Welcome to another “work” week: it’s Monday, October 26, 2026, and National Pumpkin Day.

Pumpkins are not all of one species, though they’re all in the winter squash genus Cucurbita. This photo from Wikipedia shows two species: it’s labeled, “A variety of pumpkin cultivars. The central and rightmost orange fruits are Cucurbita pepo, all others are Cucurbita maxima.”

It’s also National Mincemeat Day, National Mule Day, and Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day.  Here’s one I had—yes, in Texas— in 2005; my hand is for scale to show the size of this behemoth. Note the side of white bread and the mason jar of sweet tea:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Tomorrow is a big and consequential election in Israel.  But don’t worry: the New York Times tells us what we need to know about it.

What happens on election day?

Election Day is a public holiday in Israel, with schools, government offices and many public services closed. In most of the country, polls are scheduled to open at 7 a.m. local time and close at 10 p.m., with hours slightly reduced in some small communities, hospitals and prisons.

Voters are assigned to a polling station near their registered residence and may vote only at that location. There are exceptions for soldiers, people with limited mobility and prisoners, among others.

All Israeli citizens 18 or older who are registered to vote may do so with a valid identification, such as a passport, driver’s license or Israeli identification card. Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up about 20 percent of the population, could play a significant role in the vote, depending on turnout.

What’s on the ballot?

Israel’s electoral system uses nationwide proportional representation. Elections to the Knesset, Israel’s 120-seat Parliament, are held at least every four years, though they can happen more often. In 2022, Israeli elections were held for the fifth time in three years after the Knesset dissolved itself.

Israelis cast a single ballot for a list of candidates affiliated with a party. A party receives a number of seats proportional to the national vote it got. To gain a place in Parliament, however, a party or must receive at least 3.25 percent of the valid votes. About 10 parties are expected to clear that electoral threshold.

How is a government formed?

No single party has ever won a majority of votes, which means parties must form factions and party leaders try to forge a governing coalition of at least 61 lawmakers.

Within seven days of the official election results being announced, Israel’s president, who plays a mostly symbolic role, meets with elected representatives of the parliamentary factions.

Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, will assign a member of the Knesset — usually the leader of the party or faction that has won the most seats — to form a government. That candidate then has 28 days to negotiate with other factions and forge alliances to form a government, which must be approved by the Knesset in a vote of confidence. That person can request a 14-day extension to the deadline.

If this fails, they keep trying, and if failure continues, they have new elections. More:

Who are the top contenders?

Different polls in the week ahead of the election have suggested different outcomes, which is “very problematic for political scientists,” said Assaf Shapira, who heads political research at the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Israel.

Many Israelis consider this election to be a referendum on Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership. Mr. Netanyahu and his Likud party, and their hard-right allies, are in a close race with Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff who heads the opposition coalition led by the Yashar party and has emerged as Mr. Netanyahu’s top challenger.

I have no predictions here, as I don’t follow Israel’s internal politics that closely. My only prediction is that whoever becomes Prime Minister, it won’t reduce the world’s hatred of Israel. Israel-dissing based on Netanyahu is, in my view, largely bogus: a mask for antisemitism (= anti-Zionism). Netanyahu despite his flaws, is simply an excuse.

*WaPo foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius dilates on whether the U.S. has to gain by restarting our war with Iran, and what tactics are more likely to win if we do fight?

The U.S.-Iran conflict has been going on for so long that it sometimes seems stuck on replay. But the chapter that began in February changed the Middle East battlespace, likely forever. Deterrence failed. U.S. military bases in the region were ravaged. So were Gulf nations that had relied on American power. The old regime in Tehran was decapitated, but it was replaced by cocky hard-liners who seem convinced they can outlast a war-weary superpower.

What’s next? For now, the region is holding its breath, awaiting the outcome of Israel’s election Tuesday and the U.S. midterms a week later. But U.S. forces are surging into the region, and commanders are said to be preparing military options for President Donald Trump. One ominous sign is that the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh ordered some employees to leave, and other U.S. embassies in the region are reportedly making similar moves.

. . . Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still wants regime change. “There is only one way to remove this threat once and for all: overthrow the regime in Iran,” he said Wednesday. Trump hasn’t gone that far, but he said Sunday that “we will soon finish the job” if Iran’s leaders don’t “change their ways, rapidly.”

. . . After that failure [the “memorandum of understandibng], Trump settled on a policy that combined armed escorts of Western oil tankers through the strait with economic strangulation of Iran. That combination, to me, has been the president’s most successful approach to date. But it hasn’t guaranteed his red line: Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. So, after nearly eight months of war, Trump is weighing whether to resume combat.

. , .If America goes back to war, how will it organize its forces? That’s the second question planners need to assess.

. . . “This is the moment to rethink the shape of the American military presence in the Middle East,” argued Richard Fontaine, who heads the Center for a New American Security. “The archipelago of U.S. military bases has been shown to be vulnerable.”

For now, with the bases damaged and vulnerable to drones and missiles, Centcom will have to rely on stand-off forces at sea and distant air bases. That may be a better architecture for the future, too. These forces can be surged into the Middle East when there’s a crisis, and they can spend most of their time in Asia, to which successive administrations have tried to “pivot.”

But H.R. McMaster, a veteran of two decades of war in the Middle East and former national security adviser, cautions that “you can’t accomplish political goals with stand-off forces.” To reassure local partners, Centcom will need layered air defenses and some hardened underground military bases. The Middle East isn’t about to disappear, and the long-term need to contain Iran will probably continue.

The Iran war is unpopular because it lacks a coherent endgame. Rolling the dice once again on regime change, as Netanyahu urges, isn’t a wise bet.

*In a news piece, the WSJ describes how AOC, ridden with ambition but typed as a “progressive”, has tried to broaden her outlook by becoming more centrist, perhaps hoping to run for President (Ceiling Cat help us) in 2028.

n the eight years since [she was elected to the House], Ocasio-Cortez has been the one to shift tactics—in ways that would have once seemed unthinkable for the firebrand leftist. The result is a political transformation reflecting real-world lessons about how to win in Washington.

The 37-year-old lawmaker has tempered her combative style, cozied up to establishment Democrats and distanced herself from some extreme positions pushed by other Democratic socialists—such as abolishing prisons and the police.

Whether or not Ocasio-Cortez decides to run for president in 2028—a much-talked-about possibility she says she is considering—she has tried to broaden the progressive base to include voters whose views don’t traditionally align with the far left, including Black voters and segments of MAHA.

. . .Yet her evolving strategy risks alienating progressive and far-left voters she needs in any bid for higher office, whether the Senate or the White House.

Ocasio-Cortez’s more inclusive approach, viewed skeptically by colleagues wary of her Democratic socialist credentials, coincides with a growing embrace of a populist economic agenda among Americans in both parties, according to a Wall Street Journal poll in September.

“I personally don’t think that we need to water down on our policy and our agenda and our principles,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview. “But I do think that we can expand and evolve in the way that we talk to people, and the way that we include people and shift away from a culture of exclusion.”

To that end, Ocasio-Cortez has sought to become a team player. In the past, she backed primary challenges to Democratic incumbents. She now contributes to the party committee that boosts campaigns of vulnerable lawmakers, including those who in the past have criticized her far-left ideas. Ahead of the midterm election, she has so far brought in more than $37 million, making her a top Democratic fundraiser, Federal Election Commission filings show.

I am wary of any candidate who changes their philosophy just to get elected: it’s as if they’re duping the public and have a real agenda that is secret. In addition, although she is savvy, particularly with respect to social media, I don’t think AOC is particularly smart, accomplished in terms of having done much in Congress, or, especially, experienced. She attracts media attention, and that’s what she’s good at. In my book, that’s not enough to be a Senator, much less President.

*After I recently wrote about the downside of “land acknowledgments,” reader Cate sent me a post about them that I’d missed. It’s at the Substack site of economist and writer Noah Smith, and is called “No, you are not on indigenous land,” with the subtitle, “Pieces of territory belong to institutions, not to racial groups.” It makes a number of good arguments against LAs, and is good further reading as well as more corrective to John McWhorter’s slanted argument.

If you go back far enough in time, of course, at some point this is no longer true. Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?

I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups. In general, the first people who arrived on a piece of land did so in dribs and drabs, in small family units and tiny micro-tribes that met and married and fought and mixed and formed into larger identities and ethnicities and tribes over long periods of time. In most cases, the ethnic groups who now claim pieces of land as their own did not even exist when the first humans discovered or settled that land.

. . .But even in those cases when it did exist, why should land ownership be assigned to a race at all? Why should my notional blood relation to the discoverers or the conquerors of a piece of land determine whether I can truly belong on that land? Why should a section of the map be the land of the Franks, or the Russkiy, or the Cherokee, or the Han, or the Ramaytush Ohlone, or the Britons? Of course you can assign land ownership this way — it’s called an “ethnostate”. But if you do this, it means that the descendants of immigrants can never truly be full and equal citizens of the land they were born in. If Britain is defined as the land of the Britons, then a Han person whose great-great-great-grandparents moved there from China will exist as a contingent citizen — a perpetual foreigner whose continued life in the land of their birth exists only upon the sufferance of a different race. This is the price of ethnonationalism.

The downsides of ethnonationalism have been exhaustively laid out in the decades since World War 2, and I’m not going to reiterate them all now. Suffice it to say that most nations of the world have moved away from ethnonationalism — there is an informal sense in which some people still think of France as the land of the Franks and so on, but almost all nations define citizenship and belonging through institutions rather than race. Israel, one of the few exceptions to this rule, receives a large amount of international criticism for defining itself as an ethnostate.

And yet these days I am subjected to a constant stream of ethnonationalist claims from progressives in the country of my birth. Here’s one from the ACLU of Nebraska:

. . . Once the logic of land acknowledgements and “decolonization” is followed, it leads very quickly to some very dark futures. Assigning each person a homeland based on their ethnic ancestry, and then declaring that that homeland is the only place they or their descendants can ever truly belong, would not be an act of justice; it would be a global nightmare made real, surpassing even the horrors of previous centuries.

And in practice, any attempt to create such a world would inevitably lead to violent resistance by the groups in danger of being “decolonized”. The orderly world of nation-states would dissolve into a chaotic free-for-all of competing irredentist claims, backed by genocides and expulsions. Ten thousand October 7th-style attacks would be followed by ten thousand Gaza-style wars.

I do not want that, and you should not want it either. The American people certainly don’t want it, and the insistence of progressives on intoning land acknowledgements has probably tanked the movement’s cachet in wider society. I agree with Wayne Burkett when he says that land acknowledgements have probably hurt the Democratic party:

There’s a lot more to the longish piece, but I think most readers already want little to do with land acknowledgments.

*Over at the Free Press, NYU law professor Max Raskin ponders whether the rise of AI, which produces text even professional writers can’t distinguish from human writing, spells the death of the latter.

I spoke to George Will, one of this country’s most prominent columnists, who simply “rejects the premise” that AI will ever write better than the best human prose stylists. “If you want AI to mimic Hemingway, that’s easy. To mimic George Eliot is not easy,” Will said.

Other writers and editors I’ve spoken with over the past month aren’t as sure. What they’re quietly asking one another is whether they’ve already written their last essay, the way you may have watched your last DVD or mailed your last letter without knowing it. Why would anyone pay to read them when a machine can mimic their voice, faster and cheaper?

. . .Most people initially reject this premise because they think they can tell whether an essay was written by a human. Enough data and anecdotes are pouring in to show this confidence is an illusion. In a study published in August by Villanova University researchers, 1,682 adults read short fiction written either by AI or human beings. They not only preferred the stories written by AI, but in follow-up experiments, they did no better than a coin flip in determining authenticity.

The educated literary elite performed no better—in a separate study, researchers at Columbia, Michigan, and Stony Brook universities had readers with MFAs try to distinguish between passages written by AI and passages written by writers with MFAs. When the models were trained on a writer’s body of work, the MFA readers preferred the AI-generated passages to MFA-generated passages, and the best detection tools only flagged the AI text 3 percent of the time.

You can take your own test in the article (if you can access it), Raskin then asks that what follows if we admit that AI can write better than humans. After all, computers can beat all human chess players, but chess hasn’t disappeared. Will writers? There’s a way to say “no”:

Take two of the most famous political writers of the 20th century: William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal. It is impossible to think of them just as writers. They had distinct public personas that they cultivated through television, public appearances, and profiles. We are still watching documentaries about them. Their writing was always going to be secondary to developing and promoting their personas. Even if a machine is able to generate prose as well as Buckley or Vidal, it can’t replace the social capital they accumulated to get them to where they were. They traded favors with friends, schmoozed opinion makers, and knocked their tribe’s enemies. Would anyone really have cared if someone found out they had a team of ghostwriters working for them?

. . .So what matters for publishing houses is not so much how the writing got done; it is the social or political capital writers have earned. Writers write stories that flatter their friends, advance their ideals, and attack their enemies. And fiction does not escape these considerations. As for the news business, it has always involved commercial decisions. Reporters aren’t going away—newsmakers don’t want to trade their valuable scoops with robots. But as for columnists, part of that commercial calculation is that tribal affiliation and status matter. We like our favorite writers and probably won’t feel the same way about our favorite robots. A perfect case is chess. Everyone knows that Magnus Carlsen can be beat by the processing power in an old iPhone. That doesn’t stop people from both playing and watching him.

Readers will still want a face to a name: George Will isn’t going anywhere. The writer of the future, much like the writer of today, will be much more a persona and brand than a craftsman or laborer.

I’m not sure I buy this argument, but it does have some force. What do you think?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a question:

Hili: Do you know the answer to my question?
Andrzej: Probably not, but we can try.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy znasz odpowiedź na moje pytanie?
Ja: Prawdopodobnie nie, ale możemy spróbować.

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

From Meow Incorporated:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices; note the cattle horns on the hood:

From Cheryl’s Amazingly Positive, No Politics Allowed, Interesting People Group:

This woman, who’s in Poland with Masih, had a hard row to hoe, but she’s brave. Look at the story of the monster she was married to in Iran:

She was born in Iran and built her life in Afghanistan a woman’s rights activist with a voice that frightened the men around her.

So her ex-husband threw acid on her face.

In the hospital, after the surgeries, she sat with her head shaved doctors had taken skin from her scalp to rebuild her face. She was still bandaged, still bleeding, still healing.

But her son was not by her side. He was living with his father. And his father set the condition: if you want to talk to your son, you will do it on a video call so I can see what you’ve become.

She accepted. She needed to hear her child’s voice.

On that call, her ex-husband looked at her destroyed face and smiled. He said: “Look at you. You’ve become like a monster. You’ll never dare go out in public again people will be terrified when they see you. I dare you. I dare you to go out and talk about women’s rights.”

He thought he had broken her. He thought that face was the end of her.

He was wrong.

Every scar on her face became a sentence in her speech. They took her beauty so she took his fear and turned it into courage. Today she walks in public with her head high, and she speaks about women’s rights louder than ever.

He wanted to bury her in shame. Instead, he gave the world a witness.

That is why I invited her to our Freedom gala in Poland to dedicate to her the Medal of Freedom I received. Because she is the symbol of resilience itself: the symbol of every woman whose face was burned but whose voice could not be silenced.

Thank you, Poland for opening your doors, for giving visas to my delegation of women from Iran, Afghanistan, and Cameroon.

We are about to start a global women’s rights movement and we will go together, all of us, to the German Parliament very soon.

This time, I invited 10 women. In Berlin, we will invite more dissidents.
@FahimaSarfaraz

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) October 25, 2026

From Luana; “women are the first victims of immigration”:

French women are speaking up 🔥

“It’s an immigration crisis. They come to France only for economic advantage. They don’t want to become French. They are not French in their spirits.

For women it is very complicated.

There is a lot of sexual harassment by migrants, a lot of rapes by migrants. And it’s not only in Paris, it’s in all the big cities of France. Where you have migrants, you have problems.

Women are the first victims. And the government don’t want to speak about that. It’s taboo.

It’s very difficult to get migrants to go back to their country, because their country don’t want them. We have a lot of left-wing liberals. For them migrants are victims all the time.

So it’s very unjust, because there are a lot of poor French people too.

You’re a racist if you just say the truth. Open your eyes and you can see what we say. This is the truth.”

Refreshing and necessary. This pattern is repeated across Western Europe.

Action is long overdue. https://t.co/oyxSmJEkKs

— Erik Dale 🇳🇴 (@EuroDale) October 25, 2026

From Malcolm; a compendium of cute, awkward, or funny cats. Some might well be fake:

cute funny cats https://t.co/cImg7w2UVT

— Kitty Cat Empire (@KittyCatEmpire) October 17, 2026

From the Number Ten Cat, making a funny:

Was the bird dead?

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) October 24, 2026

Two from my feed. First, watch the four-minute video on how squirrels live in boxes built by a nice man:

This guy built over 1,000 homes for squirrels and fitted some of them with cameras to see how they live.

[📹 squirrel_boxes] https://t.co/yXerBj5RF7

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 24, 2026

A musical tribute to performative hatred, shared properly:

🎶 “I Think I Just Freed Palestine” 🎶
A heartfelt musical tribute to performative activism, where the slogans are loud, the Jew-hate is palpable, knowledge is optional, and the results are nonexistent.
Please support my original work by sharing directly from my post. https://t.co/MSZ403OLOe

— David Lange (@Israellycool) October 25, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz (note the star). She was seven years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 26, 2026

And one from Doctor Cobb: look at the size of this behemoth!

This footage shot by a tourist aboard Jacksonville Boat Charters near Amelia Island, Florida shows a leatherback sea turtle (Dermochelys coriacea).At 2000 lbs (900 kg) & 7 ft long (2.1 m) they're the largest turtles & indeed one of the heaviest extant reptiles on Earth.Here There Be Monsters!

— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2026-10-24T17:06:55.051Z

Welcome to Sunday, October 25: the Sabbath for goyische cats and National Greasy Foods Day. Below you see your choice of meat in the back room of Black’s BBQ in Lockhart, Texas, the finest establishment of its kind in America.  Starting at the left and going clockwise: brisket, ribs, link sausage, and giant beef ribs. This food has plenty of Vitamin G (grease). You tell the guy what and how much you want, and he hacks off the requisite portion.  You get sides before you get to this room.

Many will be repelled by this photo. Those people will, on average, live longer than I, but I will be the one who’s eaten like a king. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now.”

It’s also National Tight Ends Day (it’s football season!), World Pizza Makers Day, and World Pasta Day. Here’s the famous white clam pizza served at Frank Pepe’s in New Haven, Connecticut. I requested to be taken here after I gave a talk at Wesleyan, and my friend Fred Cohan (a prof at WU) took me.

Pepe’s white clam pizza is perhaps America’s most famous pie (as I said, I eat like a king), and here’s a short video about the place. As you’ll hear and see, the clam pie is made with freshly shucked clams, and sometimes they run out.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 25 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*As expected, the riots that started in France have spread to other countries in Europe this weekend: 

While protests in France have claimed most international attention, large demonstrations also rocked many European cities Saturday from Milan to Rome to Madrid, Lisbon and Tirana.

In Milan, huge crowds of mostly young people gathered as night fell, chanting insults to Meloni and holding aloft banners such as “No to lies of the state.”

. . . . A separate anti-war march took place in central Rome. Organizers sought to distance themselves from potential unrest, urging participants to keep their faces uncovered and hands visible.

But it was these marchers who briefly clashed with police near the Piazza della Repubblica, even as organizers were trying to hold the crowd back using batons and tear gas. In the end, the protesters pulled back when a water cannon was turned on. They retreated to a location about half a kilometer (mile) away.

. . . In Albania’s capital Tirana, riot police used water cannons on large groups of protesters, some of whom set government buildings on fire and threw projectiles at police. Authorities said 2,500 officers patrolled the streets Saturday.

Looting, however, was far less frequent than it was last weekend. Stay tuned.

*To her credit, Melania Trump has apparently brokered a cease-fire deal that will allow people in a Ukrainian city captured by Russians (and cut off from the rest of Ukraine)  to move back to Ukraine as a whole (article archived here).

Melania Trump, the first lady, said on Friday that she had brokered a cease-fire between Russian and Ukrainian forces in Oleshky, a southern Ukrainian city that is occupied by Russia and whose citizens are cut off from food and medical aid.

Mrs. Trump said the cease-fire would allow residents of the frontline city to leave “through a designated safe passageway.” The city, in the Kherson region of Ukraine, has been occupied by Russia since it began its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

“It was abundantly clear that without my intervention, the possibility to bring humanitarian aid into the city and to evacuate the elderly would be impossible,” she said in a statement, adding that the “localized cease-fire” would begin on Thursday. Pope Leo XIV also lobbied Vladimir V. Putin for a cease-fire in recent days, calling the Russian leader from his hospital bed after undergoing lung surgery.

David Arakhamia, the head of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s party faction in the Ukrainian Parliament, said in a statement that the cease-fire would begin in “the near future,” with the goal to establish “permanent humanitarian corridors for the safe evacuation of civilians and the delivery of aid.” He offered “sincere gratitude” to Mrs. Trump and the pope.

Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, said in statement that the Russian military was “working on agreeing upon the timing of a cease-fire in that area to enable this humanitarian mission.” The first lady “made a significant contribution” to the negotiations, he said.

The unusual announcement by the first lady, who has tried to position herself as an intermediary between the warring sides, underscored the Trump administration’s freewheeling and unorthodox approach to diplomacy. It came as Ukraine and U.S. allies try to head off a turn toward Russia by President Trump that they fear could alter the course of the war.

In recent days, Mr. Trump has defended Mr. Putin and demanded that the Ukrainians replace Mr. Zelensky. He has also arranged to purchase diesel from Moscow and insisted to reporters that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” even as Russia attacks civilians with missiles and drones.

Earlier this week, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, called Mr. Putin a “humanitarian” for releasing an American held for more than four years on what the State Department called fabricated charges.

*Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for Ohio’s governorship, has ignited a controversy because he put out a ludicrous and insulting attack against his Democratic opponent Amy Acton, highlighting her estranged mother’s calling her a “liar.”  As the NYT revealed earlier, the estrangement resulted from Acton having accused her stepfather of sexual molestation, and thus being removed from the home. Now Ramaswamy is using the “liar” characterization as fodder for his candidacy.

In the ad, Donna Arthur, Dr. Acton’s mother, says, “Don’t let her become your governor. If you think she’ll make your life better, you’re fooling yourself.”

Now the ad itself has divided Republicans, as it’s such a low blow (Ramaswamy spent $4 million to air it, and is still airing it).

The most explosive advertisement of the midterm elections has split Republicans and again posed the question of what is fair game for campaign attacks in American politics.

In the days since the leak of the ad from Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, many fellow G.O.P. politicians have denounced, disavowed or distanced themselves from the spot. Yet President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have defended the ad, a remarkably ruthless one even by the standards of modern political campaigns.

The ad features the estranged mother of Mr. Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, calling her daughter a liar and urging Ohioans not to vote for her. Ms. Acton has said that she has not spoken to her mother since she was 12 years old, when she was removed from her mother’s custody after her stepfather was arrested and charged with raping her.

The outrage over the ad’s dark backstory has left Mr. Ramaswamy, a billionaire entrepreneur who exemplifies the anything-goes, attack-at-all-costs ethos of Trump-era politics, at the center of a self-created political firestorm.

The Republican disagreements over the ad show that major figures in the party can still become divided over the rules and red lines of political warfare in the Trump era. And they set the stage for high drama on Election Day in Ohio, a state that has trended solidly Republican in recent years but now has outsize importance in the midterms. The overarching political question is: Will a potential backlash to Mr. Ramaswamy hurt other Ohio Republicans in competitive races, especially Senator Jon Husted, who is trying to fend off a well-known Democratic rival in a vital race for Senate control?

There is now a degree of unpredictability in the state. Campaigns in both parties do not know how voters will react.

Crikey! I was going to say that at least some Republicans have ethical standards about campaigns, but it looks as if they’re mainly worried about how this hamhanded ad will affect their candidate. Their concern appears to be more on the “did it work?” side than  the”is it underhanded?: side.   I couldn’t find the full ad on YouTube, but here’s a news report that shows part of it.

*The WaPo describes what seems like an out-and-out medical scam, with patients being charged high “hospital fees” for procedures done in doctors’ offices—without ever having set foot in a hospital (article is archived here).

As U.S. hospitals buy up a growing portion of the doctors’ offices in the United States, patients are paying a steep cost: Routine medical care is often being billed at the much more expensive rate for hospital care, instead of the lower cost for procedures in a doctor’s office.

The higher rates along with hospital “facility fees” — tacked on even when patients never step into a hospital — can lead to bills 10 times costlier or more, according to research on patients’ bills.

“The numbers are staggeringly large,” said Blue Cross Blue Shield Association CEO Kim Keck, citing her organization’s estimate that hospitals would bill $500 billion less over the next decade if they were federally banned from charging higher rates for the same service offered through a hospital system rather than an independent physician’s office.

Doctor’s offices tend to say there is nothing they can do. It’s the hospital systems they are part of that charge hospital rates to insurance companies and therefore to patients.

Hospital systems, meanwhile, justify higher rates for doctor’s office procedures by saying the charges are necessary to subsidize the enormously complex round-the-clock care that happens at their hospitals. Limiting their ability to charge those fees would undermine their overall finances, potentially leading to reductions in services, they said.

Insurers and lawmakers are looking into ways to curb the practice of charging hospital rates for routine care or tacking on hospital facility fees for care that was not in hospitals. But it’s been going on for years with little progress made to stop it, and it is only getting more common as hospitals acquire more medical practices, now consolidating nearly half of all physicians in the U.S. into hospital systems, up from less than 30 percent in 2012.

This “we need to subidize other care” excuse won’t wash, at least in for-profit hospitals, which have a median profit of about 5.5%, but could be justifiable in nonprofit or government hospitals, which either are close to breaking even or are losing money. The solution would be to make it illegal for procedures in a doctor’s office to be charged at hospital rates, but we know that isn’t going to happen, as doctors themselves make more money when they are rembursed by insurance like Medicare at higher rates if they are affiliated with hospitals and thus allowed to add “facilities fees” to their bills.

*Voters in two blue states are set to vote on a ballot measure that would ban trans-identified men and boy from women’s sports, and supporters are confident that the ban will pass.

Colorado and Washington are reliably Democratic states where elected officials have rejected moves to ban transgender women and girls from female sports competitions. Now activists have gone around lawmakers to put proposed bans on both states’ ballots.

At a time when some Democratic leaders nationwide are recalibrating their approach to transgender issues, particularly sports, and polls show Americans generally back the bans, supporters are optimistic they will pass and open the door to similar efforts in other places where lawmakers have blocked bans.

Though the issue has been debated in many legislatures, this is the first time it’s going to voters.

“What is happening in 2026 is a testing ground for the future,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which supports LGBTQ+ rights.

Twenty-seven states — including all where Republicans control both the legislature and governor’s office — already have such laws.

. . .The efforts are billed as a way to protect women and girls and keep separate spaces for them, tapping into a concern that’s gained momentum. President Donald Trump has taken steps to roll back transgender rights. The Supreme Court has upheld state sports bans.A June poll from Quinnipiac University found that about 7 in 10 registered voters think transgender women and girls should not be allowed to play on female sports teams. About one-quarter think they should. Democrats are divided, with about half saying transgender women and girls should be allowed and about half saying they should not.

Robert Preuhs, a professor of political science at Metropolitan State University of Denver, said the absence of public polls on Colorado’s ballot measure, which also covers college sports, makes it hard to predict whether it will pass. “It’s probably going to get more support than some of the Republican candidates that will run,” he said.

Overall, Americans are opposed to trans-identified men competing in womens sports, and the “rights” of these males have to be balanced against the rights of women to compete fairly. As I’ve written repeatedly, the latter trumps the former, as the first right carries more unfairness.  At any rate, if a law simply said that men and women could compete with each other until age ten or so, I wouldn’t have as much objection to that, as the differences in athletic ability are greatly enhanced at puberty. But I’d still object in general because I think a ban creates a better climate to keep the sexes separate at greater ages (stuff like dodgeball in elementary school might be excepted since it’s not a team sport). In general, and I must say this again, sports is one of the very few areas in which trans “rights” have to yield to other rights.

*The new film about Elizabeth Holmes, “You can see everything“, has become wildly popular, with its opening being the biggest regular documentary since Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” in 2004. In the WSJ, John Jurgensen and Ben Fritz discuss the factors making the film so popular. (See also the absorbing hourlong NYT videocast, “Why no one can look away from Elizabeth Holmes,” which features ohn Carreyrou, the journalist whose book began the exposé of Homes. ) An excerpt from the WSJ piece:

For nearly three years, fewer than 10 staffers at the New York-based indie film studio A24 knew that their 300-person company was making a genre-bending documentary about convicted Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes.

Keeping “You Can See Everything” off the radar, a minor miracle in an industry where leaks are routine, was intended to prevent any interference for directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim as they worked.

The secrecy around the film, the studio soon realized, could also be its most potent marketing weapon.

In June, A24 executive Nicolette Aizenberg texted the director of the Telluride Film Festival: “Have something…of note to talk to you about.” Though the Colorado festival’s lineup was almost locked, they hatched a plan to unveil “You Can See Everything” there. On Sept. 6, 650 people filled a theater and locked up their phones in Yondr pouches without knowing what they were about to see.

It was a major gamble for a movie company. A24 knew it had a notorious subject, surprise twists and, in Fielder, a filmmaker who was cult-famous for his attention-grabbing stunts. But was it enough to flip the switch from silence to buzz?

The ripple effect of ecstatic reactions set the tone for a sprint to theaters nationwide just over a month later. “It destabilized everything in the best possible way,” said Julie Huntsinger, the Telluride director. The movie teaser, dropped at the same time as the Telluride debut, was instantly viral, spawning memes of Holmes and Fielder locking eyes.

. . . . Last weekend, the film opened to $15 million in domestic ticket sales and more than 3,000 sold-out showings. It was the biggest box-office debut for a non-music documentary since Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” in 2004. Some 70% of ticketbuyers were under age 35, according to the studio. It will expand to 2,600 movie theaters this weekend—on par with wide releases from major studios.

The insatiable reception has already reconfigured the race for awards that will play out in the coming months. A24 plans to mount a campaign for best picture at the Academy Awards, where “You Can See Everything” could become the first documentary in Oscars history to be nominated for that top prize.

Most movie studios are valued on their record of hits and flops. A24 has built something rarer and more valuable: a brand identity. Young audiences trust that an A24 release will be as relevant for them as a Disney movie is for families. Fans of the studio buy its merchandise, subscribe to a membership club and use “A24” as an adjective to describe an edgy-yet-artful aesthetic.

“I’ve never seen anybody say ‘Let’s go see a Warner Bros. movie, let’s go see a Paramount movie, let’s go see a Sony movie.’ Young people are saying, ‘Let’s go see an A24 movie,’” said David Permut, who produced A24’s psychosexual relationship comedy “The Invite.”

I guess I’ll have to see this movie.  Other A24 movie hits include “Marty Supreme” (I thought it was good but not great, “Backrooms,” and “The Drama”. If you’ve seen “You Can See Everything,” please weigh in below.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pretending that Ancdrzej is prey:

Hili: I’m gonna pounce on you any second now.
Andrzej: Fine, but then we’re going home.

In Polish:

Hili: Zaraz na ciebie napadnę.
Ja: Dobrze, ale potem wrócimy do domu.

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

From Cats that Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From CinEmma:

It is characteristic of Masih to bring the blinded Iranian protestors onstage in Poland with her to show what the Islamist regime is doing. She is getting an award, but insisted on sharing it with the victims for whom she fights incessantly.

How ironic… https://t.co/VP9I4VdGRe

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) October 24, 2026

From Luana; this appears to be a real ad aired in Ireland, intimating that it’s a form of abuse when your grandma hugs you. The ad caused a big backlash and has been pulled.

The latest ad from the Irish Government to the Irish people, who are the font of all problems in the country and desperately need to be stopped from their bad behaviour.

This time, it’s hugging your grandkids. https://t.co/IKYKteKP8m

— John McGuirk (@john_mcguirk) October 21, 2026

The Number Ten Cat has some great advice:

Always stroke a cat when given the chance

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) October 23, 2026

Two from my feed.  I love the first woman! “I bought loads of Israeli goods. .  thanks for inspiring me.”

I was shopping in Brighton and antizionists tried to stop me buying Israeli goods from Waitrose. They said I’d be “racist” to buy them. I asked if it was xenophobic to boycott a whole nation. They had no answers. So I bought LOADS of Israeli products and they were NOT happy. https://t.co/LohsFNCcDM

— Heidi Bachram (@HeidiBachram) October 24, 2026

I love these guys, too:

In 1983, an orange cat named George got stuck on top of a 160-foot chimney in Bolton, England. Fred Dibnah, a famous steeplejack, tried to rescue him, but George wasn’t making it easy.

After a 30-hour standoff, George was finally brought safely back to the ground. https://t.co/JaSLCYtduv

— Furrend (@hifurrend) October 24, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Polish Jewish woman, about 20 years old, died in Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 25, 2026

And one from Dr. Cobb, describing a venerable Oggsford tradition (this can only be done when the time falls back). Click to go to original post:

Some music. One of the greatest jazz duo songs I know: Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins alternate solos on the Rodgers and Hart song “It Never Entered My Mind“. Oscar Peterson is on the piano; the song was recorded as late as 1957.

A combination of the two greatest sax players of their era (note the difference in tone and style) and a beautiful song. Ben Webster starts off, and they switch to Hawkins at 2:25. It’s one verse repeated and improvised over and over.

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.

It’s also the anniversary of Black Thursday, the day in 1929 when the stock market crashed, a trigger for the Great Depression; National Bologna Day; World Tripe Day; and National Good & Plenty Day; celebrating a staple candy of my childhood moviegoing. The site says this:

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.

Da Nooz:

*The rumors that Israel and the U.S. will jointly attack Iran in the next few weeks are rife, and Iran apparently is paying heed. The Islamic theocracy has threatened to attack “economic and civilian targets” in the Gulf if the U.S. and Israel do what they’re planning.

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.

*Surprisingly, the NYT called attention to violence by Palestinian settlers (might as well use that word) on the West Bank, and at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal dissects its consequences. First, from the NYT:

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.

But after all that, you know what the reveal is: The flag really was upside down. It was the right side up footage that was manipulated. Everyone had to retract their stories.

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.

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

From Stacy:

From CinEmma:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

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.

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) October 23, 2026

From Luana. If Omar is really named that, she’s in bigger trouble than I thought. Trump, of course, loves it:

BREAKING: President Trump calls on Ilhan Omar to immediately resign for using a fake name. https://t.co/ZtsvpB2Nvp

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) October 23, 2026

From Malcolm.  I’ve had this view from a plane. There’s nothing like it.  I believe that’s Everest towering over the others at the extreme right.

Breathtaking golden hour view of the Himalayas https://t.co/9xvWSjbGAf

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 22, 2026

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.

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) October 23, 2026

Two from my feed. This kitten knows the drill precisely:

Cat be acting like its on the Brink of Starvation 😹🐈 https://t.co/lYMpwuCWco

— Rosy (@rose_k01) August 31, 2026

If the head goes through, the rest can, too:

Proof that cats are liquid😺😸 https://t.co/JeOY2byQPL

— Vanna Kline (@KlineVanna29358) October 23, 2026

And one from the Auschwitz Memorial:

These three Italian Jewish siblings, Mario, Mara Cesira, and Sandro Sonnino, were gassed to death as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 24, 2026

One from Dr. Cobb. This must mean causation, no? But which way?

The distance between Saturn and the moon correlates with Bachelor's degrees awarded in Physical sciences (r=0.987)

— Daily Spurious Correlation 🤖 (@dailycorrelation.bsky.social) 2026-10-23T13:33:21.496Z

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.