Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, October 3, 2026: shabbos for Jewish cats and, importantly, the birthday of Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), one of my favorite authors, and one who is much denigrated by the literati for “overwriting.” And yes, he did overwrite at time, but he was so frantic to capture the tone and color of America that he couldn’t stop himself. He was quite restrained in his first and best-loved novel, Look Homeward, Angel, but then he let himself go in the other three long novels (two published posthumously), which together comprise a lightly fictionalized autobiography. I’ve read them all several times, and there are wonderful set pieces if you can’t take a diet of desserts. Read, for example, the chapters “The Child by Tiger” or “I Have a Thing to Tell You” to see what he could do (both are free at the links), or read “The Party at Jack’s,” first a novella and later incorporated into the posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again. I posted his “Hymn to October” in yesterday’s Hili.
Without the editorial help of Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s—perhaps the greatest of all American editors (he also discovered and edited Fitzgerald and Hemingway)—Wolfe, who was unable to stop writing, would never have been able to mold his gazillion pages of prose (often written on top of a refrigerator as Wolfe was so tall) into sell-able books. Wolfe eventually had to write about Perkins, since all of his novels were autobiographical, and it was not exactly a flattering portrait. The two men fell out and Wolfe found another publisher. But as Wolfe lay on his deathbed (he died at 37 of TB after a brain operation), he made amends with Perkins in this wonderful letter, which always makes me tear up. (h/t Work-in-progress):
August 12, 1938
Dear Max:
I’m sneaking this against orders—but “I’ve got a hunch”—and I wanted to write these words to you.
I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close; and I don’t think I was too much afraid of him, but so much of mortality still clings to me—I wanted most desperately to live and still do, and I thought about you all 1000 times, and wanted to see you all again, and there was the impossible anguish and regret of all the work I had not done, of all the work I had to do—and I know now I’m just a grain of dust, and I feel as if a great window has been opened on life I did not know about before—and if I come through this, I hope to God I am a better man, and in some strange way I can’t explain I know I am a deeper and a wiser one—If I get on my feet and get out of here, it will be months before I head back, but if I get on my feet, I’ll come back.
—Whatever happens—I had this “hunch” and wanted to write you and tell you, no matter what happens or has happened, I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that 4th of July day 3 yrs. ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the café on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below—
A senior United Arab Emirates political figure and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the near-downing of FlyDubai Flight 1073 as terrorism on Friday, a clear indication investigators view the incident as an ideologically motivated act.
The comments from Anwar Gargash, senior foreign-policy adviser to the U.A.E. president, came a day after an Emirati security team escorted the jet’s wounded captain and the co-pilot who stabbed him back to the U.A.E. from Saudi Arabia, where the plane made an emergency landing after passengers intervened.
Netanyahu said the picture of what happened on Wednesday’s flight is becoming clearer, calling the co-pilot a terrorist who had been radicalized. The prime minister and people familiar with the matter said the attacker was Omani, but other details of his identity remained unclear.
The prime minister said Israel has launched an investigation into who was behind the attack and promised retribution.
Other officials haven’t gone as far in defining the attack. Saudi Arabia said the co-pilot assaulted the captain but didn’t suggest a motive.
President Trump told reporters Thursday that Iran may have had a role in the FlyDubai incident. Earlier in the day, U.S. officials said there was still no concrete evidence about who, if anyone, was behind it. No other country involved has formally blamed Iran.
. . . [Pilot] Machchhar described a fierce fight with his co-pilot in a call with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday. The captain said he had collapsed on the cockpit floor after being repeatedly wounded while fighting for his life, then felt the plane pitch into a dangerous dive. Fearing for his passengers, he made a desperate lunge and opened the cockpit door, allowing rescuers to burst in.
“I knew I could not let him kill everyone,” he told the prime minister.
. . . Once the plane was stabilized, passengers took control of the cabin. Opher Dubrovsky, who works in tech at Amazon.com, said some passengers worried that crew members might have been involved in what they suspected was a terrorist attack. They decided to keep close watch on the crew, and someone would shadow their every move until they landed.
My Bayesian probability that it was at least partly motivated by terrorism is increasins, but that’s based on evidence that the copilot had been radicalized. Suicide is another possible motive, though it would be hard to explain as the sole motive when the copilot wanted to take 200 Israelis with him. We shall wait and see.
It is sensible to hope that on Nov. 3 most of the Republican Party will be smashed to atoms. It is now a trembling and embarrassed, because frightened, emanation of one man. Justice — of a rough sort, but still justice — will be done if the undertow from his unpopularity drowns many of those who have tried to purchase political longevity by obedience to him.
Vast Republican carnage should not be entirely indiscriminate. Two Republicans especially deserve to win their Senate contests.
. . .When judging Republican incumbents who have enabled Trump’s rampancy, and Republican candidates eager to further abet it, voters should remember: If there is no penalty for travesties, travesties will proliferate.
The president’s aching neediness explains his lengthening list of legally dubious, and unhinged, acts of self-celebration. Such as, taxpayer-financed ads praising him. And his proposed Arc de Trump that will double as a sniper’s nest.
Voters should ask: If there were only enough Republicans in Congress to sustain a presidential veto, would anything, including the president’s behavior, be any different? There will be enough in 2027. Beyond this number, any surplus of congressional Republicans is superfluous.
And here are the two Senate Republicans that Will thinks should keep their seats:
If Mike Rogers, former seven-term congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is not Michigan’s next senator, Abdul El-Sayed will be. The Democrat is comfortable in the company of antisemites and Holocaust deniers.
If Sen. Susan Collins loses in Maine, this will be partly because she did something admirable and senatorial. Standing against manufactured hysteria, she voted to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In 4,192 words spoken on the Senate floor, she examined his extensive judicial record and the sexual assault allegations against him. Demonstrating the complete lack of corroborating evidence, she concluded that the allegations could not meet even the minimal “more likely than not” standard. Read her statement and marvel at its sobriety about the Senate’s “advice and consent” duty. This is vanishingly rare among incumbent senators of both parties.
I don’t know if Maine Democrats even know about Collins’s stand on Kavanaugh—unless the Democrats are making a big deal about it in campaign ads. But it’s not something that would cause most people on the fence to vote for or against Collins. As for El-Sahyed, I consider him an Islamist antisemite, and I’m glad I don’t have to vote for him.
*The other day I described an op-ed in the NYT by Joe Cruz, a professor of philosophy at Williams College (where Luana teaches; she sent me this link). Cruz maintained that AI isn’t as much of a danger to higher education as we think, for students can simply discuss matters and learn things orally and verbally—the Socratic method. Writing, he argued, is not nearly as important to learning to think as is discussing. I gave a number of reasons why this wouldn’t work in general, but now Matt Taibbi has taken on Cruz on Taibbi’s substack: “Writing is good (he said controversially.”
The latest diatribe in the Times against a once-uncontroversially wonderful human activity is written by Professor Joe Cruz, chair of the philosophy department at Williams College. He appears as an advocate for permitting students “the use of A.I. writing tools,” which he believes can take place “without undermining the next generation of thinkers.”
After all, Cruz reports, when he allowed students to use A.I. for their final essays within “specific guidelines” — a comical set of “restrictions” that boil down to “you shouldn’t let A.I. completely compose your essay” — the only notable result was that students performed better:
I was aghast reading Cruz’s description of a beneficial use of A.I. The aforementioned rules at Williams don’t allow students to offer prompts like “come up with a topic” or “generate a thesis,” but do allow them to solicit “objections” from the machine. In other words, instead of writing for people, you can bounce your ideas off an A.I. This is like calling an erotic chat with a bot a form of sex.
It isn’t. The writing process does not work without the element of pain and rejection from a human audience. The whole idea is to put a part of yourself on paper and allow yourself to be vulnerable by showing your writing to another person. A negative reaction can be crushing, but it forces writers to confront the reality of how others view them. It might hurt the first time, or the first thousand times, but the human element is how you learn.
Replacing that process with an A.I. mirror that gives pillow criticism before helping students touch up “their” prose for presentation to an actual person is the ultimate in participation trophy-type infantilization. Worse, it inserts a machine — a deeply politicized, biased machine that teaches a conformist, submissive intellectual instinct — in the middle of a student’s thought process.
To the extent that a student taught this way ever learns writing (or as Cruz puts it, “archiving”), he or she will be like a healthy, ambulatory person trained to get through a Wal-Mart with the aid of a “mobility scooter.” The benefit of mobility scooters for Wal-Mart is obvious: they get everyone through the store. Functional shopping! Doing this with writing, though? It might be good for a school, in the sense that students will be able to present the appearance of literacy all the way through graduation, but it turns thinking — for college students — into a machine-aided process. Who imagines this will incentivize better thinking? Has it made fitter Wal-Mart shoppers?
. . . I’m not anti-A.I. I think the technology is amazing, and people will be able to do wonderful things with it, already have in fact. What Cruz is arguing, though, is nuts. He goes far beyond saying A.I. can be a useful tool and makes the case that perhaps we shouldn’t teach young people to write, because writing may not be so inherently valuable. He reduces it to a technical process, useful for “cognitive scaffolding” and organizing, but not for learning, which takes place through “speaking, answering, and defending our ideas.”
And here’s a point I made in my critique (Taibbi’s words):
The part that blew my mind was the notion that writing is an antiseptic, solitary behavior, lacking benefits that students gain from dialogue. Just consider, Cruz says, what “we might gain if we practiced speaking more and carrying around the resources of mind through our own attention, memory and engagement with one another.” Right, because why would a chair of a philosophy department think writing is a form of “engagement with one another”?
Of course those of us who love writing and reading, and who have done a lot of it in our careers, will naturally defend the practice as compared to speaking. But it’s more than that. There is no reason why a dialogue can’t be had in writing, and there are clear advantages of that form, including needing to weigh your words and arguments most carefully, and the fact that the words are permanent compared to oral discussion. (I used as one example my written exchange with Adam Gopnik, comprising four letters each on whether the methods of science constitute the only “way of knowin.”
I wonder if Cruz is rethinking his essay. (I doubt it.)
A Baltimore opera group ousted its recently hired white executive director after she sported cornrows at Burning Man.
The Baltimore Rock Opera Society (BROS) canned Kelly Carnes on Sept. 23 after a video posted to social media showed her with the new hairdo at an organizational event, according to an email sent to volunteers and obtained by The Baltimore Banner.
Carnes said she styled her hair in cornrows as a form of protection from the elements at Burning Man — a nine day festival in the Nevada desert.
But her appearance apparently raised concerns of ‘cultural appropriation’.
. . .Carnes confirmed her sacking to The Banner on Wednesday, saying she was stunned that an organization claiming to celebrate creative freedom would suddenly police her personal appearance.
“I believe the circumstances surrounding my termination raise serious questions about discrimination, governance, and whether the values BROS presents publicly are actually extended to the people it employs,” she wrote.
. . . . BROS proudly announced on Instagram Sept. 14 that they were welcoming Carnes — who also goes by the moniker “AWOL” — as executive director.
“BROS is excited for the new stories about to unfold under AWOL’s leadership as she supports us in our 7,000 year mission of incredible rock theater,” the group said.776
Just two days later, BROS completely changed course, declaring on Instagram that they were “taking action” after the controversial video showing Carnes’ cornrows was posted.
“We regret removing the video without an explanation and take responsibility for the confusion that [it] caused,” the organization posted, adding, “more importantly, we are taking action.”
This is palpably ridiculous. A fair number of white people, both male and female, like cornrows, and adopting them is either a form of hair protection or of admiration. It is not at all like blackface; it is appropriation based on appreciation. Why on earth do only black people have the right to wear cornrows? And isn’t just as much appropriation for black people to straighten their hair to emulate the hair of whites? Neither is something to beef about. As I’ve said before, “cultural appropriation” is worth criticizing only when someone steals stuff from another culture and, by so doing, denigrates, anonymizes, or impoverishes members of that culture. Nothing like that is going on here.
Here’s the poorly treated Ms. Carnes from a Facebook post.
Facebook/kelly.carnes
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: No fatties, no beardos, no weirdos.”
→ Iran writes a letter to its American fan base: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps published “An Open Letter to the Honorable People of the United States of America,” addressed to “the scholars, the students, and the members of the media”—Iran certainly knows its audience!—urging Americans to use the midterms to “wrest control back from corrupt politicians” and end U.S. support for the war against Iran. Iran, could you issue local district by district voting guides? I think that would really help out the media workers and the grad students! Also, a “Where Iran Eats with Friends in NYC” Apple Maps guide, and a “10 Things Iran Loves/Hates” list? Hates: 1. Loud restaurants; 2. People that say “mm-hmm” instead of “thank you”; 3. Women voting. The ayatollah should go on Subway Takes.
→ Were the Canadian doctors busy?: A woman was set to be executed in Tennessee this week, but survived two rounds of the death drug and was taken to a hospital for treatment. Apparently the drug, pentobarbital, was old and degraded? Or her veins were too small. At one point she asked if it was supposed to burn. This is the stuff of nightmares. Just hell. And here it was an “all-female lethal injection team” and everything (was that a glass ceiling we were worried about?). But Christa Pike, who’s been on death row for 30 years for the torture and murder of a classmate, survived the execution attempt. My conspiratorial gut is that someone wanted to sabotage the controversial execution (controversial because she’s a woman and, although we can vote and drive, the consensus of both sexes is that women should sort of be treated like minors when it comes to crimes). Anyway, my question is this: Canadian doctors are executing people constantly (sorry, performing medical assistance in dying), and it seems to have a 100 percent successful death rate. They do it with IVs, too. Have we called any of them to help? Right now, Christa Pike is receiving life-saving medical care so that. . . the state can potentially try to kill her again. Professionally, this time. As Robbie Soave of Reason put it: “This is a level of mania, incoherence, and incompetence that only the government could possibly deliver.”
→ A thwarted plane hijacking: On a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, the co-pilot allegedly decided to try to do a little plane terrorism. He’s accused of stabbing the flight captain and steering the plane into a nosedive over Saudi Arabia. After a young girl heard screams in the cockpit, passengers and crew snapped into action. They tied up the attacking co-pilot with headphone cords and zip ties. A dentist on board tended to the brave captain’s wounds. The crew was able to land the plane safely. It’s like a movie! Let’s see how this was covered in the press.
The paper was then very defensive about the post and made a whole thing about how no one knew anything yet so we have to keep it real vague. First of all, we knew a lot, and it had been reported all over the place by that time. Also: Funny how they’ll blast entirely fake headlines about Israel bombing a hospital, including fake fatality numbers for an attack Israel never did. But if the news might look good-ish for Israelis? Well, we all need to wait a good, long while to hear the facts. These are Israeli officials making these claims, after all; we should be careful. Certainly there must be some other explanation. And of course, now we have the chic leftists saying it’s a false flag.
“I’m not saying this is a false flag. I don’t know yet. I don’t know yet. I think it’s fishy,” says popular political commentator Ana Kasparian. And so Ana becomes Candace, and Candace becomes Ana, and we press on.
Kasparian is getting more and more antisemitic and odious.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej’s book launch went spectacularly well, with friends and readers of all stripes showing up:
Hili: So many wonderful people have come to see us. Andrzej: You’re right. Now we have to make friends with the silence again.
In Polish:
Hili: Tak wielu miłych ludzi odwiedziło nasz dom.
Ja: Masz rację, a teraz musimy znowu polubić ciszę.
There are high-school demonstrations and closures all over France (accompanied by fires and other violence), and I haven’t seen anything about this being a protest largely immigrants, but Luana thinks it is, and tenders these two tweets:
A French woman tells one of the second and third-generation migrant rioter no to vandalize her city
Regarding the riots in France, on could think that at least now people can see the dangers of allowing this much immigration from Africa and the Middle East.
But regrettably, no. We won’t even get that. The angle the news media is going with is something along the lines of “a… pic.twitter.com/7YOGGj5e6s
And I found this one. English translation: “Marseille has fallen. Now, Emmanuel Macron may finally be able to designate Marseille as the Palestinian state he so fervently desired.” That’s pretty hyperbolic, but I’ll find out what I can about the stuff going on in France.
Marseille est tombée.
À présent, Emmanuel Macron pourra peut-être désigner Marseille comme l’État palestinien qu’il souhaitait tant. pic.twitter.com/cGcrxADADZ
One from Dr. Cobb, who’s off to Dijon. This is T.H. Morgan’s lab at Columbia, and yes, he did get a Nobel Prize out of the fly work. The bananas are making fly food, and in the lab only Morgan himself was allowed to eat one.
Thomas Hunt Morgan was born OTD in 1866.If you're ever feeling that your work is uending and unedifying, remember that he once said this: "Two years work wasted, I have been breeding those flies for all that time and I've got nothing out of it."🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM
I love Fleetwood Mac, now dissolved, but of all their great songs, the one I most favor is below: “Landslide,” written by Stevie Nicks and here performed by her and her erstwhile paramourLindsay Buckingham.
Stevie Nicks has said that she wrote “Landslide” while contemplating either going back to school or continuing on professionally with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. At the time, Nicks was financially supporting both herself and Buckingham by taking up jobs as both a waitress and a cleaning lady. Following the release of their debut album Buckingham Nicks, they had been dropped from their recording contract by Polydor Records before they could release a follow-up. Nicks wrote the song while visiting Aspen, Colorado, sitting in someone’s living room “looking out at the Rocky Mountains pondering the avalanche of everything that had come crashing down on us … at that moment, my life truly felt like a landslide in many ways.”
On the studio recording of “Landslide”, Buckingham played a Martin D-18 acoustic guitar using a Travis picking technique with the thumb alternating between bass notes. He described the part as a “three against four pattern that crosses the bar line and gives the chorus another level of lift.”In 2007, Buckingham told The Austin Chronicle that the song addressed some of the interpersonal issues between him and Nicks. He thought that the song possessed a “nice” guitar solo and also maintained that “Landslide” was not a “signature guitar piece”.[10] In a different interview, Buckingham discussed how he bristled at the notion that “Landslide” was associated with country music.
This is what can be done with just a guitar and a voice (I love Buckinham’s three-finger picking). Fleetwood Mac is one of those groups that sounds just as good in concert as on records, and this is a live version.
I think we can provisionally accept that the Omani pilot was a terrorist. What is publicly known does point to that. But now, airlines in and out of Israel will need to watch for copy-cats.
Why not give the judge a knife and have the jury hold her? Everybody gangsta as long as they don’t have to get their hands dirty. Seriously, the fact that the US still has death “penalty”, sorry, murders people in revenge, stands in stark contrast to some of your real achievements.
So I am in Michigan, and am experiencing a conundrum about the election of Republican Mike Rogers vs Democrat Abdul El-Sayed for the Senate seat. I am asking readers what I should do.
On the one hand, I am very much against the expressed views of El-Sayed, and his dalliance with DSA in its presently insane form. So much so that I am sorely tempted to vote for the Republican, and I believe this would be the first time that I voted for anyone in that party. Or I could leave that box blank.
On the other hand, there is the great need to make my statement for finally getting Trmp under some degree of control. Michigan is a swing state, so this outcome seems pretty important, and El-Sayed is over 1% down in the polls while the Rogers campaign is saturating the airwaves with ads, supported by outside money . To me, right now, to put a check on Trmp is more important than the objections to El-Sayed — even though those objections are considerable. It’s a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. Not making the perfect the enemy of the good. That sort of thing. My wife is voting for Rogers, as she is pretty incensed about him. But what should I do?
Trmp is the greater evil, imo. And I try to tell myself that El-Sayed is 1 person and cannot be effective. But the message also would be that far left candidates can win in swing states. I would rather the message be that they are fairly toxic.
It’s too bad that the incumbent senator was un-seated in this primary. She was good, but I think far too timid in spelling out the issues with the El-Sayed during the primaries. She barely went after him.
Well, you know what you’re getting with the Republican, and you kind of know the extremes of that game, even with Trump emboldened. Those extremes can be remedied in future by a shift toward centre by adults from both the left and the right. But I’m terrified that the extremes that the DSA will unleash cannot be so easily remedied.
I’m in NZ, and, like the UK and Canada, we’re further along a DSA-style path than you are in the USA, and we’ve watched DSA-style politics sever the foundations that traditionally held our nation together. So, I tend to see one side as politics to endure as we always have endured, and the other side as a direct threat to democratic civilization. And to avoid any possibility of ambiguity, for me, that means the Republicans are the politics to endure. The other side is more dangerous.
The video from Marseilles showing the activist aim a flamethrower at the face of a law-abiding member of the public captures exactly why I fear garden-variety activists more than I fear politicians playing even the dirtiest politics.
Mark, All federal officials take an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution. While the wording differs, the core commitment for senators and presidents is the same. Donald Trump has aggressively exercised his Article II powers and tested constitutional limits. Many presidents do. Trump has lost some of these cases at the Supreme Court; others he has won. That is balance of power in action, no matter what one might think about the particular policies in question. And while Trump sometimes rails at the Supreme Court justices, he has complied with their rulings. The core case for or against Trump is about his policies and behavior. Ten years in, he is not a threat to constitutional governance.
Consider the DSA candidates. They belong to a group that openly advocates for the destruction of the U.S. Constitution and a fundamental remaking of our system of government. I fail to see how any of them could take the current oath of office without duplicity. Yet we have boilerplate Democrats welcoming them to the team. I find it far more unhinged than working-class MAGA embrace of the showman. As obnoxious as Trump is, he is a quintessentially American carnival barker and egotist; the men and women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries would have recognized his type immediately. The DSA is a different breed altogether.
Your senate candidate is an interesting test case. He is associated with the DSA, and has appeared at several of their events, but he is not a member. He says he is not a socialist, but he welcomes DSA support. It’s an open question what support he would give them in Congress. I’ll push back on your reflection that he would be only one senator among many. A single senator in an evenly divided body can have great power.
Don’t sweat it! Your vote won’t matter to the results. But it will matter to you! I applaud you for wrestling with the decision. If only our party-line automatons on each side would do the same.
I too, am in Michigan. I too, have never voted republican. However, I am enthusiastically voting for Rogers. To me, it’s extremely cut-and-dried. I happen to enjoy living in the Western world. Drumpf is a buffoon, a narcissist, and probably a criminal–but he’s also (probably) a necessary evil, given how insanely the DSA/far left has gone off the deep end. El-Sayed and his moslem cronies have made no bones about the fact that their goal is to end Western civilization. Furthermore, though I will continue to vote Democrat if they run decent candidates (my congresscritter seems to be one), I will vote republican every time the dems run an islamist, a socialist, or both.
Every day I look around at what I see or what I’m doing–taking a walk with my Audubon club buddies, going to Costco, seeing both of my highly educated daughters working in the medical profession, street scenes with people dressed as they like, ad infinitum (yes, I’m a suburbanite)–and I ask myself, how would a large influx of islamic people make this better? How would socialism make this better? And I (literally) never come up with a positive answer.
Furthermore, I no longer care if certain people disparage my outlook; they can call me islamophobic all day long (I cheerfully concur; as an ethnic Jew, apostate Christian, and atheist I feel like I have sufficient reason), or racist (untrue; the accusation says more about them than about me). My short reply is, if it’s a choice as to who gets it in the neck, my daughters or some illegal immigrants, well, I’m pretty sure you can fill in the rest.
Love your pictures, fellow Michigander; keep them coming!
“Plane lands at alternate airport following conversation in the cabin.”
No. It’s not a real quotation. I’m still working on coming up with a headline that best minimizes the mid-flight stabbing and slashing of the pilot by the deranged maniac or radicalized terrorist who was attempting to crash into the ground a jetliner loaded with Israeli passengers.
I wonder if those news outlets used AI to identify the most effective way to report this week’s event without actually drawing attention to it. MSNOW—which I almost never look at—did the best job of all. Their web site home page did not mention the attack at all. I looked up and down the home page on the day of the attack: nothing. I did a search using the web site’s search box: nothing. I did the same the next day: nothing. They did the best job of anyone at minimizing the story.
And, Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide is one of my top three songs of all time.
How about this headline : “Israeli passengers storm cockpit, attacking Muslim co-pilot, forcing emergency landing”.
And yes, it does seem that the rioting in France is mostly North African Muslim immigrants, which means the media is doing its best to avoid mentioning this, and indeed not even mentioning the riots.
What a beautiful letter Wolf wrote to Perkins. It made me teary eyed too.
Re: Pike: While Reddit is admittedly not the most reliable source, people on the site have offered two possible explanations for the failure of the execution.
In a post on the r/emergencymedicine sub, doctors are pretty scathing in their critique of the doctor in charge of Pike’s execution, on both medical and ethical grounds. One fact I wasn’t aware of was that this was the second botched execution that the doctor was involved in. The first one was just a few months ago.
On r/AMA, a former inmate who met and interacted with Pike wrote that Pike could have tried to sabotage her execution. She suggested two possible means: one, by dehydrating herself on the day before her execution and, two, by getting ahold of contraband phenobarbital in order to build up her tolerance to the drug.
But whatever the reason for the failure, it’s morally insane and cruel to try again.
I didn’t realize that the passenger who helped the pilot after he was stabbed was a dentist. There wasn’t a single MD on a plane full of Jews? What are the odds?
If I am not mistaken, Israel currently has the lowest ratio of doctors per 100,000 citizens in the OECD.
Many of us have been warning of this for years, and the country has recently opened a couple of new medical schools. In addition, there has been an influx of doctors moving to Israel from Western countries where they fell that the coroner environment is hostile to Jews.
I am a mathematician and a physics junkie. Back in the 90s I had a three year post doc in Ann Arbor. At the time U. Michigan was engaged in an experimental approach to teaching calculus that we sometimes derisively referred to as “new age calculus”. Among other things, the students were required to write verbal explanations of their solutions of math problems and were to be graded, in part, by the clarity and quality of their writing.
I was surprised to find that there wasn’t much correlation between a student’s writing skills and how generally smart and knowledgeable the student seemed in other ways. I had students who were PATHETIC writers, but I could not understand why. The same student could speak English in an educated way with moderately complex and correct grammar and with a good educated vocabulary. But when they tried to write, their language skills devolved to nursery school grammar and syntax. “See Dick. See Jane. See Dick run. Jane runs too.”
I don’t understand the phenomenon. It seems to me that any fully literate person can write down any complex eloquent sentence the person could orally express. But for many people, that is not the case. They sound smart and thoughtful when they talk, but they seem like morons when they write.
Very interesting. On the related subject, I suggest that Cruz’ point is applicable for the limited writing/thinking operations that most citizens engage in. Taibbi’s point applies only to GOOD writing, not to the grocery lists, letters to relatives, casual Emails, etc., for which the great majority of individuals actually use the process of writing. Put it another way: Taibbi’s argument coheres with the view that everyone ought to go to university. Should they?
This distinction could apply to other cases. The printing press and consequent expanded literacy is sometimes credited with facilitating the scientific revolution. Well, it did facilitate the ability of young Michael Faraday to enter into science—but Faraday belonged to a small minority of the European population, the vast majority of which had nothing at all to do with the scientific revolution. Just an aspect of the unavoidable fact that cognitive traits, like other traits, are distributed amongst population members.
Apparently, whether man or woman, braiding or cornrowing one’s hair is common procedure before going to Burning Man, because the sand and wind can ruin one’s hair over the days.
Three observers also pointed out that her hair wasn’t cornrowed but braided.
Whilst normally I find Larry the Cat comments pretty amusing and astute. His take on the burning of schools in France frankly absurd. Basically he thinks it’s ok for migrants to riot in France because French people rioted in the past.
The Israeli National Security Council identified this as a possible problem many years ago, and set up protocols for preventing such actions, such as vetting foreign pilots before allowing them into Israeli airspace. Only one of them was implemented, forbidding pilots from countries without relations with Israel from getting off their planes after landing. the tests of the protocols, such as background checks on pilots etc—those were never implemented. The reason is that despite identification of a serious threat, the Israeli political system and bureaucracy prevented that implementation. Once the problem was identified, the question was who would deal with it. The Transportation Ministry was designated as responsible by Netanyahu in, IIRC, 2025. But they do not have the security personnel to deal with the issue. Insides of demanding more funds to hire such people, or request help from the Israel Security Agency or Mossad, the Transportation Minister simply ignored the problem. (There is no record of any such official requests being made.) The minister, Miri Regev, is known for two things: political loyalty (within and outside of the Likud Party) to Netanyahu, and monumental stupidity. I suppose that bureaucratic laziness can now be added to her qualities. Luckily, individual courage on the part of the nonIsraeli pilot and the Israeli passengers averted catastrophe. And now, Ms. Regev, is doing the thing that she is best at: CYA.
I wonder how many people still read Thomas Wolfe. I like him well enough to have driven to Asheville (lovely place) to see his home, including the angel. I do not know how much survived the storm that hit the area, but it was well worth the drive.
Regarding El-Sayed: I understand the reluctance of Michigan Democrats to vote for Republicans. But consider this: an El-Sayed victory will result in Michigan being known as a state that sent an anti-Semite to the US Senate. I am not saying, or course, that anyone voting for El-Sayed is an antisemite. But El-Sayed himself certainly qualifies, as shown by his association with Piker and his ilk. Would you vote for a guy who campaigns with KKK activists, no matter who he is running against?
One alternative is a write-in ballot. Another is just staying home, if one can’t bring hisself or herself to vote Republican. But this will be a long remembered vote, as will the votes for the House of Representatives.
Just my opinion, of course. I understand that there are other considerations, like the other, non-Israel related policies of the candidates. But given that El-Sayed has made this an issue at all—the attacks on the legitimacy of a Jewish State—makes our an issue that ford concern me.
I’m just wondering if the Baltimore Rock Opera Society has fired every female Black employee who chemically straightens her hair.
Or anyone who has tattoos of Chinese calligraphy.
OHHH it was yesterday!
It was so busy I missed it!
Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands.
🍂🍁
Perhaps we can get some H-1B visas for Canadian doctors to come and be executioners? Or perhaps we just go to the guillotine?
I think we can provisionally accept that the Omani pilot was a terrorist. What is publicly known does point to that. But now, airlines in and out of Israel will need to watch for copy-cats.
Why not give the judge a knife and have the jury hold her? Everybody gangsta as long as they don’t have to get their hands dirty. Seriously, the fact that the US still has death “penalty”, sorry, murders people in revenge, stands in stark contrast to some of your real achievements.
Love the licking lynx, and it lets me present a favorite palindrome:
“No lynxes in unisex nylon”
Written by Anthony Etherin; check him out on Substack if you like wordplay and constrained poetry.
Ooh, that’s a brilliant one.
I’ve written a few (unpublished) palindromes. A feline-related one:
Senile few deified we felines.
(It’s false, of course. AFAIC there’s nothing demented about worshipping cats.)
From the cute kid cooking to… comedy cats duo creating some delicacy from scratch..
https:// x.com /CatFlixer/status/2103590363743269301/video/1
So I am in Michigan, and am experiencing a conundrum about the election of Republican Mike Rogers vs Democrat Abdul El-Sayed for the Senate seat. I am asking readers what I should do.
On the one hand, I am very much against the expressed views of El-Sayed, and his dalliance with DSA in its presently insane form. So much so that I am sorely tempted to vote for the Republican, and I believe this would be the first time that I voted for anyone in that party. Or I could leave that box blank.
On the other hand, there is the great need to make my statement for finally getting Trmp under some degree of control. Michigan is a swing state, so this outcome seems pretty important, and El-Sayed is over 1% down in the polls while the Rogers campaign is saturating the airwaves with ads, supported by outside money . To me, right now, to put a check on Trmp is more important than the objections to El-Sayed — even though those objections are considerable. It’s a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. Not making the perfect the enemy of the good. That sort of thing. My wife is voting for Rogers, as she is pretty incensed about him. But what should I do?
Ask yourself: who could do more harm–Trump or El-Sayed? I think the answer is clear. But I sympathize with you even having to make such a choice.
Trmp is the greater evil, imo. And I try to tell myself that El-Sayed is 1 person and cannot be effective. But the message also would be that far left candidates can win in swing states. I would rather the message be that they are fairly toxic.
It’s too bad that the incumbent senator was un-seated in this primary. She was good, but I think far too timid in spelling out the issues with the El-Sayed during the primaries. She barely went after him.
Fortunately other states are in play and Michigan may not have to deliver blue. I don’t envy you. I would not be able to vote for El-Sayed.
Well, you know what you’re getting with the Republican, and you kind of know the extremes of that game, even with Trump emboldened. Those extremes can be remedied in future by a shift toward centre by adults from both the left and the right. But I’m terrified that the extremes that the DSA will unleash cannot be so easily remedied.
I’m in NZ, and, like the UK and Canada, we’re further along a DSA-style path than you are in the USA, and we’ve watched DSA-style politics sever the foundations that traditionally held our nation together. So, I tend to see one side as politics to endure as we always have endured, and the other side as a direct threat to democratic civilization. And to avoid any possibility of ambiguity, for me, that means the Republicans are the politics to endure. The other side is more dangerous.
The video from Marseilles showing the activist aim a flamethrower at the face of a law-abiding member of the public captures exactly why I fear garden-variety activists more than I fear politicians playing even the dirtiest politics.
Ask yourself, “What does the IRGC want me to do?” and do the opposite.
Iran urges US voters to punish Trump in midterm elections
I like the way you think.
Mark, All federal officials take an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution. While the wording differs, the core commitment for senators and presidents is the same. Donald Trump has aggressively exercised his Article II powers and tested constitutional limits. Many presidents do. Trump has lost some of these cases at the Supreme Court; others he has won. That is balance of power in action, no matter what one might think about the particular policies in question. And while Trump sometimes rails at the Supreme Court justices, he has complied with their rulings. The core case for or against Trump is about his policies and behavior. Ten years in, he is not a threat to constitutional governance.
Consider the DSA candidates. They belong to a group that openly advocates for the destruction of the U.S. Constitution and a fundamental remaking of our system of government. I fail to see how any of them could take the current oath of office without duplicity. Yet we have boilerplate Democrats welcoming them to the team. I find it far more unhinged than working-class MAGA embrace of the showman. As obnoxious as Trump is, he is a quintessentially American carnival barker and egotist; the men and women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries would have recognized his type immediately. The DSA is a different breed altogether.
Your senate candidate is an interesting test case. He is associated with the DSA, and has appeared at several of their events, but he is not a member. He says he is not a socialist, but he welcomes DSA support. It’s an open question what support he would give them in Congress. I’ll push back on your reflection that he would be only one senator among many. A single senator in an evenly divided body can have great power.
Don’t sweat it! Your vote won’t matter to the results. But it will matter to you! I applaud you for wrestling with the decision. If only our party-line automatons on each side would do the same.
Hi Mark:
I too, am in Michigan. I too, have never voted republican. However, I am enthusiastically voting for Rogers. To me, it’s extremely cut-and-dried. I happen to enjoy living in the Western world. Drumpf is a buffoon, a narcissist, and probably a criminal–but he’s also (probably) a necessary evil, given how insanely the DSA/far left has gone off the deep end. El-Sayed and his moslem cronies have made no bones about the fact that their goal is to end Western civilization. Furthermore, though I will continue to vote Democrat if they run decent candidates (my congresscritter seems to be one), I will vote republican every time the dems run an islamist, a socialist, or both.
Every day I look around at what I see or what I’m doing–taking a walk with my Audubon club buddies, going to Costco, seeing both of my highly educated daughters working in the medical profession, street scenes with people dressed as they like, ad infinitum (yes, I’m a suburbanite)–and I ask myself, how would a large influx of islamic people make this better? How would socialism make this better? And I (literally) never come up with a positive answer.
Furthermore, I no longer care if certain people disparage my outlook; they can call me islamophobic all day long (I cheerfully concur; as an ethnic Jew, apostate Christian, and atheist I feel like I have sufficient reason), or racist (untrue; the accusation says more about them than about me). My short reply is, if it’s a choice as to who gets it in the neck, my daughters or some illegal immigrants, well, I’m pretty sure you can fill in the rest.
Love your pictures, fellow Michigander; keep them coming!
“Plane lands at alternate airport following conversation in the cabin.”
No. It’s not a real quotation. I’m still working on coming up with a headline that best minimizes the mid-flight stabbing and slashing of the pilot by the deranged maniac or radicalized terrorist who was attempting to crash into the ground a jetliner loaded with Israeli passengers.
I wonder if those news outlets used AI to identify the most effective way to report this week’s event without actually drawing attention to it. MSNOW—which I almost never look at—did the best job of all. Their web site home page did not mention the attack at all. I looked up and down the home page on the day of the attack: nothing. I did a search using the web site’s search box: nothing. I did the same the next day: nothing. They did the best job of anyone at minimizing the story.
And, Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide is one of my top three songs of all time.
How about this headline : “Israeli passengers storm cockpit, attacking Muslim co-pilot, forcing emergency landing”.
And yes, it does seem that the rioting in France is mostly North African Muslim immigrants, which means the media is doing its best to avoid mentioning this, and indeed not even mentioning the riots.
Your headline is even better!
What a beautiful letter Wolf wrote to Perkins. It made me teary eyed too.
Re: Pike: While Reddit is admittedly not the most reliable source, people on the site have offered two possible explanations for the failure of the execution.
In a post on the r/emergencymedicine sub, doctors are pretty scathing in their critique of the doctor in charge of Pike’s execution, on both medical and ethical grounds. One fact I wasn’t aware of was that this was the second botched execution that the doctor was involved in. The first one was just a few months ago.
On r/AMA, a former inmate who met and interacted with Pike wrote that Pike could have tried to sabotage her execution. She suggested two possible means: one, by dehydrating herself on the day before her execution and, two, by getting ahold of contraband phenobarbital in order to build up her tolerance to the drug.
But whatever the reason for the failure, it’s morally insane and cruel to try again.
I didn’t realize that the passenger who helped the pilot after he was stabbed was a dentist. There wasn’t a single MD on a plane full of Jews? What are the odds?
Israeli Jews, presumably a cross-section of the flying public, most of whom would not fit the US stereotype. Lucky there was at least a dentist. 🙂
If I am not mistaken, Israel currently has the lowest ratio of doctors per 100,000 citizens in the OECD.
Many of us have been warning of this for years, and the country has recently opened a couple of new medical schools. In addition, there has been an influx of doctors moving to Israel from Western countries where they fell that the coroner environment is hostile to Jews.
Regarding students and writing:
I am a mathematician and a physics junkie. Back in the 90s I had a three year post doc in Ann Arbor. At the time U. Michigan was engaged in an experimental approach to teaching calculus that we sometimes derisively referred to as “new age calculus”. Among other things, the students were required to write verbal explanations of their solutions of math problems and were to be graded, in part, by the clarity and quality of their writing.
I was surprised to find that there wasn’t much correlation between a student’s writing skills and how generally smart and knowledgeable the student seemed in other ways. I had students who were PATHETIC writers, but I could not understand why. The same student could speak English in an educated way with moderately complex and correct grammar and with a good educated vocabulary. But when they tried to write, their language skills devolved to nursery school grammar and syntax. “See Dick. See Jane. See Dick run. Jane runs too.”
I don’t understand the phenomenon. It seems to me that any fully literate person can write down any complex eloquent sentence the person could orally express. But for many people, that is not the case. They sound smart and thoughtful when they talk, but they seem like morons when they write.
Very interesting. On the related subject, I suggest that Cruz’ point is applicable for the limited writing/thinking operations that most citizens engage in. Taibbi’s point applies only to GOOD writing, not to the grocery lists, letters to relatives, casual Emails, etc., for which the great majority of individuals actually use the process of writing. Put it another way: Taibbi’s argument coheres with the view that everyone ought to go to university. Should they?
This distinction could apply to other cases. The printing press and consequent expanded literacy is sometimes credited with facilitating the scientific revolution. Well, it did facilitate the ability of young Michael Faraday to enter into science—but Faraday belonged to a small minority of the European population, the vast majority of which had nothing at all to do with the scientific revolution. Just an aspect of the unavoidable fact that cognitive traits, like other traits, are distributed amongst population members.
Apparently, whether man or woman, braiding or cornrowing one’s hair is common procedure before going to Burning Man, because the sand and wind can ruin one’s hair over the days.
Three observers also pointed out that her hair wasn’t cornrowed but braided.
Whilst normally I find Larry the Cat comments pretty amusing and astute. His take on the burning of schools in France frankly absurd. Basically he thinks it’s ok for migrants to riot in France because French people rioted in the past.
https://x.com/number10cat/status/2106083335021989983?s=46
You write: “As for El-Sahyed, I consider him an Islamist antisemite, and I’m glad I don’t have to vote for him.”
In what conceivable set of circumstances would you have to vote for him?
What I meant is that I am glad I do not have to vote in that election.
Regarding the terrorist incident on FlyDubai:
The Israeli National Security Council identified this as a possible problem many years ago, and set up protocols for preventing such actions, such as vetting foreign pilots before allowing them into Israeli airspace. Only one of them was implemented, forbidding pilots from countries without relations with Israel from getting off their planes after landing. the tests of the protocols, such as background checks on pilots etc—those were never implemented. The reason is that despite identification of a serious threat, the Israeli political system and bureaucracy prevented that implementation. Once the problem was identified, the question was who would deal with it. The Transportation Ministry was designated as responsible by Netanyahu in, IIRC, 2025. But they do not have the security personnel to deal with the issue. Insides of demanding more funds to hire such people, or request help from the Israel Security Agency or Mossad, the Transportation Minister simply ignored the problem. (There is no record of any such official requests being made.) The minister, Miri Regev, is known for two things: political loyalty (within and outside of the Likud Party) to Netanyahu, and monumental stupidity. I suppose that bureaucratic laziness can now be added to her qualities. Luckily, individual courage on the part of the nonIsraeli pilot and the Israeli passengers averted catastrophe. And now, Ms. Regev, is doing the thing that she is best at: CYA.
I wonder how many people still read Thomas Wolfe. I like him well enough to have driven to Asheville (lovely place) to see his home, including the angel. I do not know how much survived the storm that hit the area, but it was well worth the drive.
Regarding El-Sayed: I understand the reluctance of Michigan Democrats to vote for Republicans. But consider this: an El-Sayed victory will result in Michigan being known as a state that sent an anti-Semite to the US Senate. I am not saying, or course, that anyone voting for El-Sayed is an antisemite. But El-Sayed himself certainly qualifies, as shown by his association with Piker and his ilk. Would you vote for a guy who campaigns with KKK activists, no matter who he is running against?
One alternative is a write-in ballot. Another is just staying home, if one can’t bring hisself or herself to vote Republican. But this will be a long remembered vote, as will the votes for the House of Representatives.
Just my opinion, of course. I understand that there are other considerations, like the other, non-Israel related policies of the candidates. But given that El-Sayed has made this an issue at all—the attacks on the legitimacy of a Jewish State—makes our an issue that ford concern me.