Wednesday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Wednesday, October 7, 2026 a Hump Day (“Dita e mesit të javës” in Albanian), as well as Random Acts of Poetry Day. Here’s my appropriation of a real poet; do you know who it is? It is a fragment of a longer poem, but this fragment is about the writer’s cat. It’s long, so skip it if you’re ailurophobic.  Answer at the bottom of the post.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.

For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.

For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.

For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.

For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.

For he rolls upon prank to work it in.

For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.

For this he performs in ten degrees.

For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.

For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.

For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.

For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.

For fifthly he washes himself.

For sixthly he rolls upon wash.

For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.

For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.

For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.

For tenthly he goes in quest of food.

For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.

For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.

For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.

For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.

For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.

For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.

For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.

For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.

For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.

For he is of the tribe of Tiger.

For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.

For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.

For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.

For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat.

For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.

For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.

For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.

For every family had one cat at least in the bag.

For the English Cats are the best in Europe.

For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.

For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.

For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.

For he is tenacious of his point.

For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.

For he knows that God is his Saviour.

For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.

For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.

For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually—Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.

For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.

For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.

For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.

For he is docile and can learn certain things.

For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.

For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.

For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.

For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.

For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.

For he can catch the cork and toss it again.

For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.

For the former is afraid of detection.

For the latter refuses the charge.

For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.

For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.

For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.

For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.

For his ears are so acute that they sting again.

For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.

For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.

For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.

For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.

For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.

For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.

For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.

For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.

For he can swim for life.

For he can creep.

It’s also National Chocolate Covered Pretzel Day, National Flower Day, National Frappé Day, National Kale Day (yech!) and National Pumpkin Seed Day.

It’s a special science week; click the Google Doodle to see where it goes:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 7 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Eva Marie Saint died at a ripe old age:

Eva Marie Saint, who starred in Elia Kazan’s 1954 On the Waterfront and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 North by Northwest, died Tuesday at 102 years old.

Saint grew up in Albany and Delmar, New York. She was a delicate, porcelain beauty. She attended the Actors Studio in New York, performed on Broadway and did live television in the late 1940s. But Saint didn’t do a film until she was almost 30, after director Elia Kazan suggested she screen test with a guy named Marlon Brando. They did a scene from On the Waterfront in which Saint is supposed to keep Brando out of her house.

In 2000, Saint told WHYY’s Fresh Air, “I don’t know what happened, but … [Brando] came in the living room. We were dancing, we were laughing, I was crying. He was taking my skirt and … whipping it around, and the sparks flew. And Kazan saw that. And suddenly I was in On the Waterfront.”

In that film, Saint plays Edie, a Catholic schoolgirl who finds herself in the middle of union corruption in Hoboken, N.J. When her longshoreman brother is murdered, Edie wants justice. Saint won an Oscar for performance.

Below is one of the very famous scenes from that movie, one in which Brando and Saint have their first date. Brando, playing failed boxer Terry Molloy, was partly responsible for the death of Joey, the sister of Edie Doyle, played by Saint, but she doesn’t know it.  The acting in this scene is unparalleled. Watch Brando look around, play the tough guy, and then melt when Saint puts her hands on his face. The whole movie comprises such acting (including the “I could have been a contender” scene), and, according to Wikipedia,

On the Waterfront was a critical and commercial success and is considered one of the greatest films ever made and is said to revolve around the subject matter of alienation at the lowest social level.  It received twelve Academy Award nominations and won eight, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Brando, Best Supporting Actress for Saint, and Best Director for Kazan. In 1998, it was ranked by the American Film Institute as the eighth-greatest American movie of all time; in AFI’s 2007 list, it was ranked 19th. It is Bernstein’s only original film score not adapted from a stage production with songs.

*France is in a huge crisis as the unions have joined the students in protesting the economic and political conditions in the country.

Demonstrations swept across France on Tuesday as labor unions rallied in solidarity with high school students who have spent two weeks blockading schools to protest understaffing, overcrowded classrooms and dilapidated buildings.

Marches were held in more than 40 cities, from Caen in the north to Marseille in the south, as activists, teachers, parents and university students joining swelling protests that have spread to hundreds of schools across the country. Tuesday’s marches drew roughly 256,000 people, according to the Interior Ministry; a major union said the figure was more than twice that many.

Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu signaled that the government had heard the protesters’ demands and was taking them seriously. He also said regular classes would be “completely suspended” on Thursday and Friday so that principals could host sessions with students.

The protests on Tuesday were mostly peaceful, but a fire was started in Lyon and police officers unleashed tear gas in Nantes. The biggest march was in Paris, where the Interior Ministry said there were 56,000 demonstrators.

The demonstrations are a litmus test of the longevity of a protest movement that began late last month in the suburbs of Paris and quickly spread to hundreds of schools across France.

A different NYT article says this:

*The Free Press describes the unrest at Cornell University—unrest based on the alleged case of gang rape on campus—in a piece called “The rage at Cornell: ‘Rapists still walk among us’.”

On Monday afternoon, Taylor was one of about a dozen speakers at a “Justice for Survivors” protest blasting Cornell for perpetuating a culture that allows rape to go unpunished.

Their fury was on behalf of Jane Doe, the anonymous student who filed a September 14 lawsuit alleging that seven male students gang-raped her at a fraternity house in 2024. The student, then 20 years old, initially described the evening—including her drinking and use of a dissociative drug called ketamine—as voluntary and consensual. Then, more than two weeks after the alleged incident, with rumors about her in full swirl on campus, Jane Doe requested a rape kit at a local emergency room. At the time, the Tompkins County district attorney declined to bring charges in relation to the case based on a statement Jane Doe had given to university police, finding the description of her participation to be “voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”

The case has since exploded far beyond Ithaca, dividing the country as it wrestles with some of the thorniest questions that remain nearly a decade after #MeToo: What happens when a woman comes to understand a sexual encounter as rape in retrospect? How relevant should a woman’s alcohol and drug consumption be in determining consent? And should the names of the accused men be public given they have not been charged with a crime?

That nuance was hard to come by from the speakers at the rally, which at times felt like a mash-up of the left-wing causes of the last decade—from Black Lives Matter to the anti-Israel movement that roiled college campuses during the spring of 2024. One Cornell attendee banged on a drum while wearing a ski mask and hoodie reading “Viva Palestina Libre.” Protesters chanted “no justice, no peace.”

Athena Holloway, a senior majoring in public policy, took the stage to detail the ways that Cornell had not only failed her, but humanity. When she first came to the university, she was excited, she said.

“I believed I had found a place where every person could belong, where any person could be protected,” she bellowed, as protesters raised signs with messages like “I DON’T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL WITH RAPISTS.” “So imagine the disappointment of discovering what can happen when that any person needs help,” Holloway continued.

She then harked back to moments in the school’s past where she believed the institution had stood on the wrong side of history, including in 1969, when black students wielding guns took over a campus building to demand a stronger black studies program. Holloway, who described herself as a “low-income, first-generation” student, encouraged students to think of their struggles as connected.

“Race matters!” she blared. “Gender matters! Sexuality matters! Class matters! Disability matters, immigration status matters! Power matters!”

This was not a crowd that used the terms accused or alleged. To almost all attendees, the seven men named in the lawsuit—and not yet tried in a court of law—were guilty.

The last part is what bothered me—the rush to judgment, declaring all seven accused men of being guilty.  It’s clear that the University didn’t perform due diligence on the accusations, but what exactly went awry in the reporting process is not clear to me.  It’s a sign of the times that for many an accusation equals guilt equals conviction, but as far as I know, no matter what people think, guilt must still be established by the justice system, and withstand reasonable doubt.

*The WSJ reports on how the President of Cornell University might lost his job after that growing campus protests. (The Washington Post has a timeline of the case, archived here.)

Before ascending the ranks of academia, Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff demonstrated against the Vietnam War and earned a literature degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Weeks before he graduated in 1973, women occupied the school’s College Hall to protest leaders’ response to a series of reported rapes.

Now at another Ivy League university, Kotlikoff finds himself in the midst of rising uproar over campus sexual-assault allegations—and this time, he is the leader in the hot seat.

Kotlikoff, who at 75 is the oldest president to lead Cornell, has spent most of his two-year tenure battling crises. His predecessor stepped down in 2024 amid controversy over elite schools’ handling of pro-Palestinian protests. Then came the Trump administration’s accusations of antisemitism and liberal excess, and the disruption of federal funding.

Now, a lawsuit alleging an undergraduate was gang raped and drugged at a Cornell fraternity house in 2024—and that the school didn’t do enough to protect her—has ignited a new crisis on campus.

Monday afternoon, hundreds of Cornell students gathered near the school’s famous clock tower and marched through campus in protest. On Tuesday, the gender and sexuality studies program is sponsoring a town hall. Wednesday, Cornell’s chapter of the NAACP is asking students to boycott classes and join a seven-hour sit-in, the duration of time for which Jane Doe says she was sexually assaulted.

Members of the Faculty Senate are preparing a vote of no confidence in the ability of central administration “to effectively address the ongoing crisis of sexual assault,” according to a draft resolution.

Kotlikoff addressed the Cornell community in an eight-minute video over the weekend. “I want to acknowledge something that can be difficult for an institution to say,” he said. “We don’t have all the answers.”

He called this time a “defining moment in Cornell’s history” and pledged to be more transparent about the investigation. He promised a serious look at campus Greek life: “We owe it to Jane Doe.”

With a vote of no confidence passing, Kotlikoff is toast, regardless of what happens to the accused rapists. Of course if he played any role in keeping the case away from the local authorities, then things would be much clearer. One thing is sure: we can’t let student unrest adjudicate this case.

*As you know, Britain’s Green Party voted a big anti-Israel motion, deeming Zionism “racism,” accusing Israel of genocide, and, worse, calling for a “one state solution” to the Israel/Palestine problem, which would lead to a huge genocide—by Hamas. The Guardian reports that this had led to ostracism of the English and Welsh Greens from the European Greens. (Four of the five British MP’s in the Greens opposed the hateful policy.)

The English and Welsh Greens are facing international ostracism after adopting a policy declaring Zionism as a form of racism, which has drawn dismay from the group representing European Greens.

The co-leader of the German Greens separately said the policy was “intolerable and unacceptable”, running contrary to its belief in the right of Israel to exist.

The binding policy motion passed in a vote at the Greens’ conference in Brighton on Sunday. Four of the party’s five MPs opposed it.

The policy says Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, should be “treated as any other form of racism”, and backs a single democratic Palestinian state across historic Palestine “with equal rights for all”.

The European Green party, which represents 47 parties, including the Green party of England and Wales (GPEW), said it supported a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and the new motion went against this.

The alliance “will immediately demand clarity from the leadership and parliamentary group of GPEW, to understand the official party policy of GPEW, how they position themselves towards the self-determination of Israelis and Jews as well as the protection of Jewish people and members in the party”, it said in a statement.

Felix Banaszak, the leader of the German Greens, known formally as Alliance 90/the Greens, told a press conference the motion was “intolerable and unacceptable”.

“It runs counter to everything that Alliance 90/the Greens stands for in Germany, and it also runs counter to what the European Green party stands for,” he added.

Banaszak said: “There is a widely held view within the European Green party that Israel has a right to exist and that this right must not be undermined.” His party would “approach our partner parties in Europe to clarify how to deal with this”.

Sandy Ruthven, the chair of Amnesty International UK’s charitable trust and a longstanding Green member, resigned over the motion and accused the party of failing to confront antisemitism.

Frankly, I’m very surprised at this given the growing antisemitism in Europe.  But it’s not clear if the European Greens object only to the “one-state” policy (yes, in the British Greens a members’ vote is policy), or also to the Zionism = racism and the Israeili “genocide” lie.

*The National Bureau of Economic Research has sponsored a three-authored survey of the use of AI in STEM fields. The results are depressing. First, the authors’ summary:

Large language models are diffusing rapidly into science, raising concerns that delegating research writing to AI may undermine the development of expertise that scientific training is supposed to build. We measure AI-generated writing in the dissertations of a near-census of US STEM PhD graduates from 2019 to 2026 and link graduates to their subsequent employment. AI writing is absent before 2023, present in 29% of dissertations filed in 2026, and rapidly growing. Use is more common among students from non-English-speaking countries and at lower-ranked programs. Among graduates in the same program and cohort, those whose dissertations contain AI writing are less likely to enter academic research careers and more likely to enter non-tenure-track roles or industry, with this pattern strongest among US-origin students. At the same time as AI may increase research productivity, it thus appears to also be displacing a potentially important portion of the work through which scientific expertise is developed.

Here are some tweets showing, first, the growing number of STEM dissertations that have AI writing. Remember that the importance of a Ph.D. in STEM is research results and not writing, but it’s still unethical to have AI write part of your dissertation:

My findings have replicated!

A new paper found basically the same result I did: somewhere between 1-in-4 and 1-in-3 dissertations are now written with AI! https://t.co/h8kuznE0kF

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) October 5, 2026

And the graph showing, for both foreign (red) and American (green) Ph.D. graduates, the higher probability of going into industry than academia if you have a dissertation containing AI writing. (There is less of a disparity for foreign students.) It’s substantial, and I have a couple of theories for it, but you can think of your own:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the editor and Andrzej are messing around:

Hili: You look very tired.
Andrzej: You’re right. I think I need to stop pretending I’m working.

In Polish:

Hili: Wyglądasz jakbyś był bardzo zmęczony.
Ja: Masz rację, chyba muszę przestać udawać, że pracuję.

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

From Stacy:

From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

From The English Language Police:

From Masih. This brave Iranian woman risks her own freedom by relating what she sees:

A woman who runs a small shop near an Iranian prison sees two worlds unfold at its gates every day.

She sees families embracing loved ones who have finally been released, smiling through tears of joy. And she sees families summoned for one final visit with someone sentenced to death, holding back tears as they face an unbearable goodbye.

Behind those prison walls, people lose months and years of their lives in a system where fair trials, independent lawyers and even the most basic rights of defendants are routinely denied. Forced confessions, torture and closed-door trials have been documented time and again.

The people of Iran are being held hostage by this brutal and terrorist regime. They need the world to stand with them.

#Iran

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) October 6, 2026

From Luana.  This is most likely a reference to child marriage among some Muslims, but it’s also free speech and undeserving of punishment.

🚨BREAKING: A retired British police officer has been convicted and fined for sharing a meme.
The post said:

“Fun facts about bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!”

Stephen Gray, 65, spent 30 years as a police officer. He said the meme was satirical and meant to spark debate about child marriage.

A judge ruled it “grossly offensive.”
He now has a criminal record.

— David J Harris Jr (@DavidJHarrisJr) October 5, 2026

From Malcolm. Rats driving cars!

A Canadian man who had two rats as pets learned that letting them drive a miniature car reduced their levels of stress, so he gave them an electric miniature car and taught them to drive.

[📹 emperorsofmischief] https://t.co/N9rSBpMKbq

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 29, 2026

This really is complete bollocks!

How I have not missed hearing Trump spout uninformed bollocks about deadly diseases

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) October 5, 2026

One from my feed: our beloved DSA:

Every once in a while I like to reread this statement by the DSA and specifically one Zohran Mamdani, on October 7, 2023. Never forget. https://t.co/rfVv6CZ84C

— Yael Bar tur (@yaelbt) October 6, 2026

One I reposted form The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. 93 years after she was born, the hatred swelled again.

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 7, 2026

And two from Doctor Cobb. First, a baby bobcat rescues itself. You can see some video here.

Not your typical 'cat stuck in a tree' call. A baby bobcat got stuck on the top of a power pole in Kelowna. He waited until the rescue man reached him in the lift and said, "No thanks, I got it," and shimmied down himself. 😂🤣www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/ar…

— Bon Hanson (@bonhanson.bsky.social) 2026-10-03T22:10:33.290Z

And a crappy pigeon nest:

No lies detected (tho also magnetoreception)

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-10-06T16:50:32.468Z

The poem at the top is a fragment from Jubilate Agno, by Christopher Smart (1722-1771). Smart wrote this while confined in a mental asylum, but it’s none the worse for that. It is in fact, one of the two best poems ever written about a cat.