Sunday: Hili dialogue

October 4, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Welcome to Sunday, October 4, 2026, Sabbath for goyische cats and National Taco Day. Here’s a couple I got in a Chicago Mexican restaurant in 2014:

It’s also Cinnamon Roll Day, National Vodka Day, and World Animal Day. Here’s a lovely kea (Nestor notabilis), a famous but endangered parrot from New Zealand. It took me all day to find this one, observed hanging out at a rest stop near Arthur’s Pass, New Zealand. They are famous for being wags as well as vandals; that sharp beak can rip the chrome off cars! Note that it’s banded.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*More good news from the NYT (in the “news”) section: “Democrats may have found the recipe for flipping red-state Senate seats” (archived here). But there is no “recipe” save what Trump has done that made his approval rating plummet. Oh, and they add that in the states below, the Democrats have high-quality candidates.

On paper, the Democrats’ path to winning the Senate in November is daunting. They need to flip at least two seats that President Trump won by 11 percentage points or more — no party has pulled off a similar feat since 2008.

But in polls over the last month, the party’s path to the Senate hasn’t seemed daunting at all. Since Labor Day, Democrats have been tied or ahead in nearly every nonpartisan poll of not just two but five states that voted for Mr. Trump by between 11 and 16 points: Texas, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa and Kansas.

Today’s latest New York Times/Siena polls continue the streak. They find Democrats ahead in Texas, Alaska and Ohio; tied in Kansas; and down by only one point in Iowa. If the polls were to be exactly right — they won’t be — Democrats would take the Senate with room to spare.

Here are the polls (click to enlarge):

This is an extraordinary run of polls for Democrats, most of all in Texas and Alaska. The Times/Siena polls — and others over the last month — show Democrats building a consistent and potentially meaningful lead in both states. If Democrats won Texas and Alaska, held their own seats and added North Carolina, as expected, they would need to win only one more Republican-held state, whether in Maine, Ohio, Iowa or Kansas, or elsewhere.

Of course, leading polls in September is not the same thing as winning in November — especially in Republican-leaning states, where polls have often overestimated Democrats. And even if they’re not overestimating them this time, Republicans need only to win back reliably Republican voters over the next month to prevail. This is harder than it sounds in this political environment, but it would not be a surprise if they did so. Republicans will have the financial resources they need to make their case.

Nonetheless, just about everything has gone right for the Democrats so far. They enter the final month of the campaign in a better position than anyone would have imagined when the year began. While the story varies somewhat by state, Democrats are cooking with the same recipe across all five contests: At a time when Mr. Trump is very unpopular, Democrats have nominated popular, relatively moderate candidates against surprisingly unpopular Republicans.

The article (it’s news, not opinion) concludes that it’s very likely the Democrats will flip the whole Senate. Since the prediction markets tell us that there’s a chance of over 90% that the Dems will also control the House, the entire Congress may well be in Democratic hands. But remember that it takes at two-thirds vote of both houses to overturn a Presidential veto, so we may wind up with several years of a stifled Congress at odds with Trump.

*I know of Katie Wilson, the  recently-elected Democratic Socialist Mayor of Seattle, because she’s the daughter of evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, with whom I’ve occasionally clashed). Now her promises are falling apart in the face of reality.

Like New York, this West Coast city narrowly elected a Democratic socialist as mayor last year. On the campaign trail, Katie Wilson pitched an ambitious agenda: lower costs, tax the wealthy and build thousands of shelter units for the homeless.

Then came reality.

In recent days, the mayor stunned allies and observers alike by proposing a city budget with no new taxes, scaled-back pledges and nearly $50 million in cuts across various departments—all while boosting spending for police officers.

The small-c conservative proposal bears little resemblance to the rent freezes, city-run grocery pilots and luxury second-home taxes emerging from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York.

Since taking office in January, Wilson has struggled to shake up City Hall like liberal Seattle hoped. The 44-year-old former transit organizer, described as a quieter Mamdani, has been hobbled by a $175 million budget deficit, staff upheaval and a steep learning curve on public safety—Seattle’s most intractable issue, and one progressives nationwide have been eager to show they can tackle.

A summer shooting near the iconic Space Needle, at the Bite of Seattle food festival, left three people dead, including a suspect, and exposed acute governance gaps. A communication breakdown between the mayor’s office and Seattle police kept the public in the dark about the shooting for five hours, and the official emergency alert system went unused. At least one suspect remains at large, and the fallout has haunted City Hall for weeks.

“I don’t know who is in charge but someone needs to assume command,” Wilson’s police chief, Shon Barnes, texted command staff an hour after the shooting, according to messages released by the Seattle Police Department. Barnes, who was out of town at the time, resigned days later, and the mayor has apologized for making mistakes. Prominent Seattle-area companies such as Microsoft, Nordstrom and Starbucks have demanded a public-safety plan from Wilson by year-end.

For her signature initiative on homelessness, Wilson promised 4,000 shelter units by the end of her term—double her predecessor’s target—ignoring some campaign advisers who warned the figure was unrealistic, according to a senior staffer on Wilson’s campaign. After she took office, Seattle’s business community donated $3 million to kick-start the project, but the funds sat unused for months as City Hall stumbled through bureaucratic hurdles to scope out sites for tiny homes, according to Joe Nguyen, who runs Seattle’s business lobby.

By September, Wilson slashed her goal to around 1,000 beds in two years, blaming budget constraints and the pace of government. She called her original goal aspirational. “The point of putting that big number out there is we need to talk about the scale of the crisis,” Wilson told the Seattle Times.

Nguyen, a former state senator, was less generous. “Welcome to government,” he said in an interview.

Because of publicized public crimes, Wilson’s also expanding the network of surveillance cameras, breaking her campaign pledge to reduce their number. This might be a lesson for the mayor of New York City, who made similar promises, but it looks like there’s nothing Mamdani can do that can screw up his popularity. He’s just like Trump, who famously said this in 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”

*Pamela Paul was the NY Times’s book-review editor from 2013-2022, and after that an op-ed columnist for the paper.  But she was heterodox, a liberal who attacked the pieties of progressives, including on transgender issues, and when she and the paper parted ways in 2025 I suspected she’d been fired. This video, in which Paul converses with Meghan Daum, confirms that., saying she was “let go.”  But Paul is an excellent journalist, and now Paul is writing for the Wall Street Journal,  where she can continue her efforts without being fired. Reader Enrico contributed an archived link to one of her recent columns, “Antisemitism charges plague the literary world. New publishers are pushing back.”

. . . today, many Jews believe that publishing is biased against them.

Jewish authors, agents, scouts, editors and other book professionals describe an ecosystem from big publishers to #BookTok that is suppressing Jewish and Israeli voices. Agents and scouts say it’s become impossible to sell foreign rights to works by Israeli writers. Established authors say their recent projects have been inexplicably turned down. Published writers with overtly Jewish books say their agents have dropped them from their roster; writers are being asked by editors to purge Jewish or Israeli elements from their books.

Multiple agents now post explicitly on their websites that they aren’t interested in “Zionist” submissions; one specified that neither “Nazis nor Zionist” writers need apply. One author shared an email from her former agent telling her to put her biography of a major Israeli figure on hold until “anti-Zionism” within publishing dies down.

That’s the bad news, and it’s pretty damn bad.  “Zionist” writers? Do they mean “Jews”? Israeli writers are out, too, and this seems to be regardless of the quality of the work. It is pure censorship, and antisemitic to boot. Now the sort-of-good news:

Now a handful of publishing startups focused on Jewish and Israeli writers are emerging in response. High Line Publishing Studio, founded by Neil Blair, a London-based literary agent best known for representing J.K. Rowling, launches today with the goal of publishing writers whose ideas and subject matter he believes have been shut out of mainstream publishing. Upcoming titles include U.K. editions of recent books by Dara Horn and Matti Friedman; and world rights to new books by Adam Louis-Klein, an influencer and founder of Movement Against Antizionism; and “Anatomy of a Failure: The Road to October 7th” by Amos Harel, a military correspondent for the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which examines strategic errors on Israel’s part before and after Oct. 7.

High Line joins Canary Publishing, a nonprofit publisher of Jewish, Israeli and Zionist writers, founded earlier this month by Howard Lovy, an independent editor based in Michigan. Meg Keene Books, a fiction imprint of Wicked Son press, launched in July. Its first title will be the American edition of Booker prizewinner Howard Jacobson’s “Howl,” a 2026 satirical novel about post-Oct. 7 diaspora Jews, which came out in the U.K. in March, but which had been unable to land a U.S. publisher.

Bookstores are canceling events by “Zionist” authors, books by those authors get “bombed” with one-star reviews on Amazon, and Israeli authors are simply boycotted. There’s a ton of additional forms of boycotting; here are two more examples:

In 2024, more than 5,000 writers and literary professionals, some of them Jewish, signed a pledge not to work with Israeli publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications “that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.” That same year, a spreadsheet labeled, “Is your fav author a Zionist???” went viral on social media, singling out authors who participated in Israeli book festivals or included Zionist characters and those who, by contrast, had issued statements supportive of the pro-Palestinian movement.

Increasing numbers of authors, both Jewish and not, are declining to sell Hebrew rights to their books and refusing to join panels with authors they deem Zionist.

To be sure, Paul quotes people who deny that publishing is antisemitic, some on the grounds that being “anti-Zionist”, opposing the existence of the Jewish state, is not the same as antisemitism.  As Steely Dan sang, “Only a fool would say that.”

Nevertheless, the conclusion is dire:

“Zionism is out of fashion in the publishing world and it’s not ever going to be in fashion again,” said Benjamin Moser, author of “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History,” publishing this month. Book publishing, he and others emphasized, is now an overwhelmingly progressive industry, and opposition to Zionism is a strong component of that.

Moser has publicly rejected Zionism and identifies as an anti-Zionist. That gives him the credibility to get published. Imagine having to sign an ideological pledge in order to get your book even looked at!  And if you’re not worried about this trend, you should probably be reading some other website. How does Moser define anti-semitism? This is what Grok tells me:

Moser defines Zionism as the project of founding and maintaining a Jewish state in Palestine. In a September 2026 NRC interview he put it in one sentence: “Het stichten en het voortbestaan van een Joodse staat in Palestina” (“the founding and the continued existence of a Jewish state in Palestine”).
I call that antisemitism.

*This was clickbait for me: an article in The Atlantic called “The Right’s identity politics take a bizarre turn” with the subtitle, “MAGA activists are having a meltdown over a throwaway character in Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s political ad.” (The article is archived here.)

If you want a snapshot of how the right has changed over the past decade, here’s one data point: MAGA activists think Sarah Huckabee Sanders is too woke now.

That’s the same Sarah Huckabee Sanders who is the daughter of the GOP fixture Mike Huckabee and a former White House press secretary for President Trump. Now governor of Arkansas, she’s facing criticism from right-wing influencers over an ad boosting the state’s imposition of work requirements for recipients of the state’s Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. These requirements are a long-standing Republican priority, but my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote last year that they are “a terrible idea”: The requirement creates new taxpayer costs and red tape without really solving any problem, because most Medicaid recipients who are physically able to work already do.

That’s not why the activists are mad, though. They’re upset because the face of loafing in Sanders’s ad is a cheese-ball-snarfing couch potato named Brad who is a young white man. The “Pizzagate” influencer Jack Posobiec labels it “Antiwhite.” Sean Davis of The Federalist calls it part of decades-long, systematic discrimination against white men. The openly bigoted investor James Fishback, fresh off getting trounced in a GOP primary for governor of Florida, traveled to Little Rock this week to rail against the “false and disgraceful ad.”

Assessing the accuracy of a fictional character in an ad feels a little absurd, but for the record: More than 60 percent of Medicaid-expansion enrollees in Arkansas are white, and 18 percent are Black, according to The New York Times. (The state overall is about 75 percent white and 15 percent Black.) A little more than half are women. Sanders rebuffed criticism, writing, “Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls.”

The immediate and obsessive focus on a throwaway character in a 30-second ad is a lurid reminder of how identitarianism has become influential in segments of the American right, particularly young voters. This is a matter of how members of the movement understand politics, as well as how they attempt to communicate to the American public.

Here’s the tweet; judge for yourself:

I don’t quite get the outrage over the race of this guy; given the state’s composition, it could be seen as a random pick, though not a random person (this one’s able to work).  I thought that identitarianism was the purview of progressives, but it’s clearly not. If you’re able to work and are looking for work, and don’t have childcare duties, then yes, you should be looking to get Medicaid benefits.  Otherwise, you should get them.

*Reader Pyers pointed out an article in The Economist about the possibility of creating “mirror life”: life in which the chirality of molecules like amino acids and the proteins that they make up is reversed (right now organisms use only left-handed (“L”) amino acids, while the sugars in DNA and RNA are in the “D” forms (as opposed to “L”).  The handedness of these molecules could be a “frozen” accident of evolution, but once in place it can’t be changed—except by humans. As this article notes, such anthropogenic change could pose a serious danger to our planet.

BIOLOGY IS HANDED. In other words, many molecules essential to living organisms come in two distinct forms which, like human hands, are non-identical mirror images of one another. For a lot of those molecules, though, life on Earth employs only one of the two possibilities.

Why this should be so is lost in evolutionary history. And, until recently, only evolutionary biologists cared. But that is changing. Although biotechnologists are not there yet, they can see on the horizon the possibility of synthesising biological cells from scratch. This has led some to wonder what might happen if someone tried to reverse life’s handedness and create a cell—probably a bacterium—that held a mirror to normal biochemistry.

The answer, discussed this week by a conclave of concerned biologists meeting at the Singapore Conference on Mirror Life, is potentially terrifying. If such an organism were to escape the confines of the lab it might create an unstoppable plague or devastate an entire ecosystem. Scientists are, therefore, keen to see what can be done to nip such research in the bud.

. . . .Fears of mirror life came to public attention in a paper published in Science at the end of 2024. At first sight, the idea of through-the-looking-glass creatures seemed like a curiosity rather than a threat. The paper’s authors begged to differ. The handedness of biomolecules is so deeply embedded into biological systems that their chiral opposites go largely unnoticed. A mirror version of a bacterium would thus, those authors posited, evade immune systems, human and non-human alike, and could reproduce unchecked.

Mirror bacteria could also, they noted, be indigestible to single-celled creatures, such as amoebae, that are the principal predators of bacteria, and resistant to the viruses, called bacteriophages, which also keep bacterial populations under control. It could, in other words, multiply indefinitely. Hence the risk to ecosystems.

Nature would push back a little. Mirror life would be unable to metabolise all the left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars of the natural organisms it encountered, restricting its food supply. But lots of biomolecules have no handedness, and it could feed on them instead.

All this assumes mirror life could be made in the laboratory. With existing technology, that possibility is remote. But synthetic biology is advancing by leaps and bounds, and is accelerating as AI is applied to the process. Novel viruses of certain types can already be designed and synthesised from scratch. What in 2024 looked at least 15 years away may thus arrive sooner than expected.

Meanwhile, lest anyone have lingering doubts about the nature of the threat, Deepa Agashe, another of the 2024 paper’s authors, who is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India, was there to disabuse them. She showed data on what was previously an unquantified point: the amount of achiral nutrients in soil, blood and the contents of the gut. Each of these habitats, she opined, would be able to support the well-studied bacterium E. coli without its needing to resort to chiral foodstuffs. And if E. coli could manage it, a mirror bacterium would probably be able to do likewise.

Dr Agashe also offered a telling analogy. She likened the lack of predators and pathogens a mirror organism might encounter to the experience of a successful invasive species, such as the neotropical cane toads that are running riot in Australia for lack of predators adapted to consume their toxic bodies. Such invaders can sometimes be controlled. They have never yet been eliminated.

Better, then, to act early, before the threat becomes tangible.

I can’t see this happening any time soon, but a mirror bacterium or virus wouldn’t have to be a pathogen to be deadly: any bacterium could take over bodies so long as it is resistant to our immune systems or can use resources that normal microbes can’t. Given the pace of change in synthetic biology these days, the threat is well worth pondering, and ways devised to control it.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the feud between Kulka and Hili continues (and will forever):

Andrzej: Humility is one of the greatest virtues.
Hili: I know. Kulka really ought to hear that.

In Polish:

Ja: Pokora jest wielką cnotą.
Hili: Wiem, muszę to powiedzieć Kulce.

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

First, two memes based on last week’s unsuccessful hijacking.

From David Keyes via Orli:

x

From Eylon Levy via Anton:

From Things with Faces, an anxious umbilical cord:

From Masih: another Iranian protestor executed yesterday.

From Luana; a zebra that’s probably a mutant. Stripes protect against flies, and I wonder if this pattern will be protective:

From Malcolm; bobcat vs. rattlesnake (sound up). Do those cats have no fear?

I was once a huge fan of Rawan Osman. But 100% of this tweet’s text is AI-written (this isn’t a one-off for her, either), and I’ve lost interest in what she has to say.

One from my feed; some cuteness:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, a laughing duck:

Laughing Harlequin.A female Harlequin duck at Clover Point, Victoria, BC, Canada. This is a lifer for me.

— John Patrick (@jstcpatrick.bsky.social) 2026-09-25T23:28:51.772Z

A palindrome:

BREAKING NEWS: “Do geese see God” is a palindrome

— Ian Coldwater 🧊🚫 (@lookitup.baby) 2026-09-30T03:52:38.095Z

Today’s music: Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me,” the first song he ever wrote. This is the 1972 version (there were three). Laura Nyro was an influence; as Wikipedia notes:

Rundgren’s songs in this phase of his career were influenced by the work of Laura Nyro, but in a 2005 interview he said that the basic structure of the song was adapted from the introduction of a Jimmy Smith recording:

…the main influence for Hello It’s Me was an eight bar intro that Jimmy Smith played on a recording of When Johnny Comes Marching Home. He had this whole sort of block chord thing that he did to set up the intro of the song. I tried to capture those changes, and those changes became what are the changes underneath Hello It’s Me. I then had to come up with melody and words, but the changes are actually almost lifted literally from something that was, from Jimmy Smith’s standpoint, a throwaway.

— Todd Rundgren, puremusic.com

You can hear Jimmy Smith’s version of When Johnny Comes Marching Home, with the introduction, here.

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