Welcome to the beginning of the “work” week: it’s Monday, August 24, 2026, and National Waffle Day. To celebrate, watch this clip of Anthony Bourdain being converted to the humble Waffle House restaurant by chef Sean Brock. This one is in Charleston, South Carolina. Hungry?
It’s also National Peach Pie Day and Pluto Demoted Day, the latter marking that dreadful day in 2006 when, as the site notes:
. . . . the International Astronomical Union (IAU) demoted Pluto from planetary status and designated it as a dwarf planet. At the time, new rules said in order for a celestial body to be a planet it must orbit around the Sun, have a nearly round shape, and “clear the neighborhood around its orbit.” Pluto doesn’t meet the third criteria because its orbit overlaps that of Neptune for about 20 years of its 248-year orbit. For that period of time, it is closer to the Sun than Neptune is. Being that Neptune is much larger, it still is considered to be a planet.
The “overlap” criterion is bogus; Pluto is a damn planet! It can’t be a planet some times and a nonplanet at others.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 26 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has declared that, after Trump is putting big tariffs on Canadian goods, his country is “at war” with the United States, and that Canada is reluctantly cooling its relationship with America (article archived here).
An excerpt:
On Friday night, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada did something that few other world leaders before him have dared to do.
After days of intense trade negotiations with the United States, with less than an hour to go on a midnight deadline for a new round of tariffs from the Trump administration, Mr. Carney instructed his negotiators to walk away.
Then, he announced that once 50 percent tariffs came into effect on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, he would order retaliatory tariffs on the United States “dollar for dollar.”
Then on Saturday, in a lengthy televised address to Canadians, Mr. Carney brought fighting words to Canada’s act of defiance.
“Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And I promised: ‘That will never, ever happen.’ We are keeping that promise,” Mr. Carney said somberly, before reporters in Ottawa.
“Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away. And we are just getting started,” he added.
By walking away, Mr. Carney chose a road that no major U.S. ally has taken: With his country’s economy on the line, he stood up to President Trump and refused to accept the administration’s offer of a new trade relationship with tariffs permanently baked in. Britain, the European Union and other major U.S. trading partners have agreed to smaller deals that have been volatile and often left them worse off.
As I’ve maintained before, tariffs are never good for anybody, the ultimate victim here being not just consumers, but also the amicable relationship that the U.S. used to have with Canada. Canadians will pay higher prices, Americans will pay higher prices for goods made in Canada, and our norther neighbors are angry at is—and rightfully so. Here’s Carney announcing the rupture. (It upsets me that he refers to “America has changed” when it’s really Trump behind this, not all Americans.)
*Amit Segal, writing at “It’s Noon in Israel,” wonders whether the U.S. has “secretly won the battle of Hormuz“. Segal also attacks the press for “running with the Iranian line”:
What if Iran is the same way [as the Soviet Union in the late 1940s]—weaker than anyone thought, its post-war signs of stability in fact masking a steadily cracking foundation?
Many read the 13 days of U.S. strikes on Iran in late July as loud, inconclusive and ultimately swallowed by another round of deal rumors. Channel 14’s Tamir Morag reads them differently. The absence of strikes on the high-value sites deep inside Iran wasn’t hesitation—it was a choice to spend the campaign dismantling the radars and sensors that let Iran control the strait.
The conventional wisdom dictated that since a single IRGC survivor with one remaining drone is sufficient to make global shipping sailing the opposite direction, nothing short of convoys, and perhaps not even that, could reopen the strait. But a blind attacker is almost as harmless as a disarmed one, so CENTCOM went after the network of radars, cameras and sensors.
The radars went first. Iran had meant to protect them with mobility—a radar truck rolls out, paints the strait for a few minutes, finds a tanker, and folds back into hiding. The trouble is that a radar, the moment it switches on, becomes the most conspicuous thing over the water, and a missile rides its own beam back to the truck.
The cameras were the harder half. Electro-optical and infrared sensors don’t emit “kill me” signals, and the islands in the strait lent the Iranians a perch from which they could track a tanker without announcing themselves. According to Morag, there was no shortcut against passive sensors, only the slow work of finding them by eye and taking them out one at a time, until the whole network, radars included, was significantly degraded.
Despite being blinded, the regime is still selling the myth of control because the strait constitutes most of its leverage at the negotiating table. A press that wanted the story to be one of Trump’s failure is still running with the Iranian line.
. . .Today, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to announce the opening salvo against any country that provides “any type of lifeline to Iran” as part of Trump’s newly declared economic war. According to the secretary, the sanctions will “collapse this regime”—perhaps overly ambitious, but I’m glad to see regime change set as a goal, even if only in an economic capacity.
But as George Kennan said of the Soviet Union, “it cannot be easily defeated or discouraged by a single victory on the part of its opponents.” It will take “patient persistence” to bring down the enemy.
Forty-four years passed from the writing of his article to the collapse of the Soviet Union. If Trump can show the same moral and institutional persistence against Iran as the best-remembered of U.S. presidents did against the Soviet Union, I highly doubt it will take that long.
But Trump has never been one of “moral and institutional persistence,” for crying out loud, yet Segal seems to be counting on that. True, the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has picked up a bit, but it’s not nearly what it was before the war. As far as I can see, this is still a war of attrition on both sides: attrition of U.S. weaponry and reputation against attrition of Iran’s economy and well-being. But of course I’m not a pundit.
*Now that people are using AI-generated tweaks and prompts on their prose, should you disclose that? In an essay in Quillette, “Show us the prompts,” Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry answers “yes.” Remember that the rector at his former University (Ghent), who suspended Nathan Cofnas, “decided to outsource her inaugural address to AI” and also used AI to write her letter informing Cofnas he’d been suspended. And this stuff is spreading:
My former rector is not the only person to have been embarrassed by a digital ghostwriter. In March, the former academic turned Reform UK candidate Matt Goodwin published a book littered with fabricated quotations and non-existent references, which earned him the nickname “MattGPT.” In a case of cosmic karma, Steven Rosenbaum’s The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality turned out to contain half a dozen fake or misattributed quotes. Governments and consultancy firms have written expensive reports citing studies and papers that do not exist. An online database now lists more than 1,800 cases of AI hallucinations in court filings.
The good news for anyone recruiting an AI ghostwriter is that the odds of public mortification are falling. Fabricated quotes and references are just about the only way to catch a lazy author out, since there is virtually no innocent explanation for them. But as Large Language Models have improved, hallucinations like these have grown rarer. And without those dead giveaways, we are left with AI detection tools, which are irreducibly probabilistic. The best of them is Pangram, which boasts a false-positive rate of one in 10,000, given a long enough chunk of text and some reasonable assumptions. Writers accused of AI plagiarism routinely deny it, and there is no way to prove the charge conclusively.
. . . But something bugs me about all this. As a writer and non-native speaker of English, I am grateful for Claude’s proofreading help when I am drafting an essay. And as a reader, I have come across AI-generated poems, short stories, andjokes that I have really enjoyed— sometimes I knew their provenance from the start, sometimes I discovered it only later. Far from diminishing my enjoyment, this realisation often heightens it, out of sheer fascination with the technology. But argumentative non-fiction feels different. For some reason, I resent belatedly discovering that an essay that tries to persuade me of something was machine-written, and I lose interest at once. Why is this?
Here’s why Boudry disdains AI-written text, along with his solution to these difficulties:
Interpretive charity is also what makes LLM prose so compelling. There is no actual train of thought behind it—just extraordinarily complex statistical patterns emulating human text, which passes for the real thing under the ordinary application of charity. In many contexts, we have no reason to care. So long as the output is indistinguishable from what an actual expert with a real train of thought would have produced, it serves its purpose. That, after all, is what allowed me to ditch my proofreader, along with my accountant and my legal advisor.
Because of our interpretive charity, however, we tend to attribute meaning and coherence to text that has neither. Human slop is not that hard to spot, unless you are very insecure or too deeply sunk in your own intellectual investment. AI slop is far subtler, and far harder to distinguish from actual thought. Before ChatGPT, things were simple. If a text looked coherent and comprehensible, you could safely assume there was a thought process to reconstruct, belonging to an actual thinking person—there was no other way to produce coherent prose. That is the world in which our interpretive charity evolved, and that is the world to which it is calibrated. Today, AI writing can be so slick and polished that it takes far longer to notice you are not following a train of thought but a stream of superficially plausible verbiage. You have to slow down and read each sentence with care to catch your charity being hoodwinked. What a waste of time.
. . .There is nothing wrong with using AI to generate text per se, and I do it myself if I am drafting a reference letter, writing a legal defence, or answering a long email. The prompt is usually based on a short list of bullet points and instructions, or on things I have written before. LLMs are extremely good at catching your drift, especially when they have been trained on your earlier writing. It is fine, too, wherever the pleasure is in the artefact rather than the argument: jokes, poetry, perhaps some kinds of fiction.
But if you ask AI to compose an entire argument, then sign it with your name and send it to the Guardian, it behoves you to disclose it and leave your readers to decide whether or not they are still interested. That hardly any writer does this, unlike many creators of AI images and video, suggests a degree of guilty conscience. These people want to preserve the illusion that an actual person produced the text, because they rightly suspect that we would stop reading if we knew the truth.
. . . To my knowledge, of all the writers accused of AI plagiarism by Pangram, not a single one has done so. If you have nothing to hide, and you’re happy to let a machine ventriloquise you, why not just show us the damn prompts?
I agree 100% with this, except I am loath to use AI to write anything I’ve put under my name, and have never done so. When I use it to look up stuff, I simply quote it verbatim and note where it comes from. I treat it like a quotation from a source, which is what it is (Grok, my main source, always gives references that you can check).
By the way, Maarten uses Pangram to detect AI-written content, and you can use it on a limited basis for free, though I haven’t done so.
*A clickbait title for me from the WSJ: “Why Democrats still have a shot at winning the Senate.”
Democrats fighting to win back the Senate from the Republicans spent their summer sweating out a last-minute candidate switch in Maine and the emergence of an antiestablishment progressive in swing-state Michigan.
The two races remain central to Democrats’ hopes of winning back Senate control in the November elections as they try to navigate a narrow pathway to the majority. But even as flipping Maine and retaining Michigan look challenging, Democrats have made headway in defending Georgia, capturing North Carolina and competing in redder states including Alaska, Ohio, Iowa and Texas.
“We have a very good chance to take the majority back,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.). He said Democrats had “expanded the map and have the strongest map we’ve had in years where many states that are purple or even red are now poised to go into the Democratic column.”
Here’s the WSJ figure, credited to Kara Dapena. As you see, flipping only three seats creates a 50/50 situation, though J. D. Vance can break the tie in favor of Republicans. Four seats will do it for Democrats, and you see that four states are tossups (but “leaners” could also go Democratic):
More:
Still, the developments in Maine and Michigan have added some uncertainty to Democrats’ plans. A loss in Maine by replacement candidate Troy Jackson against GOP Sen. Susan Collins, long an elusive target for Democrats, would represent another missed opportunity in a state that then-Vice President Kamala Harris carried by seven points in 2024. If Democrat Abdul El-Sayed loses the race for the Senate seat in Michigan, it would force the party to flip multiple seats in Donald Trump country.
“Michigan is clearly the No. 1 pickup for Republicans, and that would really throw a wrench into Democrats’ math,” said Jessica Taylor, a Senate analyst for the Cook Political Report.
Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, meaning Democrats must gain a net pickup of four seats to win back power during President Trump’s final two years in office. The president’s party typically suffers losses in midterm elections, and Republicans concede their candidates are facing a difficult environment, marked by high fuel prices, the war with Iran and Trump’s poor approval ratings. Prediction markets see the odds for control as about even.
Surveys show Democratic voters are more enthusiastic about voting in the midterms than Republicans. GOP candidates won’t have the benefit of Trump generating higher turnout among infrequent voters when he leads the ticket. And party insiders wonder how Trump might deploy roughly $400 million in his MAGA Inc. super PAC.
“We’ve got political headwinds at us, there’s no question about it, some frankly economic headwinds too that we’re facing,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) recently told reporters in South Dakota. “So it’s not going to be an easy cycle. But we’ve got really high-quality candidates. They will be well-resourced.”
So far Democrats have raised more money for Senate races than Republicans, but that will certainly narrow as the midterms approach. It’s stressful to see all the polling and speculation about these races.
*In an unusual murder trial, Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother who killed her three young children after apparently seeking treatment for postpartum psychosis, has pleaded not guilty and is being supported by hundreds of other women (article archived here).
Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother, is standing trial on murder charges in the deaths of her three children. The weekslong trial in the high-profile case has included testimony from her ex-husband, medical professionals and other people who were close to Ms. Clancy in the months before the killings.
On Jan. 24, 2023, Ms. Clancy’s husband, Patrick Clancy, returned home from picking up the family’s dinner to find the couple’s children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — in the basement choked by exercise bands, he told investigators. Cora and Dawson were dead; Callan would die days later.
The horrific deaths at the family’s home in Duxbury, Mass., an affluent suburb south of Boston, have revived a long-running debate about how the legal system should treat mentally ill mothers who kill their children.
The trial has been emotional, punctuated by testimony from Mr. Clancy and audio from his 9-1-1 call, during which he found his children in the basement. Ms. Clancy has frequently broken down crying in the courtroom, and some jurors have shown emotion as well.
Closing arguments are expected to begin this week, as early as Monday.
Ms. Clancy’s lawyers rested their case on Friday. The defense presented witnesses who described her struggles with mental health, providing the most detailed description yet of her state of mind before and after the killings.
Medical professionals described months of severe postpartum depression symptoms, saying Ms. Clancy made two calls to a suicide hotline before the killings. Afterward, she repeatedly described a voice commanding her to kill the children and then herself, a forensic psychologist and a hospital chaplain said.
Ms. Clancy, who has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, faces a sentence of life in prison without parole if convicted. If found not guilty by reason of insanity, she would very likely be committed to a secure state psychiatric facility.
This is a tough one. As noted below, Clancy tried to kill herself after the murders by jumping from a window, paralyzing herself from the waist down. That suggests some severe mental disruption. And yes, if Clancy did have postpartum psychosis, and her murderous impulses came from a given situation, but if she is forbidden to have children (is that possible?) this wouldn’t recur. How much time, then, should she get if found “not guilty by reason of insanity”? Do you think she should go to jail? If so, for what reason? One could argue that she’s suffered enough, having lost her children and now in a state of paralysis for life.
Here’s an informative CBS News report explaining why Clancy didn’t take the stand in her own defense.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej are into a deep discussion of theology:
Hili: Was there really a word in the beginning?
Andrzej: It was probably just a sneeze.
Hili: And then?
Andrzej: Nothing terrible, cosmic entropy began.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy na początku rzeczywiście było słowo?
Ja: Prawdopodobnie było to tylko kichnięcie.
Hili: I co?
Ja: Nic strasznego, zaczęła się kosmiczna entropia.
*******************
From CinEmma:
From Funny and Strange Signs:
From Nicole:
Masih mourns another protestor who was hanged yesterday:
Majid, I am sorry that I knew nothing about you before they hanged you. Forgive us.
Majid, you have a family. You are someone’s son. Someone’s brother. Someone loved you, waited for you, worried about you. And yet we know almost nothing about you.
This is Majid Adineh, a… pic.twitter.com/ouLU5MM4H5
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) August 23, 2026
The Number Ten Cat was falsely reported as dead!:
Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated… https://t.co/8LDPKyEwE3
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) August 21, 2026
J. K. Rowling defines “female”:
Female means possessing the reproductive system that produces eggs instead of sperm. It is irrelevant whether said system is defective, immature or surgically altered.
I just described every female on earth. https://t.co/crLTp2V4qk
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) August 22, 2026
Richard Dawkins cites the scholarly achievements of the University of Cambridge—for obvious reasons.
The University of Cambridge can boast 126 Nobel Prizes. That’s more than any other university in the world except Harvard, and it does it on an endowment that is one twentieth the endowment of Harvard. In the Nobel ranking, Cambridge beats MIT, Chicago, Columbia, Oxford, and Yale…
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 21, 2026
Two from my feed. First, a lovely squirrel post (squirrels are seriously underappreciated). Sound up:
This guy built over 1,000 homes for squirrels and fitted some of them with cameras so he could see how they live
Welcome to the cutest reality TV show out there
Writer: Ianpic.twitter.com/OlnWI4UUTG
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) August 22, 2026
Translated from the French, here’s the English:
I am sincerely sorry to share such images with you on a Sunday, but as the back-to-school season approaches, people need to know what is still happening on the beaches in terms of organized extortion.
Je suis sincèrement désolé de vous partager de telles images un dimanche, mais à l’approche de la rentrée, les gens doivent savoir ce qui se passe encore sur les plages en matière de racket organisé. pic.twitter.com/eAHj71aY9O
— 🅶🅾🆁🅺 (@Raclure03) August 23, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was 6 years old, and would be 89 today had she lived. https://t.co/vk51HYZnxG
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) August 24, 2026
And one from Doctor Cobb, showing George Herriman, a favorite cartoonist of Matthew and mine, and creator of the great Krazy Kat cartoons.
Oh my gosh today is George Herriman's birthday!
— Benjamin Dreyer (@bcdreyer.social) 2026-08-22T20:18:15.698Z
Knowing Jerry’s feelings about Pluto, I sent him a Space.com article this morning from this past Spring in which the Nasa Administrator (also a pilot and serious self-funded astronaut) agrees with him to “make Pluto a planet again”. He asked that I make it available to readers in today’s comments. Issacman article url should be
https://www.space.com/astronomy/pluto/nasa-chief-jared-isaacman-says-hes-fighting-for-pluto-i-am-very-much-in-the-camp-of-make-pluto-a-planet-again
And I want to get a two-fer in this comment: reading Richard’s comment on the Dept of Ed at Cambridge AND taking some of the responses to him in that strand at face-value, it looks more like mission creep at the University than simply one department. Please read the strand beyond his comment.
The problem is that, as I’m sure you realise, if one accepts Pluto as a planet then there’s no principled reason to withhold that status from a dozen other trans-Neptunian objects (and perhaps a hundred more as searches improve). So we have to pick one of:
Accept a radically different view of planets and how many Solar System planets there are.
Grandfather Pluto in, because it was accepted for decades, but deny the others (making the concept a bit inconsistent).
Accept that Pluto is a “dwarf planet” for a full planet, and at least have a fairly consistent conception of “planet”, while departing least from tradition. If what we now know about Pluto had been known when it was discovered, it would likely never have been regarded as a planet.
Also, Pluto’s orbit is not only highly eccentric (thus its orbit overlapping Neptune’s) but it is also not in the same plane as the orbits of all the other planets. And, as Neil de Grasse Tyson has pointed out, Pluto’s composition is more like that of the comets than that of the planets. It really is the one thing that’s not like the others.
But it was so I will assert that it’s a planet because it used to be called one of the nine planets whose order I memorized as a kid!
I memorized all the planets out to Pluto by the time I was in first grade. To this very day, when I recite the names of the planets, it feels very strange to stop at Neptune. Try it yourself. It has the tension of an unfinished sentence.
Agreed. And it’s not the first time. When Ceres was discovered, it was likewise hailed as a new planet. Then astronomers started discovering more and more of these “planets”, and nobody wanted there to be that many planets, so they updated the definitions and invented asteroids.
Besides, Pluto always had an implied asterisk next to it, even when I was a kid in elementary school in the ’80s. It was the oddball of the planets, not really behaving like the rest of them. Now that we’re discovering a whole host of bodies that behave like Pluto, it just makes sense to create a new category to cover them (trans-Neptunian objects specifically, dwarf planets more broadly).
I mean, if Pluto were to reman a planet, then certainly Eris at the very least would have to be counted as a planet, as well, considering that it’s more massive than Pluto.
I can understand the reasoning about its demotion, no-one wanted the extra 12+ planets with more to come as new dwarf planets are discovered, but I really think that Pluto should have been left alone as an historical anomaly.
The IAU really struggled to exclude it and as far as I remember it was Pluto’s inability to clear its immediate orbit that was used to demote it, I don’t remember the overlapping orbit even coming into it. Whatever, the new definition is very woolly since no body can clear its orbit as far as I know, there will always be Lagrange points that are at least quasi-stable and there would no doubt be at least one dwarf planet whose L1 and L2 were far enough away to defeat a baked in distance and lead to the same problem.
Coel and dawg: Just personally, I really do not care how it all eventually plays out. Except I do not see “dwarf” as a demotion, but simply a new classification based on new data of the past30-40 years leading up to the iau decision. I think there IS real value simply in the discussions as our k-12 kids learn that the pieces of schmutz, whatever we call them, orbit in ellipses of low eccentricity, not circles, but that Pluto is slightly more eccentric….enough more that its orbit passes inside of neptune’s for a portion of its year, temporarily making it the eighth planet in distance from the sun. And that they are not all orbiting on a flat table-top but vary a few degrees above and below the ecliptic…except for Pluto which varies much more. And kids get to see photographic images of each and a number of their moons. How different Nasa and the US scientific missions have made k-5 classrooms from when I was a kid in the 1950’s.
Saying a “dwarf planet” doesn’t qualify is ableism.
Since people with medical conditions causing short stature prefer to be called “Little People,” rather than dwarves, perhaps it would be more respectful to planets with conditions causing low mass if we called them “Little Planets.”
And, in case anyone has forgotten, it was the discovery of Eris—a stellar body the same size as Pluto, but almost twice as far from the sun—that provoked the controversial decision to demote Pluto, as well as the uncontroversial decision to name Eris after “the Greek goddess of discord,” and to name her moon after her daughter Dysnomia, the “demon goddess of lawlessness.” I’m glad astronomers have a sense of humor.
Although I don’t have a strong opinion about Pluto’s status, I do enjoy the ‘discord.’
Achondroplanetia
Dwarfism should not rule out a planet.
And eccentricity should not rule out a planet, any more than it should rule out a scientist.
Full disclosure: I have a personal stake in this. I fit in one of those categories, and I am 176 cm tall.
Hmm. “Midget planet” would be even more offensive than “dwarf planet”. How about “mass-divergent” or better yet, “special” planet?
I am there with you. There are currently 5 known dwarf planets, with recognition that there are possibly several more. So ‘dwarf planet’ simplifies rather than complicates.
But I don’t think that Woke 1 is over, and it’s only a matter of time when there are strident calls to stop using the term ‘dwarf’ in reference to these orbiting bodies.
Seattle’s Greenwood district used to have a shop devoted to space travel supply items. Some years ago, demonstrations in favor of Pluto’s reinstatement were organized by the shop [see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBnGgbrdd9U ]. At the time, the solution of calling for Pluto to be designated a “trans-planet”, in the vein of Affirmative Astronomy, just didn’t occur to us.
From Wiktionary: At first, dwarfs was the only normative plural in modern English, and dwarves was considered incorrect.[1] After J. R. R. Tolkien used dwarves in his works, that form became an acceptable plural for the mythological beings. For a non-mythological dwarf (people with dwarfism, small plants, animals, planets, stars etc.), dwarfs has remained the preferred plural form.
HAHAHA. As soon as I saw Pluto I thought “Oh Jim’s gonna be ALL OVER THIS ONE and… it ain’t gonna be pretty!”
hehehe
Cheers to you, Jim. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
“There’s a Starman waiting in the sky,
He’d like to come and meet us but he thinks he’d blow our minds”
-David Bowie, “Starman” 1975
NYT : “[..] Ms. Clancy made two calls to a suicide hotline before the killings. Afterward, she repeatedly described a voice commanding her to kill the children and then herself [..]”
And that means …
Well, that means that a) her legal responsibility for their deaths is diminished and b) this is yet another indication of the woeful state of American mental health care, particularly for women. The US acts as though it is a low-resource nation compared with other developed nations that have (for example) dedicated mother-baby units for women in such straits.
‘Pluto is a damn planet’…and the planet of the damned. It deserves to be demoted. I’d rather have it removed altogether.
On our orange PotUS: Venezuela was excellent and their ex-president enjoys our hospitality here in Brooklyn.
He’s pretty good on Israel. But monstering Canada*, NATO and the Greenland bs are terrible mistakes on our president’s part.
Thx for sending on Amit’s daily review: top notch intellect, even if PCC(E) and I disagree with him in part.
As a column writer myself I can’t fathom why people use AI in place of actual work product. I’d never do that and I don’t expect it here at WEIT also.
D.A.
NYC
*speaking of Canada, has anybody seen or heard from Dr. Leslie Mc Millan? His loudmouthery here matched mine but he hasn’t commented in ages. (Prob off hunting moose or poutines or whatever that strange and lovely people do up there in their snowland….)
I don’t know what happened to him (Leslie), come to think of it! He did not always agree with me, and I think he bested me on most of those occasions.
The last post I remember him writing was to say that our host should stop feeding the ducks (it was during the tumultuous early duck-season). Jerry was having none of that and told him to take a hike. I think Leslie may have taken his advice.
If so that’s a pity, since I always read his comments with interest (as I do with many other commenters here).
Yes, I remember reading that post before Jerry weighed in, and I thought, “Leslie, not the ducks. Please, not the ducks!”
As with others, I miss his informed and sometimes heterodox takes.
I thought pretty much the same thing: “Not the ducks!” Especially during a time when Jerry was obviously distressed.
I too appreciated his comments.
I’ve seen him on a Canadian site I visit. I saw a comment from him yesterday. So he’s still around but I haven’t seen him here for quite a while.
In reply to Carney’s response to Trump, I recommend the Australian response, in Aussie English. Just try King Carney activates Kong mode.
There seem to be two, polar, schools of thought on Iran. Either we’ve lost the war and Iran has become more powerful, or we’re winning the war and it’s just a matter of time until the Iranian economy—and the regime, presumably—collapse in a heap. A newly published article in The Atlantic by Robert Kagan espouses the former position (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/08/iran-middle-east-power/688374/). Amit Segal, quoted extensively above, espouses the latter. (I don’t know how readily available the Atlantic article is.)
In arguing in The Atlantic for the U.S. losing the war, Robert Kagan makes point after point based on observable or inferable facts on the ground, on Iranian responses to U.S. actions, and on the sequence of Iranian provocations and escalations. The analysis is relentless, sobering and dark. On the other side of the ledger, those who argue that the collapse of the regime is imminent—or will happen in due course—seem mostly to call on hope, hope that Iran is weakening behind the scenes thanks to economic pressure. I retain hope, but I feel a big weight tilting toward the other side.
I commented many months ago that it might not make sense to think in terms of the binary of winners and losers but, rather, to think in terms of changing configurations, as both sides gain some and both sides lose some. We may never have a decisive outcome, but may simply have to live with changed configurations.
Good description. I don’t know which side I fall on. I do think an extended blockade could do serious damage to the Iranian economy. OTOH, the IRGC don’t seem like they’ll give up easily.
The regime itself is still determined to hang on, judging by Masih’s almost daily tweets on the regime executing protesters.
Yes. They are hanging on. And I wonder what it might actually look like if the extended blockade works. Will Iran come back to the negotiating table and lie about giving something up to save themselves? Will the Iranian public rise up and stage a coup? Will the IRGC take over completely and declare martial law? Will the IRGC lash out and attack everyone they can reach with whatever weapons they have left? Will Iran buy a nuclear weapon from their new friend North Korea? Will Iran become a failed state like Libya? Even regime collapse will be a big mess.
The question about Clancy is, in a way, similar to the question about Pluto, since it’s a debate over diagnostic categories. Is/was Clancy ‘sane’ or not? But I think we make a mistake in relying on expert opinion in making such decisions, since the reality is that psychiatrists don’t have much better insight into human beings than layman jurors themselves. Based on the totality of the evidence, I think it is clear that Clancy’s choice to murder her children was a choice she would not have made if she had not been in an incredibly unbalanced state of mind.
Oddly, the only thing that gives me the least pause is the fact that Clancy cares whether she goes to prison or not. As a mother, if I lost my children—whether by my own hands in a fit of mental derangement or by any other means—I think I’d be indifferent to my fate, since the rest of my life would be hell on earth wherever I was.
Re: Larry the Cat: he may be old, but he’s clearly still going strong. For heaven’s sake, he just recently caught a mouse! All the same, he’s showing his age somewhat by his neglect of his grooming, since he’s looking awfully scruffy of late. I’ve been meaning to have a word with his staff.
Clancy probably doesn’t care much where she ends up – she is likely mentally destroyed, as you surmise. Which puts her in no position to strenuously object to her husband, who may well want her not imprisoned; nor to her lawyer whose ethical stance must be to plead not guilty; nor to postpartum activists, who see her trial as an opportunity for justice for women afflicted with a terrible disease.
I think you’re right.
I asked AI recently to compose a brief, one-time affidavit for which I lacked experience and instructions. It wasn’t a complicated piece of work, but I was miffed that the information being asked for was already available elsewhere in the filings. In other words, a standard bureaucratic hoop to jump through. AI kicked out an acceptably formatted response in about two seconds; I changed one sentence and it was done.
I also used it once to rewrite a series of emails to a customer service rep about a litany of problems and defective products for a somewhat pricey order. Given that I was extraordinarily pissed, Grok and ChatGPT were able to take my characteristic sting out of the correspondence while remaining firm. (It wasn’t the customer rep who was the problem.) Again, I tweaked the piece to my satisfaction and was quickly done.
There are other bureaucratic or routine tasks for which I would never use AI to compose. Chief among them are employee performance reports and awards packages. Another would be the grading of student essays. These demand personal attention.
Skilled writers shouldn’t sacrifice their talents to the machines. People less skilled should develop those talents without using substantive AI crutches. But even most skilled writers seek human feedback. I thus remain intrigued at the resistance to AI among some in academia. The same people routinely ask colleagues, some of whom might be renowned experts, to review books and articles and offer suggestions. They think nothing of having an editor finesse the work—when they are lucky enough to have a real editor. And shall we consider the graduate students in elite institutions who plug away on bibliographies, checking cited material against the sources, formatting, etc? Why is machine help so opposed by some when human help is readily sought and accepted?
I like how the article in Globe and Mail about these negotiations started. Quoting from memory, “We consider ourselves a mouse living with an elephant. All we want is a bit of dignity.” What we got is the elephant pissing on the mouse. All we can do is run and hide. Canada is an afterthought to many US citizens, we can’t help that. But yours and our industrial operations are highly integrated. The whole exercise replaces taxation with revenue unjustly applied to these industries. It will hurt those industries, something that neither Canadian nor US economy can afford. Trump seems to do it in order to induce mutual hostility and restore protectionism. But Canada is fully open to return to previous amicable relationship, as long as Trump (or more likely his successor) chooses to restore decorum.
Regarding Pluto: Here is some history. After the famous discovery and observation of Neptune in the 1840s by La Verrier, who deduced the existence and location of Neptune by careful observation and analysis of the orbit of Uranus, it quickly became apparent that either Newtonian gravity is wrong, or some undiscovered body was messing with the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. Hence they postulated the existence of “Planet X”, later named Pluto.
It wasn’t until 1930 that the existence of Pluto was considered certain, but they badly overestimated Pluto’s mass. It was thought that the mass of Pluto was only slightly less than the Earth. As observations and calculations got more accurate over the succeeding decades, the estimated mass of Pluto got smaller and smaller. As late as the 60s and 70s the mass of Pluto was still overestimated. It wasn’t until the discovery of Charon in 1978 and subsequent delicate analysis of the gravitational dynamics of the Pluto-Charon system that it was possible to definitively establish that Pluto’s mass is only about 1/6 the mass of the Earth’s moon.
Quibbles about whether Pluto should be regarded as a planet were decades older than the hullabaloo initiated by Niels Tyson deGrasse et al. Back in the 30s when astronomers thought the mass of Pluto was comparable to the Earth, or at least Mars, everyone wanted to call Pluto a planet and a generation of school kids grew up taught that Pluto is a planet. But as the estimated mass got an order of magnitude smaller, the designation became less apt. But because of mental inertia everybody continued to think of Pluto as a planet.
A rose by any other name …
I agree with Dawkins. It is frustrating to see Cambridge in the spotlight for the reason of someone like Arday, when might of the people making him a martyr as well as those using him to criticize universities have probably never heard of the great scientists who worked at that university, and certainly could not identify the advances in human knowledge they made possible.
And it is not just the Dept. of Education. Departments like Gender Studies, Social Anthropology, Sociology etc. are, quite simply, ruining the intellectual atmosphere of the university (all universities, not just Cambridge). It is not a matter of the humanities and social sciences versus the hard sciences. Once, social anthropology was a real academic discipline. The issue is that certain fields have become shelters for grievance studies, wrapping them in pseudointellectual babble and presented as real university work. The universities themselves need to clean house, or society will do it, and you can bet that the politicians will throw out the baby with the bath water.
In some of the midwestern states – Montana, Nebraska, Idaho, & South Dakota there are independent candidates for Senate. What I know of the guy in SD, Brian Bengs, I like. If the Democrat would drop out, the polls suggest that Bengs would have a chance. As it is, the D has no chance.
Update – I see that he did in early Aug, so it’s now Bengs v the R.
Up here in Canada we actually thought that America was our friend. After all the wars we fought in side-by-side, our help during 9/11, families that live on both sides of the border, etc. etc. we thought that meant something. Turns out a bad president is all it takes to ruin that relationship. I know that this is not the feeling of all Americans, or even most Americans, but that doesn’t change the fact that Trump is trying to severely damage our economy. Canadians are generally quite forgiving, but in my lifetime (almost 60 years old) I have never seen a time when people here are so furious at the country to our south. No one in my friends or family circle will travel south anymore. We have little hope that the mid-term elections will change much with all the gerrymandering of districts. Up here if the Prime Minister was that unpopular the party would be wiped out in the next election – it has happened here more than once.