Reading time: If you need to know this, you’re at the wrong place.
Welcome to the Sabbath that was made for goyische cats: Sunday, October 5, 2025, and National Apple Betty Day. This dessert, pictured below, used to be called “Brown Betty,” and that’s still the title of its Wikipedia page (it’s simply apples baked with sweet crumbs). It’s pretty dry unless it’s warm and you top it with a big dollop of vanilla ice cream.
The discrepancy between the Wikipedia name and the day’s designation comes from accusations that the name “Brown Betty” was racist:
There is speculation as to how the brown Betty got its name, in that first written citation in the Yale Magazine the “b” in brown is not capitalized, but the “b” in Betty is. This has led some historians to believe that Betty was the name of the cook and creator of the recipe and that brown was in reference to her skin color. In the Original Picayune Creole Cook Book (1901) a recipe identical to the Brown Betty traveled under the name “Mulatto’s Pudding” furthering the idea that the sweet-sounding Brown Betty was more a race-based epithet towards its maker than a homey moniker denoting golden-brown bread crumbs.
I’m not having a dog in this fight; I never eat the stuff anyway, and can’t remember seeing it in a restaurant.
It’s also Global James Bond Day (the first Bond film, “Dr. No,” was released on this day in 1962), Rocky Mountain Oyster Day (yes, these are fried bull testicles, and some people like them), World Teachers’ Day (they got the apostrophe right this dime), and Do Something Nice Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 5 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The U.S. government is still shut down tighter than a drum, of course, but the WSJ sees something unique about this one, compared to the several other shutdowns we’ve all lived through. It’s pretty obvious:
Between 2013 and 2019, three government shutdowns were caused by Sen. Ted Cruz’s stand against the Affordable Care Act, Sen. Chuck Schumer’s push on children of immigrants and President Trump’s demand for border wall money.
The 2025 shutdown is about something deeper: a complete breakdown in trust.
Democrats don’t trust that the White House will take any spending agreement and adhere to it. The White House has for months routinely ignored congressional appropriations, keeping government funds from flowing as directed by Congress.
Trump, twice-impeached by Democrats during his first term and having survived two assassination attempts while out of office, doesn’t appear to trust the minority party on virtually anything. He has run his second term by uniparty rule, through narrowly passed Republican legislation and a record-shattering number of executive orders.
That’s left little hope for the trust needed to negotiate a deal. Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has already moved to cancel billions of dollars in congressionally appropriated money (Vought said he was freezing $2.1 billion in Chicago funds on Friday).
“I was just trying to figure out a process we could create that will first create trust,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) said of a failed attempt to broker talks.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.), meanwhile, suggested that trust had eroded so much with Democrats that he suspected the other party of staging publicity stunts instead of having serious talks.
Washington’s current dysfunction is a reflection of a broader, nationwide revulsion against America’s political system. Nearly two-thirds of voters believe the nation is too divided to address its problems, a recent New York Times poll found. Nearly 80% in a Quinnipiac University survey agreed with the statement that the nation is in a political crisis.
In the first eight months of Trump’s second term, the parties have operated in almost parallel universes. Major bipartisan legislation is rare.
Both parties are going through a metamorphosis. Like his remodeling of the Oval Office, Trump has completely taken over and refashioned the Republican Party in his image. There are fewer people in his cabinet attempting to stop him than in his first term, and he’s mowing through much of his agenda with ease. For Trump, Democrats are a political foil, nothing more.
If the Democrats are undergoing a sea change, let it be towards reason (i.e., the center) and not towards the “progressives.” Touting “progressives” as the Great Democratic hope is a recipe for disaster. In the meantime, I have revised my personal estimate of the length of the shutdown from a week to four weeks—or maybe more.
*Last night Israeli PM Netanyahu spoke in Israel about The Deal , claiming that Israel and Hamas are on the brink of an agreement about hostage. But all is not settled (bolded part below is mine):
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday night that Israel was “on the brink of a great achievement” and that he hoped to announce soon that the remaining Israeli hostages will be coming home from the Gaza Strip.
In a short speech in which he repeatedly rebuked those who have long demanded an end to the conflict in hopes of a hostage release, Mr. Netanyahu insisted that Hamas was only willing to free the hostages now because of the military and political pressure that he and President Trump had applied.
“I withstood immense pressure from home and abroad to end the war,” he said.
The prime minister’s speech came after Israel and Hamas had signaled a readiness to move forward with parts of President Trump’s cease-fire plan in what many hoped would lead to a diplomatic breakthrough.
Significant gaps still need to be negotiated to bring an end to the war in Gaza, but there have been hopeful signs over the last 24 hours. On Friday, Hamas said that it was ready to release all of its remaining hostages in exchange for prisoners in Israel, a key part of the White House peace plan, but the group did not directly address many other demands in it, including that they disarm and take no role in the postwar government of Gaza.
The Israeli government on Saturday morning said that it was preparing for the “immediate implementation” of the first steps of Mr. Trump’s proposal. Then Mr. Netanyahu said in his speech that the two sides were close to an agreement. Egypt said it would be hosting indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas in Cairo on Monday.
Mr. Trump exuded confidence that a deal was imminent, saying it was a “big day” while also exhorting Israel to stop bombing Gaza. He conceded that negotiators still needed “to get the final word down in concrete.”
Netanyahu also reiterated that the Gaza strip will be demilitarized.
Trump, of course, wants a Nobel Prize for this, but, putting that aside, this is a mixed deal. The hostages are freed, which is fantastic, and has heartened many Israelis, but we don’t know how many are still alive. Exchanging them for free Palestinian terrorists or other jailed Palestinians is the usual necessary evil. The disarming of Hamas and its insistence in participating in a postwar Gaza government is the nonstarter: Israel surely knows this won’t end terrorism nor lead to a peaceful “two-state” solution. Hamas must be completely disbanded, and I can’t see that happening. Absent that, it won’t be long until the rockets start flying from Gaza.
*We haven’t looked in at Andrew Sullivan for a while, and his latest column is a recurring theme here; it’s called “How utterly lost is the Left?” The answer is in the subtitle, “From UK’s Labour to the response to Charlie Kirk in the US, it’s paralyzed.” I’ll just give his opening, in which he bashes Kamala Harris (this has been verboten for Democrats until now), and a summary:
The other day I sat, slack-jawed, reading Kamala Harris’ book — which was not easy to do with my eyeballs permanently rolled into the back of my head. (On one issue that killed her campaign, trans policy, she still hasn’t got the slightest clue what she’s talking about.) At one point, I even tried to imagine what America would be like today if this woke lawyer had actually won last year.
Then it occurred to me that we already kind of know. We actually have a pretty good test case of exactly that: a center-left lawyer-politician coming to power last year after a massive immigration wave had discredited and ousted the previous incumbent. Enter Keir Starmer, my high school frenemy, and now prime minister.
But unlike Harris, Starmer has at least shown signs of understanding his problem: he kicked the far-left Corbynites out of the party, called out anti-semitism, and in his big speech to his party’s annual conference this week, spoke proudly of flying the Union Jack, saying “we placed too much faith in globalization.” In office, he backed Israel’s war against Hamas strongly for a year-and-a-half, followed the science by banning puberty blockers and sex changes for kids, tightened immigration rules a bit, and pursued deregulation of the private sector, especially housing.
So how is he doing?
In one recent poll, his approval rating is 18 percent, with 61 percent disapproving. His government, just a year old, is polling around 19 percent. And in his first year in office, the new anti-immigration Reform Party has doubled its support from 15 to around 31 percent. The Tories — who gave Brits a massive wave of non-white, non-European immigration after Brexit — are at a historic low of 15 percent. Boris may have done what no leftist could: destroy the most successful political party in the West.
This, to put it mildly, is an earthquake. A party barely a year old is almost more popular than the Tories and Labour combined.
. . . .Lefties have finally begun to accept they got immigration wrong and need to adjust; but they cannot actually stop believing that mass immigration is still a moral signifier, a virtue, an elevating repudiation of “whiteness”. As Biden blurted out in 2015, making white Europeans an “absolute minority” in America is a “source of our strength.” The Dems feel they have to adjust because the country is full of racists, and Trump is so dangerous. But they still believe their critics on immigration are “on the wrong side of history” and almost all bigots.
That’s where Ezra Klein is, it seems. In a podcast last week, he pitched the Starmer line for the Dems, and Ta-Nehisi Coates represented woke purity. Ezra crossed a woke line when he wrote in the immediate aftermath of the Kirk assassination that Kirk was doing politics “the right way” — engaging opponents, debating them, rather than demonizing or canceling them.
This, of course, remains anathema to the woke. In their critical theory worldview, those who oppose them cannot be reasoned with — because reason itself is a form of oppression — but only opposed, canceled or demonized, because all opposition to wokeness is rooted in ineradicable “white supremacy”. Coates is still peak 2020:
We’re not stupid. No amount of fake rhetorical moves to the center will work. When very basic things that most human beings take for granted — that foreigners are not citizens and citizens come first, that men are not women, that children are not adults — are deemed fundamentally immoral in one political party, that party deserves to lose.
And they will.
Yes, but there is no Democratic leader as crazy as Trump. Doesn’t a party that elected him, and often seems to worship him, deserve to lose as well?
*The Washington Post editorial board, in a group editorial called “Holding back gifted students in the name of equity“, is actually touting merit above equity. (Remember that “equity” now means “all ethnic groups should be represented in the same proportions as their occurrence in the population.”) How did this change of views happen? The villain guy this case happens to be the probable next mayor of NYC, as shown in the article’s subtitle, “Zohran Mamdani treads on dangerous ground by putting equity ahead of educational opportunity”. Apparently Mamdani, a “progressive,” has done what progressives do, though I was unaware of it:
Mamdani’s plan, first revealed in response to a questionnaire from the New York Times, would eliminate gifted programs for all children in public schools until they enter third grade. Currently, students can enter these programs as early as kindergarten based on nominations from their preschool teachers, as well as other measures such as report cards. The gifted program, which has spots for only about 2,500 children out of roughly 55,000 citywide, teaches the same curriculum but at a faster pace.
The left has long criticized the programs for exacerbating segregation in the city’s school system. Students who come from higher-income families are at an advantage of being selected, resulting in a disproportionate number of White and Asian kids. Black and Hispanic kids, who comprise 66 percent of total enrollment, make up only 21 percent of participants in these programs.
Mamdani’s campaign has also criticized the selection process. “Identifying academic giftedness at age 4 is hard to do objectively by any assessment, whether through testing or teacher nominations,” campaign spokesperson Dora Pekec said in a statement to Chalkbeat. Mamdani’s plan, she wrote, “will ensure that every New York City public school student receives a high-quality early education that enables them to be challenged and fulfilled.”
But what Mamdani and school systems that have made similar changes don’t seem to appreciate is that gifted children have different learning needs from their peers, just as children with cognitive disabilities benefit from education plans that are specific to them. It’s one thing to critique how the city identifies gifted students, which at young ages is not a perfect science. Mamdani’s proposal, however, would essentially create a one-size-fits-all educational experience that might not serve these children well. That would complicate teachers’ ability to tailor their lesson plans for their students.
Parents see the gifted programs as stepping stones toward high-achieving schools down the road. But the solution is not to take away opportunities from children who are currently benefiting from them; it is to expand the program and improve how the city identifies children from underserved populations.
Politicians tread on dangerous ground when their pursuit of equity comes at the cost of children’s opportunities.
I’ve never thought much of Mamdani. His proposals are unworkable and I suspect he harbors a hidden vein of antisemitism, manifesting itself as anti-Zionism. Yes, he’ll be elected, and AOC will be reelected next year. But if we try to elevate these people as symbols of a bright future for the Democratic Party, we will, as Andrew Sullivan noted, “deserve to lose.”
*From the AP’s reliable “oddities” section, we hear of a bear in Arizona running into a grocery store and galloping through the aisled:
A bear surprised shoppers at a southern Arizona grocery store when it walked through the front door and ran around inside for a few minutes before exiting the building.
Over the weekend, the bear was seen in the neighborhood near the Fry’s location and was spotted again Monday behind the store before entering it.
Right before entering the store, the animal bumped up against the automatic doors and managed to eventually walk in, said Darren Wright, a spokesperson for the Oro Valley Police Department.
“It just ran around,” Wright said. “I don’t think it did any damage.”
A video taken by a shopper showed a man looking for the bear inside the store. After peering down at his phone, the man looked up to find the bear within several feet of him. The bear ran away from the man.
The animal was seen at some point in the store’s produce section but isn’t believed to have taken anything. An officer who was nearby arrived at the store and worked to get people out of the building. Authorities lost track of the bear after it left the store.
“We have had several bear sightings in Oro Valley,” Wright said. “We occasionally get them coming out of the desert. But this is the most interesting interaction we have had with one.”
They should have let the bear eat what it wanted after the people got out. After all, bears were here before us and we have more food than they do. Here’s a video of the errant ursid:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili seems to be mocking god (she is an atheist cat):
Me: What are you looking at?
Hili: At artificial intelligence in the cloud.
In Polish:
Ja: Na co patrzysz?
Hili: Na sztuczną inteligencję w chmurze.
*******************
From Animal Antics:
From Now That’s Wild:
From The English Language Police:
From Masih: An imam IN SWEDEN proclaimed that it’s okay to hit your wife (not too hard, now!) if they are disobedient. This is IN SWEDEN. I presume it’s against the law there, but would the Swedish cops arrest a Muslim man for it?:
In Sweden, an imam openly announced: husbands have the right to beat their wives, the same misogynistic Sharia the Islamic Republic of Iran has pushed for decades. I’ve warned about this for years: if we don’t confront it, today it’s Stockholm, tomorrow it’s every European city. https://t.co/LtAZlLUf1r pic.twitter.com/JvycdT43QR
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) October 3, 2025
Simon has hopped briefly back to Twitter from BlueHair, and guess what? There’s good stuff on “X”, and Simon went to Rowling’s page!
I am if you’re the alternative. pic.twitter.com/bw8Xthicb5
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) October 1, 2025
From Luana, who, like me, will reluctantly cite this study when students or audiences ask, as they always do, “Is natural selection still acting in humans?” Yes, but not in a way we’d like:
“A massive UK study found that genes associated with earlier childbirth in women and higher BMI in men are being favored by natural selection. Meanwhile, genes associated with intelligence and educational attainment are being selected against.”
[Link below.] pic.twitter.com/aKnNo0Y00A
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) September 25, 2025
From Malcolm: an automatic chick vaccinating machine. But lordy, they look like they get the jab in the neck!
Automated machine vaccinating young chickspic.twitter.com/5pCbCs2O34
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 13, 2025
From my feed: a wily cat steals a supermarket fish and takes off like a bat out of hell. (This may be a setup.)
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/IQFmgWHOlz
— LAnDo NIFFIRG™️🇨🇦 (@llandoniffirg) October 3, 2025
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This German Jewish woman was gassed as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz. Presumably she was deemed too old to work at 54.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-10-05T10:33:32.292Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First: duck butts, something I see all the time when we’re rearing mallards in Botany Pond:
Mallards / Stockenten (Eich, Germany)#mallards #ducks #enten #birds #vögel #birdoftheday
Matthew calls this “a weepy”. Remember this show?
Robert Vaughn appeared on Junior Points of View – kids were invited to send questions. I loved Napoleon Solo and TMFU so, age 7, I wrote asking if he would marry my mum – my Dad had died in 1961. They read the letter out! Can’t remember RV’s response (kind, no doubt). My poor mum burst into tears.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-09-22T20:16:08.838Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance. -Vaclav Havel, writer, Czech Republic president (5 Oct 1936-2011)
Koran 4.34. As I understand it, the text doesn’t say “lightly”; that is added in by modern translators who at least recognize that perhaps the verse is not the happiest sentiment that a foundational religious text could utter.
Well, there is also plenty of Rabbinic literature in which wife beating finds approval, though there is no OT verse that specifically sanctions it — surprisingly enough, since treatment of women and wives in the OT is otherwise (largely) atrocious. (You can, e.g., kill your wife if you find out she wasn’t a virgin when given to you.)
There are also any number of NT verses which, again, though not explicitly allowing wife beating, are explicit in saying, e.g., that the wife is not the owner of her own body but is the property of the husband, and that she is to submit to her husband in everything, which obviously lends itself to extreme interpretations.
And of course there is an endless list of Christian preachers past and present who have sanctioned (and practiced) wife beating.
Don’t get me wrong, I abhor Islam in almost every way. Let’s just don’t pretend that it’s any worse than the OT or the NT and/or various avatars thereof.
(More modern versions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam which have jettisoned much of what their holy texts say and have adopted Enlightenment and Humanist values instead are, of course, a different matter in many ways. These synagogues, churches and mosques, however, have to be intellectually dishonest, in that they proclaim a special place for their holy texts, but must perform remarkable mental gymnastics in picking and choosing what they accept and what they reject from their holy texts.)
“Don’t get me wrong, I abhor Islam in almost every way. Let’s just don’t pretend that it’s any worse than the OT or the NT.” Sorry, but that’s not really a reasonable comparison. As you note, modern Judaism and modern Christianity reject wife-beating (of course), but that’s exactly the point: in modern Islam wife-beating is STILL regularly sanctioned from the pulpit. God bless those mental gymnasts throughout the Jewish and Christian worlds who oppose it.
There are also plenty of mosques and imams that have a much more liberal approach, as they have, lo and behold, been influenced by Humanism and the Enlightenment, not to mention a long Islamic tradition in which more conservative and more liberal interpretations have had their say. (There are, after all, also surahs that explicitly speak against hitting one’s wife.)
And yes, god bless the mental gymnasts! Only problem is, once they get into a argument with the fundamentalists, they turn themselves into ridiculous knots and generally lose the battles, giving the fundamentalists good press. They can’t, after all, just say, “we reject the OT and NT because it’s a bunch of nonsense and basically just accept Humanist and Enlightenment ideals, and we just cherry pick from texts so that we can act like we’re still Jews/Christians,” which would be the only convincing thing they could say.
Christianity rejected a lot of the Old Stuff with Jesus and the Enlightenment, Judaism has a (very lawyerly I note and enjoy) legalistic dodge around hte rough stuff. (Sanhedrin, Temple rebuilding, etc.)
Islam, though, is perfect. EVERY single word and dot in the Koran is forever, 100 p/c valid. It is utterly inalterable as time is frozen 1300 years ago morally and legally.
THAT is a huge operational difference between the 3.
D.A.
NYC
https://x.com/DavidandersonJd (for my “Iswamofobiya”)
Nonsense Anderson. Even within the Quran there are verses which are said to be superseded by other verses within the Quran. It is called abrogation (nashkh) in Islamic studies. It is from this concept that Rushdie drew his title “Satanic Verses”.
And also here, it depends on how fundamentalist or liberal the tradition is. You have plenty of Jewish and Christian streams that are entirely literalist, even today. (I have an uncle who introduced his book with the words “Since the Bible cannot contradict itself …”. And by “Bible” he means OT and NT together.) Others are more or less liberal. Similar with Islam.
Sorry, but again, you seem to be missing the point. There would be outrage within the Jewish and Christian worlds were ANY of their respectivs clerics to sanction wife-beating, yet the Islamic clerical world, the Islamic world at large, and the rest of the world too, is largely mum when that religion’s clerics sanction this loathsome practice. Comparing the ancient Jewish and Christian texts to their modern-world manifestations, we see a blindingly stark contrast with Islam’s historical trajectory: modern Islamic practice on this issue (and so many other issues) remains in the very Dark Ages during which the Koran was written.
Danny, I would suggest that support for wife-beating is rather less common among Islamic clerics and lay persons than you think (though, granted, all too common!) and significantly more common among Christian churches than you think. I myself have heard numerous Christians, primarily in the US (it would be similar and Africa and Asia, somewhat less so in Europe), express more or less open support for physical violence toward wife and children. I have also spoken to numerous Christians who, when cornered on the issue (because I use to view this line of questioning as my trump card), will profess that they, too, would go slaughter women and children if commanded to by their god, as he did in the OT.
Why is this? Well, Britain’s leaders are enabling about 700,000 migrants every year from third-world countries. Only about 1 in 20 of these will be a net gain financially (that is, paying more in taxes over their lifetime than they receive in benefits). The typical third-world migrant will cost the British taxpayer of order £1,000,000 eachover their lifetime.
They are roughly five times more likely than British people to be on benefits and to live in state-subsidsed housing. Crime rates are much higher (especially among African migrants, not so much among those from Pakistan and similar nations). And they have radically different cultures, and of course many of them are Muslims (Islam being the world’s most backward and harmful religion, which has a baleful effect on all countries where it is prevalent).
The net effect is that GDP-per-capita has not increase in 20 years, and wage growth has lagged other Western countries. We’re also in a spiral of the government raising taxes to fund all this, with over-taxation then leading to lower growth.
Since house building is occurring at only 10% of the rate of mass immigration, house prices have risen to seven times annual earnings, and are essentially unaffordable for the younger generation.
All of this is diametrically opposite to what the British people say they want and what they try to vote for. But the major parties continue to do the exact opposite of what the voters want.
They justify this by saying “boosts the economy!” (it raises GDP — more people, more money changing hands — but reduces GDP-per-capita; politicians always point to the former). If you probe further they’ll simply call you a “Racist!”.
And the police are now arresting 12,000 people a year for mere speech, for any comment on social media that any migrant might be offended by, in a desperate attempt to stop the British people complaining.
I wonder whether we will see a state collapse of a major European country because of that. The global demographics make white minority status inevitable, and it is also untenable to have one worker supporting five unproductive citizens.
Re Islam being the world’s most backward and harmful religion —
It’s a very big world out there. The parents of an albino child who was blood-sacrificed to harvest body parts for black magic would surely disagree (unless of course they were the ones who did it, or got a good price for the live child).
Fortunately the adherents of animism are safely stuck in the back of beyond far up the river in African countries and can’t hurt the rest of us, being too poor to travel even to the Mediterranean coast. (And very likely they were happy to be shut of their albino child to lift the curse that must have been placed on the family by some enemy in the village. Let’s hope there were no white missionaries or MSF doctors in the neighbourhood to take the blame, especially if the family was locally powerful and prone to grudges.)
Islam, on the other hand….
I agree that Islam is a good contender for “most harmful” overall, but animism is surely more backward.
Yes, Leslie. Horrible rural “traditional” stuff like albino eating and sacrifice of devil babies… isn’t legal, disappearing slowly.
As you’ve noted before Islam is not.
It is unalterable. And the legal code (broadly or actually) of 50 countries.
There’s a huuuge scale asymmetry here.
D.A.
NYC
1). If the bear had been allowed to eat all it wanted, who would pay the grocer for what it ate and spoiled -> rendered unsaleable by contamination? (Not to mention cleaning up all the bear scat.) Why not just invite all the bears in all the time for free eats? Access to food isn’t determined by who got there first but by who can drive whom off. This contest is usually determined by which party can produce more food, which it has no reason to share with those who can’t, but hope to take the land back anyway and demand to be fed by the labour of their competitors. Bears, you listening?
2). If the bear had been allowed to eat all it wanted, it would have become habituated to human food, for the taste and lack of effort required, and it would have come to associate people with easy food, which would make it aggressive and dangerous enough that it would have to be shot to keep if from killing someone.
The Democrats (in 2024) had a lot of problems. Trans was only one. The border was another. DEI was another. Inflation was another. It didn’t help that the Democrats ran one of their worst candidates (she got zero delegates back in 2019). One of Trump’s ads included Imane Khelif.
One Democrat (Seth Moulton D-MA) tried to move towards the center on trans issues. Quote (from him) “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that”. The backlash was fierce. His campaign manager resigned. There were demonstrations against him. He was denounced by head of the local Democratic party, the mayor of Salem, and the governor of Massachusetts. He is (in my opinion) somebody to watch. He may be the President of the US in the future.
Salam Massachusetts, eh? The irony is strong with this one.
I spelled ‘Salem’ correctly (I checked a map). Salem is an important town to me. My parents met in Salem. I have been to Salem (it has a great museum). In the era of clipper ships, Salem was a center of the world. That era is long over.
Oh bother, pipped by a typo. I really did mean colonial Salem, which IMO is only slightly less ironic in this context.
I just HATE to sound like I’m speaking up for equity rather than equality, but I think on these specific programs Mamdani may have a point. I think kindergarten is way too early to start sorting out the Einsteins and the Mortimer Snerds and putting them on separate academic tracks. Kids will develop at different speeds and that is ok. A kid not so bright at five or six might really intellectually and academically turn on at eight or nine. The developmentally impaired kids should be identified and given help and the rest should be treated much the same in the early grades.
If I correctly recall my schooling from the 70s it was around fourth grade that they started giving IQ tests and such. It was around sixth grade that kids were fast tracked or slow tracked. That, in my humble opinion, not as an expert on child development but just as a thoughtful observer of humanity, makes more sense.
It is a bit of a canard to point out that in the modern school system Einstein would have been slow tracked and Oppenheimer would have been fast tracked, but it is true. Poor Henri Poincaré would have been treated as a retard all throughout his schooling even though he was a first rate mathematical and scientific genius.
I say the kids should be sorted at around nine or ten, not earlier.
I see it similarly. I would only add that it would probably be a good idea — to get the best of both worlds — if the pupils could spend some time learning all together, so that they can all learn to get along in a setting where all are present and involved, including the strong/bright helping and teaching the weak/slow; but then be divided into groups according to their abilities for the rest of the time, where the bright can be properly challenged and the slow can be properly helped.
Suppose the strong/bright (or their parents) resent being required to teach/help the weak/slow? Isn’t that the teachers’ job? And suppose the weak/slow (or their parents) resent being required to be “taught”/”helped” by other children? An opt-out would be much too popular to be useful.
When children enter kindergarten already able to read and write, I’m not sure they can be accommodated outside of a gifted/talented program. There’s skipping a grade, of course, but that’s not necessarily going to be a good idea for the individual.
In the absence of a special program there’s tracking. My understanding is that tracking has gone out of favor – and it still might not be enough. The ability to read with comprehension jump starts everything else.
Mr. Cole, Miller and Sastra, I believe you folks are missing the point. The goal is to lower academic standards.
Yes. But the right way to lower standards is to introduce equity at the high school level. Make sure high schools don’t offer chemistry and physics and calculus. Teach Afrocentric anticolonialist math and that stuff.
Thaaank you, Rick.
I was happy about Comrade Mandami wanting to get rid of the gifted programs
– there’s no way to better immolate any Asian (and a lot of Jewish, and all bright kids – black, white, PR, and hispanic) support.
(I have no kids in the fight. Though I have a dog – no fights though!) 🙂
Mandami is a greater threat to NYC than 9-11, hurricane Sandy, the blackout and covid – all of which I “enjoyed” in my adult life in Manhattan.
D.A.
NYC
https://x.com/DavidandersonJd
Lower than they already are? Isn’t there a floor somewhere? Having the majority be “taught” to be functionally illiterate and innumerate seems way more than sufficient. Or does equity require that everyone be functionally illiterate and innumerate? In which case a Lord of the Flies system would be cheaper than having any teachers at all.
Love the password joke!
Gaza. We’ll see. Trump is trying to push and shove Hamas (and Israel) into the agreement, claiming a breakthrough when we really just have a framework for a breakthrough. Netanyahu, though skeptical according to reports, is playing along. Hence his feigned enthusiasm. Hamas sort of accepted the framework, but not really—not without revisions (and their trademark delay). They will certainly balk at removing themselves from power and disarming—which is where we’ve been all along.
All that said, war weariness just might push the agreement over the line—or a line of some sort. If Israel gets the hostages back, it will be free to clean up later if needed, as the leverage of the hostages will be gone. Hamas has been severely degraded, and some reports say that the leadership is so depleted and disorganized that it isn’t even capable of approving or sustaining a coherent agreement. That’s good. Hamas is in bad shape.
Whether there can be long-term peace depends on how Gaza will be governed and what role Hamas will play (ideally none). If the governance agreement breaks, or if Hamas rearms, Israel will most certainly have to go back in. Real peace, if it ever happens, will take generations.
I am quite certain that neither Israel/Bibi nor Hamas has any intention whatsoever of adhering to the agreement (in full).
(1) Currently, there is no solid agreement about the “deal”.
(2) The Hamas jihadis, unlike Qatar and the Hamas executive, have no incentive to accept it; victory or martyrdom are each far preferable. Deux vult is at least as powerful a motivator for today’s true-believing holy warriors as it was a millennium ago for the Christian Crusaders (who weren’t even promised an eternal freak-off of virgins to ravish).
(3) So Bibi and iDJT have no worries about having to adhere to anything. I’m sure Bibi knows the score; I’m pretty sure iDJT actually believes his self-aggrandising BS, or at least is orthogonal to its reality.
I know moderate Democrats think they are in the majority, but what is the actual evidence for this view? Progressives seem to have the upper hand in the Democratic party. Certainly the mainstream Dems are terrified of them.
Maybe moderate Dems will have a better chance of reforming the GOP? There was an article the other day claiming that Bill Clinton’s policies weren’t that different from MAGA policies. Maybe that is the path forward.
Data from 2020 and 2021:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/the-democratic-coalition/
Only 11 or 12 percent of Democrats identified as progressive in these surveys.
How do you explain this sort of thing, then?
https://youtu.be/aMSmoNOZJ9Y?si=JEvFm9-NsB_RrOnW
I’m not sure how much this explains:
Polarization in U.S. politics starts with weak political parties. Yale News, Nov 17, 2020
Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale, says weak political parties are responsible for the polarization in American politics.
https://archive.li/fqdGu
No mercy for wind sock weathervane Ezra Klein*.
*remember? “Charles Murray is a WAAACIST and so is Sam Harris, and an Iswamofobe” to boot.
Klein’s sickening jihad went on for months and columns. He was the damn DRIVER on the woke bus… until it ran out of gas. And now he begs for mercy at the side of the road by throwing the troons under the bus? No THANK YOU SIR!
There’s a difference between somebody who changes their mind as the facts emerge, – essential – and a conman grifter weathervane. THAT is your Ezra Klein.
And Coates is just a Kendi level fraud. His “Reparations” article in The Atlantic some years ago was… amazing. Frauds all.
Andrew Sullivan isn’t a fraud – he’s a worthy adversary, but he does love boasting about his important friends…. all the time. Then I realized.. in the UK, (like Japan and Korea) all the important people went to two schools and were mates. Quite an elite class.
I’m not criticizing it, for the UK, Japan and Korea’s success silent any bitching about that.. but it is different to our set up in the USA.
D.A.
NYC
… and in case you haven’t had enough of my berserk rantings….
https://x.com/DavidandersonJd (I dare ya!) 🙂
That success in the UK was from a different era. Now it appears they suffer from the incestuousness and insularity of the ruling class.
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein Hash Out Their Charlie Kirk Disagreement. Ezra Klein Podcast, Sept 28, 2025, 71 mins
Transcript: https://archive.ph/rfoT1
The video of the conversation is on YouTube.
Klein on how do you build power:
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein Hash Out Their Charlie Kirk Disagreement. Ezra Klein Podcast, Sept 28, 2025, 71 mins
The video of the conversation is on YouTube. Transcript is on archive.today (when I included the URL in this comment, it went into moderation – so I removed the URL). One can get the New York Times URL of Klein’s podcast with Coates through a simple Google search (it’s needed to get the transcript on archive.today).
Klein on how do you build power (bolding added):
I have some bad experience with Coates. I was banned from The Atlantic for posting some CDC data.
Regarding race and IQ?
I was attempting to post CDC data on BLLs (Blood Lead Levels) when I was banned (by Coates). However, you are essentially correct. The underlying topic was IQ. Note that BLLs have declined dramatically in recent decades as Lead has been removed from gasoline. Before you (and everyone else) treat this as 100% positive, keep in mind that the US used super high Lead in gasoline in WWII planes. The US (in WWII) approach was low-tech, but worked really well.
Of course lead isn’t inherently evil, just cumulatively poisonous when taken. AIUI there are now synthetic additives for making high-octane petrol.
This comment is meant for Barbaba KNox (CoC). Many chemicals have devised for raising octane levels (for example, my favorite, MTBE). However, none are as good as Lead (what I really mean is TML or TEL). WWII avgas was as high as 150 octane. Germany never had a chance. The US approach worked much better.
I was helping someone create an account and they wanted to use a single character for the password; “x”. I explained that it had to be at least 8. So the password is “atleast8”.