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.
Although Halloween is over, Maher is kvetching on Real Time about “safetyism” rules, including curfews that end trick-or-treating at 7 pm or even 5 pm! But then he reminisces about Halloween when he was a kid and the joys of running around on your own. Now, of course, kids rarely go trick-or-treating unaccompanied by parents, even though it’s safer now than it was when Maher and I were kids (I, too, was a “free range kid”).
The spiel continues with the Maher detailing the bad effects of spending a lot of time on the internet—something that results from kids not being allowed to roam on their own.(62% of kids 12 and under have never walked or biked anywhere without an adult, and 50% of parents won’t even let their kids roam to another aisle in the grocery store). He describes an alternative called “trunk or treat”, a fun-killer that you’ll have hear about by watching the short video below.
Ah, the joys of roaming free, biking off alone to see friends after school! That is dead and gone.
I was going to put this in my critique of Abdul El-Sayed yesterday, but forgot. Fortunately, Bret Stephens, in his latest NYT column, alludes to something like what I’m about to say:
This is what I forgot to add to my own post:
Imagine that a white American had some relatives killed by Islamic militants in Somalia (this has happened, albeit rarely, to both American civilians and military personnel). Devastated, the American gets a gun, drives his truck into the The West Michigan Somali Cultural Religious Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan and opens fire on a group of children, wounding a security guard. Fortunately, nobody was killed, and the attacker takes his own life. When asked about the attack, a white politician proffers an explanation: “Hurt people hurt people.”
Can you imagine how people would come down on that politician for heartlessness and obtuseness?
When Abdul El-Sayed said precisely that phrase after an attack on a Michigan synagogue and preschool this spring (apparently, some relatives of the would-be murderer were killed by the IDF in Lebanon), it was not just an explanation but an excuse. El-Sayed later apologized for the statement, but I don’t believe his faux contrition. But he got away with it, even though it encapsulates his entire view of Jews and Israel.
But enough; Bret Stephens, a far better writer than I, draws the parallel in his latest NYT column, which you can read by clicking on the screenshot below. You can also find his piece archived here.
Excerpts (I hope you’ve seen Cenk’s pro-el-Sayed ad):
The stakes in the race were again brought home after Representative Haley Stevens, who had been El-Sayed’s opponent in the Democratic primary, endorsed Rogers after a falling-out with El-Sayed, largely over his refusal to condemn what may be the most nakedly antisemitic political ad in modern U.S. political history.
The ad, which came from an El-Sayed-friendly political action committee founded by Cenk Uygur, a left-wing media personality, features a couple shopping for groceries while discussing why they can no longer afford a $7 carton of eggs: The money has already been stripped from their wallets by the federal government so that it can be sent to Israel and spent on “killing Palestinians” while also “probably” funding Israel’s universal health care.
A voice-over then asks, “Why does Mike Rogers care so much about what Israelis want, and so little about what you want?”
What’s wrong with the ad? For starters, the price of a dozen eggs has fallen by about half since Trump returned to office; a price-conscious shopper in Michigan could pick up a dozen eggs at Walmart for under $2. And while prices for groceries have undoubtedly been affected by higher energy costs because of the war with Iran, for which Israel is partly responsible, they’ve also been affected by the war in Ukraine; droughts in Brazil, China and the Midwest; and Trump’s capricious tariffs. Is Israel to blame for all that, too?
The larger problem with the ad is that it unites three of the oldest antisemitic tropes in history. First: There’s a powerful Jew out there who’s picking the pockets of the less fortunate. Second, that Jew is doing so to slaughter the innocent. Third, he’s paying a non-Jewish intermediary (who, by implication, is either a dope or a stooge) to do his bidding. To suggest the ad is only about U.S. policy toward Israel would be like arguing that an ad denouncing foreign aid to African countries while featuring the worst stereotypes about people in those countries isn’t racist. It doesn’t pass the smell test.
That’s the ad, but what about El-Sayed’s reaction to it? His failure to denounce it is one reason why Stevens endorsed Rogers. Bret Stephens says this:
It would have been morally right — and a political no-brainer — for El-Sayed to forthrightly and unequivocally denounce the ad. A similar dynamic played out in early 2008, when Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., turned out to have a record of incendiary rhetoric. Obama denounced the pastor’s statements, and, after Wright kept it up, broke off relations with the man. Doing so drew a firm and effective line under the controversy, underscoring Obama’s insistence that he was no radical.
Yet the most El-Sayed has said about the ad was that it “was not made by me,” that he didn’t agree with its content but that the controversy was “not worth my time.” That’s odd: It was El-Sayed himself who called Israel “an affordability issue” while adding “we should keep our money here instead of sending it there to drop bombs on people’s schools or their hospitals.” Nor has he been shy about denouncing Israel at nearly every opportunity he gets. The ad he now says he has nothing to do with merely expresses what he plainly believes.
It’s part of a broader pattern.
His initial response to the Temple Israel attack, where only a miracle spared the over 150 children and staff inside from death or injury, was that “hurt people hurt people.” It took him five months to offer a quasi apology. (“My comments may have been misconstrued.”) He campaigned alongside the antisemitic media personality Hasan Piker (who recently compared campaigning for El-Sayed in heavily Jewish West Bloomfield Township to campaigning for a Black candidate in a “Klan K.K.K. neighborhood”) and quietly distanced himself from him because he feared it was costing him votes, according to reporting by CNN. Tucker Carlson, the right’s most prominent normalizer of antisemitism, now features in one of El-Sayed’s campaign ads.
A question for Michigan voters, especially those who lean left: If the stigmatized minority here weren’t Jewish but, say, gay or Latino or Black, would you even consider a vote for any candidate abetting, or at least tolerating, the stigmatizing?
Remember that El-Sayed gained nothing with his “hurt people” statement, but he said it anyway. This is why I think it represents what he really believes, and why I distrust all his later apologies. El-Sayed doesn’t have much of a filter between his brain and his mouth.
Stephens finishes this way:
None of this will matter at all to voters who thrill to El-Sayed’s message. Nor will it matter enough to voters willing to put their misgivings about him aside because they feel that Rogers, for his part, has failed to call out the rhetorical excesses of Republicans, and that nothing is more important than sending Trump the sternest electoral rebuke they can. Yet come January, Trump will still be president, no matter how well Democrats do in the midterms.
The real issue for voters in Michigan is what moral price is worth paying for an additional seat in the Senate. There are, after all, other winnable Senate races in other states. And a vote to further strengthen the forces of antisemitism in American politics, under any party banner or political justification, is no vote for democracy, either.
This is a clear declaration that Stephens thinks El-Sayed an antisemite. I agree. But antisemitism and demonization of Israel are rapidly becoming hallmarks of not just “progressive” Democrats, but of mainstream Democrats as well. If party affiliation should always override principle, we are truly lost. And one principle should be that attacks on Jewish children, simply because they were Jewish, are evil and should at least be denounced.
This notice appeared on Andrzej’s Facebook site in Polish, with an English translation. He also sent me the notice by email.
Polish:
Hili odeszła na zawsze. Po otworzeniu jamy brzusznej okazało się, że obok guza na wątrobie były liczne przerzuty. Zgodnie z moją instrukcją nie została wybudzona po operacji. Rodzimy się, żeby umrzeć, pogodzić się nie sposób.
In English:
Hili is gone forever. When they opened her abdomen, they discovered numerous metastases in addition to the tumor on her liver. Following my instructions, they did not wake her from anesthesia after the surgery. We are born to die, but accepting it is impossible.
NOTE: Hili died today from metastatic liver cancer. I am devastated but Andrzej even more so. He lost his wife and his cat companion within a bit more than a year. If you have a message for Andrzej, put it in the comments and I will convey it to him.
Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, November 3, 2026, and it’s Election Day. I trust you will vote if you’re American, as that is our duty (though sometimes not our pleasure). It’s also National Sandwich Day. Here’s my pastrami sandwich at Katz’s in NYC, eaten in 2014. It is of course on rye bread with hot mustard, and accompanied by the requisites: a plate of pickles (with the prized half sours) and a can of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda, which, with its celery flavor, happens to be the perfect accompaniment to pastrami or corned beef.
There’s a Google Doodle today urging you to vote. Click on the icon below to see where it goes, which tells you where you must go to vote based on your location.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 3 Wikipedia page.
The surveys found that Democrats hold sizable leads in Texas, which has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988, and Kansas, which has not elected one since 1932.
To win a Senate majority, Democrats need to defend all the seats they currently hold and flip at least four seats that are currently held by Republicans. It has been seen as an uphill battle because many of the seats they need to win are in Republican strongholds.
But the new polls found Democratic candidates ahead in five states that now have Republican senators and effectively tied in a sixth. They hold leads in Kansas, Maine, Ohio and Texas and a narrow edge in Alaska. They are effectively tied in Iowa.
In Michigan, the lone top Senate battleground already held by Democrats, the poll found the Democratic candidate leading by double digits. (It was conducted before a Democratic feud erupted in Michigan this weekend.) The surveys did not include North Carolina, where polls have long found the Democrat leading and Republicans have pared back their campaign spending.
Dissatisfaction with President Trump and frustration over his management of the economy are dragging down Republicans, according to the polls. Just 38 percent of likely voters approved of the president’s job performance in the seven states in the poll, a strikingly low figure given that Mr. Trump had won five of the states by double digits just two years ago.
The newfound Democratic strength was powered by growing trust in the party to handle the economy — the key motivating issue for voters this year. Democrats hold a nine-point advantage on the cost of living across the battlegrounds, and they led on this crucial measure in every single state.
Here’s the chart that the NYT gives. As always, I’m not going watch the votes roll in over the evening; I’d prefer to go to sleep peacefully and wake up tomorrow to find out who’s ahead (or won):
America’s Gulf allies are steeling themselves for a heavy U.S. bombardment of Iran that they expect to trigger a vicious cycle of retaliation against their own economic and civilian infrastructure as early as this week.
Their concerns are heightened by a lack of progress in the various efforts to reach a negotiated end to the conflict while the U.S. and Iran are threatening especially ferocious fighting if the conflict resurges.
President Trump has been leaning toward a large postelection attack that could target Iranian infrastructure and nuclear sites, but hasn’t decided whether to go ahead, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Iranian officials said over the weekend their response to any attack would be unrestrained.
“The only reason why I’m not finished with Iran is I want to be nice. I want to try and save all those lives if I can,” Trump said Sunday at a rally in Iowa ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. “But at some point we’re going to have to give them the hammer.”
Governments including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were running security drills—including at airports—and attendees at a major energy conference in Abu Dhabi were cutting short their stays on advice from their governments. Schools in the capital of Saudi Arabia, which is also under fire from the Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen, will remain online this week. Dutch and Belgian embassies in the region warned Thursday that security conditions could deteriorate quickly in the region.
Anwar Gargash, senior foreign-policy adviser to the U.A.E.’s president, said at a security conference over the weekend that the country hopes the diplomatic efforts will pan out, but is “braced for the worst.”
Will this happen? I’m guessing it will, and not long after the midterm results are in. Certainly before Congress recalibrates towards being Democratic in January, as they could put the brakes on Trump’s ambitions, though I’m not yet sure how. But Trump is impatient (his waffling is just that, not patience), and I’m betting he’ll order a strike within a month of the midterms. (But remember, I’m not a pundit; your guess is as good as mine.)
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed over their views on Israel Thursday, calling their positions “wrong” and saying they did not reflect congressional Democrats.
The two progressive Democrats were mentioned by “On Brand” podcast host Donny Deutsch, who asked Pelosi how he, as a Jewish man, could reconcile his support for the Democratic Party with politicians whose statements he considered antisemitic.
“When you say Israel doesn’t have the right to be a Jewish state, that’s antisemitic as far as I’m concerned with all that,” Deutsch said.
When Pelosi asked for examples, Deutsch named Mamdani and El-Sayed, calling their comments “concerning.”
“No, it’s more than concerning,” Pelosi responded. “It’s wrong. It’s wrong. And it isn’t a reflection of the Democrats in the Congress of the United States. This new person in Michigan, we’ll see if he gets elected to the Congress. But the mayor, bless his heart, I hope he succeeds as mayor, but I don’t agree with some of the things he has said. But in terms of our people in the House of Representatives, if somebody says that, the other members disassociate themselves from it.”
Note that this is the opposite of what Chuck Schumer tweeted: “Senate Democrats are united in our support for Abdul El-Sayed.” Are they? More:
Earlier in the interview with Deutsch, Pelosi initially denied that anyone in the Democratic Party was antisemitic.“The fact is that I really do not know of anybody there on our side who is engaged in antisemitism. That may be what it appears to be or what they’re charged to be. But if they are, it’s only a few. If there are, I think sometimes they say things that they shouldn’t and can be interpreted that way,” Pelosi said.Despite her concerns about Mamdani and El-Sayed’s comments, she dismissed their impact on the party as a whole.“People represent their districts, and we have to respect that. The job description, job title is representative, but that doesn’t mean it has an impact on the consensus of the Democratic Party, and [House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries has been very clear on that,” Pelosi said.. . . . Rabbi Yaakov Menken, executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, acknowledged Pelosi “as one of the Jewish community’s best friends among House Democrats” but said it was alarming that she did not seem to recognize antisemitism among her colleagues.“Pelosi claims she wants for those voices to be marginalized within her party, yet she demonstrates that she has turned a deaf ear, both to antisemitic expression from her colleagues and to the rabbis anxious to set her straight on the magnitude of the problem. If she is indeed one of our best friends, should we not be scared by that?” Menken told Fox News Digital.
I agree with the rabbi; Pelosi doesn’t seem to recognize that no Democratic anti-Semite is every going to be blatantly anti-Semitic because even Democrats won’t tolerate that. They thus use code words like “Zionist” or “genocide,” or even express support for an immediate two-state solution, which is effectively calling for more terrorism to rain down on Israel. But at least Pelosi isn’t as gullible as Schumer.*With the Israeli Prime Minister post not yet settled, Amit Segal tells us who the most important person in the recent election (and Israeli politics in general) is.
It’s Monday, November 2, and Israel’s future rests in the hands of a triumvirate, though none of its members is the country’s Caesar. As with the alliances that presided over the fall of the Roman Republic, whether Yashar’s Gadi Eisenkot, Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Liberman and Together’s Naftali Bennett act together or apart will decide the country’s fate.
The conventional wisdom puts Eisenkot at the head of the trio. With 21 seats, Yashar is the second-largest party in the Knesset, and the former IDF chief of staff will most likely be the first to receive the president’s mandate to form a government. Some are watching the enigmatic Liberman and his seven seats. Since 2019, his decisions about whom he will and won’t sit with have denied Benjamin Netanyahu a majority and fueled Israel’s long political crisis. But in my humble view, the man who holds the most power is sitting right now in the upper-middle-class town of Ra’anana: Naftali Bennett.
Here’s why.
The Together chairman is, along with the Yashar chairman, one of only two pivot players in any possible government.
Without him, an Eisenkot-Netanyahu government doesn’t add up. Even with Liberman, Likud and Yashar are stuck six short of a majority. Only Bennett can get them over the line, to a comfortable 67. As the bloc’s second-strongest figure, and once Eisenkot’s rival for its leadership, Bennett holds the other key too. Eisenkot can’t enter any government that includes Haredim and/or Arabs without Bennett providing the parliamentary ballast, and the vaguer but no less essential seal of approval.
But there is a fundamental difference between the two. Eisenkot would serve as prime minister in a minority coalition or, at the very least, as an equal partner in a unity government. He has something significant to gain. Bennett has a lot to lose. He would absorb much of the criticism and the electoral damage for every broken campaign promise, but on the income side of the ledger he’d have to settle for a senior (very senior) ministry, with no return to the most important office in the country.
. . .Over the weekend I spent hours going through every possible permutation for a government: a minority government with the Arabs, a minority government with the Haredim, even the purely hypothetical and absurd Arab-Haredi alliance, with Agudat Yisrael leader Yitzhak Goldknopf and Shas leader Aryeh Deri as rotating prime ministers. But only one answer guarantees Israel a strong and stable government able to contend with the challenges we face: unity.
Bennett may be the pivotal figure, the first rock to tumble in what becomes a landslide. But without Eisenkot and Liberman following him, and possibly Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich as well, stability will suffer, and with it the country’s most essential needs in security and society. As Sallust, the Roman historian and a contemporary of the First Triumvirate, observed, “Through harmony small states grow; through discord the greatest fall apart.”
Here is Bennett’s tweet (translated from Hebrew) recommending that Israel’s President (who has this task) recommend Eisenkot to cobble together the next government of Israel. It looks as if Bennett’s in favor of a Yashar/Likud coalition, which could, if the Arab parties join in, put Eisenkot in the PM’s seat.
*Over at Air Mail, Larry David has a “modest” proposal—or rather 12 of them—for the Democratic Socialists of America (article archived here). It is of course a spoof if you know David and the DSA: I’ll give you six, and you have the link to see the whole schmear:
I recently attended a meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, where I officially enrolled as a member. Though I was new to the party, I put forth a number of proposals, many of which were met with considerable enthusiasm and, I’m happy to report, have now been incorporated into their manifesto. I present them herein.
1.) Let’s never forget we’re all in this together. Therefore, we have determined that all doors to private homes must remain unlocked at all times. Strangers may enter as they please to open your fridge, use your bathroom, floss, or just relax and watch a ball game. This open-door policy is the perfect way to get to know our fellow Americans.
. . . 4.) In our Socialist America, everyone will be so fulfilled spiritually and financially that the police department will be dramatically reduced to where an officer’s only job will be to adjudicate domestic disputes. Toward that end, stands will be set up at local farmers markets, where they will work to resolve marital issues in a folksy, farm-to-table manner. Fresh berries will be provided.
. . . 6.) The loss of a dog can be devastating and, in some cases, worse than even when a human passes. Recognizing that, we at the D.S.A. will institute a three-week bereavement period during which pet mourners will continue to receive full work compensation. This benefit will also apply to the loss of a cat, turtle, parakeet, or goldfish. For certain farm animals, such as chickens, donkeys, goats, and pigs, the bereavement period will be reduced to two weeks. Conversely, if you are the proud owner of a new pet, you’ll be granted a two-week paternity leave to bond with, house-train, and teach it commands. You’d be surprised what a goldfish can do if you get them early.
. . . 9.) The D.S.A. has great respect for religious traditions. Because of our burgeoning Muslim population, we want to take all measures to give these people a strong sense of belonging in America. Along those lines, we’ll require that all Caucasian women wear a hijab on weekends in solidarity with their Muslim sisters. In addition, Jews will no longer be allowed to refer to themselves as “the Chosen People.” Henceforth, their new nickname will be “the Bagel People.”
. . . 10.) We strongly believe in a two-state solution. To this end, we propose that Palestinians should be given all the land currently occupied by Israel and that Israel should be given Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific, where the weather is beautiful and grapefruits are aplenty. We think the Bagel People will be very happy there.
. . . 11.) Firing is prohibited in Socialist America. The only way anyone will be able to replace a worker is to trade them to another company, like they do in professional sports. The worker will also have a “no trade” clause in their contract so it can be voided if they choose to do so.
This is a post by Masih on Facebook, showing her berating Spanish officials for cozying up to Iranian authorities while denying visas to women protestors blinded by the Iranian cops:
From Luana; more Wikipedia editing:
Over the past months, a single Wikipedia editor has been quietly shaping @AbdulElSayed’s entry.
The editing has been intensive and highly directed. For example:
+ Hasan Piker controversy got cut down.
+ Syed’s antisemitism problem – deleted.
+ Harris and Obama endorsements went in.
+ A line saying AIPAC’s brand is “toxic” included.
Is it an op?
Well, two weeks ago the same editor had this to say in an edit summary on the El-Sayed page:
Two from my feed. First, a viral video of a pro-Palestinian student striking two fellow students (the girl is Jewish) at the University of Michigan. She got arrested, as you’ll see. English translation of the tweet: “Probably the first time in her life that this dumb cow has faced consequences for her actions.”
Wahrscheinlich das erste Mal in ihrem Leben, dass diese dumme Kuh Konsequenzen für ihr handeln erfahren hat. https://t.co/Avtl4SnlrK
As readers will know, I’ve been a lifelong Democrat, and though we don’t have to register by party in Illinois, I’ve always voted solidly Democratic, as I just did (it isn’t hard in Illinois). However, “liberal” Democrats like me, who are more towards the center than are “progressives” like AOC or “the squad”, are starting to face a dilemma, especially if they’re Jewish or sympathetic to Israel. (A hallmark of “progressive” Democrats is their demonization of Israel, sometimes flirting with anti-Semitism.)
I started to face this dilemma in the last Presidential election, which pitted Trump, who I see as an odious and unstable egomaniac, against Kamala Harris, a Democrat who I see as inexperienced, not overly bright, and a disser of Israel. I couldn’t vote for either of them, so I wrote in the Democrat Gretchen Whitmer (now I’d probably write in Democrat Pete Buttigieg). I wasn’t worried that that would promote a Trump victory, because Illinois is a reliably Democratic state and my vote wouldn’t affect the outcome. But were I in some other state, I’d have been a bit more hesitant to write in a Democrat rather than vote for Harris.
But were I voting in Michigan now, I would certainly not vote for Abdul el-Sayed, nor would I vote for Mike Rogers, even though Haley Stevens, el-Sayed’s opponent in the Democratic primary, who was defeated, has endorsed Rogers and said she’ll vote for him. Stevens withdrew her support for her fellow Democrat because he refused to condemn the odious ad (made by Cenk Uygur’s PAC) blaming Israel for the rise of grocery prices in America. And El-Sayed has a history of anti-Israel actions and statements.
Now I’m not a one-issue voter, casting my ballot only for pro-Israel candidates, but up until recently Democrats have been pro-Israel candidates and were aligned with my values on most other issues. But the party is moving leftwards towards “progressivism”, espousing policies that irk me—not just anti-Israel views, but open-border policies, defunding the police, emphasizing equity as opposed to equal opportunity, eliminating all private health insurance in favor of “Medicare for all” (I do favor healthcare for all, just not solely a government system), allowing trans-identified men to compete in women’s sports (and again I emphasize that this is one of the very few areas where I see women’s rights trumping trans rights), promoting drastic income distribution, like what Democratic Socialists favor, and so on.
On the other hand, I still differ—usually more seriously—with Republicans, who tend to be against abortion (I’m a full-on pro-choicer), against gun control (I favor strict regulation), in favor of more drilling and usage of fossil fuels, more willing to curb trans rights (like banning trans people from the military, a ban I oppose), historically less supportive of civil rights for minorities, and so on. The widespread Republican support for Trump—who I see as a narcissistic and unstable demagogue who, while he has done a few things that had good results, has damaged America—is something I cannot stomach, and I could never vote for a Republican who supported Trump.
Thus I can’t vote for nearly any Republican, and I won’t vote for Democrats who hold positions that oppose. El-Sayed, for example, is not only a probable anti-Semite, but favors universal health care with the eventual abolition of private health care, which he sees as “redundant and unnecessary”, broader wealth taxes, and defunding the police. His antisemitism and demonization of Israel—epitomized by his refusal to condemn Cenk’s “blood libel banana ad”—would alone erode my support for him, and, since I haven’t studied Rogers’s positions, were I to vote today I would probably write in a Democrat. This is worrisome because, of course, the Senate is at stake here because Michigan is more evenly divided politically than is Illinois. But my principles would prevent me from voting for an antisemite.
This post was prompted by two things. The first is the leftward move of the Democratic party, so that Stevens’s withdrawal of support from El-Sayed led Chuck Schumer, Democratic minority leader of the Senate, to denounce Stevens as committing a “despicable betrayal”, as if all Democrats are obliged to vote for El-Sayed. (And Schumer used to be a strong supporter of Israel.) Here’s Schumer’s tweet from yesterday.
This is a despicable betrayal from Rep. Stevens.
Senate Democrats are united in our support for Abdul El-Sayed, because we know he will fight for the economic interests of working families in Michigan, unlike Mike Rogers, who is a tool of Donald Trump and billionaire donors.
It’s as if party must always override principle, and when it doesn’t, as in Stevens’s case, it’s a “betrayal.”
The second reason I’m writing this is an email I received from a friend urging me to stop saying I’m a diehard Democrat and start supporting Republicans. I said that the GOP in general, and Trump in particular, was so offensive to me that I couldn’t contemplate that, even though the Democratic Party is becoming a party I can’t support in toto. I wrote that to my friend, who responded with this email (reproduced with permission):
I’ve been holding my breath on this issue forever. The straw that broke my back was the guy who commented that Michiganders should hold their noses and vote for Al Sayed. Why? Because he’s not a Republican. Now Chuck Schumer agrees. The Democrats have become the party of antisemitism. Like Amit Segal (and others) are saying: When the Democrats come into power they will recognize a Palestinian state; they will curtail (if not eliminate) arms sales to Israel; they will promote international financial sanctions against Israel, isolating the country internationally. In short, they will be an existential threat to the State of Israel. I get it that Trump provokes a certain visceral repulsion. But he is the only president we’ve had to stand up to Iran, he has stood up to DEI, he has stood up to campus antisemitism, he got Europe on the road to paying its own way in NATO.
I was a lifelong Democrat. We haven’t changed sides. The Democratic Party has. They’re the baddies now.
There’s a lot of sense in this, and a lot of things I agree with. I’m not quite as much a one-issue voter, but my friend is correct: the Democratic Party is isolating classical liberals by moving away from them, chugging inexorably towards the “progressive” Left.
I decided that from now on that I will simply study harder the positions of candidates (realizing that what they say may not wholly reflect how they feel, which I think is true in El-Sayed’s case), and then vote for the candidate whose values align better with mine. Some readers will disagree, as this stand, if adopted by everyone, may lead to Republican victories in some swing areas. It could also do that by prompting people to write in candidates who don’t stand a chance. Yes, you may disagree, but never in a million years would I vote for Abdul el-Sayed simply because he’s a Democrat.
Photo of me in Spain in 2006. Thought balloons added with AI.
Welcome to the first Monday of the month: it’s November 2, 2026, the last day before the Midterm Elections, and Plan Your Epitaph Day. I’m going to be incinerated, so I won’t have one, but have a look at the gravestone of Mel Blanc as shown in Wikipedia. As Wikipedia notes:
Organizers of a ballot measure that would end Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system say the effort by Democrats to boost Mary Peltola’s Senate bid by stacking Tuesday’s ballots in an attempt to confuse voters should be the system’s death knell.
Since Alaska voters approved open primaries and ranked-choice general elections in 2020, opponents — most of them Republicans — have argued the system is too confusing for the average person.Now it’s been tainted by scandal involving the recruitment of a challenger with the same name as the incumbent. That has led to federal legal action, a Justice Department investigation and a separate state investigation.
. . . A similar referendum two years ago lost by 737 votes.
. . .Under current law, candidates for state and federal office in Alaska compete in one open, nonpartisan primary, with the top four advancing to November. Voters rank them in order of preference. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place finisher is eliminated and those votes are redistributed according to voters’ next choices. The process repeats until someone wins a majority of the remaining votes.
Ballot Measure 2 would return Alaska to primaries open only to voters registered to a particular party. That would be followed by a traditional general election where voters choose just one candidate.
I find the ranked-choice option confusing, and so would vote to repeal the system. After all, anybody can still run if they’re registered with a party (any party) and get the requisite number of signatures. Below is from the second article, with the NYT so proud of itself. Questions (in bold) are from NYT deputy editor Amy Gardner, answers are from the reporter, Kellen Browning:
Ballot-stacking is generally considered legal. Republicans have used the tactic in Alaska. What was newsworthy about the effort that led us to write an article?
Amy: It’s not unprecedented for campaigns or major parties to find decoy candidates with the same name as a major-party contender. But it is rare, and that’s what made the candidacy of Dan J. Sullivan unusual. We’ve also written extensively about other ballot-stacking efforts, by both parties — including in Alaska this year. Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy also became a subject of interest in the Alaska political world and beyond, and questions were being raised when he barely campaigned. There is also the fact that the Peltola campaign so vigorously denied it, for so long. That made it a bigger story, in the end.
I’d add: Dan J. Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher who lives in a remote village accessible only by plane or boat. He has a Che Guevara magnet on his fridge. He gave money to a past campaign of Mary Peltola. It’s just a great story all the way around.
Kellen: Yes, Democrats have made the point that Republicans have done this, which is true. That doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t write about particularly glaring or interesting examples of it. And in this case, we were able to pull back the curtain and take readers inside the plan in an unusually detailed way.
I suppose Democrats will criticize the NYT for singling out Alaska, but I think Kellen’s response is okay, though past examples by Democrats of this kind of chicanery should have been mentioned. I can’t be arsed to go back and see if they were.
*Andrew Sullivan appears to have made the transition, at least for this election cycle, to supporting the Democratic Party. At least that’s the message in his latest column, “You know what to do” (subtitle”: It’s our last chance to show that Americans have not forgotten who we really are.” Although I no longer subscribe to his site, the link appears to give his full article. Some quotes:
“Pretend I’m on the ballot!” the president insists, as if there is any other Republican on the ballot. It’s been two years of governance without a Congress — the lifeless body effectively passes one bill a year while deferring in every other single respect to the cult leader — so voting for a Republican congressman or senator is, quite simply, a vote for Trump. And an endorsement of his de facto suspension of constitutional balance.
So vote for anyone other than a Republican next Tuesday. Or if that’s too compromising for you, don’t vote at all. We need to send a deafening message to bring the republic back to some kind of balance — loud enough that the remaining sane Republicans hear it, and emphatic enough to render Trump’s inevitable attempt to delegitimize it futile.
Trump’s second term is, after all, a near-perfect illustration of why the Founders were smarter than he is. Economic policy has been conducted by presidential whim, not by Congressional deliberation. Tariffs can maybe work if they are raised gradually, and stably — but not when they change from rate to rate and country to country from minute to minute. Foreign policy follows the same monarchical structures so that a full-scale war, initiated by a foreign government, was launched without the American public or the wider Congress even being informed in advance. And because power is concentrated so thoroughly around one deeply unethical man and his cronies, and because the Congress is controlled by his cult, corruption is at stratospheric levels.
Yes, the war was and is a terrible idea. Yes, prices for almost everything are higher, and the president has helped make them so through war and tariffs. Yes, economic security feels out of reach for everyone on the brink of the AI revolution, with an executive obviously a mere plaything in the hands of unaccountable moguls. Yes, immigration control, however needed, has been marred by brutality, mindless enforcement, and abrogation of constitutional rights. Yes, the president has broken every minimal norm of decency, ending his campaign with jibes against jihadists and faggots and freaks, as if slurs were all he had left against El Sayed and Talarico.
But these are all downstream of the constitutional collapse: an executive branch staffed by clowns and led by a madman with no countervailing force. The answer to that is simple: a Congress that can function again as the central political body in our democratic system, so we can finally draw a line under Trump’s kleptocratic idiocracy. That can’t happen overnight, but a demonstration that the constitution still lives can be seen by the world next Wednesday morning.
. . . Voting for Harris in 2024 was an excruciating decision to put resisting a deranged despot ahead of my ideal policy goals. I feel no such conflict now. I don’t have a huge amount of confidence that the Dems will use their power wisely, but any use of Congressional power to push back on the tyrant will do for now
This was not hard for Sullivan to right, and I am pleased that he did. He even promotes a Congressional investigation of Trump’s pardons, thinking that we may need a Constitutional amendment to prevent the abuse of pardons to reward your friends.
*I’ve learned that on any subject where there’s an accepted “progressive” point of view, Wikipedia will adopt it, rendering the “people’s encyclopedia” biased and misleading. This is certainly true for the history of Israel and of conflicts between Israel and its enemies. Quillette has an informative essay on Zionism called “How Wikipedia rewrote Zionism,” a distressing example of bias (you can find Wikipedia’s article here).
Before 7 October 2023, the English-language Wikipedia article on Zionism opened by describing a movement that emerged to “espouse support for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.” Since then, the opening has been reworded to say that this homeland was to be established “through colonization,” immediately followed by a new sweeping claim: “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” The sentence is backed by an unusually large bundle of 17 citations, drawn from historians including Benny Morris, Rashid Khalidi, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé, and to the casual reader it looks like the settled verdict of scholarship. It is not. The editor who introduced it in August 2024 has since been banned from the entire Palestine-Israel topic area for non-neutral editing. Yet the sentence survives, and for a year Wikipedia formally barred its editors from even discussing whether to remove it.
That matters because Wikipedia is widely regarded as a generally reliable source of information, and its influence extends far beyond the millions of people who consult it directly: it has also been incorporated into many of the datasets used to train artificial intelligence systems, thereby shaping the information those systems subsequently reproduce. That reputation and reach rest in large part on one of Wikipedia’s foundational principles—presenting a “neutral point of view.” Wikipedia articles are supposed to summarise what reliable sources say without taking a position of their own. This principle is particularly important on controversial subjects, and few subjects are more contentious than Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more broadly.
The sentence is only the most visible symptom of a much larger change. Over the past three years, Wikipedia’s coverage of this topic has undergone an extraordinary transformation, best exemplified by the Zionism article itself. I recently conducted a quantitative analysis of the article’s revision history and found that since 7 October 2023, about 80 percent of the article has been completely rewritten, and only about 20 percent of the pre-October 2023 text has survived.
More importantly, this dramatic, measurable change reflected a fundamental shift in the topics emphasised by the article. For example, the volume of material associated with colonialism rose roughly two-and-a-half-fold, and coverage of ethnic cleansing roughly doubled. At the same time, discussion of antisemitism and persecution—the primary historical drivers of the Zionist movement—was cut approximately in half, while the return to the historic Jewish homeland went from the most prominent of the four topics to the least.
. . .Similarly, the scale of this rewriting cannot be explained by any recent fundamental shift in the underlying scholarship. For example, the most cited author in the article is Benny Morris, who published Righteous Victims in 1999, the substantially revised The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited in 2004, and 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War in 2008, drawing extensively on Israeli and Western archival material that had become available over the preceding decades. The same holds for the broader academic literature on the subject: the key works on which the article relies had all been published long before the page underwent its wholesale rewrite. In other words, there has been neither substantial new evidence nor a major historiographical shift since 7 October 2023 that could plausibly explain why four-fifths of a mature encyclopedic article suddenly needed to be replaced.
The explanation lies instead within Wikipedia itself—specifically, in the editorial choices determining which sources were foregrounded and how they were represented. An encyclopedic article is not supposed to reflect the political preferences of its editors, but to fairly represent serious scholarship on the subject. The post-October 2023 rewrite did exactly the opposite. Rather than neutrally presenting the actual range of views found among historians, the article moved towards a simplistic, partisan account, dominated by the perspective of Zionism’s political adversaries. Nor was the partisan editing limited to deciding which parts of the scholarship to foreground and which to push aside. It also repeatedly distorted what the scholarship actually said.
The article shows how the changes were effected largely by cherry-picking quotes from scholars like Benny Morris, changing their meaning. As the article argues,
The real issue, then, is not simply bias. It is bias introduced in the guise of neutral, scholarship-based synthesis—and nowhere is that clearer than in the opening paragraph of the article, where a sentence introduced by an editor banned for non-neutral editing still tells readers what Zionism is.
Don’t expect any change in the article, though. Those who want to eliminate the bias will be steamrollered by assiduous antisemites who hover over the article to keep it biased. That’s the way that all this ideological slant is produced in Wikipedia.
*Over at The Spectator, Douglas Murray contemplates the damage done to the City of Light in recent demonstrations, and asks “Will we always have Paris?” (archived link).
Two worlds met in Paris last week. Thanks to the presence of Art Basel, some of the world’s most valuable art that wasn’t already in the city was shipped there. It arrived just in time for Paris to go up in flames. Most of the art fair went ahead as planned at the Grand Palais, but the final weekend was cancelled.
. . . Unfortunately reports from the front line all confirm a pre-existing prejudice of my own – which is that almost no group is more detached from society than those who call themselves ‘artists’. A particularly fine example came courtesy of a woman called Louisa Buck, who writes for the Art Newspaper. Reviewing the carnage in the city, as well as the contents of Art Basel, Buck (the daughter of the late Conservative MP Sir Antony Buck) twittered admiration not for the art but for the vandalism.
Taking to Instagram, she wrote: ‘For me the most powerful artwork encountered in the last 48 hours was the defaced sculpture under lowering skies in Place de La République passed on my way off to Gare du Nord that speaks volumes of the fury and disappointment felt at uncaring governments and savage policing – and it’s not just restricted to France.’ She continued to trill about the beauty of the black graffiti that made it look almost as though the figure of Égalité was ‘weeping black tears… (or maybe her eyes put out altogether)’.
Of course to voice such sentiments, any person – especially an art critic – must have had their brains fall out altogether. The monument in question is one of Paris’s landmarks, with the 19th-century sculpture centring around a statue of Marianne, the symbol of France. But the art world has long been dominated by an elite of ‘anti-elitists’. So much so that the daughter of a Tory MP and knight of the realm thinks nothing of celebrating the despoiling of France’s national monuments because of the need for justice, progress or some such.
. . . In other words, it isn’t just France’s new culturally enriching population who believe burning things down can be good. Some of its home-grown best are up for it too. One French woman, Bettina Zourli, a sociology lecturer, was caught on camera last week arguing with a beautiful young Parisienne who had been threatened with rape by the rioters. Zourli appeared to have no sympathy for the victim, and explained to the younger woman that she was simply ‘collateral damage’. She has since apologised for her ‘clumsy’ words.
Like so many other French activists and thinkers, Zourli spoke her truth. France’s best include people who believe – to use the old cliché – that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. But they never do make their omelette. They just leave every-one else with a bloody, burned-out mess.
The omelette making has spread to Italy and Spain, and I’d expect, as a result, to see Europe voting for hard-right candidates in the next year. But Paris will recover, as it always has, though it is slowly changing.
*The AP reports that a Brit named Karl Bushby is about to come home, after 28 straight years of walking.
Karl Bushby has spent 28 years walking home, but as he approaches the finish Monday, it’s not clear he’s ready for the audacious journey to end.
Pushing a cart loaded with camping gear up a busy country road in northern England about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the finish line, Bushby was uncertain of the future, anxious about the prospect of living in his mom’s basement and facing an identity crisis.
“My purpose and reason for living is about to end,” he said. “It’s going to be difficult … trying to blend back into a society that you just don’t know anymore.”
Bushby, 57, was just shy of 30 when he entered the unknown at the tip of South America on Nov. 1, 1998. Since then, he has walked 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) across four continents, navigated shifting ice over the Bering Strait and swam — a generous description of his technique — across the Caspian Sea and English Channel. He has battled almost every type of element and terrain imaginable through 30 foreign countries to get back to where he started half a lifetime ago.
Swampy jungle, scorching desert and frozen tundra slowed him down, but mountains of red tape helped turn what was supposed to be a 12-year trek into the epic he has dubbed the “Goliath Expedition.”
It’s taken nearly three times as long for Bushby to return to his mother, Angela, in Hull, as it took the hero in “ The Odyssey ” to make it back to his wife, Penelope, in Ithaca.
“Odysseus was a bit of an amateur,” Bushby quipped. “But, you know, I’ll cut him some slack — I haven’t met any giant Cyclops.”
The route, with the green part left to go. From yahoo! life courtesy of Karl Bushby:
. . . and an AP video. He is supposed to be home today, but there’s another video him having arrived in southern England. Thgt video also shows him crossing the Darnien Gap, the Bering Strait, and the English Channel (using the backstroke).
I am not sure that this trek is a good “reason for living,” but when you think of other people’s “reasons,” it doesn’t seem so outré.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is not comfortable. In fact, she is not doing well at all, and Andrzej fears the worst.
Hili: This armchair isn’t the most comfortable. Andrzej: Come on, let’s lie down together somewhere else.
In Polish:
Hili: Ten fotel nie jest najwygodniejszy.
Ja: Chodź, poleżymy razem w innym miejscu.
And, as a treat, Khadija Khan shows us that Cenk already is blowing an artery!:
Masih shows some Iranians celebrating Halloween–in Iran!
Halloween in Iran…
The Islamic Republic calls Halloween a “Western vice” and tries to ban it. But young Iranians have a message for the ayatollahs: You don’t get to decide how we live, dress, dance, or celebrate.
While the new “supreme leader “ and other mullahs hide in fear, the young generation is out there celebrating their own lifestyle.
The regime wants to turn Iran into a graveyard. This generation is determined to turn it into a dance floor.
It was an honor to be a part of this video by the brilliant @cenkuygur for @AbdulElSayed . It is so important to go out and vote! #makeamericadeerborn https://t.co/5FqIGBeCdj
From FB; Michael Che makes a tasteless joke about Israel on Saturday Night Live:
“This week, a record number of people voted in Israel’s election — which is great to see, regardless of if you’re on the right side, or the left side, or the genocide.” See for yourself at 2:09 below.
Music: Here’s Barbra Streisand, who along with Karen Carpenter was one of the two great female pop singers of our time. Here she’s singing “Somewhere,” written by Leonard Bernstein (music) and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) for the musical “West Side Story.” This is from Streisand’s 1986 “One Voice” concert, given at her home in Malibu, California. What more is there to say except that there’s a long introduction by Robin Williams along with comments with various notables, and the singing starts at 3:20?
The movie “Paging Hezbollah” came out two days ago, and it’s a film worth noting, as Liel Leibovitz has done at the Free Press. I don’t know if it will be available on Netflix, but for sure you won’t find it at the local theater, nor will you see it reviewed in the NYT (I hope I’m wrong).
As you might guess from the title, it’s about “Beepergate”, also known as “Operation Grim Beeper” or, as Wikipedia calls it, the “2024 Lebanon electronic device attacks.” And you may remember some details: how, over a ten-year period, Mossad created an elaborate scheme of shell companies and advertising schemes that would sell pagers to Hezbollah, who decided that pagers and walkie talkies were safer than cellphones. But the Israelis had put 3 grams of a cryptic explosive into each device, and then somehow sold thousands of pagers and walkie talkies to Hezbollah, rigged so that, after Mossad sent a signal to these devices, the receiver would buzz or vibrate, and, when the “notified” Hezbollah member tried to answer or clear them, they’d explode. The devices were set off on September 17 and 18, 2024.
This explosion would normally occur when the device was held beside the head, leading to head injuries, including loss of eyes or ears. They weren’t designed to kill, but to injure, taking Hezbollah members out of action but leaving them alive. Note that the specific targeting avoids injuries to non-combatants, refuting the notion that the attack on Hezbollah was “genocidal.” (Also note that Shin Bet’s current series of attacks to kill Gazans who participated in the October 7 massacre of Israelis is also targeted, again refuting “genocide.” We’ll read about that tomorrow.) At any rate, the ratio of civilians killed to terrorists killed was below 1:2—an extraordinary low figure. As Grok tells me when I asked for the mortality figures:
“Total: 42 (Lebanese government/Health Ministry figures; early reports were lower, around 32–37).
Pager wave (Sept. 17): At least 12 killed.
Walkie-talkie wave (Sept. 18): At least ~25–30 killed.
Civilians: At least 12, including two children (reported variously as an ~8–10-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy) and several healthcare workers. Lebanese officials, including Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib, stated that most people carrying the pagers were not fighters but civilians such as administrators or institutional staff. Health Minister Firass Abiad emphasized that many victims were in civilian settings (markets, homes, streets), included children and the elderly, and presented as non-combatants.
Hezbollah members: The remaining ~30. Hezbollah issued death notices for multiple fighters/members (e.g., at least 8–12 announced early on, including the son of a Hezbollah MP, with more overall). The Washington Post reported that most of the early toll (~37) appeared to be fighters based on the group’s notices. Many were part of Hezbollah’s broader network (reservists, logistics, political, or institutional roles) rather than solely active frontline combatants. Hezbollah has described most of the dead and wounded as its fighters or personnel.”
Despite this targeted operation and low civilian mortality, people were outraged, with some calling it an Israeli war crime. I would take issue with that, and for sure Hezbollah would have done it to Israel if they had the capacity and smarts. And you won’t find a lower ratio of civilians/combatants killed in any such operation.
At any rate, here’s what Leibovitz says about the movie, starting off with a bit of jingoism (i.e., it’s a “feel good” movie) that I won’t reproduce:
Paging Hezbollah tells the story of how the Israeli military managed to trick the Lebanese terrorist organization into using beepers installed with plastic explosives, pressing the button one day in the fall of 2024 and watching the devices—and with them scores of hands, noses, eyes, and testicles—explode.
It’s a riveting tale, and the director, Justin Folk, enjoyed unprecedented access to Israeli officials, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to David Barnea, the head of Mossad, Israel’s legendary intelligence agency. Indeed, this was the first time that the Mossad chief sat down for an on-camera interview to explain in detail precisely how he and his team pulled off one of the greatest operations in modern military history.
Incredible as these details are, they might’ve, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, made for a mosaic of mere machismo, all boom and bluster and no soul. Thankfully, the man the Israelis trusted with telling their story also possesses a virtue no less important than the ability to spin a great yarn—a sturdy moral compass.
Rather than rush into his story, Folk takes his time explaining to his viewers what’s at stake. And at stake, he realizes, is the fate of our civilization, everywhere under attack by men hell-bent on death and destruction. Hezbollah, Folk reminds viewers who might’ve forgotten or have never really known, was founded in 1982 to murder not only Israelis but also Americans, a task at which the organization, sadly, once excelled: In 1983, the terrorist group bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American service members. That same year, it bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut as well, claiming the lives of 17 more Americans, before kidnapping, torturing, and executing others in years to follow, including CIA station chief William Francis Buckley. Folk shows us archival footage of these horrors, doing everything he can to help a generation reared on social media and enamored with blowhard banshees like Tucker Carlson realize who are the real enemies of Israel and America, and everywhere in the still-free world.
That history lesson, brief but deeply moving, is worth the price of admission alone. Hollywood these days is hardly known for its excess of moral clarity, which is why its luminaries love wearing the red hand pin, which appears to symbolize the lynching of two Israelis by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah in 2000. Folk delivers more candor and clarity in a few minutes than most of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters have in decades, giving us an unvarnished look at the merciless marauders at war with the West.
. . .it’s here that reality—and with it, Folk’s film—takes a turn to the fantastic. The solution, like something out of a particularly twisted episode of Mad Men, turns out to be not technology but advertising: What if, quips one female Mossad agent, a would-be Don Draper with a license to kill, what if we could make Hezbollah’s terrorists believe that only large devices could withstand the wear and tear afflicted by real, tough men? What if we could turn comically large beepers into status symbols for the terrorist on the make?
No sooner does the film pose the question than Folk cuts to an actual commercial, produced by Mossad, showing the supersize pager—think about three tins of Altoids stacked on top of each other and encased in black plastic—in a host of manly settings. You can get it wet! You can toss it on the sand! It’s indestructible, just like you! Another recreation of an absolutely true story shows us what happened next: The terrorists, enamored with the well-marketed gizmo, place their orders, giving Mossad a direct supply chain into Hezbollah HQ.
And the end:
Because some things in life, Paging Hezbollah reminds us, really are that uncomplicated. Some cultures cling to life and others sanctify death. Some create and others destroy. And when the two clash—onscreen and in real life alike—we have no other job than to watch with bated breath and applaud wildly when the good guys, against all odds, pull it off.
I applaud the cleverness of this operation—especially the elaborate advertising and sales campaign—and I think it was a good way to target a nefarious enemy. And I’m surprised but pleased that Israel uncharacteristically shared details of the operation with the filmmakers. But somehow I can’t share Leibovitz’s apparent glee, for it seems to celebrate the very sacralization of death that it abhors. Civilians were killed, and the terrorists had families. I think of this as a necessary tragedy, but not something that should bring glee. But I will try to see it.
