weight shaming and utterly unrealistic body standards of the early aughts, it gained traction online in the late 2000s and early 2010s, moving from corners of the internet like Tumblr and ultimately making its way to magazine covers and elite media outlets. But alas, the science still doesn’t seem to have drawn the conclusions desired by the fat positivists. And so, they persist.
To be clear, none of the three main speakers at this Harvard Medical School event (a current Harvard medical student also participated) are medical doctors or scientists of any kind. Yet that didn’t stop them from making many of the same bold claims about health and medicine.
Have a look at this!
The most viral moment from the event came when, after an audience question mentioned health insurance companies, Gay cheered, “Free Luigi,” to applause. Unsurprisingly, a Harvard visiting professor openly expressing support for a targeted assassination made headlines and led to a Harvard spokesperson telling Fox News, “The views expressed by speakers at events are their own and do not represent Harvard Medical School or Harvard University.”
Calls for Fat Revolution!
First, Harrison claimed that the United States currently exists under “body fascism,” which he cogently defines as “a state, wherein everything that we know about how bodies are supposed to exist in the world, are supposed to function as, and are supposed to look like, has been perfected and overemphasized in modern society, as a way to discipline and punish . . .fat folks and fat bodies.”
Translation for normal people: He thinks modern American society so oppresses, mistreats, shames, and controls fat people that it constitutes a form of body-focused fascism. . . . Harrison, based on his past public comments, supports violent revolution.
And here, in a nutshell, is their argument (bolding is mine):
Next, Chastain questioned whether obesity even causes health issues.
Before you start wondering why you’ve been lied to your whole life: There is a clear, established causal pathway in medical literature that outlines how excess body fat leads to negative health outcomes like heart disease through increased inflammation. The American Heart Association states that obesity contributes directly to hypertension, sleep disorders, and type 2 diabetes. The Centers for Disease Control, for its part, says obese people are, compared to healthy-weight people, at increased risk for “stroke, many types of cancer, gallbladder disease, sleep apnea and breathing problems, mental illness, body pain, and difficulty with physical functioning.”
Chastain, however, argued that the negative health outcomes associated with obesity might actually have nothing to do with obesity itself and everything to do with society’s hatred of fat people.
This flat denial of reality is what really angers me: it’s comparable to biologists and anthropologists denying that there are not two sexes, but rather there’s an entire spectrum. You can read Luana’s reaction in her Heterodox STEM piece from June, describing her two encounters with “Fat Studies” lectures at Williams College.,
*To the best of my knowledge, Ilhan Omar hasn’t appeared after the feds raided her home save for a brief appearance on Instagram that I posted yesterday and now a 30-minutes interview with Christ Hayes at MS NOW (see link below). She’s still issuing statements, though, The latest is that she’s going to move out of her Washington, D.C. home because the raid made her feel unsafe:
U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar will move out of her Washington, D.C., home that federal agents searched last week, she said Wednesday, noting that attention brought on by the raid has made her feel unsafe there.
Federal authorities are investigating potential fraud in her family’s immigration paperwork and have issued grand jury subpoenas to some of her relatives, a person briefed on the investigation told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Omar, who was born in Somalia and is a naturalized U.S. citizen, said Wednesday in her first interview since the search that she is “confident in the fact that I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The progressive Minnesota Democrat has been a frequent critic and target of President Donald Trump, who has on multiple occasions pushed for the prosecution of his perceived political enemies.
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In the interview with MS NOW, Omar said she was rattled by the search weeks out from the Nov. 3 midterms, which will decide control of the House and Senate. She is running for reelection in a deep blue district centered in Minneapolis and is expected to retain her seat.
Omar recalled waking around 6 a.m. to Homeland Security investigators banging on her door with a warrant. They searched for four or five hours and seized 17 items, including phones, notebooks, a Somali language children’s book and a vintage camera that her husband had received as a gift, she said.
The Justice Department has shared few details about the case other than saying it was a criminal investigation.
Omar came with her family to the U.S. at age 12, after they obtained asylum. She became a U.S. citizen five years later, in 2000.
“It would be a huge undertaking to, I suppose, indict a 12-year-old for so cleverly conspiring to defraud immigration services to come to the United States. I’m sure there are a lot of smart 12-year-olds, but that seams like a leap,” she said in the interview.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview. I haven’t listened to the whole thing, but several sites, including yahoo! news, highlight a curious statement in the interview relating to the rumors she married her brother, and the “not to my knowledge” bit is at 14:59.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., dismissed long-standing allegations that she married her brother as part of an immigration fraud scheme during a Wednesday interview, although she stopped short of categorically ruling out a family relationship with her former husband.
“Not to my knowledge,” Omar told Chris Hayes on MS Now when asked whether there was any “weird kernel of truth” to allegations involving Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, whom she previously married.
That statement, however, doesn’t seem like hedging to me, but rather an offhand response to the question. We’ll see what happens when this plays out. The latest update, reported by Newsweek and other sources, is that Ilhan Omar isn’t her real birth name:
A federal court filing submitted Wednesday by the office of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, obtained by Fox News, refers to the congresswoman as “Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, a/k/a Ilhan Abdullahi Omar.” The filing concerns efforts to keep materials sealed in relation to the federal search warrant for Omar’s Washington, D.C.-area home.
*Speaking of Congress, division, and faith, one of the most acrimonious contests for the Senate is the Michigan race between Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers. El-Sayed tars Rogers with his ties to Trump, and, in the other direction, El-Sayed is tarred with his supposed ties to terrorism. Bolding is from the Washington Post article:
The candidates conducting one of the country’s most divisive and hard-fought Senate campaigns roasted each other Wednesday night in the second and final debate of the Michigan Senate race.
Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, and Republican Mike Rogers, a former congressman, jabbed each other for an hour over the economy, national security and health care.
Both laced their substantive policy answers with unrelated personal attacks.
Michigan’s open Senate seat is key for both parties’ hopes for controlling the Senate, where Republicans now hold a 53-47 advantage. Republicans view it as the best opportunity to flip a seat, even as they’re on defense elsewhere in the country. Democrats are aiming to hold every seat they have while flipping four Republican-held ones.
Here are five takeaways from the debate, aired live from WXYZ Detroit’s studios in Southfield, Michigan.
Family ties and the Muslim Brotherhood took a back seat
The headlines that dominated this race all week were largely — but not completely — a footnote.
El-Sayed would be the nation’s first Muslim senator, and Republicans have leaned into attacks related to his religion and identity.
El-Sayed protested that Rogers has been questioning his loyalty to the country, and said, “It is really quite beneath you.”
“I know you want to make this about being a victim,” Rogers retorted. “This is about an ideology.”
El-Sayed would not let up on Rogers’s ties to Trump
El-Sayed repeatedly challenged viewers to play “MAGA Bingo” when Rogers was talking, diminishing the former congressman’s positions as recycled Trump talking points designed to change the subject and paper over Rogers’ true views.
He described Rogers as “hip to hip with Trump” and called him the president’s “sock puppet.”
They disagreed sharply on many policies
Trump was also at the center of several policy differences.
Rogers called Trump’s tariffs on Canada “a mixed bag” while El-Sayed said they “clearly have hurt” people. El-Sayed called the war in Iran unnecessary and responsible for the rising prices of gas and groceries, while Rogers said it’s necessary to contain the threat Iran poses to the world.
Rogers defended Trump’s immigration enforcement surge, saying it contributed to a nationwide drop in violent crime. El-Sayed said it contributed to illegal searches of citizens and neighborhoods terrorized by masked agents.
Rogers painted El-Sayed as a democratic socialist
Rogers tried to link El-Sayed to his party’s most left-leaning flank.
While some prominent democratic socialists, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), have campaigned with the Democrat, El-Sayed does not consider himself a member of the movement.
But Rogers characterized El-Sayed’s campaign slogan of “Money out of politics. Money in your pocket. Medicare for all” as signifying a democratic socialist agenda that would result in a huge tax increase that could bankrupt the economy.
The race remains close
Despite national media attention and record spending in the state, polls consistently show El-Sayed with a narrow edge, barely outside of the margin of error — a margin much smaller than Democrats are holding in Michigan’s other statewide races.
Here’s a short video news report on their recent debate. The election will be one to watch closely, as it’s pretty much neck and neck right now, but a rush of voters might favor one side or another at the polls.
Scientists doubling as art detectives have traced Vincent van Gogh’s “ The Starry Night ” to a celestial scene that suggests a new date for one of the world’s most famous paintings.
Their findings indicate that rather than being a product of van Gogh’s imagination, “The Starry Night” may have been inspired by what he saw as he gazed heavenward from his French asylum 137 years ago.
A South Korean team reported Thursday that after years of forensic astronomy and research into the Dutch artist, they have matched his masterpiece to a predawn sky over France’s Saint-Remy de Provence right around July 22, 1889.
That’s a month later than the long-accepted time frame for the postimpressionist painting depicting a crescent moon and Venus surrounded by a sky of swirling stars with a village nestled below and cypress trees looming on one side.
Art historians have long dated the painting to June 1889, soon after Van Gogh checked into the asylum. He’d cut off his left ear several months earlier during an argument with painter Paul Gauguin.
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A team led by Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, the CEO of a Seoul telescope maker, is now disputing that date in a study appearing in the journal Scientific Reports.
The sky that is most similar to the painting occurred around July 22, 1889, said Kim, who is also a doctoral candidate at Kyung Hee University. He noted that the few days before and after could have inspired van Gogh as well.
. . . . The latest study addresses “a real puzzle” that in mid-June 1889, the moon was not the thin crescent painted by van Gogh, said Jose Luis Aragon at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He has studied “The Starry Night” as a physicist, but did not take part in the new research.
This of course assumes that van Gogh was painting from real life, not from his imagination, and I wouldn’t bet on the former. Besides, the time from crescent to crescent is about 30 days, so what’s the difference between late June and late july? And is the position of Venus (which I can’t identify among those bodies) crucial? But we’ll never know, of course. Still. . . . Here’s the painting:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is still harassing Andrzej:
Hili: How many times a day are you wrong?
Andrzej: Seven.
Hili: How do you know?
Me: I’m guessing.
In Polish:
Hili: Ile razy dziennie jesteś w błędzie?
Ja: Siedem.
Hili: Skąd wiesz?
Ja: Zgaduję.
*******************
Via Divy on FB: a cat and d*g sleeping together make a weird combination:
From Masih: a heartbreaking video of a woman blinded by the Iranian regime for protesting, still wanting to look good on stage in a meeting in Poland:
Just before stepping onto the stage, Farideh asked me a simple question: “Should I leave my hair down, or tie it back?”
I said let it go.. but my heart broke. She can no longer see her own reflection in the mirror. She still wants to look beautiful, to stand tall, and to be seen.
Farideh was blinded in both her eyes by the Islamic Republic during the uprising in 2022, in Sanandaj.
She’s a hero and that is why I invited her to join our delegation in Poland while I receive an award.
With Farideh joining us, our delegation now carries three women blinded under Islamic regimes. Fahimeh is from Afghanistan. Her husband blinded her, just for women’s rights activities. And Kosar was only 22 years old when she took to the street after the murder of Mahsa Jina Amini in the hand of morality Police, shouting for freedom. The Islamic Republic shot her in the face and took one of her eyes.
Yesterday we visited Auschwitz. I walked where millions of innocent people were murdered. We could not hold back our tears. And you know what broke my heart even more? The dictators and oppressors who commit crimes against humanity are the same ones who deny the Holocaust in our country.
The Islamic Republic denies the Holocaust, they even hold cartoon contests mocking it, while they are committing their own crimes against our people in the streets of Iran.
This is what evil does. It denies the crimes of others while committing its own. That is why we must never be silent. We must speak, we must document, we must bear witness, so the world cannot say we did not know.
And at the end, I want to thank Poland for opening your doors to these brave women, for standing with us, for giving us this platform so the voices of the blinded women of Iran and Afghanistan can be heard. Poland knows the price of freedom, and that is why freedom echoes here.
My dream is to take these bra women to university campuses in Europe in America to tell the truth what it means living under Islamic Stats.
Hear Our Stories!
Two from my feed. First, an infant with good taste in music.
You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a baby with no teeth, no job, and no idea who Barbara Ann is absolutely losing their mind to “Ba ba ba, ba Barbara Ann!” by The Beach Boys! 😂🎶 https://t.co/RIjA3vaOA5
This isn’t AI, but it’s close, and nearly as unethical:
Ever wondered if a wildlife photo was staged? "Photography game farms" use captive animals for awards and stock photos, misleading viewers. Learn more in this episode of the 'Conservation, Entangled' series by Izzy Sasada.Find all the episodes in Mongabay's YouTube!mongabay.cc/Conservation…
Music: Here’s an unreleased song written by Paul McCartney but never formally recorded by him or the Beatles. “Goodbye” was sung by Mary Hopkin in 1969, and you can see her version here. It was a hit for her, reaching #2 in the UK but blocked from the top spot by, ironically, the Beatles song “Get Back.” McCartney’s demo was later released in an Abbey Road boxed set.
This is a mono-to-stereo remix of Goodbye—a rare home demo recorded by Paul McCartney during the sessions for Abbey Road.
One particularly interesting aspect of McCartney’s demo is his vocal performance. Not only does he sing the lyrics from a female perspective, but he also performs the backing vocal phrases within the same breath and during the same take.
For this remix, those backing vocal elements were separated and placed in another channel—similar to how backing vocals would normally appear in a stereo recording. With a bit of processing, the result creates the illusion of two singers: one performing the lead and another providing backing vocals.
To add a little more flair, McCartney’s verse where he sings the “da-da” vocal phrases has been super-imposed during the final verse so that it accompanies the lyrics, giving the impression of an additional backing vocal.
The demo itself was recorded by McCartney at his Cavendish Avenue home, not far from EMI Studios, using his personal home recorder. The recording was intended as a guide for Mary Hopkin, who had recently been signed to Apple Records.
A mono version of this original demo was eventually released decades later on the Abbey Road Super Deluxe Edition box set in 2019, giving fans a rare glimpse into McCartney’s songwriting process during that period.
With the added percussion, the demo now takes on a minimalistic production feel reminiscent of Blackbird from The Beatles—the same album that also featured “Mother Nature’s Son.” Paul would continue exploring this stripped-down musical style after the breakup of the band on his first solo album, McCartney.
From Wikipedia:
To assist Hopkin in learning the song, McCartney recorded a solo demo at his home, 7 Cavendish Avenue, London, in early February 1969. This demo was later released on the Abbey Road: 50th Anniversary Edition in 2019. The song was arranged by Richard Hewson, who had also orchestrated “Those Were the Days,” and produced, along with its flip side, “Sparrow”, by Paul McCartney on 1 March 1969 at Morgan Studios in Willesden. To better match Hopkin’s voice, the key was raised from C major to E major. The recording was Apple’s first official double-A-side, and the first Apple record to feature a full-fledged picture sleeve.
Hopkins’s “Those Were the Days,” produced by McCartney in 1968, was a huge hit, reaching #1 in the UK and #2 in the U.S. I well remember groups (mostly of women, curiously) singing the song together in college. More from Wikipedia.
For the recording, Hopkin sang and performed acoustic guitar, while McCartney played bass guitar, an acoustic guitar introduction and solo, along with lap-slapping percussion and drums. Backing vocals, horns and strings, in Hewson’s arrangement, were overdubbed.[11] The session was filmed by Apple’s Tony Bramwell for a promotional clip. In the footage, Hopkin can be seen miming to the song inside the studio, combined with shots of her and McCartney in the control room listening to a playback.
The McCartney demo (again, Hopkins’s released version is here):
Welcome to Thursday, October 22, 2026 and National Nut Day. One of their more tasty incarnations is in pies, particularly pecan pie. Here are some of the pecan pies that competed in (and were on sale after) last year’s South Side Pie Challenge. I will be at this year’s competition on November 8, ready to buy four or five prizewinning slices.
Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration, U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter said.
Both Musk and President Trump have expressed anger at Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries in recent weeks, which the president blames for high energy prices. Last week, Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network, the people said, rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless.
Musk and Trump discussed the Starlink decision in a call soon after the slowdown became public, while the president was campaigning last week, two of the people said. One of the people also claimed Musk and Trump discussed the matter prior to the decision to throttle Starlink.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s public complaints—namely that Ukrainians could die if the unrestricted service wasn’t restored—led to widespread confusion about who ordered the slowdown, and to an informal investigation inside the White House.
, , ,Musk himself posted on X hours after the slowdown became public, “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS,” using the acronym for president of the United States. Trump told reporters Monday that he didn’t know who was responsible for the Starlink slowdown, “but I would like to find out.”
Some U.S. officials say that Musk acted unilaterally and that Trump didn’t specifically order any retribution against Ukraine. But a person familiar with the situation said Musk talked to multiple senior administration officials, including with Trump, before imposing the new speed cap, which Ukrainian officials said had allowed Russian missiles to evade their defenses.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration didn’t make any request for a throttling of Starlink. “There was no foreknowledge,” he told reporters during a visit to India.
Did Rubio lie? Who knows? But it’s clear that both Musk and the Trump administration worked together in a way that hurt Ukraine in its war with Russia. It’s reprehensible for the U.S. to help the Russian oligarchy merely to punish Ukraine for supposedly driving up the price of oil in the U.S.,
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal argues in a post called “Sooner or later,” that yes, Israel and the U.S. will attack Iran, but not before the midterms. But Iran might attack Israel between their elections (October 27) and the U.S. midterms (November 3), trying to get the U.S. involved so that the Republicans would lose seats in the House and Senate.
It’s Wednesday, October 21, and according to the Financial Times, Benjamin Netanyahu attempted what many suspected he might: start a war before the election. Three people familiar with the matter told the paper that Donald Trump shut down a multi-day campaign set for the weekend of October 10. “We will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the midterms,” Trump has declared, and he seems to be sticking by it.
This would undoutbly be a story about a rift if Trump hadn’t spent Sunday writing Netanyahu an endorsement that made the most ardent Bibi supporter blush. Add Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s visit to Israel on Monday, and it is clear that Washington and Jerusalem are in lockstep on everything but timing.
If Netanyahu did float an earlier date, I doubt he meant it in earnest. For a man with his ear firmly pressed to White House grounds, I doubt he would have missed Trump’s clear timing preferences. If it happened, Netanyahu was testing the waters, not drawing a line.
The plan the FT describes is roughly what many expect: a multi-day bombing campaign over a weekend, before markets reopen, hitting nuclear sites, the regime’s apparatus of repression and its energy infrastructure. Though not stated in the report, the plan afterward is likely to maintain the blockade and wait for the streets to fill with protesters.
The smooth plan obscures what will be far from a clean process. The fallout will send energy prices soaring, as the regime tries to take as much of the world’s energy capacity down with it. Meanwhile, whatever spring arrives to the streets would be far from bloodless.
But the enemy also gets a vote, and I doubt Iran is casting it for Trump. If Tehran takes his many statements at face value, or reads anything into the third aircraft carrier on its way, it knows an attack is coming and that it can do little to stop it. Waiting politely until every vote is counted and the markets close for the weekend buys it only a few more days of slow strangulation. The price of that reprieve is the initiative, and after twice seeing what Israel and the U.S. can do with it, Tehran knows exactly what waiting costs.
There is a week between Israel’s election and the midterms; there’s a good chance the Iranians won’t let it go to waste.
Yes, it will be messy, and yes, oil prices will rise. And no, I am not at all sure that the people will rise up and force regime change. But Iran has not yet gone to ground, and I am in favor of Israel and the U.S,. finishing the job.
The U.S. and Israeli militaries have developed specific plans for renewed strikes against Iran after the American midterm elections, according to U.S. officials and other people briefed on the deliberations.
As planning for a short but intensive operation progresses, the U.S. and Israeli militaries have stepped up exercises, flying planes over Iraq to practice strike maneuvers. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel this week to discuss new strikes, U.S. officials said.
The targets would likely include Iran’s energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile and drone arsenal. Some officials say one more big round of attacks could push Iran’s economy over the brink and force the country to make diplomatic concessions after nearly eight months of conflict.
Still, there are reasons to be skeptical that a renewed war would be any more successful than the first phase of intense U.S.-Israeli strikes between February and April. Those rounds of fighting drove up energy prices and inflation around the world, eroded security in the Middle East and severely strained the Pentagon’s supply of missile interceptors.
It is also far from certain Mr. Trump will approve fresh strikes. Repeatedly this year he has vetoed plans for a return to major combat operations, including this month when the U.S. and Israeli militaries were nearly ready to attack.
All of the officials interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss military planning.
Iranian officials have promised to retaliate this time by expanding their targets beyond commercial ships and energy infrastructure in the region to data centers and underwater internet cables.
They say the fighting will neither be quick nor limited.
Note that although this is a “news” piece, the NYT’s subheadline and text raise doubts about the success of the planned strike. This is not news but opinion, and of course the NYT wants the war over soon, with the U.S. sustaining a loss.
*Representative Ilhan Omar seems to have disappeared after the feds searched her house, also getting samples of her DNA (this site implies through “dumpster diving”) and taking her passport. The Times of India notes this:
Is Ilhan Omar missing from public view? The Minnesota Democratic congresswoman has reportedly not been seen in public since federal agents raided her Washington, D.C., residence last week as part of an investigation into alleged immigration fraud. According to Fox News Digital, Omar’s daughters have been spotted arriving at the property in recent days, while her husband, Tim Mynett, has intermittently appeared outside the home. Sources cited by the outlet said investigators are examining whether Omar or her father provided false information in her citizenship paperwork. Omar has strongly condemned the raid, accusing President Donald Trump’s administration of weaponising federal law enforcement against political opponents. Vice President JD Vance has denied that the investigation is politically motivated, saying it should be guided by the law and the facts.
Omar reappeared yesterday riding in a car, promising to reappear and asking for campaign money. (She doesn’t need it; her reelection is a sure thing.) Click on the screenshot to go to her Instagram post:
I’ve said that if the whole case is about Omar or her father lying about her age (by one year) to get her American citizenship, it’s not only making a molehill into a mountain, but it’s governmental persecution right before an election—something traditionally avoided. Alan Dershowitz, someone not widely admired, says that Omar seems to be in deep trouble, though (h/t: Jay). Have a listen even if you don’t like Dershowitz.
Where is Rep Ilhan Omar? She used to be one of the Democrats loudest voices and most effective fighter — and now 2 weeks before the midterms she is missing in action. That may say quite a lot about the scope of the fraud case against her. https://t.co/B0ApuF0bIZ
*The common wisdom of how magician and escape-artist Harry Houdini died at 52 is that he was subject to a “sucker punch” to the stomach from a visiting student who wanted to test Houdini’s claim that his muscles could withstand any blow. And, so the story goes, that blow either caused appendicitis or aggravated an existing case of appendicitis, causing Houdini’s death nine days later. Now, says the NYT, a urologist went back, looked at the data, and has another theory, one involving Chinese-American food. After running through a panoply of existing and probably incorrect theories, the urologist says this:
. . . . Many consider it more likely that the student’s punches simply brought attention to an existing case of advanced appendicitis.
Now Larrian Gillespie, a 77-year-old retired urologic surgeon, has deployed the skills of a forensic medical investigator to challenge the conventional wisdom and clear Whitehead’s name.
“This isn’t just a story about Houdini’s death,” Gillespie writes in “Houdini: The Man Who Died Twice,” released in July. “It’s a story about how truth disappears — and why, sometimes, it takes science to bring it back.”
. . . When she reviewed Houdini’s city death certificate, she thought it seemed off. Information was scratched out. Names were inaccurate. It was signed by a physician who had not been present when Houdini died.
“I knew immediately things were wrong, that this was not the way a death certificate is normally filled out,” she said in an interview. Gillespie was intrigued, even though she “had no interest in Houdini whatsoever,” she said, adding, “I’m not into magic.”
. . .To research Houdini’s death, Gillespie consulted 1920s medical textbooks, affidavits, death certificates, letters and newspaper accounts. She interviewed experts, medical practitioners and a Houdini relative.
Gillespie said that, in addition to the Michigan death certificate, there had been two others, one filed in Detroit and another with Houdini’s insurance company. The city one was later proven to be invalid by the head of fraud at the Michigan State Vital Statistics Department, Gillespie said, because of several indications of tampering.
Gillespie said she found a paper trail of misstatements and actions by more than a dozen people close to Houdini, including relatives and employees. Among them, she asserts, several helped to cover up of the date he died, in part to make it appear to be Oct. 31 — “we remember Houdini because of the association with Halloween,” she said.
. . .The accepted account is that Houdini died when appendicitis, aggravated by the blow, led to Streptococcus pyogenes peritonitis, a form of infection.
Gillespie argues that the appendicitis was not the primary cause, and that the punch was not a critical factor. Rather, she argues, the culprit was a bowel obstruction, brought on by a fibrous mass of chop suey that Houdini ate on Oct. 28.
The obstruction led to emergency surgery on Oct. 29 in the late afternoon, Gillespie argues, an enterotomy to evacuate the bowel. But it was too late; according to the author, septic shock set in, Houdini’s fever spiked to 105 and his rapid breathing led to muscle spasms and unconsciousness.
“You don’t expect someone to survive 24 hours in this condition,” she said, “and so he doesn’t.”
But the bowel obstruction was never mentioned in any of the death records.
Houdini was operated on a second time on Oct. 30. Gillespie’s research into the death certificates indicates that the magician died that afternoon at 1:26 p.m., not on the following day at 1:30 p.m. But the documents were manipulated to change the date.
“Not identifying on the death certificate the second surgery is the critical tip-off,” she said. “That’s the smoking gun. Why was that not mentioned?”x
. . .The accepted account is that Houdini died when appendicitis, aggravated by the blow, led to Streptococcus pyogenes peritonitis, a form of infection.
Gillespie argues that the appendicitis was not the primary cause, and that the punch was not a critical factor. Rather, she argues, the culprit was a bowel obstruction, brought on by a fibrous mass of chop suey that Houdini ate on Oct. 28.
The obstruction led to emergency surgery on Oct. 29 in the late afternoon, Gillespie argues, an enterotomy to evacuate the bowel. But it was too late; according to the author, septic shock set in, Houdini’s fever spiked to 105 and his rapid breathing led to muscle spasms and unconsciousness.
“You don’t expect someone to survive 24 hours in this condition,” she said, “and so he doesn’t.”
But the bowel obstruction was never mentioned in any of the death records.
Houdini was operated on a second time on Oct. 30. Gillespie’s research into the death certificates indicates that the magician died that afternoon at 1:26 p.m., not on the following day at 1:30 p.m. But the documents were manipulated to change the date.
“Not identifying on the death certificate the second surgery is the critical tip-off,” she said. “That’s the smoking gun. Why was that not mentioned?”
Death from chop suey!? I’m not surprised. But really, the truth is far less romantic than often described (including the claim that, contrary to Gillespie’s research, Houdini died on Halloween). It does, however, exculpate, Joscelyn Gordon Whitehead, the McGill University student who supposedly struck Houdini in the stomach.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is trying to be profound:
Andrzej: What can you see from this rooftop?
Hili: A wider horizon.
In Polish:
Ja: Co widać z tego dachu?
Hili: Szerszy horyzont.
*******************
From Meow Incorporated. I knew a guy who had a white cat and a black cat, and named them Null and Void respectively (true!):
This tweet from Masih can’t be embedded, but I wanted to put it up anyway, and apologize if it upsets you. But these are public spectacles, and Iranian children are sometimes forced to watch them. The hanging is done on cranes that are slowly raised, so I suspect that the victims (protestors in this case) are slowly strangled rather than the faster process of “long drop” hanging that snaps the neck. Click the screenshot to go to the tweet:
Like me, Larry is peeved at hos Trump & Co. is treating Ukraine:
The stated position of the Trump administration is that the President of Russia is a humanitarian and that the President of Ukraine should be removed from office.
The American electorate have a chance to make their feelings about this known in less than two weeks.
From Jeff Maurer. Sadly, I don’t subscribe so can’t read the whole thing:
“If AOC is trying to memory hole past wokeness like it’s an ill-advised Mumford & Sons phase, she’s doing it in a weird way. Since her remark, she has repeated virtually every trope that most people now agree was, indeed, crazy with four ‘y’s.” (link in next tweet) https://t.co/rtNTBO1vnN
The link to the above is here, and below is an excerpt:
AOC’s recent comment that “woke 1 was crazyyyy” rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. The problem, as I see it, is that she wasn’t saying “woke was crazy and we should not repeat those mistakes,” but rather “woke was crazy and you can’t hold me responsible for what happened way back five years ago.” At least, that’s how it seemed — I’m deducing meaning from the timbre of her laugh and the number of “y”s in “crazyyyy”.
But if AOC is trying to memory hole past wokeness like it’s an ill-advised Mumford & Sons phase, she’s doing it in a weird way. Since her remark — which was in August — she has repeated virtually every trope that most people now agree was, indeed, crazy with four “y”s. She’s like an ex-alcoholic informing us that she’s a reformed and sober person now while dropping the whiskey shot into an Irish car bomb.
Perhaps the most memorable woke 1 trope was the upgrading of institutional violence against Black people from “problem” to “the defining aspect of American society”. That habit was why at woke 1’s peak, large numbers of left-leaning people overestimated police shootings of Black people by several orders of magnitude. Last month, AOC recreated this logical flaw by tweeting this misrepresentation in response to an initiative by fellow Squad member Ayanna Pressley. . . .
Two from my feed. The first is funny, though a lot of kids don’t seem to have any idea what their dads do:
These kids were asked what their daddies do for a living, and their answers were absolutely hilarious and completely unexpected! 🤣🤣 https://t.co/zcGAVoNxet
I had no idea. It’s a good thing I don’t have a cat or I’d test it:
Did you know?
Cats are far more sensitive to sounds than humans, and they can hear frequencies that we cannot. So, when your cat hears the teeth of the comb being flicked around, it irritates them enough to make them gag. https://t.co/ybV7qHCMB9
Two from Doc Cobb. Matthew didn’t know about beetles mimicking bees, and neither did I:
An insect from a different tribe altogether that's pretending to be something it isn't. Eurasian Bee Beetle, as the name suggests, is rocking a bumblebee look this season to deter bird predators that don't fancy dealing with a sting in the tail.
This was a real name; check the link. (He was called “Formalin” for short.)
My son very kindly sent me a link to the Wikipedia page for this gentleman, Preserved Fish. “There were at least ten other Fish family members with the Quaker given name Preserved, whose lineages are often confused.”en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preserv…
Today’s song is “Taxi,” written and performed by Harry Chapin, who recorded it in 1972. (Chapin died at only 38 in a car crash on Long Island.) It’s a sad song about a weed-smoking cab driver who picks up an old girlfriend who, in contrast to the driver’s meager life, has become wealthy. They recognize each other and make plans to meet again, which are futile.
A lot of it is semi-autobiographical: Chapin got a cab license, but never drove a cab, and he did have an on-and-off romance with a woman who dreamed of becoming an actress (see Chapin’s intro below).
From Wikipedia:
Chapin debuted the song on NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, which prompted calls and telegrams from viewers requesting that Chapin return to the show. It was the first time in the show’s history that host Johnny Carson brought a performer back the very next night for an encore performance. “Taxi” helped to establish Chapin’s musical style and emerged as his early signature song, with Chapin often associated with taxi-related imagery.
. . .Chapin said, “there’s not a single line that tells how the guy or the girl felt. It’s a very cinematic technique. But it’s also a very uneconomical technique. That’s why my songs are so long. I literally put you in that cab and let you experience. It’s a more involving form of music than sitting and hearing somebody sing ‘I’m lonely’.
Record World called it “spell-binding,” saying that Chapin “sets up, develops and resolves a situation in 6:40. A very short 6:40.” Billboard called it “a strong piece of folk ballad material while lengthy, should garner hefty top 40 and FM play with sales and chart action to follow.”
The falsetto part is performed by John Wallace, one of Chapin’s backup musicians (3:38 in the video below). The version below is live; the original recording is here and the lyrics are here. Before the song starts at 1:08, Chapin is interviewed by John Denver and explains what factual basis there is for the song. The live performance ends at 7:35 and is followed by the recorded version.
It’s a beautiful but bittersweet song about romances that fade away, and it reminds me a bit of the Eagles song, “Lyin’ Eyes”.
Since I had my first disastrous cataract operation on Sept. 22 (not the doctor’s fault!), I haven’t been able to read a book on paper. I can read the computer if I close my right eye because the right and left have different middle-distance prescriptions. But not reading a real book is depressing, and I’ve basically been walking around with my right eye shut for a month.
This situation is of course intolerable, so I asked the ophthalmologist to give me a prescription for interim glasses until I get the left eye done. (Believe me, after my ocular trauma, I’m not in a rush!). Although he cautioned me that it may not work well, I was willing to take the chance rather than walk around like Popeye, unable to read anything but a can of spinach. Today I went to Costco to get those glasses, which should be ready in a week or ten days. Costco is, I’ve found, the best and most reasonable place to get specs, and the service is fantastic.
But Costco also has other great stuff, and while I was there I picked up, besides their hot dog special (footlong dog and endless fountain drink for $1.50), the Big Three items I always get there (the pie is seasonal).
From left to right: The famous Costco rotisserie chicken. Three pounds of delectable pullet, and about five bucks. This will last me at least four meals.
Extra virgin olive oil, single origin, harvested this spring. About $16. Costco’s “extra virgin” is reliable, not so with the oil you get from other places, which often fails laboratory tests for virginity.
And, since it’s the season, the 58-ounce Costco Pumpkin Pie, which will last about a week and a half kept in the fridge. I also have some vanilla ice cream to go with it–the making of a perfect breakfast. It’s huge, better than any commercial pumpkin pie I’ve had, and, for nearly four pounds of pie, it’s less than six bucks.
You can’t go into a Costco without getting a chicken and a pie at the very least. If I can’t read a book for a week, at least I can eat.
