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.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, October 11, 2025. It’s shabbos for Jewish cats and also International African Penguin Awareness Day. Here are three photos I took last August of African Penguins (Spheniscus demersus) at Boulders Beach) near Capetown, South Africa. (h/t Martim and Rita):
Thousands of people began the long walk from the south to the north of the Gaza Strip on Friday after the Israeli military announced a cease-fire that mediators hoped would lead to the end of the two-year war.
Men carried bags, women carried young children, and older children held hands as they made their way up the dusty seaside road toward the ruins of Gaza City, which they were ordered to flee weeks ago. Some said they were heading north for the first time since the war began.
Though the surroundings were bleak, the mood was jubilant.
“The crowds are unbelievable,” said Shamekh al-Dibs, who fled south with his family last month. “People are so happy, even if what they’re going back to is destruction.”
Israel agreed early Friday morning to a cease-fire deal with Hamas, which the military said came into effect at noon. As part of the agreement, Hamas would release the remaining hostages held in Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, while Israeli troops would partially withdraw.
The deal was based on a proposal presented by President Trump last week. On Friday, a spokesman for Israel’s Parliament said Mr. Trump was expected to visit the chamber in Jerusalem on Monday.
Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Mideast envoy, said the U.S. military had verified that Israeli troops had withdrawn to the agreed-upon line inside Gaza. That, he said on social media, opened a 72-hour window in which Hamas must hand over the remaining hostages.
The bit below was in the NYT morning newsletter (h/t Luana). Bolding is mine:
This is where each side stands:
Hamas is taking a risk. The group would give up much of its leverage over Israel by releasing the remaining hostages. There is no certainty that by doing so, it will achieve its main goals: the complete withdrawal of Israeli military forces from Gaza and a permanent end to the war.
Netanyahu is thinking ahead. He had promised “total victory” in Gaza and is pulling back before Hamas has disarmed. But welcoming home Israeli hostages is a major political boost, and he will soon be up for re-election.
Trump claims victory. He craves the Nobel Prize Prize. He did not win today, but this agreement boosts his chances in the future.
Nope, the words in bold are not the main goal of Hamas, which is really a Palestinian state from the river to the sea, and a Judenrein Middle East. The goals given above are interim goals.
The Trump administration moved to begin laying off federal workers Friday while the government was shuttered, fulfilling threats from President Donald Trump to take advantage of the closure to shave off still more parts of the federal workforce he dislikes.
“The RIFs have begun,” White House budget director Russell Vought posted on X Friday afternoon, using an acronym for reductions-in-force.
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans, confirmed that the RIFs were starting, and said “they will be substantial.” The White House did not provide specifics on how many employees were affected, or at which departments.
The shutdown layoffs are the culmination of years of groundwork laid by Vought, an architect of the Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s second term, which outlined a drastically reduced federal bureaucracy. Vought’s office had threatened mass dismissals during the shutdown, perhaps even stretching into the hundreds of thousands, and told agencies they should “retain the minimal number of employees necessary.” Trump told reporters before the shutdown that he might fire “a lot” of people, and once the shutdown began, Vice President JD Vance and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt indicated that cuts were coming, as well.
The Washington Post previously reported that the dismissals were likely to total fewer than 16,000.
The layoffs run counter to recent internal warnings from senior government officials that such dismissals are legally questionable. In the first days of the shutdown, officials privately counseled agencies against conducting reductions in force, or RIFs, while the government lacks funding, because it would likely violate the law, The Post reported this month.
. . .The officials cautioned that the Antideficiency Act forbids the government from obligating or expending any money not appropriated by Congress, which means the government cannot incur new expenses during a shutdown, when funding has lapsed. The RIF process, which is extensive and involves promising severance payments, would probably be prohibited under the act, the officials concluded.
That theory will now almost certainly be put to the test. Even before the layoffs began, they drew a legal challenge from several federal unions. Their lawsuit, brought against OMB and the Office of Personnel Management on Sept. 30 over threats of dismissals, argued that the administration has no authority or ability to conduct RIFs amid a shutdown, in part citing the Antideficiency Act.
Another lawsuit! I’ve lost count of how many suits are pending against the federal government based on Trump’s actions. It must be at least several dozen.
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column in the Free Press. This week’s is indeed done by Nellie, and is called “TGIF: Shutdown blues.” There’s one about the University of Chicago:
→ Campus field trip: A University of Chicago professor was arrested and charged with violent felonies during riots at an ICE facility in the Chicago suburbs. Eman Abdelhadi, of the university’s Department of Comparative Human Development (which honestly sounds like a pretty racist field), is accused of aggravated battery against a government employee and resisting/obstructing peace. This is the same professor who in July said: “Fuck the University of Chicago, it’s evil. Like, you know? It’s a colonial landlord.” Fascinating. When did the University of Chicago get in on the radical professor game? I thought UChicago was one of the buttoned-up ones, but then again, I guess this counts as conservative thinking on campus lately.
More importantly, what in the heck is the Department of Comparative Human Development? Is it, like, hot or not? I actually think I’d be great there if so. I have some theories I’d like to share. Bar says with her new job I’m not allowed to talk about it, though.
→ Closed borders: According to new internal federal statistics obtained by CBS News—which, by law, I now have to say is a very great news service or I won’t get to eat dinner—unlawful U.S.-Mexico border crossings have fallen to the lowest annual rate since 1970.
In fiscal year 2025, U.S. Border Patrol agents recorded nearly 238,000 apprehensions of migrants crossing the southern border illegally—down from the 2.2 million made in 2022.
While you might think this comes from a nationwide effort, really the feds are on their own. On October 4 in Chicago, Border Patrol and ICE agents faced backlash from protesters. Police were allegedly ordered not to respond to the agents’ calls for help (the head of Chicago police denies this). Boys, I love a Chicago beef, but let’s remember you’re all on the same team here. It is interesting every once in a while, in our relatively functional society, to see a little flicker of what total breakdown would look like. Chicago PD versus Border Patrol would be quite a scene in our civil war, if that’s something you like to imagine (I just like to imagine the little burrows I would hide in).
→ Beautiful, if odd:Nicholas Roske, the transgender woman who now goes by Sophie and who traveled from California to Maryland to try to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, was sentenced to just eight years in prison. In the ruling, the Biden-appointed judge said: “I am heartened that this terrible infraction has helped the Roske family. . . accept their daughter for who she is.” Wait, guys, are we doing heartwarming family reunions or are we putting a would-be assassin in jail? Like what’s going on here?
*Anna Krylov, one of my partners in crime, has written a thoughtful analysis of Trump’s “compact” offered to U.S. universities. If they agree, they get perks like grants (MIT has just rejected this compact). By and large, she thinks the compact is good, though she objects to a few of its stipulations. (You can see the compact, which has ten stipulations, here). Some excerpts from Anna;
Based on this initial input, I expected the Compact to be a gross infringement on university autonomy. I expected to find an outrageous set of demands, on the level of rounding up all faculty who criticized President Trump on social media and putting them on unpaid leave, instituting a mandatory prayer at the beginning of each class, setting up ICE checkpoints, demanding affirmative action for conservatives, and requesting all prospective hires to sign an anti-Woke pledge. But after reading the actual document, I realized that it is nothing of the sort.
The document, which is only nine pages long, reads more like an aspirational manifesto than concrete policy. It calls on universities to show their willingness to comply with existing non-discrimination laws, such as banning the use of race or sex in admissions and hiring and protecting women sports and spaces (Titles VI, VII, and IX). It also calls on universities to adopt the principle of institutional neutrality and to cultivate open discourse on campus. In addition, it calls for the restoration of academic excellence by strengthening merit-based admissions, using standardized tests, and curbing grade inflation. I found myself in agreement with a good 75% of the Compact, and I cannot wrap my head around why it generated such fierce opposition.
True, not everything in the Compact is acceptable — I find rigid caps on foreign enrollment, political litmus tests for foreign students, and a few other details objectionable. Also, I think the government should made it clear that all universities are invited to sign it, not just the initially selected nine schools. Such objections should be communicated to the government in response to their invitation to provide feedback. If these objections can be negotiated out, universities — including USC —should sign. This will signal to the public their good-faith willingness to reform and right their course. Below I discuss specific sections of the Compact and explain why I think signing it is the right thing to do.
Anna goes through the stipulations one by one, and, in the end, concludes that her school, USC, should negotiated the problematic bits but then sign it:
The key question, then, is whether the Compact is the right way forward. Aside from the concerns about specific points in the Compact I have already discussed, I have three general concerns.
First, I do not like the idea of only select universities being given the offer to sign—the invitation should be extended to everyone. Second, I would like to see organizations such as FIRE, the AFA, the Heterodox Academy, and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters be involved in shaping the Compact, and universities play a greater role. Ideally, I would like to see a consensus on the principles articulated in the Compact emerge among university leadership and the broader academic community, but this might be unrealistic, given the problems of ideological capture described above.
Third, incentivizing signatories with “increased overhead payments where feasible, substantial and meaningful federal grants, and other federal partnerships” is wrong—research funding should not be used as either a carrot or a stick. While essentially the same thing was done by using DEI mandates as a prerequisite for federal funding by the Biden administration, and by the decades-old practice of holding universities hostage to Title VI and Title IX (see here for a brief account), past misdeeds are not an excuse for new misdeeds.
To sum up, the essential ideas articulated in the Compact are excellent. The Compact is an opportunity for universities to signal good will, to reform, and to right their course, and to recommit to their mission of research and education. It is an opportunity to win back public trust. However, the process should be improved—by making clear that the offer is open to all universities, by allotting more time for finalizing the content of such a historic document, and by inviting the broader community of universities and organizations championing academic freedom to participate in this process.
We discussed this yesterday, and I more or less agree with her assessments of each “demand”, though I don’t at all like the idea of the government trying to control the behavior of universities. Further, some stipulations, like limiting foreign students to 15% of the student body, are maladaptive. But remember Biden and Obama also tried to control universities; it’s just that Trump’s reforms are from Trump, even though most of them are sensible. And because they’re from Trump, and universities are nearly all on the left, the stipulations must be rejected. We’ll see if schools like MIT start curbing grade inflation, adopt institutional neutrality, and get rid of its DEI structures. A WSJ op-ed, surprisingly applauds MIT’s rejection of the compact:
In a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, MIT President Sally Kornbluth wrote that the school can’t support the compact because it is “inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.”
That’s a pointed response to the Administration’s theme that signatories must commit to elevating merit and objective measures of accomplishment everywhere from university admissions to grade allocation. The letter notes that MIT “prides itself on rewarding merit” and “was the first to reinstate the SAT/ACT requirement after the pandemic.”
Ms. Kornbluth’s letter says MIT already “meet[s] or exceeds” many of the priorities that the Trump Administration required of the compact’s signers. More than 80% of undergraduate students graduate without debt. International students are capped at 10% “in service to the nation,” and that’s well below the compact’s demand of a 15% upper limit.
. . . .While universities need to change, the Administration’s overreach is likely to gain more decliners than adherents. A lighter touch might lead to more progress.
*Andrew Sullivan’s column yesterday is called “Why Bari Weiss matters“, with a subtitle, “Big media and higher education desperately need reform. For democracy’s sake.” Sullivan begins by showing how much trust both the media and Ivy League colleges have lost with the public, and then asks whether the media has gone completely down the tubes, becoming polarized and anti-Trump. This is where Weiss comes in:
And the truth is that the media is eminently fixable, and our job as journos is to fix it. If we already had, none of this would be happening. That’s why Bari Weiss matters at CBS, and why I am praying she pulls it off. It’s also why Bezos is right to rebrand the WaPo and bring in more intellectually diverse columnists; and why getting NPR off federal funding is important — so it no longer propagandizes on our dime. In my view, these are positive developments — even if they are rooted in Trump’s re-election.
If Bari et al. can return to mainstream media and make it less polarized and more empirical, it will be a mitzvah for the republic. We need these institutions. I’ve never believed that the old blogosphere, or YouTube, or the new Substack, could replace them. They matter. And as long as Bari understands that while both sides deserve scrutiny, only one is in power right now, and that is therefore where the main focus must be, she’ll succeed. It is vital she shows her anti-Trump mettle as well as her opposition to wokeness. If we are to regain liberal democracy, it will not be by continuing to one-side everything. It will be by guiding these institutions back to public respect.
He then mentions Trump’s “compact” with universities (see above), which he approves of:
The same applies to elite universities. I was prepared to be horrified by Trump’s memo of conditions for future federal funding, sent to nine institutions. But I wasn’t. The demands make sense: ending race discrimination in admissions and hiring (already illegal); ensuring intellectual and ideological diversity; mandatory SATs and grade transparency — anonymized, of course; tuition fees held steady for five years; an end to the gender madness; and foreigners capped at 15 percent of the student body.
In fact, very little of this piece is about Weiss; she appears to be a symbol of reform for both colleges and media, someone who is not supposed to “propagandize on our dime.” Whether she does is a matter for the future. I am not writing off Weiss simply because she lacks experience in television or is too you. My approach with her is simply wait and see.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili expresses her disdain for poor Kulka
Hili: This form of cohabitation doesn’t suit me.
Kulka: Maybe I shouldn’t have come here at all.
In Polish:
Hili: Ta forma kohabitacji mi nie odpowiada.
Kulka: Chyba niepotrzebnie tu przyszłam.
*******************
I finally have a tropical storm named after me (h/t Nicole):
My sister, @MariaCorinaYA , has become the nightmare of Venezuela’s dictator.
Across oceans and borders, women who dare to speak truth to power often pay the heaviest price. She called millions into the streets, and she paid dearly for it. Listen to our conversation, it is… pic.twitter.com/9KB9mHkdAF
From Luana. AOC gives her theory of “spiritual height.” Ladies and gentlemen, friends and comrades, this may one day be President of the United States:
After facing backlash over her body-shaming of Stephen Miller for his height, AOC proclaims her love and support for the Short King Community. She then explains her theory of height:pic.twitter.com/o9cl5vc9cl
Jordan Peterson’s daughter announces that he’s pretty sick:
Hey, as you know @jordanbpeterson has been really sick. A lot of people have been asking for updates so here’s one. He’s recovering slowly day by day but I won’t lie, it’s slow and scary. He won’t be back for another few months at least, probably longer. We’re not entirely sure… pic.twitter.com/wmS5Wy2tg8
This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. He was only 8 months old, and would have been 84 today had he lived. His mother was gassed with him, and his father died in the camp less than a year later.
This video, collected at ~500 meters depth during Dive 16 of the Windows to the Deep 2018 expedition on June 30, 2018, highlights a benthic fish (Atlantic Midshipman, Porichthys plectrodon) dwelling in a burrow, snatching a large midwater fish (barracudina in the family Paralepididae) with quill worms as onlookers. The snail was an innocent (and unfortunate) bystander to the whole thing as well.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people? -Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat, author, and lecturer (11 Oct 1884-1962)
A brief look at some of the reduction in force process (RIF) of the federal gub’mint as I recall from when our lab director took the preparation process very seriously (I think to scare the heck out of people into retiring because a RIF never happened then) during a RIF scare about twenty-five years ago:
Everyone (several thousand employees) had to develop a RIF resume which for longtime employees could run 8-10 pages or even more, as it included every position you had filled during your civil service career, its responsibilities and your accomplishments in each of those positions. For scientific and technical people, every promotion is essentially a new position because you have additional and different responsibilities. These resumes also included your publications and presentations record. These resumes would be used by human resources to establish something called “bumping rights” where people whose positions were scheduled for elimination in the RIF could bump someone in another more stable position and take over their job (whether you were really qualified for it or not), leading to a potential cascade in which that person might bump someone else who might bump….etc. these resumes took a couple of weeks to put together during which nothing else got done.
Severance pay turned out to be pretty generous for people with lots of years of service…I think it amounted to close to a full year’s pay for employees with around thirty years service.
As I have said before the discounting of the value of federal service through these wasteful bureaucratic exercises is very demoralizing to the workforce…which is of course part of the Project 2025 unsaid agenda.
I only worked for the Federal government for eighteen months, in 1989-90. I learned then, watching the budget battles in Congress, that Congress is the worst paymaster you can have.
The latest episode of the Pseudo-Archeology podcast is a review of “Sex is a Spectrum”. Interesting in that the host, Andrew Kinkella, is not a fan of the book’s premise, saying that sex is strongly binary. He also calls “Why Evolution is True” by Jerry Coyne fabulous.
Interesting to see someone take this in directly. He even mentions that most academics are afraid to talk about it.
Amidst all the scholarly ranting and gnashing of teeth, Danielle Allen, a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy at Harvard, wrote a generally supportive piece about the Administration’s proposed compact with higher education. A taste:
”I think my colleagues have rushed to judgment and are missing an extraordinary opportunity to do the right thing — in fact, two right things. The compact introduces a chance to establish a much-needed fresh relationship between America and higher education. It also offers an opportunity to pivot away from executive branch overreach and restore legislative supremacy.”
Good article. As I foreigner I had to read it to understand how Prof. Ashe’s proposal would re-engage the legislative branch, and I’m glad I did.
BTW, the Administration’s proposal to cap foreign visa student enrolment at 15% is good. Otherwise you will incentivize the springing-up of bogus “schools” that offer courses of interest only to foreign students and only because they provide a fig leaf of justification for the visa application. At many of these “schools” in Canadian cities like Brampton and Surrey, the entire enrolment is visa students. The educational load is light enough that enrolled “students” can work full-time at low-wage jobs, legally in Canada but when did it being illegal ever stop anyone? As in the United States, we don’t know if the “students” return home after they “graduate.” 14,000 of them claimed political asylum last year, so probably No, they don’t. All we know is that their student enrolment passes to the next class of visa students, providing a steady increment in permanent immigration. Canada winks at this because immigration is good, right? Diversity is our strength, and we do need low-wage workers from a class of immigration that most Canadians didn’t know about until they did.
Elite American colleges may see that any number of foreign students enrich their campuses without limit. But in Canada, highly rated universities get proportionally few of the foreign students. Most of the traffic is to two-year diploma colleges shunned by Canadian highschool grads who have better options and to mills that exist solely to harvest foreign tuition dollars….and provide a back door to immigration. A 15% quota would starve some of the legitimate schools but it would put the mills out of business.
Indeed. As you say, Hamas’s acceptance of Trump’s plan is only an interim agreement. Recall that there was a ceasefire in place before October 7, 2023. That, too, was an interim agreement.
The short clip of Ocasio-Cortez babbling about human height reveals a moronically conventional sensibility—precisely the feature of woke performance that
renders calling it “radical” so inaccurate. No wonder the wokies run in herds.
Naturally, Jeremy Corbyn’s old outfit and its friends marks the Gaza ceasefire in its customary way. Their announcement on Oct. 10:
” Tomorrow, we will march again in London in huge numbers calling on the British government to take meaningful action to end its complicity in Israel’s ongoing crimes against Palestinians and push this ceasefire into a lasting deal that is framed around principles of justice and rights.
Join us at 12 noon, Victoria Embankment.
End the genocide, stop arming Israel, stop starving Gaza.
Free Palestine.
Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Palestinian Forum in Britain
Friends of Al-Aqsa
Stop the War Coalition
Muslim Association of Britain
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament “
As a Reagan-era anti-nuker, I am saddened that CND has succumbed to the rot.
And in true form, revealing their expected level of classiness and grace, the Pharyngulites, along with their leader with permanent foot-in-mouth disease, were positively gleeful about the tragic situation that has developed with J. Peterson.
I don’t care for the person either, but it made me very angry.
Is common human decency now politically incorrect? Regarding issues of life and death, we really are all in this together.
Apparently Peterson’s daughter believes their family is being “spiritually attacked”.
I’ve long known that JP is all-in on Jungian woo (as a former True Believer you can trust me: any time he says something that baffles you or makes you cringe, that’s Jungian Theory), but this is a new one on me. Sounds more like Scientology than analytical psychology.
Whatever. Hope he recovers.
As someone who has a fondness for some of Jung’s non-woo non-transpersonal ideas, I’d appreciate any tips on what to particularly avoid.
His daughter also convinced him to follow a diet of only meat and salt. Some reports link it to his addiction to benzos. She seems like an evil spirit.
Re TGIF, I recommend clicking thru to the whole thing; it’s free this week for non-subscribers. I particularly like the item Amazon removes the guns from James Bond. A taste:
James Bond’s guns have been airbrushed out of the franchise’s artwork for Amazon Prime UK viewers. That’s right, some Amazon executives in the UK decided that James Bond had too much gun, which is like King Kong having too much gorilla.
Probably not a portent of the-end-of-civilisation-as-we-know-it, but really now. JB was once part of Brit cool, along with the Beatles, miniskirts, and much more. Does 007 now have a license to holistically pursue social justice? What’s next, a Final Folio edition of Shakespeare without the violence?
I was shocked to learn just a few minutes ago that Diane Keaton has died.
Oh. I am sad about that. Thanks for letting us know. I always kind of identified with her, being a bit off-centre myself.
Dr. Peterson has clearly (at least according to his daughter) been quite ill again. Wishing him a good recovery. Being in the ICU is no fun, especially for older people (like over 35.)
CIRS is something of a fringe diagnosis adduced to explain almost anything you want. I would call it transgenderism of the immune system. https://coem.com/chronic-inflammatory-syndrome
Here’s a weird coincidence. On 14 Aug 2025, a healthy-looking JP uploaded a podcast to YouTube featuring, you guessed it, two experts on CIRS! (Can’t tell when the podcast was filmed, only that it was broadcast on that date.) And here he is now, just recently transferred out of the ICU where according to his daughter he was treated for that very thing, which he had never heard of before reading up on it to prepare for the interview with the experts.
Note the first comment under the video (from a former worker in property maintenance):
I can smell [mold] the second I walk into these places and my throat closes up and my lymph nodes swell up. I left the industry because the greed was hurting people and I couldn’t be a part of it.
Replies to that comment get weirder.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people? -Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat, author, and lecturer (11 Oct 1884-1962)
A brief look at some of the reduction in force process (RIF) of the federal gub’mint as I recall from when our lab director took the preparation process very seriously (I think to scare the heck out of people into retiring because a RIF never happened then) during a RIF scare about twenty-five years ago:
Everyone (several thousand employees) had to develop a RIF resume which for longtime employees could run 8-10 pages or even more, as it included every position you had filled during your civil service career, its responsibilities and your accomplishments in each of those positions. For scientific and technical people, every promotion is essentially a new position because you have additional and different responsibilities. These resumes also included your publications and presentations record. These resumes would be used by human resources to establish something called “bumping rights” where people whose positions were scheduled for elimination in the RIF could bump someone in another more stable position and take over their job (whether you were really qualified for it or not), leading to a potential cascade in which that person might bump someone else who might bump….etc. these resumes took a couple of weeks to put together during which nothing else got done.
Severance pay turned out to be pretty generous for people with lots of years of service…I think it amounted to close to a full year’s pay for employees with around thirty years service.
As I have said before the discounting of the value of federal service through these wasteful bureaucratic exercises is very demoralizing to the workforce…which is of course part of the Project 2025 unsaid agenda.
I only worked for the Federal government for eighteen months, in 1989-90. I learned then, watching the budget battles in Congress, that Congress is the worst paymaster you can have.
The latest episode of the Pseudo-Archeology podcast is a review of “Sex is a Spectrum”. Interesting in that the host, Andrew Kinkella, is not a fan of the book’s premise, saying that sex is strongly binary. He also calls “Why Evolution is True” by Jerry Coyne fabulous.
Interesting to see someone take this in directly. He even mentions that most academics are afraid to talk about it.
Podcast link:
https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/pseudo
Amidst all the scholarly ranting and gnashing of teeth, Danielle Allen, a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy at Harvard, wrote a generally supportive piece about the Administration’s proposed compact with higher education. A taste:
”I think my colleagues have rushed to judgment and are missing an extraordinary opportunity to do the right thing — in fact, two right things. The compact introduces a chance to establish a much-needed fresh relationship between America and higher education. It also offers an opportunity to pivot away from executive branch overreach and restore legislative supremacy.”
https://ash.harvard.edu/articles/why-im-excited-about-the-white-houses-proposal-for-a-higher-ed-compact/
Good article. As I foreigner I had to read it to understand how Prof. Ashe’s proposal would re-engage the legislative branch, and I’m glad I did.
BTW, the Administration’s proposal to cap foreign visa student enrolment at 15% is good. Otherwise you will incentivize the springing-up of bogus “schools” that offer courses of interest only to foreign students and only because they provide a fig leaf of justification for the visa application. At many of these “schools” in Canadian cities like Brampton and Surrey, the entire enrolment is visa students. The educational load is light enough that enrolled “students” can work full-time at low-wage jobs, legally in Canada but when did it being illegal ever stop anyone? As in the United States, we don’t know if the “students” return home after they “graduate.” 14,000 of them claimed political asylum last year, so probably No, they don’t. All we know is that their student enrolment passes to the next class of visa students, providing a steady increment in permanent immigration. Canada winks at this because immigration is good, right? Diversity is our strength, and we do need low-wage workers from a class of immigration that most Canadians didn’t know about until they did.
Elite American colleges may see that any number of foreign students enrich their campuses without limit. But in Canada, highly rated universities get proportionally few of the foreign students. Most of the traffic is to two-year diploma colleges shunned by Canadian highschool grads who have better options and to mills that exist solely to harvest foreign tuition dollars….and provide a back door to immigration. A 15% quota would starve some of the legitimate schools but it would put the mills out of business.
Indeed. As you say, Hamas’s acceptance of Trump’s plan is only an interim agreement. Recall that there was a ceasefire in place before October 7, 2023. That, too, was an interim agreement.
The short clip of Ocasio-Cortez babbling about human height reveals a moronically conventional sensibility—precisely the feature of woke performance that
renders calling it “radical” so inaccurate. No wonder the wokies run in herds.
Naturally, Jeremy Corbyn’s old outfit and its friends marks the Gaza ceasefire in its customary way. Their announcement on Oct. 10:
” Tomorrow, we will march again in London in huge numbers calling on the British government to take meaningful action to end its complicity in Israel’s ongoing crimes against Palestinians and push this ceasefire into a lasting deal that is framed around principles of justice and rights.
Join us at 12 noon, Victoria Embankment.
End the genocide, stop arming Israel, stop starving Gaza.
Free Palestine.
Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Palestinian Forum in Britain
Friends of Al-Aqsa
Stop the War Coalition
Muslim Association of Britain
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament “
As a Reagan-era anti-nuker, I am saddened that CND has succumbed to the rot.
And in true form, revealing their expected level of classiness and grace, the Pharyngulites, along with their leader with permanent foot-in-mouth disease, were positively gleeful about the tragic situation that has developed with J. Peterson.
I don’t care for the person either, but it made me very angry.
Is common human decency now politically incorrect? Regarding issues of life and death, we really are all in this together.
Apparently Peterson’s daughter believes their family is being “spiritually attacked”.
I’ve long known that JP is all-in on Jungian woo (as a former True Believer you can trust me: any time he says something that baffles you or makes you cringe, that’s Jungian Theory), but this is a new one on me. Sounds more like Scientology than analytical psychology.
Whatever. Hope he recovers.
As someone who has a fondness for some of Jung’s non-woo non-transpersonal ideas, I’d appreciate any tips on what to particularly avoid.
His daughter also convinced him to follow a diet of only meat and salt. Some reports link it to his addiction to benzos. She seems like an evil spirit.
Re TGIF, I recommend clicking thru to the whole thing; it’s free this week for non-subscribers. I particularly like the item Amazon removes the guns from James Bond. A taste:
Probably not a portent of the-end-of-civilisation-as-we-know-it, but really now. JB was once part of Brit cool, along with the Beatles, miniskirts, and much more. Does 007 now have a license to holistically pursue social justice? What’s next, a Final Folio edition of Shakespeare without the violence?
I was shocked to learn just a few minutes ago that Diane Keaton has died.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/10/11/diane-keaton-dies-report/
Oh. I am sad about that. Thanks for letting us know. I always kind of identified with her, being a bit off-centre myself.
Dr. Peterson has clearly (at least according to his daughter) been quite ill again. Wishing him a good recovery. Being in the ICU is no fun, especially for older people (like over 35.)
CIRS is something of a fringe diagnosis adduced to explain almost anything you want. I would call it transgenderism of the immune system.
https://coem.com/chronic-inflammatory-syndrome
Here’s a weird coincidence. On 14 Aug 2025, a healthy-looking JP uploaded a podcast to YouTube featuring, you guessed it, two experts on CIRS! (Can’t tell when the podcast was filmed, only that it was broadcast on that date.) And here he is now, just recently transferred out of the ICU where according to his daughter he was treated for that very thing, which he had never heard of before reading up on it to prepare for the interview with the experts.
Note the first comment under the video (from a former worker in property maintenance):