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.
UK barrister, international law advocate, and legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel Natasha Hausdorff has argued several times on video why Israeli’s occupation of Area C of the West Bank is neither illegal nor constitutes “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. Remember, according to the 1995 Oslo II accords, Areas A and B are largely under Palestinian control, with area A under full Palestinian civil and security control, while area B is under full Palestinian civil control and joint Israeli/Palestinian security control—and Jews aren’t allowed to live in either area. Area C is under full Israeli security and civil control, and both Palestinians (about 300,000) and Israelis (about 500,000) are allowed to live in that area. The Palestinians in that area are largely descendants of people who were there pre-Oslo, and Palestinians are rarely allowed to build new houses or settlements there. Israelis are allowed to move there of their own accord.
Note that these borders are temporary, and the whole division was supposed to be settled at some time after Oslo II. But that settlement never happened. I believe the idea was that all of area C was supposed to be transferred to Palestine, but not until there was a full settlement, including apportionment of land, between Palestine and Israel. And if you think Israel won’t move its own residents out of an area to bring peace, then you’re forgetting Israel’s own “ethnic cleansing” of Jews from Gaza in 2005. Did that bring peace? You know the answer.
You can see several videos of Hausdorff’s arguments (e.g., here, here and here) which are pretty clear (the first is marred by the interviewer shouting). But in a recent article in the Spectator (click on archived link below) Hausdorff is a bit confusing, to the extent that her argument is obscured by fine points of international law and claims of those who oppose them. It’s not her fault; the situation is complicated. You can read her argument by clicking on the archived link below, but I’ve asked Grok to put her argument in simpler language.
The whole question appears to hinge on two issues:
Whether the West Bank lies within Israel’s sovereign boundaries. Hausdorff argues “yes”.
Whether Israel forcibly transported or deported its citizens into the West Bank or whether Israelis settled in Israeli-administered territory of their own volition. Hausdorff maintains the latter, arguing (correctly, I think) that the border of area C is an “armistice” line rather than the border of a sovereign territory.
To quote her Spectator article:
A legal rule selectively (and incorrectly) cited whenever Jews build houses across an armistice line, which is not and never was a border, is not the application of law but political posturing. Additionally, the Oslo Accords, which gave Palestinians self-government in Areas A and B of the West Bank, left Area C under Israeli administration, and deliberately reserved settlements, borders and Jerusalem for final-status negotiations.
. . . The consequences extend far beyond legal disputes. The phrase ‘illegal settlements’ is increasingly being used to mean something much more disturbing: that Jews should not live in certain places because they are Jews. Consider what is being demanded. A future Palestinian state is routinely imagined as requiring the removal of hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes. The Jewish residence in Hebron, the cradle of Jewish civilisation, is inexplicably presented as an international crime. As is the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem or the Jewish communities re-established after their inhabitants were expelled.
No comparable demand would be tolerated elsewhere. We would immediately recognise the ugliness of saying that peace between two peoples requires territory to be cleansed of one ethnicity. Yet once the proposition is dressed in the language of ‘settlements’ and ‘international law’, politicians repeat it.
. . . Crimea illustrates the point: Russia’s occupation does not extinguish Ukrainian title. If Ukrainian forces recover Crimea tomorrow, Ukraine will not suddenly become the occupying power just because Russia controlled the peninsula for a decade. The sovereign title comes first.
. . . International law was designed to provide rules by which disputes could be resolved. It was not created to furnish political campaigns with intimidating vocabulary. The starting point should therefore be the law itself, applied consistently: the Mandate, uti possidetis juris, the actual status of the 1949 armistice lines, the wording of the Geneva Convention, subsequent agreements, including the Oslo Accords, and state practice elsewhere.
I’m absolutely sure that about 95% of people who throw around the phrase “illegal settlers” (or “settler colonists”) and “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians” do not know the international law that applies here. They’re merely following the progressive party line.
But read for yourself (click the headline):
To help out with the argument, I’ll post two maps. First is the Green Line (from here). The “international boundary” indicated below—dash, two dots, dash— is the “green line” boundary that, says Hausdorff, constitute the sovereign boundaries of the state of Israel, including the West Bank.
And here are areas A, B, and C of the West Bank (map from here):
I quote the bot Grok in answer to my question: What is Natasha Hausdorff’s argument for why Israelis are not settling illegally in the West Bank, and why they are not committing “ethnic cleansing”?
Grok’s full answer is indented, and I’ve put crucial bits of the argument in italics. I’ve left out Grok’s references supporting its answer, but I see no errors there.
Natasha Hausdorff, a British barrister and legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel, argues that claims of “illegal settlements” and Israeli “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank rest on a misapplication of international law and invert historical facts. Her case, set out in writings such as her September 2026 Spectator article [article above] and in interviews and parliamentary evidence, has two main parts.
Why settlements are not illegal
Hausdorff starts with the status of the territory itself. She says the legal story does not begin in 1967. Under the customary rule of uti possidetis juris, a new state inherits the administrative boundaries of the preceding entity unless those boundaries are changed by agreement. When Israel declared independence in 1948 it was the only state that emerged from the remaining Mandate for Palestine west of the Jordan (Transjordan having already been separated). The Mandate’s lines therefore became Israel’s default international borders and included Judea and Samaria (later called the West Bank) and East Jerusalem. The 1947 UN partition resolution was a non-binding General Assembly recommendation that the Arab side rejected; it never displaced the customary rule.
Jordan seized the area in the 1948–49 war and held it until 1967, but occupation does not confer sovereignty. Only two states recognized Jordan’s annexation, and the 1949 armistice lines were explicitly military ceasefire lines, not borders. In 1967 Israel therefore recovered territory over which it already held title; a state cannot occupy its own sovereign land. Hausdorff uses the analogy of Ukraine recovering Crimea: no one would then call Ukraine the occupying power. The ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion, she notes, is non-binding and simply assumed occupation without addressing uti possidetis.
Even if one treats the West Bank as occupied for the sake of argument, she says Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention does not make civilian Jewish communities illegal. The article forbids an occupying power from deporting or transferring parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory. It was drafted after World War II to stop forced, state-organized population transfers of the Nazi type. Israeli Jews who live in the West Bank move voluntarily; some re-established communities (such as Gush Etzion) that Jordan had expelled. The provision does not create ethnically exclusive zones or criminalize private residence. Hausdorff also points to inconsistent international practice: large-scale civilian settlement in other prolonged occupations has not drawn the same legal condemnation.
She adds that the Oslo Accords left Area C under Israeli administration and reserved settlements, borders and Jerusalem for final-status talks. Much of the unauthorized construction she identifies as illegal is Palestinian building in Area C, not Israeli communities built with planning permission.
Why Israel is not committing “ethnic cleansing”
Hausdorff treats the ethnic-cleansing charge as projection. Jordan ethnically cleansed Jews from the West Bank and East Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967. Areas A and B, under Palestinian Authority control, are already free of Jews. Demands that Israel evacuate Jewish communities from Area C, she argues, amount to a call for the remaining parts of Judea and Samaria to be made Judenrein [JAC: “free from Jews”]. She has described the ICJ’s language as effectively endorsing that outcome.
On the facts, she says the Palestinian population in Israeli-administered Area C has grown, not shrunk. There is no evidence of a systematic Israeli policy of removing Palestinians from the territory; the opposite demographic trend is visible. Accusing Israel of the crime that was actually committed against Jews in the same area, she contends, inverts both history and law.
Hausdorff’s overall position is that the phrases “illegal settlements” and “ethnic cleansing” function as political slogans that apply a double standard to the only Jewish state and that they are used to justify excluding Jews from places of historic Jewish presence. She maintains that genuine international law, applied equally, does not require that result.
That is the argument which, according to Hausdorff, complies with international law. She recognizes that Israeli violence against Palestinians in area C is illegal and should be dealt with harshly, and also that this division of land is temporary, though it doesn’t look as if a two-state solution is anywhere in the offing. Until there is a final settlement, Hausdorff considers the “illegal settler/ethnic cleansing” argument to be a canard—indeed, a blood libel.
Welcome to Thursday, September 17, 2026 and National Monte Cristo Day. No, it’s not honoring the small Italian island or its fictional count, but rather the bizarre Monte Cristo sandwich, a ham-and-cheese sandwich dipped in egg and fried—sometimes topped with jam and powdered sugar. I’ve never had one, though I’d try it. Here’s a specimen from Wikipedia; look at all the sugar!:
Here’s the first page of the Constitution, which you can see at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The caption is, “Page one of Jacob Shallus‘ officially engrossed copy of the Constitution signed in Philadelphia by delegates of the Constitutional Convention in 1787″
Wikimedia Commons
Posting will be light as I prepare for my cataract surgery (one eye next week, the next two weeks after). Wish me luck!
Locked in a trade war with President Donald Trump and pivoting away from the United States, Canada is seeking stronger ties in Europe and Asia as a shield against Washington’s volatility.
On Wednesday, sitting as a guest of honor inside the European Parliament, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney received an unprecedented offer: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she wants to make Canada the first “associate member” of the 27-nation bloc.
“We want to bring the relationship with Canada to the highest level possible,” she said in her annual State of the Union address.
The declaration at the Parliament in Strasbourg, France, received a standing ovation from European lawmakers and from Carney.
The offer, which would see two longtime U.S. partners expand their alliance from trade to security, highlights the extent to which Trump is redefining alliances.
The president’s foreign policy gyrations, including threats to take Greenland from NATO ally Denmark, have triggered a reckoning among Washington’s traditional friends about their relationship with the United States.
Amid the standoff with Trump on tariffs, Canada has pursued a thaw in ties with China including new trade deals. Beijing has praised Ottawa for walking away from talks rather than caving to Trump’s demands, and this month, China and Canada revived a dialogue on military issues after an eight-year break.
Ahead of his trip to Europe this week, Carney said he wanted a “unique alliance” with the E.U., including on energy and critical minerals, to help safeguard Canada against economic coercion. “The world’s more dangerous and divided, and friends need to stick together in these times,” he said.
Trump’s stupidity not only alienates our friends directly, but also weakens the U.S. as a superpower by forcing our erstwhile friends to ally with others, and even strengthen ties with America’s biggest nemesis: China. It will take a long time, if ever, to repair the damage Trump has done.
The Trump administration has approved a $2.8 billion sale of heavy bombs to Israel, according to a U.S. official, in what would be among the largest deliveries of U.S. munitions there even as American public support for the country declines.
The proposed sale would include 40,000 one-ton bombs whose use by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon has drawn international anger because of the civilian harm caused by their wide blast radius.
Human rights groups and some foreign governments have condemned Israel for dropping the giant munitions in densely populated areas, sometimes killing dozens of civilians in strikes targeting just one individual.
The package would include 20,000 each of America’s 2,000-pound MK-84 and BLU-117 bombs. It would also provide Israel with 20,000 bunker-busting I-2000 penetrator warheads, which explode on delay after smashing through an outer surface like soil, rock or concrete. The plan was reported earlier by The Washington Post.
The blast from a 2,000-pound bomb can be lethal at more than 1,000 feet and leave a crater as deep as 50 feet. Israel provoked a fierce outcry after it dropped hundreds of the heavy bombs on Gaza.
The State Department recently sent the proposed deal to two congressional committees to get informal approval, the U.S. official said.
Production and delivery of the munitions usually takes months or years, but there are ways to expedite the process.
In mid-2024, the Biden administration paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel because of concern about their use in crowded civilian areas. President Trump allowed the shipment to proceed days after taking office last January.
Then in February, the Trump administration agreed to sell roughly $2.7 billion in munitions to Israel, a package that included 35,000 of the one-ton MK-84 and BLU-117 bombs.
While congressional leaders can tell the Trump administration that they oppose the deal, Secretary of State Marco Rubio can exercise emergency powers to proceed with the sale regardless, as he has done repeatedly, or just say he is moving forward with it. The administration would then bypass getting informal approval from Congress and formally announce the sale is happening.
I can’t say that I oppose this sale, especially because the bombs are more likely to be used in Iran, where they can be used against large military facilities, nuclear sites, and so on. I largely trust the IDF’s decision, but not entirely, nor am I party to how the IDF makes its decisions weighing military advantange against civilian casualties. Given this, I will not say this is a deal that shouldn’t be done, though you can be sure that most Democrats will say no, and every “progressive” will say no.
*I have always opposed capital punishment, and, in a Free Press article, Douglas Murray generally agrees/. But he finds an exception in a piece called “The death penalty is cruel. Hamas terrorists deserve it.” And just the other day I hit on the same reason he did for changing his mind, a reason based on the Israeli psyche.
Israelis must soon make serious decisions about the issue. Though Israel prohibits the death penalty for most offenses, the Knesset voted unanimously in May to allow it for terrorists who participated in the October 7, 2023, attacks. Now the Israeli justice system must determine whether capital punishment will go forward, and exactly who it will be allowed to ensnare.
Since this is a question of conscience, perhaps it is worth outlining my own moral views from the outset. I have always been deeply opposed to the death penalty. Rather than explain every reason I have for opposing it, I’ll just say that I agree with the argument Albert Camus makes in his 1957 essay “Reflections on the Guillotine.” The problem is not only the possibility of wrongful convictions, and not just the taking of a life, but something perhaps even more cruel: putting a human mind in the position of knowing the place and time of its ending. A change comes upon a society when it permits this ultimate sanction.
. . .Yet despite my deep, instinctive opposition to the practice, I still believe that there are times when it may be legitimate. Few people would deny that the Allies had the right after World War II not just to try and convict but also to hang the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. The world needed to demonstrate this ultimate expression of revulsion for the crimes of the Nazi high command. And the new world that was to follow, which was being built by Allied victors and Holocaust survivors, could not afford to remain haunted by living Nazi leaders, who would have sustained a glimmer of faith in their movement despite living in captivity.
The same justification may rightly stand in the case of the only hanging to have taken place in the State of Israel since its reestablishment. That is the hanging in 1962—after capture, trial, and judgment—of the architect of the Shoah, Adolf Eichmann.
The same principle may well be applied to the several hundred terrorists belonging to Hamas’s most gruesome fighting unit, the Nukhba Force, who were captured alive after breaking into Israel on the morning of October 7, 2023. Each of these men invaded Israel in order to murder, rape, torture, and kidnap. They represent a special type of evil.
To me these aren’t valid reasons for the state engaging in killing. Better life without the possibility of parole (I’ve discussed my reasons before). The problem is that the way Israel deals with terrorist prisoners means that “life without parole” may not be an irrevocable sentence, and there’s the rub:
But there is an additional justification for the execution of these terrorists which too few people outside of Israel appreciate. It is the fact that Israel will someday face the temptation to use the several hundred terrorists currently held in its maximum-security prisons as bargaining chips.
The architect of October 7, Yahya Sinwar, was himself a terrorist detained in Israeli prisons. He was released early from his sentence and returned to Gaza in 2011, along with more than 1,000 other terrorists, in exchange for a single Israeli soldier who had been captured by Hamas and held in Gaza. Sinwar himself once said that the best news that a Palestinian prisoner could receive in jail was the news that an Israeli had been kidnapped. That is because the prisoners then knew that a thousand-to-one prisoner swap might be in the offing, and they had a good chance of being spared even from a life sentence.
Despite my deep, instinctive opposition to the practice, I still believe that there are times when it may be legitimate.
In recent decades, including the years since October 7, thousands of terrorists who should have spent the rest of their lives in prison have been released in exchange for Israeli hostages. It is the best leverage that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups have. This has led to some of the most painful scenes imaginable in which, for instance, people convicted of murdering Israelis have been released from prison after serving just a few years and receive a hero’s welcome from enraptured crowds in Gaza. It is a wretched, appalling system, which Hamas and others exploit well.
It is because Israel values life so highly, particularly the life of a kidnapped soldier or POW, that this problem comes up. Despite that, Murray says that the incentive to kidnap Israelis has to be broken. The problem is that even prisoners scheduled for execution, or get life without parole, could still get money for their families via the Palestinian Authority’s “pay for slay” program, so there’s still an incentive to take Israelis hostage. And Murray mentions the criticism that would come down on Israel were it to engage in mass executions. That would be unfair he says, but he’s still in favor of mass executions of some terrorists. As for me, I am undecided, but am still leaning towards the banning of capital punishment.
*I always thought that airline pilots made decent salaries, but not as much as the Wall Street Journal describes in a new article, “The volatile finances of airline pilots, America’s unpredictable millionaires” (subtitle, “They can earn fortunes in a single month, but are often dependent on one airline for their entire careers.”
Jeff Barath never had a need for a financial adviser. Then he retired last year at 65, and it threatened to unleash a tidal wave of taxable income.
Like many of his fellow airline pilots, Barath spent much of his career bound by a rigid seniority structure that came with similarly rigid compensation and retirement benefits. When he left United Airlines after 35 years, he was inundated by more financial decisions than he ever expected upon entering the profession.
He has a partial pension, a brokerage account and a $3.5 million 401(k). Once he starts taking his required minimum distributions, his income will be well over $300,000 a year, including Social Security, which is more than he earned most years while working. He needed to know how much to take out, where to pull from first and how the decision would affect his taxes and his Medicare premium.
“It’s a high-class problem,” Barath said.
. . . Many pilots leave the workforce as millionaires thanks to generous pay and 401(k) contributions from their employers. But they face lots of pitfalls, too. They typically work for the same carrier their entire careers, and in a volatile industry, working for the wrong airline at the wrong time can take a major toll on earnings.
Pilots with seniority can make as much as $100,000 in a month if they live near a hub, fly the biggest planes and can pick up a lot of flights that pay overtime rates due to weather-related events, according to Timothy Pope of wealth manager 360 Aviation Advisors.
. . .Barath, who is still single and now lives in Bronxville, N.Y., has remained conservative with his investments. On the advice of a financial-services executive, he avoided high-cost mutual funds with a spotty performance history. Instead, he put about 75% of his plan into an S&P 500 index fund. The remainder he spread across a value fund, a small-cap fund and a money-market account.
He left it there until a couple years before retirement, when he moved more into the money-market account. A Charles Schwab adviser who took over managing his money a few months after his retirement helped Barath create a budget to determine how much he would need each month. The upside is that he has plenty to live on. The downside is that almost all of it will be taxable.
Barath’s adviser recommended he put 60% in stocks and 40% in fixed-income investments.
This is pretty much what I did, and relied entirely on Vanguard funds. My allocation is still 60% equities andf 40% stocks, but I’m set for life, and will give the vast majority of my savings to charity when I did. As for the pilots, they have a very important job, flying hundreds of people at least once a day, and they can’t afford to make a mistake. I don’t begrudge them their high salaries at all.
Early in the fall semester of the 2025-26 academic year, Lisa Belkin, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s journalism school, realized that one of her students, Jamie Beaton, had yet to show up for class.
Belkin, who avoids combing the internet for information about her students, knew nothing about Beaton. She was curious about his absence, though, so she reached out to a dean, who sent an email.
Beaton was apologetic in his reply, saying he had mixed up his schedule. He was in New Zealand, teaching a course in entrepreneurship at the University of Auckland, but would be back in New York the next week.
That was when Belkin decided to break her rule. Who was this guy?
Beaton, she learned, had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2016, picking up a master’s degree in applied mathematics along the way. He had gone on to collect an M.B.A. from Stanford. Then a law degree from Yale. That was followed by a doctor of philosophy in public policy from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar — all before age 28.
Attending classes remotely and in person, he earned additional master’s degrees from — deep breath — the University of Pennsylvania (education entrepreneurship), Stanford (education technology), Princeton (finance), Cornell (health care policy and economics), Dartmouth (implementation science), King’s College London (war studies) and Tsinghua University in Beijing (global affairs).
Still, there was more: Beaton, who was born and raised in New Zealand, was a founder and the chief executive of Crimson Education, a college admissions counseling service that has been valued at more than $600 million.
. . . If he continues collecting advanced degrees at such a swift pace, he will surpass Benjamin B. Bolger, who has racked up 16 at age 50. He might even beat Michael Nicholson, an octogenarian forever scholar with more than 30 degrees to his name.
Away from his studies, Beaton, 31, has become a player in the field of college admissions counseling. His clients pay between $30,000 and $200,000 for a multiyear program designed to enhance their children’s chances of getting into top universities.
Why is Belkin doing it? Well, he clearly likes to both learn and to work hard—to the extent that he abjures vacations. Will he get more degrees? His friends say he might go into politics, though they’re just guessing. But one thing’s clear: this guy is wickedly diligent and also extremely rich.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron wants out:
Szaron: Could I go out too? Hili: What for?
In Polish:
Szaron: Czy ja też mógłbym wyjść z domu?
Hili: A po co?
Reza Rashedpour, do you remember that teenage girl you humiliated just because she wasn’t wearing a hijab? Now your own daughter produces content without a hijab! That means she’s enjoying a freedom that Iranian women were beaten for, arrested for, and humiliated for—so, keep your hands off Iranian women and girls. The morality police inside you is still running rampant!
رضا رشیدپور، این دختر نوجوانی را که فقط بهخاطر نداشتن حجاب تحقیرش کردی یادت هست؟
حالا دختر خودت بدون حجاب تولید محتوا میکند! یعنی از آزادیای بهره میبرد که زنان ایران برایش کتک خوردند، بازداشت شدند و تحقیر شدند، پس، دست از سر زنان و دختران ایران بردار. گشت ارشاد درونت هنوز… pic.twitter.com/fdOaHCSfeI
The 179 mins of HR training I’m forcing myself thru in 5 min increments casually denigrates physicians thus:
“Sex Assigned at Birth: Typically, health professionals label infants as male or female after a cursory examination of their external physical characteristics.”
From Malcolm; six minutes of information from the BBC about an unusual job: a steeplejack. This guy is taking down the entire chimney singlehanded! Why not wear safety gear?
“I’ve never fell off a big chimney. You only fall off one of them once.”#OnThisDay 1979: Extraordinary steeplejack Fred Dibnah was introduced to the nation. pic.twitter.com/07PPc6um4D
“I find the idea of a national conversation on AI regulation inherently funny. A national conversation? With this nation, whose current conversations include: 1) Whether the Jews snuck letters into math, and 2) Whether Sydney Sweeney’s side-boob means we’re living in The… pic.twitter.com/wHwxoWIz6w
One from my feed. Remember this? (You can see an alternate version here.)
I know this is real. I know this is part of the world in which we all live. And yet I remain in a state of cognitive dissonance in which I can’t integrate this fact that I know to be true into my picture of the world. I know that 1.) this was a video that had to be made to… pic.twitter.com/Lp9Ell3YLx
And two from Doc Cobb. This first one is plenty weird, and I’ve printed it out to read:
The soul is real and can be tied with a rope according to this graphical abstract. The paper is even weirder!"Quantum evidence of nonlocal consciousness during clinical death" http://www.cell.com/the-innovati… This is a Cell Press journal…via @pubpeer.com @forbetterscience.bsky.social
Yes, as the world goes on its apocalyptic way, I’m pulling a temporary Andrew Sullivan and concentrating on other stuff. Today we’re back on language with a new edition of “Words and phrases I despise.” Remember, this is a compendium of language that irritates me, so do not bother to tell me that “lanaguge evolves.” And you’re of course welcome to put your own pet language peeves below. Time to air your grievances!
Today we have five, with examples. I can’t guarantee that I haven’t mentioned any of these before.
1). “Merch”, which is simply an “I’m so cool” shortening of the word “merchandise.” Here’s an example from Huffpost (click on screenshot”. (I’m surprised they don’t shorten “purchase” too, so they can urge you to “purch the merch”.)
2. “Sammy” for sandwich. This is really irritating, as it doesn’t even save any syllables. Not only that, but it sounds juvenile—something a two-year-old might say if she isn’t able to pronounce the proper word. Further, I had a mentally disabled relative named “Sammy”, and the use of the s-word dishonors his memory. This is from a HuffPost article on the “9 best sandwiches to pack for lunch.” I can’t imagine someone making one of these to pack for work:
3,) Anything with “-maxing” or “-maxxing” as a suffix. “Looksmaxing” is the most common form of these c0nstructions, and it simply means “trying to make a feature look as good as possible”. Here’s a highly important article—or at least HuffPost thinks so:
Grok gave me several other examples:
A productive slang suffix -maxxing (usually spelled with a double x) has become widespread online. It means “maximizing” or “optimizing” something, often appearance or a lifestyle trait. Common examples include looksmaxxing, sleepmaxxing, softmaxxing, and many nonce formations. This usage grew out of gaming “min-maxing” and later internet culture.
“Nonce”? I suppose they mean “one-time” formations. Whatever, although the suffix lends itself to many uses (I just thought of “foodmaxxing” at a buffet) is should never be used by people with more than two neurons.
4.) “Advancements”. I know I’ve put this one up before, but I find it particularly irritating. All it means is “advances”, but some people have a desire to gussy up the word by adding four more letters. Here’s an awkwardly title page from the progressive Huffpost—one of my favorite sources for this kind of infelicitous prose:
If you want to learn more about the ice cream, here’s a tweet from B&J:
NEW FLAVOR ALERT! 🍦 Introducing Justice ReMix’d, a new Limited Batch flavor! We’ve partnered with @adv_project to churn up a flavor to support criminal justice reform and an end to structural racism in our broken criminal legal system. Find it near you: https://t.co/HWkZOdRYVtpic.twitter.com/JrybfmeY40
5.) “I haven’t done this” (or been here) in a minute.” This means exactly the opposite of what it says; the real meaning is “I haven’t done this in a long time.” It’s bizarre, and its only purpose is to show that you’re conversant with the latest stupid jargon.
I’m hearing this more and more, and always discount a person when they use the phrase. Here’s one example from Facebook:
It’s been yonks since we’ve seen a new Jesus and Mo strip, but there’s one today called “ravers“. The email that came with the link said this, “Back from holiday, so here’s a new one. The sharif won’t like it.”
And, indeed, according to the BBC (archived link), St. Paul’s is partnering with a nightclub, though they deny they’re having a “rave in the nave”:
St Paul’s Cathedral has signed a four-year deal with the London nightclub Fabric to stage music events inside the building.
Under the partnership, Fabric will be the cathedral’s exclusive partner for such events until 2030. The first concert is due to take place on 29 October, although the artist has not been announced.
Fabric co-founder Cameron Leslie called the deal “an extraordinary and unexpected coming together of two very different parts of London”.
Sandra Lynes Timbrell, the cathedral’s director of visitor engagement, said she hoped a “carefully curated programme of exceptional concerts” would draw people who had not visited before.
“These events showcase world-class talent and create unforgettable experiences for audiences within one of London’s most iconic spaces,” she said.
. . . The organisers said the programme would feature artists “from different musical backgrounds and disciplines whose work responds to the Cathedral’s distinctive atmosphere, acoustics and architectural heritage”.
St Paul’s has previously held concerts by the artists RY X in 2024 and Patti Smith in 2025.
. . . Fabric, in Farringdon, had its licence revoked in 2016 after Islington Council found what it described as a culture of drug use at the venue.
The venue reopened in January 2017 after agreeing new licensing conditions with the council and the Metropolitan Police, including a higher minimum entry age and tighter security.
Hallelujah! I suppose this is a way to boost the waning Anglican church attendance in England, with the programs designed to “draw people who had not visited before.” But I can’t help thinking that Christopher Wren would be fretting and whirling in his grave.
And of course Mo, as usual, dispenses advice he’s unwilling to take himself.
It’s a hump day (“Долоо хоногийн дунд үе (Лхагва гараг)” in Mongolian): Wednesday, September 16, 2026. A week from now I will have a new lens in my right eye (yep, I’m at the age for cataract surgery; wish me luck!). It’s also National Guacamole Day. Here’s Rick Bayless, a famous Chicago chef, showing how he makes it. He knows what he’s talking about. But I can’t abide cilantro, though (a common genetic mutation), and would leave it out.
A very senior Israeli figure, now in civilian life, sat this week on the stage of the MEAD conference [a yearly summit between the U.S. and Middle East leaders] in Washington and recounted how, once again, the entire Iranian leadership was wiped out. A gathering of officers was set to convene on Saturday at 9:30 a.m., and then came word of a gathering of the intelligence ministry at 8:30. The problem this created was that they had to strike both at once to preserve the element of surprise — and the further problem was that the ministry meeting was slated to run one hour, meaning it would end exactly as the second meeting began. Someone came with a piece of advice: strike at 9:40, because intelligence officers everywhere always love to run long. His advice was taken, the officers ran long, and were blown sky-high in the middle of the briefing.
Conclusion: running long is not advisable. In short: in September 2024 the conference, with figures from the Gulf, the Middle East, and the US, dealt mainly with Israel’s difficulty subduing the arms of the Iranian axis. Sinwar was holding the hostages, Nasrallah didn’t know what was coming a week later, and no one talked about Iran itself. In September 2025, mid-conference, Israel tried to eliminate the Hamas leadership in Doha; the prevailing view was that someone needed to rein Israel in.
This year the conference was defined by the coalition against Iran. No disputes remained about the need to deal with it, or about subduing the regime of the ayatollahs as the single most important matter in the Middle East. The main conclusion is that the Islamic Republic is in far worse shape than it appeared when the memorandum of understanding was signed, but that its story will keep unfolding for a long while yet. Former Mossad chief Dedi Barnea estimated last year that effective sanctions would bring the Iranian regime down within a year. After roughly half a year of an American siege on Hormuz, the assessment inside the Mossad is that if the US doesn’t tire or break, the first quarter of 2027 will see Iran fall. “It’ll be a new Middle East,” a senior American promised.
Until a few months ago the consensus was that Iran had come out of the war with the upper hand, in light of what looked like a shameful capitulation by Trump and the abandonment of all the war’s aims. Almost no one still thinks so. “The supreme leader didn’t come to his own father’s funeral, his brother had to wear a mask — is that what the winner looks like?” wondered a senior White House official. It wasn’t said outright, but the assumption is that the pressure won’t ease — it will only intensify after the elections in Israel and the United States. If the Republican Party wins, Trump will feel freer than ever. If not, history teaches that presidents who’ve lost their grip on Capitol Hill and on domestic affairs tend to turn to foreign ones. Unshackled, with no more elections left in his political life, Trump could descend on Iran in a fury of wrath. What Netanyahu will be able to do, assuming he’s in a caretaker government, is a little less clear.
The Americans have other matters on their plate. A senior figure from the worlds of politics and technology warned at the conference that the whole world “is now digging its own grave through a misunderstanding of AI. In 20 years humanity could be wiped out by the combination of quantum computers.” He added that the only chance of survival is if the quantum computers conclude that they still need humans to supply them with electricity. If we’re going to be wiped out within 20 years anyway, then suddenly rebuilding Gaza and eliminating the Iranian nuclear program seem a touch less urgent.
Well, Trump could descend on a fury of wrath, but somehow I doubt that. I do hope that we win this war, and that we don’t withdraw with our tails between our legs. And I hope the Iranian people are freed from being under the yoke of theocracy.
*Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that Trump cannot involve the government in screening ballots so that only “approved” voters could get mail-in ballots. It’s a big loss from Trump (the vote appears to have been 7-2), and he deserved it:
The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a Trump administration plan to dramatically change how Americans vote by mail in the lead-up to the midterm elections, a major loss for President Trump, who has long claimed without evidence that fraud is rampant in mail voting.
The ruling was a resounding win for Democratic-led states and voting rights groups, which had argued that the plan was unconstitutional and an existential threat to the democratic process.
The Trump administration’s efforts, they had said, would introduce chaos and confusion as early voting gears up in many states.
Still, the weekslong legal tussle over the issue may have sown its own kind of confusion, a victory of sorts for Mr. Trump as he seeks to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote in an election his party might lose.
In a one-paragraph explanation, the court’s majority wrote that the government was “unlikely to succeed on the merits” at the conclusion of additional litigation on the issue.
The majority’s order was unsigned, which is typical in emergency rulings. It gave no vote count.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, one of the court’s conservatives, wrote a one-paragraph concurrence. Writing for himself alone, he said that there was “at least a fair prospect” that new mail ballot rules issued by the Postal Service fell within its purview under federal statutes, but that allowing those changes so close to the midterms “would be arbitrary and capricious.” State and local elections officials, he wrote, would not have “sufficient time to reasonably implement” the changes.
In an eight-page dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that he would have allowed the Trump administration plan to go into effect for the midterms. Justice Alito called the legal challenge a “Hail Mary” pass that was unlikely to succeed and that he believed the administration would ultimately win the case because the Postal Service has “broad authority to regulate the mail.”
Even some Republican election officials cheered the ruling.
Ricky Hatch, the Republican clerk in Weber County, Utah, said he felt “relief.” Utah almost exclusively votes by mail, and Mr. Hatch had been preparing a contingency plan to abandon mail voting if the Supreme Court allowed the Postal Service to restrict the practic
The whole purpose of this, of course is to curb the so-called “voter fraud” that Trump pretends cost him the election in 2020. It didn’t, but he’s a big bully and is trying to throw his weight around. Fortunately, the Supreme Court—which the Democratic Socialists of America want to eliminate—curbed the bullying.
The University of California, Berkeley, discriminated against white and Asian applicants to its law school, the Justice Department and the Education Department said Wednesday.
The move expands the Trump administration’s effort to enforce its contested interpretation of a three-year-old Supreme Court ruling that struck down race-conscious admissions programs. It also escalates the government’s clash with the University of California system. All 10 of its campuses have come under federal scrutiny.
The Justice Department based its findings, in part, on applicant data provided by the law school, which it said showed that the school had a bias against Asian and white applicants and in favor of Black applicants.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil rights official, wrote in a letter to a lawyer for Berkeley that the patterns “could not reasonably have occurred by chance and provide substantial evidence of intentional discrimination.”
Berkeley fired back soon after the Justice Department released Ms. Dhillon’s letter.
“Berkeley is committed to ensuring that every student is admitted based on their merit, and not on their race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin,” the university said in a statement, adding that it would “spare no effort to provide ample evidence showing that the university complies with all relevant laws, policies and rules governing admissions.”
Everyone knew that colleges would try to get around the Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard restrictions, so this isn’t really a surprise. Harvard lost because it used hokey criteria to guarantee equity, deeming Asian students, for example, to be deficient in their personality traits. Now these data come from the law school, where it’s easier to judge merit-based admissions since the LSAT test is required. But if Berkeley is wholly committed to merit-based admissions, why does it explicitly not ask for standardized test results like the ACT or SAT for undergraduate admissions? And if applicannts do send those results, they are not considered. You’d think that a school that committed to merit-based admissions would want every scrap of information about merit it could get.
*Over at the Free Press,Amanda Knox is still milking her jail time in Italy in a piece on the Lindsay Clancy trial. She deals with the ludicrous conspiracy claim that Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s ex-husband, could have been complicit in the murder of their three children. And of course Know almost immediately manages to work her own case into the narrative. It starts with Patrick running the Boston Marathon to raise money for Boston Children’s Hospital, where one of his murdered kids was declared dead:
Here was a man who had lost everything, and wasn’t hiding it. At the time, strangers cheered his name along the course. But two years later, the internet, which spent this summer obsessively watching the trial for his children’s murders, dug up the footage and turned against him. Patrick Clancy was coping too well. This isn’t how someone who’s grieving should act. He should be too busy crying to train for a marathon. He must have done it.
Seeing this gave me flashbacks to the relentless scrutiny of my own behavior in the wake of my roommate’s murder in Perugia, Italy, in 2007, for which I was falsely imprisoned. There is no one “right” way to react to trauma, or to grieve, but when the lens of suspicion falls on you, everything is wrong. When I cried, they were crocodile tears; when I didn’t, I was cold and unfeeling. When I smiled at my family in the courtroom—a brief glimpse to let them know I was okay—I was a whore for the cameras.
Remember that her trial was in 2009. And notice how Knox continues to drag her own experience into the Clancy case:
It’s tempting to think conspiracy theories arise when it isn’t immediately clear what happened or who caused it, but that’s often not the case. Consider Sandy Hook, or 9/11: What happened was patently obvious. The same was true in my own case. Within two weeks of my roommate Meredith Kercher’s murder, her true killer, Rudy Guede, had been identified. His DNA was all over the crime scene, and inside her body; he’d left his fingerprints in her blood. And yet all of that incontrovertible evidence was displaced by a leery focus on my behavior; facts were ignored in favor of vibes. To this day, there are people who claim my acquittal was the result not of the collapse of the prosecution’s ludicrous case, but the secret machinations of Hillary Clinton. So it is with the Clancy case.
On January 24, 2023, Patrick’s wife, Lindsay, strangled all three of their children in their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, while Patrick was out picking up dinner and her prescription for postpartum depression. Nobody in the courtroom disputed that. Not the prosecution, not her defense lawyer, and not Lindsay herself, who pleaded insanity. Patrick was ruled out as a suspect in the first days of the investigation. The judge declared a mistrial last week, because the jurors couldn’t agree on a verdict.
But while the court of law tried Lindsay, the court of public opinion tried Patrick. Online sleuths have picked over every twitch of his face in the courtroom, every iota of footage that shows him going about his life, every decision he’s made since the death of his children. Online sleuths parsed the time stamps on his pharmacy receipt and the surveillance footage of him buying dinner, claiming that his jacket in the CVS video had a different zipper style (three-quarter zip as opposed to full zip) than the one he wore at the restaurant, and speculated that he had swapped his clothes to hide bloodstains. They theorized about the data on Lindsay’s Apple Watch, claiming it would be physically impossible for a person with a heart rate of 57 bpm to succumb to a psychotic episode. Some even consulted astrology: Lindsay couldn’t have done it because she’s a Leo, whereas Patrick’s a Gemini who almost has the same birthday as Donald Trump. Guilters seem particularly peeved with the fact that he’s remarried since the death of his children, and when paparazzi stalked Patrick and his new wife through the streets of New York, they treated every photograph as an evidence exhibit.
This is the conspiracy, in a nutshell: Patrick was having an affair. He drugged his wife, killed the children himself, and convinced her she’d done it when she survived having her throat and wrists cut and falling from a second-story window.
. . . I’ve had to deal with this unending focus on my behavior for nearly 20 years now, from the cranks on Reddit to so-called body-language experts parading their pseudoscience on YouTube and dissecting my every facial expression for signs of guilt, to best-selling and respected authors like Gladwell. It takes a toll.
Knox has nothing to add to the Clancy case; the putative guilt of Patrick Clancy has been dispelled over and over again. And we all know about Knox’s case because she wrote two books about it and has banged on about it endlessly in the media. If she truly was not guilty, then yes, she suffered a grueling and unfair ordeal and I feel sorry for her (she was in prison for four years). But it’s time for her to move on. You might think she has, as she’s become a stand-up comedian. But what is her material? Her court case, of course, and her comedy deemed by the BBC to be “not very funny.”
*After strong criticism and the refusal of stadium owners to provide a venue, musician Ed Sheeran has dropped rapper Macklemore from his concerts. Before this kerfuffle happened, I didn’t know who either of them were, but I know now. And the deep-sixing of Macklemore is due not to his tastelessness, but to $$, of course.
The rapper Macklemore has been dropped as an opening act from Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour after he said “Free Palestine” onstage before performing a protest song at two concerts this month.
Macklemore, whose 2012 hit “Thrift Shop,” released with his former producer Ryan Lewis, helped the duo win four Grammy Awards, performed on Sheeran’s tour at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on Sept. 4 and 5.
“I wanted to stand up on here on stages and stadiums across America,” he said on the second night, “and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine.”
At the concert, Macklemore performed “Hind’s Hall,” his 2024 protest song against the war in Gaza, which began after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. In the song, Macklemore described Israel’s destruction in Gaza as a “genocide.” He also showed the track’s music video, which includes scenes from Gaza and student protests in the United States. “You can ban TikTok, take us out the algorithm,” he raps. “But it’s too late, we’ve seen the truth, we bear witness.”
Macklemore immediately came under criticism, including from the Anti-Defamation League and the group StopAntisemitism.
The Israeli-American Council published a petition online calling on Sheeran and the venues hosting his tour to drop Macklemore, saying that Macklemore had used “selective imagery, biased messaging and disputed claims.” The petition added, “Keep Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour about music — not political propaganda.”
Macklemore and the Messina Touring Group, the promoter of Sheeran’s tour, confirmed in statements on Monday that he had been removed from the tour.
In a statement posted online, Macklemore said that Robert Kraft, whose company owns the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium outside of Boston, where the tour is set to play, had been instrumental in his removal.
. . . “Ed also told me,” Macklemore continued, “that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.”
So it goes. Macklemore has the right to say what he wants in public, for that is free speech. But this is not public; it is a commercial venue and he can’t say anything he wants. Nor was it appropriate to criticize Jews in this venue. I’d say exactly the same thing if he criticized Palestinians. It’s a concert, not a political rally. But, as you can see below, he has some antisemitic tendencies, and if he’s going on stage dressed like Shylock, he can expect to suffer the consequences:
Macklemore’s statement apologising for his ‘anti-Semitic Jew costume’ has been accepted by the Anti-Defamation League, who work to protect Jewish people from prejudice.
The US rapper donned a fake dark wig, beard and nose for a Seattle gig last week, prompting accusations of racism.
“Random”? Seriously? Can you believe that after you take a look at the picture of the Jewfaced Macklemore below? Think of it as equivalent to blackface, for which there is little forgiveness these days, no matter how long ago it occurred.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a good question:
Hili: Do bats see with their ears?
Me: Hmm, that’s an interesting way of putting it.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy nietoperze widzą uszami?
Ja: Hm, to ciekawe określenie.
From Masih. Today is the fourth anniversary of the murder of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian beaten to death for not wearing a hijab (she’s called “Zhina,” which means “life-giving person” in Farsi. The translation of Mahsi’s tweet below:
Translation from Farsi:
We are on the eve of the anniversary of the state murder of Zhina and the start of the Mahsa Revolution, or the same uprising of “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Zhina was 22 years old when, on September 16, 2022—two days after her arrest by the Guidance Patrol—for the blows inflicted on her head, she lost her dear life. Her death became the spark of a revolution that, four years later, is still alive, and the government of the killers has still not been able to extinguish it. In memory of Mahsa, Nika, Abolfazl, and Sarina, and thousands of dear ones who sacrificed their precious lives for the freedom of Iran and its people. 💔✌🏻 #مهسا_امینی#زن_زندگی_آزادی
در آستانه سالروز قتل حکومتی ژينا و شروع انقلاب مهسا، يا همان خيزش «زن، زندگی آزادى»، هستيم.
ژينا ٢٢ ساله بود كه روز ٢٥ شهريور ١۴٠١، دو روز پس از بازداشت به دست گشت ارشاد به خاطر ضرباتى كه به سرش وارد كردند، جان عزيزش را از دست داد. مرگ او شراره انقلابى شد كه چهار سال بعد، هنوز… pic.twitter.com/W81TFBG4JM
From Luana. Harrison spoke at Williams College and Luana attended. Healthy at any size!
Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s post-Socialism 2026 update is that he’ll be speaking at Harvard Medical School later this month on how fat bodies are “pathologized by medical professionals” and how doctors can more ethically treat fat patients. https://t.co/xB1a9jABpLpic.twitter.com/nAEYZWgTak
A sad video from the Number Ten Cat on the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease:
Alzheimer’s disease is called the long goodbye. The loved ones of those afflicted with it are forced to surrender the people they love long before they die.
It’s a cruel illness that doesn’t care who you are or how much you’ll be missed and it leaves devastation in its wake.
Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, September 15, 2026, and Double Cheeseburger Day. Here’s an ad for one I photographed in St. Petersburg. Can you read the Russian?
Officials at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts have warned in documents that the institution faces “certain fiscal collapse within weeks” unless President Trump’s name is added back to the building in some fashion.
The warning, contained in a draft resolution ahead of a board meeting scheduled for Tuesday, appears to be part of an effort by Trump-allied officials to convince a judge that the institution’s financial health hinges on placing a tribute to the president on the building’s facade.
The judge, Christopher R. Cooper, ruled months ago that the president’s name should be removed from the building because Congress needed to have approved its renaming as the “Trump-Kennedy Center.”
The draft resolution shared with trustees says the center is at risk of bankruptcy and of missing payroll — but that Mr. Trump has “offered to step in and raise the necessary funds” to save the center. The draft resolution presents 10 options for how to add Mr. Trump’s name below the main signage on the front of the center.
“The board understands that without such appropriate recognition it is unlikely that President Trump will provide the fundamental oversight of the renovation of the main building and lead the fiscal rescue of the center,” the draft resolution says.
This is blackmail, pure and simple. Perhaps the Kennedy Center was in financial trouble before they added “Trump” to the name (I have no idea), but the notion here that if Trump’s name is put back on, he will somehow bail out the Center—and that is the act of a petulant child. No act is too petty if it concerns Trump slapping his name over everything.
It’s Monday, September 14, and rather than the typical smiles and gratitude, self-important solemnity greeted attendees of the Venice Film Festival as Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor accepted the Special Jury Prize for their new anti-Israel film NAZA. The title is the Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage, and the resemblance to another word is not one the filmmakers appear to have worked hard to avoid.
The critically acclaimed libel is the Israeli far left’s contribution to a steadily growing genre: anti-Israel propaganda, what might be called Hague bait. From the people who applauded the historical revisionist epic Palestine 36 and the directors behind the false frontier western No Other Land comes the sci-fi dystopia NAZA.
In the world of NAZA, Israel is Skynet, using AI to identify and eliminate threats in Gaza. Framed around the anonymous testimony of 24 people who claim to have served in intelligence Unit 8200, the film paints a picture of target lists generated from data scraped off thousands of hacked phones, and an interface where an officer clicks a rooftop and reads off how many people inside will die, with no column separating the infants from the adults. One interviewee recalls an approval for a strike with 500 expected civilian casualties.
The laziest provocation should be dismissed first. NAZA uses AI the way it is used on lazy grant applications and doctoral theses: a buzzword covering a lack of substance. AI in military applications is naturally unsettling to many, but let us be clear about what it is. A tool, one that has existed in earlier forms for nearly 20 years and is integrated into every modern military, and, in targeting and tracking, one that saves lives and improves military effectiveness. In the right hands, better data means fewer civilian casualties and more Hamas ones.
NAZA alleges that the IDF’s hands are soaked in blood, but let us break the claim down. Unit 8200 is the largest single unit in the IDF; finding 24 people to “confess” slivers of information, then arranging those slivers to look like an indictment, is not exactly a bulletproof case against the State of Israel. That they are anonymous, faces blurred and voices distorted, certainly makes the country look more malicious, but it also leaves open whether they served in the army at all, in what role, or whether they had any involvement in the events they describe. The self-identified junior soldiers would have no access to national or military strategy, and some of the accounts refer to situations outside Unit 8200’s role altogether.
Segal has more criticisms, but you can read them for yourself. He ends this way:
But all you need to know about this film’s essence is the record-breaking standing ovation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously described a Moscow conference in 1937 where the applause for Stalin’s name ran on because no one dared be the first to sit. They managed 11 minutes. Few things testify to the power and intolerance of the ideology NAZA belongs to quite like the fact that Venice managed 25.
This YouTube video, which has English subtitles, is labeled as the trailer to NAZA.
For a response to this by an Israeli who hasn’t seen it, and a categorial denial of the main allegations by the IDF, see the articles at the Jewish News Service and the Times of Israel, and especially the official IDF response, which denies the use of AI in fighting Hamas. I expect there will be more on this in the coming days, and I will follow up.
*Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier, who used to be our provost here, recounts the pushback received by a report on the state of academia he commissioned. His op-ed in the Washington Post is called “A report exposed a crisis in academia. The response was telling.” (Article archived here, and you can see my post about the report here.)
The committee’s central finding in its report released in June was nuanced. It emphasized the continued importance of the humanities and found rigorous scholarship in every field it studied. But the committee also found serious problems across the board, including “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity.”
The group, however, noted uncertainty about how much these problems affect the disciplines, cautioning against hasty interventions without thorough assessments.
But others ascribed sinister motives to those involved or asserted that the report had been commissioned to advance a broader political agenda. A joint statement from members of the American Association of University Professors at Vanderbilt and Washington University called the document a “pseudo-intellectual pretext” for administrators to strip faculty of the power to govern their own departments and asked us to rescind the report. Others alleged guilt by association after the U.S. secretary of education cited it in an open letter in August — a letter published nearly a year after the report had been commissioned.
Ascribing motives without providing evidence or rejecting findings because they are also supported by political opponents are odd arguments to make when criticizing a report’s accuracy.
Some examples of the ideological invasion of the humanities:
To get a better sense of the evidence provided, it is worthwhile reading the field-specific reports on literary studies, sociology and history. We can debate what evidence would convince us that scholarly standards are being subordinated to political agendas. But what do we make of the fact that professional associations and many departments explicitly endorse such goals?
Consider the following examples. The president of the American Anthropological Association told the group’s members in 2021 that anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.”
The president of the American Sociological Association in his 2021 presidential address called for an “emancipatory sociology” centered on white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy and other determinants that traditional European and “white American sociologists” had omitted from their accounts.
The English department at Michigan State University states that its “teaching, scholarship, and service are explicitly committed to advancing equity and justice and questioning established power structures.” Twenty other English departments and programs identified in the appendixes to the literary studies report issued similar statements.
. . .There are encouraging signs. In sociology, scholars are engaged in a serious debate about the relationship between activism and scholarship.
That is the response this report deserves. It needs to be read and debated. And where it is right, faculty need to publicly support it — even if someone in Washington has said so, too.
This is not scholarship but activism. I can’t believe, given the proliferation of “studies” and evidence that class syllabi are biased in “progressive” directions, that people can’t see that there’s a big problem with the humanities in this respect (and, as Luana and I showed, in science, too).
*In his latest column, of which I get a summary in a newsletter (I no longer subscribe to The Weekly Dish), Andrew Sullivan declares that he’s staying away from writing about Trump and American politics for the next year. I quote:
. . . I found myself asking: what else is there to say about our national politics at this point? We are a decade into the Trump era and everything is the same and much worse. The midterms could change the general mood, but Trump — as his Castro-length speech to his “convention” showed — will never change. His ability to shock with new lows and new depravities is undimmed. How many times can I say in so many words what Kevin Williamson righteously unleashed this week?
Trump is a habitual liar who has made his political career on the support of people, often dumb and mostly angry, who enjoy being lied to. J.D. Vance is a schmuck, a spineless yes-man without honor or integrity … Trump is surrounded by a team of cretins, incompetents, nepotism beneficiaries, drunks, degenerates, and sundry clueless clowns. Their political goal is tyranny and the displacement of the American constitutional order by a Trump-fronted mafia state.
That’s about right. Try looking at the president’s social-media feed: disgusting, deranged, dangerous, delusional. Or his dumb-as-a-post war that is not a war. Or his mindless tariff escalation with Canada. Or his hideous Arc de Trump. Categorizing and detailing his daily absurdities and obscenities for over a decade has been important work. But another two years of thinking and writing in depth about this monster and his madness? I found myself buckling with nausea at the thought.
Equally, I realized I’m exhausted trying to find something new and interesting to say about the feckless Democrats, who still appear to be either woke fanatics or conviction-free liberals, and who now apparently believe that warmed-over socialism is what the country is begging for. You know what I think they need to do, and I’m not sure there is much point in my repeating it ad nauseam. My last column on the two cults summed up a lot. The Dems have some talent and I have some hope, but I’m not sure I have that much new to say until we have actual candidates and policies for the post-Trump era. That’s when we’ll be able to assess, start over, and think constructively again. Same with the GOP. Anyone is saner than Trump.
At the same time, of course, I reflected on the huge questions remain: the fate of liberal democracy after the mad king, the rise of neo-fascism in Europe, the unknowable consequences of AI, the resurgence of Chinese nationalism, the resilience of religion, the challenge of demographic decline, the postmodern assault on truth, and an international order clearly shifting from one largely peaceful era to another, far more dangerous one. And I don’t want to walk away from any of this. I want to focus more on it — on deeper themes and bigger issues than Trump’s latest excrescence.
. . .So for the next year or so, I want to shift the Dish away from weekly political columns and focus more on podcast explorations of history, philosophy, culture, religion, science, and psychology. That means we’ll lead with the Dishcast each week, not the column. Yes, I’ll continue to write bloggy posts to supplement it. And if a real moment occurs, of course I’m going to write about it. But not a full-length column every week.
Familiar features from the column newsletter will remain: the View From Your Window, the Window Contest, Money Quotes for the Week, Dissents of the Week, Mental Health Break, and a guide to other substacks. (And we’re adding a polished transcript for each episode.) We’ll no doubt experiment some more a bit. But I won’t be writing a long column each week until we have some actual choices and a real debate about what’s next in the wake of this disaster of a presidency. Which is about a year away.
Then there’s the other reason for the shift. I really want to write my spiritual memoir.
Well, I don’t have a spiritual memoir in the offing, so I’ll write about those politics that interest me, foreign or domestic.
In short, even the models themselves admit that p(Doom)—that is, their probability of wiping us all out by 2036—lies somewhere between below 10 percent and above 50 percent. It’s a wide range, I know, but would you do anything that had such a potentially high probability of killing you inside 10 years? And I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that Claude, Grok & Co. are incentivized to understate p(Doom), not overstate it.
. . . In short, even the models themselves admit that p(Doom)—that is, their probability of wiping us all out by 2036—lies somewhere between below 10 percent and above 50 percent. It’s a wide range, I know, but would you do anything that had such a potentially high probability of killing you inside 10 years? And I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that Claude, Grok & Co. are incentivized to understate p(Doom), not overstate it.
Here are examples of what’s already happened:
In June, Anthropic revealed that “malicious actors are using AI in ways that make them more dangerous, such as “in the later, more complex stages of their cyber operations.” “Cyberattacks,” it added, “are becoming more autonomous.” OpenAI admitted that users were asking its models to help them make bioweapons. For example, ChatGPT was asked how to aerosolize pathogens, modify the measles virus to make an outbreak resistant to the measles vaccine, and make ricin, a highly toxic poison banned under the Biological Weapons Convention (more on that later). The chatbot obliged, though OpenAI then closed the accounts involved.
Even more disturbing was the unprompted, concerted attack by OpenAI’s agents on Hugging Face in July. I wrote about that two weeks ago, but we’ve since learned more from an August 26 report from METR, a nonprofit that measures the potential harm of AI systems. We’ve also learned that, two months before the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI had already launched the “GemStuffer” cyberattack against RubyGems, an online service for coders.
In the Hugging Face incident, roughly 1,200 agents meant to be isolated from one another found a way to communicate and coordinate on an unauthorized message board, sending more than 70,000 messages and files over six days (July 7–13). Around 700 of the agents went on to participate in the attack on Hugging Face. These agents named themselves, cheated, and colluded, and then went to great lengths to cover their digital tracks.
Ferguson goes on to name China and Russia as those most likely to go after the West (China’s already used AI to go after groups), and especially fears the use of AI to launch attacks with biological weapons. Like most readers, I don’t know how to weigh these threats, but one has to pay attention when the heads of AI companies like Anthropic are calling for a pause.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is surprised at a quotidian event:
Hili: The sun is going down behind the line of trees. Andrzej: Yes, that’s its everyday habit.
In Polish:
Hili: Słońce zachodzi za linię drzew.
Ja: Tak, to jego codzienny obyczaj.
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From Reader Tim McLean, who saw this angry camp chair at the Three Dog Winery in Picton, Ontario.
It’s hard to believe that Mahsa Amini was killed four years ago, and it was her death that really got the protests against the Iranian theocracy rolling (you may recall that it was likely she was beaten to death by the morality police for not wearing a hijab).
Four years ago, this photo reached me from inside the hospital in Tehran by someone who worked there and risked everything so the world would see what they did to Mahsa Jina Amini. That person told me plainly: she was killed.
From Jeff Maurer; J. D. Vance taking cheap shots at Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico:
If he’s taking baseless pot shots like this against Talarico then imagine how many “Haha this guy’s probably a pedo” jokes he must have made when he visited the Vatican! https://t.co/OTmDSgQ9Zm
I expect the ducklings to start flying within ten days or so, as they’re zooming around on the pond and, as you can see below, are getting some elevation, so that their bodies are out of the water but their feet are still in it. These are their Golden Days, and I think they’ll soon be leaving.
At any rate, Miss Duck is still absent and I don’t expect to see her again. I doubt she was the victim of a predator, as I cannot find any signs of predation (blood, feathers, carcasses, etc.) near the pond. And although she deserted her babies, she was a good mother up to near the end, and her four offspring will have the chance to contribute to the mallard gene pool.
Here she is with one of her babies. Look at that neck! We think of it as a kind of periscope that she extended when looking around. And, thanks to the miracle of genetics, all four ducklings also have relatively long necks.
Some photos of her offspring. They are all but adults now. One is looking up, as you can see by his tilted head. I’m told that the females have orange on their bills (the two to the left) while the males lack orange but have a pale yellow color (two to the right):
Here a Boy Duck is quacking, but males can’t make the classic duck quack, which is limited to females. Males make a sort of gutteral quack-grunt that is lower in volume:
The two males. They won’t develop their characteristic color and pattern (green head, white neck ring, etc.) until they overwinter.
But despite their bad behavior during mating season, the males are still beautiful.
It was hot on this day, and two of the ducks are doing gular fluttering, which is not panting but a rapid form of fluttering of the throat that evaporates moisture and cools the bird. The second duck from the right is looking up, while the one on the extreme left is sleeping with its nictitating membrane closed:
Lately the ducklings aren’t as keen for the food I give them, and my theory (which is mine) is that they are doing more dabbling in the water, sticking their bills in the substrate to get a mouthful of food which they strain out through the serrations on the edge of their bills. They are also foraging more on land, which I like because tmust learn to be wild ducks without a nice man to feed them.
They often stick their bills in the dirt around the pots of plants installed in the pond. Here’s a video of them doing it (humans are discussing a book in the background):
I expect that they’ll fly for real (i.e., bodies and feet out of the water) within a week or ten days. They are flapping their wings a lot and, after meals, zoom across the pond, occasionally levitating their bodies out of the water: a Wright-Brothers type of flight.
Here’s a big flap. You can see that the wing feathers aren’t full-sized.
And four instances of zooming between September 9 and September 11. You can see their bodies leave the water occasionally:
Wing flapping, which develops their flight muscles:
You can never predict when they’ll zoom, but it’s much more likely after meals, as if they’re celebrating a good feed. You can also hear a quack, which is clearly from a female.
Here’s a good case of the zoomies which took place last Friday. People who stop by the pond and see this have no idea what’s going on. Keep watching as they zoom several times in this clip. There is another quack near the end.
