Saturday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to shabbos for Jewish cats, Saturday, September 19, 2026, with Yom Kippur beginning at sunset tomorrow and lasting 24 hours. It is the Day of Atonement—the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.  You cannot have any food or water during the entire period, or even brush your teeth (you might ingest water!).  And you’re not allowed to touch or kiss your wife/husband, and must sleep in separate beds. You can see the other rules here, though most Jews aren’t that observant and won’t follow them.

It’s also National Gymnastics Day, and in honor of that I present the first perfect 10 score in gymnastics, Romanian Nadia Comǎneci on the uneven bars in the 1976 Montreal Olympics.  Wikipedia also has a list of “perfect 10 gymnastics” performances for both men and women.  Here are the top five performances on the parallel bars in Montreal, with Comǎneci’s performance last, starting at 2:31:

It’s also Astronomy Day, Batman Day (celebrating the batster’s 75th anniversary in 2014), International Eat an Apple Day, International Red Panda Day, International Talk Like a Pirate Day, National Butterscotch Pudding Day, and Thank a Police Officer Day (the DSA will not be endorsing this).

ARRRRRR!

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 9 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT reports that AOC has donated  $300,000 to help NY state Democrats, and will be campaigning across the state this fall (article archived here).

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez plans to campaign across New York in the weeks before the midterm elections, and she has donated $300,000 to help boost the Democratic ticket in her home state as speculation has swirled over whether she will run for Senate or president in 2028.

In an interview, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said she would be “traveling across the state to boost turnout in many different areas,” including planned stops in Buffalo, Syracuse and Ithaca in the coming weeks.

“New York,” she said, “has become increasingly relevant to whether we have a majority or not in the House of Representatives.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez will donate the funds to a pool of money for Democrats statewide that is being overseen by Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is seeking re-election this year. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has earmarked the funds for voter organizing rather than advertising, with a specific proviso that half of the money be devoted to Spanish-language outreach.

“This investment is really not just about throwing money around and putting points on the board,” she said. “This is actually about transforming the way Democrats go about building a coalition.”

Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for Ms. Hochul, said that the statewide effort, known as a coordinated campaign because it helps candidates for various offices, would be “prioritizing communities that are too often overlooked and written off.”

The sum is more symbolic than financially significant in a state as expansive and expensive as New York. It is also more money, though, than any other member of the New York delegation has contributed, according to two people familiar with the donation. Ms. Hochul had asked Ms. Ocasio-Cortez for the contribution, which had been under discussion for several weeks.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is one of the Democratic Party’s top fund-raisers nationwide and has raised more than $32 million since the start of 2025. She entered the summer with $15 million in the bank.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, whose district includes parts of the Bronx and Queens, suggested that there should not be much reading of tea leaves into her announcement as she weighs a political future with at least three options: re-election, a New York Senate race or a presidential run in 2028.

“I’ve been pretty open about the fact that I’m going to be weighing this decision, but I’m going to be weighing it after the midterm elections,” she said.

The fact that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez previously clashed with Jay Jacobs, the state party chairman, appears to at least partly explain why she chose to direct the money to the Hochul operation.

“It’s no secret that I’ve had my criticisms about the Democratic Party in the state in the past,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, adding she felt “more confident” giving the money to the effort being overseen by Ms. Hochul.

I’d be willing to bet that AOC, who has ambitions as big as her record is thin, will run for Senator, given that (I think) her chances to win the Presidency is small.  But even as a Senator she’d have more power than she deserves, as she’s accomplished little in the House save promote herself. Yes, she’s good at that, and she’s a Democratic Socialist, so the kids like her, but as a politician, she’s a disaster for someone of my stripe.

*Reader Peter N. called my attention to a piece on slime molds in the Guardian, a piece that makes you question the notion of intelligence, and whether it can be seen in amoeba-like organisms that have no neurons: “‘This is dangerous: slime molds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence.” Because I’ll give a few quotes at length, I am giving only four news sources today.

Forty years ago, as an undergraduate in Hokkaido, Toshiyuki Nakagaki came upon a lemon-yellow stain in a petri dish. That encounter turned him into a doyen of slime mould research – and fed a storm of biological and philosophical debate about the meanings of life and intelligence that persists to this day. Before, no one would have called a slime mould “intelligent”; the popular adjective, in fact, was “simple”. “A simple mass of protoplasm,” one 1895 description ran; “among the most simple of organisms”, said another. And it was hard to argue otherwise. A slime mould can appear to be just a small cell, capable only of feeding and reproducing. Simple is as simple does.

Of that first meeting, Nakagaki said: “I was just impressed with how fast it moved.” Physarum polycephalum, the slime mould species in that petri dish, has a top speed of 1cm an hour. For amoebic organisms, that’s gold-medal standard. At first glance, Physarum seems to spread as irregularly as ink on blotting paper, but in fact it senses its meals of bacteria or other microbes and reaches for them with a long, thin finger of protoplasm – which not only digests its food but then forages further or pulls back into the rest of the mould. It’s impossible to watch a slime mould over many days without sensing some deliberation at play.

. . . .In 2000, his astonishing research began to surface in the media. “Slime mould solves maze puzzle,” one headline ran, summarising an experiment in which Nakagaki induced a Physarum to find the shortest route through a maze in search of food. (In labs, slime moulds are reared on oat flakes, a convenient diet that can double as a researcher’s breakfast.) In 2010, the New York Times wrote about Nakagaki’s most famous experiment – the canonical study that scientists offhandedly call “the Tokyo railway one”. Nakagaki placed oat flakes to resemble the map of Tokyo and 35 of its satellite towns. Then he let the Physarum loose from the centre of “Tokyo”. From that one metropolitan oat, the mould spread outwards seeking the others, stretching towards them with its tubules. Then, putting out more branches, it linked up with itself, from one suburban oat flake to the next.

In doing all this, the mould displayed such a verve for efficiency – no wasted motion, an optimal pursuit of its food – that it ended up nearly retracing the route map of the greater Tokyo area’s railway system. Nearly, Nakagaki said – because, in fact, free of human bias or politicking, Physarum may have improved the design of the network. Later, when Nakagaki twice won the Ig Nobel – the prize for research that is both amusing and thought-provoking – the first award cited his maze paper in the field of “cognitive science”, but the second, cheekily, hailed the Tokyo railway study as a breakthrough in “transportation planning”.

. . . For more than a century, scientists were sure that cognition and intelligence required neurons, the cells that make up brains and nervous systems. These neurons form and reform connections between themselves to create pathways for thought and memory. This understanding of intelligence was an implicit argument that animals occupy a special place within the living kingdom – separate to plants and microbes – and that humans are most special of all.

But since the 1980s, more and more scientists have argued that traits such as cognition are intrinsic not just to animals but to all life – a stance that Pamela Lyon, a philosopher at Adelaide University, calls “biogenic”.

. . . . Given that the mould has no brain, slime is evolution’s way of “storing” memories of spaces. One of Reid’s experiments suggests Physarum uses its slime as an aide-memoire to recognise the paths it has travelled and those it hasn’t. The yellow slime, sticky but more watery than human mucus, is a soup of sugars and proteins. Its presence, Reid believes, tells a mould that it has already foraged in these parts and consumed any food there was to be had. When Reid’s team harvested slime from a mould, coated one route in a maze with it, and introduced the mould into this set-up, it nearly always chose to traverse the dry, un-slimed areas. More impressively, the Physarum can distinguish between its own slime and that discharged by of other species – as if Hansel could tell his breadcrumb trail apart from Gretel’s.

Over the past three decades, as the study of intelligence has broadened beyond humans, slime-mould research has gathered speed. We know now that Physarum is made up of thousands of tiny oscillators that sense their environment. If they pick up the chemical markers of a meal, these units oscillate faster, in turn causing the cell’s protoplasm to flow more thickly towards that area. This is how the mould moves.

But how these oscillators, so minuscule and seemingly so rudimentary, manage to sense so much – proteins, salts, acidity, light, heat, humidity, perhaps even gravitational and magnetic fields, and masses looming at a distance – is still unclear. In 2008, Nakagaki and his colleagues subjected a Physarum to cold, dry air streamed at regular hourly intervals, prompting it to slow its locomotion. After three such gusts, the mould spontaneously slowed on the top of the fourth hour – even when the mistral didn’t blow. No one can figure out how the slime mould keeps time.

. . .The truths are rooted in semantics. Unlike, say, the word “haemoglobin”, terms such as “cognition” have been around for so long that they’ve been coded into colloquial use in phrases such as “cognitive decline” and “cognitive bias”. To freely stretch the word beyond its wider connotation of the workings of a brain – to apply it to brainless beings such as slime moulds – “misleads the public”, Alex Kacelnik, a zoologist at the University of Oxford told me. “It hollows out the word itself.”

Kacelnik, who has studied the New Caledonian crow’s nimble use of tools, pointed out that “even an oak tree ‘decides’ – in inverted commas – how many acorns it will produce, what size each acorn is going to be, and when it will shed them. But when people say they’re going to cognitive therapy, they mean something different from what the oak is doing, right?” Misusing the word, he said, is counterproductive. By likening the tree’s function to cognition, “you haven’t solved the problem of how the oak does what it does – you’ve just trivialised it, or defined it out of existence”. He uses the term “cognition” in his own writing only when he can show that it involves “some kind of internal algorithm, with some kind of concept formation, in some kind of ‘language’ – in inverted commas”.

IU agree with Kacelnik in that we’re projecting when we ascribe “intelligence” to a creature like a slime mold, regardless of how highly evolved it is to do cool stuff. It doesn’t use neurons, but chemical cues, and to ascribe “cognition” to it—something I think is key to “intelligence”—is misguided. In fact, to argue whether it is “intelligent” or not seems to me the wrong path to take.  What we can do is marvel at, and figure out, how this protist can do all this stuff, and even do experiments to see how it evolved. Even tiny organisms like these are the products of millions of years of evolution, and can show adaptations that boggle the mind (think of all the amazing things ants do with a brain the size of a dot made by a pencil).

There’s a lot more to this article, and a lot of word-parsing and philosophizing. In the end, I think the problem is semantic, but I’d prefer to think of “intelligence” as requiring cognition—an ability to reason.

Here’s ZeFrank’s segment on slime molds:

*The NYT reports that the new Merriam-Webster dictionary is “Wordsmaxxing with 1400 new definitions” (article archived here). As you know, you have to be au courant with language, so here are some new words:

Merriam-Webster, the venerable dictionary that traces its roots to a time before looksmaxxing and yacht rock, has added those words along with chili crisp, shapewear and cuffing season, to its comprehensive accounting of the English language.

The company, based in Springfield, Mass., announced on Tuesday that it had added those five terms and 1,395 other new definitions to its online dictionary, Merriam-Webster.com. Many will also be added to upcoming editions of the print dictionary.

Merriam-Webster is the oldest dictionary publisher in America. It traces its start to 1843, when the brothers George and Charles Merriam bought the rights to the 1841 edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary. The company emphasizes that the dictionary is not a static catalog, but a reflection of the many different ways words are used by real people.

That includes food-related words that have become more commonly used in the United States like superfood, “a food (such as salmon, broccoli, or blueberries) that is rich in nutrients,” and shishito, “a slender usually mild chili pepper of East Asia.” On the sweeter side, the dictionary added cake pop, “a compressed ball of cake crumbs and icing that is dipped in a usually chocolate or sugary coating,” for the uninitiated.

Anyone who dreads going to work or school might be familiar with the Sunday scaries, the “feelings of anxiety or sadness that arise on Sunday from the knowledge that the weekend is almost over.” And people who know Braden Peters, the proudly vain social media influencer known as Clavicular, might be familiar, for better or worse, with looksmaxxing. Merriam-Webster calls it “the practice of taking one or more sometimes extreme or dangerous measures intended to increase one’s physical attractiveness.”

Yes, we discussed that odious word last week. But wait! There’s more!

. . . .Fans of Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald might be pleased to see that yacht rock made the cut. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a style of soft rock music originating in the 1970s and 1980s.”

Also clearing the bar was cuffing season, “a time of the year when people who are not married or in a relationship begin looking for a short-term romantic partner to spend the colder months of the year with.”

Merriam-Webster also added parasocial, “a one-sided emotional connection with someone (especially a celebrity or fictional character) whom one does not know personally,” and Rickroll, “to trick (someone) into hearing the song ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by English singer Rick Astley.”

The only one I know of these, save “looksmaxxing”, is Rickroll, and I like that one.

*As always, I’m stealing a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column at The Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: Experts fear worse ahead.”

→ Ed Sheeran debacle: Ed Sheeran decided to have Macklemore as his tour opening act, and the rapper took the stage to give a “Free Palestine” speech, like he was kicking off a course at Columbia or something. In the long debate about whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism, Macklemore leaves little doubt, in that he once performed wearing a fake beard and an oversized prosthetic nose in what was widely seen as a Jewish caricature. Anyway, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft then pressured Ed Sheeran’s promoters to drop Macklemore, and Macklemore was dropped. You can imagine what happened next. Macklemore has become even more of a hero, gaining hundreds of thousands of followers, bringing more attention to the cause. All of Ed Sheeran’s other opening acts backed out of the tour, as did his own backing band. For a sense of the public tone, comedian Mike Recine posted: “Robert Kraft is a pedophile and someone should kill him.” So it’s all going really well, temperature’s nice and low out here. Recine deleted his initial, um, joke? and posted: “Hey everyone I’d like to apologize for the post I made last night when I said ’Children deserve to have legs.’ I didn’t realize that statement was offensive to the Jewish community and I will choose my words better moving forward.”

The idea here being, I guess, that Jews love to kill children, or at least blast their legs off, so telling people to assassinate Robert Kraft is the same as saying you want to save children. So, by extension, then, being pro–Robert Kraft’s life equals wanting to remove Palestinian children’s legs.

All the former pro–cancel culture people are suddenly screaming “free speech,” which is always just so funny, and they point out the same hypocrisy in the anti–cancel culture people, who are suddenly saying deplatforming is a private company’s decision. Fair critique of both sides. But it’s all word games. The fact is, antisemitism is popular right now, and the Bob Krafts of the world cannot win. You either host the man who hates you and wants you in a work camp—or you make him even more of a star. Those are your options, Bob. Choose wisely, and if I were you, I’d probably stay away from your own venue for fear of the mobs.

→ Quote of the week: Here’s the latest scandal from Hasan Piker, the top political influencer on the left and a frequent campaign buddy for Dems.

Because I’m in the United States of America, the most dogshit country on the fucking planet, the absolute worst country on the planet, straight up, bar none. A capitalist shithole. The absolute worst fuckin’ place on the planet, just a horrific, monstrous, awful, dogshit country that I fucking despise. The absolute fuckin’ worst country that has the most—the most—wealth throughout history, throughout time, the wealthiest nation on the planet, and we don’t have a fraction of the dedicated broadband speed that you can get in a fucking village on the countryside of France. Okay? I just—the worst fucking infrastructure, the absolute biggest shithole on the planet, I fucking despise this nation. I despise this country with my entire fuckin’ heart. Okay?”

Okay! That’s right, while livestreaming from his gorgeous West Hollywood home, the Wi-Fi got a little wobbly, and so Hasan went nuclear. America is his mom, and she’s being a total bitch. This is what young people love shooting directly into their veins. “Dogshit country that I fucking despise.” Get this guy a swear jar and he might end up as poor as the people he pretends to advocate for!

In late-breaking news, Piker also sat down with Alex Thompson of Axios: “Do you think America then is worse than al-Qaeda?” Piker: “Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes.” Perfect.

→ Testing, testing: New York State’s Regents exams are three-hour tests on subjects like English, math, and science. Students need a score of 65 on multiple exams to pass and get a high school diploma. But now New York’s planning on dropping the requirement. Here’s New York Board of Regents member Felicia Thomas-Williams on the change: “Maybe you’ve seen the cartoon where you have a fish climb a tree? You don’t assess a fish on climbing a tree because fish can’t climb trees.” If the Regents exam asked students to breathe underwater, then Felicia’s argument might track. But the exam asks students to read, write, and solve math problems—skills that are standard for most educated human beings. Or should be? Of course this test was dropped as a requirement for vaguely anti-racist reasons that no one bothered to really explain. But now: What will New York high school students have to prove in order to graduate? Will they just fill out a feelings wheel? Are they going to play Go Fish for 40 minutes and call it a day? That’s insane for the public school system. Playing games at school costs at least $50,000 at a private school in Santa Monica.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being bribed with beef:

Hili: Sometimes even a cat has had enough of everything.
Andrzej: Do you want a piece of beef?
Hili: That’s psychological manipulation.

Hili: Czasem nawet kot ma już wszystkiego dość.

Ja: Chcesz kawałek wołowiny.

Hili: To jest psychomanipulacja.

*******************

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Things With Faces; happy suds!

And from somewhere on Facebook; spot the cat!

Here’s a message from Masih to Mojtaba Khamenei, who may well not be alive to receive it:

This is a gift from me and the women of #WhiteWednesdays to you @khamenei_ir
💃🏻💃🏻🌻🌻💃🏻💃🏻 pic.twitter.com/E4MpqjCgiQ

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 18, 2026

From Luana.  The NYT, well, I can’t say it on a family-friendly site:

What the f**k is this, @nytimes? pic.twitter.com/ncXTtDvQnL

— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) September 16, 2026

Math fun from reader Bryan:

Carl Friedrich Gauss, often called the “Prince of Mathematicians,” famously described mathematics as the “queen of the sciences” and number theory as the “queen of mathematics.”

I think prime numbers are the oxygen of number theory. They are the fundamental building blocks of… pic.twitter.com/F0WLsEyaMS

— Math Files (@Math_files) September 17, 2026

It appears that the Number Ten Cat caught another mouse: his fourth in about fifteen years:

Still got it. pic.twitter.com/gNrdeymvgP

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) September 18, 2026

Tw0 from my feed. I think the Democrats are finally realizing that Hasan Piker is a liability. What a dumb party we are! Here’s Rahm Emanuel:

Now that he won’t stop talking, the folks who told us Hasan Piker is a serious voice who should be listened to ought to let us know which of these positions we’re supposed to take seriously:

1. That “pound for pound,” America is worse than al-Qaeda – a ridiculous statement on a…

— Rahm Emanuel (@RahmEmanuel) September 18, 2026

Cats helping out:

Good Morning!
Cats. When not needed, but want to be included. 😅 pic.twitter.com/9B28vR2rHK

— Bluegrasspatriot (@kylawndog) September 18, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was eight years old. https://t.co/c462awbT5T

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 19, 2026

And one from Herr Dr. Professor Cobb, which he calls, “Nearly a caracal”:

It's amazing that perhaps the world's best place to see an awesome wild cat – the caracal – is right on the edge of a big city. Climbed #TableMountain today from #CapeTown with a tiny hope of seeing one, & was delighted to find some poo. Half the joy of #MammalWatching is just knowing they're there

— Jack Ashby (@jackdashby.bsky.social) 2026-09-16T15:45:16.469Z