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.
The movie “Paging Hezbollah” came out two days ago, and it’s a film worth noting, as Liel Leibovitz has done at the Free Press. I don’t know if it will be available on Netflix, but for sure you won’t find it at the local theater, nor will you see it reviewed in the NYT (I hope I’m wrong).
As you might guess from the title, it’s about “Beepergate”, also known as “Operation Grim Beeper” or, as Wikipedia calls it, the “2024 Lebanon electronic device attacks.” And you may remember some details: how, over a ten-year period, Mossad created an elaborate scheme of shell companies and advertising schemes that would sell pagers to Hezbollah, who decided that pagers and walkie talkies were safer than cellphones. But the Israelis had put 3 grams of a cryptic explosive into each device, and then somehow sold thousands of pagers and walkie talkies to Hezbollah, rigged so that, after Mossad sent a signal to these devices, the receiver would buzz or vibrate, and, when the “notified” Hezbollah member tried to answer or clear them, they’d explode. The devices were set off on September 17 and 18, 2024.
This explosion would normally occur when the device was held beside the head, leading to head injuries, including loss of eyes or ears. They weren’t designed to kill, but to injure, taking Hezbollah members out of action but leaving them alive. Note that the specific targeting avoids injuries to non-combatants, refuting the notion that the attack on Hezbollah was “genocidal.” (Also note that Shin Bet’s current series of attacks to kill Gazans who participated in the October 7 massacre of Israelis is also targeted, again refuting “genocide.” We’ll read about that tomorrow.) At any rate, the ratio of civilians killed to terrorists killed was below 1:2—an extraordinary low figure. As Grok tells me when I asked for the mortality figures:
“Total: 42 (Lebanese government/Health Ministry figures; early reports were lower, around 32–37).
Pager wave (Sept. 17): At least 12 killed.
Walkie-talkie wave (Sept. 18): At least ~25–30 killed.
Civilians: At least 12, including two children (reported variously as an ~8–10-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy) and several healthcare workers. Lebanese officials, including Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib, stated that most people carrying the pagers were not fighters but civilians such as administrators or institutional staff. Health Minister Firass Abiad emphasized that many victims were in civilian settings (markets, homes, streets), included children and the elderly, and presented as non-combatants.
Hezbollah members: The remaining ~30. Hezbollah issued death notices for multiple fighters/members (e.g., at least 8–12 announced early on, including the son of a Hezbollah MP, with more overall). The Washington Post reported that most of the early toll (~37) appeared to be fighters based on the group’s notices. Many were part of Hezbollah’s broader network (reservists, logistics, political, or institutional roles) rather than solely active frontline combatants. Hezbollah has described most of the dead and wounded as its fighters or personnel.”
Despite this targeted operation and low civilian mortality, people were outraged, with some calling it an Israeli war crime. I would take issue with that, and for sure Hezbollah would have done it to Israel if they had the capacity and smarts. And you won’t find a lower ratio of civilians/combatants killed in any such operation.
At any rate, here’s what Leibovitz says about the movie, starting off with a bit of jingoism (i.e., it’s a “feel good” movie) that I won’t reproduce:
Paging Hezbollah tells the story of how the Israeli military managed to trick the Lebanese terrorist organization into using beepers installed with plastic explosives, pressing the button one day in the fall of 2024 and watching the devices—and with them scores of hands, noses, eyes, and testicles—explode.
It’s a riveting tale, and the director, Justin Folk, enjoyed unprecedented access to Israeli officials, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to David Barnea, the head of Mossad, Israel’s legendary intelligence agency. Indeed, this was the first time that the Mossad chief sat down for an on-camera interview to explain in detail precisely how he and his team pulled off one of the greatest operations in modern military history.
Incredible as these details are, they might’ve, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, made for a mosaic of mere machismo, all boom and bluster and no soul. Thankfully, the man the Israelis trusted with telling their story also possesses a virtue no less important than the ability to spin a great yarn—a sturdy moral compass.
Rather than rush into his story, Folk takes his time explaining to his viewers what’s at stake. And at stake, he realizes, is the fate of our civilization, everywhere under attack by men hell-bent on death and destruction. Hezbollah, Folk reminds viewers who might’ve forgotten or have never really known, was founded in 1982 to murder not only Israelis but also Americans, a task at which the organization, sadly, once excelled: In 1983, the terrorist group bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American service members. That same year, it bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut as well, claiming the lives of 17 more Americans, before kidnapping, torturing, and executing others in years to follow, including CIA station chief William Francis Buckley. Folk shows us archival footage of these horrors, doing everything he can to help a generation reared on social media and enamored with blowhard banshees like Tucker Carlson realize who are the real enemies of Israel and America, and everywhere in the still-free world.
That history lesson, brief but deeply moving, is worth the price of admission alone. Hollywood these days is hardly known for its excess of moral clarity, which is why its luminaries love wearing the red hand pin, which appears to symbolize the lynching of two Israelis by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah in 2000. Folk delivers more candor and clarity in a few minutes than most of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters have in decades, giving us an unvarnished look at the merciless marauders at war with the West.
. . .it’s here that reality—and with it, Folk’s film—takes a turn to the fantastic. The solution, like something out of a particularly twisted episode of Mad Men, turns out to be not technology but advertising: What if, quips one female Mossad agent, a would-be Don Draper with a license to kill, what if we could make Hezbollah’s terrorists believe that only large devices could withstand the wear and tear afflicted by real, tough men? What if we could turn comically large beepers into status symbols for the terrorist on the make?
No sooner does the film pose the question than Folk cuts to an actual commercial, produced by Mossad, showing the supersize pager—think about three tins of Altoids stacked on top of each other and encased in black plastic—in a host of manly settings. You can get it wet! You can toss it on the sand! It’s indestructible, just like you! Another recreation of an absolutely true story shows us what happened next: The terrorists, enamored with the well-marketed gizmo, place their orders, giving Mossad a direct supply chain into Hezbollah HQ.
And the end:
Because some things in life, Paging Hezbollah reminds us, really are that uncomplicated. Some cultures cling to life and others sanctify death. Some create and others destroy. And when the two clash—onscreen and in real life alike—we have no other job than to watch with bated breath and applaud wildly when the good guys, against all odds, pull it off.
I applaud the cleverness of this operation—especially the elaborate advertising and sales campaign—and I think it was a good way to target a nefarious enemy. And I’m surprised but pleased that Israel uncharacteristically shared details of the operation with the filmmakers. But somehow I can’t share Leibovitz’s apparent glee, for it seems to celebrate the very sacralization of death that it abhors. Civilians were killed, and the terrorists had families. I think of this as a necessary tragedy, but not something that should bring glee. But I will try to see it.
UC Davis math professor Abby Thompson has sent us a batch of lovely marine invertebrate photos from California. Abby’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
The October low tides had some challenging features. There was a strong wind (which makes me cold and everything harder to photograph), but most importantly the tides were running about a foot over (astronomical) predictions.
The very highest tides here are usually about 6 feet above sea level, and the very lowest about 2 feet below (listed as +6 or -2). A “good” low tide, when lots of different species are visible, is below –1. This means that a 1-foot difference from predictions has a significant impact on where you can go and what you can see. The reason for the overage is apparently twofold; the warmer water from El Niño (thermal expansion of the water), and the mysterious “Kelvin waves” sweeping up the coast, which interact in a complicated way. While the physics of the Kelvin waves escapes me, I can attest that the low tides were about 1 foot higher than projected, and that the water is warmer than usual. While my personal frustration is with the too-high low tides, everyone else is understandably worried about the upcoming King tides in November, December and January, when the maximally high tides of the year occur. If those high tides run 1-2 feet higher than usual, and happen to coincide with a storm surge, there’s going to be a lot of coastal flooding.
Challenging or not, it’s always beautiful to be on the beach, so here are photos from late October.
Some species of gull (Genus Larus)—perhaps someone can tell species from this photo. The sand acted like a mirror in the late afternoon sun:
By-the-wind sailor (Velella velella). In the spring these can wash up by the thousands, but it’s unusual to find any alive at this time of year. It might be because of the warmth of the water. I found two very small ones:
By-the-wind sailor underside:
Urtibrina rimicola; this used to be (approximately last week) called a “stubby Pacific rose anemone”; then the taxonomists got to work on it, and it’s now stuck with just a scientific name:
A clutch of nudibranchs: the first two are common, but happened to pose nicely for the camera:
The second two are rarer where I am; I’ve found each of them only once or twice.
Apata pricei.Dillon Beach (where I am) was close to the northern edge of this species’ range on inaturalist until a few days ago, when someone posted one from much farther north, near Trinidad, CA. El Niño at work?:
Polycera atra. It’s a little hard to believe this coloration is adaptive, but they’re surprisingly hard to spot. The second photo gives a little better idea of how they might blend into their bryozoan prey. Kind-of like a zebra:
NOTE: Did you set your clocks back last night? Daylight Savings Time ended at 1 a.m., which became midnight. You either got an extra hour of sleep (as I did, thank Ceiling Cat) or you’ll get an extra hour of leisure or work.
Welcome to Sunday, November 1, 2026: we are now approaching winter in the Northern Hemisphere. As I posted 11 years ago:
Since November has arrived, I’ll take this opportunity to post one of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems. My absolute favorite is “Peter Quince at the Clavier“, but this one is more is appropriate since it expresses both the change of seasons and the degeneration of nature, ending with a completely mangled month.
Metamorphosis
by Wallace Stevens
Yillow, yillow, yillow,
Old worm, my pretty quirk,
How the wind spells out
Sep – tem – ber….
Summer is in bones.
Cock-robin’s at Caracas.
Make o, make o, make o,
Oto – otu – bre.
And the rude leaves fall.
The rain falls. The sky
Falls and lies with worms.
The street lamps
Are those that have been hanged.
Dangling in an illogical
To and to and fro
Fro Niz – nil – imbo.
The central panel features a pastoral scene of peasants harvesting acorns from oak trees, for the benefit of swine grazing beneath the trees. In the background on the left a château is partially visible on the bank of a river. The château has not been identified; it’s possible that Colombe relied on his imagination in depicting the château; it’s also possible that it’s not extant and therefor unrecognized.
The peasant on the left looks poised to hurl his stick into the trees, striking the ripe acorns so that they would fall on the ground to be consumed by the waiting pigs. Farther back, in the middle distance, two other peasants accompanied by sticks and pigs are engaged in watching the pigs, and in assisting the acorns to fall.
You’ll notice that the oak trees are very straight, and have had their lower branches lopped off in a practice known as pollarding. It was common in the middle ages in Europe to pollard oak and hazel nut trees by lopping off the lower branches every year or so; these could be used for firewood, and the tree would still grow and bear nuts. It also allowed more trees to be planted, because they could be planted closer together without lower branches inhibiting the growth of nearby trees.
Little is clear about the power dynamics that will govern Israel and the United States in the coming months after pivotal elections in both countries. But Iran’s leaders are watching the contests closely, analysts said, and bracing for a renewed round of conflict whatever the outcome.
Tehran expects more attacks whoever takes control in Israel or of Congress, and has shown little willingness to make concessions demanded by the Trump administration to seal a peace deal.
On Saturday, Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said on social media that he had met with senior leaders of the armed forces and directed them to respond to any kind or level of threat with an immediate response in order to establish “maximum deterrence.” He also directed them to be prepared to target all types of U.S. and Israeli assets.
“They have been expecting a new round of war already for a few weeks, and they’ve been preparing accordingly,” Hamidreza Azizi, senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group, said of the Iranian government.
. . .In Israel, Iran would welcome the removal of Mr. Netanyahu from power, said Mohammad Saleh Sedghian, director of the Arab Center for Iranian Studies in Tehran. The Israeli leader helped persuade Mr. Trump to attack Iran this year and sought to orchestrate new airstrikes on Iran ahead of the election. But Iranian leaders believe that changing prime ministers would probably have an impact only in the short term rather than leading to a fundamental shift in Israeli policy, Mr. Sedghian said.
“Iranian and Israeli policies toward each other have remained consistent regardless of which government has been in power in Israel since the 1980s,” he said. “Any changes would likely be temporary rather than strategic.”
When it comes to the United States, Iran’s leaders are keenly aware of how the costs of the war, including higher gasoline prices for Americans, have affected Mr. Trump’s popularity and the Republican Party’s prospects in the midterms. Their assessment appears to be that a deal with Iran would benefit Mr. Trump politically, giving Tehran leverage in any negotiations to end the war. Iran, on the other hand, has already borne enormous costs including worsening inflation, without its leaders changing their stance.
Although the article mentions that the U.S. was pursuing a deal with Iran to help Trump and the Republicans, it’s too late now: the midterms are on Tuesday. All things told, my prediction (and I’m not a pundit) is that we’ll be fighting Iran again within a month.
The question for Israelis is not whether resumed war with Iran is prudent, but whether resumed war with Iran in the next six months can achieve a realistic strategic objective. The mistake of the war this spring was to seek expansive objectives, rather than to stage a series of strikes that would appreciably damage the regime, while allowing Israel to terminate operations when America dictated as much. Indeed, the reality of this war is President Trump, not Netanyahu, determines when the fighting begins — albeit not when it ends.
Trump’s relatively short attention span, reinforced by his management style, militates against long-term patient strategic planning. Trump quite clearly thinks in two- to four-week cycles. This explains his attempt to bring gas prices down through a cosmetic, ineffectual diesel deal with Vladimir Putin’s Russia in mid-October, just under a month before a probable midterm defeat. The result has been vacillation between intense pressure on Iran, negotiations, and pseudo-pressure masking desired disengagement. The Trump administration, however, is clearly contemplating a new round of strikes against Iran, as indicated by meetings with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine and leaked planning discussions with CENTCOM Commander Brad Cooper.
The issue is the objective. Israel, with Netanyahu at the helm, will certainly be interested in resuming an offensive, but that offensive must have a clear goal to justify it. The United States and Israel can once again hammer Iranian missile and drone-launch capabilities and production facilities. They can also attack industrial targets across Iran, further undermining the country’s already battered economy. More limited strikes, including repeated ones, against Iran’s coastal missile launch sites and sensors are also justified.
Nonetheless, without fomenting an uprising or leveraging forces on Iran’s border, neither Israel nor the United States can base its immediate policy upon the collapse of the Islamic Republic, even if the Revolutionary Guard could lose its grip on power as rapidly as the Soviets did.
This does not mean, however, that pressure on Iran is fruitless. Instead, the United States can direct Israeli attention elsewhere, leveraging Israel’s capacity to solidify the anti-Iranian coalition that the U.S. sought to bring into existence under the first Trump administration.
This coalition relies on alignment between Israel and the Gulf States, not simply the United Arab Emirates. Emirati leaders, much like their Jordanian counterparts, appear to have realized that friendship with Israel is an asset in an otherwise volatile region and that Israeli military capabilities can, in fact, be leveraged in dangerous situations. But the Emiratis are only one part of the equation. The Saudis are the other. Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman has refused to move toward normalization with Israel absent dramatic concessions from Jerusalem and Washington, including over Saudi nuclearization. He has also refused to allow the U.S. to stage strikes from Saudi bases and constantly balked at even limited bombing campaigns against Iranian coastal targets.
. . . Iran aims to destroy Israel, force the U.S. from the region, and ultimately become a genuine threat to the U.S. through possession of nuclear weapons and ICBMs. Israel and the U.S.’s goal should be to destroy the Iranian regime. The past eight months show that patience is required. If we haven’t learned this, we haven’t learned anything.
Yes, and help install a regime that would not pursue nuclear weapons. I’m not sure how much time the U.S. really has to do this, though, as several articles imply that a Democratic Congress may be able to force Trump to do their bidding with respect to war. And that gives the U.S. until January 3.
*I no longer donate to Doctors without Borders (MSF) because of its blatant anti-Israel stand, but now Switzerland has suspended much of its funding to MSF for a different reason: sexual abuse in Chad by some of MSF’s employees. And not just a few employees either. Further, MSF is making excuses about how it failed to act as quickly as possible:
Switzerland’s federal government is freezing some funding to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) due to the agency’s handling of a sexual abuse scandal that saw staff victimise refugees in Chad.
Officials from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, or SDC, appear to have been blindsided by the scale of the abuse and MSF’s inadequate disclosure of information, according to Zurich newspaper NZZ, which first reported the funding suspension to MSF Switzerland this week.
The abuse was exposed by reporting by the Associated Press in 2024. Women and girls said they were forced to exchange sex for money, jobs, or better access to humanitarian assistance, pointing to staff from MSF. The agency initially reported this to Swiss authorities as a case involving three women, according to NZZ.
But the organisation would later find widespread abuse, including exploitation that may have amounted to “sexual trafficking”, AP reported in June 2026. MSF later acknowledged that it had identified 59 allegations of “misconduct, including sexual harassment, exploitation, and abuse” involving “staff, daily workers, external contractors, and suppliers”.
The organisation says it has dismissed 18 staff. However, SDC appears to have been in the dark about the extent of the abuse until the June 2026 media report, the NZZ report suggests.
As with all cases of sexual abuse, the findings are likely an undercount as victims and survivors are often hesitant to speak, or to trust investigators tied to organisations that employed their abusers. Some 4.5 million people in Chad need humanitarian assistance, including refugees who have fled the civil war and genocidal attacks in Sudan, internally displaced people, and host communities.
What MSF says: “As we investigated the abuse in eastern Chad in 2024 and 2025, we remained in contact with the SDC, informing it about the media reports and providing updates on the ongoing investigations and their progress during meetings in Bern and Chad,” an MSF spokesperson told us. “However, we did not proactively communicate the full scale of confirmed cases and dismissals as early as we should have.”
Christopher Lockyear, MSF’s secretary general, said the organization was not aware of the allegations and wanted to investigate. “Asking for money or sex in exchange for access to care or a job is a clear violation of our behavioral commitments,” he said.
MSF would not say how many such cases had been reported among Sudanese refugees in Chad. Last year, out of 714 complaints made about MSF staff behavior where it works globally, 264 were confirmed to be cases of abuse or inappropriate behavior including sexual exploitation, abuse of power and bullying, Lockyear said.
MSF has dropped the ball on this one, not disclosing information that it should have. Sexually exploiting the very people it’s supposed to help is shameful behavior. They won’t get dime one from me, and I suggest that if you’re donating them, you reassess your strategy. There are a lot of groups that help people and don’t have a track record like MSF.
Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan stood up from her dining table, where the tuna fish and matzo ball soup sat half-eaten, and let loose about the moment she grew disillusioned with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
It happened this month, during her state’s first Senate debate between Dr. El-Sayed, who defeated her in a bitter Democratic primary in August, and former Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee. Dr. El-Sayed, an outspoken critic of Israel, was asked if Iran or Israel posed a greater threat to the United States. He dodged the question, calling it a “ridiculous hypothetical.”
This was unacceptable to Ms. Stevens.
“He’s a good speaker,” she said during the lunchtime interview on Friday at her home in Birmingham, Mich., raising her voice and rising from the table. “He’s an orator. He is gifted. Then how does that happen? Come on!”
Since the debate, Ms. Stevens has sat for a procession of cable television interviews that have been increasingly critical of Dr. El-Sayed, her endorsement of him becoming shakier by the day. Their hug at a party unity brunch in August has faded into distant memory.
Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan stood up from her dining table, where the tuna fish and matzo ball soup sat half-eaten, and let loose about the moment she grew disillusioned with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
Since the debate, Ms. Stevens has sat for a procession of cable television interviews that have been increasingly critical of Dr. El-Sayed, her endorsement of him becoming shakier by the day. Their hug at a party unity brunch in August has faded into distant memory.
On Friday, Ms. Stevens announced that she would attend a Sunday church service in Detroit with Dr. El-Sayed, a peace offering brokered by Representatives Debbie Dingell of Michigan and James E. Clyburn of South Carolina. But Ms. Stevens’s statement came with a caveat: a demand that Dr. El-Sayed publicly disavow an ad that one of his allies posted online. She called the ad antisemitic because it blamed U.S. support for Israel for high grocery prices. [JAC: note below that this meeting is off.]
On Friday, Dr. El-Sayed pushed back.
In a blistering statement, he offered a reminder that he beat her in August and an assertion that “Congresswoman Stevens seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago.”
. . . .Several times in the interviews, she returned to her anger over the online ad, made by Rebellion PAC, a left-wing group that backed Dr. El-Sayed, and his refusal to publicly disavow it. The El-Sayed campaign has said it did not make and is not responsible for the ad.
“Maybe it’s how you fund-raise, maybe it is what you want people to believe, but the reality is that we are not going to say that the cost of groceries is because of Jews and the Jewish state,” Ms. Stevens said. “We’re not going to say we don’t have health care because of Jews and the Jewish state.”
Other Democrats, though, are criticizing Stevens for upsetting the apple cart. After all, Democrats are supposed to stick together so Republicans won’t retain Senate control. But to me, enough is enough. Is that end worth any means, including supporting a closeted anti-Zionist who can’t bring himself to condemn an antisemitic ad? Seriously! Stevens is acting like a Democrat should, condemning what should be condemned. It’s gotten so that anybody who calls themselves a Democrat deserves support, no matter what they say or do.
Abdul El-Sayed has disinvited Rep. Haley Stevens from a joint campaign appearance planned for Sunday at a heavily Black church in Detroit, the latest sign of Democratic division in this critical state.
The Senate nominee’s campaign has asked Stevens to stay away from El-Sayed events ahead of Tuesday’s election, according to two people familiar with the decision. Politico reported on the move earlier, after the two Democratic primary rivals sniped at each other in public on Friday.
Bickering within the party could hardly come at a worse time as Democrats try to hold on to a critical Senate seat.
Yes, winning has become everything, with party labels overriding anything, including antisemitism and blood libels.
You Can See Everything is great. I saw it last week, after having been exposed to weeks’ worth of buzz making it sound like a documentary created in one day by Jesus himself, so I went in with certain expectations.
I’m not sure it was as good as social media and the most enthusiastic reviewers said (a dumb standard, to be sure), but it’s a great documentary. It will stick with me for a long time.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I think Nathan Fielder is a capital-G Genius, I believe Nathan for You is one of the, say, seven (?) funniest TV shows ever produced, and I think The Rehearsal (particularly season 2) is one of the most interesting and original TV shows ever produced. I am just a giant Fielder fanboy in general, even as I acknowledge that he is Not For Everyone (for some of the same reasons I Think YouShould Leave is NFE) — not everyone can handle the level of cringe he tends to bring to his projects. (I thought The Curse was good and I’m glad I watched it, but it bounced off me a bit in a way none of his own work ever has.)
I went in knowing as little as possible about YCSE given the insane level of Discourse, and you should do the same.
Singal then recounts part of the movie in which Holmes doesn’t understand the famous “Who’s on first” joke, even when it was explained to her; Singal thinks this is a deliberate attempt to buttress her reputation, as John Carreyrou puts it in a NYT piece, “the neurodivergent entrepreneur who operated on a different wavelength.” By the way, Carreyrou, who exposed Holme’s lies, wrote his own take in the NYT, and you should definitely read it. Back to Singal:
Fielder and director Lance Oppenheim (who I am furious at for being only 30 years old) linger on these moments, often heightening the weirdness with painfully long close-up shops, not to make sure Holmes has her say or that we’ve really heard her out, but to attempt to simulate, to the extent possible via film, the extent of falling under her sway.
Except it’s too late for that. She’s been convicted and is headed to jail, so now we’re dealing with a diminished version of her that has only a camera crew and Fielder to plead her case to. And she’s doing so not from glamorous digs but from a dusty beachside Airbnb.
But it’s the same thing: She’s a bullshit artist, and bullshit artists are going to bullshit. She will use whatever tactics are available to her, in a given situation, to attempt to cast a spell over whoever she is trying to bullshit. But she’s trying to bullshit a bullshit artist — and the difference is that Fielder is very open about being one.
The film is “about” a number of different things, all interesting — that’s what makes it great. And the more you watch it, the more layers you notice. But Fielder is almost always playing “Nathan Fielder,” at some remove from himself, when he’s on camera in supposedly documentary settings. And for the first half of YCSE, he plays the part of someone who just might be falling under Holmes’ sway.
Okay, that’s it: I MUST watch this movie. It’s playing locally and I’ll have to find the time to see it. If you have any interest in Holmes, or at least interest in movies and an acquaintance with her story, you should, too.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej remember old times (Hili is still ill and is being force fed and given IV fluids; I am quite worried).
Hili: There was once a big table in this room. Andrzej: Our life was different back then.
In Polish:
Hili: Kiedyś w tym pokoju był wielki stół.
Ja: Kiedyś nasze życie było inne.
Masih highlights the women, injured or shot by the Iranian regime or by Islamic patriarchy, on stage in Lodz. The group will also testify in Germany in about a week. There is translation of anything in Farsi:
What would you do if someone threw acid in your face or shot you in the eyes with a shotgun?
Look at these beautiful women. Yes, bravery is beautiful. Bullets took their eyesight. Acid scarred their faces. But they are still fighting not just for themselves but to protect all women from Islamists terrorists.
On November 9, these women will enter the German Parliament. They will stand alongside courageous women who have survived prison, torture, persecution, and authoritarian regimes.
This gathering is deeply personal to me.
In 2025, during Berlin Freedom Week, I met Julia Klöckner, President of the German Bundestag. Our conversation inspired a vision that is now taking shape.
Evelyn Zupke, Germany’s Federal Commissioner for the Victims of the SED Dictatorship, is hosting our Women Summit.
The participation of Julia Klöckner the President of Bundestag and Yaël Braun-Pivet, President of the French National Assembly, brings an important international parliamentary dimension to our shared commitment to women’s freedom.
Women from Iran, Afghanistan, and other authoritarian countries who have been denied education, erased from public life, imprisoned, flogged, sexually assaulted, and sentenced to death for demanding freedom and security.
#LetUsTalk
*From Luana. This tweet highlights an interesting post on population differences in gene frequencies, something that “blank slaters” argue is insignificant. As Luana and I argued in our Skeptical Inquirer paper, there are differences between human populations that are significant both historically and in terms of traits. Sadly, the article is largely paywalled. The tweet is part of a ten-tweet thread:
10/10
SNPs and structural variants describe DNA changes. Polygenic describes how many genetic influences contribute to a trait.
Specific variants bring their mechanisms—and uncertainties—into focus.
And one from Doctor Cobb, displaying vocalizations of Mephitis mephitis:
So, if anyone wants to know what my yard sounds like at night…it's this. My yard skunk has A LOT to say, starting around 10 p.m.I did not *know* it was the skunk until tonight when I got a look with the headlamp from safe distanceIt is NOT a soothing sound 😂www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoP_…
Music: Few pop and rock music lovers appear to know abut the 1964 T.A.M.I Show and its video, but it’s important in music history. It was the first widely publicized appearance of many stars and groups, especially James Brown, whose performance in the full video below (he appears at 1:17:37) is fantastic, showing why he’s been called “The hardest-working man in show business.” I love the bit in which they try to drag him offstage in a cape but he keeps coming back. From Wikipedia:
T.A.M.I. Show is a 1964 American concert film directed by Steve Binder and released by American International Pictures. It includes performances by numerous popular rock and roll and R&B musicians from the United States and England.
In 2006, T.A.M.I. Show was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
The concert was held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on October 28 and 29, 1964. Free tickets were distributed to local high school students. The acronym “T.A.M.I.” was used inconsistently in the show’s publicity to mean both “Teenage Awards Music International” and “Teen Age Music International”. The best footage from both concert dates was used in the film. Jack Nitzsche was the show’s music director.
Jan and Dean emceed the event and performed its theme song, “(Here They Come) From All Over the World”, written by Los Angeles songwriters P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri. The song erroneously asserts that the Rolling Stones are from Liverpool. Director Steve Binder recalled that Bobby Roberts suggested Jan and Dean host the film.
. . . T.A.M.I. Show is particularly well known for the performance of James Brown and the Famous Flames, which features his legendary dance moves and explosive energy. In interviews, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones has claimed that choosing to follow Brown and the Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Bobby Bennett, and Lloyd Stallworth) was the worst mistake of their careers, because no matter how well they performed, they could not top him. In a web-published interview, Binder takes credit for persuading the Stones to follow Brown, and serve as the centerpiece for the grand finale in which all the performers dance together onstage.
Don’t miss Lesley Gore, either (she appears at 36:31 (her real last name was Goldstein; she was a good Jewish girl):
Caturday felid is moribund, but we continue today with three items and lagniappe.
First, a professor found a kitten at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and I didn’t hear of it until a reader told me. First, the news headlines from NBC 5 (note the “cat distribution system”). Click headline to read:
Here is some text, but the two videos below also tell the same story. And they show the kitten:
A missed connection at O’Hare turned into an airport adoption when the ‘cat distribution system’ struck during a traveler’s smoke break.
Minnesota native Virgil Wiebe was at O’Hare Airport waiting out a long delay when he stepped outside to smoke a cigar, he told NBC Chicago. While at the little park outside Terminal 1, Wiebe said his new little furry orange friend came running up to him.
“He sort of appeared out of nowhere,” Wiebe said. “I already missed one flight, and I figured, well, I might be missing another one.”
Wiebe looked around for a mother, assuming it may have been born in the bushes, but couldn’t find one. So, he took the kitten and went up to ticketing counter.
“The TSA agent had no idea what to do, said they never seen a stray at the airport,” Wiebe said. “They tried to be helpful, said ‘you’re gonna need a kennel.'”
With his flight set to board, Wiebe used DoorDash to deliver a kennel and formula while United Airlines booked one more passenger on the flight home.
Wiebe said he was charged $150 for the cat ticket, “and that was it.”
It’s not clear how the three-week-old kitten — now named Macanudo O’Hare by Wiebe after the cigar he was smoking and the place they united, or Harry, for short — found its way to the middle of the world’s busiest airport. Nonetheless, he had a home with Wiebe from that moment forward.
“He’s just a joyful little thing, and it’s so coincidental how it all happened,” Wiebe said. “Who knows where Harry came from, but now he’s ours.”
Macanudo is a brand of cigar. And here are two news videos:
x
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The Sphynx breed of cat, which is nearly completely hairless (they may have short hairs on their body) was developed around 1960. Hairlessness is caused by a recessive allele that makes the hairs fragile, so they fall out easily. I don’t know anybody who has one, but I’ve encountered them at cat shows and even got to pet one (it was soft, feeling, as Wikipedia says, like chamois leather). They are known for their loving temperament. As Wikipedia says:
Sphynx are known for their extroverted behavior. They display a high level of energy, intelligence, curiosity and affection for their owners. They are one of the more dog-like breeds of cats, frequently greeting their owners at the door, and are friendly when meeting strangers. Sphynx cats tend to be highly attached to their owners, often demanding large amounts of attention. This breed tends to cuddle for body warmth due to their lack of fur. A study was conducted by the Journal of Veterinary Behavior in 2012, and while further research needs to be conducted, purebred Sphynx cats were rated by their owners as friendlier than purebred European cats.
Here’s a short video about a Sphynx cat named Gemini which freaks out its owner through incessant staring and “jump scaring”. If any cat is a Halloween cat, it’s this one, not a black cat.
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Finally, we have a science paper published in PLOS One (first headline below) and a popularized account at ScienceAlert (second headline); click either headline to read for free. The upshot, happiness is associated with cat density across 93 countries, even when other factors correlated with cat density are removed:
The abstract of the paper above; bolding is mine.
National happiness is related not only to socioeconomic factors but also to biological and ecological factors. This ecological correlational study examined associations between national happiness, cat density, Toxoplasma gondii exposure, and socioeconomic indicators across 93 countries. We hypothesized that countries with higher socioeconomic indicators (e.g., GDP, health expenditure, income level) would exhibit higher happiness levels. In contrast, we predicted that higher T. gondii exposure, both acute (IgM) and chronic (IgG), would be negatively associated with national happiness. Data on happiness measures, cat density, GDP per capita, income classification, health expenditure, and T. gondii seroprevalence in pregnant women (as a proxy for broader population exposure) were obtained from publicly available sources. In line with our hypothesis, we found that national happiness was positively associated with cat density and some socioeconomic factors and negatively associated with IgM seroprevalence. In multivariate analyses, cats per 10,000 inhabitants and IgM seroprevalence remained the strongest independent predictors. Overall, these exploratory analyses suggest that biological and ecological factors are associated with socioeconomic variables in determining national well-being. Future studies of happiness at the national level should integrate both socioeconomic and biological perspectives and include longitudinal and interdisciplinary approaches to elucidate the underlying mechanisms and processes.
Toxoplasma gondii is a neural parasite that humans contract from cat feces. Infections are found in all warm-blooded animals but the only host in which the parasite can reproduce sexually appears to be felids. Most infected people (10%-30% of people in these countries are infected) are asymptomatic, but some people develop flu-like symptom, muscle aches, and, if immunocompromised, could have seizures and even worse symptoms.
The authors theorized that toxoplasmosis incidence would be associated with poor countries because it’s spread by outdoor cats in areas with poor sanitation, rats, and so on. Because happiness is negatively correlated with such conditions, the authors theorized that toxoplasmosis incidence would be associated with lower happiness. In contrast, because having pets relieves loneliness, the authors also supposed that cat ownership in a country would be correlated with its inhabitants’ happiness. Here’s a map from the paper showing the 93 countries that had data on toxoplasmosis (immunological data taken from pregnant women), cat ownership, economic conditions, and happiness:
Here’s a “heatmap” showing correlations between the measured variables,with positive correlations in purple, negative in red, and asterisks showing statistical significance. Note that these are not independent effects with cross-correlations removed. Cat density, for example, is highly correlated with both income and GDP (which of course are correlated with each o0ther), so the high correlation between cat density and happiness (0.623, highly significant), could result simply because people in high-income countries can afford to have cats, and are also happier because they make more money.
Eliminating cross-correlations between some variables to reduce spurious effects, the authors still found that cat density was highly significantly associated with happiness (my bolding).
Due to high multicollinearity between GDP and income (VIFs = 7.61 and 7.41, respectively) these variables were excluded from the exploratory regression analysis. While residuals showed a non-normality distribution (Shapiro-Wilk p < 0.05), the model was robust to this deviation given the sample size (N = 93) and the maintenance of linearity and homoscedasticity. Health expenditure was retained as the primary socioeconomic indicator, as it represents a more direct proxy for national wealth (for example, because it relates to public health infrastructure). Therefore, only cat density, health expenditure, and T. gondii IgM and IgG seroprevalence were included as predictors (VIF < 1.71 in all cases). Our model accounted for 47.0% of the variance in national happiness (R2 = 0.470, F(4,88) = 19.500, p < 0.001) and showed that cat density positively (β = 0.520, p < 0.001) and IgM negatively (β = −0.240, p = 0.021) significantly contributed to the prediction of happiness scores.
You can read the article below for a more popular account:
An excerpt from the above:
The findings suggest that biological and ecological factors can play a role in finding that much-desired feeling of happiness, factors which aren’t typically included in studies.
“This goes against the simple assumption that having more cats necessarily means greater parasite exposure and suggests that factors such as pets management, sanitation, and socioeconomic conditions may be important,” says biologist Javier I. Borráz-León, from the National Institute of Psychiatry Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz in Mexico.
The popular presentation doesn’t discuss the picking apart of factors to make them independent, but the lesson is clear: CATS MAKE PEOPLE HAPPY!
Welcome to CaturSaturday, October 31, 2026: shabbos for Jewish cats, the last day of the month and Halloween! Here’s a short Tik Tok video from The Quack House featuring ducks and an appropriately carved pumpkin:
In the two days since Israelis cast ballots, there’s been a yawning gap between the results and the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is talking about them.
The final vote tally, while inconclusive, indicates that barring drastic change, Netanyahu will stay in power indefinitely. Nobody has a clear path to a coalition, so the incumbent remains, possibly through multiple rounds of elections. And after the wars, catastrophe and domestic strife of the past four years, Netanyahu could reasonably count that as a victory.
Except that Netanyahu isn’t acting like a victor. Yes, he crowed that his party was the largest, but as he himself knows well, that doesn’t guarantee another term. He spent much of his election night speech militating against a Jewish-Arab opposition government — recognition that his opponents, however fractious, have the majority.
Moreover, in the days since then, he has protested that the election was “stolen” and that the vote was illegitimate. He’s demanded investigations and lashed out at his opponents.
Usually, the candidate who won doesn’t claim that his election was stolen, and doesn’t try to delegitimize the vote. Yet Netanyahu is in power and will probably stay in power. So what’s going on here?
A likely possibility is that Netanyahu, by demonizing his opponents, is laying the groundwork for a repeat election in the coming months, in which he may improve his showing. But he may also realize his coalition is fraying, and that while he will remain at the head of the government, his days of effectively governing may be numbered.
This seems to me a correct deduction, and if a coalition can’t produce a Prime Minister, the Israelis are in for more elections. As Bret Stephens says, though (see below), a different election outcome may not lead to a drastic revision of Netanyahu’s policies, though it may call a halt to some of his actions (e.g. , towards the Supreme Court of Israel).
*Over at the the NYT, Bret Stephens offered four lessons from Israel’s election, even though he wrote his column before the election results are known (they’re still not known with respect to who will lead the country). The article is also archived here.
The first thing to say about Tuesday’s election in Israel is the one that tends to be mentioned the least: The country is having one. Competitive, lawful, on schedule and with a plausible expectation of unseating the powerful incumbent.
That’s more than can be said of the Palestinian Authority under the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected to a four-year term of office in 2005 but has bypassed elections ever since. It’s more than can be said for Hamas, which won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, went to war against its domestic political opponents and has ruled through fiat and fear ever since.
It’s also more than can be said for Egypt, whose president came to power in a 2013 coup and won an “election” the next year with nearly 97 percent of the vote; for Turkey, whose president stays in power by jailing popular political rivals and nettlesome independent journalists; for Jordan, a repressive dynastic monarchy; for Lebanon, whose parliamentary government cannot enforce its writ against Hezbollah and its masters in Tehran.
The second point is that, for an election widely billed as the most important in the country’s history, very little is likely to change, at least as far as the outside world is concerned.
This is not 1977, when the Likud’s Menachem Begin broke the Labor Party’s lock on power, later making peace with Egypt and going to war in Lebanon. It’s not 1992, when Israelis returned Yitzhak Rabin to office, leading to the Oslo peace process. It’s not 2001, when the election of Ariel Sharon in the midst of the second intifada signaled the end of Oslo and led to the full withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza.
This time around, all the leading contenders are on the political right. Not one of them wants a Palestinian state. Not one of them is going to remove Israelis from the West Bank or issue a blanket ban on settlement construction. Not one of them wants anything less than an assertive military posture toward Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. And if, as polls suggest, no party emerges with a clear majority, then nobody is likely to have the votes to force the kinds of tectonic policy shifts achieved in those earlier elections, including the military conscription of the shirking ultra-Orthodox.
All this means that no plausible alternative to Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister is going to shift the country’s course sufficiently to mollify its growing list of global detractors. But there’s a different kind of shift Israel desperately needs.
Hence the third point: What’s at stake in this election isn’t about policy. It’s about spirit. It’s about whether the Jewish state will honor the foundational idea “klal Yisrael,” the whole of Israel, and the Jewish principle that every Jew is responsible for every other Jew.
Since returning to power in 2022, Netanyahu has repeatedly violated both.
. . .Finally: What’s at stake in this election isn’t Israel’s “standing.” Of the many intellectually flabby critiques of Israeli policy since Oct. 7, the idea that Israel should have traded its physical security for the sake of some added dollops of liberal pity is among the flabbiest. As I’ve written before, Israel doesn’t exist to showcase Jewish victimization. It exists to end it.
What is at stake is whether a people who have borne the burden of Hamas’s terror and Iran’s missiles and a nonstop state of emergency that would have broken weaker democracies and the unceasing chorus of global condemnation that is one part ignorance, two parts bigotry and three parts self-delusion should have a government worthy of their sacrifice, steadiness and courage. This week, a free and sovereign nation once again has the chance to elect one.
It’s clear that Stephens doesn’t think that Netanyahu should be part of that government.
*The Ilhan Omar kerfuffle is heating up, with the New York Times reporting Thursday that “Several current and former law enforcement officials said an Obama-era investigation found some evidence that Ms. Omar had entered into a sham marriage with a man suspected of being her brother.” (Article archived here.) Of course, as the Washington Free Beacon points out, the NYT and other sources have also assured readers over the year that there was no substance to the Omar incestuous-marriage claim. From the NYT:
The federal investigation of Representative Ilhan Omar is focused in part on whether she entered into a sham marriage in 2009 to help a man suspected of being her brother obtain a green card, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.
The F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security investigated the marriage in summer 2016, during the Obama administration, and found some evidence that it was fraudulent, current and former officials said.
Speculation that Ms. Omar committed marriage fraud with a brother has shadowed the Minnesota Democrat’s political career for more than a decade and President Trump repeated the accusation last week. She has long called it a right-wing conspiracy theory that federal officials debunked during her first race for elected office in 2016.
But that case stalled chiefly because prosecutors concluded that the potential crime, a felony, fell outside a five-year statute of limitations, according to the current and former officials, most of whose law enforcement careers spanned several presidential administrations.
. . .The reporting for this article is based on interviews with three current and former officials familiar with the present-day investigation and six current and former officials with knowledge of the 2016 investigation.
It is unclear what evidence prosecutors, then or now, have showing that the person Ms. Omar married was her brother. Marrying anyone for the sole purpose of securing a green card is illegal under federal law. Marrying a sibling is illegal under state law, but it is not clear whether state authorities ever investigated the matter.
It is also unclear whether federal prosecutors could find a path to charging Ms. Omar that skirts the statute of limitations that applies to marriage-based immigration fraud, a crime that would not threaten her citizenship.
Regardless, they could cite the marriage in an indictment or civil action that describes a family immigration fraud conspiracy — a broader case that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said could lead to Ms. Omar’s deportation.
Omar is an Islamist and an antisemite (“follow the Benjamins”), and if these allegations are true, I hope they can circumvent the statues of limitations by finding legal ways to indict her. Frankly, as with the Alaska fracas, I’m surprised that the NYT is putting significant investigative resources into this case, especially since in the past, they’ve downplayed it:
From the Free Beacon:
This will no doubt come as a shock to loyal Times readers, who were repeatedly assured that Omar did nothing wrong. Following her election to Congress in 2018, the Times ran a glowing profile casting Omar as a bullied Muslim refugee with a “soft voice,” “delicate features,” and a “uniquely American” life story who has come to regard her adopted country as a cesspool of racist cruelty. Running for office, the Times lamented, had “forced Ms. Omar to make public details about her complicated private life, which became fodder for conservative bloggers, who seized on her brief marriage to a British citizen.”
Months later, the Timespublished what it claimed was a “fact check” of President Donald Trump’s numerous “attacks” on the historic Muslim congresswoman, including the allegation that she married her brother. “Rumors … have been circulating since 2016,” the Times explained. “No proof has emerged substantiating these claims.”
The lazy and dismissive fact check, which relied almost exclusively on Omar’s public denials, declined to acknowledge any “murky” aspects of the marriage. It included multiple links to an equally dismissive Associated Press fact check based on some actual reporting. Despite reviewing Omar’s marriage records, the AP declined to mention the bizarre detail about the Christian minister’s signature. Neither did the Times, obviously.
*Once again I’m stealing a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly snark-and-news column in the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: Fake & Gay.”
→ Excuse me, what are the VCs doing?: Joseph Lonsdale. . .
Breed how many what now? Sir! Please. No monkey breeding. Not after the pangolins. We’re not ready. Should I email my friend Joe and ask him why he’s getting into the monkey-breeding business? No, no. I don’t want to know. (Okay, fine, I looked at the website, it’s to test new drugs before human trials to save human lives. I’m still against it!)
And then there’s a new company called Warhound, started by Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey, and they’re genetically engineering new dog lineages for war. They call themselves “the advanced canine genetics and cybernetic platform.” Woof. Here is the image on their landing page:
Guys. Men of tech. You know I stand with you on so many freaky things. I say every week: Let the cars drive themselves. I’ve installed Flock cameras in my powder room. ChatGPT is my therapist. But I do not want monkey farms, and I do not want mutant killer dogs even if it’s very cute how their ears stick out from their combat helmets. Tech men, we have found the fissure, you and I. Can’t wait to see you soon (when I’m outside the monkey lab protesting naked with PETA slogans written across my back).
→ My new favorite Cambridge professor:
Under “dictator” Mao! It’s the quotes that get me. I love this guy. He’s a political economist and development studies professor at the University of Cambridge. He’s teaching Cambridge students about good and bad ways to do development. Of course, “development” means millions of deaths but who’s counting when all those hectares of land are being passed around? Did you know that under Mao, steel output grew? These are the same people who are anti–data center because the buzzing sound bothers folks nearby. Mao’s policies killed tens of millions of people to get you that steel, and Professor Hauge is out there nodding along like, it’s worth it, baby! He doesn’t deny the deaths, he’s just like. . . yes, and? Did you want the nuclear weapons or no?
→ Oh wow, The Economist is going for it: Okay, let’s do this slowly and calmly. I’m scared but I’m ready. No one get mad.
And then they have the data:
My first question: If it’s not so bad, guys, why’d you have to use a log scale? Like, “hardly an epidemic,” but you gotta use a log scale to chill the data out a little bit (log scale pushes that “10x” to be less visually alarming, like to pretend it’s all kind of a smooth distribution, like a ladder). Anyway, I think it’s good to speak of these things. If we can talk endlessly about the rape culture of frat boys, I think—yes—we can talk about the rape culture of Afghanistan, a place currently run by the Taliban.
Alright, now I’ve gotten a text requesting that I leave New York City by sundown.
Stephen Kronberg voted 10 years ago to legalize recreational marijuana in his home state of Massachusetts, hoping that it would lead to a boost in tax revenue and a “cleaner product” compared with black-market weed. “I thought it seemed like common sense,” he told me.
But next Tuesday, Kronberg, 63, will vote to make recreational cannabis illegal again. He plans to vote yes on Massachusetts Question 8, which would “prohibit the legalization, regulation, and taxation of the retail sale of adult recreational use marijuana” while keeping possession of small amounts legal.
Massachusetts was the sixth U.S. state to permit the sale of recreational marijuana. Today, weed is legal in 24 states—and the Bay State could soon be the first one to reverse course. Since the vote to legalize cannabis took effect in 2018, Massachusetts’ marijuana industry has generated about $10 billion in revenue and $2 billion in state and local tax revenue, according to the state’s Cannabis Control Commission. The 943 licensed marijuana businesses in Massachusetts range from small family farms and cannabis-infused gummy manufacturers to delivery couriers and posh retail shops.
But there have been problems, too. A Massachusetts General Hospital study found that psychiatric emergency hospital visits among young people between 12 and 17 rose sharply after the sale of recreational marijuana became legal in Massachusetts. (Marijuana sales are legal only for people who are 21 and older.) A separate study found that hospital admissions for cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, a condition caused by heavy marijuana use that entails vomiting, nausea, and intense cramps and can last for days on end, jumped 1,350 percent after legalization.
For some voters, the stakes are personal. During the pandemic, Kronberg watched one of his family members struggle with what he described as “around-the-clock” marijuana use that led to “panic attacks, psychosis, anxiety, depression” and a lengthy stint in rehab. “It completely changed my mind,” Kronberg said. “I support free markets, but this market—the marijuana market—can damage lives, and it has to be watched closely.”
The measure to repeal recreational marijuana sales in Massachusetts probably won’t pass. In a poll last month of likely voters by Suffolk University and The Boston Globe, 71 percent said they would vote to keep the current law in place. But even if the measure fails, the fact that it is on the ballot at all shows that the backlash against legalization is gaining momentum. Parents, physicians, and even users are increasingly troubled by marijuana’s drawbacks. A similar measure in Maine has received nearly two-thirds of the signatures needed to go on the ballot next year.
If you compare marijuana to tobacco or alcohol, the plant is far, far less dangerous. Although younger people may use weed instead of thanbooze or cigarettes, weed has a far less serious effect on public health, and of course people smoke marijuana largely for the pleasure (or relaxation). Weed is not nearly as addictive. What we’re seeing appears to be a new form of prohibition or paternalism, and I hope it does not grow in support.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is still ill but seems to be improving. Still, she’s beefing about attdistractions. Please cross your fingers for Hili as she is barely eating, which is dangerous for a cat.
Hili: I’m afraid we have more attractions than we need. Andrzej: I’ve noticed that too.
In Polish:
Hili: Obawiam się, że mamy nadmiar atrakcji.
Ja: Też to zauważyłem.
From Malcolm. Voyager 1 is still operating, and is now one light-day from Earth—over a billion miles!
Humanity’s most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, is rapidly approaching an unprecedented cosmic milestone. On November 18, 2026, NASA anticipates that the legendary probe will officially reach a distance of one light-day from Earth. This monumental span equates to approximately 16.1 billion miles, which is roughly 25.9 billion kilometers.
At this profound depth of space, the vast physical gap severely impacts communication lag. Even a radio signal, which inherently flashes through the void at the absolute speed of light, requires a full 24 hours to cross the distance in a single direction. Consequently, when flight controllers on Earth beam a command to the spacecraft, the instructions require a whole day to arrive, and any corresponding reply takes another full day to travel back. This latency creates a grueling 48-hour round-trip delay for a single exchange, a baseline timeline that does not even account for deep-space network scheduling or onboard computer processing times.
Voyager 1 has traveled for nearly half a century to reach this historic boundary. Originally launched on September 5, 1977, the spacecraft primary mission focused on exploring Jupiter and Saturn, famously transmitting unprecedented, close-up observations of their swirling cloud tops, intricate ring systems, and diverse moons. Rather than stopping there, the probe maintained its outward trajectory. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made history by becoming the very first human-made object to breach interstellar space, crossing the heliopause, which is the magnetic boundary where the solar wind gives way to the raw interstellar medium.
It is vital to recognize that a light-day is a strict measurement of immense distance, rather than an indication of travel duration. It has taken the mechanical explorer 49 years of continuous flight to achieve a separation that a single photon of light can cross in a mere 24 hours. Even at this unimaginable distance, the scale of our cosmic neighborhood remains humbling. While Voyager 1 has long since exited the sun’s protective bubble, the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, a colossal and distant reservoir of icy primordial bodies bound by solar gravity, still lies far ahead on its endless journey.
For the dedicated engineering teams remaining on Earth, this expanding gulf transforms the nature of spaceflight operations. The luxury of real-time troubleshooting is entirely gone, forcing engineers to meticulously program sequences in advance and patiently wait days to discover if their commands succeeded.
This Austrian Jewish boy was first put in a children's home, and then transported to Auschwitz, where he was gassed on the spot. He was eight years old.
Matthew explained this one why I asked “Why?”: “Because he could! He was beheaded and rather than being dead the power of faith enabled him to walk around with his head! A MIRACLE! HALLELUJAH!”
Saint Firmin who carried his head about. Nice trick but don’t try this at home
Blind Faith performing “Can’t Find my Way Home” in an early performance (1969) at Hyde Park in London. The lead singer is Steve Winwood, with Eric Clapton on guitar (he has a nice solo), Ginger Baker on drums and Rich Grech on bass. The group released only one album before dissolving. Years later, Clapton and Winwood reunited to perform the same song in a great performance (with Derek Trucks).
One of the most-cited empirical achievements of indigenous peoples is the ability of Polynesians, Melanesians, and Micronesians to navigate their way across vast, unmarked expanses of the Pacific Ocean to get to small, uninhabited islands. How did they do it? And, regardless of their navigational methods, how many attempted voyages failed, with the navigators and their human cargo perishing? We’ll never know because there was no way to keep records.
One could think of the process of developing the techniques of cross-Pacific navigation as a form of natural selection on cultural variation, with the methods being refined incrementally because navigators who were successful survived to pass on their techniques. Over time, navigation would become increasingly refined and successful, though, even when “perfected,” people would still fail and die.
Finally, how did they know there were unihabited islands to go to, and where, roughly, they were? How, for example, did they get to Hawaii?
An article by science writer Patrick Whittle in Quillette, which you can access below or read part of it in this archived version, says that the methods of Pacific way-finding were uncovered by New Zealand physician and adventurer David Lewis by interviewing the few older Pacific people who recalled navigational techiques. His results were summarized in the 1972 book We, the Navigators, The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific.
Click on the cover image to go to the Amazon site:
I really need to read this book since the history and methods of long-distance voyaging have always fascinated and puzzled me. My most pressing question is “How did the navigators know where they were going; that is, how did they know there were nice uninhabited islands out there, and where they were?” I discovered that our library has this book (the second edition) and I’ve just requested it be pulled so I can pick it up.
Click below to read Whittle’s piece in Quillette (if you have a subscription)
The point of Whittle’s article, though, is not navigation: it’s whether the methods of navigation qualify as indigenous “ways of knowing,” and how this relates to modern science. This is a topic we’ve debated at length, and I have to say that Whittle comes to a fairly sensible conclusion, one that I wouldn’t deny. And that is this: indigenous ways of knowing that have an empirical basis, like navigation, can sit side by side with modern science, and can be taken as science insofar as they express empirical “truths” (in this case, a set of methods that with some reliability can get you from island to island). But, says Whittle, indigenous knowledge like this oten comes with a cultural overlay: stuff like taboos, spiritual interpretations, and so on. Here’s Whittle’s thesis:
Across the Anglosphere, traditional Indigenous knowledge systems are increasingly being discussed not simply as accumulated practical expertise, but as distinct “ways of knowing”—often described as holistic and relational, and as inseparable from ancestry, place and lived experience, rather than, like modern science, a detached body of objective knowledge. These ideas form part of a wider movement to “decolonise” knowledge by challenging the historical dominance of Western intellectual traditions. In New Zealand, for example—the largest landmass settled by ancient Pacific sailors—the incorporation of Mātauranga Māori (traditional Māori knowledge) into the school curriculum has prompted fierce debate about the relationship between traditional knowledge and empirical science. At stake is not merely cultural authority, but whether different knowledge traditions should be judged by the same standards, and even what it means for something to count as knowledge in the first place.
In my view, the spiritual overlay belongs in the realm of anthropology and sociology, while the empirically true and replicable kernel of knowledge should be incorporated into modern science. That is not the argument Whittle mentions, though. The “fierce” argument, as in New Zealand, is whether the whole panoply of “ways of knowing”, including their spiritual, religious, cultural, and ideological components, should be taught as coequal to modern science, as in the entire worldview of Mātauranga Māori (“MM”; see my many posts on this subject here). It has been proposed that the whole gemisch of MM should be taught in New Zealand university classes, though I think that scheme is dead.
There are, however, two distinctions between modern science and indigenous “knowledge”. The first, which Whittle doesn’t mention, is that indigenous “knowledge’ is often scientifically wrong, but is retained anyway. One example is the NZ government-funded project to stem the fungal blight destroying kauri trees by dousing the trees with whale oil and playing whale songs to them. This is based on a Māori myth that kauri trees (Agathis australis) and whales were once related (brothers) in ancient times, but whales were sent to the sea. As the story goes, playing whale songs to the trees and dousing them with whale oil will enable whales to cure their landlocked and afflicted brothers.
This is palpable nonsense, of course, and though it’s part of the Mātauranga Māori “way of knowing,” there’s no scientific basis to pursue this project, and the Kiwi government is wasting its money by funding it.
Further, a huge part of indigenous “ways of knowing” involve spiritual and herbal cures for diseases, most of which have not been tested in modern scientific ways to see if they’re effective. Thus, any untested claims are not “modern science” in any sense, but hypotheses.
Second, the fundamental methods of establishing indigenous knowledge and modern science differ, with the former involving trial and error (as in navigation) and the latter involving hypothesis testing, pervasive doubt, toosl like statistics and blind testing, and establishing universal truths. A lot of indigenous knowledge is locality specific, like “here is how we create mussel beds in New Zealand.” That still counts as knowledge, but is not universal in the modern scientific sense. And the religious, teleological, spiritual, and mystical overtones of indigenous ways of knowing do not belong to modern science.
Like the seven Auckland Unversity professors who started off this controversy in 2021 with a letter in The Listener, I think that indigenous knowledge systems as a whole should be taught in anthropology and sociology classes, not in science classes, though the empirically true kernel of knowledge in such systems can fit into science class. (But I have to add that that kernel is tiny compared with the huge ambit of modern chemistry, physics, and biology.) So I don’t take much issue with Whittle’s conclusion:
Ironically, in trying to escape the seeming Western hegemony over what counts as “knowledge,” scholars sometimes simply replace one highly abstract category with another—Indigenous “ways of knowing”—that perhaps tells us more about contemporary academia than about the historical traditions it purports to describe. In reality, traditional practitioners like Lewis’s ancient mariners were not extraordinary masters of esoteric knowledge; they were ordinary human beings who had mastered the extraordinary capacities of cumulative culture.
Ultimately, when we clear away the institutional power dynamics and the culture war crossfire, a simple principle emerges: Indigenous knowledge deserves neither romanticisation nor dismissal. These traditions should be studied seriously, criticised where necessary, and appreciated for what they truly are—not timeless, inaccessible mysteries, but a vital part of humanity’s shared and evolving intellectual inheritance.
Who could disagree with that? But what we can dismiss are myths and religious stories like the actual brotherhood of kauri trees and whales. That story has about as much credibility as saying the Moon is made of cheese; neither is science and neither deserves serious study since there is no substantive basis for the hypotheses.
This still leaves me with the mysteries about navigation discussed above. Apparently Lewis, in his studies, discovered that the navigators had a completely (to us) non-intuitive system of wayfinding, described like this:
For example, [Lewis] was initially baffled by the concept of etak, or “moving island.” As he came to realise, however, the old navigators weren’t treating the canoe as travelling across a static ocean; rather, they were seeing their vessel as fixed beneath the stars, with the islands and the sea moving past it (much as passengers on a moving train might imagine the landscape sliding backwards while they themselves remain stationary). To keep track of progress, therefore, the navigator would visualise a reference island off to one side—the etak—that would drift backwards under successive stars on the horizon. By noting which star this island was under at a given time, the navigator could work out how far the canoe had travelled and where it lay along its route. What at first appeared mystifying to Lewis gradually revealed itself as an ingenious mental framework—a “polydimensional system,” as he called it—for organising spatial information without maps or instruments.
I still don’t understand how the concept of a “moving island” would work, since it requires reference islands nearby, and often there weren’t any. Further, the crucial question of “how often did this system work rather than fail?” must remain unanswered, as we lack the necessary data. Thus, even with the amazing navigation of the Pacific, we don’t have a scientific answer to a crucial question: was the system infallible or not, and if not, how fallible was it?
I’m just going to have to read Lewis’s book. There’s a fair amount of information about ancient navigation methods (use of the sun, birds, and so on) in the Wikipedia article on Polynesian navigation, including their use of double-hulled canoes:
Polynesians made contact with nearly every island within the vast Polynesian Triangle, using outrigger canoes or double-hulled canoes. The double-hulled canoes were two large hulls, equal in length, and lashed side by side. The space between the paralleled canoes allowed for storage of food, hunting materials, and nets when embarking on long voyages
Here’s a modern replica of one, labeled, “Hōkūleʻa, a fibreglass-hulled replica of a Hawaiian double-hulled canoe sailing off Honolulu, 2009″:
Welcome to the end of the work week and the penultimate day of the month: Friday, October 30, 2026, the day before Halloween, and National Buy a Doughnut Day (note that it says nothing about eating them. But here’s a special doughnut I bought in 2005, along with 0thers for the lab. It’s a “Big Dat,” a monster creation of Dat Donuts near the University of Chicago. The websote calls it a “colossal shareable treat,” but of course I ate the whole thing.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 30 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*This is amazing: the NYT broke a story that could cost the Democrats a Senate seat from Alaska. We all know that the Republicans are running two candidates with the same name: Dan Sullivan. Trump was furious about that as in this election, Alaska is a swing state, and Trump threatened to have the DOJ file charges if Republicans lost. Now, from a NYT exclusive exposé, we know that the faux Dan Sullivan, the ringer, was ginned up by the staff of the Democratic candidate, Mary Petola, who was apparently aware of this effort and said did about it. I’ve given a bit longer excerpt than usual, and bolding is mine.
In the summer of 2025, a staffer for Mary Peltola, the Alaska Democrat who was eyeing a run for Senate, received unusual instructions from top campaign aides: Find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as you can.
The staffer complied, combing through voter records to produce a list of Dan Sullivans from across the state.
This was no random request. Dan S. Sullivan is the name of the state’s Republican senator. And if the Peltola campaign or its allies could track down and persuade another Dan Sullivan to run for Senate, the confusion could cost the senator crucial votes on the state’s unusual, four-person ballot.
The plan worked. This spring, a retired teacher from a tiny fishing village along the Alaska Panhandle, reachable only by air and sea, announced his candidacy for Senate. His name was Dan J. Sullivan.
The Peltola campaign has repeatedly denied any involvement in his candidacy. But The Times has found, based on interviews and text messages, along with documents prepared for a potential lawsuit against the campaign, that not only did Ms. Peltola’s team work with people trying to recruit Mr. Sullivan to run for Senate, but the effort was much broader. The group worked to coax other would-be spoilers into the race, to dilute the incumbent’s support and help catapult the Democrat to victory.
The endeavor, which was internally called the ballot composition project, involved secret trips to far-flung Alaskan communities and the appearance of a mysterious Midwestern operative, who traversed the state using a fake name and made his pitch to would-be candidates over beers at brew pubs.
It also involved the Peltola campaign’s lawyers, as well as senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which directs the party’s campaign strategy in Senate races across the country. From Washington to Anchorage, those advisers participated in regular conversations about the effort and even considered forming a new political party to draw conservatives onto the ballot.
Ballot-stacking tactics are common in politics and generally considered legal — and have been employed by both parties in Alaska. But this operation, which has not been reported before, reveals the lengths to which Democrats went to seek advantage in a Senate race that could determine control of the chamber.
“Alaskan voters need to know,” said Elisa Rios, Ms. Peltola’s former campaign manager and longtime aide, who was fired amid a staff shake-up in August, and agreed to a series of interviews with The Times since then. “There was a lot of speculation, and voters should get the full picture when making their decisions.”
Ms. Peltola was not directly involved in the project, Ms. Rios said, but she was “definitely aware.”
The operation had impact. On Tuesday, Ms. Peltola will be the only Democrat on the ballot, facing off against the two Mr. Sullivans and a long-shot candidate named Gerald Heikes who was also recruited into the race, according to The Times’s reporting. Polls give Ms. Peltola a strong chance of winning.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, filed a lawsuit in federal court at President Trump’s behest last week seeking to block certification of the election results if votes for the other Mr. Sullivan cost Senator Sullivan the win.
Granted, the real incumbent Republican is on the ballot as “Sullivan, Dan S., Republican (incumbent)”, while the faux Sullivan is on as “Sullivan, Daniel J., Jr.”, but you can see how some voters might be confused. Rios tried to retract her comments by asking the NYT, but they didn’t have to, and didn’t do so. This is Democrats playing dirty pool, something I’m not used to compared to Republicans, and if Poltola tried to win by this method, well, she doesn’t deserve to win. I don’t know what will happen with Trump’s lawsuit if she does win.
*There’s also an article about this by the editors of the Free Press (the first “editors-authored” piece I’ve seen, called “Democrats subvert democracy to save it.”
In the race to the bottom that is American elections, there is officially no high ground left to stand on. Democrats are demanding that voters elect them to save democracy, which they insist is threatened by President Donald Trump’s desire to meddle with the midterms. Now Americans will learn whether they meant any of it based on how they respond to brazen election meddling by one of their own.
The FP then describes the details of the NYT article given above.
. . . The false-flag candidacy was made possible by Alaska’s open primary, in which candidates can run under whichever party they’re registered with, and the top four finishers advance to the general election. The organizers of the scheme were not only determined to win at any cost but were also amused by their own craftiness and contemptuous of the voters they were hoping to trick. “Peltola advisers seemed to make fun of voters while watching a focus group, surmising the participants would be susceptible to being tricked into voting for a ballot spoiler,” the Times report says.
The DSCC denied any connection to Decoy Dan’s campaign in the wake of the news, while the Peltola campaign and Democratic leaders have largely remained silent. But as reporters continue to press them, they will have to account for what looks like a straightforward attempt to subvert democracy.
. . . The report also shines a new light on a Trump administration lawsuit regarding the Senate race. The Justice Department sued Alaska on Friday, seeking to delay certification of the result if the challenger Sullivan draws enough votes to swing it from the incumbent to Peltola. As our colleague Jed Rubenfeld noted, the suit was launched on a flawed legal basis and likely won’t hold up in court. Yet the basic premise of the challenge has now been vindicated. While a state court in Alaska previously declined to remove Decoy Dan from the ballot because his motive for running couldn’t be proved, the Times report makes clear that he was running in bad faith, which state law should preclude.
The news also reframes the outrage Democrats expressed in reaction to the Justice suit. “This is clearly corruption,” Peltola said in an interview. “This is clearly a very desperate attempt to cling to power, using his allies in Washington, D.C., to rig the system even further.” With full knowledge of her own campaign’s scheme, she was bold enough to accuse Trump of meddling in the midterms. Other Democrats may not have had the full picture, but one after another suspended their disbelief in the likelihood of a second Dan Sullivan joining the race on his own. “This is an outrage. It shows they know they’re going to lose. We will fight tooth and nail. And we will win,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in response to the lawsuit. A better reaction to the unlikely coincidence of two Sullivans may have been to privately lean on Peltola’s campaign for answers, or at least decline to comment while the facts take shape.
Ironically, the Times shares a piece of the blame for hyping the Trump election-meddling angle. Days before its report that showed Peltola’s role in the campaign deceit, it ran a headline saying “Justice Department Seeks to Block Alaska Vote if Republican Loses,” making it seem as though Trump sought to throw out the result rather than merely verify whether the second Sullivan was a legitimate candidate.
It’s become a familiar pattern. Trump and many of his allies earned their reputation for dishonesty after a failed campaign to overturn elections in 2020, yet ever since, Democrats have sought to cast themselves as saviors of democracy, hoping voters will forget their many attempts to subvert public choice. That includes suppressing stories about Hunter Biden and conjuring flimsy indictments to discredit Trump. The tale of two Sullivans is only the latest example, and a reminder that there was never any high ground to begin with.
This saddens me for reasons given above. I would like to think that Democrats do have the high ground. In general I think they do, especially given Trump, but even one screw-up like this is bad.
Why would a hyperlocal life-drawing community in Seattle be interested in a nonfiction book about the shifting aspirations of young people in India’s small towns? The book was published seven years ago. What did they want from me?
I accepted the invitation. The next email had a slick poster promoting the Zoom event, with the book cover as the backdrop and blurbs from the Economist and other publications. My attention was drawn to something more intriguing: a request for a “contribution fee”, with no amount specified. It would cover promotion, coordination and administration. But, oddly, this email didn’t come from Timothy. Signing off this time was Stephen – “Organiser, Community Improv LA”, which was another group in another city. According to the improv community’s Facebook group, Stephen is indeed the name of the organiser. However, Stephen had written to me using Timothy’s email address. To add to the chaos, Stephen/Timothy had also left what I suspect was an AI prompt in the email, which included the line: “MAKE IT MORE PROFESSIONAL.”
This was undoubtedly a scam. Genuine book clubs don’t ask for money from authors. But who was behind it?
Had these individuals actually read my work, they would have wanted to stay away from me. I have spent the last 10 years reporting on transnational fraud. My first book, Dreamers, closed with a chapter on fake call centres in India; my second, Scamlands, travelled to other low-income countries in Asia to portray an invisible empire that thrives on inequality, technological change and the erosion of trust.
Along the way, I met and interviewed the scammers whose labour keeps this empire running. For some, fraud was a route to upward mobility; for others, an act of revenge against the privileged. Though I have formally emerged from this underworld, I can never delete a scam email without wanting to know more.
I agreed to pay the book club – but after rather than before the event. After clarifying that “Stephen” was a typing error, “Timothy” sent me a Google Meet link for the book discussion. I joined the meeting to find about 20 people already in there: Alexander, Andrew, Mira, Rajnish, another Alexander, and several others. Timothy was also there and so was Stephen. None of them had their cameras on. Going by the profile pictures they used, most of them appeared to be white.
. . .I am not the only author to have found myself stuck in a Zoom book club with fake readers. Countless writers with published books have been receiving invitations from reading communities that start to unravel after a basic Google search.
As often happens with scams, most invitations sound too good to be true – thousands of members, incredible Goodreads clout and, at times, something even more alluring for an author: a deep understanding of their book.
Many authors spot red flags from the first email onward, but not all.
I guess this is a worldwide scam, or at least one directed at Anglophones. The “contribution fee” is the way these organizations make money. At any rate, authors should publicize who and where these scams come from so that people can Google these offers (all of them seem to be fake). This one was from Timothy Firth, organiser of a Seattle-based life-drawing community called CAM Life Drawing. There should be an “s” before the first word.
Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has unilaterally passed a rule that will allow specialty pharmacies to sell six specific peptide drugs, overruling scientists at the Food and Drug Administration.
The peptides are popular among members of Kennedy’s Make America Health Again movement, and many prominent MAHA figures and Kennedy allies sell them. Kennedy said he uses some of the peptides and called himself a “big fan.” But FDA scientists continue to say there is insufficient evidence to show if they’re effective, and they are potentially dangerous. In 2023, the safety concerns led the FDA to remove the six peptides from a list of drugs that can be made by specialty pharmacies called compounding pharmacies—which make customized formulations of drugs for patients, or, in cases such as this, specialty drugs in bulk.
Kennedy’s new rule sidesteps the need to formally undo that FDA action. The rule is titled “Enforcement Discretion Policy Regarding 503A Compounding Using Certain Peptide Bulk Drug Substances” and was made available Wednesday on the Federal Register, with the final publication date set for October 30. The rule does not change the regulatory status of the peptide; instead, it states the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will no longer take enforcement action against compounding pharmacies for making the peptides, essentially giving them a green light to freely produce and sell them. Kennedy had quietly proposed this rule earlier this month.
. . .Along with the notice in the Federal Register, HHS also posted a more detailed explanation of the policy today that includes more of Kennedy’s rationale for easing enforcement of the six select peptides, which are: BPC-157, Epitalon, KPV, MOTS-c, Semax, and TB-500.
One reason cited for all the peptides was that an FDA advisory panel voted in July to add these six peptides back to the list of drugs compound pharmacies can make. However, prior to the vote, Kennedy stacked that 12-member committee with eight new members. At least six of Kennedy’s additions have ties to peptide-related businesses and clinics, raising serious conflict-of-interest concerns.
Another explanation for allowing the peptides is that the safety concerns are mainly hypothetical or “inferential” and not based on observed harm in humans. But this is mainly because there are few to no studies involving humans that show either benefits or harms from the peptides.
I looked up these peptides, and none of them have support for their efficacy from rigorous human clinical studies. Indeed, there have been no clinical studies at all in about half the peptides. RFK Jr.’s policy is not only unsound, but possibly dangerous.
*I just voted a straight Democratic ticket in Illinois, so don’t chew my tuchas when I criticize my own party, for they’ve disappointed me terribly in the last several years. I’m going to chew the Democrats’ rump by calling your attention to another Free Press article, “The Democratic case against Abdul El-Sayed.”
Democratic voters are being instructed to do exactly what Democrats lectured Republicans not to do in 2016—which is to put party over country. They are being lulled into a tribalist fury, made to believe they have to set aside any reservations they may have about their nominee or the creeping forces of illiberalism co-opting their party, because right now the only thing they are allowed to worry about is Donald Trump.
Indeed, instead of addressing Jewish Michiganders’ very legitimate concerns about El-Sayed—he who campaigned with far-left, “America deserved 9/11” streamer Hasan Piker, he of “hurt people hurt people” fame, he who once urged an Egyptian president to “purge” the police and the media of non-Islamists, he who refused to say anything about an Iranian ayatollah’s assassination because voters in Dearborn, Michigan, were “sad”—Obama sidestepped all that, offering up some of the old kumbaya cha cha cha that worked in 2008 but feels ridiculously stale now.
. . .It does not matter that El-Sayed has apologized for or tried to distance himself from some of his excesses. That is what one does in the heat of a campaign. We should assume his beliefs are unchanged.
I am amazed at how many Americans assume an apology equates to a complete change of views.
Which should be more than enough for Democrats to reject him.
But Democrats, like Republicans, have mostly succumbed to a partisan muddleheadedness that makes it impossible for them to see beyond the next election. Right now, the next election is one week away, and the only thing the partisan can think about is who will control the House and Senate. El-Sayed, of course, is very important. He is a candidate in one of the two or three races that will decide what happens in the Senate, and it does not matter that he’s not sure whether Iran or Israel poses a greater national-security threat to the United States. What matters is winning—clobbering Trump, derailing his agenda. Once they take care of Trump, Democrats imagine, they’ll have the luxury of worrying about other things. Like how big, exactly, their tent should be.
. . .Democrats should not simply reject El-Sayed because he’s hateful. They should reject him because he will cost Democrats election
His victory will confirm voters’ worst fears about the Democratic Party, that the red-green alliance—the partnership between radical leftists and Islamists that threatens France and other European countries—is coming for America. Like New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, El-Sayed will obsess over the Jewish state. He will prioritize ending the U.S. relationship with it (he’s already indicated he wants a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee), and every time someone, Republican or Democrat, points out all the advantages of supporting a multiracial, multireligious democracy in the Middle East—the shared intelligence, the reining in of extremists, the stability, the tech, the commercial opportunity—El-Sayed will scream “genocide,” and the Democrats will roll over. They will be scared of being called Islamophobic, and they will welcome more radicals into their gargantuan, oversized tent. They will look weak, and they will sound detached from reality, because they will be.
The positives are fixing a party that has values: “We believe in markets and the Bill of Rights and the West, and we don’t make excuses for terrorists attacking synagogues, and we don’t cavort with Maoist streamers, and even though we have many problems with Donald Trump—the corruption, the embarrassing spectacle of it all—we’re not about to surrender our principles, even if that means losing a Senate seat. The republic is so much bigger than that. We are so much bigger than that.” The FP doesn’t go so far as to say that Michiganers should vote for Republican Mike Rogers; that advice is not mentioned once.
El-Sayed is a terrible candidate and a semi-closeted antisemite. You might remember that when a man attacked a Michigan synagogue last spring, El-Sayed offered an explanation: the man was getting revenge for the death of his relatives in an Israeli airstrike—in Lebanon. “Hurt people hurt people” said El-Sayed, and though he later apologied for his remark, this is one of several that indicate his animus towards Jews and amity towards terrorists. I’m glad I don’t have to vote in Michigan, but if he wins the Senate will go in a bad direction. (I’d probably write in a candidate rather than vote for him.)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a strange desire:
Hili: Can we go to Egypt? Andrzej: I’m afraid we’ll have to strike that category of dreams off the list.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy możemy pojechać do Egiptu?
Ja: Ten gatunek marzeń musimy już skreślić.
Here’s Masih in Poland, showing her bodyguards, her meeting with Salman Rushdie, and part of her speech at a meeting:
I refuse to be intimidated. So do the brave women of Iran and Afghanistan who were blinded for daring to fight for freedom.
Death threats, assassination plots, massive online harassment, smear campaigns, none of it will silence us.
Thank you, Poland, for protecting me, standing with us, and amplifying our voices against the brutality of the Islamic Republic, the Taliban, and Islamist terrorism.
From Sue, a heartening (and true) story. And the guy liked kittens, too!
In the middle of World War Two, German soldiers in southeastern Poland started avoiding a cluster of villages.
They wouldn’t go in. They wouldn’t take people out for forced labor. They put up warning signs and stayed away.
They believed the area was infected with typhus.
It wasn’t. Two doctors had invented the whole thing.
The man behind it was Eugene Lazowski, a young Polish doctor working for the Red Cross in the town of Rozwadów. He was watching the Nazi occupation tear his country apart. Executions. Deportations. People shipped off to labor camps, many never coming back.
He wanted to stop it. He had no weapons, no army, and no way to fight.
What he had was medicine.
His friend and fellow doctor, Stanisław Matulewicz, had discovered something strange. If you injected a person with a harmless, dead strain of a certain bacteria, their blood would test positive for typhus.
They wouldn’t be sick at all. But on paper, they’d look like they had one of the most feared diseases of the war.
And the Germans were terrified of typhus. It spread fast, it killed, and it could tear through an army. When the Germans found it, they quarantined the area and kept their distance.
Lazowski realized what that meant. If he could make enough people look infected, the Germans would leave the whole region alone.
So he started injecting his patients.
He chose carefully. He sent the blood samples to German labs for testing, exactly as the rules required. The results came back positive. Again and again.
The Germans declared an epidemic zone. Villages were quarantined. Soldiers kept out. People who would have been seized for forced labor or worse were left alone, because nobody wanted to go near them.
Lazowski had to be careful. If too many cases looked fake, someone would ask why nobody was dying. So he spread out the injections over time and kept the outbreak believable.
Eventually the Germans did get suspicious. They sent a team of doctors to inspect.
Lazowski met them with food and vodka and played the gracious host. He guided them toward the sickest looking, dirtiest patients he could find, in the most crowded rooms. The German doctors, worried about catching typhus themselves, took a few samples and left in a hurry.
The tests came back positive.
The fake epidemic lasted until the end of the war. Estimates say it may have protected around 8,000 people.
Lazowski also secretly helped Jews from the nearby ghetto, giving them medical care at enormous risk.
After the war he moved to the United States and became a professor of pediatrics in Chicago. For decades he barely talked about what he’d done. Late in life he finally wrote a memoir. He called it My Private War.
He died in 2006.
He never fired a shot. He beat the Nazis with a needle and a lab test.
Two from my feed. First, a new cat song (AI, natch):
You loved “Dead Mouse Delivery.” Oscar took that as encouragement. 😼 Now he’s back with “Who’s a Good Human?” – Widescreen (better) below ⤵️ https://t.co/AAap5klY5e
— ILikeToasters (Latent Creations) (@LikeToasters) October 29, 2026
One I retweeted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
30 October 1939 | A Dutch Jewish girl, Selma Henriette Lievendag, was born in Hengelo.
In October 1942, she was deported to #Auschwitz. After the selection, she was murdered in a gas chamber together with her older brother Johan.
—
A short video about the first two gas chambers created near Auschwitz II-Birkenau: https://t.co/KArryHBbea
