Category: Hili Dialogue

Thursday: Hili dialogue

October 8, 2026 • 6:45 am

There will be a shortish version of Hili today as I’m not feeling that well (yes, the eye, which is ok but focusing makes me nauseated).

Welcome to Thursday, October 8, 2026 and National Pierogi Day. I eat a lot of pierogi in Poland, and here’s some blueberry dessert pierogi I had in a restaurant:

It’s also Alvin C. York Day, honoring the day in 1918 when York killed 25 enemy soldiers and captured 132, earning the Medal of Honor; International Lesbian Day; National Fluffernutter Day; World Octopus Day; and National Salmon Day (best smoked on a bagel with a schmear).

There is a Google Doodle today honoring World Space Week.  Click to see where it goes:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 8 Wikipedia page.

As I have mentioned several times before, this website seems moribund: comments are few, and the content doesn’t seem to appeal to potential readers. This is depressing, and it can’t continue at the present rate. I am not seeking reassurance here, as I write what I want. This is just a notice. Few people send in readers’ wildlife (it used to be a daily feature), and comments are waning. All the signs are that the website’s life is moving peacefully to its close.

Da Nooz:

*A column in the WaPo, “Is society growing stupider? The clues are simple and repeated,” is an extract of author James Marriott’s book, The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society (article archived here).  There are lots of data:

Once upon a time, the idea that the world was growing stupider was mostly confined to the realm of dyspeptic reactionary polemic. But nowadays, the idea is increasingly mainstream. The belief that smartphones are “rotting our brains” is a widely repeated cliché. Data seems to corroborate this feeling, too: Studies have shown declines in IQ over the past two decades, with the sharpest drops among age brackets that use their phones the most. Students themselves have reported since the 2010s that they have difficulty concentrating and remembering. One study found that even having a phone turned off on a table nearby may be enough to impair a student’s academic performance.

But perhaps another reason that people feel this way is that cultural output — not just short-form videos or Instagram posts but films, television, music and books — is becoming simplified, too. The smartphone’s constant distraction and hostility to complex thought is reshaping almost every aspect of culture. Entertainment and the arts are undergoing what might be termed a Great Simplification.

Take the Netflix film “Irish Wish,” which ranked No. 1 on the streaming platform following its release in 2024. The film stars Lindsay Lohan as an American book editor named Maddie, who travels to Ireland dreaming of marriage to a hunky best-selling author (a genre of person more common in films than in life). As writer Will Tavlin observed, as you watch, you may notice that the characters are explaining what is going on, as if you are too slow to understand. In one scene, Maddie says to her lover, “We spent a day together. I admit it was a beautiful day, filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” He replies, “Fine. That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over, I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”

In a world of constant distraction, scriptwriters can no longer rely on audiences to pay attention. Executives at Netflix have reportedly demanded simpler scripts in which characters repeatedly announce what they are doing, so that scrolling viewers can keep track of what is going on.

According to actor Matt Damon, filmmakers are told: “It wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue, because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” The result is the inverse of the traditional creative writing advice “show, don’t tell.” It is hard to sustain interiority or nuance in a film in which every action must be clearly signposted. Not every Netflix film needs to be a masterpiece of insinuation and subtext, and good, challenging films are still being made — but nonetheless, complexity seems to be rapidly draining out of culture.

. . .The same relentless pressures toward simplification are at work in almost every creative industry. A 2024 statistical analysis of more than 350,000 songs between 1970 and 2020 found that lyrics are becoming simpler, more repetitive and less rich in their vocabulary. Another study suggests that melodies are becoming less complex, too.

. . . Equally striking is what is happening in the publishing industry. Books are getting simpler and easier to read. An Economist analysis of New York Times best-selling books from the 1930s to the 2020s found that “sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.” Long sentences are not easy to grapple with in an age when, according to one estimate, the average American checks his or her smartphone 186 times per day. The audiences for serious nonfiction and literary fiction have declined steeply in recent decades. Sales of books about economics, current affairs and politics have fallen particularly sharply. [JAC: If the average American is awake 17 hours, then the average rate of phone-checking is 11 times an hour, or about once every 5.5 minutes!]

By contrast, best-selling books of the 1960s included Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” Saul Bellow’s “Herzog”and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard.” In 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling’s collection of essays “The Liberal Imagination” was a bestseller in the United States, with more than 100,000 copies sold.

It is not easy to imagine such books commanding mainstream audiences today.

. . .Getting to grips with a new book, film or song requires a special and sometimes painful effort of concentration.

I think this attention may partly explain why studios opt for remakes, franchises and “extended universes.” Before the turn of the millennium, only about 25 percent of top-grossing films were spin-offs or sequels; by the 2020s the figure had risen to 75 percent.

. . . Not everything can be said simply, and understanding requires sustained concentration from readers, viewers or listeners. If they are distracted and unfocused, culture risks being transformed into a smartphone wasteland.

The statistics speak for themselves. (Don’t forget the “reading time” put before many printed articles so you can see if they are too long to read!) The good news is that I can read or watch whatever I want, and, fortunately, good books and good movies are still available.

*Matthew sent this video about the sentencing of a military soldier to death by firing squad—the first such sentence since World War II. Nidal Hasan killed 13 people and injured 32 others in a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009, and has been on death row ever since.  The sentence, signed by Donald Trump, is to be carried out on December 1.  While firing squad is probably among the most humane methods of execution, I oppose it, as does Matthew, who labeled his email, “Barbarians.”  He’s right.  Life without parole is sufficient.

*The WSJ reports that AI has just solved hundreds of previously intractable mathematical puzzles.

Since you last thought about math, the people who think about math every day have been freaking out.

A month ago, when OpenAI announced that one of its powerful internal models had cracked a notoriously difficult Millennium Prize Problem, it looked like the most spectacular demonstration yet of AI’s progress in mathematics.

Then mathematicians revolted.

The backlash from the math world coincided with a global reckoning about Silicon Valley labs racing to build technology that could spiral beyond their control. On the same day that OpenAI published its landmark proof, a researcher quit Anthropic over safety concerns. Within hours, the AI breakthrough was overshadowed by fears that AI could destroy humanity.

Meanwhile, mathematicians were dealing with existential questions of their own.

But as they publicly debated the future of their ancient field, OpenAI’s model kept churning out new proofs behind closed doors. This left the company with a problem for a bunch of humans to solve: what to do with all that AI-generated math.

On Tuesday night, OpenAI published hundreds of proofs for mathematicians to wrap their minds around.

An unprecedented number of answers that had eluded mathematicians for decades arrived in a single night. The deluge included AI solutions to more than 300 problems across number theory, algebraic geometry and other fields with names that could give anyone haunted by high-school math a migraine. Among the major findings in a collection of 722 papers were advances related to three of the five remaining Millennium Prize Problems, including the Riemann hypothesis.

“If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked,” Alex Kontorovich, a Rutgers University distinguished math professor, wrote on X about the “quasi-Riemann hypothesis” proof.

The understated rollout of such monumental results marked a shift in OpenAI’s approach to publishing scientific discoveries, part of an effort to win back mathematicians who have become allergic to AI hype in recent months. On late Tuesday and early Wednesday, many of them reported feeling a sense of awe.

As stunned math experts scrolled through the results and began to absorb them, even a researcher inside Anthropic called the release “obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history.”

. . . Instead of dripping out findings one by one, OpenAI dropped them all at once. The company released 372 groups of results and said the model attempted roughly 4,000 problems in total. It also provided summaries of the model’s “chain of thought” and estimated the average result required only a fraction of the computing power that went into the Millennium Prize triumph.

Mathematicians are naturally flummoxed by this, as AI is doing what they can’t do. Further, they can’t kvetch that AI is stealing their results, because if it’s using published work to get a head start, well, that’s what regular mathematicians have always done when solving hard problems. Perhaps they’re beefing because this AI work threatens to put a lot of them out of business.

*Here are adjacent articles in yesterday’s (Oct. 7) New York Times.  This is a pathetic attempt to be objective in their reporting.  I’d blame those bodies on Hamas. The NYT has become hopelessly slanted in its coverage of Israel, and not in favor of Isael.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej engage in badinage:

Hili: I’m walking into the future, leaving the present behind.
Andrzej: At my age, I prefer to do that sitting down.

In Polish:

Hili: Idę ku przyszłości i zostawiam za sobą teraźniejszość.
Ja: Jestem już bardzo stary i robię to na siedząco.

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

From Stacy:

From Clean, Funny, & Cute Animal Memes:

From CinEmma:

From Masih: “Aimless strolling” is now verboten in Iran:

*Here’s the odious NYC Mayor pretending to honor dead Jews when in fact he accuses Israel of occupation, apartheid, and genocide, while Hamas gets accused of none of these, but is the subject of 3/4 of the Mayor’s tweet.  I detest this man and still can’t believe that New Yorkers—including many Jews—voted for him. But just wait until they get their subsidized grocery stores and free daycare!

From Steve Stewart-Williams via Luana; the “gender equality paradox for STEM.  Fewer women go into STEM fields in nations that have greater equality between men and women. This holds for other counterintuitive indices of “accomplishment”.

From Jay, a joke from The Babylon Bee:

From Malcolm; a great collection of hidden moggies:

Two from my feed:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Doctor Cobb, urging people to read this paper about Rosalind Franklin and”photographs 49 and 51″, and giving his take on the whole issue:

A lot of excitement on here about the article in Science summarising the discoveries of @alistairsponsel.bsky.social and Brian Sutton, just published in the Journal of the History of Biology. Some people have asked, so here is what I think they show, and what are the implications:

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-10-06T13:23:45.341Z

Today’s music is from a group that readers either have forgotten or are too young to know about: the Kingston Trio (all the members of the original group have expired). This is one of the old folk songs they rearranged: “The Wagoner’s Lad,” first recorded in the 1920s. It’s a sad song about young lovers forced to separate because the lad drives wagons. The first verse is an paean to first-wave feminism.

From the link just preceding:

One of the things that I have always loved about folk music is its capacity to surprise. You can be humming along through all the wonderful chanteys and cowboy songs and ballads and love songs…and then stumble unexpectedly on the surpassingly beautiful (like “Shenandoah” or “The Mountains of Mourne”) or the darkly tragic (like “The Sloop John B”) – or amazingly modern sentiments in a very old song, like “The Wagoner’s Lad.”

The very first verse of the song, which is known in a host of variants including “My Horses Ain’t Hungry” (recorded famously by Peter, Paul and Mary as “Pretty Mary”) and “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” and which dates to the early nineteenth or even late eighteenth century, tells us that we are not in the standard folk universe in this song, where women are usually the objects of either romantic desire or borderline misogynistic humor or scorn. Instead, “Wagoner’s Lad” opens with a plaint as old as time, one that remains distressingly true for a really unthinkable percentage of the world’s women today – in the Middle East, in most of South Asia and much of East Asia, and in large parts of Africa. Perhaps half of the women in the world today do not choose their husbands freely, making that opening verse perpetually relevant:

The link to the song’s name will take you to several recorded versions, including ones by Joan Baez, Sarah McQuaid,  John Denver, and one by Burt Jansch and John Renbourn, which I finally found on YouTube.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

October 7, 2026 • 6:45 am

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 is also, of course, the third anniversary of the genocidal attack on southern Israel by Palestinian terrorists, killing at least 1,195 people, including 828 civilians. You can expect widespread celebration by the haters today. This Times of Israel article gives the gist (click to read):

From the article:

As Israeli and Jewish communities around the world mark the third anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion and massacre in southern Israel, 262 pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests and events have been identified in 37 countries, the Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry said.

The events are planned through October 14, with 121 scheduled for October 10-11, the ministry said, citing data from its J-SOC (National Center for Combating Antisemitism). On October 7 itself, 75 demonstrations are planned worldwide.

. . .The United States has the largest number of planned events, with 45, followed by Spain with 40, the ministry said. Australia expects to see 21 protests, the UK 19, and Italy 16. Germany and Canada each will have 14, while France will have 10, and the Netherlands eight.

Of the 262 events, 21 have been classified as high-risk and 66 as medium-risk.

Here’s one from Seattle that lauds the terrorists:

And just to remember what these morons are celebrating, here’s one of the Jewish victims from October 7. Be sure to read the whole message from Libi:

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:

While the causes of the chaos may appear disparate, they can be traced to a common root: France’s two-decade-long struggle to fund its state, now exacerbated by high borrowing costs, surging fuel prices and political uncertainty, with jockeying underway to replace President Emmanuel Macron next spring.

French public finances, already fragile, continue to deteriorate, fanning fears in financial markets that France could be the next European country to tumble into a full-blown financial crisis. The fiscal jitters were amplified by recent polls that show the far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, would beat all her rivals in presidential elections that will be held next spring.

On Tuesday, teachers and other public workers plan rallies against proposed wage freezes as the government labors to pass a budget. They will join thousands of students who have blockaded schools to protest underfunding that has led to crumbling facilities and a shortage of teachers.

As far as I can determine, immigration has no direct connection with this save that the school protests began in areas that were relatively poor and had a high proportion (about 30% of immigrants.

*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:

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:

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

From Malcolm. Rats driving cars!

This really is complete bollocks!

One from my feed: our beloved DSA:

One I reposted form The Auschwitz Memorial:

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.

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

October 6, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day, Tuesday, October 6, 2026, and National Noodle Day. Here’s a bowl of hearty beef noodle soup that I had in Hong Kong ten years ago. It’s a famous dish there, and I went to a place that specialized in it:

It’s also Garlic Lovers Day, National Badger Day, and National Orange Wine Day,

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 6 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Supreme Court’s new term began yesterday, and it’s expected to adjudicate about 60 cases in this session. The NYT morning newsletter describes three important ones:

My colleagues Ann E. Marimow and Abbie VanSickle have a useful preview of the cases the justices will hear — and what’s at stake in them. Here are three:

Suncor v. Boulder

First up, with arguments today, is a major environmental case about whether state law can be used to hold companies liable for the costs of climate change. It pits the city and county of Boulder, Colo., against Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil, companies those government entities say concealed the risks of climate change.

If the justices agree, the companies would have to reimburse Boulder for damages from wildfires, floods and other extreme weather. If they don’t, the ruling would have wide impact — dozens of other cities, counties, states and tribal governments around the country have filed similar suits seeking billions of dollars from energy companies.

St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy

In November, the court will hear a case brought by the Archdiocese of Denver that challenges Colorado rules requiring preschools that receive public funding to accept the children of gay and transgender parents.

The archdiocese and two Catholic schools argue that doing so would be at odds with church teachings — but that excluding its schools from public funding would violate the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.

Lower courts have upheld the Colorado law on the grounds that the state could require participating schools to abide by its anti-discrimination rules, so long as the requirements are applied to all schools and without regard to religion. And so here we are.

Viramontes v. Cook County

This one’s a blockbuster dealing with the question of whether state and local laws banning semiautomatic rifles violate the Constitution, a subject that the court has avoided for years.

The case, slated for oral argument on Dec. 2, concerns Illinois and Connecticut, but the decision could seal the fate of similar laws around the country aimed at restricting the ownership of military-style rifles, such as the AR-15.

It’s a deeply polarizing subject. AR-15-style rifles are among the most popular long guns in the United States. People hunt with them, shoot them for sport, derive comfort from having one in the name of personal safety. They’ve also been used in mass shootings, including in both the Sandy Hook and Uvalde elementary school massacres.

Those who support the bans point to those catastrophes, and characterize the rifles as unusually dangerous. They argue that their restriction is an important use of governmental power to ensure the safety of the public.

Opponents say such bans violate citizens’ right to bear arms. They cite a judicial precedent of “common use” to argue that a gun that tens of millions of Americans use lawfully cannot be banned anyway.

Read more about the Supreme Court’s new term here.

My quick take on these three cases in order: 1. seems unworkable, 2. schools getting publis funding should accept those children, and 3. military-style rifles should be restricted. If not, how can they restrict automatic weapons, grenade launchers, or tanks? You could argue that all of those are permissible under the Second Amendment since they might be useful in a “well regulated militia”.

*The U.S. has removed all B-1 bombers from a UK RAF base in light of a suspect terrorist plot involving the planes. (The B-1 is a long-distance, high-speed bomber, and was used in U.S. attacks on Iran.

The U.S. removed all its B-1 bombers from the U.K.’s RAF Fairford air base, a decision made because of security concerns over suspected plots to attack the facility, American officials said Sunday.

The decision represents a shift for the U.S., which has used the military base northwest of London as a hub for launching bomber strikes in Iran. Until their recent departure, a dozen B-1s had been stationed at the base.

“While operational security precluded us from confirming the movement of our assets and forces in real-time, we can acknowledge now that all U.S. bombers that were deployed to RAF Fairford have redeployed to their home stations in the United States,” the Pentagon said in a statement, adding that the U.S. bombers remain ready to carry out attacks from the U.S. The U.K. Ministry of Defense declined to comment.

The decision follows the arrest of six suspects in connection with a suspected attack on the base that U.S. and British officials said was foiled last Sunday. U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said there were “strong indications” that Iran played a role in the incident, which was shrouded in mystery after the U.K. released the suspects on bail but continued to investigate the situation.

U.S. officials were aware of an Iran-linked plot to attack the bomber aircraft and kill personnel at the base, The Wall Street Journal has reported. A branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had recruited U.K. nationals to carry out the plot, which involved multiple steps including a diversion in the neighborhood nearby, according to a senior U.S. official.

In the U.K., authorities are still trying to piece together what happened, and some U.K. officials question the level of sophistication of the planned attack.

And here’s what the WSJ says in the link above about the plan, which in fact does seem to have involved attacks on the bombers:

U.S. officials were aware of an Iran-linked plot to attack the bomber aircraft and kill personnel at the base, according to an official familiar with the intelligence. A branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had recruited U.K. nationals to carry out the plot, which involved multiple steps including a diversion in the neighborhood nearby, an official said.

I’m glad the plot was foiled, though information has been notably slow in coming. Why were the suspects released if they were planning acts of terrorism?

*To its shame, the Green Party of the UK has adopted a motion that Zionism is racism, that Israel is committing genocide, and, worst of all, there should be a “one-state” solution, which of course means the elimination of Israel. By Party protocol, these now become official positions of the Green Party. (Bolding is mine):

Britain’s Green Party voted on Sunday to class Zionism as a form of racism, drawing criticism from British Jews and from the Israeli government which said it now viewed the party as “a body that gives legitimacy to terrorism.”

The party – which received 6% of the vote in national elections in 2024 – said it regarded Zionism as “an ethnonationalist political project” and repeated its call for Britain’s Labour government to end all arms trade with Israel.

“The motion also restates the Green Party’s backing for the right to self-determination and calls for the establishment of a single democratic state throughout historic Palestine,” the party said in a statement.

The definition of Zionism – which inspired the foundation of the modern state of Israel in the 20th century – and what it implies for the rights of non-Jews in Israel and neighbouring territory, is contentious. Jewish groups sometimes define it as a right to Jewish self-determination.

The Green Party motion passed by a majority of 1,022 to 813 despite opposition from many senior figures. Party leader Zack Polanski, who is seeking election to Parliament on Thursday in former Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s now-vacant London constituency, did not vote.

The result was condemned by British Jewish groups.

“The Green Party has made antisemitism party policy and become a racist party,” the Movement for Progressive Judaism said, adding that the support of some Jews for the motion did not mean it would not be used to discriminate against others.

. . .Mothin Ali, deputy leader of the Green Party and a supporter of the motion, told Sky News on Saturday that the heavy Palestinian death toll in Israel’s conflict with Hamas – which followed the Palestinian militant group’s deadly 2023 attack on an Israeli music festival – was the key context for the vote.

“The motion defines Zionism quite clearly. It defines it as an ethnonationalist movement. It defines it as ethnic cleansing. It defines it as genocide,” Ali said.

This is all complete lunacy, especially calling for the effective elimination of Israel via a one-state solution. We’ll see how many UK politicians or public figures will condemn this vote. According to the Guardian, four of the five Green Party members of Parliament oppose this policy. If you’re a Green, defend the policy, and its implicit call for the elimination of Israel, in the comments. If you can’t, you shouldn’t be a Green.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal reveals that the target of the FlyDubai hijacker was not just the passengers on the plane, but the Tel Aviv airport.

It’s Monday, October 5, and a few days ago, we believed that without the heroism of the passengers on Flight 1073, the almost 180 people aboard, 27 of them children, would have been killed. Now we know that without the bravery of Capt. Smit Machchhar, Yaniv Hayun, Tzvika Mans and Assaf Rajuan, we would be facing a catastrophe likely worse than October 7.

Under interrogation, Hamam al-Hammami, the Omani co-pilot, confessed that after killing the pilot his plan was to fly a normal landing approach and, in the final seconds, when interception was no longer possible, crash the plane into Ben Gurion Airport. That is why, rather than striking at the outset, he attacked the captain only once the plane was over Jordan.

The flight was due to land around 9:30 a.m., at the height of Sukkot, when traffic through the airport peaks. Tens of thousands of travelers would likely have been in the terminal when it arrived, and the death toll could easily have run into the thousands. Under interrogation, al-Hammami admitted that on previous trips to Israel he had “gathered information,” perhaps on where a crash would claim the most lives.

Had he managed to crash the plane into the Saudi desert, as we originally believed was his intention, the aftermath would have been catastrophic. The day would have gone down as the second-deadliest terror attack in Israel’s history, with nearly five times the death toll of the third. The central artery of the Abraham Accords, the 30-flight-a-day corridor, would have been severed, and the steadily warming relations between the Emirates and Israel would have frozen.

Had his original plan succeeded, it would have been, by a wide margin, the worst attack in Israel’s history, and it would have closed far more than one flight corridor. Even if the physical damage at Ben Gurion could be quickly repaired, no airline would risk flying to Israel. The country would face an aviation isolation worse than anything it experienced even at the peak after October 7.

. . . The most obvious and striking parallel is that Israel almost had its own 9/11, nearly exactly 25 years after the first. Not in the loose, figurative sense in which the phrase is so often used, but literally: a plane turned into a weapon, with a death toll that may have been comparable to that disaster, and far greater relative to Israel’s population. And the effect would have been even more disastrous. The World Trade Center was a symbolic target, while Ben Gurion is the heart of Israel’s connection to the outside world. It would have done more to isolate Israel from the world than any single Hamas attack.

I guess al-Hammami will be tried in the UAE and I hope he gets a stiff sentence. Israel has requested extradition because of the destination, but the UAE refused to send the suspect to Israel. The UAE does have strict laws against terrorism, though, and given that he’s likely to be convicted, his sentence wouldn’t be light.

*Convicted murderer Christa Pike remains comatose and on a ventilator after two botched attempts to execute her by lethal injection of pentobarbital.

Christa Pike has remained unconscious and on a ventilator at a hospital in the four days since her failed execution in Tennessee, and her prognosis might not be known for days more, one of her lawyers said Sunday.

Little has been released about Pike’s condition since Wednesday night’s execution attempt. She has since remained hospitalized under guard as doctors try to get the massive dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital out of her system.

When asked whether she ever regained consciousness after the execution attempt, Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell, Pike’s lawyer, said on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “Not that I am aware of.”

Pike, now 50, was 18 when she and her boyfriend tortured and killed a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in a jealous rage in 1995. She became one of the youngest women to be sent to death row.

Tennessee prison officials gave Pike two doses of the lethal injection drug on Wednesday night. The pentobarbital didn’t kill her, but her lawyers said her arms were burned and blistered from the caustic drugs.

Pike gave someone her medical power of attorney and that person is protecting her privacy, Ferrell said.

This was the second time this year Tennessee has not been able to execute a prisoner who was seemingly moments away from death. In May, Tennessee stopped the execution of Tony Carruthers after staff placed an IV into his right arm but couldn’t get a secondary IV line.

. . .It is unclear what will happen in her death penalty case. Pike’s lawyers have asked the governor to commute her punishment to a life sentence.

“If she recovers, she may not fully recover. And there may be issues about her competence,” Ferrell said.

The governor has suspended all executions, but only for the rest of the year.  And if Pike remains comatose, the execution would turn out to be a life sentence under intubation, unless her medical guardian decides to pull the tube. The sick part of all this is that if she manages to revive, the state may well decide to kill her anyway. That is in fact what happened in the case of Robert Breechen in Oklahoma in 1995. Breechen tried to kill himself with an overdose of sedatives shortly before his scheduled execution.  They rushed him to the hospital, revived him, and then executed him, only two hours behind schedule.  I vehemently oppose state-sanctioned executions on several grounds, but if they are going to kill somebody, they should use a tried and true method, like the firing squad or guillotine. But that’s too gory for the government!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,

Hili: Don’t make me laugh now.
Andrzej: Why?
Hili: Because I’m trying to look really serious.

In Polish:

Hili: Nie rozśmieszaj mnie teraz.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Bo próbuję wyglądać bardzo poważnie.

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

From Now That’s Wild:

Screenshot

From CinEmma:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Masih; a heartbreaking execution of an Iranian protestor. Just before he was to be hanged, he had a heart attack.  They put him back in a cell, and then he got married over the phone.  They then hanged him the day after his wedding:

From Jeff Maurer; another person went to Heaven and came back, assuring us that Jesus was a man and about 6 feet tall:

From Malcolm. Dogs like bread?

Two from my feed. First, a rejection from Nature of work that later won the Nobel Prize (read about it here):

Drama kitteh:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And the last from Dr. Cobb: an amphipod parasite that represents a new branch of animals.

We have a new branch in the family tree of animals: Atreyea- a previously unrecognized lineage among the closest unicell relatives of animals.Led by @konsmitsi.bsky.social & @freejakoba.bsky.social together with a fantastic team of collaborators.🔗 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers….#protistsOnSky

— Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo (@multicellgenome.bsky.social) 2026-09-28T11:41:15.759Z

Today’s song was chosen by my friend Tim, who knows his soul songs.  This Motown number, “Since I Lost My Baby,” is performed by the Temptations but was written by Smokey Robinson and Peter Moore. Tim likes it because, he says, it shows what life is like: what a spurned lover would really feel—even though the bosses are paying. It came out in 1965, and here’s a bit from Wikipedia:

Longing and melancholy, “Since I Lost My Baby” tells a story about the pain of losing a lover. Temptations lead singer David Ruffin, portrays the song’s narrator, bass singer Melvin Franklin is also heard out front after each of Ruffin’s first two lines on the first verse. It was Ruffin’s third straight lead on a Temptations single.

Cash Box described it as a “tender, slow-shufflin’ pop-r&b tearjerker about a lad who has been singing the blues since his romance went kaput.”

Monday: Hili dialogue

October 5, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to another work week, with classes in full swing at the University of Chicago: it’s Monday, October 5, 2026, and Global James Bond Day, celebrating the “Bond franchise and is held on the anniversary of the date on which the first Bond film, Dr. No, premiered in London in 1962.” Ursula Andress was the love interest, and here’s a trailer (Ursula shows up at 2:01). I still think Sean Connery was the best Bond ever.

It’s also Do Something Nice Day, National Apple Betty Day, Rocky Mountain Oyster Day (yes, testicles), World Teachers’ Day, and World Architecture Day. Here’s a lovely work of architecture, The Big Duck on Long Island. I’ve been inside! It used to sell ducks and duck eggs, but now it sells souveniers:

Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 5 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*This has got to be illegal: Trump has used taxpayer money (mine!) to make ads touting his own Prsidency. (the NYT article is based on 12 anonymous sources within the administration):

President Trump personally instructed his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads praising him and his presidency, setting in motion a $20 million contract that used funds from the Department of Homeland Security, according to people familiar with the matter.

The ads have run across cable and network television — on Fox News, CNN and MS Now, with football games on Fox and with national newscasts on CBS, ABC and NBC, including “Meet the Press,” which Mr. Trump is known to watch.

Mr. Trump was eager to see the laudatory ads on the air and told Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to come up with the money from within the government, the people said. Mark Paoletta, the budget office’s counsel, and Will Scharf, the White House counsel, both said it would be legal to use D.H.S. funds. The president and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, both spoke with Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, about the ads.

The taxpayer-funded ads have been criticized by Democrats and even some Republicans as a possible violation of federal laws against using taxpayer dollars for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” And they come as the president is also directing spending from his super PAC — MAGA Inc., which entered the fall with $400 million — for which he has been raising money since he won re-election in 2024.

It was not clear why taxpayer funds, and not money from the super PAC, were used for the spots.

The White House has called the ads public service announcements and said they are appropriate because there is no “call to action” to vote for any candidate. Some of his aides also noted that Mr. Trump is not running for office now, in an attempt to blunt criticism of the ads as violating federal laws about the use of public money.

When pressed by a reporter on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said: “If somebody said that that’s wrong, I’ll gladly pay the money.”

“But these are ads for the country,” he added. “You have to understand. I’m not promoting a candidate. I’m not promoting myself because I’m not running for office. I’m promoting the country.”

I saw the second one the other day and about fell off my seat when I read “Paid for by the U.S. Government” at the end. These are the first two released:

Somebody should sue; these are clearly campaign-related ads and therefore a violation of the law. I won’t have my dosh supporting Trump’s narcissism.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal calls the upcoming week “The most dangerous week of 2026. ” What he means is that Iran has to figure out what to do, if anything, between the Israeli elections on October 27 and the U.S. midterms on November 3. Either action or inaction on Iran’s part will, says Segal, have big consequences.

It’s Sunday, October 4, and if the Islamic Republic could vote, whom would it choose: Benjamin Netanyahu or Donald Trump? It sounds like an abstract problem, but the choice facing Tehran is the same one Citizen Change posed to American voters in 2004: “Vote or Die.”

With the U.S. blockade plunging Iran into an ever-deepening economic crisis, Tehran must break the status quo. The question is when. Escalating before the Israeli election and the midterms would send the markets into an inconvenient panic and Israeli jets to Tehran. Any conversation outside of security would be quickly stifled, burying some of Netanyahu’s other indiscretions while bringing gas prices and Trump’s failures to the front of American voters’ minds on November 3. A war before October 27 is a vote for Bibi and against Trump.

Tehran, reluctant to boost Netanyahu’s security credentials, could wait until both elections are over, but that is casting a vote for Trump.

The conduct of the war in the near term won’t depend on what happens during the midterms, even if Democrats win both houses of Congress, for Trump, as Commander-in-Chief, still gets to dictate the conduct of the war. And if by “escalation” Segal means “military escalation,” Iran doesn’t stand a chance.

. . . Observant readers will notice that there is a gap between the two trips to the ballot box. Tehran has a single week, between October 27 and November 3, in which it can launch a war without helping either candidate.

There is also the risk that, unlike winter, election season makes war more likely. Trump is currently holding back to give Republicans a chance of holding the Senate, telling reporters the war will be brought to a conclusion “right after the midterms.” While I struggle to imagine a fate worse than the hell on earth Trump has already threatened to unleash multiple times, if Iran extinguishes whatever electoral hopes are constraining the president, the response is unlikely to be the controlled escalation Tehran may be hoping for.

Despite declaring at the United Nations that “the resistance of the Iranian people will only increase in the face of sanctions,” President Masoud Pezeshkian reportedly approached Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, with an Iranian compromise the same day. Like an Iranian moderate, an Iranian compromise exists mainly by comparison.

That compromise didn’t fly, and I still don’t think there will be one unless Iran meets, at least on paper, Trump’s demand that it cease production that could lead to nuclear weapons.  The ending:

The truth is Iran has a larger problem than timing: its vote doesn’t matter. Trump still has months before a Democratic-controlled Congress could begin impeachment proceedings, and even while trapped in endless inquiries, he still holds the power over the military and foreign policy. Meanwhile, whoever becomes the next Israeli prime minister, in the increasingly unlikely event the election produces a definitive outcome at all, Jerusalem is not going to turn pro-Tehran. No matter who they vote for, nothing will change in time for Iran to survive.

I’ve stopped trying to predict what’s going to happen in the Middle East. The Israeli elections are uncertain and Trump is unpredictable. But I think it would be disastrous to simply pull our troops out and declare victory. Disastrous for us and disastrous for the good people of Iran.

*It’s pretty clear now that the Omani co-pilot who tried to hijack the FlyDubai flight to Israel was committing an act of terrorism, and didn’t care if he died in the act.

Hamam al-Hammami, identified by people familiar with the matter as the co-pilot on FlyDubai Flight 1073, posted a paean to flying in a now-deleted social-media post from June 2022 written in Arabic.

“What makes aviation and flight training so beautiful is that it’s anything but routine,” the post said. “There are moments you never forget—like your very first solo flight, or your first time landing an aircraft with passengers on board.”

Investigators are now trying to understand why the Omani national took a radical turn and ended up repeatedly slashing his captain with an onboard ax before trying to crash an airliner with more than 170 people aboard, the people familiar with the investigation said.

They also want to know how he got hired by FlyDubai, those people said. His first aviation employer, state-owned Oman Air, banned him from flying after authorities became aware of his interest in browsing extremist websites, people briefed on his background said. Hammami was sent through a deradicalization program and given a desk job, but later found his way to a new job in the United Arab Emirates, they said.

Oman received no requests for information from other countries to vet him for employment, the people said. The U.A.E. and FlyDubai declined to comment while the investigation is ongoing.

The U.A.E.’s attorney general said Saturday morning that the co-pilot on Flight 1073 tried to carry out a terrorist act, echoing a conclusion drawn earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and another Emirati official.

An Emirati security team brought Hammami back to the U.A.E. on Thursday morning. He is currently undergoing questioning after having been interviewed earlier in the week in Saudi Arabia, where the flight he was co-piloting made an emergency landing Wednesday after the incident.

A Saudi official briefed on the interrogation said Hammami acknowledged that he wanted to intentionally crash the plane and that he wasn’t afraid of death.

What is more surprising that this is terrorism is why FlyDubai hired the copilot without vetting him.  I wouldn’t be surprised (and would be pleased) if FlyDubai revenues dropped sharply after all this.  I suspect Israelis aren’t going to fly on that airline simply because the company screwed up big time, and in a way that endanger Israeli lives.

*The Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle is treading perilous ground in her new piece, “Cornell raises an uncomfortable question about consent” (article archived here). We all know about the alleged Cornell gang rape, and the legal machinations around it have been convoluted, with New York governor Kathy Hochul replacing the local D.A., whom Hochul doesn’t trust, with state attorney general Letitia James. And yet many people, despite the “presumed innocent” stipulation of justice, have already convicted the perps in their minds. McArdle doesn’t think the case is so cut and dried.

There is no question that something terrible happened at a Cornell University fraternity in 2024. The question is what. Was it a brutal gang rape? Or was it something messier and more complicated, a sexual encounter that was unwise but nonetheless consensual?

What facts we have are not enough to distinguish between the two possibilities.

. . .What we cannot ascertain — and may never be able to — is whether she was too intoxicated to be able to consent. So we are now fighting over this as we have fought over so many accusations over the last few decades — the Duke University rape hoax, the allegations that Christine Blasey Ford made against Brett M. Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and the endless horrors unearthed by #MeToo. But why? Why is it so hard to agree on something that seems, to both sides, as though it ought to be obvious?

One answer is that sex between people who know each other is hard to adjudicate from outside, especially when one or both parties have been drinking or using drugs, thereby lowering their inhibitions, impairing their judgment and blurring their memories. Another is that different people can genuinely view an encounter differently, especially in hindsight, after regret has set in.

But I’d argue the reason these fights are so fraught is mostly that we are trying to believe too many contradictory things.

We want sex to be simple and sexual assault to be simply unthinkable. We want there to be bright lines that obviously shouldn’t be crossed so we can shout “J’accuse” at anyone who does.

But we want to proclaim that men and women are fundamentally the same, aside from socialization. We want to declare that anything goes, as long as both parties have consented. And then we want to set 18-year-olds free to live out this liberation theology.

The result is predictably disastrous. We demand that young people with poor judgment respect boundaries, and then we refuse to establish any.

I know the retort that will spring to many readers’ minds: Consent is a clear boundary. It is certainly a boundary, and sometimes it is clear. If you force yourself on someone who is screaming and pushing you away or who is trembling on the edge of unconsciousness, that person must be left alone. If you do not, we can and should put you in jail.

. . . When two people who are both extremely drunk have sex — as I believe may sometimes happen — did they rape each other? Or was the woman obviously the victim?

The author will get demonized simply by asking these questions, as guilt is often judged these days by ideology rather than by facts that dispel any “reasonable doubt”.  Since most rape accusations are accurate, that puts the weight on “guilty,” but there are seven men involved, and their stories conflict.  The last question is a good one for those who say there are no differences between men and women, when clearly men are stronger. Once again, as in the Lindsay Clancy case, I’m glad I’m not on the jury (there certainly will be one).

*The NYT identifies the two loudest bird species on the planet, saying in the subtitle, “A new study has identified two species of Brazilian birds, the bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema, as the loudest in nature.” I say, “BUSHWAH!”

If you look at the paper in Evolution, they measured the amplitude of song in only 123 bird species from two places:

We made recordings between December 2018 and January 2025 in the United States (Commonwealth of Massachusetts) and Brazil (states of São Paulo, Mato Grosso do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, Roraima, and Amazonas).

Now the paper itself doesn’t say that the birds are the world’s loudest; it’s the NYT author Taylor Mitchell Brown who says that.  And since they haven’t measured the other 11,000 species of birds, the claim has no weight. Sure, we know lots of birds that are quieter, but the proclamation will not stand until the world is scoured for louder birds.

An excerpt from the article:

Deep in the Serra do Mar mountains of Brazil, a curious call echoes from high in the jungle canopy. The sound is practically deafening, a loud metallic pang that cuts through the forest’s thick foliage.

The bare-throated bellbird, which produces such calls to attract female mates, is no larger than a dove. And yet his song is louder than a jackhammer or a chain saw. It’s louder than an elephant’s trumpet.

It is, according a new scientific study, one of the loudest birdsongs ever recorded.

“They can even exceed elephants and lions and wolves and bison,” said João Menezes, an evolutionary biologist and lead author of the study, recently published in the journal Evolution.

Joining the bellbird at the top of the volume charts, the researchers found, is another Brazilian species: the red-legged seriema.

The two birds now join a previously identified bellbird species as the loudest avians known to science.

The study also uncovered a few of the anatomical traits that allow these birds to belt such powerful songs, answering many of the questions underlying the mysteries of birdsong.

. . .Bellbirds have a distinct metallic chirp, while seriemas sing elaborate, melancholic songs that have been the subject of poetry. Both birds produced tunes that registered between 121 and 122 decibels

“The bellbirds are really super interesting,” Dr. Podos said, “because not only are they that loud, but they make those loud sounds with that small body size.”

Birds are capable of singing with such volume in part because they have a uniquely evolved organ called a syrinx, which takes air from the lungs and projects it through the long tube of the trachea.

Yes, “loudest known to science” may be accurate because science hasn’t measured the call volume of more than 1% of all birds.  It sounds as if they are looking for adaptive explanations, and there may well be some. But it’s early days, and I’m betting there are louder birds to be found.  In the meantimes, here are two videos showing the calling species:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, neither Andrzej nor Hili can turn off their minds:

Hili: Sometimes I just can’t stop thinking.
Andrzej: I have a feeling I know what you mean.

In Polish:

Hili: Czasami nie mogę przestać myśleć.
Ja: Mam wrażenie, że wiem, co chcesz powiedzieć.

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

From Kitty Litterposting:

From Stephen:

From Stacy:

From Masih: an Iranian protestor whose “heart gave out at the gallows” was. revived and now is due for execution again:

From Maarten Boudry via Luana; why Europe needs a First Amendment:

From Malcolm. I’m very glad this cat survived, with only a few bristles erected. Amazing!

The Number Ten Cat is clearly a fan of Labour:

Two from my feed:

What a great idea! And Mama Owl was elated (sound up):

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Dr. Cobb. What say you?

GOAT OR BIRD????

— Faine Greenwood (@faineg.com) 2026-09-30T00:56:19.722Z

Today’s music: “What Does it Take (To Win Your Love)“, a great soul song by Jr. Walker and the All Stars that hit #1 on the R&B charts (#4 on Billboard). Recorded in 1969 and released by Motown, the son is notable for  its saxophone solos by Walker (real name: Autry DeWalt Mixon Jr.). This is a “live” video but the music you hear is recorded, so there’s lip-synching.

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. Clearly those who don’t have the ability to get a job, or do have the ability but aren’t looking for one, shouldn’t qualify for Medicaid benefits.

*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.

Friday: Hili dialogue

October 2, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, October 2, 2026. We’ll have a shortened Hili dialogue today as I was at the doc’s yesterday, having my retinas inspected nine days after cataract surgery. And the news is very good: my operated-on right eye is healing well, with the hemorrhage decreasing in size, and it should be gone in 1-3 months. In the meantime, I have no symptoms except EYE PAIN since they not only created an incision on the right side of my right eye during the cataract operation, but, in the frantic period thereafter when the eye pressure skyrocketed, the opthamologist POKED THREE HOLES IN MY EYEBALL with tweezers. And oy, did that hurt!  The pain comes when I look down and the four wounds make contact with my lower eyelid.

But still: I’m a very lucky boy as this rare occurrence of a hemorrhage (1/1000 at most) could have been much worse. I also found out that while I had the impression that the hemorrhage was small, in fact it covered 25% of the inside of my eyeball. But it did not encroach on the crucial central area of vision, the macula.

Enough about my medical issues. It’s October and I missed putting up the month’s painting from the 15th century manuscript the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.  Here it is: none other than the Louvre itself, which of course used to be a palace surrounded by country.. Celtic Studies Resources describes the painting:

In this calendar image for the month of  October from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry (f. 10v) the labor of the month is sowing the winter grain. This is one of the images that was left uncompleted when Jean Duc de Berry died in 1416. The original artists responsible for most of the image in this book of hours, the Limbourg brothers, also died.

The manuscript passed to King Charles VII, the Duke’s brother, and the image for the October calendar was finished by another artist.

In the warmer parts of Europe, the wine regions, October marked the month when the grapes harvested in September were put into barrels for aging. In the regions less friendly to grapes, October’s labor is sowing the winter grain, or sometimes, plowing.

As it says in the medieval lyric listing the labors of the month “And here I sawe my whete so rede” (Bodleian MS. Digby 88).

In the background, you can see the Louvre; this Parisian palace was built by the Duke’s older brother, King Charles V. The medieval Louvre was substantially changed by successive royal owners; here’s a reconstruction showing what we think it looked like in the 15th century. The Très Riches Hours calendar image shows three central towers. Between the three central towers are two balconies, or brattices, each pierced by three windows from which, during a siege, defenders could hurl boing water or hot oil on to the attackers below.

Beneath the towers and the central donjon of the the Louvre, you can see a small door that opens in the thick wall, exiting on to the banks of the Seine. People chat in a small group right at the door. A set of steps leads down to the Seine, where women do their laundry by beating it with a stick, near a small boat that’s moored. To the right, in front of one of the central towers, two dogs play. There’s a second set of stairs down to the Seine, and three more boats are tied up.

In the central scene below the Louvre and the river, a man in red mounted on a horse drags a harrow across the field. The wooden harrow is weighted with a rock. The weight of the rock forces the tines of harrow into the earth. As the horse drags the harrow along, the tines break up the dirt clods. This is particularly useful after plowing since the harrow helps cover the previously sown seeds as it smooths the soil. Beyond the mounted rider, in the central part of the image, there’s a field that’s already been sown with seeds and a scarecrow dressed as an archer. The strings tied with rags that criss-cross the field around the scarecrow are meant, like the archer scarecrow, to ward off marauding birds.

To the right in the front of the image, a peasant dressed in blue scatters seeds, hand-sowing, while magpies (the black-and-white birds) and crows devour the freshly sown (but not yet covered by the harrow) seeds. Notice the naturalistic detail of the footprints left in the soft earth as the seed-sower progresses along the row. Those footprints, like the shadow cast by the scarecrow, the reflections cast by the boats, or the vaporized breath and the smoke from the chimney in the image for February are other early examples from the Très Riches Heurs of the artists using realistic, technical, details in European art of the Middle ages.

Limbourg brothers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And of course yesterday I missed Thomas Wolfe’s ‘Hymn to October, which I always put up on October 1. Here it is. from his novel Of Time and the River:

Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands.  The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling.  Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big that you cannot say that the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails, just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up; the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling upon you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun so that you cannot say that sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground, and where the leaves. .

October is the richest of the seasons: the fields are cut, the granaries are full, the bins are loaded to the brim with fatness, and from the cider-press the rich brown oozings of the York Imperials run.  The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death on sill and ceiling, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of old October.

The corn is shocked: it sticks out in hard yellow rows upon dried ears, fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania, and the big stained teeth of crunching horses. The indolent hooves kick swiftly at the boards, the barn is sweet with hay and leather, wood and apples—this, and the clean dry crunching of the teeth is all:  the sweat, the labor, and the plow is over. The late pears mellow on a sunny shelf, smoked hams hang to the warped barn rafters; the pantry shelves are loaded with 300 jars of fruit. Meanwhile the leaves are turning, turning up in Maine, the chestnut burrs plop thickly to the earth in gusts of wind, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling.

Wolfe in 1937 (he died of TB in the next year only 38 years old):

Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 2 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Although I’ve reserved judgment about the reason the copilot tried to take down a FlyDubai plane headed for Israel, it’s starting to look more like terrorism might be the reason.

The Omani copilot who stabbed the pilot on the flydubai flight yesterday discussed killing Jews on social media, an Israeli official tells The Times of Israel.

The official adds that the attacker asked the Emirati crew members to kill him, citing conversations with passengers on the flight.

“This was a person who was willing to commit suicide,” says the official. “His social media accounts [say] clearly that he has been radicalized into jihadist ideology. He talks about killing Jews.”

“We can’t say for sure until the investigation’s over,” the official continues, “but it certainly seems like he was a suicide actor who was probably going to try to down that plane.”

“Our understanding is he’s going to be transferred to the UAE,” the official continues. “We will be part of that investigation.”

In the meantime, Israel is doing its own internal investigation and making changes to security procedures, says the official.

Ergo it might have been a suicide attempt and an attempt to kill Jews.  We don’t know now, and perhaps we never will.

*And if you are pleased that 200 Jews did not die in the flydubai hijacking the other day, and have any sympathy for Israel you will like the Substack piece by Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.: “The meaning of FZ 1073″ (h/t Bat):

, . .Israel’s response to October 7, however, unique in the contemporary world, has not been cost-free. Our people remain agonizingly divided over which of our leaders bore responsibility for that morning’s failure and for decisions made in the subsequent war. A no less bitter schism separates those who are willing to fight from those who, avowedly for religious reasons, are not. Some 924 Israeli soldiers have been killed since October 8, and thousands physically and emotionally wounded.

And yet, we keep fighting. We will defend ourselves in the court of international law, we will stand up for truth in the media. We will battle Hamas and Hezbollah again as the need arises, and mount crippling operations against Iran should America resume the war. Missiles may once again smash into our neighborhoods, schools and businesses may close, and the world will continue condemning us for doing what so much of it no longer has the will to do—for defending our homes and families. We will celebrate births, bar mitzvahs, and weddings, and pioneer technologies that benefit humankind. We will do all of this not because, it is often stated, we have nowhere else to go, but because of who we are. We, the Jewish people, are indomitable.

We are the people who, for nearly two thousand years, never forfeited our hope of returning to our ancestral homeland. The people who, a mere three years after the Holocaust, declared our independence in that land and thwarted successive enemy efforts to destroy us. We are the people who, despite grave disagreements between religious and secular, right-wing and left, Ashkenazi and Mizrachi, geographical periphery and center, still coheres. We are a people that, less than a month from now, will go to the polls, demonstrating once again our uniqueness as one of the very few nations never to have known a moment of non-democratic governance.

That, then, is the meaning of FlyDubai Flight FZ1073. While their airliner plunged nearly 20,000 feet in under two minutes and their courageous wounded pilot struggled to open the cockpit door, ordinary Israelis overcame paralyzing uncertainty and rushed to the front of the plane. There, regular citizens—not commandos, not armed air marshals—with their bare hands and headphone wires, disarmed, subdued, and bound the co-pilot suspected of trying to kill everyone on board precisely because most of them were Israelis. Were Jews. And once the danger passed, the Jews of FZ1073 didn’t wallow, didn’t shrink, but instead broke into song. They sang words of the late 18th and early 19th-century Hasidic genius, Rabbi Nahman—“All the world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to fear”—and “Am Yisrael Chai,” the people of Israel live.

FZ1073 has a message for the world. For the terrorists striving to take innumerable Israeli lives and make the survivors’ lives unbearable—the message is that your love of death will never diminish our love of life nor make us any less determined to defend it. For the European leaders who prefer to boycott Israeli Jews rather than confront the extremists who are conquering their countries from within. FZ1073 stands as an example of what a proud, strong, and self-respecting people can still accomplish. And for Israelis soon to celebrate the completion of the yearly Torah readings—Simchat Torah—and commemorate the anniversary of October 7, FZ1073 reminds us of who we are, what we stand for, and what we are willing to do to remain Israelis. The sheer heroism displayed by the Israeli passengers of FZ1073 shows why nothing can ever defeat us.

I for one hope that he’s right.

*The governor of Tennessee has decided to suspend executions in his state after the botched attempt to execute a woman via lethal injection.

Christa Pike, a Tennessee woman who was set to be executed on Wednesday, survived two doses of a lethal drug that had been administered, according to her lawyers.

Ms. Pike, who was convicted of the 1995 murder of a classmate, is the only woman on death row in Tennessee. Before the failed attempt to put her to death, she was set to become the first woman to be executed in the state in more than 200 years.

Ms. Pike was in “critical condition, receiving life-saving care” on Thursday afternoon, one of her lawyers said.

It was not immediately clear what went wrong with the administration of the lethal drug on Wednesday night.

Ms. Pike’s lawyers said that while two syringes of pentobarbital had been administered, she did not lose consciousness. She still had a heartbeat, they said, and was audibly snoring.

. . . The Tennessee Department of Correction later said Ms. Pike had been taken to an off-site medical facility.

This was the second time this year that Tennessee had struggled to administer a lethal injection. In May, the state called off an execution because staff members could not find a vein to administer lethal drugs.

. . .The failed execution on Wednesday night was the state’s second bungled death penalty attempt this year, and Mr. Lee on Thursday said he was suspending executions — including Ms. Pike’s — to allow an independent review.

Lawyers for Ms. Pike said that did not go far enough, and urged Mr. Lee to take her off death row. “This is awful, and this kind of thing should never happen again,” said one of her lawyers, Randy Spivey.

Mr. Lee previously denied a similar request and his office did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. Speaking to reporters earlier Thursday, he said the failed execution “shouldn’t have happened.” He added, “We should find out what happened and make those changes necessary to do what the people of this state want done.”

. . . The death row inmate Christa Pike was in critical condition and receiving medical care, her lawyers said Thursday, a day after Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her. They called for Gov. Bill Lee to reduce her sentence to life in prison, calling the botched attempt to end her life with two doses of pentobarbital “cruel and torturous.”

*The dude in charge of the Eiffel Tower has stepped down after it was revealed that he removed women staff from the tourist magnet during a visit from an apparently misogynistic Hindu group (h/t: Ginger K).

The operating company that runs the Eiffel Tower said Tuesday its chief would step down at the end of this year in the wake of a controversy over the removal of women staff during a visit by a Hindu religious group.

Patrick Branco Ruivo, who has been director general of the Paris landmark since 2018, would leave his job at the end of the year after an internal probe revealed that “operational flaws and shortcomings” in organising the visit led to the “unacceptable” removal of women staff, the company SETE said in a statement.

The removal of women staff during a visit by the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) spiritual movement on September 5 prompted a staff walkout and the closure of the monument for a day, as well as an outcry across political spectrum in France which prizes secularism and gender equality.

At the time, SETE acknowledged the Hindu delegation had requested the visit be organised so as to limit “interactions with women” and said that “these conditions should not have been accepted”.

. . .The Socialist mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Gregoire, had lambasted the move to remove women staff as an “absurd, unjust and unacceptable decision” and ordered two separate probes.

The mayor Tuesday “acknowledged Patrick Branco Ruivo’s responsible decision” and commended “his commitment to the Eiffel Tower and SETE” since his appointment in late 2018, a person close to him told AFP, asking not to be named,

Yay for the French!  There’s not even a conflict of rights here: the Hindu delegation had no right to have an environment free from women, though the women had a right to be on the job.  They should light up the Eiffel Tower for one night in purple, white, and green: the colors of the feminist movement.

*The judge in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial refused to declare the defendant not guilty after the defense argued that there was no proof that Clancy in fact killed her three children:

The judge in the Lindsay Clancy murder case on Thursday refused to declare her not guilty, turning down a defense motion that had argued there wasn’t enough evidence to prove she was responsible for killing her three children.

During Clancy’s first trial, which ended Sept. 4 with a deadlocked jury, her defense argued that she was not criminally responsible because of a mental disease, specifically a rare condition called postpartum psychosis. As such, the defense didn’t dispute that the 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse carried out the killings at her family’s Massachusetts home in 2023.

However, in a hearing earlier this week, Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington tried to persuade the judge that prosecutors had not offered any proof that Clancy did it. Prosecutors argued there was plenty of evidence, calling Reddington’s claim “laughable.”

Prosecutors have yet to decide whether they will put the case in front of a jury for a second time. They could choose to retry her on first-degree murder charges or seek to try her only on lesser charges, including second-degree murder or manslaughter, or drop the case entirely.

In his ruling Thursday, Judge William Sullivan noted that for the purposes of his decision, he was required to analyze the evidence in the light most favorable to prosecutors — and that it was up to the jury, not the judge, to decide whether to believe expert witnesses for the defense who testified that Clancy was not responsible for her actions because of mental illness.

“There was evidence introduced, both physical and circumstantial, that would permit a rational trier of fact to find beyond a reasonable doubt the elements of the charge of murder,” Sullivan wrote.

Clancy admitted she killed her kids in order to plead “not guilty by reason of insanity,” but she never did so on the stand. Here, from Grok, is the evidence that she did the deed:

  • “Medical examiner findings of asphyxia/strangulation as the cause of death for all three children, with ligature or manual compression marks consistent with intentional constriction of the neck rather than accidental injury or natural causes.
  • The children were discovered in the basement with exercise bands or similar items nearby that investigators linked to the mechanism of strangulation; the scene showed no signs of forced entry or third-party involvement.
  • Lindsay Clancy was the only adult present with the children during the relevant period. Her husband had left the house earlier that day at her request (she had asked him to pick up takeout and medication).
  • After the jump, while hospitalized and before formal charges, she made statements to police and medical staff acknowledging that she had harmed the children. Those statements have been referenced in court proceedings, though their precise admissibility and weight remain subject to litigation given her injuries and mental state.
  • Digital and physical evidence recovered from the home (including her phone and notes) has been described in filings as reflecting planning or awareness in the hours beforehand, alongside a documented history of postpartum mental-health treatment.”

This defense maneuver is just that—a ploy—and won’t fly.  If there is a retrial and she’s declared “not guilty by reason of insanity”, she will still be committed to a psychiatric facility (this will be the case, I think, even if they don’t try her again. That, however, might be a much shorter period that a sentence of guilty for first- or second-degree murder.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is referring to Andrzej’s new book (English title: The Blue Stone of Sisyphus),with the book launch party having taken place in Dobrzyn last evening. Here’s the book:

Hili: Fascinating.
Sharon: What’s there?
Hili: No idea. Some Sisyphus is trying to push a pebble up through the ground.

In Polish:

Hili: To fascynujące.
Szaron: Co tam jest?
Hili: Nie wiem, jakiś Syzyf wypycha kamyk spod ziemi.

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

From Give Me A Sign:

From Meow Incorporated:

From Masih: Two Iranian protestors were hanged yesterday. The charge:

From Luana; yet another professor who thinks colleges need to revert to all-oral testing along Socratic lines:

From Bryan; apparently UK television is a lot like this:

From Malcolm; proof of a non-flat Earth:

One from my feed: a hypocrite:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Doctor Cobb. First, a fantastic photo. It took the photographer six years to get the conditions right; read about that here .It’s an amazing photo!

In this splendid photo from Valerio Minato three wonders were captured in a single shot:- the Basilica of Superga, located near Turin (Italy)- the Monviso, the highest mountain of the Cottian Alps- the setting Moon, captured in a crescent phase➡️ apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap23122…🔭 🧪 #sciart1/2

— Nereide (@drnereide.bsky.social) 2025-11-06T14:10:24.323Z

This has got to be a typo!

when your country's new accord on “super intelligence” misspells the country's name

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) 2026-09-30T18:55:43.265Z

‘Today’s music: “Rockin’ Chair” with trumpet solo by Roy Eldridge and Gene Krupa’s band. When I first heard this solo by “Little Jazz,” as Eldridge was called, I was mesmerized.  Wikipedia gives the details:

One of Eldridge’s best known recorded solos is on a rendition of Hoagy Carmichael‘s tune, “Rockin’ Chair”, arranged by Benny Carter as something like a concerto for Eldridge.Jazz historian Gunther Schuller referred to Eldridge’s solo on “Rockin’ Chair” as “a strong and at times tremendously moving performance”, although he disapproved of the “opening and closing cadenzas, the latter unforgivably aping the corniest of operatic cadenza traditions.” Critic and author Dave Oliphant describes Eldridge’s unique tone on “Rockin’ Chair” as “a raspy, buzzy tone, which enormously heightens his playing’s intensity, emotionally and dynamically” and writes that it “was also meant to hurt a little, to be disturbing, to express unfathomable stress.”

This is jazz at its best. (I do agree that the final cadenza is a bit out of place.)

Hili dialogue

October 1, 2026 • 6:45 am

There will be no long Hili today, and probably not tomorrow, as I have to have my retina scrutinized (I think things are okay). Wish me luck, and bear with me.

Speaking of bears, we have a winner in Alaska’s Fat Bear Contest involving the ursines of Katmai National Park and Preserve. The champ: Backpack! The voting was close:

Here’s how fat he got (photo from Explore.org):

Here’s a short video about Backpack and his leg injury, which he overcame.

And an article in the NYT!:

In the annual battle of the big bears, only one can be the winner. This year, 89 Backpack, was crowned the winner of Katmai National Park and Preserve’s Fat Bear Week.

The match came down to two single bears in a battle of the sexes. Backpack is an adult male who overcame an injury in 2007 and has what park staff describe as a “quiet toughness,” according to his bio on Explore.org, the media organization that helps host the event. And on the other side, representing the lady bears, was 910, an adult female whose mother, 409 Beadnose, was a previous Fat Bear Week champion.

It was a nail-biter: Backpack won by just over 5,000 votes, coming in with 103,344 over 910’s tally of 98,253 votes.

His name comes from childhood, when Backpack was often seen clinging to the back of his mother, Holly, while she swam across the river. (Holly was also a former Fat Bear Week champion.)

Earlier in the competition, Naomi Boak, a former communication specialist for the Katmai Conservancy who was a producer for the event for several years, said she was excited to see that 89 Backpack had earned a spot in the bracket at long last.

Backpack can be “elusive,” Boak said, making it hard to photograph him at the beginning and end of the season, which is necessary to enter a bear into the competition.

Boak was actually inspired to move to Alaska and work with the park when she watched Backpack from her New York City apartment in 2019 on the park’s livestream. She described him as her “gateway bear.”

Backpack, according to his bio, has fewer scars than might be expected on a male bear his age, because he is less aggressive than some of his peers.

“Unlike many large adult male bears, Backpack hasn’t shown much aggression toward his competitors,” his competition bio said. “He’ll stand up for himself when necessary, but he prefers to use a quiet strength to gain access to preferred fishing spots.”

Boak called him “a gentleman bear.”

More news: 

*We all know that the reported hijacking attempt of an FlyDubai airplane headed for Tel Aviv ended happily, with all passengers safe though the stabbed captain and the alleged perp are injured. Without the presence of extra pilots who happened to be on board, everyone would have died. The Jerusalem Post explains the extra pilots:

There were four flydubai pilots aboard flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday when an alleged terror attack inside the cockpit sent the aircraft plunging thousands of feet and ultimately forced it to make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.
Israeli officials said the co-pilot stabbed the captain and attempted to crash the aircraft before passengers and crew intervened. The flight transmitted the international 7500 code for unlawful interference, initially prompting fears of a hijacking, and Israeli fighter jets were scrambled as the crisis unfolded.
Now, The Jerusalem Post can confirm why two other pilots happened to be aboard.
The additional pilots had been placed on the flight because possible regional rerouting could extend the journey and push the original crew beyond permitted duty hours, a person familiar with the matter told the Post.

Their presence was unrelated to any advance security warning.

The UAE is conducting an investigation of whether terrorism was involved:

UAE investigators will now determine “whether the incident was linked to any terrorist activity or purpose, or involved prior planning or direction”, according to the UAE’s state news agency.

Abu Dhabi authorities have jurisdiction over the incident because the aircraft is registered in the UAE and flies under its flag, the statement said.

It comes after Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said it is “too early to say” who was behind the incident, as he hailed the actions of the flight’s captain.

Netanyahu blamed “fanaticism and hatred of an incalculable level” during a Fox News interview but said he has no confirmation yet of the motive for the attack. The attacker was arrested in Saudi Arabia.

*Tennessee botched an execution by lethal injection yesterday:

A Tennessee woman convicted of murder survived two doses of lethal injection on Wednesday night before state officials suspended the execution and had her taken to a hospital for medical care, her lawyers said.

It was the second botched execution in the state this year.

The apparent failure came after dueling court rulings delayed the execution of the woman, Christa Pike, by about nine hours. The state had raced to go ahead with the execution before the day ended and to avoid having to reschedule.

In a pair of emergency legal filings, Ms. Pike’s lawyers said that while two syringes of pentobarbital, the lethal drug, had been administered, Ms. Pike had not lost consciousness. She still had a heartbeat, they said, and was audibly snoring.

It was not immediately clear what went wrong with the administration of the drugs, or what Ms. Pike’s medical condition was. In a statement late Wednesday, her lawyers said that she was at a nearby hospital but that they did not know her condition. Tennessee officials confirmed to a federal judge late Wednesday that Ms. Pike was receiving medical care.

“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “There is no precedent.”

. . . It was the second time this year that Tennessee failed to administer the lethal drugs. In May, the state called off one of four planned executions because medical staff could not find a vein while administering a lethal drug.

Just one of several reasons I oppose the death penalty. It would have been more humane to shoot her, but I don’t think the state should kill anyone.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, fall is here in a big way:

Hili: And the apples are dropping again.
Andrzej: It’s all because of that Newton.

In Polish:

Hili: I znów spadają jabłka.
Ja: To wszystko przez tego Newtona