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 weather is threatening a hard rain, and we not only received tornado warnings, accompanied by loud sirens, on our phones, but there’s a big siren blaring at the university.
But the ducks don’t care; this is their weather. In fact, all five were napping together on the Second Sacred Rock. It’s rare for them to all be sleeping, but it’s dark with clouds and Miss Duck decided to join her brood in forty (or is it 200?) winks. Note how fast the ducklings are getting feathered:
The warning
I wasn’t quite sure what John McWhorter’s take on l’affaire Ardey would be, but given that he is sensible, heterodox, and has himself been somewhat sidelined by his circle of linguistic scholars, I’m not surprised that he doesn’t see the affair as demonstrating racism as much as showing “the soft bigotry of low expectation” towards black scholars. Arday, he says, wasn’t really a scholar, but a mimic who got by with calling out the racism of his peers.
What does surprise me is that McWhorter chose to publish his views in the City Journal, which is generally conservative and Right-leaning. I don’t know if he tried to publish it in his regular column in the New York Times, but I suspect that it wouldn’t fly there, even if he is heterodox.
Click below to read McWhorter’s take. I’ll give a few excerpts
Excerpts:
. . . Compared with some other examples of the genre, Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying. But he is nonetheless a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.
The main theme of Arday’s work is that racism is grievously determinative in the lives of black Britons; his Ph.D. dissertation describes racism that black scholars must grapple with endlessly. In presentations, his manner, in his usual way, suggests that no decent person could disagree with this take, and that in a just world he wouldn’t even have to spell it out. Racism’s ubiquity and power is obvious, and anyone who questions this has an ulterior motive (maintaining power, inability to process The Other as fully human, etc.). In this, what Arday has in common with Ibram Kendi is not just dreadlocks but an assumption that his view is one that everyone would share if not compromised by hatred of the subaltern.
The problem is that what is obvious is probably not very complicated—never mind that what Arday thinks is obvious is a vast and self-indulgent exaggeration. Within this mental universe, Arday’s academic focus was not on learning new things and fashioning new ways of processing existence but on criticizing others’ morals. This is not intellection but advocacy, and that is frankly much easier than thinking. The term “scholar-activist” tries to finesse this by making the two appear to be alternate forms of the same endeavor. But the scholar-activist is often more activist than scholar, and Arday was an extreme example of the type.
Nothing in his work suggests intense engagement with a body of data (Arday himself has claimed that because of his dyslexia, he can engage only one page of academic prose in a sitting) or with a challenging way of analyzing that data. In academia, what is interesting is the counterintuitive, the discovery. Arday merely reinforced long-established and simplistic pieties. He became the equivalent of a full professor at Cambridge based on doing interviews with acquaintances about the racism they experienced, and then largely just presenting what they said. At its highest level, this could be good (but not great) journalism; it could not be academic work. On the level Arday worked, my 14-year-old could best him after some quick training in Latinate, Judith Butler-esque prose.
Arday was defrocked after the revelation that most of even this incurious nattering in the guise of research was plagiarized from others’ work. Claiming that his supposed autism made him think that learning was mimicry, he composed most of his work from generous tranches of cut-and-paste from other sources, often (but certainly not always) lightly reworded. But even if this performance art disguised as thought were all his own work, his elevation to such heights by Cambridge was an abomination.
As I might say (with palms out and widened eyes), arguing for the obvious is not brilliance. Even when it’s about black people.
. . .Even worse than Arday’s work displaying no actual excellence is the consequence that characters like him wind up passing the torch to the next generation of black scholars. In a career spent in and around academia, I’ve seen this happen too many times. I refer to nothing like all black academics. But this is a vortex that young black scholars are sadly vulnerable to being pulled into, aided and abetted by white fellow travelers.
Especially if they have a certain stage presence, people like Arday attract mentees, who often value sitting at the feet of someone of their own race, who may understand their experiences more readily than other professors. But what happens when the Arday types don’t have anything actually to teach? Some of his former students are demanding redress.
Arday had no original ideas. He can’t teach someone how to write because his writing consists of, well, “mimicry.” (Even his resignation letter seems likely to have been generated by AI.) There are reports that—big surprise—Arday had no idea what actual teaching was and couldn’t be bothered with supervising students’ work, probably because he had never done any himself. People taught by versions of this type end up occupying an alternative academic universe, where cultural fellowship and advocacy are the North Star, and learning and curiosity get lip service but are beside the point.
When eager young black students gravitate to people like Arday, they learn that, for black academics, their race is more important than having anything to say. Sadly, white colleagues reinforce this by treating black academics this way at conferences and in hiring. One typical result: Carolyn Rouse being appointed president of the American Anthropological Association, despite her inability to answer civil but serious questions about charges of ideological takeover in her discipline with anything beyond verbal coleslaw. Arday was treated as brilliant for his self-involved, unfocused, underinformed drivel—and his resignation letter shows no awareness that anything was amiss about that.
I have to stop myself from reposting the entire article, as it’s eloquent and sensible. But you can read it all for yourself. McWhorter can get away saying this stuff because he himself is a black academic, though he’s somewhat suffered for his “anti-wokeness.” Here’s a bit more from the long piece:
No, it is only because he is black that Arday was elevated in this way. The idea is that being black and triumphing over obstacles merits being appointed a Cambridge professor. This means that race determined his appointment.
. . .The youngest-ever black professor at Cambridge properly should have been a physical education teacher who did some after-hours tutoring. A make-believe academic who misspelled paltry as poultry in the title slide of a keynote address instead scaled the heights of Britain’s Harvard because of his skin color and his exceptionally long dreadlocks.
There is a certain mercy in the impression that he won’t perceive how those who elevated him saw him as a performing monkey. Still, it’s long past time for Anglophone academia to stop thinking that it’s immoral to evaluate black scholars on the basis of whether they are—get ready!—intelligent.
It really is time for academia to have a reckoning of this sort, judging scholars not by ethnicity or background but on accomplishment and merit. The first paragraph in the excerpt above, beginning “it is only because he is black that Arday was elevated in this way,” is something that everybody knows but that nobody—save “heterodox” blacks like McWhorter—can say. It is an “Emperor has no clothes” statement that we need to discuss openly.
I should add that several black academics express the opposite view: yes, tthey say, there is a double standard in academia, but it leads to harsher evaluation of black than of white scholars (see this Guardian article). But given that Arday got by—actually, got so high—for so long with so little, that view doesn’t hold water.
If you already think the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are bad, have a gander at this interview. An article in the Times of Israel (click screenshot below) summarizes a New Yorker interview, also on video (below), with Megan Romer, current co-chair of the DSA. As you know, DSA members or affiliates are winning important Democratic primaries throughout America, and so, especially if you’re a Democrat, you’ll want to know their platform and their leadership. (The platform is summarized here in a post about it.)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are the members of the DSA in Congress, but come November there will likely be more. (I do predict that the ambitious AOC will quit the DSA and become a Democrat plain and simple.) Bernie Sanders identifies as a Democratic Socialist but is not a DSA member. Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, is also a card-carrying member.
And remember the follies of their platform, which include abolishing the Senate, replacing the Presidency and the Supreme Court with an organization subservient to a unicameral legislature, and putting all the means of production (including large corporations) into the hands of the public, as well as eliminating bills, providing free and equal housing for all, and, of course, getting rid of Israel. But the ToI below gives a summary
The ToI article is mostly about the DSA’s damnation of Israel and support of Hamas (!):
The co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has defended rallying in support of Hamas and disputed Israel’s right to self defense during a recent interview.
Megan Romer, the United States’ national co-chair of the DSA, told The New Yorker in an interview published Friday that she “probably would have” joined an anti-Israel rally in New York City the day after the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel, had she lived in the city.
“One day after the slaughter of 1,200 people and taking of over 200 hostages, you would have come and rallied behind Hamas?” New Yorker editor David Remnick asked Romer.
“I think that October 7th was largely inevitable. If you put people in an open-air concentration camp and you deprive them of rights, of dignity, of food, of the ability to live in safety, you have to expect that they are going to not take that for that long,” she said.
If there was ever a Palestinian state, it was Gaza, and any restrictions on travel out of Gaza (also imposed by Egypt) were the results of Hamas, which governed the territory, spent its money building tunnels, and fostered terrorism. In fact, the October 7 attack on Israel did express dissatisfaction, but not with the governance of Gaza (blame those problems on Hamas), but with the existence of Israel, which Hamas has sworn to destroy. A bit more from the ToI:
At the October 8, 2023, rallies in New York City, anti-Zionist protesters chanted in support of Hamas killings, mocked and threatened Jewish counter-demonstrators, celebrated the taking of Israeli hostages, and called for the destruction of Israel.
Romer is one of two co-chairs of the national DSA, making her a central figure in the ascendant far-left movement, which has made anti-Zionist activism central to its politics.
. . . The DSA candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won her congressional primary in New York City in June, attended the rally. Chevalier refused to condemn Hamas or the October 7 attack during her campaign.
Romer told The New Yorker that any defense or economic support for Israel was a “solid red line” for the DSA, and that the movement sought a “free Palestine with the capital in Jerusalem,” which she described as a “one-state solution.”
As you’ll see from the 30-minute New Yorker interview with Romer below, she is either ignorant of many things she should know, or she refuses to be specific about what the DSA thinks. But it’s clear that she’s an anti-Zionist (e.g., antisemite) and favors the erasure of Israel. More from the ToI:
Romer was unfamiliar with former US president Bill Clinton’s Camp David Summit, during which Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat walked away from a proposed Palestinian state.
Asked if she would have been “satisfied” with the terms at the Camp David Summit, Romer said, “I don’t know them off the top of my head.”
She also disputed Israel’s right to defend itself, saying, “People, humans, peoples have the right to life in safety. But if that safety means doing genocide to somebody else, then no, that’s not defensible.”
Of course she doesn’t define “genocide”, so it’s not clear what, if anything, Israel could have done after October 7 to defend itself against Hamas’s terrorist attack. She simply implies that Israel didn’t defend itself “properly” because it committed “genocide”. Philosopher Maarten Boudry has a much better take on this issue than Romer.
The New Yorker also pressed Romer about supporting both “queer-friendly” politics and the anti-LGBTQ Hamas.
“I would not call Hamas queer-friendly. I would not say that you can get a lot of social rights when you’re under siege,” she said.
Again. with the excuses: Hamas has to kill gay people because Gaza was “under seige”, ego they had to throw gay people off buildings. Does that make any sense? No, it’s just an excuse for the excesses of Islamist governance. Finally, she refuses to condemn Hamas, and a refusal to condemn terrorism doesn’t bode well for DSA’s governance of the U.S.
Romer also defended Hamas in 2024, saying that “no socialist should” condemn the terrorist group.
The ADL has its say.
The Anti-Defamation League said Romer’s rhetoric “puts every Jewish American at risk” due to her justification of violence against the Jewish state.
“The DSA co-chair does not and will not condemn a US-designated foreign terrorist organization responsible for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and whose charter calls for the destruction of the state of Israel,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement.
But listen to this half-hour video, which should both appall you and frighten you. Ms. Romer is one of the two heads of the DSA. She’s questioned by David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who does a good job trying to get her to be explicit about her beliefs and the DSA platform. The ludicrous views she espouses are masked by her genial demeanor, and is further hidden by her claims that much of the DSA’s platform will be enacted at some time in the future (e.g., getting rid of the police)
Now much of what the DSA wants is in principle admirable, like public medical care and and end to the Electoral College. The problem is how to do this. But much of the rest of their platform involves amending the Constitution, which, according to Remnick, has a chance of “about zero.” As for getting rid of Israel and supporting Hamas, well, you know my position on that, which is that it both instantiates and demonstrates anti-Semitism.
I oppose the DSA for several reasons. It wants to abolish capitalism, which, though the system has some bad effects, can be modified to ameliorate those effects (Social Security and Medicare). It wants to get rid of America’s balance of power, a crucial aspect of American government that has served us well. It wants to get rid of cops and prisons, and no government in the West had done that or wants to—the effects are predictable, as seen in the 1969 M0ntreal Police Strike.
And it wants to get rid of Israel and, for all I know, the Jews. The DSA is not yet at the stage of camps and gassing, but already Canadians are leaving their country because of antisemitism and repairing to Israel. If the DSA controlled America, we’d see a similar exodus.
Finally, as a Democrat, I think the DSA will fracture and perhaps destroy the Democratic Party, ushering in Republican governance, something I don’t want. Already prominent centrist Democrats, like Rahm Emanuel and J. D. Pritzker, my own governor, are holding their tongues about the DSA and its anti-Israel policies.
Although the DSA doesn’t represent most of the Left, they are loud, promise Pie in the Sky, and above all are performative, talking a good game but not accomplishing much. They are not really “democratic socialists” in the European sense: capitalist democracies with some socialistic aspects. Nope, they are Marxists, pure and simple, and I will not vote for one.
h/t: Bat
Welcome to The Cruelest Day, Tuesday, August 11, 2026, and Ingersoll Day, celebrating the life of “The Great Agnostic,” born on this day in 1833 (died 1899). Today he’d be called “The Great Atheist.” Ingersoll was an eloquent speaker, great writer, and by all accounts, a genial and lovely man. My favorite quote from Ingersoll, which I often used on lectures about the incompatibility of science and faith, is this:
“There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: ‘Let us be friends.’ It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: ‘Let us agree not to step on each other’s feet’.”
Here he is:
It’s also National Panini Day, National Raspberry Bombe Day, and National Raspberry Tart Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 11 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The Strait of Hormuz remains a sticking point in the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran. Trump thought the opening was imminent, but that wasn’t Iran’s plan.
For weeks, President Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory in the Iran war should Tehran fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, even floating the idea privately to senior aides that he’s willing to walk away without a nuclear deal, U.S. officials said.
But that scaled-back objective became more difficult when Iran insisted Saturday on its highest price yet for permitting the free flow of traffic in the waterway, seeking billions of dollars in U.S. payments, the removal of American troops from the region and an end of the U.S. naval blockade, among other things.
This rapid chain of events suggests Trump’s options for walking away from the conflict have again narrowed. Trump has repeatedly threatened—and then backed away from—a massive escalation of its bombing campaign. But the recent chaos in negotiations signaled Tehran is prepared for a long and grinding conflict.
“Iran’s recent hardline demands for reopening the strait make it increasingly difficult for the president to manufacture a face-saving off-ramp from the conflict,” said Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Gregory Brew, an Iran expert at the Eurasia Group consulting firm, said, “The Iranians fully believe Trump wants out and is focused on opening the strait, which is why they are playing hardball.”
Hanging over diplomatic talks since April has been the White House’s ultimatum that Iran will never obtain a nuclear weapon. Trump sought to include nuclear talks as part of broader negotiations with Iran, but those have proven too difficult, leading the White House in recent weeks to focus more on reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
There we have it: Trump is willing to “walk away without a nuclear deal”—the deal he said was the most important issue for the U.S. Iran was never going to get nuclear weapos, Well, forget about that; all he wants now is an open Strait of Hormuz, and you don’t have to be a genius to realize that Iran is going to delay that and deny it. This “war” may last a while, but Trump will never be able to declare victory on the terms he wanted.
*Now here’s a clickbait headline in the NYT (click to read, or find article archived here):
An excerpt:
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York posted a series of video clips on social media Saturday night saying that she would freeze her eggs despite what she called a “political risk” for sharing her decision.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 36, a Democrat who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, made the announcement hours before saying in a TV interview Sunday that she is open to running for president or the Senate.
“There is very strangely a political risk, or a political tax, that comes with sharing this info,” she said of her decision to freeze her eggs. She added that she had shared the information “to show more depictions of women having full lives in every context and every choice.” The announcement further fueled speculation on social media that she is gearing up for a presidential run.
Asked on ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday morning if she would consider a White House bid, she said, “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” adding that she was “humbled” by the support she is receiving.
She also suggested she would consider running for the Senate seat held by the minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, telling host Jonathan Karl that “anything is possible at this juncture.” But, she added, “I think that we have a responsibility to remain focused on the midterms and not on our individual aspirations or plans.”
Her interview Sunday — her first appearance on a major Sunday news show since 2024 — marked her most public suggestion yet of aspirations for higher office. First elected in 2018, she rapidly became a top voice in her party’s ascendant progressive wing.
While Ms. Ocasio-Cortez identifies as a democratic socialist, she distanced herself in the interview from some of the more radical positions of the Democratic Socialists of America. Asked if she supports all of the tenets of the group’s guiding document, including abolishing the Senate, police and prisons, she said no. She also said she was a member of her local D.S.A. chapter, but not the national group.
I don’t care if she freezes her eggs or not, and I don’t understand why anybody else should care, either. The time has passed when women would be criticized for deciding not to have children, or for delaying that decision. What bothers me instead about AOC is her arrant careerism, combined with no sign that she has leadership abilities to warrant elevation to the Senate, much less the Presidency. From the beginning it was clear that she wanted a Big Time Political Position, but she’s been primary sponsor of zero bills that have become law, though she’s been a co-sponsor of such bills, and has introduced minor amendments that became law. Her main activity in Congress apepars to be self-promotion. And I predicted that she’d back away from her Democratic Socialist positions when she realized that would impede her rise to the Senate. That is exactly what she’s doing now. If she does run for higher office, I hope she gets primaried.
Democrats are lashing out at fellow Democrats for the nation’s largest pandemic-era welfare fraud, theft that handed Republicans a potent example of government waste from Democratic mismanagement.
In a recent debate, Rep. Angie Craig flashed anger as she connected the scandal to progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, her opponent in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.
“It pisses me off that you completely put all of the responsibility on the governor of Minnesota when you were the No. 2 elected leader in Minnesota during that period of time,” she said. “Republicans, they are going to have a field day with this with you.”
Flanagan was alongside Gov. Tim Walz when the fraud was uncovered. Craig, who represents a swing district, added she felt it was her “responsibility to warn Democratic primary voters that Republicans are dying to run against you because they believe that you have a unique vulnerability on fraud.”
Flanagan has tried to play down her role in the scandal, saying at the debate that “the governor has taken the lead” in addressing fraud fallout.
. . .Democrats are lashing out at fellow Democrats for the nation’s largest pandemic-era welfare fraud, theft that handed Republicans a potent example of government waste from Democratic mismanagement.
In a recent debate, Rep. Angie Craig flashed anger as she connected the scandal to progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, her opponent in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.
“It pisses me off that you completely put all of the responsibility on the governor of Minnesota when you were the No. 2 elected leader in Minnesota during that period of time,” she said. “Republicans, they are going to have a field day with this with you.”
. . . The swindling, perpetrated mostly by Somali immigrants, has been jarring to many longtime residents because they had long clung to an unofficial Minnesota motto: Our taxes may be high, but we have good government and services.
Former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson, a Republican who served as a state auditor for 12 years before he led the state, said it was stunning how many officials missed major warning signs or looked the other way.
“You’ve got to have a culture that is protective of the dollar, and that culture had long disappeared,” he said.
The reason the Democrats didn’t come down hard on this fraud is because it was done largely, as noted above, by Somali immigrants. Somalis are deemed an oppressed group, and therefore any fraud on their part must be overlooked. This is one result of wokeness among Democrats. The fault is not that the culture is not protective of the dollar, but that it is protective of those perceived to be oppressed, who are treated lightly according to a “progressive” double standard.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal discusses the Board of Peace’s U.S.-inspired plan in a piece called “Destroying the tunnels will take a decade.”
t’s Monday, August 10 and within hours of Benjamin Netanyahu announcing that Israel rejects the 15-point roadmap, Nickolay Mladenov—Director General of the Board of Peace, the Trump-led body meant to oversee postwar Gaza—sat down with me to explain why Israel should want the very thing Bibi had just rejected.
His entire case reduces to one word: verification. Nobody is required to do anything, he insists, “last of all Israel,” before verified steps on the ground. The IDF sits at the yellow line agreed under the comprehensive plan; the Board’s ask is only that it hold there and not fire across unless troops face a real threat. The line moves back only after individual sectors are cleared and their weapons certified, stored, and rendered unusable. If the next stage’s commitments go unmet, “the process stops.”
Why store the weapons in warehouses inside Gaza, where Hamas is “always one wall away from rearming”? Because they will be rendered unusable, he says, by the Board’s National Committee for the Administration of Gaza with backing from the international force. More a reassurance than an answer.
Who destroys the tunnels? Contractors, but at this rate it will take more than a decade, and, he adds, this is precisely why Israel needs the Board of Peace: together it will go faster.
What counts as the “personal arms” Gazans may keep—might that quietly include the Kalashnikovs that actually govern the Strip? No, he says; the framework covers everything, heavy weapons to personal ones. He acknowledges that Gaza is ruled from the barrel of a Kalashnikov—which is why, he insists, those rifles and every other weapon must pass to civilian authority.
And Turkey and Qatar—the two governments Israelis least want inside Gaza? Without Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar, he says flatly, Hamas would never have agreed to the roadmap at all; their role was critical. Told that letting them help dismantle Hamas is the fox guarding the henhouse, he answers: “If I have to speak to the devil, I will speak to the devil”—to make sure no second October 7 ever occurs. The verification mechanism, he stresses, is American-led, backed by the ISF and, on paper, by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Morocco.
Pressed on whether Hamas will really disarm itself—whether the whole thing is too good to be true—he offers the tell. “I’m not building any of this on the basis of trust. And none of us are.” Clear-eyed about the risks, he says, and building on verification instead. If it doesn’t work, the process stops.
Yet despite this, Segal is in favor of at least starting to implement this plan:
My take: In contrast to the entire political establishment, I support this plan. It won’t dismantle Hamas—nothing will, not completely. But if it nets a third of the tunnels and half the Kalashnikovs, I’ll take it. Will 100,000 Kalashnikovs be handed in? Of course not. But 40,000 collected and another 300 kilometers of tunnel mapped is not nothing—and the next round, which everyone knows is coming, gets fought on considerably more favorable terms.
I’m not sure why the “next round” will be more favorable to Israel, much less the U.S. Yes, half the guns is “not nothing’, but it’s not far from nothing. We’re a long, long way from peace in Gaza.
*The famous “Furthur” bus documented in Tom Wolfe’s book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in which the Merry Pranksters, Neil Cassady, and Ken Kesey took their act on the road, is getting ready for one more trip (article archived here). I had no idea that it still existed. (Wikipedia’s article on Furthur notes that there have been two buses, but this trip will use the original, the one in Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test )
Among the rolling hills outside Eugene, Ore., down a winding gravel path and inside a big barn sits a school bus built in 1939. Its once-blazing colors have faded. Its roof is crumbling. Its windows are cracked. The only regular occupants these days are insects.
It might look like a hunk of junk, but the muted technicolor splotches tell the story of one of the most exuberant periods of San Francisco history.
Sixty years ago, this bus symbolized the city’s counterculture revolution, the embrace of psychedelic drugs and the live-out-loud, love-your-neighbor ethos for which the era is remembered.
With the nation once again facing war, polarized politics and cultural battles, Zane Kesey thinks some of that old bus magic is needed. And that is why he has agreed to send the bus, the one he helped cover in swirls of Day-Glo paint when he was 3, back to the city that spawned a movement.
“I would love to see it adored again,” he said. “And for people to feel that pure, innocent love that came out of it.”
His father, Ken Kesey, who died in 2001, had just written the novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” when he purchased the former school bus that a large Bay Area family had tricked out with beds, benches and a refrigerator for road trips. Mr. Kesey and his freethinking friends, called the Merry Pranksters, painted the bus in psychedelic colors, cut a sun roof into it, added a powerful sound system and installed a balcony on top.
. . .So later this month, it will leave the Kesey family farm in Pleasant Hill, Ore., a short drive from Eugene, for the first time since 1969. A flatbed truck will carry it down Interstate 5 to California, over the Bay Bridge and into the city. In the dead of night, when the streets are quiet, it will trundle into Golden Gate Park and into its Hall of Flowers alongside the botanical gardens.
There, starting Sept. 5, the bus will be on display as part of a show called “Forever Grateful, Golden Gate Park,” put on by the Haight Street Art Center, which aims to preserve and showcase art and cultural artifacts from the city’s counterculture movement. The exhibit will also feature Jerry Garcia’s BMW, live performers, puppetry and storytelling.
I’d love to see this iconic bus, but if you’re in SF and a Wolfe/Kesey/Cassady fan, go see it! The NYT article has lots of cool photos (see the archived version), but I’ll show two from the Wikipedia article as well as the whole movie about the original trip.
Here’s the original Further in 1964:
And the inside, also from Wikipedia; note the psychedelic painting (the bus was of course loaded with drugs). You can see more in the movie below. Cassady, of course, was the driver, and the only driver.
Here’s the video “Magic Trip” (out in 2011) with Ken Kesey, my hero Neal Cassady, and the Merry Pranksters. I’m so glad this is free on YouTube. Click on “watch on YouTube”, or go here.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cats are making Big Plans:
Szaron: Got any plans for tomorrow?
Hili: Yes, I’ll be lying in a different spot.
In Polish:
Szaron: Masz jakieś plany na jutro?
Hili: Tak, będę leżała w innym miejscu.
*******************
From Funny and Strange Signs, this one in Times Square:
From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:
From Meow Incorporated:
From Masih; an Iranian woman hanged for defending herself against sexual assault and killing the assailant.
Islamic Republic in Iran hangs 24-Year-old woman who defended herself from sexual assault
Yesterday the regime executed Marziyeh Neyri yesterday, a young woman who was forced into marriage at age 17 and hanged for fighting back against her attacker.
Marziyeh was 18 years old… pic.twitter.com/mq0I2CcTYy
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) August 10, 2026
From Luana, the sad state of math proficiency in UCSD students (read the whole tweet):
This sounds like a joke, but it’s not:
– 1 in 12 incoming UCSD freshmen don’t know middle school math,
– and the remedial math course was too advanced,
– so UCSD had to create a remedial remedial math course,
– and a quarter of the students placing into it had a perfect 4.0… https://t.co/cHdBjw38L8 pic.twitter.com/cbymCyG7iI
— Justin Skycak (@justinskycak) August 7, 2026
The Number Ten Cat apparently doesn’t like Ricky Gervais’s new animation, “Alley Cat”, and he strikes back at Gervais:
Two can play this game: I’m writing a cartoon about a comedian from Berkshire who hasn’t written anything funny for a decade https://t.co/x4R7VCyNyd
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) August 8, 2026
From Malcolm, a Japanese school bus. So cool, and look at the little girl bow before she gets on! (Sound up.)
Translation from the Spanish: “Japan’s school buses are causing a sensation abroad.”
Los autobuses escolares de Japón están causando sensación en el extranjero pic.twitter.com/rX0rxTdVHa
— Sabiduría Eterna. (@LealtadSabia) August 3, 2026
One from my feed; it is a sin to disturb a sleeping cat:
Coming across a cat on his way, this man stopped to play with it until it drifted off to sleep right there. He stayed completely still afterward, careful not to disturb its rest. No act of kindness is ever too small, and the world keeps turning because of men like him, truly 🐾 pic.twitter.com/90Kh0UKV2S
— Enezator (@Enezator) August 10, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
11 August 1928 | Dutch Jewish girl Ariette Wilk was born in The Hague.
In December 1942 she was deported to #Auschwitz. After the selection she was murdered in a gas chamber. pic.twitter.com/YgJGvQGy8V
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) August 11, 2026
And two from Dr. Cobb. Matthew says that in the first one, the grouper just wants a cuddle:
— Standplaats Kraków could really use some cash! (@standplaatskrk.pl) 2026-08-10T11:55:42.419Z
Matthew sent me this yesterday and told me that perhaps the answer would appear soon. But it hasn’t, and it may be a mistake:
Ok the answer to this is apparently 40 but I have no idea why. Any ideas? 🧪 #academicsky
— John Stott (@jpsastro.bsky.social) 2026-08-09T09:33:56.351Z
Not long ago I wrote about the bizarre tale of Jason Arday, a University of Cambridge professor accused of multiple instances of plagiarism as well as bizarre behavior and fabulism, involving stories about his background, appointments at other universities, physical feats, maladies, charity donations, and so on, all or many of them probably false. After the accusations mounted and Arday produced no evidence backing up his stories, he resigned his full professorship at Cambridge, admitting no wrong and blaming racism for the brouhaha.
But the tale isn’t done. On August 11 of this week, Simon & Schuster is issuing Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, a book for which Arday reportedly got a six-figure advance (curiously, the publisher is no longer listed on the Amazon page but the publisher’s page is here).
So far there are only a couple of reviews of the book, and the main ones, from the Torygraph, Times of London, and the Atlantic, I’ve put below. All are archived so you can read them. Click on the screenshots to do so. I’ll put a brief excerpt of each review below the title.
The Torygraph:
Excerpts:
Earlier this year, shortly after it was announced that the publisher Simon & Schuster had bought the rights to Jason Arday’s memoir, the then professor of sociology of education at Cambridge University gave an interview to The Bookseller. “I always wanted to be a person who flew close to the sun,” Arday mused. “But sometimes I wonder: did I fly too close?”
On the evidence of his book – due to be published in the UK on August 27 – and all that has emerged about Arday in recent weeks, the answer is probably yes. Titled Great and Unfortunate Things, the memoir might have been more honestly named Great and Improbable Things. This week, suspicions were raised about whether Arday’s resignation letter, in which he announced his intention to leave his post at Cambridge, was written by AI; the casual reader of Great and Unfortunate Things might suspect the ghostly hand of AI too – although the book was apparently written in collaboration with the definitely human writer Eve Claxton.
. . . What is slightly unexpected about the book that Arday has actually written is that it is – at least on the surface – painfully, mind-numbingly dull. Anyone with a passing familiarity with LinkedIn will find much to recognise in its tone: gushing, earnest, slyly self-promotional, oddly impersonal. The book feels powered by a grim determination to inspire readers come what may, and to settle the debate once and for all about the absolute awesomeness of its subject, Jason Arday. Yet to do so it relies on a narrative that, with everything we now know about his habitual false claims, stretches credulity to breaking point.
. . . One striking feature is that the book is suspiciously stingy on detail: years, ages and last names are often withheld. Much of the kind of information, in short, that journalists and suspicious academics might have liked to be able to check is not included. The amount of money that Arday has raised for charity over the years, for instance, is kept ambiguous. Instead, the reader is fed platitudes such as “It was ingrained in me to devote myself to charity work whenever I could”, and “I’d taken part in all kinds of fundraising drives”.
. . . A more amusing thread running through the book is Arday’s almost impressive ability to draw parallels between himself and major figures from cultural history, all while ambiently stressing his humbleness and simplicity of heart. He was named by his mother after Jason and the Argonauts – a good thing too, he notes: “She couldn’t have known then that my life would involve so many trials, obstacles and tests of courage, just like that of my mythological namesake with his quest for the Golden Fleece.”
. . . Readers hoping to find vivid descriptions of some of Arday’s more colourful tales about his life will, alas, be disappointed. Arday has claimed that a severed pig’s head was delivered to his family home in south London, but the incident is not recorded here. Nor is there any mention of the bananas and bullets he has said he was sent in the post after starting in his role at Cambridge. The claim that a knifeman turned up at the university twice to threaten to harm him unless he resigned is also left out of the book, but would surely have made for absorbing reading. As would the car crash and subsequent three-month coma that he recounted in his initial proposal for the autobiography, but which didn’t make the final book.
We are treated, however, to regretful sermons about the scrutiny Arday has been subjected to because of the fateful combination of his skin colour and his success. When a professor implies that he might be cheating in his coursework (the cheek of it), Arday seizes the opportunity to note that “people who are Black or from other disadvantaged groups” commonly face such scepticism.
We are treated, however, to regretful sermons about the scrutiny Arday has been subjected to because of the fateful combination of his skin colour and his success. When a professor implies that he might be cheating in his coursework (the cheek of it), Arday seizes the opportunity to note that “people who are Black or from other disadvantaged groups” commonly face such scepticism.
The review leaves out some of the incidents that have surfaced during the reporting of Arday’s fabulism, including the pig’s head, bullets, and bananas he said were delivered to his family’s home, as well as Arday’s claim, in his book proposal, that he was in a car crash that put him in a coma for three months.
On to the Times of London, which pulls no punches in its title:
Excerpts (the Times, like the Torygraph, calls attention to the fact that Arday describes detailed memories when he was young—well before age 11 when he was able, he said, to speak):
Maybe I should turn myself in to the nearest cop shop now, because this review is not going to improve Arday’s mood. Great and Unfortunate Things is mawkish, self-aggrandising and hard to believe. Extraordinary claims are made with no supporting evidence. Arday’s story — regardless of its authenticity — feels precision-tooled to flatter the biases of the sappiest white liberals.
One notable feature of the book is what it omits. Several of Arday’s more incredible achievements are either not mentioned or included in a softened form. His adolescent football career doesn’t figure, and nor does the 600 miles in six days challenge. His remarkable fundraising achievements are alluded to, but no definitive figure is given. Perhaps his co-writer, Eve Claxton, did a little judicious fact-checking.
. . . There are, however, some new additions to the Arday canon. The brain tumour, for example — treatment for which caused him to lose his memory just before his viva, so he had to relearn his whole thesis from scratch. He also writes that he was severely beaten at the age of 18 by four youths in an unprovoked attack, causing him to have lifelong seizures.
. . . Even for the not-notably-modest genre of the inspirational poverty-porn memoir, Arday lays it on a bit thick. He compares himself at various points with Rocky (driven, gritty), Forrest Gump (simple, wise) and God. Seriously: his mother apparently believed that “just because God wasn’t always visible, that didn’t mean he wasn’t there”, and held that the same must be true for Arday’s intelligence.
And that points to the ultimate cruelty of this story. Arday’s self-mythologising is very funny, but it has done real damage — most significantly to nonverbal children and their families. By promoting the medically unusual story of his own late-childhood flourishing, Arday is creating false hope. Parents will blame themselves, wrongly, for not living up to the impossible standard of Giff.
. . . And that points to the ultimate cruelty of this story. Arday’s self-mythologising is very funny, but it has done real damage — most significantly to nonverbal children and their families. By promoting the medically unusual story of his own late-childhood flourishing, Arday is creating false hope. Parents will blame themselves, wrongly, for not living up to the impossible standard of Giff.
. . . Nor do I have any sympathy for his publisher. Fact-checking works of non-fiction should be standard practice. Instead, as we know from The Salt Path, it’s often no more than an exercise in libel-proofing: reality doesn’t matter. Arday still has defenders who claim he is the victim of a racist stitch-up. In a post-truth world, audacity beats veracity every time.
My understanding is that publishers commonly make authors, in their contract, attest that what they wrote is their own work, is not plagiarized, and is factually true. (I had to do that with my trade books.) But publishers themselves do not have the time nor the money to do their own extensive fact-checking, ergo the contract. (Sometimes, if there’s a chance of lawsuits for libel or defamation against the publisher, they do a “legal read” using a lawyer. This may be why they changed two names in Arday’s book.)
Regardless of whether Simon & Schuster fact-checked Arday’s book, surely the University of Cambridge should have checked his credentials more thoroughly. When claims about Arday’s fabulism surfaced, Cambridge just sloughed them off, saying that investigations of plagiarism belonged to Arday’s Ph.D. university, not Cambridge. That is a dereliction of duty on the part of Cambridge. Only when the ruckus became more prominent did they launch their own investigation, whereupon Arday resigned.
I’ve found one book that was withdrawn because of factual inaccuracy, a memoir of an Australian police officer published by Hachette. Presumably Arday’s book could also be withdrawn if they find factual inaccuracies. But how can you check some of his claims if there’s no evidence one way or another. I could say “I flew up to the Moon and back yesterday, though nobody saw me,” and that is uncheckable. It’s unlikely, but how do you say it didn’t happen?
Another book, The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, made dubious claims according to the Observer, but was not withdrawn.
The Atlantic has perhaps the most extensive take on the book, but also gives it a thumbs-down:
Excerpts:
. . . A year later, [Arday] set out to sell his memoir. According to a cover letter that his agent sent to publishers at the time, Arday’s book, to be titled Great and Unfortunate Things, would be “an awe-inspiring tale of near mythic proportions.”That now appears to be an understatement. Arday’s story was indeed astonishing: As a toddler, he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delays; he didn’t fully speak until the age of 11; he learned to read and write only as an adult. Arday’s parents are Ghanaian immigrants; he grew up wearing homemade clothes and hustling for cash by playing snooker. Yet in spite of all these obstacles and many, many others he has recounted over the years, Arday found a way to go to university and then to graduate school. Eventually, he got his Ph.D., and then he became a star. “We are so lucky to have you,” Cambridge’s head of faculty for education, Hilary Cremin, told him in a clip shown on BBC shortly after his hiring was announced. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”
Arday’s claims have now fallen apart, of course, and Cambridge should be embarrassed. The Atlantic made inquiries:
Arday did not respond to questions from The Atlantic, but he told The Timeslast week that he is not a “liar” or a “fantasist” and that he’d been given insufficient supervision as a graduate student, especially in light of his learning disabilities: “It’s more likely that I’ve made a mistake, there’s a clerical error. It’s not that I’ve fabricated.” He also seemed to address such allegations at a conference in April for the British Sociological Association, where he gave a talk about pervasive efforts to discredit Black scholars including himself. “These people are brilliant, perversely brilliant,” he told his colleagues. “There are times when you look at what they’re doing and you say to yourself, Well done, well played, very good. You’ve caught me [in] a thousand knots—how do I get myself out of this situation?”
. . . Great and Unfortunate Things, which Arday co-wrote with Eve Claxton, is still scheduled to come out next week from Simon & Schuster. The story that it tells should not be taken at face value; it differs notably from other versions of his life that Arday has shared in public and in private, including in the original proposal he sent out with his agent. But the book is also, in a way, very honest and quite telling: It provides a vivid portrait of a man who was always manifestly ill-equipped for academia yet found a way to reach its upper levels. This is not someone else’s cruel assessment of Arday’s tragic and improbable career. It’s his own.
The reviewer, Daniel Engbber, recounts the now-familiar obstacles that Arday faced and apparently overcame. Here’s one that the Atlantic tried to fact-check, but failed:
The book sticks mostly to this frantic register, and coincidence abounds. Arday claims, for instance, that when the kids who beat him up at the bus stop were arrested, he told the judge that they shouldn’t go to prison. Then, years later, when he took a brief teaching job at an unnamed London university, two of the muggers turned out to be his students. They’d been so moved by his act of mercy that they’d turned their lives around, and now they were coaching other at-risk youths. “Both of them gave me a huge hug, which I returned,” he writes. One asked Arday to be the godfather of his child.
Is that really true? I reached out to the book’s fact-checker to ask whether this and several other stories from the book had been verified, but she did not respond. Even asking that question places me on the wrong side of Arday’s moral ledger. Again and again, the book acknowledges his “impossible” success, yet his indignation at anyone who ever doubted him remains a running theme throughout the book. These are Arday’s villains—the Ivan Dragos and the Clubber Langs of academia, who dared to wonder whether his work was really so original, or questioned whether he did it on his own. He swallowed his “feelings of offense,” he says in reference to one lecturer who insisted on drilling him about subject material in person, “but I have never forgotten them.”
. . . But the most disturbing inconsistencies arise from Arday’s book proposal, a copy of which was obtained by The Atlantic. That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.
Could that be due to legal fact-checking? Who knows? And Arday cannot be sued for what he claims in the book proposal but not in the book. But he and the publisher can be sued, and the book withdrawn, if the book does contains factual claims that are false.
As a publishing veteran told me, “If this guy applied for a job with our company, we’d check his references. Did Cambridge?” In the end, the damage is mostly not to Simon & Schuster, who may make a pile, or to the reader, who may like a good tale even if it’s false, or even to Arday himself, who simply cannot believe he did anything wrong, and also got a tidy sum for his book. The real damage is done to Cambridge University for apparently hiring on background rather than merit, as well as to black scholars of real quality, who are now subject to being denigrated as “DEI hires”. I often wonder if Arday believes the tales he tells, in which case he is mentally ill, or is he simply a grifter getting by on outrageous tales, with doubts dispelled by his accusations of racism. Who knows?
But I’d be remiss if I didn’t call attention to those who defended Arday and echoed his claim that this affair was simply a racist witch hunt. Here’s one article from The Guardian, which, in other articles, did a lot to call attention to Arday’s unbelievable claims (click to read):
This article doesn’t defend Arday so much as criticize the people who brought him down, and even implies that Arday’s fall wasn’t so bad because “there’s lot of people who don’t deserve to be where they are.” If that’s meant to defend Arday, it’s shameful. (“Andrews” below refers to “Kehinde Andrews, who was the first Black Studies professor in the UK but was recently made redundant from Birmingham City University.”)
A quote:
“It’s not just about Black people – any minoritised group, our success is generally seen as not being genuine,” said one academic, speaking anonymously.
“[The row] will make the small number of Black people in the field feel much more vulnerable. It will give licence for a while to people who don’t want Black people in the academic space and it may give pause to people who want to redress the massive [racial] imbalance in academia.
“But it’s a mistake to think of any of this as a meritocracy – there’s lots of people in academia who don’t deserve to be where they are, and there’s lots of people who should be more advanced in their careers than they are.”
Andrews said he was setting up an independent Black Studies centre, describing the university sector as “toxic”.
“Academia is set up so that there’s these few places and we’re all fighting over scraps to get into these places,” he said. “It might just be time to say, let’s do it ourselves and let’s not keep relying on these institutions.”
But while Arday’s case – and cuts to the humanities – negatively affect morale, many academics emphasised the proud history of Black scholarship, insisting the Arday affair must not be allowed to tarnish it.
“Black British academics – like Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby and Isaac Julien – punch way above their weight globally. The idea that this one incident in some way reflects Black British academia in general is bonkers,” one academic said.
“There’s a bunch of people out there who think Black people are less intelligent than white people, and that the only way they can get anywhere is by being forced into situations that they are unqualified for. For those people, being Black is the definition of being unqualified. It’s an old racist wine in a new bottle.”
That’s fine: Arday’s fall should not in the least affect other black scholars. But it’s weird that the author uses the fall as a reason to call out academia for racism.
Finally, Richard Dawkins has an interesting piece in UnHerd (click to read) arguingthat Arday’s prose is obscurantist and stilted: a sign that he didn’t have much to say:
One short excerpt:
Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic discipline expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Modern physics is genuinely difficult. Natural selection of Pleistocene man did not prepare our poor brains for Einstein or Heisenberg. Common sense, forged in a world of middle-sized objects travelling at medium speeds, must be sent away on compassionate leave when we open a book on quantum mechanics or relativity. Physicists have no need to language-up their writing. Their subject is intrinsically difficult. Naming no names, practitioners of a subject that any fool can understand may suffer from what has been called “physics-envy”. Longing to sound more profound than they are, what recourse have they but obscurantist language? Look, for example, at the following passage from Arday’s thesis:
“An important consideration which also formed part of the theoretical paradigm for the research recognised that the mentoring process is socially constructed, and therefore the relationship between the participants and the researcher needed to be tailored towards supporting the professional development of the student teachers, and making them autonomous social actors in this process, hence the researcher adopting the secondary position of facilitator within the research.”
I must ask: did the examiners at Liverpool John Moores University, who judged his thesis worthy of a PhD, actually read it? One trivial give-away: the thesis contains 332 instances where a plural noun’s terminal “s” is incorrectly followed by an apostrophe. There’s even one in the thesis title: “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” Where I come from, a PhD candidate has a research supervisor, with a duty of care. It’s hard to believe even he read the thesis before letting it go forward to examination.
There’s more at the site, and stay tuned as other reviews of Arday’s book appear. Will I read it? I don’t think so. I’ll let others do that job, as three reviewers above have kindly done.
Stalwart regular and crack arthopod photographer Mark Sturtevant has sent us photos of spiders, lepidopterans, and assorted insects. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
The various arthropods shown here were all photographed from my area in eastern Michigan. Most were taken in the field, but a couple were staged shots. Let’s begin with spiders.
The first is a new species for me. This is the Butterfly Orbweaver, Araneus pegnia. The name comes from the white four-lobed marking on the abdomen. Although very stretched in this gravid female, in thinner individuals it does look like a four-winged butterfly.
Next up is my highly reliable always-there-for-me-in-case-I-need-it jumping spider, usually called the Tan Jumping Spider (Platycryptus undatus). They are common on our shed, but lately they are also turning up on our front and back porches. This is perhaps because I often leave the porch lights on these days to draw in nocturnal insects. This adorable male was photographed as a manual focus stack on the dining room table. You can see the reflection of my home-made flash diffuser in the eyes, along with the black outline of the lens. As usual, I forgot to remove the clamp of the Raynox diopter lens that is used to boost magnification, and so you can see that too in the reflection.
A small obsession with me lately is shown with the next spider. This is the Candy-striped Spider, Enoplognatha ovata, and she has the remains of a small Hemipteran on a daisy flower where she was hanging out. Candy-striped Spiders are in the family of cobweb-weaving spiders (which includes our common house spiders and widows), but this species lives our in the sunshine, and is commonly seen lurking just under the flowers of herbaceous plants. One item of notoriety about them is that they prowl around their plants at night, looking for sleeping insects which then never wake up. So, I regularly scour our gardens to keep track of the known spiders to see what they have been up to. They almost always have prey on hand, and after a good night they may have several insects with them. I call these collections “a little shop of horrors”, inspired by their nocturnal habit of dining out.
The last of the spiders is a Hammock Spider, Pityohyphantes costatus. They build untidy hammock-like webs on plants in forests, and they too seem to do quite well. This one got a Long-legged Fly (Dolichopodidae), which are super alert flies with very fast reflexes as any macrophotographer will know:
That will be all for spiders. Next up are Odonates. This little damselfly is the Eastern Forktail (Ischnura verticalis). I really need to get more damselfly pictures since there are so many species that I have never photographed. A long focal length macro lens would help immensely!
The next Odonate is one of my favorites. This is the Calico Pennant Dragonfly (Celithemis elisa). Mature males like this one are stunningly colored with deep reds, while the similar females have yellow coloration:
A place that I call the Magic Field has a very dense population of grasshoppers. One of my favorite species commonly seen out there are the Carolina Grasshoppers (Dissosteira carolina), But surely everyone in the U.S. and parts of Canada are familiar with them. Adults have boldly contrasting black and yellow hind wings, as shown in the linked picture, but with wings folded at rest they are well camouflaged. The grasshoppers are divided about evenly into two color morphs, and these are shown here as nymphs that were picked up in the Magic Field for staged pictures on the dining room table. The combined picture is a bit of post-processing trickery since they were photographed separately:
The next picture is a katydid that was also found in the Magic Field. This is a nymph of the Fork-tailed Bush Katydid (Scudderia furcate). It was systematically cleaning all 6 feet without any concern about my proximity:
The little planthopper in the next picture was pulled in from the porch lights mentioned above. This is Tylozygus bifidus:
Lets’ wrap this up with Lepidopterans. It is always a special day to find the caterpillars of giant silk moths, but the species that seems almost common are Promethea Moth caterpillars (Callosamia promethea). These grow into beautiful pastel colored caterpillars the size of large pickles, and later into a palm-sized moth like the one shown in the link. But for now, these youngsters were the size of rice grains. The younger caterpillars tend to stay together through their early instars. It was neat that they had even molted together.
The swarm of recently hatched caterpillars in the next picture were found on a swamp milkweed leaf, so they should be Milkweed Tussock Moth caterpillars (Euchaetes egle). These don’t look like much now, but later they grow into flamboyantly furry caterpillars.
Lastly, we have our largest butterfly, the Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes). I was following it for some time, taking pictures, and here it was nicely photo-bombed by a Common Eastern Bumblebee (Bombus impatiens):
Welcome to another “work” week: it’s Monday, August 10, 2026 and World Lion Day. There is only one species of lion, Panthera leo, though it has a disjunct distribution, living in sub-Saharan Africa and the Gir Forest of India (habitat destruction undoubtedly led to this distribution). Here’s a short video showing a young female cub joining the crèche of her pride and meeting her dad:
It’s also National Duran Duran Appreciation Day (count me out), National S’Mores Day (count me in), and Smithsonian Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 10 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Israel has rejected Trump’s 15-point plan for a cease-fire in Gaza, a key element of the overall peace plan (see the 15 points here).
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected President Trump’s plan for disarming Hamas, a key plank of the Gaza peace process that also requires Israel’s gradual withdrawal from the enclave.
The Israeli leader issued a statement in a government meeting Sunday spelling out his rejection of the plan, in an unusual public break with Trump. The move risks angering the president, who hailed what he called “a historic agreement” to disarm Hamas late last month.
Netanyahu faces uphill elections in October and has come under domestic criticism from his hard-right coalition partners who accused him of misleading them over the terms of the plan, which would see the decommissioning of Hamas’s weapons in exchange for phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
“Israel rejects the 15-point document. The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed. And when I say the disarmament of Hamas, I mean heavy weapons, less heavy weapons, light weapons, all the weapons,” Netanyahu said in a video statement released by his office at the opening of an Israeli cabinet meeting, using an acronym for the Israeli military.
When Trump announced that a deal had been reached between Hamas and his Board of Peace, a body he created to oversee Gaza’s postwar transition, he said Israel was very happy with it.
But Israel and Hamas are deeply distrustful of each other, and major disagreements about the 15-point plan’s details have since emerged, such as the sequencing of disarmament and Israel’s withdrawal.
The Gaza plan arrives at a sensitive moment for Netanyahu with polls showing he is likely to fail to secure a ruling majority in the coming general election. While the U.S. would like to see Israeli troops withdraw from what Israel calls buffer zones in Gaza, as well as Lebanon, these moves are likely to be very unpopular with the Israeli prime minister’s right-wing voter base who see Israel’s presence there as important to their country’s security.
Netanyahu’s announcement comes despite intense pressure, including from the U.S., for Israel to agree to the plan, according to two people briefed on the matter. The Gaza plan was raised by U.S. officials in a recent meeting between Netanyahu and Trump in late July, according to one of the people briefed.
It only makes sense, given the mendacity of Hamas, to condition Israel’s withdrawal on the complete demilitarization of Hamas. And yes, Netanyahu will lose support from his right-wing base if he bows to the plan. But I dislike every move that Israel makes like this being attributed to Netanyahu’s desire to be re-electerd. Maybe the motivations are 100% correct, but maybe part of them is due to not endangering Israel in the future. I agree that Hamas should completely disarm as step #1 of the plan. There is no place for Hamas—armed or not—in a reconstructed and peaceful Gaza.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal discusses what the U.S. (and Israel) might do vis-à-vis Iran now that America is running out of missiles.
It’s Sunday, August 9, and “I will fight tooth and nail, if necessary,” Netanyahu declared when President Biden imposed a weapons embargo on him. But what, exactly, will the United States fight with? Even without an embargo, its own arsenals are approaching the red line fast. The commander of United States European Command warned the Pentagon that there aren’t enough resources to defend against the coming confrontation with Iran while protecting both Israel and American forces—they will have to choose. Reuters reported that the U.S. Army has nearly exhausted its entire stock of precision missiles. In Israel, it was reported that the bunker-buster bombs of the kind dropped on Fordow last year are also nearly gone after a single night of strikes, making an attack on Pickaxe Mountain difficult.
And all this after just a few weeks of fighting a failing Middle Eastern dictatorship—torn from within and teetering on economic collapse. What happens if Russia stages a provocation somewhere else in Europe? Or if China decides to push forces toward Taiwan? The state of the U.S. military brings to mind the IDF on the eve of October 7: an imposing image that, in practice, delivered failure after failure, draw after draw. Its only clear victory since the end of the Cold War was over Saddam Hussein, a quarter of a century ago.
The whole world is now watching Trump. Will he end the war with Iran still controlling the Strait of Hormuz, the regime still standing, and its army merely licking its wounds?
Two absurdities. The first: the American—and especially Republican—trauma of a ground operation and a bloody quagmire is the very thing that has kept the Iranians alive. Almost any ground operation—to seize uranium, take Kharg Island, or capture senior officials—would likely have triggered a dramatic upheaval of the regime. The second: it is precisely the fear of a dramatic collapse in American standing that stops Trump from ending this conflict the way Washington ended Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. Walter Russell Mead, a prominent American conservative commentator, proposed years ago that the United States finish off Iran—the small, weak, estranged son of the Sino-Russian-Korean axis, and the only one that doesn’t yet have nuclear weapons. The message, he wrote shortly after October 7, would land well in every capital that loves evil—even if the message is that the United States can no longer win.
I fear that this conflict will end the way Vietnam did, withdrawal and ending with nothing accomplished. I opposed the Vietnam War in the first place, as we had no business being there and losing 50,000 American lives in vain. But we do have business being in Iran; it’s just that Americans, as Segal said, have no stomach for ground troops on Iranian soil. This is, in my mind, a just war on two counts: it has the potential to free the Iranian people from an oppressive and murderous theocracy, and Iran, unlike Vietnam, is already engaged in spreading terrorism throughout the world.
*At his website Critical Mass, physicist Lawrence Krauss describes what he sees as the greatest threat to modern society. No, it’s not nukes or AI—it’s Islam. This may be only part of his website, as I don’t have a subscription:
I have been thinking for some time what may be the greatest threat to modern civilization. While a lot of attention is given to AI, I don’t think that is it–at least yet. AI will change everything, but so did writing, and we survived, and in fact flourished as a result. We have to be vigilant, but I know a lot of smart people who are working on AI safety, so at least it is not being ignored.
Obviously nuclear weapons exist as as sword of Damocles hovering over civilization, and the dangers of nuclear conflagration are increasing with time. I was Chair of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin Atomic Scientists for a decade, following on heroes like Einstein, Oppenheimer, and my immediate predecessor Leon Lederman, so I know first-hand that the dangers of nuclear war are something that should never be taken for granted. I am particularly concerned about the lack of active effort in nuclear arms control amongst the nations with nuclear weapons right now. That concerns me as much as worries about proliferation in Iran, North Korea etc.
But, perhaps surprisingly, I think the most immediate and least hypothetical threat to modern society may be the rise of Islam. This religion not only has a growing base of adherents, it imposes itself on all aspects of people’s lives, and its scripture demands both complete adherence and urges punishment for apostasy. Thus, it has built in ‘anti-virus’ protection, as a computer scientist friend of mine put it.
As a result, Islam may not easily evolve over the centuries like the older and now more comfortable religions such as Christianity or Judaism, where most adherents don’t take their scriptures literally, and instead pick and choose what they like so they can use their religion as a crutch when needed.
Needless to say, all the three religions are based on similar false myths, but to the extent that they don’t interfere with day to day life in a secular society that can be largely (but not always) innocuous. Unless we can figure out a way to de-fang Islam, encouraging secular muslims who identify as muslims but at heart are non-believers, like so many Christians and Jews, and who can coexist with other secular ‘people of faith’, as well as atheists, I think Islam has a reasonable chance of destabilizing modern civilization in this century.
Lawrence has a point about “defanging” Islam, and it’s the subject of a book by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. It was a good book, but at the time I remarked that it was impossible to implement her recommendations since many Muslims won’t voluntarily be defanged. I just hope Krauss watches his back, as Hirsi Ali has bodyguards 24/7. and you know what happened to Salman Rushdie.
*It looks as if Andrew Sullivan has made his latest weekly Dish post, “Will the two cults finally fall?“, free, as I no longer subscribe but can see it. The two cults he’s referring to are that of the far Right and far Left—namely, Trumpism and wokeness.
There are two complementary cults in America today, it seems to me: the cult of Trump and the cult of Woke.
They exist alongside but also currently control the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. And they have a sick, mutually perpetuating and advantageous relationship. By “cult”, I mean a collective embrace of a compelling figure or dogma, the worship and protection of which dominates everything else. (I presaged this almost a decade ago now: “America’s New Religions.”)
That our politics will not recover until these two cults are unraveled is in some ways the core conviction of The Weekly Dish. And the good news, I think, is that it’s finally happening. Cult leaders, however charismatic, are usually sociopaths when they aren’t simply sexual abusers, and so cults tend to implode when the leader’s flaws emerge beyond any denial. Fixed dogmas can also collapse when the lies required to sustain them simply become too absurd, too huge to believe, when the avatars of the system are exposed as frauds and liars. And to my eyes, the emperors’ clothes on both sides are now unmistakably falling.
Why the Trump cult is ending:
Out. Of. His. Mind. The reporter who has followed Trump most closely, Maggie Haberman, tells us that around 70 percent of the president’s mental bandwidth is now occupied by his various cockamamie — and grotesquely kitsch — construction projects around DC. If the Democrats were not completely useless, this presidency would be over.
And who in the world takes anything Trump says seriously anymore? Every definitive statement is abandoned in days, if not hours. No deal is ever finished. Major gambits, like the tariff wars, collapse under the weight of incompetence. The sheer fecklessness of the Iran War has undermined deterrence everywhere. China has eaten Trump’s lunch on trade. The IRGC treats him as a mere noise machine. Pretty soon, a supermajority of Americans will be there too.
And by November, if the cult is emphatically rejected at the pols, the Trump era could be done.
But he doesn’t tell us why the woke cult is ending; in fact, Sully says it’s going strong:
The cult of woke is far less easily defenestrated because it’s not just one unhinged man. It is an elaborate, networked edifice of lies and power grabs, with deep tribal appeals to the worst of human nature, sustained by an elite overwhelmed with self-regard and incapable of self-reform.
Some argue that wokeness is over, and they talk about vibes and shifts. But they never point to actual legislative or institutional change — because no such change is happening. Women still have dicks, America is still a “white supremacy,” all gays are queers, all cops are suspect, borders are racist, and oppression is omnipresent. These lies are still held as sacred truths by every major institution in America.
And with the case of Jason Arday, we have the apotheosis of this moral and intellectual rot.
. . . I’ve spent the last decade tilting against [these cults] — and it has seemed pointless half the time, as the Trump faction has doubled down on its hero at the expense of our Constitution, and the woke have kidnapped the culture at the expense of our liberalism. But lies always fail in the end. And in the quiet these days, you can hear them dying. Our task now is to ensure that whatever follows both of these noxious, illiberal cults is something rooted in empirical truth, everyday English, and constructive solutions to our common problems.
His confidence (“know hope,” he says unconvincingly) is that wokeness is build on lies and lies always fail. Well, it may take a while. . .
*The NYT has a lovely article on salticids (jumping spiders), with lots of movies and photos that I can’t reproduce, nor can you see the videos in the archived article (here).
Jumping spiders — a common variety of spider that lives on every continent except Antarctica and includes at least 6,000 species — have become social media’s tiniest and unlikeliest animal celebrities. Their popularity as pets has been fueled by their appeal on social media, where they appear in close up shots, perched on a human’s manicured fingernail, staring intently with eight penetrating, beady black eyes.
These arachnid social media stars have cute names like Bambi, Ivy, Juniper, Pumpkin and Flower. They do adorable things: tilting their heads to one side quizzically, curling up in their little web hammocks, waving their front legs above their heads as if hailing a taxi, crawling around miniature bakeries and supermarkets and watching mini toy TV sets while munching on live worms.
Their fans call them spooders, spoods and web puppies.
Some of these spider fanatics were once frightened of the animals they now lovingly live with. “I was terrified of them,” said Olivia Ontkean, 34, a dance teacher in Portland, Ore., who became “fully addicted” to spiders after conquering her phobia.
She now has close to 250 adult spiders in her home, and countless baby spiders, which she sells through her business, Dances With Spoods. Another spider convert, Joleen Hernandez, 39, a stay-at-home mother of five in Oakley, Calif., said social media changed her perception of spiders as scary and gross, and inspired her to get her own jumping spiders.
“My friends and family thought I was crazy,” she said. Common responses were “why” and “ew,” she added.
Spiders, long maligned as creepy or terrifying, have undergone a remarkable reputational makeover. It’s partly because, their fans say, they’re just such good content.
In an era when so much social media content is repetitive, trend-driven or sponsored by brands, the spooder-boomlet delivers a jolt of something different: a tiny fuzzy friend crawling across glittery gemstone nails, a spider no bigger than a coffee bean doing “uppies” (raising its front arms like a toddler asking to be picked up), then leaping onto a person’s hand.
. . .Spider aficionados say jumping spiders are the perfect arachnid ambassador: They’re small, curious and observant, and can often adapt to being handled by humans.
“People are really just discovering how clever and charming these animals are,” said Nathan Morehouse, an ecologist and associate professor at the University of Cincinnati, who studies jumping spiders. “If you as a person are interacting with them as a pet, you quickly begin to realize they’re paying attention to you very closely.”
I’d love to have one of these, but they don’t live all that long and I wouldn’t want to get attached to something that dies too soon. I’ve put a video of a pet salticid below, but if you’re considering getting one, also watch this video of the pros and cons of having a salticid.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, it’s the same old-same old for Hili’s and Andrzej’s lunch:
Andrzej: Are we repeating yesterday’s lunch today?
HilI: This is beginning to look like an epidemic of plagiarism.
In Polish:
Ja: Robimy dziś powtórkę wczorajszego obiadu?
Hili: To zakrawa na plagę plagiatów.
*******************
From Divy:
From Funny and Strange Signs:
From Things With Faces: not a cow!
From Masih; they’re coming for women’s legs in Iran. “And put your headscarf on, too.”
A woman waiting at bus stop in northern Iran. Her crime? Wearing shorts.
A hijabi woman attacks her. Police arrive and force her to put on pants in the street.They cannot keep the hijab on Iranian women’s heads. Now they’re coming for their legs pic.twitter.com/wwabOzc9Fh
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) August 9, 2026
From Luana. I’ll highlight the Atlantic review later today, along with other reviews.
The Atlantic reads Jason Arday’s memoir, and finds his life story was even more inspirational than we thought
He was beaten so badly as a teen he became an epileptic. When the boys who did this were caught, he magnanimously told the judge he didn’t want them to go to prison.… pic.twitter.com/RsJaVd7AOz
— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) August 6, 2026
The Number Ten Cat gets petted:
Everything is right in the world when you’re stroking a cat https://t.co/3LAS7xSA10
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) August 7, 2026
From Malcolm, a lovely fountain (the sphere has to be pretty spherical, though):
A kugel fountain is a water feature or sculpture where a sphere sits in a fitted hollow in a pedestal, and is supported by aquaplaning on a thin film of water. pic.twitter.com/miZxHGxzqa
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) August 1, 2026
One from my feed, and this is new to me:
This is fore-edge painting: a scene hidden in a book's gilded edge, invisible until you fan the pages just right. Here it meets Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
— Digital Brain (@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social) 2026-08-09T13:41:50.000Z
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz. He was 12 years old. https://t.co/u8lDDHYHtH
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) August 10, 2026
And two from Herr Doktor Professor Cobb. First, one skunk chasing another:
More from my trail camera 🤣🦨🦊 youtube.com/shorts/mtvJh…
— Wildmaven (@wildmaven.bsky.social) 2026-08-08T23:52:39.011Z
Of this Doktor Cobb says, “Look at that snoot!”
Snack time with Tilli the aardvark! 💖📹: Animal care staff Alex
— Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium (@ptdefiancezoo.bsky.social) 2026-08-08T00:47:37.144Z