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.
As I reported recently, Ghent University in Belgium suspended Nathan Cofnas from his postdoc position after the death of Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor of sociology who apparently killed himself after Cofnas started a spate of Cambridge University and media investigations by showing that Arday had plagiarized much of his Ph.D. thesis. And that was on top of Arday’s copious fables about his life. fables that were too fantastic to be real. After initially defending Arday, Cambridge finally decided to investigate him, whereupon he was found dead. I do not hold Cofnas or the media responsible for that death.
Ghent is among the wokest universities in Europe. Yet, knowing full well that Cofnas devoted a lot of his work to the inflammatory subject of ethnicity and IQ, they hired him anyway. In her letter to Cofnas announcing his suspension, the excuses that Ghent Rector Petra de Sutter gave included Cofnas’s doing work he was not contracted to do (as if no academic diverges from their research plan!), and that Cofnas’s research “had a negative impact on the functioning of the University and the well-being of, and cooperation with, students and other members of staff.” (Maarten Boudry showed that most of de Sutter’s letter was written by AI.)
The real reason, I suspect, is that Ghent got a ton of letters objecting to Cofnas’s presence, the nature of his work, and holding him responsible for Arday’s death. Whatever the reasons, though, the suspension of Cofnay, who is not really an admirable character, is still a violation of his academic freedom.
Ghent’s “preventive suspension” of Cofnas was to precede a formal investigation, even though de Sutter was found to have urged Ghent faculty to write in opposing Cofnas’s presence at Ghent. Some impartial investigation! In the meantime, Cofnas was suspended from teaching and working at Ghent, and was banned from its campus.
I was sure that Cofnas’s suspension would be followed by a permanent firing, but not it’s not clear. Cofnas is an American citizen, and first there was an announcement that the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, had negotiated an “amicable agreement with Ghent” that would allow Cofnas to see out the end of his one-year term without being suspended. (He was still restricted from some activities, though.)
And although there’s a newspaper article reporting that Cofnas’s suspension had been lifted, Ghent continues to hold its “investigation.” As Maarten notes above, what is the point of investigating him if they’ve reached an amicable settlement?
Here’s an article from the Flemish newspaper De Morgen that deepens the mystery. Click to read the English translation:
Quotes from the article(indented) and tweets (the bolding at the bottom is mine):
US Ambassador Bill White thanks Ghent Rector Petra De Sutter on X for ‘lifting the suspension’ of researcher Nathan Cofnas. However, according to the university, the disciplinary proceedings are ongoing and Cofnas’ disciplinary measure remains in place.
“After having spoken with all parties, I am satisfied that Ghent University and Nathan Cofnas have reached an agreement by mutual consent to lift the suspension of Mr. Cofnas.”
With that message, US Ambassador Bill White responded yesterday evening to a post on X by UGent researcher Nathan Cofnas. “I am very grateful to Rector Petra De Sutter for allowing me to stay at UGent,” Cofnas said in the post.
The reports followed barely a day after Ghent University had announced a new disciplinary measure against Cofnas. This entails that Cofnas must work remotely for three months and is prohibited from taking on teaching duties. The disciplinary measure is part of the disciplinary investigation the university is conducting against the researcher.
On X, however, both seem to suggest that Ghent University dropped the disciplinary case against Cofnas, which has been ongoing since August 20, following intervention by White. “I am against the suspension and possible disciplinary sanctions against Cofnas (…) But this is clearly blackmail by a foreign state and it is scandalous,” writes Ghent University professor Tijl De Bie on X. Philosopher of science Maarten Boudry, on the other hand, is pleased with the ‘agreement’.
Investigation continues
However, UGent confirms to De Morgen that the investigation against Cofnas is still ongoing. According to the disciplinary regulations, the preventive suspension issued by De Sutter last week can last a maximum of seven working days. Instead, a disciplinary measure covering three months followed on Wednesday. The ongoing investigation against Cofnas could also still lead to disciplinary action.
However, there had already been a meeting between the university and the American ambassador. “During that meeting, the ambassador provided further clarification regarding his statements on X,” says a university spokesperson. “UGent informed the ambassador of the disciplinary preliminary investigation, the confidentiality of the procedure, and the measures that were taken.”
The meeting took place after White announced on X last Friday that he would review all American ties with Ghent University, including academic exchanges and research funding. “Insincere, corrupt institutions that engage in scapegoating the masses, or reward such behavior, are not desirable partners for us,” said White.
In his most recent post, White seems to backtrack on that and says he looks forward to further collaboration with De Sutter and wants to continue the relationship between the university and the US.
All in all, Cofnas is not at present suspended from Ghent, but the investigation of his work and behavior is continuing, and he could still be fired. Ergo, his academic freedom is still under threat (I needn’t emphasize that an “ongoing investigation” has a chilling effect on an academic). This is what happens when you work on a taboo subject.
I’ll add that I don’t think the American ambassador should be butting into this affair, even if Ghent did violate Cofnas’s academic freedom. Ambassador White’s statement above, which is indeed a form of blackmail, is out of line. The U.S. government has no business butting into the affairs of a university in another country, as the Cofnas affair does not affect American interests.
The “ducklings”—if you can call them that now that they’re fully feathered and miniature adults—are almost six weeks old: they hatched on July 25 and came to the pond the next day. All is well with them: they all seem healthy and lively, and they eat heartily, though Miss Duck allows the babies to eat before she does. It’s hard to get food to her as her brood tends to scarf it up.
The babies are already starting to flap their wings vigorously, as you can see in the videos below, and I expect that in about 2-3 weeks they’ll be trying to fly, and levitating a bit. I suspect that the “zooming” behavior you see below is both fun but also practice for taking off.
But first some photos. First, Miss Duck, the ever-attentive mom who is still monitoring the babies closely. She’a also starting to molt, and during this period she will be able to flap and levitate a bit, but when she molts her flight feathers she’ll be pretty much grounded for a couple of weeks.
First, Miss Duck on the water. I love this photo, what with the reflection and all. (I posted it the other day.)
On the edge of the pond, watching her brood. Notice that her foot is on the side and not underneath her:
And a glamour head shot. If she returns next year I’ll be able to recognize her by this distinctive beak pattern.
Here’s the brood crossing the sidewalk in the morning so I can feed them in the channel. As soon as they plop in the water (I won’t feed them on land), they immediately turn and face me, waiting for their duck pellets. They know the drill!
Make way for ducklings! You can see that Mom is still larger:
Sleeping on the water six days ago (iPhone photo). Mom is floating:
Often Miss Duck and the brood will get the “zoomies” after a meal. Usually initiated by Miss Duck taking off and flying a short distance in the pond, the ducklings go wild, zooming across the pond at high speed chasing Mom, as well as dunking themselves and swimming underwater. I’m convinced that, with Mom’s prompting, this behavior prepares them for flight. Notice how they often flap their wings during the exercise.
I’ll show two bouts. This first one took place after third breakfast a week ago (they get fed three times a day):
And here’s a vigorous case of the soomies yesterday:
The babies also “dabble” after meals. In the wild, they get most of their food by going butt-side up and thrusting their beak into the pond bottom, taking in some mud and then squeezing out the dirt but keeping the edible stuff (worms, other inverts, etc.). As I’ve shown before, ducks have “teeth”: serrations on their bill that allow them to get rid of the inedible stuff and keeping the food. In this way they’re like baleen whales.
Since the pond bottom is gravel and not dirt (a huge mistake in the pond design), the dabbling takes place in the dirt in the few pots of plants that they’ve put in the pond, which have dirt in them. Unfortunately, the plants cannot spread because the pond bed is gravel. It’s beyond my ken why they designed the pond this way, for it will prevent the luxurious growth of aquatic grasses and water lilies we were promised when the pond was reopened.
Here’s one duckling dabbling in an empty plant pot in mid-August. At this time they still had their duckling fuzz, but you can see the feathers coming in. Now they are fully feathered and fuzzless, but their flight feathers have a way to go.
And here’s a napping duckling with almost all the feathers grown in. There’s still a patch of fuzz on the butt and neck.
Ducklings napping on the edge of the pond. They always do this in the full group of four, and Miss Duck is among them, usually at one end of the line so she can watch them all. The “white” covering in the eye is their nictitating membrane.
The babies are starting to develop the speculum: the patch of blue secondary wing feathers that you can see on Miss Duck’s wing above. It is one of the landmarks of attaining adulthood. I’ve circled the nascent speculum in the first photo. Curiously, we’re not sure what this speculum is for. It’s present in both sexes, but could be the result of mutual sexual selection or selection for species recognition.
The nascent speculum is clear here:
The brood heading to one of the three Sacred Rocks to rest after a meal. There’s lot of dunking and preening before they settle down. Notice that Miss Duck gets up on the rock to let the babies know where to go.
DANGER! There is a nest of Cooper’s Hawks (Astur cooperii) in the quad, and the young hawks often inspect the pond. Miss Duck sees them before we do, and she warns the babies with a specific quack. They immediately become motionless. While I’ve seen the hawks fly low over the pond, they’ve never tried to take a duckling, thank Ceiling Cat.
These photos were taken three days ago by my friend Peggy Mason, a neurobiologist on Team Duck. The tree is adjacent to the Pond, but I let Peggy take a few pictures before I chased the hawk away.
The definitive ID comes from Bruce Lyon, who looked at the photos and said, “Yes I think it’s a Cooper’s. I had to double check that it was not a broad-winged hawk. Looks like it is molting its tail so it is shorter than typical and a long tail would indicate Coopers’.”
And we musn’t forget the turtles. We now have six of them. We originally had five but one died (I was told, without proof , that its shell was cracked when students were playing Frisbee with it). But then a student found a large red-eared slider on the Midway, far from the pond, and carried it over and let it jump in. That made five again. Then a smaller red-eared slider appeared, probably another willful introduction.
They are all well and many people come to watch them. A group of women who work in the Regenstein Library regularly visit, and they’ve named all the turtles after hamburger-ish sliders, like “Buffalo Chicken Wing” and “Beef”. Unlike me, they can recognize every turtle.
A few photos of our terrapins. Here are four sunning on the rocks and doing Turtle Yoga, stretching their limbs to catch the sun:
You can see why they call them red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans):
Finally, two videos showing the turtles. This first one also shows some of the seven species of fish we have in the pond. All are naturally-occurring (as are sliders and ducks), but there are four pesky goldfish that someone is going to remove and put in an aquarium.
This turtle is going after some leftover duck food, but they do get fed a healthy diet of turtle food (not by me):
This video shows how they swim around. They’re quite fast in the water when they’re in a hurry, in contrast to their slow ambling on land:
Welcome to Friday, the last one in August: it’s August 28, 2026 and National Bow Tie Day. I’ve worn one only at a prom, and that was years ago.
Here’s a Doctor Who video featuring bow ties (two “crackers of ties”), but it’s even better because Dr. Who and his assistant (played by Karen Gillan) transport Vincent van Gogh to the future so he can see (at the Musée d’Orsay) that he became posthumously famous and beloved, even though during his lifetime he was obscure and neglected. This clip always makes me tear up—like Vincent.
Yes, I know I’ve posted this before, but it’s worth more than one look. On a second look you may notice, for example, how Vincent is taken aback by seeing a Monet: for van Gogh knew Monet’s Impressionist paintings well and admired them.
There’s again a subtly moving Google Doodle gif honoring the National Parks (this one is Yosemite). Click to see where it goes:
As I’ve intimated, traffic, or at least comments on this site, have slowed, and if you want it to continue at least let me know you’re reading. I know the difficulties of commenting on a phone, but you shouldn’t be reading this on a phone!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 28 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*A giant flood devastated parts of Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday and Thursday, likely killing over 2,000 people, including many visitors (the area is popular with tourists). The cause of the flood isn’t yet known but was probably triggered by a landslide (article archived here).
Emergency workers and helicopters scoured steep Himalayan valleys on Thursday in a desperate search for survivors after a torrent of water, mud and ice killed hundreds — and perhaps many more — as it swept through a river valley that runs through Tibet and Nepal. More than 1,400 people were still missing.
A New York Times reporter and photographer who traveled to the region with rescuers found miles of devastation and weeping residents unsure if their families and neighbors would ever be found. In one Nepalese village, a man described what sounded like a thunderclap before a wave of muddy water crashed into his home, carrying away his wife and two daughters. “They all died and I lived,” he said, adding that he still clung to a slim hope they had somehow survived.
The flood that tore through the remote river valley in northern Nepal and the Tibet region of China caught many of its victims without warning. Its speed and force destroyed roads and bridges, toppled buildings and severed communications — all of which were complicating rescue efforts.
Scientists said the flood was probably unleashed by a massive rock landslide that coincided with the collapse of a glacier high in the mountains near the border on Wednesday morning, unleashing a wall of water that surged down the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers. Survivors described lightning fast floodwaters laden with debris that shattered houses and quickly swallowed up people trapped in buildings or as they fled on foot.
Warming temperatures caused by climate change may have destabilized the rock face and precipitated the disaster, scientists said, though they added it was too early to determine a precise cause.
Images captured the flood’s terrifying speed and force, and Times journalists traveling with the Nepali military on Thursday surveyed the devastating aftermath. One highway, near the Bhotekoshi River, had mostly disappeared. Scars on hillsides showed that in some places the river had risen as high as 650 feet during the flood.
Shisir Khanal, Nepal’s foreign minister, called the flood “one of the largest natural disasters we have experienced in recent memory.”
Here’s a photo shown by the NYT and credited as “Composite 3D image from Google Earth.” Although I’ve been to Nepal three times, trekking in the Himalayas, this is one area I never visited.
And here are 12 minutes of news videos, with some really scary video of the flooding. At the beginning, look at at those buses tossed about like rubber ducks by the massive wall of water! And all those people you seei n that segment are probably dead as well.
A Republican push to prosecute Dr. Anthony Fauci for contempt of Congress has stalled as the Trump administration questions whether the legal approach supports an indictment by the Justice Department.
Three weeks after a GOP-led Senate committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress, some administration officials are skeptical that the current approach is procedurally sound enough to indict him for failing to answer questions before lawmakers, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Aug. 6 contempt vote was brought by Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), a longtime Fauci critic. He sought to bypass the Senate’s customary full-floor vote by having Vice President JD Vance certify the resolution, allowing him to refer it directly to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
Paul, who has said Fauci should go to prison, pushed a contempt vote against the 85-year-old former public-health official after he declined to answer questions before Paul’s committee over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. The contempt resolution, which passed on a party-line vote, would traditionally be considered by the full Senate. Given his resolution would almost certainly fail to meet a 60-vote threshold to pass, Paul’s measure called on Vance to certify it in his capacity as Senate president.
But as of early Tuesday, people familiar with the matter said that Vance’s office had yet to receive a document to certify. Paul’s office sent the report to the vice president late Tuesday, according to people familiar with the process, following repeated inquiries from The Wall Street Journal about its status. The Justice Department, which received a letter from Paul the day of the vote laying out the committee’s case against Fauci, has yet to receive a formal referral, a person familiar with the matter said. And President Trump hasn’t determined whether he wants the Justice Department to act on the referral, according to people familiar with the discussions, who say the issue hasn’t been a high priority for the president.
Paul’s move put the White House in a tough situation. While Trump has criticized Fauci, certifying the document could force the White House to defend it in court, where some administration officials say it might not survive a motion to dismiss without a full Senate vote.
This smacks of a vendetta. Yes, Fauci did lean on scientists to oppose the lab-leak hypothesis when they were writing a paper, and I consider that bad behavior. But I don’t see it as criminal behavior, and nothing I’ve read about him indicates that he should be indicted—unless he lied under oath. Even so, the guy is 85 years old and, as the article notes, a contempt resolution would be unlikely to pass a full Senate vote. The J.D. Vance maneuver circumvented normal procedure. Leave the old dude alone!
*A distressing (for me) report from the Free Press: “Are Americans losing faith in capitalism? We asked them.” The FP partnered with the think tank Populace to survey Americans of different ages and political stripes, and here are the main results:
A big question has dominated political debate in this year’s primary elections. With the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who have racked up victories from New York and Pennsylvania to Colorado and Florida, our elections have become a referendum on our economic system. So we decided to ask Americans what they’re thinking about capitalism versus socialism.
The results suggest that the public is feeling down about capitalism but is still wary of full-blown socialism. And many are deciding whether a few socialist candidates might help shake up the system. We found that:
—Just a third of Americans privately say they have a positive view of capitalism.
—Less than half of Republicans privately express a positive view of capitalism, though two-thirds support it in public.
—Almost half of women privately say they would consider voting for a socialist.
—Nearly a third of Gen Z publicly say that America would be better off as a socialist country, but only 14 percent say so in private.
—The majority of blacks publicly say capitalism is the cause of America’s social ills, but only 37 percent say so privately.
—Of people earning more than $150,000 a year, 58 percent privately say they are open to voting for a socialist, though only 42 percent say so publicly.
They add this, too:
We asked other questions too—about Israel and antisemitism, AI and data centers, income inequality, and more. Stay tuned for our next batch of results next week.
I’m not looking forward to the data on Israel! Anyway, you can read the methodology here and how they distinguished public from private opinions. It’s a relatively small survey. Here’s what they see as most telling:
While many Americans express a low view of capitalism, and a significant share say they’re open to socialist candidates, only a very small share would prefer to adopt socialism altogether. In public, merely 18 percent say America would be better off socialist. In private, support drops to a meager 11 percent.
The younger the respondent, the more willing they are to embrace socialism in public. Nearly a third of Gen Z say publicly that America should adopt socialism, along with more than a fifth of millennials. Yet support drops considerably in private, to 14 percent among Gen Z and 10 percent among millennials. Meanwhile, Boomers are equally opposed in public and private, standing pat at only 7 percent support.
The most notable result of all may be the public-private gap among the left. Thirty-eight percent of liberals and 28 percent of Democrats say publicly that a switch to socialism would be good for the country. But in private, the left’s faith in socialism wanes by double digits. Only 22 percent of liberals and 14 percent of Democrats want America to trade in its current economic system in favor of a fully socialist one.
I wonder if those who think American should “adopt socialism” know what that really entails. Surely the approbation for socialist candidates is not the same as a full-hearted embrace of socialism, and I’d like to know the different (and undoubtedly diverse) construals of “socialism”. Do the respondents know that, classically, it means that the state owns all the means of production and distribution? I think the poll largely reflects a widespread ignorance about “socialism”.
*Also depressing: a NYT op-ed by former Time magazine writer Charlotte Alter, “What are moderate Democrats for?” , which, tellingly changed its title yesterday afternoon to “What ever happened to the young, exciting, moderate Democrats?” (article archived here). Since I’m one, I want to know. Alter’s example of someone who should be exciting all of us is Seth Moulton, a Congressman from Massachusetts who’s running for a Senatorial seat this fall. Alter’s thesis is that moderate Democrats, in contrast to “progressives,” haven’t laid out what they stand for, or what changes they want to make.
Now a six-term congressman, [Moultin is] running for Senate in Massachusetts’s Sept. 1 primary against the incumbent, Ed Markey. It doesn’t seem to be going well.
You’d think this would be Mr. Moulton’s moment. Democratic voters are in an anti-incumbent, anti-establishment mood, and the disaster of Joe Biden in 2024 has made them increasingly nervous about aging candidates. Yet polls show Mr. Moulton losing by double digits to Mr. Markey, an 80-year-old who has been in Washington for half a century.
Mr. Moulton’s bid exposes the dilemma of the center-left in a year when progressives seem to be notching win after win. Moderate Democrats must distinguish themselves from the left without antagonizing the energized Democratic base. They’re struggling to articulate a message of change that isn’t necessarily progressive change. And the 2024 fiasco has made it harder to argue that moderation is the only way to win elections.
Democrats are not “screaming that we want socialists,” as Mr. Moulton pointed out to me in an interview. Instead, he said, “there’s a whole bunch of Democrats saying, ‘The party establishment is failing us.’” But progressive Democrats do have a clarity advantage: American voters know what they stand for, whether they like it or not. Center-left candidates tend to offer more pragmatic versions of progressive ideas or wonky political strategies to achieve incremental change. This forces voters to make exhausting calculations about how to actually get things done.
. . . It’s always been clear what Mr. Moulton is against: the geriatric Washington establishment, the inertia of incumbency, whichever oldster happens to be in charge. But he’s been so busy fighting the establishment, he hasn’t explained precisely what he was fighting for.
. . . So while I had Mr. Moulton on the phone, I asked him: What does his campaign stand for, besides a new generation of leadership?
“Well, I mean, it’s a new generation of ideas,” he said. Even though he and Mr. Markey have many of the same goals, Mr. Moulton argued that he is more pragmatic. Mr. Markey is running on Medicare for all, while Mr. Moulton favors an expanded public health care option. The housing crisis in Massachusetts, Mr. Moulton said, means that “obviously, whatever Senator Markey has been doing or not doing with regards to housing hasn’t worked.” He said that expanded rail transit could improve housing affordability and that Mr. Markey’s proposed transportation plan is out of the “1910s.”
None of this is particularly new or inspiring.
But what if we consider people other than Moulton? What about Pete Buttigieg? What about Gretchen Whitman? And even what about my own Governor, J. B. Pritzker? Alter may be right that no centrist Democrat has articulated a particularly stirring message, but I’d rather vote for one of them than for a “progressive” who has articulated a disturbing message, like AOC.
With the 25th anniversary of 9/11 on the horizon, the CBC has circulated a memo to reporters and editors across all its news platforms reminding them not to refer to the attacks that claimed 3,000 lives and changed the modern world as “terrorist attacks.”
The missive from the broadcaster’s journalistic standards and practices office, a copy of which was obtained by National Post, includes a section of the “longstanding language guidance” on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks carried out by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda.
“Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks,” it reads about halfway through, with the first part bolded and the last two words linking back to the CBC’s internal language guide.
. . . Kerry Kelly, a public affairs spokesperson for CBC, told National Post in an email that “it is wholly inaccurate to state our journalists have been urged to declare that this was not a terrorist act.”
Rather, she said the memo was a regular reminder about adhering to the CBC’s language guide for “the terms ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism.’
“CBC preferences use of these words with attribution to credible sources, a practice shared by many of the world’s top journalistic organizations,” Kelly wrote, pointing to an October 2023 blog by Brodie Fenlon, CBC News editor in chief and general manager.
He was writing in response to a similarly leaked memo to staff regarding the use of the same words in reporting about Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel that had occurred a week earlier.
Staff will use the terms, he said, but they will always be “attributed to government officials, authorities, experts and politicians.”
“But CBC News does not itself designate specific groups as terrorists, or specific acts as terrorism, regardless of the region or the events, because these words are so loaded with meaning, politics and emotion that they can end up being impediments to our journalism,” Fenlon said, noting the policy has existed for decades and many news outlets employ their own.
The post included a portion of the language guide, which urges employees to “exercise extreme caution before using the words terrorist or terrorism” because they can be “highly contested” in some instances and potentially raise questions about the CBC’s “consistency and impartiality” in covering other attacks.
Well, language evolves, but this is not a natural evolution of language; it’s an attempt by the CBC to take the “terror” out of people who, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, are “[People] who who [use] violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims; esp. a member of a clandestine or expatriate organization aiming to coerce an established government by acts of violence against it or its subjects.” Is that a biased definition?
The OED adds that the word “is generally considered to be derogatory; hence the use of terms such as partisan, freedom fighter, etc., by those who approve the actions of the individuals concerned.” DUH! So what word are you going to use? “Freedom fighter” for the pilots of 9/11? I’m sure the CBC doesn’t do that, but it probably says stuff like “Hamas, generally considered by Western governments to be a terrorist organization.”
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is experiencing something similar to me:
Hili: Retirement is the busiest time of your life.
Andrzej: I get that feeling too, but since no one pays me for it, I can call it fun.
In Polish:
Hili: Emerytura to najbardziej pracowity okres w twoim życiu. Ja: Też mam takie wrażenie, ale ponieważ nikt mi za to nie płaci mogę to nazwać zabawą.
— We don’t deserve cats 😺 (@catsareblessing) August 8, 2026
The Number Ten Cat corrects Trump’s latest stupid attempt at renaming:
“Ontario” is a Native American word. It’s from the Iroquoian language of the Wyandot people and means sparkling water.
“America” is from the name of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. https://t.co/5Xd1HUzYlY
Two from my feed. First, the renaming from the White House’s mouth. The name change will apply only to U.S. government use, not to other countries’ usage:
This French Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was four years old and would have been 89 today had he lived. https://t.co/QNAovhMO3O
And one from Doctor Cobb, showing a male elk apparently having a dream:
This elk appears to be dreaming! About a pristine lake? About finding an apple orchard? About being late for school?#mammals #nature #deer #love #trailcam #Seattle #wildanimals #goodmorning #PNW #nokings #wildlife #elk
Susan Harrison of UC Davis is back with some nice photographs of birds, including Barred Owls. Nearly half a million of these owls are scheduled to be shot in what I see as a misguided attempt to save the Northern Spotted Owl. I think Susan agrees with me here, but I won’t speak for her. At any rate, her IDs and captions are included and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
Large birds of the Oregon Coast, August 2026
One fog-bound morning on the central Oregon coast, a fellow camper hailed me with “There’s an owl by the outhouses!” This wasn’t a total surprise since, in the middle of the previous night, the distinctive “who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you” call of a Barred Owl (Strix varia) could be heard. We watched as the large grey specter glided along the edge of a meadow, perching here and there in classic hunched-owl position to look and listen for camper-attracted rodents.
Barred Owl:
Sadly to me, the US Forest Service has announced plans to kill large numbers of Barred Owls in a desperate measure to save endangered Northern Spotted Owls (Strix occidentalis caurina). It’s a complicated issue upon which reasonable people (i.e., owl lovers) disagree, and you can read and decide for yourself here and elsewhere. But I will not reveal the location of any Barred Owl!
JAC: Let me add that the Northern Spotted Owl is a subspecies of the Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis) and is not itself a distinct species. There are in fact several subspecies of Spotted Owls.
A nearly full-grown Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) begged incessantly to be fed by one of its parents; the other sat silently in a neighboring tree. The juvenile finally flew off to preen, but was quickly displaced from its perch by a Red-Shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) that repeatedly chased the young Osprey around the meadow.
Red-Shouldered Hawk:
At the nearby coast, Elegant Terns (Thalasseus elegans) and Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) held a bathing party, and the preening pelicans stretched their unearthly pouches:
Welcome to Thursday, August 27, 2026, and National Burger Day. Here’s a bacon cheeseburger I had in Hawaii (Oahu) in 2019 and, as is common with Hawaiian plate lunches, the vegetable was macaroni and cheese. Note that there’s also pineapple on the burger.
To celebrate the last holiday above, here’s my latest hero, basketball player Sophie Cunningham, playing Rock Paper Scissors with a young fan, with an athletic shoe being the prize:
And, apropos, here’s the famous moment when Cunningham pointed at an opponent (DeWanna Bonner) for 22 seconds, indicating that Bonner should have received a foul along with Cunningham’s teammate Caitlin Clark. Cunningham got a foul for pointing, too. This is destined to become a historical meme on the Internet. Cunningham pulls no punches (except when she’s retaliating on the court), has a potty mouth, but most of all, I admire her for insisting that only biological women should be competing in women’s athletics.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 27 Wikipedia page.
In early July, terrifying shrieks were heard across Kyiv. As part of a wider attack on the Ukrainian capital, Russia had launched cheap one-way drones powered by turbojet engines instead of propellers.
The Shahed drones, now more like missiles, were capable of flying up to around 300 miles an hour—roughly three times as fast as older versions. Some 30 people were killed in the attack, which also included ballistic and cruise missiles.
It was the latest innovation in one-way attack drones and, like others, it only became possible thanks to China, whose factories provided the engines, according to Ukrainian officials who examined some of them.
Washington’s main strategic rival has long served as arguably the most important clearinghouse for Shahed components, including engine parts, servomotors and gyroscopes, according to current and former U.S. officials and analysts.
It is part of a complex global supply chain that analysts say enabled an isolated country—Iran—to pioneer and share one of the most transformative military innovations of the era: cheap, flying, killing machines that have bedeviled the U.S. and its allies, added to the civilian toll in Ukraine and undermined America’s military edge in the Middle East.
China’s foreign ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment. It previously said it strictly regulates the export of “dual use” components, which can serve both civilian and military purposes. It rejects unilateral U.S. sanctions that punish unauthorized trading of such parts, saying they violate international law.
The Shahed—a deceptively simple and destructive flying wedge of fiberglass, microchips and explosives costing as little as $20,000—helps show how weapons proliferation has changed, and why tapping global supply chains is now so important.
In the past, technological innovations in warfare tended to come from major powers that had their own industrial bases, enabling them to produce their weapons at scale. The AK-47 rifle is a good example: It was developed by Russian designers, influenced by a German assault rifle, then mass-produced by the Soviet Union’s sprawling factories.
In today’s world, however, any country with an idea for a weapon—even a middle power such as Iran—can turn to cheap parts suppliers abroad, especially in China.
To develop Shaheds, Iran employed a design pioneered by the U.S. and West Germany. To actually make them, however, Tehran had to source parts from across the globe, including Western nations as well as China. Yet even the Western parts tended to get moved through shell companies in mainland China or Hong Kong to disguise their origin, and over time, many were replaced by components made there, according to former U.S. officials, Ukrainian officials and analysts.
. . . The Shahed and its variants continue to wreak havoc. Shahed drones helped devastate a U.S. base in Bahrain at the start of the war with Iran, fueling Navy logistics problems. Ukraine’s air force says Russia has launched Shaheds each night this month. Such drones have also forced the U.S. and its allies to burn through pricey interceptors.
Here’s a vido about the Shaheds, which are bigger than I thought:
The use of drones has revolutionized warfare; they are are kamikaze bombs that can kill without endangering the “pilots”.
The thing about Dolly—the reason Annie and I loved her so much, and from the very beginning—was that that woman could sing. She could really, really sing. If you don’t know what we fell in love with, stop everything and listen to her recording of “Mule Skinner Blues (Blue Yodel No. 8).” Any questions you might have about how she got so far in her life will be answered. At the root of that massive career that came to stand for so many things was a great voice and a childhood drenched in one of the great American art forms: bluegrass music.
. . . She was also a great songwriter. She wrote her two most famous songs, “I Will Always Love You” (which was made famous by Whitney Houston in the film The Bodyguard) and “Jolene” on the same day in 1973. Parton had performed duets with country and western singer Porter Wagoner on his regional television show for seven years and suddenly it was over and she never explained why. But those two songs—about begging another woman not to steal her man and about undying love for someone who has left her—explain all you need to know about that foundational experience.
. . . Her 1977 album, Here You Come Again, included a song called “Two Doors Down,” which became a tremendous hit and won her a Grammy. And with that, America gave up any inclination to marginalize her, and she was accepted into the select group of celebrities who are welcome anywhere and recognized by just about everyone. She wore them down with her talent and her willingness to be in on the joke of her own persona. As the years passed, she became not just accepted but widely beloved.
It’s tempting to recognize the entirety of her public performance as a kind of drag: the huge wigs and elaborate costumes, her enormous bosom, in combination with her playful willingness to engage with talk show hosts on the level of her obvious, and in some ways ludicrous, sexuality. And yet, there never, ever seemed to be some other, more authentic side of her. Like a great star of the past she never, ever appeared without being fully made-up and extravagantly dressed.
Dolly Parton was a pure product of America. She was Scots Irish, part of a population that came to this country very early in its history, the majority during the 18th century, and she maintained a great pride in that heritage—of the Great Smoky Mountains and of surviving poverty and of helping to preserve its customs and products.
Try to think of anyone who has made as deep and long-lasting a mark on American culture as Dolly Parton. She was a child of the Deep South who was pro-gay; she assiduously avoided getting caught up in anything “political,” so it was easy to ascribe to her whatever opinions you had about the country; and as far as I know, she never got caught up in public fights of any kind.
You never realize how influential someone really is until they die and their contributions are trotted out in obituaries. As far as I can see, Parton never made a misstep, and the press is all laudatory. That’s not just because she was careful in how she behaved; it’s because she was a genuinely good person.
*The NYT obituary of Dolly Parton reveals that, as many suspected, she died of cancer or its complications (article archived here). I’ve put in a few bits from the (very good) obituary, clearly prepared in advance, that might be new to you, as they were to me:
Dolly Parton, a rags-to-rhinestones daughter of Appalachia who for six decades ruled country music and beyond with an outsize personality and down-home wit that enshrined her as one of America’s most cherished originals, died on Tuesday in Nashville. She was 80.
Her death was announced by her family. A spokesman said that she died after a brief battle with cancer and that she had been admitted to the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville on Friday. Concerns about Ms. Parton’s health arose last year when she postponed a Las Vegas residency, and intensified to the point that she took to social media in October to announce, “I ain’t dead yet.” This May, she canceled the residency but said that she had responded well to treatment after her immune and digestive systems had, as she put it, “got all out of whack” in recent years.
And, like Brian Wilson, she simply had to write, and was doing it constantly:
“Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast,” she told The Times in 2002. “I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder. I write every day, even when I’m on a plane, in the tub or on the bus. It burns in me.”
She continued: “Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out. Not everything I write is good, but it’s all good for me — like therapy.”
. . .The Partons were so poor that Dolly’s father had to pay the doctor who attended her birth with a sack of cornmeal. Ms. Parton may have grown up without plumbing, heat, electricity and other modern conveniences, but she always insisted that she also grew up happy, and that music offered her a refuge from want.
. . . When she was 5 or so, she wrote her first song, a ditty about a corncob doll with corn-silk hair called “Little Tiny Tasseltop.” She started singing on radio and on TV at 10, on the “Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour” in Knoxville, securing bookings with the help of her uncle Bill Owens, who also bought her her first guitar. The two would go on to write many songs together.
. . . Endowed with a surfeit of creativity and an unflagging work ethic, Ms. Parton admitted in interviews to sleeping as few as three hours a night. She was nominated for more than 50 Grammy Awards, 10 of which she won, along with being recognized for lifetime achievement by the Recording Academy in 2011. A show about her life, “Dolly: A True Original Musical,” is scheduled to open on Broadway in early 2027.
There are nearly four thousand comments on her obituary, and the NYT even posted a few at the end of her obituary:
If only humans were more like starfish. Oyster farmers learned the hard way that if you slice up one of these ocean dwellers, some of the pieces will regenerate into entirely new animals. Imagine harnessing that superpower to regrow diseased or injured body parts at will. This is not entirely in the realm of science fiction. Scientists have already made extraordinary progress in manufacturing tissue for medical purposes. I’d put money down on this frontier producing multiple breakthroughs in the next decade.
Damir Marusic: Advances in robotics
While many of the headline-grabbing medical stories recently have focused on artificial intelligence, I’m more intrigued by the strides being made in robotics — particularly the prospect that machines might soon be aiding us both inside and outside our bodies.
Stanford researchers are developing a millimeter-scale micro-robot that could be injected into the bloodstream, swim through arteries and treat strokes. Guided magnetically, the prototype can compress clots down to a fraction of their original size, potentially bringing a lifesaving treatment to hospitals that lack specialized stroke surgeons. Meanwhile, robotic exoskeletons are becoming lighter and cheaper. Originally built mainly for rehabilitation, they could eventually help people with paralysis, weakened muscles or simply aging knees move more naturally and independently.
Jim Geraghty: T cell immunotherapy
Back in 2025, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists for their work in identifying and defining regulatory T cells. Those are white blood cells within your immune system that control your body’s response to foreign substances; the Nobel committee summarized T cells as your “immune system’s security guards.” If you have high-functioning T cells, your body does a good job of identifying cells that are potentially harmful, and you tend to not get cancer and live for a long time, even past 100 years.
. . . But this summer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Orca-T, the first immunotherapy based on regulatory T cells, to treat adults with certain high-risk blood cancers. If we can harness the power of these high-functioning T cells, everyone could have a healthy immune system.
Leana S. Wen: GLP-1 drugs
It’s impossible to have a conversation about transformative health innovations without mentioning GLP-1 drugs. They have already revolutionized the treatment of diabetes and obesity, which is no small feat considering that about 40 percent of American adults have obesity, a condition that increases
But what excites me most is that we are still at the beginning of understanding what these drugs can do. Researchers are studying their potential to treat conditions ranging from addiction to neurodegenerative diseases. And their success is catalyzing conversations about optimizing health as we age so that people don’t just live longer but extend the years they can live well.
Dominic Pino: Investment in future breakthroughs
I am excited not just by Moderna’s melanoma vaccine, which looks like it could save lives, but also by last week’s enormous surge in Moderna shareholders’ wealth. Hear me out.
The pharmaceutical company’s stock price more than doubled on the news that the vaccine had succeeded in a clinical trial. That should encourage other companies to develop even more cures and medical breakthroughs going forward.
Pino’s isn’t really a medical breakthrough, but to him it disproves the notion that “big pharma” doesn’t really want to develop cures because it makes more dosh selling treatments. I suppose for my part I’d add mRNA vaccines.
The time has come to admit it: The United States has a potty-training problem. In Utah, a law came into effect last year mandating that, with some exceptions, children will not be allowed to enroll in public school without first being toilet trained. Kansas lawmakers introduced a similar bill in January, and at least one district in Florida is considering a policy change that could force kindergartners to stay home until they are out of diapers.
These directives have come about because growing numbers of children are showing up to school unprepared to use the toilet. And U.S. schools aren’t the only ones confronting this issue. In the United Kingdom, the nationally representative School Readiness Survey found that last year, more than a quarter of children were not toilet trained when they began primary school (which most children do the September after they turn 4). Felicity Gillespie, the chief executive of Kindred Squared, the organization that commissions the annual survey, told me this means that teachers “can never really get into the curriculum, because they’re constantly having to take kids out and change their nappies.”
. . . The shift toward delayed potty training, I learned while reporting this article, has been under way for quite a long time. And the sources I spoke with pointed to a few factors driving it. One is that easy access to disposable diapers—which reduce the mess involved in having a child who can’t reliably make it to the toilet—has made the need for training less pressing. Another is that many families with working parents are short on the considerable time needed for monitoring trips to the bathroom. But from Gillespie’s perspective, the root of the issue is that parents are taking a child-led approach to what should be a “100 percent parent-led activity,” she said. “You don’t sit and wait for a child to say, ‘Do you know what? I think I’d like to try wearing pants today.’”
A desire to empower children as decision makers in their own lives, as well as an underlying wariness about parental authority, manifests in many trending parenting philosophies—and is perhaps most recognizable in “gentle” or “respectful” parenting, which emphasizes guidance and persuasion over rules and instruction. Broadly, this approach is rooted in an admirable desire to respect children as humans. The author of The Sovereign Child, a 2025 book that advocates for rules-free parenting, describes a general philosophy of “taking children seriously.” What it amounts to, though, is going to great lengths to avoid just telling your kid what to do.
Potty training offers a strong case study in how easily the child-led approach can break down amid the realities of modern life.
The rest of this scatological explains a rising philosophy of letting the kid tell you when it’s ready to use the toilet: “child-led toilet training”. This is the result:
According to data from the 1950s, a large majority of kids, 80 percent, had completed bowel training by 24 months; only 5 percent were still bowel training after 34 months. Even within a sample of 1950s children whose parents were advised by Brazelton to use his child-oriented approach, 98 percent were daytime potty trained by age 3. Over the next few decades, this timeline was pushed back. A 2001 study found that close to zero percent of kids had completed potty training by 24 months, and only about half had done so by 36 months. Still, that study found that almost all kids had started training before their third birthday. These days, only 21 percent of kids begin potty training before they hit 2—and about a quarter do not begin until after they turn 3.
I can’t remember when I was “bowel trained”, and my parents aren’t around to ask.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s in the way:
Andrzej: Darling, you’re blocking my view of the calendar.
Hili: And what about it?
In Polish:
Ja: Kochanie, zasłaniasz mi kalendarz.
Hili: I co z tego?
From Masih. Let’s be clear, she has no beef with Iranians cutting their hair in grief, as this woman does. Masih just doesn’t like performative Western feminism around Iran:
A woman cuts her hair at her sister’s funeral in #Iran, because the regime shot her sister in the head for the crime of peacefully protesting and demanding freedom.
Her name was Melika Dastyab.
She was 21, a musician, economics student and she was dead by security forces while… pic.twitter.com/jJz8G65OgL
You guys realize that the leftist reaction to the Jason Arday case is going to incentivize more and more people to just “self-ID” as autistic or neurodivergent right?
Why? Because it instantly unlocks two-tier judgment. There will be massive upside to identify as…
Finally, one from Doctor Cobb; a storm, a sunrise, and an aurora from the ISS (you can see a longer version here). Click on the screenshot to see the video tweet, as I can’t embed it:
My two-person book club, in which a friend and I alternately choose a book for both of us to read, recently finished an excellent novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, writtten by Oscar Hijuelos and published in 1989. Wikipedia puts it in the genre of “magical realism,” but I wouldn’t call it that, as the “magic” consists only of the main characters having fantasies that might have occurred but didn’t.
At any rate, it’s a longie—407 pages in my library version—but a goodie, recognized with a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990. The story contains at least one huge spoiler that I won’t describe, but it’s a spoiler that divides the book into two parts, and that bipartite structure helps make the book so good.
“Mambo Kings” is the name of a Cuban-music band organized by two brothers, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, who immigrated from Cuba in 1949, hoping to achieve musical fame in America. They find both living in America and finding gigs tough, and one of the best parts of the book is the vivid description of problems faced and lives lived by Cuban immigrants. As my book-pal emailed me, one of these aspects was
” . . . . the fact that the book never left the world of the Cuban Americans or a made any concessions except indirectly to events exterior that world.”
There are five dominant elements in the lives of Cesar and Nestor: music (always mambo, rumba, and other Hispanic stuff), love, sex (often but not always separable), booze (a solvent for the brothers’ troubles), and memories. I don’t know how Hijuelos learned so much about Cuban music, but it permeates the book, with dozens of musicians named and recognized. Hijuelos, the son of two Cuban immigrants, must have either been inundated with the music of his parents, or learned it for the book—or both. You too will learn a lot, and you’ll surely have heard of at least one Cuban musician who appears repeatedly in the tale: Desi Arnaz of the “I Love Lucy” television show. (I take this back: you have to be of a certain age to know him and the show.) In the book, Arnaz invites Cesar and Nestor to play on his show, which makes them briefly famous, and then befriends the brothers for life.
Nestor is hopelessly and fruitlessly in love with a woman he left behind in Cuba, while Cesar, justifiably proud of his pinga, beds an army of women but never finds real love, perhaps impeded by the memory of his beloved mother left behind in Cuba. And both the brothers are ridden with memories of their youth on the island, so you’ll also learn quite a bit about the lower rungs of Cuban life (they grew up in a poor farming family). The sex is frequent and graphic, perhaps surprisingly so for a Pulitzer winner, but it’s integral to the fruitless search for love. My book pal added this:
“despite all the sex (and there’s a LOT of it), it’s at its heart a book about the love between two brothers.”
It’s a colorful, fast-paced, wonderfully inventive and well-written story, and well deserved its acclaim. In the NY Times review of the book in 1989, Michiko Kakutani, a notoriously harsh critic, lauds Mambo Kings. A few excerpts to give an opinion besides mine:
Indeed, Oscar Hijuelos’s remarkable new novel is another kind of American story – an immigrant story of lost opportunities and squandered hopes. While it dwells in bawdy detail on Cesar’s sexual escapades, while it portrays the musical world of the 50’s in bright, primary colors, the novel is essentially elegiac in tone -a Chekhovian lament for a life of missed connections and misplaced dreams.
. . . With his sympathetic, yet uncompromising portrait of Cesar, Mr. Hijuelos has created a character who will continue to inhabit readers’ imaginations long after they have finished this book; and with his sharply sketched supporting cast of characters he has also succeeded in fashioning a colorful fictional world. Nestor’s wistful wife, Delores, who dreams of bettering herself through books; Vanna, Cesar’s flamboyant mistress, who eventually settles down to life in Co-op City with a postal worker; his shady business partner, Perez, who has made a fortune through prostitution and drug-dealing, and his sensible friend Manny, who has saved all his money to buy a small bodega – together, these friends, lovers and family members give us a portrait of a tight-knit immigrant community struggling to survive in the promised land of New York.
By turns street-smart and lyrical, impassioned and reflective, ”The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” is a rich and provocative book – a moving portrait of a man, his family, a community and a time.
If Kakutani liked it, that’s another reason to read it. “Rich” is an adjective that is absolutely accurate, while the sometimes graphic descriptions of sex are no longer so “provocative.”
Click below to see the Amazon site. A paperback is only ten bucks.
