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, August 29, 2026, shabbos for Jewish cats, and the last Saturday in August. It’s also International Day Against Nuclear Tests. Here is a video of five nuclear tests caught on camera, and there are some far more powerful than the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima. We’d all prefer a world without nukes, but given that they’re here, how can we be sure that the deterrent effect of nukes is effective if the enemy doesn’t know that they work? And that means testing.
First, from the NYT’s morning newsletter, a like cause:
As emergency workers flew helicopters up steep Himalayan river valleys yesterday to find survivors of a flood that killed more than 500 people and left more than 1,000 missing, scientists began to investigate its cause. They’ve been looking at satellite imagery and seismological data.
The likely culprit: A gigantic landslide high in the mountains led to a glacial collapse that sent millions of tons of ice and rock into the valleys below it, pulverizing them into mud and water. The slurry burst dams and turned rivers into hydraulic rams. “The rock that the glacier was sitting on collapsed,” one scientist said.
The scale of the disaster is staggering. It’s as if 1,000 Empire State Buildings exploded at the same time and the debris coursed down a canyon. The path of destruction ran for more than 40 miles. It washed away roads, cut bridges in half, overcame buildings and swallowed people whole.
After three days of searching for survivors of a massive flash flood that swept through Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday, killing more than 600 people, the disaster’s full extent and human toll were still being revealed in recovered bodies, battered survivors and growing lists of the missing.
The tally of missing people in Nepal rose above 2,400 on Saturday. The number has climbed dramatically since Friday, with Nepali officials saying hydropower producers had only recently shared a count of unaccounted-for workers at projects in the devastated river valleys. China said more than 500 people were missing in Tibet on its side of the border and at least five had died.
Exclusive videos verified by The New York Times show the clearest view yet of the avalanche that sent the wall of water and mud coursing downriver.
The first 48 to 72 hours after natural disasters are typically a critical window for finding survivors. But the devastation left many miles of roads unusable and damaged communications, making it harder for rescuers and aid organizations to locate people and deliver food, medicine and temporary shelters.
Search efforts along the 50-mile stretch of destruction were also complicated on Friday by fears of more flooding, as the authorities in Nepal warned that more water from new lakes created by the landslide that set off Wednesday’s flood could overflow and send more water rushing into the valleys.
About 30,000 Nepali security forces have been deployed for the relief mission, according to the United Nations. On Friday, Nepal Army personnel took many rescued people to a barracks on the banks of the Trishuli River, where many could be seen jostling to see if they recognized names on printed lists of survivors.
The Nepali authorities said that more than 3,700 people had been rescued so far, and released footage showing uniformed personnel pulling people by hand through a river of mud. Officials said they had been trapped in a tunnel that was part of a hydroelectric project that had been under construction.
Given that this is Nepal, where census data might be thin, and the fact that many people are buried under mud, I’d guess that the number of dead will eventually exceeed 3,000. It’s a horrible tragedy.
*In his week’s Tuesday NYT column, Bret Stephens ponders a prediction he made earlier, “Has World War III already started?” The answer seems to be “pretty much.” (Article is archived here.)
Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I wrote a column under the headline “This Is How World War III Begins.” More than four years on, I wonder how much I got right.
My argument was based on the origins of World War II, which did not simply start with Germany’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Instead, the war was an accumulation of regional wars and crises, beginning with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, which gradually gathered into a single global conflict.
That gathering, abetted by the converging ambitions of the totalitarian states and the divisions and vacillations of the democracies, led to catastrophe. Added to this was a revolution in military technology and tactics that gave the dictatorships an early advantage in offensive combat. Also an advantage: their willingness to inflict — and endure — a level of brutality and suffering their adversaries were initially reluctant to match.
In 2022, I saw a similar pattern unfolding. . . .
And here’s his evidence:
First, as in the 1930s and ’40s, the spheres of conflict have multiplied and are merging.
Russia’s battlefield reversals seem to have done nothing to diminish Putin’s appetite for risk as he expands his campaign, in barely concealed attacks and threats, against Moldova, Poland and Germany, among other states, while his political allies repeatedly call for direct strikes on Europe and the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023 became, in stages, a war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran; then a war between Iran, the United States and the Gulf states. . .
. . . Second, the Axis of Authoritarians has become a fully operational military alliance.
Russia is providing North Korea with help to modernize its armed forces, while the North has returned the favor by sending millions of artillery rounds and is now reportedly prepared to send thousands of additional troops to fight for Russia in Ukraine. China supplies Russia with most of the electronic components used in its drones and other military hardware. . .
. . .Third, the West is a mess.
President Trump complains of our allies’ weakness. The allies complain of Trump’s bullying, capriciousness, callowness, mendacity and incompetence. Both sides are right. The latest U.S. tariff salvo on Canada is a case in point: politically ill advised, economically self-defeating, strategically enervating. . .
The war against Iran revealed not just the munitions shortages, which helped bring the war to a premature close, but also America’s acute sensitivity to military fatalities and economic pain, which gave Iran’s leaders an asymmetric advantage given their own tolerance for human suffering.
. . . Fifth, we may be near the economic brink.
One great difference between the 1930s and the present is that, unlike then, we are not in the midst of a worldwide depression. But the warning signs of a sharp and abrupt downturn are everywhere. What happens if or when the A.I. boom starts to run out of steam, much as the dot-com boom did at the beginning of the century? Or if the currency crisis in Japan causes it to start selling off its U.S. Treasury bonds?
Stephens ends this way:
A deep U.S. recession, or a global financial panic, will inevitably worsen every trend mentioned above. In periods of economic distress, democracies almost always become more risk-averse, while dictatorships become risk-prone. That’s a pattern of history worth recalling as we continue to drift, only dimly aware, toward the gathering storm.
Perhaps this is just a warning rather than a prediction, but WWIII will involve nukes, and I still can’t believe that any major country is going to use them. And of course many of us will be dead if Stephens is making a prediction that will come true in decades.
→ Lake America: Our new foreign and trade policy is basically to rename things America, as punishment. That’s what Donald J. Trump is threatening to do to Canada if they don’t agree to our trade terms. You like your little Lake Ontario? You think that’s nice? Too bad!
The president announced on Truth Social: “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.” We punish other nations by calling their waters America. It’s like schoolyard bully colonialism. In late-breaking news, he went and did it:
I think we just bring back old-fashioned colonialism and take Canada, a failed state, and keep the name Ontario, or Muskoka, or whatever funny words they use up there as a courtesy. It’s not enough to call it America and overlay funny text when you can make it America. But Trump is too busy posting a ranking of past presidents with himself at the top as The Greatest.
I can’t believe the post right above. But let’s move on:
→ Jason Arday fallout continues: America’s most prestigious medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, has opened its pages to a Jason Arday take. Here it is:
Yes, it’s a medical journal, and yes, Arday was a doctor of. . . education, but no matter. The piece begins: “They are trying to kill us.” It ends: “They are trying to kill us. They always have been. And yet, we are still here.” This is in the most prestigious medical journal in America. Or you can listen to this NPR podcast about Arday. And there was a huge vigil for him in Trafalgar Square in London. Arday, truly a fabulist who seems to have faked his past jobs and much else, has become the folk hero of 2026. A strange choice but a clear one. We must accept him as the year’s hero. Soon we will be told that, in fact, Jason Arday threw the first brick at Stonewall. Woke 1 might have been crazy, but I promise you Woke 2 will be crazier.
→ The left wants war:
The Green Party of England and Wales is holding its big conference and any British terrorist who’s anyone is invited, but you know who’s apparently not invited? The Jewish-Palestinian peace group Standing Together. Standing Together accuses Israel of genocide and apartheid. They say they want “peace and independence for Israelis and Palestinians” and “full equality for everyone in this land.” And they’re still not invited because, according to The Jewish Chronicle, that would violate the Green Party’s policies on boycotting Israel. News flash about the Green Party: They don’t want peace! They want war.
Which is increasingly what Americans want.
No, Cenk, say it! Say it loud, say it proud. Is it globalists? The Epstein class? Zionist monies? GQ communist Hasan Piker said on a Twitch stream, “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action—not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”
One more thing here: The majority of Democrats in Virginia want not just the end of support but the imposition of sanctions on Israel. A whopping 61 percent of Virginia Dems want sanctions, with only 12 percent against them, and 27 percent unsure.
Within a few years, we’ve moved from allies with Israel to neutral on Israel to the majority of Dems wanting active aggression against Israel—and the most popular left-wing influencer saying that American Jews better watch out. Or else someone’s going to come around and take action.
There are many outrageous things about this hierarchy, but as usual, it is almost certainly the case that Trump put no more thought into this than seeing a meme that praised him and sharing it without a second thought for where anybody else ranked on the list. This serves both as self-flattery and trolling of his enemies.
If you spend more than an instant looking at the chart, aside from the bad rankings and some of the terrible pictures (Millard Fillmore did not have a big, brown moptop when he was president), what ought to leap off the page is that there are only 34 presidents pictured, while 45 men have held the office (two of them, Trump and Grover Cleveland, having done so twice). Conspicuously omitted are Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush — every Republican president since 1932 except for Trump.
There’s a reason for that. Sharp-eyed internet sleuths noticed that the chart largely reproduces a “survey” of 55 academics conducted for the November 1, 1948, issue of Life magazine (an issue dated the day before the presidential election) by Arthur Schlesinger.
Have a look at the New Republic link; the two charts are, given who’s on both of them, nearly identical. More from the NR:
That also explains the absence of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, although whoever turned the Schlesinger chart into a Trump meme threw in three contemporary Democrats to fill out the “Failures” tier (Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Jimmy Carter), and added — either out of respect or for a sheen of fairness — Bill Clinton to the “Average” tier.
There are, as I explained in 2024, serious methodological problems with producing presidential rankings by the consensus of a select group of academics, most glaringly the effort to produce a purportedly nonpartisan, nonideological output that very obviously includes ideological and partisan biases in its inputs. (This is why I’ve done my own ranking by separating the presidents by party.) Schlesinger and his selected panelists putting FDR second only to Washington and Lincoln during the 1948 presidential campaign was done in the same spirit, for many of the same purposes, as Trump fans putting him first in 2026. Roosevelt had only been out of office for three years, and Democrats in 1948 were wrapping their campaign themes in the need to keep FDR’s coalition together.
. . .That also explains the absence of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, although whoever turned the Schlesinger chart into a Trump meme threw in three contemporary Democrats to fill out the “Failures” tier (Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Jimmy Carter), and added — either out of respect or for a sheen of fairness — Bill Clinton to the “Average” tier.
There are, as I explained in 2024, serious methodological problems with producing presidential rankings by the consensus of a select group of academics, most glaringly the effort to produce a purportedly nonpartisan, nonideological output that very obviously includes ideological and partisan biases in its inputs. (This is why I’ve done my own ranking by separating the presidents by party.) Schlesinger and his selected panelists putting FDR second only to Washington and Lincoln during the 1948 presidential campaign was done in the same spirit, for many of the same purposes, as Trump fans putting him first in 2026. Roosevelt had only been out of office for three years, and Democrats in 1948 were wrapping their campaign themes in the need to keep FDR’s coalition together.
A tractor-trailer rollover sent a truckload of squid spilling into a Rhode Island roadway, leaving a stench as they sat in the road for hours in the summer heat. Local authorities have dubbed it the “Squidpocalypse of ’26.”
It was a warm, sunny day in the coastal town of Narragansett when the spill happened Sunday, and Narragansett Police Capt. Ryan Prest said he was told that the scene “started to smell bad as the squid sat out in the sun for a few hours.”
The fully-loaded trailer was taking the squid to a processing facility out of town when the trailer dislodged and tipped on its side as the driver was navigating a turn, spilling a “substantial portion” of its calamari cargo, the police department said in a statement.
Police responded at 9:27 a.m., and the intersection wasn’t reopened until 5:15 p.m., authorities said.
“Squid has a distinctive odor to it,” Richard Stevens, a Narragansett resident and fisherman, told WJAR. “It can be very foul smelling, especially if it lands on the road and stays there for awhile.”
Heavy equipment and a dump truck were used to remove the squid, Prest said.
. . . The Narragansett Police Department made light of the situation in a social media post on Wednesday, stating that the town is “still recovering” from the “Squidpocalypse of ’26 — the spill that put ‘slippery when wet’ to shame.”
And a video, of course. Look at all those squid!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, exchanges between Andrzej and Hili are getting pretty arcane:
Andrzej: The one for whom the bell tolls probably doesn’t hear it. Hili: That depends on the context.
In Polish:
Ja: Ten komu bije dzwon raczej tego nie słyszy.
Hili: To zależy od kontekstu.
From Masih, absolutely reprehensible behavior from an American academic. It looks as if the University of Arkansas fired Shirin Saeidi in May for “violent and anti-Semitic” social media posts”. She was not only tenured, but “former director of UA Fayetteville’s Middle East studies center.” Well, this falls under the notion of free speech to me, so I don’t think firing is in order unless it somehow affected her job. The article does mention that ” Saeidi had disregarded numerous attempts to counsel her for other behavior.” Those other behaviors aren’t specified, but to me this looks like a violation of the First Amendment, no matter how reprehensible Saeidi’s speech was:
WATCH: Former University of Arkansas political science professor Shirin Saeidi is seen in a disturbing video telling Iranian human rights activist Ladan Bazargan that she will travel to Iran, find the grave of Bazargan’s brother Bijan, executed by the Islamic Republic dance on… pic.twitter.com/unHB8sgY28
A different person weighed in on Jason Arday before even Cofanas did. Harris has a 25-minute video embedded in the tweet.
🚨 EXCLUSIVE: In 2023, David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, became one of the first academics to raise serious questions about the scholarly standards of Professor Jason Arday’s published work, shortly after Arday had been appointed Professor of… pic.twitter.com/1s5gnTUtU3
— Committee for Academic Freedom (@ComAcFreedom) August 28, 2026
Larry gives Brits license to leave early today. There’s apparently a “summer bank holiday” on Monday.
It’s a bank holiday weekend so I say you should finish work early and start having fun. If your boss has a plan problem with that tell them Larry said it’s fine.
This Italian Jewish girl, and probably her mother, were likely gassed as soon as they got to Auschwitz. Her father didn’t survive, either. Gianna was only two years old, and would be 85 today had she lived. https://t.co/I0gwGd3kns
For a geography nerd and a loudmouth NYer I never realized Lake … let’s call it “Ontario” borders NY State.
But then there’s a lot uptown I don’t notice. 🙂
Bret Stephens is an excellent geo-political analyst but occasionally his grip on finance/money isn’t the best. I’ve noticed him flub before on bond yield curves and what they mean and, Bret, Japan isn’t selling off their supply of US Treasuries. And absent war, neither is China.
I grew up in Binghamton, a city in upstate New York. When we talked about “going into the city,” we meant going to New York City (usually Manhattan or Brooklyn). We lived upstate but didn’t notice.
Mr. Arday’s employment at Cambridge was not an anomaly, an oopsie that can be giggled away as a figment of Woke 1.
The Spectator reports that the Cambridge Faculty of Education, which elevated Jason Arday, has appointed Farah Ahmed assistant research professor of education. Hers is, in my view, a more insidious faculty presence than was that of the tragic, hapless Mr. Arday.
Trump #1! He’s a #1 nutcase. (Is that word still allowed?) No one should pay attention to his “renaming” of Lake Ontario or to his a asinine presidential ranking, except to note that each outburst checks yet another box indicating that the President is an incurable narcissist—the #1 Narcissist, in fact.
World War III. On that more serious note, it’s hard to say. My guess is that one could position oneself at any time in the past 75 years and, from that vantage point, identify enough cracks in the international state of affairs to make the same claim. In other words, I’m not sure that any time is really much different from any other time, and that we may always be living in peril. But I respect Bret Stephens enough to take his analysis seriously.
Please Mr. President. Do not rename Canada Geese to “Geese of America.” At many of our parks here in the Pacific Northwest, they are a nuisance we’re trying to eliminate. They poop all over everything and they attack the unwary. Renaming them would signal that they own the place. I don’t know why we don’t eat them to get rid of them. But we don’t.
World War III doesn’t necessarily HAVE to involve nukes (though we all grew up thinking of it that way, and that is probably the worst case scenario). It may be just a huge, conventional war involving most of the world, which is more than bad enough. And I agree with Stephens that it may in fact already be underway.
For a geography nerd and a loudmouth NYer I never realized Lake … let’s call it “Ontario” borders NY State.
But then there’s a lot uptown I don’t notice. 🙂
Bret Stephens is an excellent geo-political analyst but occasionally his grip on finance/money isn’t the best. I’ve noticed him flub before on bond yield curves and what they mean and, Bret, Japan isn’t selling off their supply of US Treasuries. And absent war, neither is China.
Have a great weekend, friends!
D.A.
NYC
“But then there’s a lot uptown I don’t notice. 🙂”
I grew up in Binghamton, a city in upstate New York. When we talked about “going into the city,” we meant going to New York City (usually Manhattan or Brooklyn). We lived upstate but didn’t notice.
I’m surprised Trump hasn’t heard of a president called Reagan, but perhaps he just doesn’t want to draw attention to a Republican hero.
And back in the days we thought the idiot comments about the crowds at the Inauguration days were lunacy…
And where will it end in a year or two?
Mr. Arday’s employment at Cambridge was not an anomaly, an oopsie that can be giggled away as a figment of Woke 1.
The Spectator reports that the Cambridge Faculty of Education, which elevated Jason Arday, has appointed Farah Ahmed assistant research professor of education. Hers is, in my view, a more insidious faculty presence than was that of the tragic, hapless Mr. Arday.
Trump #1! He’s a #1 nutcase. (Is that word still allowed?) No one should pay attention to his “renaming” of Lake Ontario or to his a asinine presidential ranking, except to note that each outburst checks yet another box indicating that the President is an incurable narcissist—the #1 Narcissist, in fact.
World War III. On that more serious note, it’s hard to say. My guess is that one could position oneself at any time in the past 75 years and, from that vantage point, identify enough cracks in the international state of affairs to make the same claim. In other words, I’m not sure that any time is really much different from any other time, and that we may always be living in peril. But I respect Bret Stephens enough to take his analysis seriously.
Please Mr. President. Do not rename Canada Geese to “Geese of America.” At many of our parks here in the Pacific Northwest, they are a nuisance we’re trying to eliminate. They poop all over everything and they attack the unwary. Renaming them would signal that they own the place. I don’t know why we don’t eat them to get rid of them. But we don’t.
World War III doesn’t necessarily HAVE to involve nukes (though we all grew up thinking of it that way, and that is probably the worst case scenario). It may be just a huge, conventional war involving most of the world, which is more than bad enough. And I agree with Stephens that it may in fact already be underway.
“Soon we will be told that, in fact, Jason Arday threw the first brick at Stonewall.” That’s Nellie Bowles-class snark. One excellent version of the story here: https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/premium-before-the-brick-part-1