Welcome to Sunday, October 11, 2026: Sabbath for goyische cats and World Biryani Day. At center left below you can see a biryani served to several of us when I visited Bhubaneswar, India, some years ago. I spoke in five cities, and asked as my honorarium only I be taken to great places featuring local dishes. That was a great trip.
It’s also General Pulaski Memorial Day, Kraken Day, National Coming Out Day, National Sausage Pizza Day, Southern Food Heritage Day, and World Dulce de Leche Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 11 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Over at the WaPo, Fareed Zakaria tells us why “The U.S. can’t win in Iran until Trump makes a decision.”
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. would regularly detail the massive damage it had done to the enemy, from weapons destroyed to body counts of enemy soldiers dead. But the test of success is whether that damage makes the adversary cry uncle. So far Iran has not surrendered, and there are reasons to think more bombing will not change that reality.
The fundamental problem with Trump’s approach is that he cannot decide whether he wants to change Iran’s policies or its government. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent illustrated the contradiction in September when he said the message to other countries was: “This is the end of the regime.” Yet in the same interview, he insisted the goal was not necessarily to collapse the government but to pressure it into negotiations.
Addressing the United Nations last month, Trump wondered whether he should make a deal allowing Iran to rebuild into a greater country — or “annihilate the Islamic republic and do it quickly.” Meanwhile, his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were negotiating with Iranian officials. Washington was threatening to destroy the government while asking it to negotiate seriously.
If Iran’s leaders believe Washington intends to destroy them regardless of what they do, why would they make concessions? Their incentive would be to resist, inflict costs and outlast the U.S. In Foreign Affairs, Stephen Biddle and his co-authors argue that wars ultimately end through political bargains. Military force can improve the terms of those bargains but cannot substitute for them. The U.S. has repeatedly forgotten this lesson, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, demonstrating extraordinary skill at destroying armies but much less at translating battlefield achievements into lasting political outcomes.
The Trump administration must decide what it wants. If the goal is policy change — reopening Hormuz, constraining Iran’s nuclear program and curbing its regional aggression — it must define achievable terms and pressure Iran to accept them. If the goal is regime change, it must plan for a bloody struggle, probably with more regional spillover. Until Washington resolves that contradiction, the country will remain stuck in its latest Middle Eastern quagmire.
The American people, including, I think, Republicans, won’t put up with a bloody struggle to effect regime change, so I don’t think that’s in the cards, much as I would like regime change. That would require the mass effort of the Iranian people, and they have no stomach for protest after 30,000 were killed by the regime in a short period. But it’s not clear whether there are achievable aims, save for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Certainly Iran will not make a credible promise to end its ambitions to build nuclear weapons.
*Christa Pike, who survived two attempts by Tennessee to kill her by lethal injection, has, amazingly, recovered to the point where she can walk, though she’s not yet there in full.
Christa Pike has been discharged from a Nashville hospital, her lawyers said on Saturday, 10 days after she survived an attempt at lethal injection.
She is back at Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the primary prison for women in Tennessee, her lawyers said. As of Thursday, Ms. Pike had been walking with assistance, but still struggling with concentration and memory.
“She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances,” her lawyers said in a statement. “She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery.”
Ms. Pike has spent three decades in the prison, largely in isolation, for the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate in Knoxville. On Sept. 30, she survived two doses of the drug pentobarbital, the second time this year Tennessee has failed to carry out an execution.
Ms. Pike is the first person to have survived receiving doses of a drug during a lethal injection execution.
. . .The Tennessee Department of Correction confirmed that Ms. Pike had returned to the prison, but declined to offer additional details about her condition or treatment.
Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican in the final months of his term-limited tenure, had put a moratorium on executions for the remainder of the year while an independent investigation into Ms. Pike’s botched execution continues. Frank Strada, the head of the state’s prison system, said he would step down this month.
The course of medical treatment for Ms. Pike in prison was not immediately clear.
Her lawyers have asked Mr. Lee to grant her clemency and allow her to spend the remainder of her life in prison.
Agreed. This mess should never have occurred in the first place. As I’ve said repeatedly, it’s barbaric for the state to kill people, and especially barbaric when things go wrong, as they did for Christa Pike. If they really wanted an effective way to do away with prisoners, I’d suggest the firing squad or guillotine, but the states prefers bloodless executions. They should be preferring life without parold.
*Without being asked, an AI site submitted a false tip in a homicide case being handled by the Philadelphia police department.
An Anthropic artificial intelligence model submitted a false tip to a Philadelphia police website about an unsolved homicide case, authorities and Anthropic said.
It’s the latest example of AI models acting in unintended ways and manipulating government and other websites during tests. In a report Friday, Anthropic also disclosed a separate incident when its AI model submitted forms to an undisclosed government website instead of stopping before submission.
The incident in Philadelphia occurred on July 18 when the AI model Claude Haiku 4.5 was tasked with generating and performing example tasks on randomly selected webpages, Anthropic said.
Claude filled out a form on police site PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com indicating it might have information regarding an unsolved murder listed on the site.
Philadelphia Police said in a statement they were unaware of the incident until Anthropic notified them on Wednesday. Then they found the submission in the website’s tip records and confirmed it was marked spam and never forwarded to police.
. . .“Unsolved cases involve real victims, grieving families and investigators working to secure answers,” the Philadelphia Police Department said in a statement. “Technology companies must take all appropriate steps necessary to prevent their systems from submitting false information to law enforcement.”
Anthropic said in its report that most of the reported behaviors are forms of what it calls “persistence” — “in which Claude, when it cannot complete a task as given, works around a restriction instead of stopping.”
The company said it was modifying its training to “reduce the likelihood of further misbehavior.”
This is only the beginning of AI “misbehavior”, and it could get much worse. Imagine if AI could get into Medicare or Social Security websites, or bank sites. We can’t even imagine what bots can do.
*Elisha Wiesel, the son of author Holocaust survivor, and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel has written a piece in the Free Press condemning the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, calling it “The death of the Nobel Peace Prize.” (See also the WSJ’s editorial, “A Nobel Prize for Hating Israel.”)
This morning, the same committee awarded the same prize to Navi Pillay, who chaired the UN commission of inquiry that, on September 16 of last year, betrayed the meaning of the word genocide and weaponized it against Israel. Her commission held Israel to impossible moral standards demanded of no other sovereign nation defending itself from attack. The decision followed years of anti-Israel advocacy by Pillay, including signing a manifesto in 2020 calling on governments to “Sanction Apartheid Israel.” Others have been able to see Pillay for who she is. In 2022, for example, Berlin’s mayor withdrew her support from an event honoring Pillay with a peace medal. The event was subsequently canceled.
The decision to honor Pillay is not a onetime lapse for the Nobel Committee. It is part of a long-standing trend. Members of the committee have said publicly that they wished they could take back former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres’s 1994 prize because of concerns over Israel’s conduct. A decade later, four of the five members were still defending former Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat’s prize, awarded that same year. The Israeli laureate was judged by everything he did afterward. The Palestinian laureate was never judged again. Antisemitism today looks less like hatred than like scrutiny with one permanent defendant, carried out in the language of justice. Kåre Kristiansen, a member of the committee, understood this. He resigned within an hour of the 1994 announcement because he could not honor a man whose record was soaked in terror.
It is not that Pillay has done nothing worthy of praise. Her record against actual apartheid, in South Africa, is real. So was my father’s: In his Nobel lecture he spoke of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and said, “Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as antisemitism.” So I don’t dismiss her work lightly. The problem is that she does not resent antisemitism the way my father despised apartheid. To take only the most notable example: When Miloon Kothari, a fellow member of her UN commission, complained in 2022 about social media being controlled by the “Jewish lobby,” Pillay defended him.
More importantly, the commission’s declaration that Israel is committing a genocide is wholly baseless. Consider the facts. On October 6, 2023, there was not a single Israeli soldier or civilian living in Gaza. In 2005, Israel withdrew every soldier from Gaza and removed thousands of its own citizens from their homes, against their will, to find out whether Palestinian self-rule would bring peace. Hamas seized the territory. It took hundreds of millions of dollars that could have built schools and hospitals and spent them on rockets and hundreds of miles of terror tunnels. Even so, Israel kept trying: In the months before October 7, it issued work permits to roughly 18,500 Gazans, looking to build economic ties with a population that desperately needed the work.
Critics say Israel’s control of Gaza’s borders makes it an occupier anyway. But Gaza has two borders, and Egypt has kept its own crossing as tightly controlled as Israel’s, flooding Hamas’s smuggling tunnels and razing homes to build a buffer zone. Hardly anyone calls that occupation. Could it be that no country wants terrorists crossing into it, and that only the Jewish state is condemned for feeling the same?
. . .In 1975, after the United Nations declared Zionism a form of racism, my father wrote: “This is not the first time the enemy has accused us of his own crimes. Our possessions were taken from us, and we were called misers; our children were massacred, and we were accused of ritual murder.”
We will fight the lie that Israel committed genocide with facts, in every forum, for as long as it takes. My father took sides. So do we.
The last sentence refers to Wiesel’s own Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he said, ““We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
*I largely stopped reading Nicholas Kristof in the NYT after he wrote his undocumented “dog rape” column, but in his op-ed this week on child marriage, he reveals some shocking data that is certainly checkable. And once again we see both the Left and the Right behaving shamefully, but for different reasons:
Every three seconds, on average, a girl under the age of 18 is married somewhere in the world. In India. In Ethiopia. And, to our shame, in Illinois, Maryland, Colorado — and most of America.
Thirty-two states still allow child marriages in some circumstances, such as with the permission of a parent or a judge. Two states, New Mexico and Mississippi, have no minimum age at all.
Some of the defenders of child marriages in America are religious groups on the far right, but as a liberal myself, I find it deeply dispiriting that in a number of states they are joined by left-leaning organizations such as the local affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood — even, in Illinois, the National Organization for Women.
That’s right: Some progressives and feminists fight to defend child marriage, usually on the basis of “child rights.” I shake my head in disbelief: If you actually talk to girls and women who have been married young, what you often hear is the opposite of empowerment. Instead, it’s oppression and rape and the loss of education and childhood.
For progressive organizations to ally themselves with right-wing extremists to defend what sometimes amounts to state-sanctioned statutory rape — this is liberal self-caricature.
. . .Child marriage isn’t routine in the United States, but neither is it rare. Unchained at Last, a nonprofit that fights child marriage, pored over marriage records and calculated that some 315,000 children were legally married in the United States between 2000 and 2021. A great majority were 16 or 17, but some were as young as 10. Most were girls married to adult men.
At least 66,000 of those marriages involved ages or age differences that would have constituted a sex crime in that state.
“It’s a workaround for statutory rape,” said Fraidy Reiss, the executive director of Unchained at Last.
. . . These are the states that still allow child marriages in some circumstances: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
If you live in one of these states (especially New Mexico and Mississippi), first check the rules that allow child marriage, and then I’d urge you to write to the governor and your local state Representative.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has replaced Malgorzata with Andrzej as a pillow:
Hili: Time for bed.
Andrzej: Yes, but could you sleep next to me tonight instead of on top of me?
In Polish:
Hili: Pora iść do łóżka.
Ja: Tak, ale czy mogłabyś dziś spać obok mnie, a nie na mnie?
*******************
From Andrzej:
From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:
From The Language Nerds:
Masih breaks up when relating this horrible story; be sure to watch the video:
Islamic Republic executes groom just hours after he married bride in prison wedding over the phone!.
What kind of regime turns a wedding day into an execution day? What kind of monsters make a woman a widow on her wedding day?
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) October 9, 2026
From Luana, who is not responsible for using the word “retard”. You can see the article here.
One year on and I still haven’t found a more retarded article. https://t.co/3l7IY9lUuk
— Retard Finder (@IfindRetards) October 8, 2026
I want to know what was wrong with Larry!
Still got at least six lives left
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) October 9, 2026
Jeff Maurer is right: geckos, emus, that damn “Liberty Biberty”. . . oy!
— Jeff Maurer (@JeffMightBWrong) October 6, 2026
One from my feed, and the operant word is “feed”:
This guy spent 14 hours waiting for a squirrel to set off this Rube Goldberg Machine.
[📹 Creezy] https://t.co/9xZO5Yruoh
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 9, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
Everyone in this photo was gassed to death when they arrived at Auschwitz. It was a Polish Jewish family.
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 11, 2026
Two from Doc Cobb. I might have posted the first one before, but so be it:
jfc why don’t they just make it pay-per-view already. maybe start out with an mma fight or two.
— shauna (@goldengateblond.bsky.social) 2026-10-08T21:29:22.373Z
I’ve never tried this:
Elisabeth Anscombe on how to summon the courage to ask a question at a seminar.
— Arvid Ågren (@arvidagren.bsky.social) 2026-10-07T18:21:36.600Z
I’m really worried and confused, now that it is apparently an established medical fact that men can become pregnant. Could someone explain how this happens? Is it with another man or does a woman need to do things to me? And if so what? I am very keen to avoid getting pregnant and am very disappointed that there is no contraceptive advice out there so we men know how to keep safe from accidentally falling pregnant.
It’s easy. Just make sure you only have sex with women who have had their penises amputated.
(I was wanting to link to a chart I saw recently which showed how many men vs. how many women had their penises amputated, but now I can’t find it. Sorry.)
🫃🏻The emoji world says it is so.
And I say it’s a tumor.
I suppose that if a biological man’s hormones were doctored in the right way in advance, a fertilized embryo might be able to implant somewhere in a man’s abdominal cavity, much like in an ectopic pregnancy. (The embryo would have been created in vitro, of course.) Such a biological man would be pregnant, but could that man bring the fetus to full term? As with all ectopic pregnancies, it would be difficult, and in this case the chemical conditions in the man’s abdomen might not support the fetus. I (think I’ve) read that rare abdominal ectopic pregnancies (in women) have led to successful (surgical) births. Surely this has been tried in animal models, no?
What about transplanting a uterus in the man’s abdominal cavity and implanting the embryo in that? I’ve read of women who have had uterine transplants and successfully gestated infants. (I’m not suggesting this is a good idea, btw, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time.)
Men who think they’re women have demanded uterine transplants since the 1970s. They claim they can be better “mothers” than women.
These men called women “gennies,” meaning “genetic women.” That was their slur instead of “cisgender.”
Comment by Greg Mayer
Healthline is not where one would go for established medical facts. From its Wikipedia article:
GCM
Are you telling me Stan can’t have babies after all? Well at least he has the right to, even if can’t actually do it. (cf Life of Brian)
I really don’t understand all these bungled executions. I do not address the old moral question of whether it is right to ever execute anyone, however horrific the crime. I am just asking this: IF we have judged, rightly or wrongly, that for a certain convicted criminal the death penalty is just, how can it be so difficult to definitively kill the person in a painless way? I am not aware that veterinarians similarly bungle the euthanasia of dogs and cats.
I have no special medical knowledge, but surely a simple two shot regimen would work. The first shot should rapidly induce deep unconsciousness (I think there are many drugs that would do that). The second shot could be a huge overkill overdose of something lethal, say 50 or 100 times the usual lethal overdose of heroin or fentanyl or barbiturates or something like that. Surely that could not fail to kill the condemned. Surely there would be no chance that the person could regain consciousness and experience suffering. Am I missing something here?
“Show me a foolproof procedure and I will find a fool bigger than your proof” (or something like that). Even competent medicos sometimes can not find a usable vein. I suppose injecting into the jugular would almost always work, but that’s not a good look. For no fuss no muss methods, see a book on voluntary euthanasia.
No, you are not missing anything.
Without referencing the morality of executions, there is certainly a way of doing so “humanely”, though I suspect that lethal injections are more about the feelings of the government officials and observers than they are about the criminal.
One major problem is the use of barbiturates. Pentathol has no real medical use these days aside from animal euthanasia, and even that is happening less and less with the easy availability of opiates. It is difficult to find a reliable supply. Using an opiate such as heroin or fentanyl has the same effect: they suppress the activity of the neurons in the brainstem that innervate breathing. The subject falls into a deep sleep, and stops breathing.
Another problem is finding a medical professional capable of reliably finding a vein for the injection. Many such people do not want that job; they think that they are healers.
The food looks delicious!
NJM insurance, a small company only available in 5 states, does have the slogan “No Jingles or Mascots.” I see their ads on TV here in Connecticut, one of the few states.
Christa Pike: Commute her sentence to life in prison. Even putting aside the question of capital punishment, the State of Tennessee has demonstrated that it is not competent to manage the process in a humane way. Should the state really get another chance at putting someone to death who it has already tortured? They damaged her brain. What calamity could be next?
Navi Pillay and her Nobel Prize: Elisha Wiesel criticizes Navi Pillay and her U.N. commission of holding Israel to “impossible moral standards.” I disagree. By rejecting Israel’s right to defend its citizens and borders from attack by terrorists, Pillay is demanding that Israel commit acts that are patently immoral. States, including the State of Israel, have the moral obligation to protect the people that live within its jurisdiction. Pillay has her “amorality” exactly backwards, and the Nobel Committee apparently does, too.
Nick Kristof is the vilest journalist in the known universe.
I soured on him many years ago when he was constantly defending religion and “people of faith” and at the same time criticizing the oppression of women, most of which comes from religion.
Good segue into the child marriage issue: I’ll bet nearly all of those child marriages are within Islam or fundamentalist Christian sects.
With Kristof my disgust was long before the recent dog rape scandal and a bunch of his other idiocies. I’ve mentored a few very young writers for my publications as a favor to my editors. Even they wouldn’t commit the kind of journalistic malpractice Kristof does routinely.
D.A.
NYC
D.A.
NYC
2026 Florida Statute:
741.04 Issuance of marriage license.—
(1) A county court judge or clerk of the circuit court may not issue a license to marry to any person younger than 18 years of age, unless:
(a) The person is at least 17 years of age and provides the written consent of his or her parents or legal guardian, which is acknowledged by an officer authorized by law to take acknowledgments and administer oaths; and
(b) The older party to the marriage is not more than 2 years older than the younger party to the marriage.
I don’t have a problem with the 17 age threshold combined with the “not more than 2 years older” party stipulation.
BTW, the change in statute is fairly recent. Until 2018 , the law allowed pregnant girls of any age to marry with a judge’s permission. Sherry Johnson, who was forced to marry her rapist at the age of 11, was instrumental in having the laws changed.
Gov Gavin Newsom recently signed a law banning child marriage in California. The minimum marriageable age is 18 for both women and men; no exceptions. Yes, both ACLU and Planned Parenthood opposed this bill. PP somehow strangely connected child marriage to abortion rights.
Both these orgs would have been hypocrites to support a minimum age for marriage while claiming that a 12-year-old can consent to have her healthy breasts amputated because she wants to be a boy.
Interesting first sentence from the article on child marriage, if accurate, it can make one ponder.
Indian food photos, thanks for them, we have a wonderful Indian restaurant about 45 minutes away – what a joy to go there.
Ha! the Ms. Anscombe advice is a good one when feeling tongue-tied, or even otherwise.
FWIW, a post from a FB group called NZ Against Hamas turned up in my stream. They have nearly 10K followers. There’s apparently considerable opposition to Hamas in Kiwiland. Might be worth a visit to their page.
From a chemistry professor to his admin before dinner for the speaker: You can always(sic) ask “Have you considered the effect of temperature?”
And don’t forget to ask about the effect of pH, the running joke amongst biologists.
On the Iran war: the analytics firm Kpler suspects that at least some Gulf countries are paying Iran to get their oil out. They don’t have hard evidence.
This would be a bad development because it hands money to Iran, allowing them to withstand the blockade longer.
A bit like paying Russia to get their oil out.
Quite by coincidence, we had biryani for dinner last evening. We would have been eating when it was breakfast-time on the 11th in India, so I guess that counts as having biryani on World Biryani Day. Yay!
We don’t make it from scratch; we use a kit made in India and available here in Canada from several national grocery chains. To the kit, which comes with its own rice, we add chicken, raisins and cashews to make it a meal. It’s moderately spicy – about the limit I can tolerate. It’s quick to make (~25m) and a great way to use up left-overs from a store-bought BBQ chicken.
βPer
In real life, some 46-XY persons can get pregnant. Consider Swyer syndrome. Are persons suffering from Swyer men? I would say no. One of them is actually somewhat famous. I am referring to Sara Fosberg on YouTube. Note that Swyer requires IVF.
So a 17 year old is a child, but an 18 year old is an adult? Ah, the perils of imposing categories on continua.
Joan of Arc (17 when at Orleans); Alexander (16 when acting as regent, including military action, in his father’s absence); Vanderbilt (16 when starting his first business, a ferry and freight service). Children.
Alexander (18 when commanding his own troops); Cleopatra (18 at accession); Octavian (19 when he marched on Rome and was admitted to the Senate); Lafayette (19 when granted honorary commission in the Continental Army; real command followed a year later). Kids. They should have been in college bopping like bunny rabbits (assuming proper consent) and playing beer pong.
That is quite a list! I recall reading that Mark Antony ridiculed Octavian as “just a boy”. I’m sure he regretted that later.