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.
Starting with the recent accusations of gang rape against 7 denizens of a fraternity at Cornell University, Bill Maher’s latest real-time episode takes out after the Greek houses, including sororities. (Maher went to Cornell, with a double major in literature and history). I agree with Maher: when I went to William & Mary, I participated in fraternity rush, but gave up after visiting two houses and seeing the “brothers” making cryptic notes on the freshmen. I’d prefer to find brothers using my own criteria rather than theirs, and many of the friends I made, most not in fraternities, are still friends today.
While he doesn’t conclude anything about whether there was a rape or not, but he does think that fraternities, with their hazing, drinking, and rowdiness, don’t conform to their mission to produce “gentlemen.” I’ve never heard of the “elephant walk” he describes as a bonding event. but Grok (below) affirms that it has been a real thing.
The guests you see on the panel are U.S. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Sara Eisen(financial reporter for CNBC).
The “elephant walk” described by Grok (my quesiton in bold). I’ve left out the links.
Do fraternities really practice the “elephant walk”?
Yes, some fraternities have practiced the “elephant walk” as a hazing ritual, though it is not universal, is often illegal, and has become less common (or more underground) due to bans, lawsuits, and scrutiny.
The ritual typically involves pledges (new members) forming a single-file line or circle, frequently while nude or partially clothed. Each person holds the genitals of the person in front of or behind them and walks together. Variations include inserting a thumb into the anus of the person ahead (sometimes with a rule that if it slips out, the thumb goes in the mouth). The posture is said to resemble elephants linked trunk-to-tail. It is framed by participants as a bonding or loyalty test through shared humiliation.
Documentation and evidence
It is treated as a known practice in academic work. Folklorists Alan Dundes and Lauren Dundes analyzed it in their 2002 essay “The Elephant Walk and Other Amazing Hazing: Male Fraternity Initiation through Infantilization and Feminization,” placing it in the broader context of humiliating initiation rites.
Dictionaries and references record the slang meaning explicitly (e.g., Wiktionary).
News coverage has referenced it as an established form of hazing. A prominent 2019 case involved Sacramento State’s Delta Chi chapter: an anonymous tip with a photo of a “simulation” (clothed men holding objects) triggered an investigation. Participants described it as an educational skit about hazing rather than the real thing; the university treated the allegation seriously amid other Greek life issues. Other reports and student accounts mention similar incidents or rumors at various schools.
Hey, you reprobates! Send in your good wildlife photos if you have them. I know who you are!
Despite having just lost her beloved cat Natasha, ecologist Susan Harrison from UC Davis has some bird photos to share with us. Susan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
Lewis’s Woodpeckers and others
This is an irruption year in the Western US, in which large numbers of seed-eating birds have been on the move in fall. One of these species, the Lewis’s Woodpecker(Melanerpes lewis), has just arrived en masse at our local Lake Solano County Park, where riparian forest lines a small gem of reservoir. These dramatic pink, ruby, and green birds are loosely social and nomadic, moving in flocks between sources of insects in summer and acorns in winter. Unusually for woodpeckers, they catch insects on the wing, and use their drilling talents only to break acorns and cache them in bark crevices.
Excited by their arrival, I grabbed my camera and headed for Lake Solano. Only once did I catch a close-up woodpecker on the public side of the lake:
For the rest of the photos, I had to return with an inflatable boat and paddle across to the privately owned shore. There, around 40 birds were foraging for acorns on Valley Oaks (Quercus lobata), caching them in Fremont Cottonwoods (Populus fremontii) and California Walnuts (Juglans californica), and sallying high overhead for insects:
From across the lake, I spied a large group bathing and drinking:
Because the bathing photos were too distant to be crisp, I asked ChatGPT to render one as an Impressionist painting in the style of Mary Cassatt (“The Bathing Party”):
Other lovely birds were seen en route to the Lewis’s Woodpeckers.
Green Heron (Butorides virescens) imitating a successful Wile E. Coyote:
Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus) joining the woodpecker drinking party:
Welcome to Sunday, October 11, 2026: Sabbath for goyische cats and World Biryani Day. At center left below you can see a biryani served to several of us when I visited Bhubaneswar, India, some years ago. I spoke in five cities, and asked as my honorarium only I be taken to great places featuring local dishes. That was a great trip.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. would regularly detail the massive damage it had done to the enemy, from weapons destroyed to body counts of enemy soldiers dead. But the test of success is whether that damage makes the adversary cry uncle. So far Iran has not surrendered, and there are reasons to think more bombing will not change that reality.
The fundamental problem with Trump’s approach is that he cannot decide whether he wants to change Iran’s policies or its government. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent illustrated the contradiction in September when he said the message to other countries was: “This is the end of the regime.” Yet in the same interview, he insisted the goal was not necessarily to collapse the government but to pressure it into negotiations.
Addressing the United Nations last month, Trump wondered whether he should make a deal allowing Iran to rebuild into a greater country — or “annihilate the Islamic republic and do it quickly.” Meanwhile, his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were negotiating with Iranian officials. Washington was threatening to destroy the government while asking it to negotiate seriously.
If Iran’s leaders believe Washington intends to destroy them regardless of what they do, why would they make concessions? Their incentive would be to resist, inflict costs and outlast the U.S. In Foreign Affairs, Stephen Biddle and his co-authors argue that wars ultimately end through political bargains. Military force can improve the terms of those bargains but cannot substitute for them. The U.S. has repeatedly forgotten this lesson, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, demonstrating extraordinary skill at destroying armies but much less at translating battlefield achievements into lasting political outcomes.
The Trump administration must decide what it wants. If the goal is policy change — reopening Hormuz, constraining Iran’s nuclear program and curbing its regional aggression — it must define achievable terms and pressure Iran to accept them. If the goal is regime change, it must plan for a bloody struggle, probably with more regional spillover. Until Washington resolves that contradiction, the country will remain stuck in its latest Middle Eastern quagmire.
The American people, including, I think, Republicans, won’t put up with a bloody struggle to effect regime change, so I don’t think that’s in the cards, much as I would like regime change. That would require the mass effort of the Iranian people, and they have no stomach for protest after 30,000 were killed by the regime in a short period. But it’s not clear whether there are achievable aims, save for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Certainly Iran will not make a credible promise to end its ambitions to build nuclear weapons.
Christa Pike has been discharged from a Nashville hospital, her lawyers said on Saturday, 10 days after she survived an attempt at lethal injection.
She is back at Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the primary prison for women in Tennessee, her lawyers said. As of Thursday, Ms. Pike had been walking with assistance, but still struggling with concentration and memory.
“She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances,” her lawyers said in a statement. “She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery.”
Ms. Pike has spent three decades in the prison, largely in isolation, for the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate in Knoxville. On Sept. 30, she survived two doses of the drug pentobarbital, the second time this year Tennessee has failed to carry out an execution.
Ms. Pike is the first person to have survived receiving doses of a drug during a lethal injection execution.
. . .The Tennessee Department of Correction confirmed that Ms. Pike had returned to the prison, but declined to offer additional details about her condition or treatment.
The course of medical treatment for Ms. Pike in prison was not immediately clear.
Her lawyers have asked Mr. Lee to grant her clemency and allow her to spend the remainder of her life in prison.
Agreed. This mess should never have occurred in the first place. As I’ve said repeatedly, it’s barbaric for the state to kill people, and especially barbaric when things go wrong, as they did for Christa Pike. If they really wanted an effective way to do away with prisoners, I’d suggest the firing squad or guillotine, but the states prefers bloodless executions. They should be preferring life without parold.
An Anthropic artificial intelligence model submitted a false tip to a Philadelphia police website about an unsolved homicide case, authorities and Anthropic said.
It’s the latest example of AI models acting in unintended ways and manipulating government and other websites during tests. In a report Friday, Anthropic also disclosed a separate incident when its AI model submitted forms to an undisclosed government website instead of stopping before submission.
The incident in Philadelphia occurred on July 18 when the AI model Claude Haiku 4.5 was tasked with generating and performing example tasks on randomly selected webpages, Anthropic said.
Claude filled out a form on police site PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com indicating it might have information regarding an unsolved murder listed on the site.
Philadelphia Police said in a statement they were unaware of the incident until Anthropic notified them on Wednesday. Then they found the submission in the website’s tip records and confirmed it was marked spam and never forwarded to police.
. . .“Unsolved cases involve real victims, grieving families and investigators working to secure answers,” the Philadelphia Police Department said in a statement. “Technology companies must take all appropriate steps necessary to prevent their systems from submitting false information to law enforcement.”
Anthropic said in its report that most of the reported behaviors are forms of what it calls “persistence” — “in which Claude, when it cannot complete a task as given, works around a restriction instead of stopping.”
The company said it was modifying its training to “reduce the likelihood of further misbehavior.”
This is only the beginning of AI “misbehavior”, and it could get much worse. Imagine if AI could get into Medicare or Social Security websites, or bank sites. We can’t even imagine what bots can do.
*Elisha Wiesel, the son of author Holocaust survivor, and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel has written a piece in the Free Press condemning the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, calling it “The death of the Nobel Peace Prize.” (See also the WSJ’s editorial, “A Nobel Prize for Hating Israel.”)
This morning, the same committee awarded the same prize to Navi Pillay, who chaired the UN commission of inquiry that, on September 16 of last year, betrayed the meaning of the word genocide and weaponized it against Israel. Her commission held Israel to impossible moral standards demanded of no other sovereign nation defending itself from attack. The decision followed years of anti-Israel advocacy by Pillay, including signing a manifesto in 2020 calling on governments to “Sanction Apartheid Israel.” Others have been able to see Pillay for who she is. In 2022, for example, Berlin’s mayor withdrew her support from an event honoring Pillay with a peace medal. The event was subsequently canceled.
The decision to honor Pillay is not a onetime lapse for the Nobel Committee. It is part of a long-standing trend. Members of the committee have said publicly that they wished they could take back former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres’s 1994 prize because of concerns over Israel’s conduct. A decade later, four of the five members were still defending former Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat’s prize, awarded that same year. The Israeli laureate was judged by everything he did afterward. The Palestinian laureate was never judged again. Antisemitism today looks less like hatred than like scrutiny with one permanent defendant, carried out in the language of justice. Kåre Kristiansen, a member of the committee, understood this. He resigned within an hour of the 1994 announcement because he could not honor a man whose record was soaked in terror.
It is not that Pillay has done nothing worthy of praise. Her record against actual apartheid, in South Africa, is real. So was my father’s: In his Nobel lecture he spoke of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and said, “Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as antisemitism.” So I don’t dismiss her work lightly. The problem is that she does not resent antisemitism the way my father despised apartheid. To take only the most notable example: When Miloon Kothari, a fellow member of her UN commission, complained in 2022 about social media being controlled by the “Jewish lobby,” Pillay defended him.
More importantly, the commission’s declaration that Israel is committing a genocide is wholly baseless. Consider the facts. On October 6, 2023, there was not a single Israeli soldier or civilian living in Gaza. In 2005, Israel withdrew every soldier from Gaza and removed thousands of its own citizens from their homes, against their will, to find out whether Palestinian self-rule would bring peace. Hamas seized the territory. It took hundreds of millions of dollars that could have built schools and hospitals and spent them on rockets and hundreds of miles of terror tunnels. Even so, Israel kept trying: In the months before October 7, it issued work permits to roughly 18,500 Gazans, looking to build economic ties with a population that desperately needed the work.
Critics say Israel’s control of Gaza’s borders makes it an occupier anyway. But Gaza has two borders, and Egypt has kept its own crossing as tightly controlled as Israel’s, flooding Hamas’s smuggling tunnels and razing homes to build a buffer zone. Hardly anyone calls that occupation. Could it be that no country wants terrorists crossing into it, and that only the Jewish state is condemned for feeling the same?
. . .In 1975, after the United Nations declared Zionism a form of racism, my father wrote: “This is not the first time the enemy has accused us of his own crimes. Our possessions were taken from us, and we were called misers; our children were massacred, and we were accused of ritual murder.”
We will fight the lie that Israel committed genocide with facts, in every forum, for as long as it takes. My father took sides. So do we.
The last sentence refers to Wiesel’s own Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he said, ““We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
*I largely stopped reading Nicholas Kristof in the NYT after he wrote his undocumented “dog rape” column, but in his op-ed this week on child marriage, he reveals some shocking data that is certainly checkable. And once again we see both the Left and the Right behaving shamefully, but for different reasons:
Every three seconds, on average, a girl under the age of 18 is married somewhere in the world. In India. In Ethiopia. And, to our shame, in Illinois, Maryland, Colorado — and most of America.
Thirty-two states still allow child marriages in some circumstances, such as with the permission of a parent or a judge. Two states, New Mexico and Mississippi, have no minimum age at all.
Some of the defenders of child marriages in America are religious groups on the far right, but as a liberal myself, I find it deeply dispiriting that in a number of states they are joined by left-leaning organizations such as the local affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood — even, in Illinois, the National Organization for Women.
That’s right: Some progressives and feminists fight to defend child marriage, usually on the basis of “child rights.” I shake my head in disbelief: If you actually talk to girls and women who have been married young, what you often hear is the opposite of empowerment. Instead, it’s oppression and rape and the loss of education and childhood.
For progressive organizations to ally themselves with right-wing extremists to defend what sometimes amounts to state-sanctioned statutory rape — this is liberal self-caricature.
. . .Child marriage isn’t routine in the United States, but neither is it rare. Unchained at Last, a nonprofit that fights child marriage, pored over marriage records and calculated that some 315,000 children were legally married in the United States between 2000 and 2021. A great majority were 16 or 17, but some were as young as 10. Most were girls married to adult men.
At least 66,000 of those marriages involved ages or age differences that would have constituted a sex crime in that state.
“It’s a workaround for statutory rape,” said Fraidy Reiss, the executive director of Unchained at Last.
. . . These are the states that still allow child marriages in some circumstances: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
If you live in one of these states (especially New Mexico and Mississippi), first check the rules that allow child marriage, and then I’d urge you to write to the governor and your local state Representative.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has replaced Malgorzata with Andrzej as a pillow:
Hili: Time for bed. Andrzej: Yes, but could you sleep next to me tonight instead of on top of me?
In Polish:
Hili: Pora iść do łóżka.
Ja: Tak, ale czy mogłabyś dziś spać obok mnie, a nie na mnie?
If you’ve kept track of NYT Mayor Zohran Mamdani since he was elected less than a year ago, it’s not hard to conclude that, though he pretends to dislike bigotry, his statements and actions add up to a man who is not fond of Jews, and who wants Israel gone and replaced by a Palestinian state. His “official” statement on October 7 of this year, was thin on sympathy for Israel and touted the three Big Lies of antisemitism: Israeli apartheid, genocide, and colonialism. To top off the day, Mamdani had dinner at a Palestinian restaurant, showing that he not only lacks the empathy he pretends to have for murdered Israelis, but also a man who in effect spits in the face of his Jewish constituency.
Of course I can’t write about this stuff nearly as well as the NYT’s op-ed columnist Bret Stephens, who yesterday posted what I see as one of his best and most penetrating columns. It’s about Mamdani’s moral obtuseness, and you can read it by clicking the link below or seeing the archived version here. I couldn’t resist spouting off myself (flush left) after bits of Stephens’s text (indented):
I was going to give some quotes, but I found I quoted the entire column, and I hope Stephens and the NYT forgive me. It is, as Darwin described The Origin, “one long argument,” and the parts are inseparable. I’ve bolded my favorite parts:
Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, set off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”
In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.” In fact, it’s a moral obscenity. Let me count the ways.
It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The paragraph above shows not only the power of simile in calling out hypocrisy, but also how morally obtuse Mamdani really was, and how oblivious and/or insensitive he is to the feelings of people devastated by Hamas’s attacks on October 7. He couldn’t keep his gob shut for just one day without condemning Israel.
It is obscene because many of the Jews murdered on Oct. 7, living in kibbutzim with conspicuously left-leaning politics, had been at the forefront of the peace movement, volunteering, for example, to drive sick Palestinians for treatment at nearby Israeli hospitals. Hamas wasn’t just killing and terrorizing the innocent; it was eliminating the good.
It is obscene because Hamas didn’t just kill its victims in pursuit of a strategic objective. It tormented and slaughtered them like an army of serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims. Corpses of Israeli women were described by one coroner as “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others appeared to have been raped so violently that their pelvises were broken. Parents were killed in front of their children; children were murdered in their beds. A fieldworker was beheaded with a garden hoe. I know this because Hamas filmed itself doing this and I forced myself to watch the film. I know because that same month, I visited the bedrooms where the kids had been murdered, their mattresses still soaked in blood.
Although Mamdani gives lip service to the horrors experienced by Israeli civilians on October 7, not once have I seen him blame Hamas for the “genocide”, nor, indeed, say anything about the fact that explicitly genocidal aims are espoused not by Israel but by Hamas. That organization is responsible for the devastation that followed their invasion of Israel, as are the Palestinians who enable and approve of Hamas’s actions.
Mamdani does not mention that the kind of warfare practiced by Hamas guaranteed more civilian deaths. Indeed, Hamas’s late leader, Yahya Sinwar, approved of the deaths of Gazan civilians, asserting that they were actually beneficial to Hamas. Read what he said and you’ll realize that Hamas didn’t value the lives of Gazan civilians nearly as much as did Israel. Israel tried to protect Gazan civilians; Sinwar’s attitude was “the more of our civilians die, the better for our cause.” While the movie “Naza” faults Israel for killing civilians as a necessary byproduct of eliminating Hamas, the IDF tried to prevent that, while, in contrast, the “necessary sacrifices” of Gazan civilians were something that Sinwar (and Hamas) wanted and facilitated (why else would they put military facilities in and under schools and hospitals?) Stephens continues:
It is obscene because, whatever else you may think of the war in Gaza, on the eve of Oct. 7 the border of Israel and Gaza was governed by a cease-fire. It was Hamas that chose to kick off the violence, just as the Japanese did in 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Whether in fistfights between people or wars between states, whoever throws the first punch forfeits the right to throw the last.
It is obscene because Mamdani is being misleading when he speaks as if his prime objection to Israel is what it did after Oct. 7. In fact, the mayor has been an anti-Israel zealot at least since his college days, when, as a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, he broke off collaboration with the left-leaning Jewish group J Street, which advocates a Palestinian state, because it also recognizes the rights of a Jewish state. He’s written a rap professing “love” for five men convicted in a U.S. court of funneling money to Hamas. The day after Oct. 7, he issued a brief statement that said nothing about Hamas but immediately denounced Israel. Put simply, this is a mayor who first condemned Israel as guilty and then went about collecting evidence.
It is obscene because, however much the genocide allegation against Israel is mindlessly repeated by people too lazy or prejudiced to understand the difference between war and genocide, that allegation is as false as it is sinister. False, because genocide is about killing whole classes of people for who they are rather than for what they did — and if Israel wanted to kill Palestinians as Palestinians it never would have bothered mobilizing hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers for the war, and losing hundreds in high-intensity urban warfare. Sinister, because the political purpose of the genocide allegation is to trivialize, if not erase, the attacks of Oct. 7 by making them seem minor in comparison to the Palestinian casualties that tragically, but all-but inevitably, followed.
It is obscene because Hamas’s intentions toward Israel really are genocidal. Its leaders have often and publicly vowed to perpetrate future Oct. 7s. Had the group not been stopped by force that day, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have kept up its orgy of slaughter on its way to Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. Yet one searches in vain for anything from the mayor except perfunctory, pro forma condemnations of Hamas.
I often ask those who accuse Israel of killing too many Palestinians what they would do were they in charge of Israel or of the IDF. Would they stop after killing, say, 3,000 Hamas members (and about 6,000 civilians assuming a 2:1 ratio)? Given that Hamas said they’d continue slaughter and kidnapping, why would Israel stop short of wholesale elimination of the terrorists? I’ve never heard a critic explicitly say what they think Israel would have done other than what it did to eliminate the existential threat that Hamas posed.
It is obscene because there’s an even more wretched purpose to the genocide charge against Israel, which long predates the recent war in Gaza. It is a specimen of Holocaust erasure: not the dumb kind, which seeks to deny Nazi Germany’s murder of six million Jews, but a more sophisticated version that accuses living Jews of genocide as a way of ending the historical Jewish claim to a long and ongoing history of persecution and near-annihilation that accounts for its need for a sovereign state capable of defending its people.
In my view, people like Mamdani, and other Jew haters, dislike the Jews even more because of the Holocaust, which of course arouses sympathies for what Jews experienced. That’s why they either deny the Holocaust or accuse Jews of enacting the same thing in Gaza—a bit of lunacy that many have bought into. The next paragraph is sheer brilliance:
Finally, it is obscene because Mamdani is the mayor for about one million Jewish New Yorkers, many with close relatives in Israel, who deserve better on a day of grief than to be offered the equivalent of an “All Lives Matter” homily. This is yet another of the double standards through which modern-day Jew hatred manifests itself: Whenever antisemitism is mentioned in progressive circles, it is inevitably accompanied by nods about Islamophobia or other bigotries.
It would be better to have a mayor who, if only on Oct. 7, can say: Jewish Lives Matter. Israeli Lives Matter. Full stop. The lectures about Gaza can come some other day.
This Washington Post article (click to read, or find it archived here) shows that, relatively, cat ownership is outstripping dg ownership in America, mainly because cats are holding steady while dog ownership is declining. Nevertheless, pet stores and other “mech” places offer far more goodies for dgs than for cats.
The author is Robert Granadar.
Excerpts:
According to statistics from my research firmPackaged Facts, for the first time since the data began being tracked, more U.S. households own kittens than puppies. In 2014, there were 1.8 households with a dog under 1 year old for every one household with a cat the same age. That ratio reached parity in 2025, and this year, it declined to 0.94 to 1. Fewer puppies today means fewer dogs in the future.
This isn’t a story of cat ownership booming, however. It’s one of dog ownership declining. The number of American households with dogs has dropped 5 percent since 2019, while cat ownership has held relatively steady. Dogs still dominate America — roughly 71 million households have dogs compared with 53 million that own cats — but that is changing quickly.
Here’s a graph of popularity of the two mammals, with fish a distant third:
. . . . roughly halfof cat owners feel as though pet product marketers and retailers aren’t catering to cats.
Meanwhile, in most pet stores, dog owners are greeted with a wide assortment of food and treat options, toys, enrichment products, travel accessories, apparel, training equipment and seasonal merchandise. Grooming, boarding, training and other pet services remain overwhelmingly dog-centric. There are dog parks, dog beaches, dog-friendly hotels, dog-friendly restaurants, dog bakeries and even dog airlines. Cats are largely left out. They get leftover boxes from Amazon deliveries.
Pet companies treat cats like the Ken to dogs’ Barbie. So, what’s behind Americans’ move away from dogs?
Mostly, practicality. Cats are quieter, easier to leave by themselves and better at living in smaller spaces. A dog can turn your Saturday into a logistical exercise. A cat barely notices you’ve left the house.
But the trend reflects the state of the economy, too. Home buying, a traditional trigger for adding a dog to the family, has been stifled by a combination of elevated real estate prices, sluggish real wage growth and higher mortgage rates. The homeownership decline has taken some of the steam out of the dog market, as homeowners are almost twice as likely as renters to own a dog, according to our data.
Here are the data from the article, state by state, on the relative popularity of cats vs. d*gs. Note that the five states with more households having cats than dogs are nearly all in the NE, with the exception of Idaho (?): Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Illinois and Louisiana, in stark contrast show fewer than 20% of the households with cats:
And look! Cats cost almost half of what dogs do!
Demographic shifts are also putting downward pressure on overall pet ownership. Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies projects that household growth will be concentrated among older adults and minorities — groups that historically have lower pet ownership rates.
The decline in dog ownership is also a product of the way people live and work post-pandemic. Americans have smaller households, are more likely toown apartments, travel more and incur higher costs. With the U.S. facing tighter economic conditions, dogs can be prohibitive. Packaged Facts estimates that owners spend an average of $1,300 annually on dogs, compared with roughly $750 on cats.
. . . This isn’t a story about cats replacing dogs. It’s about Americans becoming more like cats: living in smaller spaces, valuing independence and preferring to be left alone.
Go cats! This article neglects to explain one fact that baffles me: why the Internet is far more dominated by cats than by d*gs. You’d expect that because d*gs are more expressive and active, as well as more popular, they’d dominate the Web. But they don’t. Any explanations?
********************
Do you know about the Cat Festival held every year in Tokyo? It celebrates the Bakeneko, a supernatural demon cat. Here’s a bit about it from Wikipedia:
The bakeneko (ばけ猫, “changed cat”) is a type of Japanese yōkai, or supernatural entity; more specifically, it is a kaibyō, or supernatural cat.[2] It is often confused with the nekomata, another cat-like yōkai.[3] The distinction between them is often ambiguous, but the largest difference is that the nekomata has two tails, while the bakeneko has only one.
There are legends of bakeneko in various parts of Japan, but the tale of the Nabeshima Bakeneko Disturbance in Saga Prefecture is especially famous.
The reason that cats are seen as yōkai in Japanese mythology is attributed to many of their characteristics: for example, the pupils of their eyes change shape depending on the time of day, their fur can seem to cause sparks when they are petted (due to static electricity), they sometimes lick blood, they can walk without making a sound, their wild nature that remains despite the gentleness they can show, they are difficult to control, their sharp claws and teeth, nocturnal habits, and their speed and agility.
Here’s a picture of a demon-cat from the Wikipedia article, with the caption, “Ume no Haru Gojūsantsugi (駅) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. A kabuki play that was performed in 1835 (Tenpo 6) in Ichimura-za. It depicts a cat that has shapeshifted into an old woman, a cat wearing a napkin and dancing, and the shadow of a cat licking a lamp.”
Part of the legends of the bakeneko is that they like to lick lamp oil!
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
But every year about this time the demon cats are celebrated in a Tokyo Festival, and people dress up in cat outfits and do catlike things. The video below shows the festival from last year. The description:
Step into the whimsical world of Tokyo’s Kagurazaka Bakeneko Festival (化け猫フェスティバル) where the streets come alive with cat-themed costumes, traditional dance, music, and joy! 🐾✨ Every year, cat lovers from across Japan gather in Kagurazaka, Tokyo, to celebrate the mysterious Bakeneko (化け猫) the legendary “ghost cat” of Japanese folklore. From adorable feline cosplay and creative makeup to lively parades and local treats, it’s a must-see event that blends Japanese tradition, folklore, and kawaii culture!
The Pentagon said it planned to livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, a former officer who admitted to killing 13 people in a 2009 shooting at Fort Hood Army base in Texas.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an interview with a conservative news outlet aired Thursday that he had wanted to ensure “people are able to watch it” because “people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”
The execution is scheduled to take place on Dec. 3 at Fort Hood.
Hegseth said it would be carried out on a Thursday at 1 p.m. Central time, which was the same day of the week and around the same time of day Hasan opened fire at the base on Nov. 5, 2009.
He called the decision to execute Hasan by firing squad a “no-brainer.”
Hasan’s execution would be the first by the U.S. military in more than 65 years. A servicemember hasn’t been executed by firing squad since 1945.
“It hadn’t been since World War II since we’ve done that. Well, I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II, which was: ‘win,’” Hegseth told Real America’s Voice.
“It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be,” Hegseth added.
Under existing Army regulation, an execution can be attended by select members of the public, including family members of the victims and members of the media. But executions aren’t witnessed by the broader public.
When asked for comment, a Defense Department official said in a statement that “it will be livestreamed” without providing further details.
As I said, given the rarity of firing squads in military executions (one was used to kill Gary Gilmore in a state execution in 1977), I am not confident that it will even take place. But even if it does, I think the livestreaming of the event would be too much for Americans to take, and would be barbaric. Granted, if you’re going to use execution as a deterrent (it isn’t), you would want the gory details publicized as widely as possible. But it isn’t a deterrent and we shouldn’t be killing people. I am not 100% sure about this, but even when Hegseth proclaims it I am not confident that it will happen.
*In his weekly NYT op-ed column, “There’s another cockpit Israelis need to rush“, Bret Stephens opposes two strains in Israeli politics—entitlement versus service—and says that the latter strain needs to win the upcoming election (note, that does not include Netanyahu). The title refers of course to the recent Israeli prevention of the hijacking of the FlyDubai flight to Tel Aviv. (Article is archived here.)
The division inside of Israel, in the broadest sense, is between the spirit of entitlement and the spirit of service. That’s the basic choice that faces Israelis when they go to the polls late this month.
On the entitled side: the leaders of the fast-growing ultra-Orthodox population, who believe their voters are owed welfare from the government along with a categorical exemption from military service, even as the army groans under an acute manpower shortage. Also, the far-right Messianics, who are convinced they have a divine right to the entirety of the West Bank, along with an exemption from legal consequences for bullying and terrorizing their Palestinian neighbors.
Most entitled: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister has real achievements to his name, above all his willingness to confront Iran head-on instead of fighting only its proxies. But he also thinks he can stay in office forever by assembling coalitions of the entitled, seeking legal impunity, dividing the country against itself, resisting calls for an independent commission of inquiry into Oct. 7, blaming his own senior security and ministerial officers for the catastrophe and taking credit for achievements against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and other foes that remain tenuous.
On the opposite side are the service Israelis. They are the hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians, done with their regular army service but still in the reserves, who have spent hundreds of days in uniform and often in combat, away from careers and communities and families. They are the spouses of those reservists, who have raised children, gone to work, kept up appearances of normality and prayed they won’t be left bereaved. They are the Israeli passengers who last week rushed the cockpit of the almost-hijacked FlyDubai flight, unhesitatingly risking their necks for the common good. They are the thousands of Israelis who have lost loved ones in this war. That includes Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief of staff and leading opposition candidate, who spent 41 years in uniform and lost a son and two nephews in the fighting in Gaza.
The difference between the two sides is profound and potentially irreconcilable. It’s also nothing new in Jewish history. “Ancient Israel’s political collapse was spawned by internal strife, underscored by a dozen civil wars, which ultimately resulted in Israel’s loss of its power, dignity and land,” Amotz Asa-El, author of “The Jewish March of Folly,” a brilliant reinterpretation of Jewish political history, told me over drinks last week. “All these forces are now back in play in Israel.”
. . .All of which is why, with Wednesday’s third anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, stories like Avinatan Or’s and the FlyDubai passengers’ are so instructive. For Israelis to surmount the formidable challenges they face, in pursuit of both victory and peace, the spirit of service — of giving yourself, doing it yourself, taking possession of your destiny against daunting odds — must win out over the spirit of entitlement. And for Israel’s genuine well-wishers, including the good-faith critics, to push that spirit forward, they need to draw a firm moral line against those who simply want Israel gone.
At the ballot box this month, there’s one more cockpit the people of Israel need to rush.
The rush, of course, is against Netanyahu, who’s in the cockpit.
*There is nobody who can produce the Free Press‘s news-and-snark summaries as well as Nellie Bowles, but sadly she’s AWOL this week. Instead, we have as her replacement Chelsea Jacobson with “TGIF: Nudity is optimal“. But I will, as usual, steal a few of the items:
→ Cornell sex ed: While the school battles a tsunami of bad headlines, its official sex-ed materials have also been making the online rounds. Cornell student Jared Lederman shared them in a viral blog post that he adapted for us at The Free Press.
One guide is titled Sexual Pleasure: Finding the “Sweet Spot,” and it opens by declaring that “sexual pleasure is a worthy pursuit.” It directs students to “feminist porn,” whatever that is. I have never seen porn titled Stepsister Teaches Her New Bro That Human Rights Are Women’s Rights and Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, but to be fair I wasn’t looking too hard. My favorite guide, titled “Sensate Focus,” gives tips on how students can touch each other and tells them, crucially, that “nudity is optimal.” Step one is titled “non-genital touching,” where “ideally, both partners are undressed, showered, and free of watches or jewelry.” Nudity. For sex? I’ll try to remember next time.
These kids are 18 years old and self-report that they’re barely having sex. In 2024, 69 percent of Harvard students said they entered college as virgins. But Cornell still wants them filling out worksheets on their favorite sex positions. It seems like we blew past the “sweet spot” in the middle when we decided to make sex education less about the birds and the bees and more a bureaucratic exercise in risk management, with a kink manual attached. And now we’re surprised when students end up either sexless or caught in a hellish ketamine orgy. Luckily, there’s a solution: Bring back first dates.
→ Obama campaigning with El-Sayed: Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat, has a problem. Given Michigan’s liberal lean, Trump’s dismal approval ratings, the price of gas and, well, everything, he’s favored to defeat Republican Mike Rogers. But—and here comes the problem—polls show El-Sayed with only a narrow lead over Rogers in a race Democrats see as a must-win.
Why can’t he get ahead? Jewish voters, for one thing: El-Sayed is a virulent critic of Israel and campaigned with Hasan Piker, of “America deserved 9/11” fame.
But his bigger issue, from an electoral standpoint, is black voters, who make up roughly 14 percent of the state’s population and some 75 percent of Detroit’s. They tend to be more moderate than the arch-leftist Abdul, and they don’t seem much swayed by his cringey attempts to win them over. Apparently, just saying “I am both African and Arab,” as El-Sayed has done in a nod to his Egyptian heritage, isn’t enough.
So Barack Obama—still broadly popular a decade after leaving office, and particularly so with black Democrats, is swooping in later this month to bail El-Sayed out. They’re going to campaign together on October 24. Problem solved, right?
Perhaps not! For one thing, as was noted frequently throughout his presidency, Obama is very good at getting himself elected, but not so good at convincing voters to elect other people. (To use one prominent example, he led a huge rally for Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia on the eve of the 2016 election, then Trump became the first Republican in almost 30 years to win Pennsylvania.)
El-Sayed also called Obamacare “a watered-down reform that kowtows to the interests of healthcare lobbies.”
→ It is a small price to pay: While speaking to a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, about the war with Iran and the resulting high gas prices, Trump said the ayatollah can have Los Angeles. “I want to see a tremendous victory. You want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did. And again, remember, with the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high,” he said. “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.”
He went on: “They can take out a city. Let ’em take out Los Angeles; let ’em take out San Diego. That’s—this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.”
I agree, Mr. President. Los Angeles is vacuous. There is no culture, only traffic. I am a New York 7 and an LA 3. Let the mullahs have it.
Naaah, Nellie is still a gazillion times better.
*Coincident with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, largely because of her participation in finding Israel guilty of “genocide,” the Trump Administration has levied new sanctions on the International Criminal Court in an attempt to dismantle it. (The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, charging them with both war crimes and crimes against humanity. (The U.S. does not recognize the ICC nor the charter that created it.)
The Trump administration has imposed sweeping new sanctions on the International Criminal Court as part of its campaign to dismantle the tribunal over investigations into the United States and its allies, including Israel.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions Friday, after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to South African jurist Navi Pillay, a former judge at the ICC and other international courts. Trump has coveted that prize for himself.
“We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate against us,” Rubio said in a video address posted to social media. “The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC.”
The sanctions cut the court off from U.S.-based financial services, technology companies and even using U.S. dollars. They set a six-month timeline for U.S. companies and individuals that have business with the court to wind that business down.
The ICC denounced the step as an attack on the rule of law and the foundations of international order, themes that Rubio had appeared to embrace only two days ago in a speech in front of the Acropolis in Athens.
“It is an attempt to obstruct the course of justice and to prevent the court from doing what it was created to do,” the court said in a statement. “It is an assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order which strikes at the simple principle that no one stands above the law.”
Given that neither the U.S. nor Israel has signed on to the court’s jurisdiction by ratifying the Rome Statute, I don’t see why either country is compelled to support the ICC. Nor do I see that the actions taken by the U.S. will “dismantle” the ICC, even though it may make it harder to do business.
I try to follow the best evidence on diet and health. What I eat now is very different from what I ate when I was growing up in the Midwest. Back then, we ate mashed potatoes, beef and gravy. But as the evidence came in, I shifted to a Mediterranean diet. . .
What’s your typical breakfast?
I usually have steel-cut oats as a base. Then I add a cup of Greek yogurt, some nuts and fruit. I try to eat blueberries on most days as part of my fruit. In study after study, berries appear to be protective against neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. It’s an area where we need more research, but berries do seem to stand out, especially blueberries.
I also have a small glass of orange juice in the morning. There are studies in multiple cohorts showing lower rates of cognitive decline when you drink orange juice on a regular basis. Orange juice does have a lot of sugar like all fruit juices do. But I only have one small glass a day.
What do you eat for lunch?
Lunch is my plant-based meal for the day. If I’m at work at the school of public health, we have a really good salad bar. So, I’ll make a big Mediterranean type of salad with fresh greens, chickpeas, nuts, hummus, tofu, and olive oil and vinegar.
When I’m at home, I don’t have time to put a lot of stuff together. When we did the Eat-Lancet Commission report, the issue of cost and convenience came up, and I said I can make a lunch for under three minutes that costs less than a dollar. It’s basically whole-grain bread with peanut butter and a little bit of jam or a touch of honey. And a carrot.
My wife and I will usually have fish or poultry. Yesterday my wife made a really nice Persian dish. It was whole-grain rice with saffron, and a stew with walnuts, chicken and pomegranate. It was really good. It’s a dish that I had in Tehran when I was first there.
When we want something quick, we might bake some fish with olive oil, and we’ll have it with cooked greens or veggies.
If I’m by myself, I will usually make a salad. The quickest thing for me is to go to Trader Joe’s and get their washed spring greens. I’ll add some olives and fresh vegetables. And often I’ll get a tin of oysters or mussels and put that on the salad. I can make that in under five minutes. Oysters and mussels are very nutritious, and they’re sustainable.
Do you ever snack?
I always try to have apples and carrots on hand. . .
Oy gewalt! Talk about an article that makes me feel guilty! But clearly Willett wants to live a long and healthy life, and cake, ice cream, and steak be damned! And he’s right, at least according to the most recent evidence. But for many of us there’s a tradeoff: some of us (including me) are willing to eat some “bad” stuff because it enhances life. But he doesn’t mention alcohol as part of his diet, and I bet he doesn’t drink any wine. I couldn’t live like that. So sue me.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Hili/Kulka feud continues.
Hili: You have absolutely no right to lie in my spot! Kulka: Do you really have to be so revoltingly jealous?
In Polish:
Hili: Nie masz prawa leżeć na moim miejscu!
Kulka: Czy naprawdę musisz być tak obrzydliwie zazdrosna?
From Masih; an Iranian woman given 74 lashes for not wearing the hijab. That looks quite painful to me:
To those who claimed that no woman in Iran has ever been flogged for refusing to wear the hijab: LOOK AT HER BACK.
This woman is one of the brave members of my #WhiteWednesdays campaign against compulsory hijab.
She sent me this photo of her scarred back after being punished with 74 lashes for the “crime” of showing her hair.
Holding a Woman, Life, Freedom slogan, she refused to be silenced. Here is her testimony:
“The morality police arrested me for resisting their van. My ‘crime’ was unveiling. After months of court hearings, I was sentenced to 74 lashes. The cleric overseeing the punishment stood there to ensure it was carried out.
I won’t give up my fight against this brutal regime, but we are fed up with living as prisoners in our own homeland.”
Seventy-four lashes. For showing her hair. In the 21st century.
This is barbarism. And you tell me, how is this different from ISIS?
From Luana. The guy shown was arrested and suspended at Haverford, accused of stalking and threatening a Jewish colleague and his infant child in a stream of antisemitic rants posted on anonymous social-media accounts:
The face of the guy writing “Goyim are taking America back” on Twitter (he’s a scholar of Chinese Sufism) https://t.co/kzqiTISD9G
A Jewish American man with a message to his friends:
Three years ago I told my non-Jewish friends they could sit this one out. I take it back. 3 years later, I’m afraid I have a different message for you.
I wrote an open letter about what being Jewish has felt like since October 7, and I need you to hear it from me. https://t.co/dhDhPykxHw
Today’s music is “Without a Song“, composed in 1929 by Vincent Youmans, “with lyrics later added by Billy Rose and Edward Eliscu.” The jazz version is performed here by Billy Eckstine, recorded live in Las Vegas in 1960. I like it because of its swinging tempo (other versions don’t have that) and Eckstein’s rich baritone voice. Wikipedia notes that there the earlier lyrics were racist:
Lawrence Tibbett, Nelson Eddy and Frank Sinatra recorded versions of the song with what appears to be the original lyrics, including the line, “A darkie‘s born, but he’s no good no how, without a song.” In subsequent recordings, Sinatra didn’t use the term “darkie”, and later recorded versions included the altered text “a man is born, but he’s no good no how, without a song.” The original was played in error on BBC Radio 4’s PM program on 9 April 2020, prompting an apology on the same program four days later.
. . . the version by the Carpenters is very different, but of course features one of the greatest voices of our era, and I don’t mean Richard’s. The ending is a bit much. . .
Well, the only thing that consoles me about this year’s grotesque award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay is that the same Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat. But in some ways this Prize is even worse, for Pillay got it for ““for her efforts to promote peace and international law,” or, as the Nobel Prize page notes:
At a time of existential challenges – including more wars and conflicts than the world has seen in a long time – international law is no longer just a supplement to peace and security. It is an absolute necessity.
In historic international court cases, Navi Pillay has shown that legal measures can help prevent acts of war and violence. She has also contributed to strengthen the institutions of international law. Her independence, expertise and steadfastness have made her one of the most respected international jurists of our time.
What did she do to prevent acts of war and violence? She promoted the idea that Israel committed genocide, without saying a word about the explicitly outlined genocide of Hamas. (She did condemn Hamas for war crimes, but, as you see below, that’s not why she got the Nobel Peace Prize.) As the NYT reports:(all bolding henceforth is mine):
Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer and international judge, was announced on Friday as the recipient of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize for what the Norwegian Nobel Committee called her efforts to uphold a system of international law that is increasingly under attack.
The committee said that Ms. Pillay had been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.” Formerly the United Nations’ top human rights official, and a judge at the International Criminal Court and on an international tribunal investigating the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she is “one of the most respected international jurists of our time,” the committee said.
“Let me dedicate this award to all the survivors of international crimes as well as to practitioners and defenders of international justice,” Ms. Pillay said at a news conference in Germany.
Last year, a United Nations commission led by Ms. Pillay determined that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a finding that the Israeli government rejected. The decision to honor her added to the growing global blowback against Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., told The New York Times that honoring Ms. Pillay “would not only damage the credibility of the Nobel Committee, but also tarnish the legacy of the distinguished laureates who have received this honor throughout history.”
Though the committee did not explicitly mention Gaza in its statement honoring Ms. Pillay, its chairman, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, told reporters that her work on the U.N. commission was “an important part of the reasoning why she received the prize.”
There you have it. But there were some problems with the “determination that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians”. I’ve already discussed the ludicrous “genocide” accusation against Israel as one of the war’s Big Lies, but Maarten Boudry did a better job in his Substack article, “They don’t believe it either.”
And one take from Grok:
What is the problem with the UN’s finding that Israel committed genocide?
The claim is not a finding by “the UN.” It comes from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (the Pillay Commission), a body created by the UN Human Rights Council. In a September 2025 report, the three commissioners concluded that Israel had committed four of the five acts listed in the Genocide Convention against Palestinians in Gaza, with the specific intent required for genocide, and that President Herzog, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and former Defense Minister Gallant had incited it. The UN as an institution has not adopted that conclusion. The International Court of Justice case brought by South Africa remains unresolved on the merits; written pleadings run into 2029, and the Court’s earlier provisional-measures orders found only that certain Palestinian rights under the Convention were “plausible” and at risk—not that genocide had occurred.
The problems with the Commission’s conclusion are structural, methodological, and legal.
The Human Rights Council maintains a permanent agenda item directed solely at Israel and has long produced a disproportionate share of its country-specific resolutions against it. The Commission’s members entered with public records of hostility toward Israel. Miloon Kothari had spoken of the “Jewish lobby” controlling social media; Chris Sidoti had dismissed concerns about antisemitism; Navi Pillay had a documented history of partisan statements on the conflict. Israel has refused to cooperate with the body since 2022 on grounds of bias. The resulting reports rely heavily on the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry (which does not separate combatants from civilians), unnamed witnesses, NGOs, and outlets such as Al Jazeera, while giving minimal weight to Israeli operational data or the documented embedding of Hamas forces.
The report largely erases Hamas as a fighting force. It does not seriously engage the scale of the tunnel network, the systematic use of civilian sites, the diversion of aid, or the October 7, 2023 attack that killed roughly 1,200 people and took hostages—the casus belli. Statements by Israeli officials are parsed selectively (“human animals,” biblical allusions) while wartime context and explicit targeting of Hamas are discounted. UN Watch’s detailed rebuttal and other legal analyses describe the evidentiary base as one-sided and the inferences of intent as conjecture.
Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, the decisive element is dolus specialis: specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, as such. High civilian casualties in urban warfare against an enemy that operates from within the civilian population do not establish that intent. Reported deaths (Gaza Health Ministry figures in the mid-to-high 70,000s by late 2026, including combatants) have not reduced Gaza’s population to anything approaching destruction; estimates remain around 2.1 million. Demographic breakdowns of identified fatalities show men of fighting age heavily over-represented relative to their share of the pre-war population. Israel issued evacuation warnings, opened corridors, and facilitated large volumes of aid—conduct difficult to reconcile with a policy of physical annihilation. Some advocacy groups that reach a genocide conclusion have acknowledged they are applying a broader standard than the Convention’s text and existing jurisprudence require.
The same bodies have not applied comparable scrutiny to Hamas’s charter language and explicit aims, or to far larger death tolls in other recent conflicts. The Commission’s finding therefore functions more as an amplification of a pre-existing political narrative than as an impartial legal determination. The only forum that can issue a binding ruling on the state responsibility question is the ICJ, and it has not done so.
As for some of Pillay’s statements on Israel before she was even appointed to the committee, much less before October of 1983, Grok says this:
Before [Pillay] was named to investigate Israel, she had already applied the apartheid label and backed sanctions:
In a November 2017 interview she said apartheid means enforced segregation on racial lines “and that is what is happening in Israel.”
In June 2020 she signed a South African BDS Coalition petition titled “Sanction Apartheid Israel!,” which called for an arms embargo, an end to military-security cooperation, and suspension of free-trade agreements, and equated Israeli policy with South African apartheid.
In May 2021 she described Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as “inhuman” and again compared it to apartheid South Africa.
On 14 June 2021, weeks after the May 2021 Israel–Hamas fighting, she signed a joint letter to President Biden decrying Israel’s “domination and oppression of the Palestinian people” and “ever-expanding discrimination and systemic oppression,” and characterizing clashes at Al-Aqsa as aggressive actions against peaceful protesters amounting to forced dispossession.
As for the 2026 Nobel Prize contest , we have a winner, but not for the Peace Prize, as nobody was dumb enough to guess Pillay. The winner is Renée Szostek, who guessed Carson for the literature prize. If you are Szostek, please get in touch with me so we can get you your boook.
Finally, a tweet from Maarten Boudry; you can see the letter, signed by U.S. military personnel, here.
The question of genocide in Gaza is not just a matter of “semantics,” as many are now claiming, quietly backpedaling from their earlier confident assertions. It is not a borderline case, or a matter of interpretation, or an issue on which reasonable people can differ.
It is an obscene lie, contradicted by everything we know about Israel’s conduct during the war (which is not to absolve the IDF of war crimes). Here are 76 retired senior military leaders and legal experts flatly rejecting the genocide allegation:
“Israel has not committed genocide but rather set a high bar for how to conduct urban warfare against an enemy who will stop at nothing, including the death of its own civilians.”
The fact that the rector of my own university wanted to prohibit questioning the “Gaza genocide,” as though it were the equivalent of flat-earthism or climate denialism, still fills me with disbelief and rage. One day it will become clear who are the real flat-earthers here.
