Welcome to CaturSaturday, September 13, 2025, the sabbath for good Jewish cats, and also National Peanut Day, celebrating goobers.
Where did the name “goobers” (or “goober peas”) come from? The American Heritage Dictionary reveals the answer: Africa.
Word History: Most Southerners recognize the terms goober and goober pea as other names for the peanut. Goober originates among the Bantu languages and is akin to the word meaning “peanut” in the Kongo and Kimbundu languages, n-guba. This regionalism is one of a small stock of words that entered American English from the languages spoken by the Africans who were enslaved and brought to the Americas during the 1600s and 1700s.
Here’s a video of harvesting and processing peanuts to make peanut butter. the lunch I have most often (when I have lunch, which is not often)
It’s also German Language Day, National Cachaça Day (in Brazil), celebrating a drink made from distilled sugarcane, Roald Dahl Day (he was born on this day in 1918), Bald is Beautiful Day, International Chocolate Day, National Defy Superstition Day, National Iguana Awareness Day and Fortune Cookie Day.
Here’s one of many funny fortunes from Bored Panda:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 13 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Update: They have caught a suspect in the murder of Charlie Kirk, who turned himself in with the help of a family member and also admitted he did the killing.
U.S. and Utah law enforcement officials said Friday that they had arrested a suspect in connection with the fatal shooting of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, ending an intense manhunt after the killing two days ago. The authorities identified him as Tyler Robinson and said that he had made statements to relatives suggesting he had committed the crime.
“We got him,” Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah told a news conference, saying that Mr. Robinson, 22, had been booked into Utah County jail and was believed to have acted alone. Law enforcement officials said they had physical evidence tying Mr. Robinson to the shooting, including messages he sent on the Discord chat app about needing to “retrieve a rifle from a drop point.”
The confirmation from authorities came shortly after President Trump said that a person was in custody in connection with the shooting. Mr. Trump said on “Fox and Friends” that the person had been apprehended after a minister involved with law enforcement had communicated with the person’s father.
A law enforcement official said Utah state and local police had made the arrest on Thursday night in St. George, Utah, about 250 miles southwest of the campus where Mr. Kirk was killed.
The capture came after two people were taken into custody on Wednesday, the day of the shooting, but later released after the authorities determined that they had not been involved. On Thursday, the authorities released video and photo images of a person seen on a nearby roof during the shooting and pleaded with the public for help finding answers.
A bit more:
Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah said in a news conference that a relative of the suspect had contacted a family friend after the shooting. That friend then contacted a sheriff’s office and told officers that the suspect had confessed, or suggested that he had committed the killing.
The Utah County attorney, Jeff Gray, plans to file formal charges against the suspect on Tuesday, according to Mr. Gray’s chief of staff. The suspect is expected to make his first court appearance, in a virtual hearing, that day at 3 p.m. Mountain time.
On Friday evening, Erika Kirk, Mr. Kirk’s widow, made her first public remarks about the killing of her husband in a live-streamed video, vowing that her husband’s mission would continue. Speaking from a podium in a studio in Phoenix where Mr. Kirk used to record his podcast, Mrs. Kirk said her husband now wears “the glorious crown of a martyr.”
And a heartwrenching video of the guy who asked Kirk his last question, from a diehard liberal. First, an intro:
The last person to speak to Charlie Kirk before his assassination was a liberal TikToker with a small audience who disagreed with Mr. Kirk on just about everything — except for their shared belief in free speech and raw political debate.
“I wanted to challenge him,” the TikToker, Hunter Kozak, 29, said in an interview at his home in Utah on Thursday. “He went with arms open to say, ‘Challenge me, please.’ ”
It was in that spirit that Mr. Kozak decided to attend Mr. Kirk’s rally at Utah Valley University in Orem, where he is studying math education.
He asked Mr. Kirk about mass shootings involving transgender people, and the two went back and forth for a moment before the shot rang out, killing Mr. Kirk. Mr. Kozak, standing a few feet away, at first thought the gunshot was a firecracker. Then he realized Mr. Kirk had been hit.
“I saw blood spurt,” he said. “I dropped to the floor.”
Mr. Kozak and his wife are unabashed liberals in a conservative corner of a deeply Republican state. Their living room is decorated with flags for Black Lives Matter, Ukraine, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, with a Star-Spangled Banner hanging among them.
. . .“As much as I disagree with Charlie, I appreciate that’s what he centered his campaign on — freedom of speech,” Mr. Kozak said.
Mr. Kozak said he was horrified by Mr. Kirk’s killing, as well as the scattered voices on the left who reveled in his death.
“I disagree vehemently with thousands of things that Charlie Kirk has said,” he said. “He is also a human being.”
“That’s a dad,” he continued. “The fact that a son is growing up without a father — that is inexcusable.”=
Here’s Kozak in that video. It is sad. It’s followed by a tweet showing the shooter fleeing the rooftop:
Officials released new unseen footage showing the Charlie Kirk shooter suspect fleeing after opening fire from the roof of Utah Valley University, before dropping down and running from the scene. The FBI says it has already received more than 7,000 tips. pic.twitter.com/Yx8RXcbf2U
— Captain Atom (@captainatomIDC) September 12, 2025
There is now more video of the “person of interest” (i.e., suspect) in the shooting of Charlie Kirk. Here it is along with a news report:
As for the motives, well, we’ll just have to wait.
*Thank Ceiling Cat that Nellie Bowles is writing this week’s news-and-snark column in the Free Press. I’ll steal just two items from her report, “TGIF: Prove me wrong,” a phrase used by the late Charlie Kirk. The first item is long, but I couldn’t leave anything out, so I’ll just post one long bit about Charlie Kirk describing the news coverage in the MSM, and a shorter one about Colin Wright:
→ Charlie Kirk: The persuasive conservative leader Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while taking questions on a university campus this week. He was seated under a tent that read “PROVE ME WRONG” and wore a shirt that read “Freedom.” Minutes after the father of two was murdered, cable news talking heads sputtered into action.
Here’s MSNBC contributor Matthew Dowd shortly after Charlie was shot: “I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” And: “You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place.” And also: “We don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration, we have no idea.” That makes more sense, right? A right-wing gun nut pointing a gun directly at the guy talking and pulling the trigger to celebrate him—that is definitely the most likely scenario. Later, facing outrage for its coverage, MSNBC apologized for these comments and ended Dowd’s contract.
Well, that’s MSNBC. But CNN? Within a few hours of Charlie’s slaughter, CNN anchor Abby Phillip was calling for the video to be censored, and did her best to do so from her pulpit. “The degree to which the algorithm on this platform is pushing video of the shooting is incredibly disturbing. There has to be some human that can turn the dial down in a situation like this.” Odd how reporters want much, much less reporting. Funny how she didn’t say that about a situation like, I don’t know, George Floyd’s killing. It’s almost like it’s political. Tommy Vietor of Pod Save America had the same reaction the day of the shooting, saying that “pushing” the video was “sickening.” Maybe it is being pushed, who knows, but it’s far more ghoulish to slaughter a polite conservative while he’s talking to college kids than it is to fail to control the algorithm tightly enough. Funny to see where their outrage goes. Popular talking head George Conway posted the image and lifespan of a young Nazi, to imply that the two men are similar, that we should be just as sad about Charlie as we would be for a dead Nazi, like we’re in a true civil war.
And then came the New York Times obituary. A classic. The headline: “Charlie Kirk, Right-Wing Provocateur and Close Ally of Trump, Dies at 31.” Right-wing provocateur. A person trying to provoke,if you think about it. As though there’s no belief system behind it. Just a provocateur. For the sake of it. In the mainstream media worldview, there are two kinds of people: those fighting for left-wing causes, who are described as people of conviction, activists for justice, deep believers in equality. And then there are those fighting for right-wing causes, who are described as provocateurs, cynics, racists, and shills. Archconservatives. They eventually changed the headline. But here’s the New York Times’ obituary: “He was so vocal in his willingness to spread unsupported claims and outright lies—he said that the drug hydroxychloroquine was ‘100 percent effective’ in treating the virus, which it is not—that Twitter temporarily barred him in early March 2020. But that move only added to his notoriety and seemed to support his claim that he was being muzzled by a liberal elite.” Fascinating. A man is murdered in public, in the middle of the day, while practicing his First Amendment rights, and the paper of record decides this must be the perfect moment to do fact-checking about hydroxychloroquine.
What you need to know from this: If your politics are that of a standard normie conservative man, your New York Times obituary will find the various things you said that weren’t exactly right (he got into hydroxychloroquine in 2020! Can you believe that?) and they’ll paint them in the sky. My politics are lib centrist, and these people would certainly celebrate my death, highlight my many errors, and refer to my defense of the SAT as my “repeated advocacy for a return to slavery” or something. What I’m saying is: Just try to stay alive because when you die, a New York Times reporter gets to juice your corpse for likes on Bluesky. MSNBC will invite talking heads on the air to suggest that the shooter could have been your mom who forgot to turn the safety on, we simply don’t know.
Speaking of, when I clicked into Bluesky to see what was happening, I was served hundreds of posts with people celebrating (I don’t follow anyone, so this is just what the standard Bluesky algorithm wanted to show me). Also dropping this right here: 34 percent of college students think political violence is acceptable, according to a new survey, writes Angel Eduardo. On Facebook, the first thing I saw was an old journalist buddy mocking Charlie and cheering his death.
And Colin Wright gets an item–a good one!:
→ Always go to Colin for the best fake, yet so very real, graduate work: Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist and now a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has been posting a series of the best, most unbelievable—but also very real—graduate papers he’s found. Colin, we needed this. Some examples include one that uses a “Gothic autoethnography” as a “framework” for “bearing somber witness to the haunting realities of mad black womxn’s slow murder due to interlocking systems of oppressions” (I have no idea what an autoethnography is, but I’m at work and fear looking it up will trigger some porn alarm). Also an “ethnographic narrative” about how universities perpetuate a “system that was built with a specific population in mind and filled with subtractive deep structures.” And, finally, a master’s thesis at UNC–Chapel Hill called “That Eggplant Is My Queer Community.” I have a lot of questions about that last one. Actually, I’d like to see a copy of it so I can really understand.
*Over at the WSJ, Peggy Noonan wrote an op-ed, “Charlie Kirk’s assassination feels like a hinge point.” I’ll leave out her request for prayers (yes, for real!) and quote her take on political change:
. . . . But the assassination of Charlie Kirk feels different as an event, like a hinge point, like something that is going to reverberate in new dark ways. It isn’t just another dreadful thing. It carries the ominous sense that we’re at the beginning of something bad. Michael Smerconish said on CNN Thursday afternoon that normally after such an event the temperature goes down a little, but not in this case, and he’s right. There are the heartbroken and the indifferent and they are irreconcilable. X, formerly Twitter, was from the moment of the shooting overrun with anguish and rage: It’s on now. Bluesky, where supposedly gentler folk fled Elon Musk, was gleefully violent: Too bad, live by the gun, die by the gun.
But what a disaster all this is for the young. Kirk was a presence in the life of a whole generation of young conservatives, and he set a kind of template for how to discuss politics—with good cheer and confidence, with sincerity and a marshaling of facts. He was literally willing to meet people where they are. Mainstream media has understandably presented him as a political person, but he was almost as much an evangelical one, a Christian unembarrassed to talk about his faith’s importance to him. All the young who followed him saw the horrifying video of the moment the bullet hit him. They will remember it all their lives, it will be part of their understanding of politics in America. They will ask: If you are killed for speaking the truth as you see it, are you really free? Is this a free country?
For young conservatives who have felt cowed or disdained on campus, Kirk’s message was no, don’t be afraid, stand and argue your position. That he was killed literally while doing that—I am not sure we understand the generational trauma there.
The political violence of the 21st century is all they’ve ever known—the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011, of Rep. Steve Scalise in 2017, riots on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022, the attack on Paul Pelosi the same year.
We like to say that something happened gradually and then suddenly. It’s from Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”: A character, asked how he went bankrupt, says, “Two ways, gradually and then suddenly.” That’s how political violence in America has been growing in this century. I would say the 2024 assassination attempts on Donald Trump, and now the assassination of Kirk, are the “suddenly” moments. The reality continues while the dark tempo is picking up.
We know this can’t continue and we don’t know how to stop it. That is our predicament.
Here are her solutions (besides prayer, which I don’t see as a solution but as self-help):
It has occurred to me that when a country stops making things like cars and toasters it turns its attention to making words, endlessly, sometimes brilliantly and constructively, often idiotically and offensively. People on social media think the words have to be sharp and dramatic. It sure would be nice to see us throttle back on the expressions and throttle forward on the reflection, at least for a while.
In the short term, increase security on everyone in our political life and maybe public life. Spend the money, public and private. Violence multiplies, it wants to increase, it imitates itself. Each incident excites the unstable. When it starts to speed up the first thing you have to do is slow it down.
We have to force our public officials—including judges—to get serious about confining the mentally ill.
The lst one probably refers to the stabbing of Iryna Zarutska last week by a mentally ill guy who had been arrested 14 times. I agree with Noonan’s last three suggestions.
*As a news and views piece in Nature Ecology & Evolution reports, scientists have discovered the cause of “sea star wasting disease”. The original paper is below (click to read), but the quote below is from the condensed popular version:
Beginning in 2013, sea star wasting disease (SSWD) decimated populations of 20 sea star species along the Pacific Coast of North America, from Mexico to Alaska. Despite seeing several sea star die offs over the decades, I was unprepared for the scale of an event during a dive in January 2014. Hundreds of Pisaster sea stars lay twisted and disintegrating where they would normally be hunting (Fig. 1) and the local population disappeared for several years. To the north, sunflower sea star (Pycnopodia helianthoides) populations collapsed by 90%, which removed one of northern California’s few sea urchin predators3. Unchecked, urchin populations exploded and reduced kelp forests by 80%, with the potential to affect nearshore fisheries. Although some species have started to recover, SSWD is still present at a quarter of the sites along the coast. After a decade-long mystery, the cause of SSWD has been identified. Writing in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Prentice et al. demonstrate that the bacterium Vibrio pectenicida causes SSWD, which provides insights into other marine diseases.
Of course “decimated” is used wrong (it doesn’t, at least until recently, mean “ubiquitous killing,” but let’s ignore that). Here’s a photo with credit and caption showing how the disease kills:
Marine diseases can be difficult to diagnose because few marine biologists specialize in infectious diseases, and marine pathogens often fall outside of medical–veterinary expertise. The slow identification timeline for SSWD mirrors other marine outbreaks: the Rickettsia-like organism (RLO) that devastated California abalone in the 1990s took a decade to identify; the ciliate that probably decimated Caribbean Diadema urchins was not confirmed until the 1980s; and scientists still have not determined what causes stony coral tissue loss disease, which is now restructuring Caribbean coral reefs. Early work on SSWD pointed to a novel densovirus; although not ultimately supported, the study highlighted challenges in identifying the true agent — particularly given the absence of visible pathogens in diseased tissue and the lack of unexposed controls in the wild.
To identify the cause of SSWD, Prentice and colleagues conducted seven controlled exposure experiments. Because healthy-looking wild stars could carry the disease, they used captive-bred, quarantined sea stars to demonstrate that healthy stars exposed to tissue or fluid from diseased stars suffered arm twisting, autotomy and death within two weeks. This did not occur with heat-treated or filtered inoculum, which pointed to a living non-viral agent. Through metatranscriptomic and 16S rRNA gene sequencing of experimental and field samples, they identified V. pectenicida as a potentially causative agent, previously known only as a pathogen from bivalve larvae. To confirm causation, they injected cultured V. pectenicida from diseased stars into healthy ones, which induced disease and fulfilled Koch’s postulates. Other studies of marine diseases might take heed that molecular diagnostics of bacteria and viruses associated with dead and dying organisms are not sufficient for determining a disease agent. Controlled experiments with adequate controls are also critical.
Even after Prentice et al. solved what killed billions of sea stars, the recovery of sea stars and the ecosystems they influence remains uncertain, and several questions remain. In particular, is SSWD transmitted from shellfish? The pathogen responsible for SSWD infects molluscs, which sea stars commonly eat; this suggests a potential foodborne transmission pathway, similar to other biotoxins that accumulate in bivalves. In mollusc larvae, V. pectenicida produces an immune-inhibiting toxin, which perhaps explains why bacterial cells were not detected in histology. Immunocompromised humans can become ill after consuming Vibrio-infected oysters, and sea stars might experience something similar. On the other hand, V. pectenicida strains might have evolved to switch hosts from bivalves to sea stars. Although host switching across phyla is unexpected, strains from bivalves that proliferate in dead stars might evolve the ability to transmit from sea star to sea star. Bacterial evolution towards increased virulence has been seen during oyster mortalities13 and some species of Vibrio trade virulence genes with other bacteria.
I don’t know how biologists can solve this one; you can’t just go injecting antibiotics into sea stars, and the bacterium resides in molluscs anyway. All we can do is wait until (and if) natural selection in the sea starts renders them more resistant to the bacterium. Here, read for yourself. The effect ramified through the ecosystem, reducing kelp forests and (they don’t mention this) perhaps sea otters as well.
*And from the AP’s reliable Oddities section, a beloved octopus, having laid (unfertilized) eggs, nears the end of her life. (Perhaps you knew that octopus females starve to death at a young age while zealously guarding their eggs. And because these eggs won’t hatch, it makes it even sadder.
A dying octopus in a Southern California aquarium is receiving an outflowing of love and well wishes as she spends her final days pouring her last energy into caring for her eggs — even though they will never hatch.
Many on social media have reminisced about seeing the giant Pacific octopus named Ghost when they had visited the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. Some shared that they had a tattoo of Ghost or would wear a sweater emblazoned with the beloved cephalopod in her memory.
“She is a wonderful octopus and has made an eight-armed impression on all of our hearts,” the aquarium said on Instagram.
Ghost laid eggs earlier this week and entered the last phase of her life cycle, known as senescence. During this period, the octopus will neglect her own basic needs like eating, instead focusing on protecting her eggs and aerating them to prevent bacteria or other harmful agents from growing on them.
Ghost’s eggs are unfertilized and will never hatch, however. In the wild, giant Pacific octopuses spend their whole lives alone and only come together for a brief instance to reproduce.
Ghost is originally from the waters of British Columbia, Canada, and arrived at the aquarium in May 2024 from a scientific collector. She was only 3 pounds (1.4 kilograms) then but now weighs more than 50 pounds (22.7 kilograms).
The average giant Pacific octopus lives for three to five years. Ghost is estimated to be between two and four years old, Jaros said.
Ghost was a “super active and very physical octopus” who enjoyed spending time with humans, [Aquarium VP Nate] Jaros said.
She was trained to voluntarily crawl into a basket so staff would weigh her and monitor her diet. Sometimes, she would push aside food her caregiver was offering just to interact with them more, Jaros said.
. . . .Her caregivers engage her in enrichment activities multiple times a day, putting food inside of toys and puzzles with moving parts to simulate what a octopus would do to hunt live crabs and clams in the wild.
One time, staff spent hours building a large acrylic maze for Ghost to explore.
“She mastered it almost instantly,” Jaros said.
While Ghost receives special attention in a private tank during her last days, the aquarium has already received a new octopus that will carry on her mission of educating the public. Staff will name the 2-pound (900 gram) octopus after spending some time assessing its personality, but it is already “super curious” and “seems to be a very outgoing animal,” Jaros said.
Here’s Ghost getting weighed:
@aquariumpacific Ghost’s weigh-in 🏋️♀️🐙⚖️ #animalcare #octopus #aquariumofthepacific
If you want to see a fantastic movie about the octopus, find and watch “My Octopus Teacher,” a documentary about a diver who spent a year befriending a wild octopus. The movie won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2021 and it’s mesmerizing. And I have to admit that I was leaking tears at the end when the octopus, guarding her eggs, wastes away to death. (They hatched, though.)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is sardonic:
Hili: Everything just makes me laugh.
Andrzej: Sounds like you’re in high spirits.
Hili: Exactly the opposite.
In Polish:
Hili: Wszystko mnie wyłącznie śmieszy.
Ja: To znaczy, że masz dziś dobry humor.
Hili: Wręcz przeciwnie.
*******************
From Cat Memes:
From CinEmma:
From Things with Faces, a terrified car:
Too many tweets today given Charlie Kirk’s murder. I’ll limit myself to the usual eight.
Masih posted about Charlie Kirk:
It is shocking and heartbreaking to see Charlie Kirk silenced for his views.
I didn’t know Charlie Kirk personally. But I know what it feels like to live under death threats for my words.
I strongly and unequivocally condemn this heinous attack. No one should ever be targeted… pic.twitter.com/qZA721MWPG— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) September 11, 2025
So did JKR (see the last line of this embed):
From Luana, the NYT makes a correction. Oy!
What a correction from the @nytimes on Charlie Kirk. pic.twitter.com/bXwcUAEzJ8
— Daniel Mael (@DanielMael) September 11, 2025
From Bryan, a hilarious version of the trolley problem (I bet it was an Acme Trolley):
Why my childhood understanding of physics and morality became warped. pic.twitter.com/GXAjpyxYmM
— Stephen R. C. Hicks (@SRCHicks) September 9, 2025
From Colin Wright via Nellie Bowles:
🚨New Master’s thesis—”That Eggplant is My Queer Community”—out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The author interviews “self-identified queer farmers” about how agriculture affirms their queerness, the “heteropatriarchal norms of agriculture,” and how they… pic.twitter.com/vuISMdC7Jx
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) September 9, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwith. He was 6 years old. If he'd lived, he's be 88 today.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-09-13T10:46:57.799Z
Two from Dr. Cobb, now back from Oslo. The first is also from the Auschwitz Memorial, and a survivor who turned 101 yesterday!
12 September 1924 | A Hungarian Jew, Tibor "Ted” Bolgar, was born in Sárospatak. In June 1944, he was deported to #Auschwitz from where he was taken to other camps. He was liberated during a death march from Muhldorf.Today he turns 101. Join us in wishing him a happy birthday.
— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-09-12T16:35:41.310698843Z
Matthew’s daughter Lauren gets a handshake after receiving her Ph.D. in Oslo. No robes for the candidate, though! (Her drawings are very nice, though, and notice that the thesis is on evolutionary genetics.)
Just finished! Congratulations to Doctor Cobb #2! Her drawings are throughout the thesis.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-09-12T13:26:14.636Z
Congratulations to Lauren (Dr Cobb #2) and the entire Cobb family on this wonderful accomplishment! The second generation continues the work.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a “necessary evil”, it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil. -Sydney J. Harris, journalist (14 Sep 1917-1986)
One of my absolute favorite op-ed journalists. So brilliant. I have all his books. I used one of his pieces as a reading during my wedding.
To the three people who dog piled on me yesterday over criticizing Charlie Kirk because my sources (Wikipedia, the Guardian, the NYT) are “biased”:
These sources aren’t as biased as you think. If they continue to promote “sex is a spectrum” (for example) it’s because a few reputable scientists continue to push it. Go after those scientists, not the sources. If they push Palestinian viewpoints it’s because they talk to Palestinians, who frequently lie (a hazard of war reporting.)
If you don’t like their coverage of Kirk, tell me what you don’t like and back it up with your own source. As Kirk himself said, prove me wrong.
A drive by comment about “biased sources” is just lazy.
On the sex issue and the Palestinian issue there is plenty of commentary available on both sides. For the Guardian, NYT etc to just push one side and ignore the other shows bias, so they are not excused. And that means they can’t be trusted on any other issue of woke salience either.
On Kirk, why don’t you give us some quotes that you regard as genuinely objectionable, and we can consider them?
For example, let’s pick the first on The Guardian’s list: “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.”
This is clearly a comment on today’s DEI policies under which hiring is based on identity not merit. If one doesn’t want people to wonder whether a black pilot is a DEI hire, and thus not been held to the same standards as others, then perhaps we shouldn’t have rampant DEI hiring?
(And yes, this is a very real issue, for example there are lots of horror stories coming about of medical schools about pressure to admit people from certain groups with vastly lower grades, and then ensure that they progress and qualify as doctors at the same rate as other groups.)
For Israel-Palestine issue, bias is in the eye of beholder. Each side thinks they’re right. In my view the Palestinians lie a lot but when it comes right down to it, how do I really know if it’s all lies? I have long supported Israel but lately I’m beginning if much more can be gained by current Israeli policies. Diminishing returns and all that.
As for Kirk, he was pretty much 100% Trumpist and I’ve got plenty to complain about with Trump, worst president ever (IMO).
Trump is very erratic and I’d never vote for him.
But…
Frau “diminishing returns” don’t mean the whole project is wrong.
They mean that one strategic aspect has been fucked up. Happens to the best of countries.
Onwards Israeli heroes. Screw up stuff they will, but they’re on the side of the Enlightenment – and there’s no greater prize against the forces of darkness.
D.A.
NYC
For the latest example just scroll up to see the belated correction by the NYT of their claim that the Israel-championing Kirk was an antisemite. Or how about the infamous NYT headline “Israel Bombs Gaza Hospital Killing 500” when in fact the bomb came from Islamic Jihad not Israel, it hit the parking lot not the hospital, and only a dozen or so were killed. I could cite many more examples but I’m sure you can find a list someone compiled online of fake news stories from the New York Times. Once known as the “paper of record” it can no longer be trusted.
As for the Guardian, it does not even pretend to be unbiased and can be accurately characterized as the Fox News of the Left. Most people who read the Guardian (as I sometimes do) know this.
The claim is that Kirk believed in replacement theory, holding that a group of elites in society are deliberately trying to reduce the percentage of the population that is white by encouraging mass immigration.
These elites are typically alleged to be Jews, for some reason I have never been able to figure out.
I’ve encountered these people online. They’ve never been able to explain what the elites (Jewish or not) gain from the scheme.
I do not rule out that Kirk could have believed in the replacement theory. It leads to intense suspicion of government, infested with malevolent elites (maybe the “deep state”?).
With the Guardian and NYT, you have to distinguish between news stories and opinion pieces. The Guardian is definitely left wing in opinion pieces but that article wasn’t an opinion piece, it was news.
But hey, the WSJ is full of people who won’t accept the NYT as a source of even news, so I’m hardly unfamiliar with the attitude.
Frau Katze, the NYT headline piece “Israel Bombs Gaza Hospital Killing 500” was news, not opinion. It was completely fake news put out by Hamas, and the NYT deliberately accompanied their fake news article with a photo of bombed-out rubble that had nothing whatsoever to do with the hospital in question, which was fully intact. They were caught pushing their anti-Israel narrative that had led Bari Weiss to leave the NYT.
As for the “replacement theory”, former Democratic Party advisor Ruy Teixeira and others have pointed out that as far back as the 90s this was an idea expressed by some Democratic politicians (including more recently candidate Hillary Clinton) as a way for the Democrats to stay in power forever. Like you I have no idea why some far right nutcases claim that Jews are behind it. I’m not super-familiar with Charlie Kirk but given his many prominent Jewish friends and support for Israel I very much doubt he thought that himself.
I already explained why the Israel-Palestine conflict is so fraught. News outlets treat the Palestinians as a legitimate source of news. I agree they lie constantly, but this how things go in war reporting. It’s the “both sides” formula.
You might be surprised to learn that many leftists are angry with the NYT for both-siding Trump.
Instead of attacking him they write these bland pieces using the “both sides” style.
So as the extremes get worse, they please fewer and fewer people.
I still read them, although never their Israel coverage.
Ceiling Cat help us!
It is a fact that Biden was flying hundreds of thousands of Haitians and other groups into the US. It’s a fact that many Democrats advocate for open borders. It’s also a fact that demographic projections show whites becoming a minority within a few decades. But if one suggests that there is a deliberate plan behind this then that is beyond the pale?
As for what Democrats gain: (1) Diversity! They believe their own propaganda, which deplores whiteness and lauds anything non-white. (2) Votes. They think immigrants will vote for them. (3) A desire to help those admitted. (4) A supposition that the economy needs workers (note, high-skill immigration from relatively prosperous countries does tend to benefit the economy; low-skill immigration from poor countries does the opposite).
Ok, you tell me why you think that Biden was flying hundreds of thousands of Haitians into the country.
Cole, Biden started the CHNV (Cuban, Hatian, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan) parole program in response to the high number of migrants from those countries crossing the southern border. It was modeled after the “Uniting for Ukraine” program that did the same thing for Ukrainians after many fled Ukraine and tried to enter through the southern border. People who applied to the program could stay in the US for up to two years if a person in the US agreed to financially support them.
This was his attempt to thread the needle, do something that solves the border crisis, but also appear humanitarian.
I think you are adding a level of maliciousness that is just not there. In your points
1) Diversity – yes no doubt about it, many democrats love racial diversity, but racially diverse doesn’t mean deploring white people
2) Votes – absolutely, anything politicians do is for votes, this is not working, many hispanic immigrants are very conservative and do not seem to have any loyalty to the democratic party
3) A desire to help those admitted – Yes, no question about it
4) Economy needs workers – Many sectors of the economy benefit from low skill labor such as agriculture.
In yesterday’s comments you said:
Wikipedia considers The Nation a “generally reliable” source yet their Kirk hit-piece was nothing short of slander. An article educating the universe that Kirk “was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist” closed with the assertion that, “his entire business was saying the other side was evil and dehumanizing them” but not before (unironically) mentioning Joseph Goebbels.
Likewise, CNN is a reliable source for Wikipedia. Here we learn that “Kirk was outspoken in his opposition to trans rights” yet there is no evidence to support this. Kirk actually took that whackadoodle Christian philosophy of loving his neighbour seriously – and for this there is plenty evidence. His stance on trans rights was that people are free to wear whatever they want and call themselves whatever they want so why would people call him an outspoken opponent and transphobe? Well, we all know the answer to that.
There is limited risk when using Wikipedia references to help understand mundane topics but for contentious topics you can be guaranteed that many sources are outright biased and there’s a high probability that selection bias excludes important information too. Caveat emptor.
So, should we lionise him? Absolutely. He was smart, well read, eloquent, compassionate, polite, brave, and, for all his effort to bring people together, was smeared for being “divisive” and got shot in the neck for it. And that’s why we should lionize him.
You need only watch the first 15 minutes of a very recent event to see a young man doing his best to have a positive impact.
Whatever your politics and whatever his, the world would be a better place with more Charlie Kirks.
The NYT headline said that Kirk had died. Not been killed. Not been murdered. Nothing to see here.
Colin Wright also updated that meme of the left moving leftward that meme of the left moving leftward.
I don’t think the Kirk’s death is a turning point. The violence has been with us for a while. Here’s a list someone put together on twitter. To my mind it should actually start with the BLM riots or even the shooting at the Congressional softball game in 2017. People in the comments complain that it’s one-sided, but no one seems to have take up that challenge to provide additional events.
I wish I could see it this way, Dr Brydon. But I’ve lost all hope. I do think this Kirk murder is the tipping point (to steal a meme). The events you highlight are examples of the normalization of political and social media driven violence. It is a ratchet. I am very afraid that the Kirk murder is the final click of the ratchet and sets the stage for disaster.
They may have reported “died” because their earlier breaking report said that he was “injured.”
That seems a plausible interpretation.
I’ll say that I disagree with the meme insofar as it implies that the right hasn’t moved further right, and I don’t think that’s a position one can reasonably hold.
There’s a significant difference between accepting a lost election and claiming a lost election as invalid. There’s a significant difference between being bitter about a lost election and storming the capitol over a lost election (an event which, incidentally, deserves a spot in that list of political violence incidents). And there’s a significant difference between yelling about one’s opponent’s policies and yelling about how one’s opponent isn’t an American citizen.
The modern progressive movement on the left isn’t treading new ground. It’s following in the footsteps of first the Tea Party and later Trump, with the Tea Party in particular being a notable point of comparison in that it, just like the Progressives now, lacked genuinely charismatic leadership (and there’s precisely zero chance the Progressives will let one of their much-lauded women lead. There’s a reason Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, both to the left of the party average, were villified while the geriatric Uncle Sanders with his history of sending cops after anti-arms-industry protesters was lauded. The likes of Ocasio-Cortez will absolutely experience the same if they dare to run against a younger Sanders-like).
Fact check:
If you slide the lines over so the ‘center’s are aligned, it’s clear that everyone¹ has moved towards the extremes. That’s pretty much a necessary consequence of drastically widening the Overton Window. Equal-opportunity chaos.
. . . . .
¹ Except once, for the author in 2012.
That is a fine list of left–> right political violence. But it does cut both ways.
2017 Charlottesville Car-Ramming
2018 Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting
2019 Christchurch Shootings …
and more.
https://www.cfr.org/timeline/far-right-terrorism-united-states
Jihadi terrorist attacks are far-right violence too; I would classify Islamism as ultra-far-right.
o7
To a great octopus.
Tragic though the lack of offspring is.
Clearly they need more octopuses. And possibly a bigger aquarium.
“We’re gonna need a bigger aquarium.”
🙂
D.A.
NYC
The Free Press has got it right in an editorial. There are many reasons why we are spinning down the drain of political violence but they put their finger on one of the biggest;
….such a depressing time
Although I disagree with increased culture of hostility and exclusion in universities, I do not see that the perpetrators of the cited political violence events have been radicalized university students. Please correct me if I am missing something, but it seems to be the unstable loners that are influenced by the social media cesspool that have access to guns that are the biggest problem.
Problems that have no solutions aren’t problems. They are just facts of life. Sorry.
As I recall, a few years ago a site I frequented — one which was dedicated to freethought, reason, humanism, and science — entertained the claim that when people on the Right were civil when presenting their ideas they were actually worse than those frothing conservatives spewing out naked aggression.
There was no real distinction here. It was all an act, a cover designed to hide hate, a show of “being reasonable” which needed to be rejected rather than welcomed. Friendly conservatives knew exactly what they were doing and weren’t acting in good faith. Don’t fall for it. Don’t engage with them. Don’t grant them the credibility of framing it as honest disagreement.
So many people I respected agreed, that I was rattled.
Marcuse’s disdain for “repressive tolerance”. Cue Bryan….
Something to keep in mind. Many of Kirk’s views are held by half the country. So when progressives say things like “Kirk deserved to die because he believed X,” the half of the country who also believes X gets the message: “they think I deserve to die, too.”
Yes Mr. L.
It indeed represents half the country.
Not necessarily me… but then I’m a “leftugee”, an aethist homeless!
D.A.
NYC
“You don’t have to rive like a leftugee”, pace Tom Petty.
For sea star wasting disease, why not identify resistant individuals in SSWD ravaged areas, test them for resistance to confirm, and start a breeding program for release back into the wild?
Jason Hodin at the University of Washington is doing outplanting of lab-raised individuals from non-selective captive breeding. They sort of assume that the few surviving adults used for this lab breeding were naturally selected for resistance during the outbreak. Selective breeding is hard to do because the life cycle is so long – at least several years from embryo to breeding adult.
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/11/14/sunflower-sea-star-wasting-captive-breeding/
Would that it were practical! But there is considerable expense, time, and high risk of failure. And where is the return? Is there economic importance? I am just placing myself in the shoes of an NIH director.
I just realized that the Sydney J. Harris quote I posted earlier was posted a day early as his birthday was September 14. Here is a quote that is for today.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
To have and not to give is often worse than to steal. -Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, writer (13 Sep 1830-1916)
I know all those sea stars from my summer at Friday Harbor Labs in 1982. They were everywhere, beautiful, colorful, big, and robust. If you’ve ever picked up a nice purple Pisaster specimen you know how strong and substantial they are. I have seen a few sea stars lately in the San Juan Islands, but still very few. My hope is that there are some sea stars that have some level of natural immunity that will enable the resistant animals to come back. Natural selection in action. If the bacterium is endemic to the mussels on which sea stars depend, then the sea stars might still recover but, again, it would seem to depend on the availability of genetic variation (for resistance to the disease) and the efficacy of selection. I don’t think that biologists will be able to do anything more than observe and hope.
Yes. “Decimation” is used incorrectly, as usual. It an annoyance, but I’ll get over it.
My thoughts too. I feel it’s a matter of watching and hoping.
I’ve heard that some tropical frogs that were devastated by that fungal disease are showing signs of more resistance now.
And I’m rooting for bats to recover from fungal condition that is plaguing them. It’s a tough world out there.
I can concur that “My Octopus Teacher” may cause a water-like substance leaking from one’s eyes.
“And then there are those fighting for right-wing causes, who are described as provocateurs, cynics, racists, and shills. Archconservatives.”
Nellie left out “grifters”. That’s the one they saved for folks at The Free Press.
“Just try to stay alive because when you die, a New York Times reporter gets to juice your corpse for likes on Bluesky.”
Possibly her best one-liner ever.
Yes, Mike. A winning line.
eggplant thesis pdf https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/8g84n3243?locale=en
Re the peanut processing video, they really should have run the voice-over past a native English speaker. IMO the Chinglish gaffes were very distracting; e.g, “self-propelled peanut comBINE machines”, Aw shucks, any midwesterner knows that these are COMbine harvesters for peanuts.
Re JKR’s “If … then you’re …” list — wow, she sure can write. If they still teach Rhetoric anywhere this would be an excellent example. (I forgive her for Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Plot.)