Welcome to Friday, October 16, 2026 and it’s Global Cat Day! Here is a celebratory drawing, courtesy of ChatGPT, and below it a photo of the Queen of all Cats, Hili:
See the Hili dialogue below for more celebration of Cat Day:
It’s also National Learn a Word Day (here’s one “jocund”), National Liqueur Day (I’ll take green Chartreuse), World Bread Day, and World Food Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 16 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Trump has canceled the planned publicly livestreamed firing-squad execution for Nidal Hasan; the execution with guns will still take place and be livestreamed, but only the family will be able to watch.
President Trump on Thursday canceled the Pentagon’s planned livestream of the execution of the Army officer who was convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting.
Pentagon officials said last week that the execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas, would be broadcast via livestream. But Mr. Trump said Thursday that only immediate families of Mr. Hasan’s victims would be able to watch the execution in person.
“Many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” he wrote on social media. “He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.”
Democrats and Republicans in Congress panned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the shooting, and even Vice President JD Vance expressed doubt about the plan.
“I’m not going to be watching it,” he said. He added: “I don’t know that that’s actually going to happen.”
The plan to broadcast Mr. Hasan’s execution, which the Pentagon said is scheduled for 1 p.m. on Dec. 3 at the same Army post where the massacre took place, had also drawn widespread condemnation from retired military officials, religious leaders and even some of the wounded soldiers who survived.
On Wednesday, dozens of retired admirals, generals and other officers published an open letter opposing the plan.
“Livestreaming this execution would clearly violate the basic human dignity of the condemned prisoner,” they wrote. “It turns what should be the solemn and grave punishment of a member of our society for committing the most serious crimes into a carnival for the enjoyment of voyeurs and spectators.”
. . . In an interview with Real America’s Voice, Mr. Hegseth said he supported the public execution of Mr. Hasan “because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”
Mr. Trump, in his post on social media, contended that streaming the execution “might have been a strong deterrent” to show how “America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan,” but he said it would not go forward.
If it’s to be a deterrent, then why not let everybody watch? What better way to let people know the “serious consequences” for mass murder? (Don’t we already know that?) The real reason is that it’s a barbaric spectacle that appeals to the worst of human nature, and Trump knows it. And I still predict that the execution will not take place.
*There’s been another sexual assault at a fraternity party, this time at the University of Chicago. Neither the accused assailant nor the reported victim went to school here, but we do have fraternities and one of them is where it is said to have occurred. From the NYT:
A 21-year-old woman reported that she was sexually assaulted last weekend at a fraternity house near the University of Chicago, the city police said, putting another campus on edge over accusations of misconduct tied to Greek life organizations.
The woman said the assault occurred in the early hours of Sunday during a party at the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, the police said, though neither the victim nor the suspect were students at the school. One witness said in an interview that she had interrupted an attack. That prompted the suspect to flee the house, according to the university, which called the episode “deeply concerning.”
The Chicago city police are investigating and did not provide further details, nor say whether there had been an arrest. On Tuesday, the school said it had identified a “person of interest” in the assault, adding that the person has been barred from campus.
Accusations of sexual misconduct are grimly plentiful on American campuses, and the report at the University of Chicago, a campus of Gothic architecture and intellectual rigor, came after a reported gang rape at Cornell University in New York propelled the issue back into the national debate.
The Chicago episode took place at a Saturday night fraternity party boisterous enough to be heard blocks away. Klara Grant, an 18-year-old chemistry student, said there was a D.J., dance floors on two levels of the house and a bar.
Mia Lara, a 21-year-old student at a nearby university, said she had seen the event advertised on the fraternity’s Instagram account. She and the woman who reported the attack, along with a third friend, decided to go.
It was the first time any of them had been to a fraternity party, Ms. Lara said. At the door, they were asked for identification, but not whether they attended the University of Chicago.
The trio danced in the basement. Ms. Lara’s friend and a man began kissing and Ms. Lara lost track of them. She searched the house, eventually finding a small group of men cheering outside a locked bathroom door in the basement, she said.
“They were saying things like, ‘When’s it my turn?’ and, ‘I want to go in there,’” Ms. Lara said.
Ms. Lara jimmied the lock and forced her way inside. She found her friend sitting on the floor, slumped against the wall with her clothes and undergarments pulled down. The man whom her friend had been kissing had his hands on her wrists, Ms. Lara said.
.. .Her friend began saying, “Make it stop” and “Get me out of here,” Ms. Lara said. Ms. Lara began screaming and the man left. She and her friend carried the woman out of the bathroom.
Outside the fraternity house, Ms. Lara chased the man, a scene captured in a social media video. In the clip, Ms. Lara yells at the man, accusing him of assaulting her friend.
“She wanted to,” the man replies. Ms. Lara swats the man with her hands, and he runs.
According to the Chicago Maroon (the student newspaper), a suspect has been identified:
Multiple people confirmed to the Maroon that Raihaan Khaja, a first-year student at Purdue University, was the individual in a TikTok video that purported to show the perpetrator of a sexual assault early Sunday morning.
The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern that they would be associated with the incident, attended the party at the Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) fraternity house where the assault occurred or were otherwise familiar with Khaja.
The attendees independently corroborated some details released yesterday by the Chicago Sun-Times and provided additional insight into Khaja’s activities at the party and immediately afterward. Their accounts also align with a Monday statement by AEPi saying that no members of the fraternity were involved in the assault.
Khaja, who was on fall break at the time, came to the party with a group of friends from his hometown in the northern suburbs of Chicago.
The University declined to name the accused assailant, but at least they banned him from campus. I would hope so!
*There’s an unresolved central question in “You Can See Everything”, Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder’s new documentary about grifter Elizabeth Holmes: was she really a grifter, or a huge case of self-delusion. A review in the WaPo describes the film, in which the filmmakers moved in with Holmes and her husband for several weeks before she went off to jail. (Why would she do that if she was obviously a grifter?). From the review by Will Leitch:
One of the surprises of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s breathtaking new (pseudo?) documentary “You Can See Everything,” which opens nationwide this Friday, is that you come away understanding how Holmes was able to draw people in. In fact, you might even get drawn in yourself.
The film chronicles (among many, many other things) the final weeks in 2023 before Holmes reports to federal prison (where she remains today) for defrauding investors. Fielder and Oppenheim had extraordinary access to their subject. Fielder not only moves in with Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, he’s also the last person to see her before she’s put in the car to be whisked away. And as we see Holmes up close, it becomes clear that there is something unique about her — a wide-eyed guilelessness that marks her, as Fielder notes in the film, as either the most sincere person on the planet or the most sociopathically manipulative one. The filmmakers embed with her for weeks, at the most trying time of her life, and can’t seem to figure out which it is. What hope did Mattis and the rest of them have?
The film, to be clear, is not a relitigation of the Theranos case; it does not pretend that Holmes was framed or railroaded. But what it does do, in a downright existential way, is examine what truth in fact is: how much of it is subjective, how much is mediated by personal experience and — most vividly — how much a person is or is not lying if they truly, profoundly believe what they are saying.
After Holmes says outrageous and untrue things, but seems to really believe them, Leitch says this:
Holmes — along with [her husband] Evans, who becomes in many ways the central, increasingly ominous figure in the film — proves an ideal subject for this sort of exploration: There is something so alien, yet so utterly assured, about her that you can get lost looking at and listening to her. Fielder certainly does: Some of the film’s best scenes feature him just staring at her, slack-jawed, as he seems to question the fabric of reality itself.
The movie takes a wild turn halfway through that I wouldn’t dare spoil here, other than to say that it turns the whole film inside out and leaves the viewer even more adrift than they were before … yet it does so in a way that, like a magic trick, proves invigorating rather than distressing. It’s a film that chases truth but, paradoxically, discovers that sometimes the deepest truth really is to be found inside yourself. This is a mind-bender of a movie in every possible way.
I’ll see this movie for sure. Here’s the trailer, which gives you an idea of how bloody weird this movie is.
Holmes is scheduled to be moved to a halfway house in Texas in August of next year, with her full release from federal custody scheduled for 2030. The film opens today.
*Luckily, Pope Leo’s lung cancer was caught early, and there’s a good chance of a cure. (In case you wondered, he never smoked cigarettes.)
Pope Leo XIV had the lower section of his right lung removed after doctors diagnosed him with the most common form of lung cancer. While lung cancer is a leading killer, survival rates can be high if it’s caught early, as the pope’s tumor appears to have been. Here are some things to know.
The Vatican announced the pope’s diagnosis as lung adenocarcinoma, which is one of many forms of lung cancer.
There are two main groups, small cell and non-small cell lung cancers. The non-small cell kind make up the vast majority of the world’s cases and adenocarcinoma is its most common subtype. Even it comes in varieties that can grow faster or slower.
“While it’s still very dangerous, it has slightly higher cure rates than other types of lung cancer,” said Dr. John Heymach of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer. But as many as 1 in 5 lung cancers occur in people who have never smoked and it’s not clear why, maybe in some cases just random chance, Heymach said.
Other risks include exposure to radon gas, asbestos, radiation, secondhand smoke and air pollution, according to the American Cancer Society.
Surgery is a mainstay when lung cancer is detected early, and increasingly is used even in more advanced stages. The pope had the lower section, or lobe, of his right lung removed to try to ensure that all of the cancer was removed.
The right lung has three sections or lobes while the left has two. Each lobe has its own airway branch and dedicated blood vessels and when one is removed, “the other lobes actually pick up some of the work,” said Dr. Ben Zhang, a thoracic surgeon at Allina Health in Minneapolis.
The lungs gradually compensate over several months until most people, especially those who already were physically active, notice little to no difference with exertion, he said.
The pope is known to engage in weekly tennis games and swimming.
In the U.S., the average hospital stay after lung cancer surgery is two nights, Zhang said. It depends in part on how quickly the patient can get up and walk around, as well as pain and how long a tube that can drain air and fluid from the chest is needed.
The pope was walking the next day, which Heymach called “typically a harbinger of a quicker recovery.”
Whether additional treatment is needed depends on the tumor’s stage, based on factors such as its size and whether it shows signs of spreading via the lymph nodes, and if markers on its cells suggest it may be aggressive. Additional treatment can be chemotherapy, used before surgery to shrink a tumor or afterward to attack any lingering cells. Other options include radiation, immunotherapy or what are called targeted drugs aimed at specific molecular drivers of a tumor.
None of the details have been announced, and I’m not sure they will be. Given the Pope’s position, it seems okay to disclose what’s been revealed so far. But more details about treatment don’t seem necessary. I’m wondering, though, how pious Catholics rationalize how the Pope, who is at times infallible, could be struck down with potentially deadly disease.
*The WSJ has more information on the government’s investigation of Ilhan Omar, which is beginning to look a lot like a tempest in a teapot.
The Trump administration’s investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) is aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the probe.
The multipronged effort is focused at least in part on how Omar obtained her citizenship after she arrived in the U.S. from Somalia decades ago. Investigators are focused both on the congresswoman and actions of her deceased father, some of the people familiar with the probe said. Nur Omar Mohamed brought his daughter and other family members to the U.S. from a refugee camp in Kenya in 1995.
. . .At the center of the immigration investigation is whether Omar or her father changed her age on her citizenship application to show she was 17 years old rather than 18, according to people familiar with the probe. If Omar was 17 at the time her father applied for citizenship, she would have qualified automatically rather than needing to pursue her own immigration process. She became a citizen in 2000.
Officials at Homeland Security Investigations looked into a similar tip under the Biden administration, according to people familiar with those efforts, but they decided not to move forward because they lacked evidence of fraud.
The government can’t simply strip a person of their U.S. citizenship. The Justice Department must file a lawsuit in federal court and prove that the person lied in a material way to gain their citizenship. Most of the cases the Justice Department has filed this term haven’t yet been decided.
Leon Fresco, a top immigration official in the Justice Department during the Obama administration, said the Trump administration’s case would hinge on finding material evidence that Omar lied about her own age, rather than her father lying on her behalf.
“That would make the case significantly easier to prosecute,” he said. “But either way, they are not traveling a well-paved road here.”
Oy vey! It’s the matter of one year, and how are they going to prove that Omar lied about her own age instead of her father doing it? And even if they can, it smacks of Trumpian vengeance to prosecute her with the intention of deporting her, an effor that will, in the end, fail.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is celebrating her day (which is every day):
Andrzej: Today is Global Cat Day.
Hili: As far as this household is concerned, every day is Cat Day.
In Polish:
Ja: Dziś Światowy Dzień Kota
Hili: W tym domu każdy dzień jest Dniem Kota.
*******************
From Terrible Maps:
From CinEmma:
From Give Me a Sign:
From Masih: recordings of two women awaiting their execution in Iran:
Two women on death row in Iran have recorded audio messages from their prison cells and asked the free world to save their lives. Now I bring their voices to you.
Najmeh Amini is 23. An accounting student. Her crime? A post on social media. The regime calls it insulting the prophet. For one post, they will hang her.
Mahboubeh Shabani is 33. During the protests, she carried wounded demonstrators to the hospital. Her crime? Saving lives. The regime calls it waging war against God. For saving lives, they will hang her.
Let me be honest. Hashtags and tweets alone will not stop these executions. This regime only understands pressure.
So I call on American, European, and world leaders: make these executions your red line. Tie every sanction, every deal, every negotiation to the lives of political prisoners. Demand their release now. Impose real costs for every hanging.
Najmeh Amini and Mahboubeh Shabani must not die for the crime of freedom.
Act now. Before it is too late.
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) October 15, 2026
From Luana. Khadija Khan clarifies what “Islamophobia” is about.
It’s not “bringing back blasphemy laws through the backdoor” any more. We are witnessing the gradual but steady imposition of Islamic blasphemy laws in our society. The term “Islamophobia” is not about protecting Muslims as people. The term has become a synonym for Islamic blasphemy laws, and you should not doubt it.
— Khadija Khan (@KhadijaKhan__) October 15, 2026
Three from my feed (readers are welcome to submit tweets). I reposted the first one. The movie is terrific:
Two great scenes from “My Cousin Vinnie.” Marisa Tomei won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance.
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 15, 2026
Bill Maher should get a bodyguard after this:
Bill Maher is destroying the Muslims religion. Allah https://t.co/lfD9BYZ3Q9
— Larry Dean (@larry_mcwethy) October 14, 2026
It’s pretty clear what he did:
Bill Maher is destroying the Muslims religion. Allah https://t.co/lfD9BYZ3Q9
— Larry Dean (@larry_mcwethy) October 14, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This German Jewish woman was sent to Auschwitz at age 21. She died 12 days after she arrived.
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 16, 2026
And two from Doctor Cobb. First, another attempt to solve the mystery of how Amelia Earhart vanished. Click to go to the original:
Note the two-part call:
Kookaburra Call
— San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (@sandiegozoo.bsky.social) 2026-10-08T16:53:04.618Z
My father was 13 when he came to the US from Russia in 1913. His age was put down as 15 so he could get working papers. This caught up to him when he had to retire at 68 because his documents made him 2 years older.
Hahahah. That’s pretty funny Eli. If you come to New York you should really visit the Ellis Island Museum.
Maybe your dad visited it before it was a museum.
He got the full experience!
It’s an excellent day out.
D.A.
NYC
Happy Global Cat Day! Nice picture of “Life is better with cats” from CatGPT! It looks almost too good to be true. Look carefully at that picture. I don’t see a litter box. And, I don’t see anything being toppled from a shelf.
No. I don’t thing there’s all that much to Omar’s immigration history. Maybe her father lied about her age to make her 17 rather than 18. I wonder what the government’s case might be. Would the case be against her late father? If he’s not available to be charged, would Omar really be liable for her father’s misstatement (or lie)? I doubt that a misrepresentation by a (now) dead parent would have very many consequences, if any. The more I read about this, the less I see. In many cases where there is a political motivation, the investigation—the disruption, the legal costs, the emotional turmoil, and the bad publicity—is the punishment.
Clearly, this is part of God’s cancer awareness campaign. It is paradoxically his way of drawing attention to what is at least a consequence of his creation. He often teaches us through subtle contradictions.
Regarding infallibility, it seems that the last to be proclaimed from the seat was in 1950. Is that right? It is the one about the good mother’s assumption.
Yes, you appear to be right. This is what Grok says:
But notice, there is no exact, unambiguous criterion for when a Pope is or is not speaking ex cathedra. I could equally well claim to be an infallible mathematician when I assert mathematical propositions. When I am right I am infallible. But when I make an error and assert something incorrect, obviously I was not speaking ex cathedral.
True. And some Catholics wish their favourite issues to be settled ex cathedra: https://www.catholic.com/qa/the-most-recent-ex-cathedra-statement
One is never sure if one being guided by the Holy Spirit, the Devil, or just not guided at all.
“You Can See Everything” apparently weighs in at 174 minutes. I am nearing my sell-by date and watching that film would rob me of a precious three hours of life that I do not want to concede and could not get back. I read the book (Bad Blood) when it came out. So her scheme or plan turned out to be a fantasy. She may have had faith in it at first; she had some acquaintance with engineering design it seems. People who invested seemed to have the disposable income and either early on did due diligence before handing over the coin or trusted her personally or through a family relationship that she had done due diligence before coming to them. But in any case, the effort was unsuccessful and she continued to advocate for and take money well after she started to knowingly falsify results. So this part of her life was much given to fantasy.
Now come two film-makers who through, cropping, lighting, staging and music…oh the music in the trailer!…. Put together another level of fantasy of the fantasy. They win awards for their ability to do this sort of thing. I have no more confidence in learning something factual about Ms. Holmes’ adventures from this film than I would expect to learn about physics or cosmology from the Star Trek or Star Wars series of films.
The book was enough for me, thank you.
Yes, Jim. I’m a tad further from my sell by date than you but I’m catching up to you. 🙂
The whole story of this broad is not really worth my time, but I’ll say the decisions we make for our own money’s investments are different from the way venture capitalists see deals and opportunities.
Venture capitalists go in knowing that only a tenth or less of our ideas/deals are going to work out well. This would be a reckless policy for one’s own personal retirement account but it works on Wall Street.
best regards as always,
D.A.
NYC
Thanks David. Yes those numbers are what I recall from an attorney friend who did business start-ups. They ARE different from you and me.
On the contrary I have tickets for the show on Monday – it’s sold out thru the weekend in my little corner of Turtle Island. I’m keen to see a true sociopath in action but at a safe remove. I expect more horror movie than true-crime documentary. Should be fun.
Ah. That’s the spirit Mike. Had not thought of it that way. Get a large bucket of popcorn with butter, a 32oz fountain soda and settle in for the entertainment. With a nor’easter with 40mph winds, moderate tidal flooding, and several inches of rain hitting here all weekend starting overnight, a three-hour saturday afternoon movie might be just the ticket.
We’re in the high-end theatre: adult beverages, lounge chairs, the works. Stay dry there eh?
I like the Maher clip; he’s spot on. I hate the mood music that was added. It makes it sound like the trailer for a horror movie.
I’ve noticed Andrej’s keyboard more than once…does anyone know where I could get one like that that’s high quality?
*Andrzej
Amazon sells a ton of mechanical keyboards with round keycaps:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mechanical+keyboard+round+keycaps&crid=2TRQXQG5KFJRJ&sprefix=mechanical+keyboard+round+keycaps%2Caps%2C182&ref=nb_sb_noss_1
Thank you very much.
Thx!
They’re cool, Roger. I think I’m going to get one of those.
I never use my cell phone but I’m here in front of two laptops all my life!
best,
D.A.
NYC
re: Holmes movie clip .. agree with comment above by Jim, … “Put together another level of fantasy of the fantasy.” – it’s marketing, it would seem.
Thanks for the Bill Maher clip, he did a fine job of getting to the meat of it.
Kookaburra call: In past years, waking up on revisits to Australia in the (jet lagged first morning) I was always amazed by all the weird bird calls. Strange and nostalgic for me.
Retweeted Bill Maher on Islam (herein).
Very succinct and accurate.
I used to work in venture capital: Elizabeth Holmes’ “success” didn’t surprise me at all. We got so many deals across our desks, we’d look at the “the people” who, if they seemed like stand up guys/gals, we’d trust.
Ditto the patents and business plans, and.. importantly.. others who had invested already. It is how the system works.
Plus she’s pretty and charismatic: that can’t hurt.
I’m not sure I’d have invested (I knew a bit about blood and blood testing) but I might have.
D.A.
NYC
I actually heard two kookaburras laughing together when I was having a hit of cricket with my son this afternoon. They were sat on a nearby light tower and were perhaps amused at my attempts to bowl leg spin… For me though, the call of the magpie is still the quintessential sound of Australia.
As an aside, Australian birds really are incredible. I belong to a family of relatively eager bird watchers and we always joke about how thrilled we would be to spy any number of our local birds that we barely notice anymore in our day to day life… but if we saw them over seas our minds would be blown!
That’s easy – it’s “to increase our faith.” That’s the answer to virtually every perplexity and conundrum of the Christian religion. Why does God allow suffering? To increase our faith. Why are there some obvious contradictions in the Bible? To increase our faith. Why did an all-powerful Creator use evolution as His process? To increase our faith.
Just come up with some way a mental struggle must force you to perform an act of belief despite a good reason not to believe. That’s easy. And if faith is a virtue, it’s an apologetic which needs no apology.
Oh, I don’t know. You’ve got this huge party with lots of alcohol and a bunch of guys are standing outside a long-occupied bathroom murmuring impatiently? This doesn’t sound particularly suspicious to me.
I find Elizabeth Holmes fascinating and will probably watch the documentary.
But what I want to comment on here is this statement by Leitch:
“But what it does do, in a downright existential way, is examine what truth in fact is: how much of it is subjective…”
It seems that almost every day as I quickly browse through my feed I come across someone asserting that truth is subjective. This annoys me. Truth is not subjective. It is our understanding of truth that is subjective. That is a very different thing.
Truth is immensely complex and dynamic. We understand truth through the extremely simplified abstract models of conscious thought and language. There is a logical reason why those models can never be complete. The models don’t only exist as abstractions in the ether. They are in fact a very real part of ourselves. They change the way we think and act. So to model ourselves and the world completely, the model must include itself in the model. This sets up a recursion that can never fully resolve. At some point the recursion must stop and at that point thoughts and actions appear to arise as if by magic out of nothing. But it is not magic and not nothing. It is simply a part of ourselves that can never be modeled.
To say that truth is subjective is to say that truth is an abstraction of nothing. This makes no sense.
Love the fake picture of you with all the cats and cat-related items! Also, the photo of Andrzej and Hili is lovely. I wish even half the cats of the world had it that good.
I am far more familiar with Protestant Evangelicals in my neck of the woods than I am with pious Catholics. I have heard a few try to rationalize the tragic death of a child or of a young mother. And some do claim, as Sastra notes, that it is to “increase our faith.” But most are grounded in doctrinal convictions about a broken world, where death, suffering, and sin have all entered into Creation, with the faith that one day all will be restored. And while an understanding of the nature of that brokenness differs among the three major branches of Christianity, I am unaware of any pious Christian who would feel the need to rationalize the potentially fatal illness of a 71-year-old man, no matter who he is.
As Chetiya’s comment suggests, the claimed infallibility of the Pope is a concept widely misunderstood. I suspect atheists in the West have largely absorbed the Protestant caricatures and mockery of the matter. But even in the extremely rare cases in which a pope is said to have spoken ex cathedra, I am unaware of any intersection between that belief and either the medical facts and doctrinal assumptions about illness and death.
I can’t resist a political aside: It is endlessly fascinating that the “progressive” world routinely issues edicts from on high: one must say this, one cannot say that, this thing that nobody believed until yesterday is now deemed as true. And if we only follow the latest version of progressive doctrine, it will lead us to a glorious and virtuous future in which peace and justice reign. Don’t think. Don’t question. Just obey our commands, lest we cast you from our midst. They even have their own version of the sheep and the goats.
That this mindset has captured swaths of academia and the educated, secular West leads me to question the degree to which religion is the problem rather than simply a manifestation of deeper flaws in human beings. In many ways, I prefer those who leave judgment to God, gods, or fate rather than assume for themselves the role of global arbiter and savior–whether they be religious or not.
Umm. . . judgement about ethical issues should be made by God rather than people? I don’t think you mean that. I would rather have people make the rules than people who claim to have authority from God. Surely you prefer liberal secular ethics (and laws) than Islamist ethics.
I was (by odd coincidence) rather close to the Elizabeth Holmes debacle. I did not make or lose a dollar on her or her company. Conversely, I know many of her early investors. I consider her to be a ‘true believer’, but not a grifter. A great many things can be determined from a single drop of blood (DNA, antigens, etc.), other things can not (bulk blood properties). If she had limited herself, to what the machine could actually do, she would be very rich (as of today) and utterly obscure. Instead, she claimed too much… and the rest is history. I recommend the book about her “Bad Blood” by John Carreyrou. Obviously, I do not think she is innocent. I do favor letting her out. My reasons are basically sexist.
Motorcycle helmet law: when the law in Iowa ended in the 1970s, organs (for transplantation) quickly went up. Later, a series of well-known academic studies…. (Google helmet law donor organs).
Helmet laws: New Hampshire seems to take to heart “Live Free or Die”. That was my same observation when they recently stood out vs. surrounding states in some health stats – I can’t recall if it was COVID, flu, or something related.