Welcome to the Cruelest Day, and the last day of the month: March 31, 2026, and a day that will not be celebrated: César Chávez Day (he was born on this day in 1927). He was of course credibly accused of sexual abuse and sexual assault. California has renamed today Farmworkers Day, The AP reports on the rebranding efforts:
Efforts have been swift and widespread to rebrand events ahead of what typically was a day to celebrate the life and legacy of the Latino rights advocate on his birthday, March 31.
In Tucson, Arizona, last weekend’s celebration was instead billed as a community and labor fair. In Grand Junction, Colorado, it’s now the Sí, Se Puede Celebration. El Paso, Texas, will mark Tuesday as Community and Labor Heritage Day.
Lawmakers in Minnesota voted this week to end the César Chavez holiday in their state, while California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday signed a bill to rename César Chavez Day as Farmworkers Day. In Colorado, lawmakers were considering a bill to rename the voluntary state holiday there to Farm Workers Day.
ADRenaming efforts also are underway for dozens of schools, streets and other locations across the United States that are named for Chavez, including the national monument in Keene, California.
The resulting conversations have been anything but easy as supporters grapple with conflicted feelings while sorting out how best to honor what was a pivotal labor and civil rights effort in the United States.
The sorting out so far has involved simply taking off Chávez’s name from everything.
It’s also Eiffel Tower Day, International Taco Day, International Transgender Day of Visibility, National Clams on the Half Shell Day, National Tater Day, and National Crayon Day (does Crayola still make Burnt Umber?).
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 31 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Here’s this morning’s NYT headlines, emphasizing All the Bad News That’s Fit to Print. It’s pretty much all about oil and gas prices.
*And here’s the war news yesterday from It’s Noon in Israel (their bolding):
It’s Monday, March 30, and the thirty-first day of Operation Roaring Lion. The global price of oil has reached $115, up two percent since yesterday. Here are the latest developments while you were asleep:
- Spain has closed its airspace to US planes involved in attacks on Iran, going a step further than its earlier decision to deny American forces use of jointly operated military bases. The closure forces US aircraft to bypass Spain when flying to Middle East targets, though exceptions apply in emergencies. Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo said the move reflects Spain’s stance of not participating in “a war initiated unilaterally and against international law.”
- For the first time in his nearly 20 years as Prime Minister, Netanyahu successfully passed a budget in an election year—a milestone that secures the government through the end of its term. Even if the ultra-Orthodox were to withdraw from the coalition in the next legislative session and elections were called, the earliest they could be held would be September, making this the longest-serving government Israel has had since 1969. This historic budget came at a steep price: millions of shekels allocated to the Haredi sector.
- IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir has ordered the early removal of a battalion from Judea and Samaria, following an incident in which soldiers allegedly detained and assaulted a CNN crew while preventing them from filming at an illegal outpost. Soldiers were caught on camera stating that they were acting in revenge for the killing of settler Yehuda Sherman days earlier. The chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee has demanded that Zamir reverse his decision.
- President Isaac Herzog has responded to the Pardons Department’s recommendation regarding the pardon for Netanyahu. The department concluded that granting the pardon was inappropriate, but Herzog inquired politely—and firmly—whether it was legally possible despite its inappropriateness.
Now, on to the details.
Israel has invited the United States to relocate some of its regional bases from countries such as Qatar to Israel. But that raises a question:
Why is the U.S. regional headquarters in a country that actively sponsors terrorism?
It’s a relatively recent development. For decades, Saudi Arabia served as the U.S.’s regional headquarters. It was from there—not Qatar—that the U.S. assembled forces and ultimately launched the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait. After 9/11 and the Iraq War, the U.S. sought a host with fewer political constraints and a location that would recruit fewer jihadists by being farther from Islam’s two holiest sites. Qatar fit the bill: no political complications, billions of dollars in subsidies, and the ready-to-use Al Udeid Air Base.
Now, more than twenty years later, Israel is positioning itself as the U.S.’s new home away from home. The Israeli security establishment sees an opportunity to “reshape the map” of U.S. military positioning in the Middle East.
And more waffling by Trump, who’s claiming that there has been “great progress” in talks with Iran but also threatening Iran with bombardment of their power infrastructure if no agreement is reached. Further, he suggested yesterday that regime change had already been completed because whoever is in charge now is “much more reasonable” than the previous theocrats:
Though Iran’s clerical and military establishment remain in control of the country, and its most hard-line factions may even have emerged strengthened, Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One: “We’ve had regime change.”
“The one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead,” he said. He suggested that Iran had moved onto its “third regime,” and that American negotiators were speaking to “a whole different group of people,” who have “been very reasonable.”
*On Wednesday the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case of “birthright citizenship“, the Constitutional provision that ensures American citizenship for all people born on American soil. Trump has challenged this provision of the 14th Amendment by stating that people born when their parents are in the U.S. illegally, or if they are on temporary visas, are not entitled to citizenship. This was the object of one of Trump’s notorious Executive Orders, and the administration is being sued in New Hampshire by “a group of expectant parents and their children who would be subject to the order.” To me the case seems cut and dried: if you’re born here, you’re a citizen. But the NYT says that some legal experts dissent.
For generations, most legal experts and the courts have agreed that the Constitution guarantees citizenship to nearly all babies born in the United States.
But ever since Donald Trump issued an executive order to eliminate so-called birthright citizenship for the infants of undocumented immigrants and temporary residents, some conservative legal scholars have begun re-examining the history of the 14th Amendment, long understood as the source of the birthright guarantee.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order, and some conservative legal experts say that, in light of new scholarship, it might be a closer call than once thought.
“A lot of people, when Trump first started talking about it, thought this is crazy,” said John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, who was a top lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. “But in the intervening years, a lot more serious people are taking it seriously.”
Even as the legal debate has grown more robust, many legal experts, including Professor Yoo, remain confident that a majority of justices across the ideological spectrum will rule against Mr. Trump’s quest to redefine citizenship. Doing so would mean another major defeat for Mr. Trump in front of a court that includes three of his own nominees. Last month, the court invalidated the president’s sweeping tariffs on imports from major U.S. trading partners.
The issue:
The debate over the bounds of birthright citizenship moves from law review articles to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, in a historic case that will test the president’s power and the common understanding of what it means to be an American.
The Trump administration is asking the court to reinterpret the 14th Amendment, which was added to the Constitution in 1868 after the Civil War. The amendment reversed the Supreme Court’s infamous decision in Dred Scott, which in 1857 had denied citizenship to Black Americans. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the amendment declared.
The key question for the justices is what it means for a person to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, a phrase that courts have for more than 125 years interpreted as meaning nearly everyone born on U.S. soil.
But the Justice Department says the passage has been misread for decades to grant citizenship to the children of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, incentivizing foreigners to travel to the U.S. to have babies.
I’ll put my money on the court ruling against Trump.
*Iran has 1000 pounds of enriched uranium sitting somewhere, and now Trump has announced that he’s pondering using American ground troops to kidnap it.
President Trump is weighing a military operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium from Iran, according to U.S. officials, a complex and risky mission that would likely put American forces inside the country for days or longer.
Trump hasn’t made a decision on whether to give the order, the officials said, adding that he is considering the danger to U.S. troops. But the president remains generally open to the idea, according to the officials, because it could help accomplish his central goal of preventing Iran from ever making a nuclear weapon.
The president has also encouraged his advisers to press Iran to agree to surrender the material as a condition for ending the war, according to a person familiar with Trump’s thinking. Trump has been clear in conversations with political allies that the Iranians can’t keep the material, and he has discussed seizing it by force if Iran won’t give it up at the negotiating table.
. . . Before Israel and the U.S. conducted a series of airstrikes on Iran in June last year, the country was believed to have more than 400 kilograms of 60% highly enriched uranium, and nearly 200 kilograms of 20% fissile material, which is easily converted into 90%-weapons-grade uranium.
. . . The president and at least some of his allies have said privately it would be possible to seize the material in a targeted operation that wouldn’t significantly extend the timeline of the war and still enable the U.S. to be done with the conflict by mid-April, according to the person familiar with the discussions.
I wouldn’t want to be part of that operation. There’s not only the danger of radioactivity, but the U.S. has already signalled to Iran that it may go after the uranium. So of course they’re going to guard it extra closely.
*According to the FIRE Substrack site Expression (article by Sean Stevens), cancellations on U.S. campuses reached a record high in 2026. We’re talking about successful cancellations; because 2026 over yet, we don’t know about the final number of cancellations. But the success rate is over 90%, and that’s disturbing (h/t Luana).
Only three months into the year, campus deplatforming is already on pace to set a disturbing new record, and if current trends hold, 2026 won’t just be a bad year for campus free speech. It’ll be the worst year on record for campus deplatformings.
FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database tracks efforts to stop public expression on college campuses — disinviting speakers, canceling performances or film screenings, removing art, or disrupting events while they are happening. In just the first three months of this year, there have been 70 such attempts. Even worse, 65 of those attempts succeeded — the highest success rate we’ve ever recorded in any year with 10 or more attempts.
Here is the success rate of deplatforming (speakers prevented from speaking or appearing) since 2000, followed by the graph of number of deplatforming attempts over the same period. (Note that we’re only three months into 2026.) Everything is creeping up.
A couple of examples from this year:
This week, the University of Southern California scrapped a gubernatorial debate after excluded candidates complained about the race of those invited — they were all white. [See tweet below.] This shut down what should’ve been one of the clearest examples of a university serving as a forum for democratic exchange. Universities often claim to prepare students for civic participation. Canceling a debate involving major political figures because the controversy “created a significant distraction from the issues that matter to voters,” sends the opposite message. Namely, that even core political discourse can be treated as too difficult or too risky to host.
At New York University, the administration reportedly told student organizers that they could not invite certain music performers to a concert because the performers were affiliated with the No Music for Genocide boycott of Israel. That decision illustrates an especially troubling dynamic: universities are not only reacting to speech after the fact, but increasingly preempting it.
The University of North Texas removed an art exhibit after an anonymous tip alleged the show included artwork denouncing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. UNT also just revoked approval for a drag show after the university system lifted its systemwide pause on drag performances last August.
The Catholic University of America rejected requests from the campus chapter of Students Supporting Israel to host Randy Fine and Dany Turza at two separate events because the discussions would not feature a “balanced presentation” of views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
So much for freedom of speech. If you want to see everthing FIRE has recorded over the years, and who did the deplatforming, go to FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database. So far this year most of the deplatformings have come from the political right—a change from a few years ago when the Left did most of the censoring.
*The NYT has a semi-animated article on all the problems with Trump’s rush to remodel the East Wing of the White House into a giant ballroom. The normal scrutiny and approvals applied to such renovations have been almost completely neglected. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, directed by Carol Quillen, has sued the Administration about this matter:
The National Capital Planning Commission is scheduled on Thursday to take a final vote approving President Trump’s ballroom, clearing the last review for a major addition to the White House that was publicly unveiled in detail only in January. Last month, another panel led by the president’s allies, the Commission of Fine Arts, discussed the ballroom for 12 minutes before unanimously approving it.
The hurried reviews, with construction cranes already swiveling above the White House grounds, are an abrupt departure from how new monuments, museums and even modest renovations have been designed and refined in the capital for decades. And the ballroom will be worse off for it, architects warn.
“Even if we are slow and we make mistakes and we fight, that process has meaning to us,” Ms. Quillen said. No project belonging to the public should be the vision of just one man, she said.
That is, however, how the ballroom has often been described.
“President Trump is the best builder and developer in the entire world, and the American people can rest well knowing that this project is in his hands,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in a statement. Past administrations and presidents have wanted a ballroom for more than 150 years, he said, and Mr. Trump will accomplish it.
But in the sprint to complete it before the end of his term, the addition appears to have compressed the normal design evolution for any project.
As recently as October, the president was still increasing the ballroom’s capacity, the kind of decision needed at the concept stage. And the White House has said it plans to begin building in the spring, a timeline that would mean construction documents would have to be prepared even as the design was still under review. (Before a judge demanded in December that the project seek review by these two commissions, the administration appeared poised to skip them entirely.)
No, I don’t rest well knowing that Trump is the best “builder and developer in the entire world,” but, like so much of what Trump does, the deed is done before the process is vetted and adjudicated. So it goes.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, there’s a three-way conversation in the kitchen—about food, of course.
Andrzej: What are you doing here?
Hili: We’re waiting for appetite to rise again.
Szaron: She’s always talking like that.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tu robicie?
Hili: Czekamy na zmartwychwstanie apetytu.
Szaron: Ona tak zawsze.
*******************
From Barry. I think this is a real sign but don’t want to think what’s behind it:
From The Dodo Pet:
From Give Me a Sign:
From Masih, who is in Germany calling for European nations to help Israel and the U.S. eliminate the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran:
I just arrived in Germany, and will be giving a speech. And yes, I’m going to talk about international law. Because suddenly, some European leaders, including President Steinmeier of Germany, seem very passionate about upholding it.
Mr. President, You say international law isn’t… https://t.co/IcuzZ4ORIy pic.twitter.com/QN5NYgktaL— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) March 30, 2026
Larry the Cat is posting again:
Happy #Caturdaypic.twitter.com/jBfnAEy8r8
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) March 28, 2026
Re the FIRE report above, apparently Bill Maher tweeted a new rule just for that:
Bill Maher: “NEW RULE: Woke ain’t dead. Here in California this week, they canceled the governor’s debate because some people were outraged that the top 6 candidates were all white, even though this is what the people voted for, and the people are 62% minority.” pic.twitter.com/atYGuuQdeP
— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) March 28, 2026
Two from my feed. First, a real hero:
In 2013, a 3-year-old boy fell down a 49ft well in Romania. Firefighters spent 11 hours trying to get him out but couldn’t. They said it was too narrow and he couldn’t be rescued.
Then a 14-year-old seventh grader, who had just gotten home from school, volunteered to go down.… pic.twitter.com/yce5DbQGdf
— Dera II (@Neutral_OC) March 29, 2026
This is TRUE!:
This is what the internet was invented for
In 1996, a King Penguin named Lala became a local celebrity in Shibushi, Japan. After being rescued from a fishing net by the Nishimoto family, he refused to return to the wild.
He lived in an air-conditioned room in their home and was… pic.twitter.com/RISb7Vca6H
— James Lucas (@JamesLucasIT) March 30, 2026
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
The debate over the bounds of birthright citizenship moves from law review articles to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, in a historic case that will test the president’s power and the common understanding of what it means to be an American.
The Trump administration is asking the court to reinterpret the 14th Amendment, which was added to the Constitution in 1868 after the Civil War. The amendment reversed the Supreme Court’s infamous decision in Dred Scott, which in 1857 had denied citizenship to Black Americans. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the amendment declared.
The key question for the justices is what it means for a person to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, a phrase that courts have for more than 125 years interpreted as meaning nearly everyone born on U.S. soil.
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But the Justice Department says the passage has been misread for decades to grant citizenship to the children of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, incentivizing foreigners to travel to the U.S. to have babies.
And two from Dr. Cobb, who will be in Lyme Regis for a few more days. He hasn’t had a vacation this long in 15 years. I migfht have posted this first one but it’s worth seeing again. Elephants do indeed get drunk from this fruit (they also make a human cordial out of marula in South Africa).
Drunk elephants are real 🐘😂They just love Marula fruit and eat them when they’re fermented (with alcohol levels similar to beer) so end up hilariously tipsy! Reminds me of the Mead Hall on a Saturday night
— LadyFluffyOrca 📎 🇵🇸🇬🇧🇺🇦 (@ladyfluffyorca.bsky.social) 2026-03-28T10:42:25.803Z
Of this one Matthew says, “Old but droll and true (I checked Snopes)”:
A new contender for best headline
— Will Kerslake (@wkerslake.bsky.social) 2026-03-29T19:22:41.739Z
“Trump is the best ‘builder and developer in the entire world,’” (Source is Davis Ingle, no great authority but an an assistant press secretary for the White House.)
The Haredi are the bane of Israeli politics. They cut out their exceptions (to military service for eg) in the 50s when they numbered under 10,000. They breed. Big time, like (all?) religious folks so their power is extreme now and resented by many Israelis.
Qatar needs Al Ubeid A.F.B. more than we need Qatar. A few years ago, for about 4 years other Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) cut Qatar off, effectively blockading them – due to Al Jazeera and Qatar’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood (the most evil org in the world).
A US base was probably the only insurance they had against being invaded by their “allies”. A kerfuffle around that time in Bahrain had Saudi troops come in.
We could be pushing the perfidious, bad actor The State of Qatar around a LOT more.
Never understand why we/USA don’t have bases in Israel!
D.A.
NYC
The US has a large weapons stockpile in Israel, but no proper military base. If we had a base there, I wonder how the agreement between Israel and the US could be structured to allow US security concerns to extend out to Israel’s borders. IOW, could it make the PA and Hamas illegal because they endorse terrorism?
Or, imagine if a stray Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi, or Iranian missile hit the US airbase in Israel.
Thanks David. The Haredi feels like theocracy to me. The orthodox shul in our community always discounted conservatives and certainly the reform as not really Jewish. Of course conservatives discounted reform too. In any case this tribalism within the Tribe is a hell of a way to run the Jewish people enterprise.
And what about the violent Hilltoppers in the West Bank? Are they just extreme right wing or extreme orthodox or what are they and why does the Bibi administration continue to suffer or even support them?
The hilltoppers are bonkers, but so marginal as to not be relevant.
“West Bank BeHatted Maniacs” stories are often a media beat-ups to provide “balance” against the jihadis – who are really rotten, and many times more violent/murderous.
So while the hilltoppers would be like our American separatists, the world’s leftist media love to portray them as “Israel” when most normal Israelis want nothing to do with them.
D.A.
NYC
The intent of those who introduced the citizenship clause and the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was that they wanted it to include all children of slaves, but explicitly said that it didn’t include “Indians” (Native Americans) who “owed allegiance to their tribes”, where relations with tribes were dealt with by treaties.
This interpretation regarding Indians was then confirmed by the Supreme Court in the 1884 Elk v. Wilkins ruling.
The Supreme Court then ruled (1989 Wong Kim Ark) that the clause did convey citizenship to children of immigrants who were legal immigrants who were permanently domiciled in the US (where the “legal” and “permanent” were key parts of the ruling).
The Court has never ruled on whether the clause includes children of illegal immigrants who do not have permanent legal status in the US (and who, not being citizens, owe their primary allegiance to the county where they are citizens). The court could readily rule that it does not.
That would not be a stretch, and is likely in line with the original intent, and in line with the 1884 Elk v Wilkins ruling.
Sorry for the typo, Wong Kim Ark was 1898.
Birthright citizenship has never been the law of the land. The children of foreign service personnel have always been considered citizens of their respective countries. The law is 8 CFR 101.3 of the INA.
Frank that really only applies to the kids of diplomats who happen to give birth in the US while resident here on diplomatic visas. A small contingent.
“Birth tourism” (mainly Chinese tippy top elites) is also a very small contingent, most of whom are so rich they’d end up here anyway.
Scale always matters.
Always great to read your posts Frank!
D.A.
NYC
The media spin on the Iran war is ridiculous. It’s been a month.
I am halfway through Ward Carroll’s (Naval aviator F-14 vintage) video from yesterday in which he has Sal Mercogliano (merchant mariner) and Rain (F-16pilot) as panel guests. Really good knowledge. Full video is one hour. The first 40 minutes that I have watched this morning are very informative. Url should be
Sal is indeed the best chronicler of this war. His focus is right at the apex of action – shipping in the Straights.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Past administrations and presidents have wanted a ballroom for more than 150 years, Really? I can’t remember ever hearing anything re. a WH ballroom from past admins. Source?
Fait accompli is a typical tactic of people intent on destroying the irreplacable.
And Jeebus – there really is a Dildo Newfoundland! Suspect the pic is AI tho.
I was thinking about what the implications would be if the Trump admin succeeded in eliminating birthright citizenship, in light of their efforts to make people prove citizenship in order to register to vote.
If they succeeded, it seems to me that merely showing a birth certificate that proves you were born on US soil would be insufficient to enable you to register to vote. In addition, you would have to provide documentation that your parents were either US citizens or in the US legally at the time of your birth. And, no, even if you happened to have copies of your parents’ birth certificates, that wouldn’t be sufficient to prove citizenship, since your parent’s birth certificates wouldn’t prove that their parents were in the US legally at the time of their birth any more than your birth certificate does.
Since very few people could, without huge difficulty, prove their parents were in the US legally at the time of their birth, the effect would be to prevent not only the US-born children of illegal immigrants from voting, but most legit American citizens as well.
Note that most of the world does NOT have birthright citizenship. People who are legitimate citizens get a passport and/or ID card. IT IS NOT A PROBLEM ANYWHERE. No-one walks around with their birth certificate, because it is never needed in daily life.
Also, most places require proof of citizenship to vote, don’t have mail-in ballots, and don’t have voting machines. It is completely implausible to think that such things, which help in keeping the vote honest, should be a problem in the USA, for anyone. It really does look like the Democrats don’t want to budge here because they benefit from illegal votes. I realize that that is not proven (i.e., that illegal votes significantly influence elections), but, on the other hand, under the current rules, how could you prove that non-citizens are voting?
Having said that, the electoral college, first-past-the post, gerrymandering, lack of proportional representation, and so on lead to a system which is extremely non-democratic. If some third-world dictator in some banana republic instituted such a system and called it democratic, the reaction would be “Whom are you trying to mislead?”
The US would have to introduce a national ID to solve the problem.
PS: Canada also has birthright citizenship.
Yes, there are solutions, such as a national ID. But such solutions would take a while to implement, and I’m thinking in the shorter term – specifically, in terms of the next one or two elections. Most of the SAVE act is a desperate measure by the republicans to retain a majority.
It’s “terrorists” versus “freedom fighters”. It’s “we benefit the most from free trade” versus “those who benefit do so at the expense of others”. One could just as well say, with MORE justification, that oppsing the SAVE act is a desperate measure by the Democrats to retain votes which they really shouldn’t have.
Difficult to implement? In the good-ole U S of A? We’re talking about something which is simply NOT A PROBLEM in any third-world country.
And if for some strange reason it would really take too long, why aren’t the Democrats advocating it in the long term? Ditto with getting rid of the Electoral College, gerrymandering, the crazy non-linear “democratic” voting system, etc.? And, let’s face it, saying that having to have proof of citizenship would somehow disadvantage minority voters is some of the most racist stuff I’ve heard in a long time, up there with “sex testing for sports will have a huge impact on Black women because so many of them look male”, which has to be the craziest thing I’ve heard in a long, long, time, but is now standard woke doctrine.
I think you’re correct about the SAVE Act.
The entire Western Hemisphere, and most anglophone countries do. It is the default for “immigration countries.”
D.A.
NYC 🗽
If birthright citizenship is eliminated (though I doubt it’ll happen) then surely anyone who became a citizen for that reason would be grandfathered in. That would of course include actual grandfathers.
I read a while ago in the Economist that ize is the older British spelling versus ise. With ise becoming increasingly common in the 1800s. The UK and the colonies changed, and of course, the US did not. Canada seems to be a mishmash of use.
Of course, there are certain words like advertise and surprise one would never use. And of course, the most egregious of all, analyse. Despite what my spell checker says.
And my two versions of the Oxford dictionary use zeds as the default spelling. Oxford for me is my “go to” for spelling.
That’s why it is called the “Oxford Z” (see also the “Oxford comma”, which makes your writing clearer, more correct, and easier to understand). It is etymologically more correct. The “ise” comes from French, where it is the only proper spelling in the cognates. However, “z” should be used only for words where the “ize” ending means “make”, e.g. “marginailzie” means “make marginal”. So obviously not “advise” and so on.
Make an advert? Of course, an advert is an abbreviation of the word “advertisement”.
I would never use lyze as a verb, as in to break apart a chemical. It is always “lyse”! It is etymologically more correct. Hence analyse.
I want only to know what the correct spelling of “thagomizer” should be.
Yes, the Oxford University Press has traditionally preferred the ‘-ize’ ending because it better reflects the Greek root. It’s a common misconception that because American English mandates the ‘z’ spelling (with about 3 dozen exceptions, such as “circumcise”, IIRC), it is necessarily an American rather than British English spelling. Either version is fine in British English provided that it is used consistently.
It seems Noah Webster was instrumental in “popularizing” spellings that differed from the British ones.
The problem, Jez, is if we colonial brothers spelled it “circumsize,” then some would undoubtedly think it’s about girth expansion rather than tip removal.
Of the 70 cancellation attempts reported by FIRE, they code 18 as coming “from the left,” 16 as “from the right,” and 36 as “not applicable.”
Those 36 “N/A” cases all stem from one conference at the University of Arizona, the organizers of which had an apparent moral panic. “When several of the names of scheduled speakers and organizers surfaced in the ‘Epstein Files,’ organizers announced that the conference was canceled.” Perhaps it would be better to treat this as one cancellation attempt rather than boosting the numbers by counting every invited speaker. Similar overcounting appears elsewhere. The gubernatorial debate at USC counted as four cancellations; a single conference on Palestine at the University of Southern Maine was tallied as seven.
The USM event is interesting. University administrators canceled it because a speaker who was scheduled for a teleconference presentation had been sanctioned by the US government; administrators feared running afoul of US law. Nevertheless, FIRE codes it as a cancellation coming from the right, presumably because “Maine Senate Republicans also sent a letter to University of Maine System Chancellor Dannel Malloy criticizing the event and raising concerns about antisemitism and campus climate.” According to news reports, that letter criticized the event for being held in a building dedicated to a distinguished member of Maine’s Jewish community, pointed out inconsistencies with how an earlier conference on antisemitism was handled by the university, demanded information on university policies and procedures, and requested security measures for Jewish students and the broader campus. Exercising congressional oversight is a very different thing from demanding that a conference be canceled. Moreover, local reporting states that the university canceled the event days before receiving the letter from Republican legislators. (Granted, this doesn’t rule out the possibility of earlier, informal, and undisclosed pressure.)
I won’t claim that FIRE is intentionally inflating the number of incidents; I can see some value in counting the number of individual speakers affected by a single canceled event. But after digging a bit into this data, and after reading more about one of the cases, I am less confident in their overall numbers and political coding than I once was.
Is something wrong with my computer, or is the Auschwitz Memorial missing today?
I don’t see it either. Maybe ai helping jerry out….
Here we go: https://x.com/AuschwitzMuseum/status/2039085384743739563
It’s a sobering thought that at the rate of one post per day it would take 2,631 YEARS for the Auschwitz Museum website to commemorate the 960,000 Jews murdered there. (Not forgetting the non-Jewish people amongst the 1.1 million killed at Auschwitz, nor those murdered elsewhere by the Nazi regime.)
Indeed sobering.
N.tv – a news channel in Germany – reported today about the introduction of a mandatory death penalty in case of terrorism with fatalities. However, according to this news channel this applies only to Palestinian terrorists killing Jews.
Good news is that there are protests against the law already announced.
Courtesy of the British Telegraph, the next stage of ‘Anti-Zionism’ seems to be dropping the word ‘Zionisim’ in favor of ‘Jew’…
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/03/27/greens-for-palestine-antisemitic-whatsapp-messages/
Dr Cobb’s contributions were both priceless! The clip of the drunken elephants was hilarious (I wonder if elephants get hangovers too…?), but special thanks for alerting us to the existence of Dildo, Newfoundland. As far as suggestive placenames go, that one ranks up there with Intercourse, Pennsylvania, and the small town of Fugging in Austria, whose name until a few years ago was literally you-know-what!
OK. I am going to write this about the Ultra-Orthodox (hareidi) Jews. It may exceed the word limit, but I hope that Jerry will understand, it it should serve as a hazard warning about allowing extreme religiosity to influence national political life.
The hareidm are about 10-15% of Israeli Jewish society. While they vary highly, the majority of them are insular, follow isolationist, rabbinical commands, including voting patterns. The rabbis specifically command them that they must vote for the rabbinical candidates. They have been central to Israeli politics since the early 1980s, when their parties joined the governing coalition, and ever since, have used coalition politics to serve as the balance of power between liberal and nonliberal govts. In return for support, they demand that their education systems are separate, and generally do not teach secular studies (for men) past a certain level (fourth grade math and English), making the vast majority unfit for the workplace. The live almost wholly on government subsidies, and fare exempt from many taxes. And, of course, they are exempt from military service. In the past, this was tolerated by governments, but since October 7, the military is very short handed, with much of the population doing hundreds of of days of reserve duty, meaning that their families and businesses suffer in their absence. Their official reason is that these men are engaged in sacred studies, which protect the country. The reality is that even they don’t believe that—they do not call on Torah scholars to protect them from terror attacks. The reality reason is that they fear that if their young men go into the IDF, they may find that a nonhareidi lifestyle, whether religious or secular, will be better for them—and they will leave, reducing rabbinical political power.
And the reality problem is that their numbers are increasing, with average numbers of children in. Hareidi families at about 6-8, and often more than 10. It is a serious problem for Israeli society, and enabled by the Netanyahu government, which has given them far more subsidies than anyone in the past.
My old colleague David Feingold, whose wife was a Holocaust survivor and who did his post-doc in Israel in 1957, used to talk about what a wonderful place Israel had been before the fundamentalists showed up, or words to that effect.