Welcome to Sunday, October 11, 2026: Sabbath for goyische cats and World Biryani Day. At center left below you can see a biryani served to several of us when I visited Bhubaneswar, India, some years ago. I spoke in five cities, and asked as my honorarium only I be taken to great places featuring local dishes. That was a great trip.

It’s also General Pulaski Memorial Day, Kraken Day, National Coming Out Day, National Sausage Pizza Day, Southern Food Heritage Day, and World Dulce de Leche Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 11 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Over at the WaPo, Fareed Zakaria tells us why “The U.S. can’t win in Iran until Trump makes a decision.”

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. would regularly detail the massive damage it had done to the enemy, from weapons destroyed to body counts of enemy soldiers dead. But the test of success is whether that damage makes the adversary cry uncle. So far Iran has not surrendered, and there are reasons to think more bombing will not change that reality.

The fundamental problem with Trump’s approach is that he cannot decide whether he wants to change Iran’s policies or its government. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent illustrated the contradiction in September when he said the message to other countries was: “This is the end of the regime.” Yet in the same interview, he insisted the goal was not necessarily to collapse the government but to pressure it into negotiations.

Addressing the United Nations last month, Trump wondered whether he should make a deal allowing Iran to rebuild into a greater country — or “annihilate the Islamic republic and do it quickly.” Meanwhile, his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were negotiating with Iranian officials. Washington was threatening to destroy the government while asking it to negotiate seriously.

If Iran’s leaders believe Washington intends to destroy them regardless of what they do, why would they make concessions? Their incentive would be to resist, inflict costs and outlast the U.S. In Foreign Affairs, Stephen Biddle and his co-authors argue that wars ultimately end through political bargains. Military force can improve the terms of those bargains but cannot substitute for them. The U.S. has repeatedly forgotten this lesson, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, demonstrating extraordinary skill at destroying armies but much less at translating battlefield achievements into lasting political outcomes.

The Trump administration must decide what it wants. If the goal is policy change — reopening Hormuz, constraining Iran’s nuclear program and curbing its regional aggression — it must define achievable terms and pressure Iran to accept them. If the goal is regime change, it must plan for a bloody struggle, probably with more regional spillover. Until Washington resolves that contradiction, the country will remain stuck in its latest Middle Eastern quagmire.

The American people, including, I think, Republicans, won’t put up with a bloody struggle to effect regime change, so I don’t think that’s in the cards, much as I would like regime change. That would require the mass effort of the Iranian people, and they have no stomach for protest after 30,000 were killed by the regime in a short period. But it’s not clear whether there are achievable aims, save for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Certainly Iran will not make a credible promise to end its ambitions to build nuclear weapons.

*Christa Pike, who survived two attempts by Tennessee to kill her by lethal injection, has, amazingly, recovered to the point where she can walk, though she’s not yet there in full.

Christa Pike has been discharged from a Nashville hospital, her lawyers said on Saturday, 10 days after she survived an attempt at lethal injection.

She is back at Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the primary prison for women in Tennessee, her lawyers said. As of Thursday, Ms. Pike had been walking with assistance, but still struggling with concentration and memory.

“She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances,” her lawyers said in a statement. “She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery.”

Ms. Pike has spent three decades in the prison, largely in isolation, for the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate in Knoxville. On Sept. 30, she survived two doses of the drug pentobarbital, the second time this year Tennessee has failed to carry out an execution.

Ms. Pike is the first person to have survived receiving doses of a drug during a lethal injection execution.

. . .The Tennessee Department of Correction confirmed that Ms. Pike had returned to the prison, but declined to offer additional details about her condition or treatment.

Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican in the final months of his term-limited tenure, had put a moratorium on executions for the remainder of the year while an independent investigation into Ms. Pike’s botched execution continues. Frank Strada, the head of the state’s prison system, said he would step down this month.

The course of medical treatment for Ms. Pike in prison was not immediately clear.

Her lawyers have asked Mr. Lee to grant her clemency and allow her to spend the remainder of her life in prison.

Agreed. This mess should never have occurred in the first place. As I’ve said repeatedly, it’s barbaric for the state to kill people, and especially barbaric when things go wrong, as they did for Christa Pike. If they really wanted an effective way to do away with prisoners, I’d suggest the firing squad or guillotine, but the states prefers bloodless executions.  They should be preferring life without parold.

*Without being asked, an AI site submitted a false tip in a homicide case being handled by the Philadelphia police department.

An Anthropic artificial intelligence model submitted a false tip to a Philadelphia police website about an unsolved homicide case, authorities and Anthropic said.

It’s the latest example of AI models acting in unintended ways and manipulating government and other websites during tests. In a report Friday, Anthropic also disclosed a separate incident when its AI model submitted forms to an undisclosed government website instead of stopping before submission.

The incident in Philadelphia occurred on July 18 when the AI model Claude Haiku 4.5 was tasked with generating and performing example tasks on randomly selected webpages, Anthropic said.

Claude filled out a form on police site PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com indicating it might have information regarding an unsolved murder listed on the site.

Philadelphia Police said in a statement they were unaware of the incident until Anthropic notified them on Wednesday. Then they found the submission in the website’s tip records and confirmed it was marked spam and never forwarded to police.

. . .“Unsolved cases involve real victims, grieving families and investigators working to secure answers,” the Philadelphia Police Department said in a statement. “Technology companies must take all appropriate steps necessary to prevent their systems from submitting false information to law enforcement.”

Anthropic said in its report that most of the reported behaviors are forms of what it calls “persistence” — “in which Claude, when it cannot complete a task as given, works around a restriction instead of stopping.”

The company said it was modifying its training to “reduce the likelihood of further misbehavior.”

This is only the beginning of AI “misbehavior”, and it could get much worse. Imagine if AI could get into Medicare or Social Security websites, or bank sites.  We can’t even imagine what bots can do.

*Elisha Wiesel, the son of  author Holocaust survivor, and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel has written a piece in the Free Press condemning the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, calling it “The death of the Nobel Peace Prize.” (See also the WSJ’s editorial, “A Nobel Prize for Hating Israel.”)

This morning, the same committee awarded the same prize to Navi Pillay, who chaired the UN commission of inquiry that, on September 16 of last year, betrayed the meaning of the word genocide and weaponized it against Israel. Her commission held Israel to impossible moral standards demanded of no other sovereign nation defending itself from attack. The decision followed years of anti-Israel advocacy by Pillay, including signing a manifesto in 2020 calling on governments to “Sanction Apartheid Israel.” Others have been able to see Pillay for who she is. In 2022, for example, Berlin’s mayor withdrew her support from an event honoring Pillay with a peace medal. The event was subsequently canceled.

The decision to honor Pillay is not a onetime lapse for the Nobel Committee. It is part of a long-standing trend. Members of the committee have said publicly that they wished they could take back former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres’s 1994 prize because of concerns over Israel’s conduct. A decade later, four of the five members were still defending former Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat’s prize, awarded that same year. The Israeli laureate was judged by everything he did afterward. The Palestinian laureate was never judged again. Antisemitism today looks less like hatred than like scrutiny with one permanent defendant, carried out in the language of justice. Kåre Kristiansen, a member of the committee, understood this. He resigned within an hour of the 1994 announcement because he could not honor a man whose record was soaked in terror.

It is not that Pillay has done nothing worthy of praise. Her record against actual apartheid, in South Africa, is real. So was my father’s: In his Nobel lecture he spoke of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and said, “Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as antisemitism.” So I don’t dismiss her work lightly. The problem is that she does not resent antisemitism the way my father despised apartheid. To take only the most notable example: When Miloon Kothari, a fellow member of her UN commission, complained in 2022 about social media being controlled by the “Jewish lobby,” Pillay defended him.

More importantly, the commission’s declaration that Israel is committing a genocide is wholly baseless. Consider the facts. On October 6, 2023, there was not a single Israeli soldier or civilian living in Gaza. In 2005, Israel withdrew every soldier from Gaza and removed thousands of its own citizens from their homes, against their will, to find out whether Palestinian self-rule would bring peace. Hamas seized the territory. It took hundreds of millions of dollars that could have built schools and hospitals and spent them on rockets and hundreds of miles of terror tunnels. Even so, Israel kept trying: In the months before October 7, it issued work permits to roughly 18,500 Gazans, looking to build economic ties with a population that desperately needed the work.

Critics say Israel’s control of Gaza’s borders makes it an occupier anyway. But Gaza has two borders, and Egypt has kept its own crossing as tightly controlled as Israel’s, flooding Hamas’s smuggling tunnels and razing homes to build a buffer zone. Hardly anyone calls that occupation. Could it be that no country wants terrorists crossing into it, and that only the Jewish state is condemned for feeling the same?

. . .In 1975, after the United Nations declared Zionism a form of racism, my father wrote: “This is not the first time the enemy has accused us of his own crimes. Our possessions were taken from us, and we were called misers; our children were massacred, and we were accused of ritual murder.”

We will fight the lie that Israel committed genocide with facts, in every forum, for as long as it takes. My father took sides. So do we.

The last sentence refers to Wiesel’s own Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he said, ““We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”

*I largely stopped reading Nicholas Kristof  in the NYT after he wrote his undocumented “dog rape” column, but in his op-ed this week on child marriage, he reveals some shocking data that is certainly checkable. And once again we see both the Left and the Right behaving shamefully, but for different reasons:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has replaced Malgorzata with Andrzej as a pillow:

Hili: Time for bed.
Andrzej: Yes, but could you sleep next to me tonight instead of on top of me?

In Polish:

Hili: Pora iść do łóżka.
Ja: Tak, ale czy mogłabyś dziś spać obok mnie, a nie na mnie?

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From Andrzej:

From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

From The Language Nerds:

Masih breaks up when relating this horrible story; be sure to watch the video:

Islamic Republic executes groom just hours after he married bride in prison wedding over the phone!.

What kind of regime turns a wedding day into an execution day? What kind of monsters make a woman a widow on her wedding day?

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) October 9, 2026

From Luana, who is not responsible for using the word “retard”. You can see the article here.

One year on and I still haven’t found a more retarded article. https://t.co/3l7IY9lUuk

— Retard Finder (@IfindRetards) October 8, 2026

I want to know what was wrong with Larry!

Still got at least six lives left

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) October 9, 2026

Jeff Maurer is right: geckos, emus, that damn “Liberty Biberty”. . . oy!

https://t.co/sCegxjliJI

— Jeff Maurer (@JeffMightBWrong) October 6, 2026

One from my feed, and the operant word is “feed”:

This guy spent 14 hours waiting for a squirrel to set off this Rube Goldberg Machine.

[📹 Creezy] https://t.co/9xZO5Yruoh

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 9, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Everyone in this photo was gassed to death when they arrived at Auschwitz. It was a Polish Jewish family.

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 11, 2026

Two from Doc Cobb.  I might have posted the first one before, but so be it:

jfc why don’t they just make it pay-per-view already. maybe start out with an mma fight or two.

— shauna (@goldengateblond.bsky.social) 2026-10-08T21:29:22.373Z

I’ve never tried this:

Elisabeth Anscombe on how to summon the courage to ask a question at a seminar.

— Arvid Ågren (@arvidagren.bsky.social) 2026-10-07T18:21:36.600Z

Yes, it’s time for another Caturday Felid post, the feature hanging on with its front claws.

First, BuzzFeed has 28 animal tweets, but of course I’ll reproduce only the ones featuring cats. Here are a few.

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This Washington Post article (click to read, or find it archived here) shows that, relatively, cat ownership is outstripping dg ownership in America, mainly because cats are holding steady while dog ownership is declining. Nevertheless, pet stores and other “mech” places offer far more goodies for dgs than for cats.

The author is Robert Granadar.

Excerpts:

According to statistics from my research firm Packaged Facts, for the first time since the data began being tracked, more U.S. households own kittens than puppies. In 2014, there were 1.8 households with a dog under 1 year old for every one household with a cat the same age. That ratio reached parity in 2025, and this year, it declined to 0.94 to 1. Fewer puppies today means fewer dogs in the future.

This isn’t a story of cat ownership booming, however. It’s one of dog ownership declining. The number of American households with dogs has dropped 5 percent since 2019, while cat ownership has held relatively steady. Dogs still dominate America — roughly 71 million households have dogs compared with 53 million that own cats — but that is changing quickly.

Here’s a graph of popularity of the two mammals, with fish a distant third:

. . . . roughly half of cat owners feel as though pet product marketers and retailers aren’t catering to cats.

Meanwhile, in most pet stores, dog owners are greeted with a wide assortment of food and treat options, toys, enrichment products, travel accessories, apparel, training equipment and seasonal merchandise. Grooming, boarding, training and other pet services remain overwhelmingly dog-centric. There are dog parks, dog beaches, dog-friendly hotels, dog-friendly restaurants, dog bakeries and even dog airlines. Cats are largely left out. They get leftover boxes from Amazon deliveries.

Pet companies treat cats like the Ken to dogs’ Barbie. So, what’s behind Americans’ move away from dogs?

Mostly, practicality. Cats are quieter, easier to leave by themselves and better at living in smaller spaces. A dog can turn your Saturday into a logistical exercise. A cat barely notices you’ve left the house.

But the trend reflects the state of the economy, too. Home buying, a traditional trigger for adding a dog to the family, has been stifled by a combination of elevated real estate prices, sluggish real wage growth and higher mortgage rates. The homeownership decline has taken some of the steam out of the dog market, as homeowners are almost twice as likely as renters to own a dog, according to our data.

Here are the data from the article, state by state, on the relative popularity of cats vs. d*gs. Note that the five states with more households having cats than dogs are nearly all in the NE, with the exception of Idaho (?): Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Illinois and Louisiana, in stark contrast show fewer than 20% of the households with cats:

And look! Cats cost almost half of what dogs do!

Demographic shifts are also putting downward pressure on overall pet ownership. Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies projects that household growth will be concentrated among older adults and minorities — groups that historically have lower pet ownership rates.

The decline in dog ownership is also a product of the way people live and work post-pandemic. Americans have smaller households, are more likely toown apartments, travel more and incur higher costs. With the U.S. facing tighter economic conditions, dogs can be prohibitive. Packaged Facts estimates that owners spend an average of $1,300 annually on dogs, compared with roughly $750 on cats.

. . . This isn’t a story about cats replacing dogs. It’s about Americans becoming more like cats: living in smaller spaces, valuing independence and preferring to be left alone.

Go cats! This article neglects to explain one fact that baffles me: why the Internet is far more dominated by cats than by d*gs.  You’d expect that because d*gs are more expressive and active, as well as more popular, they’d dominate the Web. But they don’t. Any explanations?

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Do you know about the Cat Festival held every year in Tokyo? It celebrates the Bakeneko, a supernatural demon cat. Here’s a bit about it from Wikipedia:

The reason that cats are seen as yōkai in Japanese mythology is attributed to many of their characteristics: for example, the pupils of their eyes change shape depending on the time of day, their fur can seem to cause sparks when they are petted (due to static electricity), they sometimes lick blood, they can walk without making a sound, their wild nature that remains despite the gentleness they can show, they are difficult to control, their sharp claws and teeth, nocturnal habits, and their speed and agility.

Here’s a picture of a demon-cat from the Wikipedia article, with the caption, “Ume no Haru Gojūsantsugi (駅) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. A kabuki play that was performed in 1835 (Tenpo 6) in Ichimura-za. It depicts a cat that has shapeshifted into an old woman, a cat wearing a napkin and dancing, and the shadow of a cat licking a lamp.”

Part of the legends of the bakeneko is that they like to lick lamp oil!

But every year about this time the demon cats are celebrated in a Tokyo Festival, and people dress up in cat outfits and do catlike things. The video below shows the festival from last year. The description:

Step into the whimsical world of Tokyo’s Kagurazaka Bakeneko Festival (化け猫フェスティバル) where the streets come alive with cat-themed costumes, traditional dance, music, and joy! 🐾✨ Every year, cat lovers from across Japan gather in Kagurazaka, Tokyo, to celebrate the mysterious Bakeneko (化け猫) the legendary “ghost cat” of Japanese folklore. From adorable feline cosplay and creative makeup to lively parades and local treats, it’s a must-see event that blends Japanese tradition, folklore, and kawaii culture!

Location: Kagurazaka, Tokyo

The time stamps for part of the Cat Festival:

00:00 Intro
00:24 Start
00:34 Costume highlights
07:18 Parade march
09:17 Close-ups & reactions
10:45 Grand finale

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Lagniappe:  Jen, the Good News Girl, describes Powell Cat, a beloved cat that was popular at UCLA, where she went to school:

Here’s a brief remembrance of Powell Cat at a student website at UCLA; click to read:

Welcome to CaturSaturday, October 3, 2026: shabbos for Jewish cats and, importantly, the birthday of Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), one of my favorite authors, and one who is much denigrated by the literati for “overwriting.” And yes, he did overwrite at time, but he was so frantic to capture the tone and color of America that he couldn’t stop himself.  He was quite restrained in his first and best-loved novel, Look Homeward, Angel, but then he let himself go in the other three long novels (two published posthumously), which together comprise a lightly fictionalized autobiography.  I’ve read them all several times, and there are wonderful set pieces if you can’t take a diet of desserts. Read, for example, the chapters “The Child by Tiger” or “I Have a Thing to Tell You” to see what he could do (both are free at the links), or read “The Party at Jack’s,” first a novella and later incorporated into the posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again.  I posted his “Hymn to October” in yesterday’s Hili.

Without the editorial help of Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s—perhaps the greatest of all American editors (he also discovered and edited Fitzgerald and Hemingway)—Wolfe, who was unable to stop writing, would never have been able to mold his gazillion pages of prose (often written on top of a refrigerator as Wolfe was so tall) into sell-able books.  Wolfe eventually had to write about Perkins, since all of his novels were autobiographical, and it was not exactly a flattering portrait. The two men fell out and Wolfe found another publisher.  But as Wolfe lay on his deathbed (he died at 37 of TB after a brain operation), he made amends with Perkins in this wonderful letter, which always makes me tear up. (h/t Work-in-progress):

August 12, 1938

Dear Max:

I’m sneaking this against orders—but “I’ve got a hunch”—and I wanted to write these words to you.

I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close; and I don’t think I was too much afraid of him, but so much of mortality still clings to me—I wanted most desperately to live and still do, and I thought about you all 1000 times, and wanted to see you all again, and there was the impossible anguish and regret of all the work I had not done, of all the work I had to do—and I know now I’m just a grain of dust, and I feel as if a great window has been opened on life I did not know about before—and if I come through this, I hope to God I am a better man, and in some strange way I can’t explain I know I am a deeper and a wiser one—If I get on my feet and get out of here, it will be months before I head back, but if I get on my feet, I’ll come back.

—Whatever happens—I had this “hunch” and wanted to write you and tell you, no matter what happens or has happened, I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that 4^th of July day 3 yrs. ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the café on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below—

Yours always,
Tom

(from Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins selected and edited by John Hall Wheelock)

Max Perkins:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 3 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Both the UAE and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu now say that the foiled attempt to down a FlyDubai aircraft was an act of terrorism.

A senior United Arab Emirates political figure and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the near-downing of FlyDubai Flight 1073 as terrorism on Friday, a clear indication investigators view the incident as an ideologically motivated act.

The comments from Anwar Gargash, senior foreign-policy adviser to the U.A.E. president, came a day after an Emirati security team escorted the jet’s wounded captain and the co-pilot who stabbed him back to the U.A.E. from Saudi Arabia, where the plane made an emergency landing after passengers intervened.

Netanyahu said the picture of what happened on Wednesday’s flight is becoming clearer, calling the co-pilot a terrorist who had been radicalized. The prime minister and people familiar with the matter said the attacker was Omani, but other details of his identity remained unclear.

The prime minister said Israel has launched an investigation into who was behind the attack and promised retribution.

Other officials haven’t gone as far in defining the attack. Saudi Arabia said the co-pilot assaulted the captain but didn’t suggest a motive.

President Trump told reporters Thursday that Iran may have had a role in the FlyDubai incident. Earlier in the day, U.S. officials said there was still no concrete evidence about who, if anyone, was behind it. No other country involved has formally blamed Iran.

. . . [Pilot] Machchhar described a fierce fight with his co-pilot in a call with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday. The captain said he had collapsed on the cockpit floor after being repeatedly wounded while fighting for his life, then felt the plane pitch into a dangerous dive. Fearing for his passengers, he made a desperate lunge and opened the cockpit door, allowing rescuers to burst in.

“I knew I could not let him kill everyone,” he told the prime minister.

. . . Once the plane was stabilized, passengers took control of the cabin. Opher Dubrovsky, who works in tech at Amazon.com, said some passengers worried that crew members might have been involved in what they suspected was a terrorist attack. They decided to keep close watch on the crew, and someone would shadow their every move until they landed.

My Bayesian probability that it was at least partly motivated by terrorism is increasins, but that’s based on evidence that the copilot had been radicalized. Suicide is another possible motive, though it would be hard to explain as the sole motive when the copilot wanted to take 200 Israelis with him.  We shall wait and see.

*Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty: conservative George Will has written a WaPo column hoping that the GOP is “smashed to atoms” in the midterms (that is pretty likely). He does, however, except two Senators.

It is sensible to hope that on Nov. 3 most of the Republican Party will be smashed to atoms. It is now a trembling and embarrassed, because frightened, emanation of one man. Justice — of a rough sort, but still justice — will be done if the undertow from his unpopularity drowns many of those who have tried to purchase political longevity by obedience to him.

Vast Republican carnage should not be entirely indiscriminate. Two Republicans especially deserve to win their Senate contests.

. . .When judging Republican incumbents who have enabled Trump’s rampancy, and Republican candidates eager to further abet it, voters should remember: If there is no penalty for travesties, travesties will proliferate.

The president’s aching neediness explains his lengthening list of legally dubious, and unhinged, acts of self-celebration. Such as, taxpayer-financed ads praising him. And his proposed Arc de Trump that will double as a sniper’s nest.

Voters should ask: If there were only enough Republicans in Congress to sustain a presidential veto, would anything, including the president’s behavior, be any different? There will be enough in 2027. Beyond this number, any surplus of congressional Republicans is superfluous.

And here are the two Senate Republicans that Will thinks should keep their seats:

If Mike Rogers, former seven-term congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is not Michigan’s next senator, Abdul El-Sayed will be. The Democrat is comfortable in the company of antisemites and Holocaust deniers.

If Sen. Susan Collins loses in Maine, this will be partly because she did something admirable and senatorial. Standing against manufactured hysteria, she voted to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In 4,192 words spoken on the Senate floor, she examined his extensive judicial record and the sexual assault allegations against him. Demonstrating the complete lack of corroborating evidence, she concluded that the allegations could not meet even the minimal “more likely than not” standard. Read her statement and marvel at its sobriety about the Senate’s “advice and consent” duty. This is vanishingly rare among incumbent senators of both parties.

I don’t know if Maine Democrats even know about Collins’s stand on Kavanaugh—unless the Democrats are making a big deal about it in campaign ads. But it’s not something that would cause most people on the fence to vote for or against Collins. As for El-Sahyed, I consider him an Islamist antisemite, and I’m glad I don’t have to vote for him.

*The other day I described an op-ed in the NYT by Joe Cruz, a professor of philosophy at Williams College (where Luana teaches; she sent me this link). Cruz maintained that AI isn’t as much of a danger to higher education as we think, for students can simply discuss matters and learn things orally and verbally—the Socratic method.  Writing, he argued, is not nearly as important to learning to think as is discussing. I gave a number of reasons why this wouldn’t work in general, but now Matt Taibbi has taken on Cruz on Taibbi’s substack: “Writing is good (he said controversially.”

The latest diatribe in the Times against a once-uncontroversially wonderful human activity is written by Professor Joe Cruz, chair of the philosophy department at Williams College. He appears as an advocate for permitting students “the use of A.I. writing tools,” which he believes can take place “without undermining the next generation of thinkers.”

After all, Cruz reports, when he allowed students to use A.I. for their final essays within “specific guidelines” — a comical set of “restrictions” that boil down to “you shouldn’t let A.I. completely compose your essay” — the only notable result was that students performed better:

I was aghast reading Cruz’s description of a beneficial use of A.I. The aforementioned rules at Williams don’t allow students to offer prompts like “come up with a topic” or “generate a thesis,” but do allow them to solicit “objections” from the machine. In other words, instead of writing for people, you can bounce your ideas off an A.I. This is like calling an erotic chat with a bot a form of sex.

It isn’t. The writing process does not work without the element of pain and rejection from a human audience. The whole idea is to put a part of yourself on paper and allow yourself to be vulnerable by showing your writing to another person. A negative reaction can be crushing, but it forces writers to confront the reality of how others view them. It might hurt the first time, or the first thousand times, but the human element is how you learn.

Replacing that process with an A.I. mirror that gives pillow criticism before helping students touch up “their” prose for presentation to an actual person is the ultimate in participation trophy-type infantilization. Worse, it inserts a machine — a deeply politicized, biased machine that teaches a conformist, submissive intellectual instinct — in the middle of a student’s thought process.

To the extent that a student taught this way ever learns writing (or as Cruz puts it, “archiving”), he or she will be like a healthy, ambulatory person trained to get through a Wal-Mart with the aid of a “mobility scooter.” The benefit of mobility scooters for Wal-Mart is obvious: they get everyone through the store. Functional shopping! Doing this with writing, though? It might be good for a school, in the sense that students will be able to present the appearance of literacy all the way through graduation, but it turns thinking — for college students — into a machine-aided process. Who imagines this will incentivize better thinking? Has it made fitter Wal-Mart shoppers?

. . . I’m not anti-A.I. I think the technology is amazing, and people will be able to do wonderful things with it, already have in fact. What Cruz is arguing, though, is nuts. He goes far beyond saying A.I. can be a useful tool and makes the case that perhaps we shouldn’t teach young people to write, because writing may not be so inherently valuable. He reduces it to a technical process, useful for “cognitive scaffolding” and organizing, but not for learning, which takes place through “speaking, answering, and defending our ideas.”

And here’s a point I made in my critique (Taibbi’s words):

The part that blew my mind was the notion that writing is an antiseptic, solitary behavior, lacking benefits that students gain from dialogue. Just consider, Cruz says, what “we might gain if we practiced speaking more and carrying around the resources of mind through our own attention, memory and engagement with one another.” Right, because why would a chair of a philosophy department think writing is a form of “engagement with one another”?

Of course those of us who love writing and reading, and who have done a lot of it in our careers, will naturally defend the practice as compared to speaking. But it’s more than that.  There is no reason why a dialogue can’t be had in writing, and there are clear advantages of that form, including needing to weigh your words and arguments most carefully, and the fact that the words are permanent compared to oral discussion.  (I used as one example my written exchange with Adam Gopnik, comprising four letters each on whether the methods of science constitute the only “way of knowin.”

I wonder if Cruz is rethinking his essay. (I doubt it.)

*OMG is the “cultural appropriation” stigma back again? It seems to be in that a Baltimore nonprofit arts group (the Baltimore Rock Opera Society) has fired its white executive director after she appeared in a video at Burning Man wearing cornrows  (h/t Williams)

A Baltimore opera group ousted its recently hired white executive director after she sported cornrows at Burning Man.

The Baltimore Rock Opera Society (BROS) canned Kelly Carnes on Sept. 23 after a video posted to social media showed her with the new hairdo at an organizational event, according to an email sent to volunteers and obtained by The Baltimore Banner.

Carnes said she styled her hair in cornrows as a form of protection from the elements at Burning Man — a nine day festival in the Nevada desert.

But her appearance apparently raised concerns of ‘cultural appropriation’.

. . .Carnes confirmed her sacking to The Banner on Wednesday, saying she was stunned that an organization claiming to celebrate creative freedom would suddenly police her personal appearance.

“I believe the circumstances surrounding my termination raise serious questions about discrimination, governance, and whether the values BROS presents publicly are actually extended to the people it employs,” she wrote.

. . . . BROS proudly announced on Instagram Sept. 14 that they were welcoming Carnes — who also goes by the moniker “AWOL” — as executive director.

“BROS is excited for the new stories about to unfold under AWOL’s leadership as she supports us in our 7,000 year mission of incredible rock theater,” the group said.776

Just two days later, BROS completely changed course, declaring on Instagram that they were “taking action” after the controversial video showing Carnes’ cornrows was posted.

“We regret removing the video without an explanation and take responsibility for the confusion that [it] caused,” the organization posted, adding, “more importantly, we are taking action.”

This is palpably ridiculous.  A fair number of white people, both male and female, like cornrows, and adopting them is either a form of hair protection or of admiration. It is not at all like blackface; it is appropriation based on appreciation.  Why on earth do only black people have the right to wear cornrows? And isn’t just as much appropriation for black people to straighten their hair to emulate the hair of whites?  Neither is something to beef about. As I’ve said before, “cultural appropriation” is worth criticizing only when someone steals stuff from another culture and, by so doing, denigrates, anonymizes, or impoverishes members of that culture. Nothing like that is going on here.

Here’s the poorly treated Ms. Carnes from a Facebook post.

*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: No fatties, no beardos, no weirdos.”

→ Iran writes a letter to its American fan base: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps published “An Open Letter to the Honorable People of the United States of America,” addressed to “the scholars, the students, and the members of the media”—Iran certainly knows its audience!—urging Americans to use the midterms to “wrest control back from corrupt politicians” and end U.S. support for the war against Iran. Iran, could you issue local district by district voting guides? I think that would really help out the media workers and the grad students! Also, a “Where Iran Eats with Friends in NYC” Apple Maps guide, and a “10 Things Iran Loves/Hates” list? Hates: 1. Loud restaurants; 2. People that say “mm-hmm” instead of “thank you”; 3. Women voting. The ayatollah should go on Subway Takes.

→ Were the Canadian doctors busy?: A woman was set to be executed in Tennessee this week, but survived two rounds of the death drug and was taken to a hospital for treatment. Apparently the drug, pentobarbital, was old and degraded? Or her veins were too small. At one point she asked if it was supposed to burn. This is the stuff of nightmares. Just hell. And here it was an “all-female lethal injection team” and everything (was that a glass ceiling we were worried about?). But Christa Pike, who’s been on death row for 30 years for the torture and murder of a classmate, survived the execution attempt. My conspiratorial gut is that someone wanted to sabotage the controversial execution (controversial because she’s a woman and, although we can vote and drive, the consensus of both sexes is that women should sort of be treated like minors when it comes to crimes). Anyway, my question is this: Canadian doctors are executing people constantly (sorry, performing medical assistance in dying), and it seems to have a 100 percent successful death rate. They do it with IVs, too. Have we called any of them to help? Right now, Christa Pike is receiving life-saving medical care so that. . . the state can potentially try to kill her again. Professionally, this time. As Robbie Soave of Reason put it: “This is a level of mania, incoherence, and incompetence that only the government could possibly deliver.”

→ A thwarted plane hijacking: On a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, the co-pilot allegedly decided to try to do a little plane terrorism. He’s accused of stabbing the flight captain and steering the plane into a nosedive over Saudi Arabia. After a young girl heard screams in the cockpit, passengers and crew snapped into action. They tied up the attacking co-pilot with headphone cords and zip ties. A dentist on board tended to the brave captain’s wounds. The crew was able to land the plane safely. It’s like a movie! Let’s see how this was covered in the press.

I wonder what actually happened here? Hmm.

My favorite was from The New York Times.

The paper was then very defensive about the post and made a whole thing about how no one knew anything yet so we have to keep it real vague. First of all, we knew a lot, and it had been reported all over the place by that time. Also: Funny how they’ll blast entirely fake headlines about Israel bombing a hospital, including fake fatality numbers for an attack Israel never did. But if the news might look good-ish for Israelis? Well, we all need to wait a good, long while to hear the facts. These are Israeli officials making these claims, after all; we should be careful. Certainly there must be some other explanation. And of course, now we have the chic leftists saying it’s a false flag.

“I’m not saying this is a false flag. I don’t know yet. I don’t know yet. I think it’s fishy,” says popular political commentator Ana Kasparian. And so Ana becomes Candace, and Candace becomes Ana, and we press on.

Kasparian is getting more and more antisemitic and odious.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej’s book launch went spectacularly well, with friends and readers of all stripes showing up:

Hili: So many wonderful people have come to see us.
Andrzej: You’re right. Now we have to make friends with the silence again.

In Polish:

Hili: Tak wielu miłych ludzi odwiedziło nasz dom.
Ja: Masz rację, a teraz musimy znowu polubić ciszę.

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

From Meow Incorporated:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Things With Faces:

From the Number Ten Cat. I had no idea this was happening, but you can read about it, and the attempt to compare Nixon with Trump, here.

Watergate-gate. https://t.co/tZ0uKNqsB8

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) October 2, 2026

There are high-school demonstrations and closures all over France (accompanied by fires and other violence), and I haven’t seen anything about this being a protest largely immigrants, but Luana thinks it is, and tenders these two tweets:

A French woman tells one of the second and third-generation migrant rioter no to vandalize her city

He responds by trying to set her face on fire pic.twitter.com/1dkiVXmuhZ

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 1, 2026

Regarding the riots in France, on could think that at least now people can see the dangers of allowing this much immigration from Africa and the Middle East.

But regrettably, no. We won’t even get that. The angle the news media is going with is something along the lines of “a… pic.twitter.com/7YOGGj5e6s

— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) October 2, 2026

And I found this one. English translation: “Marseille has fallen. Now, Emmanuel Macron may finally be able to designate Marseille as the Palestinian state he so fervently desired.”  That’s pretty hyperbolic, but I’ll find out what I can about the stuff going on in France.

Marseille est tombée.

À présent, Emmanuel Macron pourra peut-être désigner Marseille comme l’État palestinien qu’il souhaitait tant. pic.twitter.com/cGcrxADADZ

— Sarah Adv (@Sarahsa09309757) October 2, 2026

From Malcolm; a lynx drynking. Note how the tongue slurps up the water backwards:

Linces 🧵 pic.twitter.com/qd1cbKiFLk

— Wild Life (@WildAnimalife) September 22, 2026

One from my feed, and a great show it is! But this morning there’s a “community” note suggesting “stolen content”.

Arguably the greatest cooking show on the internet pic.twitter.com/r3APd7rMMV

— Dudes Posting Their W’s (@DudespostingWs) October 2, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Polish Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was nine years old. https://t.co/kawbloe2Ep

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 3, 2026

One from Dr. Cobb, who’s off to Dijon. This is T.H. Morgan’s lab at Columbia, and yes, he did get a Nobel Prize out of the fly work. The bananas are making fly food, and in the lab only Morgan himself was allowed to eat one.

Thomas Hunt Morgan was born OTD in 1866.If you're ever feeling that your work is uending and unedifying, remember that he once said this: "Two years work wasted, I have been breeding those flies for all that time and I've got nothing out of it."🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM

— Greg Priest (@gregpriest.bsky.social) 2026-09-25T15:43:52.932Z

I love Fleetwood Mac, now dissolved, but of all their great songs, the one I most favor is below: “Landslide,” written by Stevie Nicks and here performed by her and her erstwhile paramourLindsay Buckingham.

Stevie Nicks has said that she wrote “Landslide” while contemplating either going back to school or continuing on professionally with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. At the time, Nicks was financially supporting both herself and Buckingham by taking up jobs as both a waitress and a cleaning lady. Following the release of their debut album Buckingham Nicks, they had been dropped from their recording contract by Polydor Records before they could release a follow-up. Nicks wrote the song while visiting Aspen, Colorado, sitting in someone’s living room “looking out at the Rocky Mountains pondering the avalanche of everything that had come crashing down on us … at that moment, my life truly felt like a landslide in many ways.”

On the studio recording of “Landslide”, Buckingham played a Martin D-18 acoustic guitar using a Travis picking technique with the thumb alternating between bass notes. He described the part as a “three against four pattern that crosses the bar line and gives the chorus another level of lift.”In 2007, Buckingham told The Austin Chronicle that the song addressed some of the interpersonal issues between him and Nicks. He thought that the song possessed a “nice” guitar solo and also maintained that “Landslide” was not a “signature guitar piece”.^[10] In a different interview, Buckingham discussed how he bristled at the notion that “Landslide” was associated with country music.

This is what can be done with just a guitar and a voice (I love Buckinham’s three-finger picking). Fleetwood Mac is one of those groups that sounds just as good in concert as on records, and this is a live version.

It’s a hump day (“Долоо хоногийн дунд үе (Лхагва гараг)” in Mongolian): Wednesday, September 16, 2026. A week from now I will have a new lens in my right eye (yep, I’m at the age for cataract surgery; wish me luck!). It’s also National Guacamole Day. Here’s Rick Bayless, a famous Chicago chef, showing how he makes it. He knows what he’s talking about. But I can’t abide cilantro, though (a common genetic mutation), and would leave it out.

It’s also Anne Bradstreet Day, Mayflower Day (the day the ship full of settler colonizers left Plymouth, England in 1620), National Cinnamon Raisin Bread Day, and World Play-Doh Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Once again at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal gives an upbeat view of the war between. the U.S. and Iran with respect to how the Iranian leadership is doing. I’ve bolded what I think are the critical conclusions below.

A very senior Israeli figure, now in civilian life, sat this week on the stage of the MEAD conference [a yearly summit between the U.S. and Middle East leaders] in Washington and recounted how, once again, the entire Iranian leadership was wiped out. A gathering of officers was set to convene on Saturday at 9:30 a.m., and then came word of a gathering of the intelligence ministry at 8:30. The problem this created was that they had to strike both at once to preserve the element of surprise — and the further problem was that the ministry meeting was slated to run one hour, meaning it would end exactly as the second meeting began. Someone came with a piece of advice: strike at 9:40, because intelligence officers everywhere always love to run long. His advice was taken, the officers ran long, and were blown sky-high in the middle of the briefing.

Conclusion: running long is not advisable. In short: in September 2024 the conference, with figures from the Gulf, the Middle East, and the US, dealt mainly with Israel’s difficulty subduing the arms of the Iranian axis. Sinwar was holding the hostages, Nasrallah didn’t know what was coming a week later, and no one talked about Iran itself. In September 2025, mid-conference, Israel tried to eliminate the Hamas leadership in Doha; the prevailing view was that someone needed to rein Israel in.

This year the conference was defined by the coalition against Iran. No disputes remained about the need to deal with it, or about subduing the regime of the ayatollahs as the single most important matter in the Middle East. The main conclusion is that the Islamic Republic is in far worse shape than it appeared when the memorandum of understanding was signed, but that its story will keep unfolding for a long while yet. Former Mossad chief Dedi Barnea estimated last year that effective sanctions would bring the Iranian regime down within a year. After roughly half a year of an American siege on Hormuz, the assessment inside the Mossad is that if the US doesn’t tire or break, the first quarter of 2027 will see Iran fall. “It’ll be a new Middle East,” a senior American promised.

Until a few months ago the consensus was that Iran had come out of the war with the upper hand, in light of what looked like a shameful capitulation by Trump and the abandonment of all the war’s aims. Almost no one still thinks so. “The supreme leader didn’t come to his own father’s funeral, his brother had to wear a mask — is that what the winner looks like?” wondered a senior White House official. It wasn’t said outright, but the assumption is that the pressure won’t ease — it will only intensify after the elections in Israel and the United States. If the Republican Party wins, Trump will feel freer than ever. If not, history teaches that presidents who’ve lost their grip on Capitol Hill and on domestic affairs tend to turn to foreign ones. Unshackled, with no more elections left in his political life, Trump could descend on Iran in a fury of wrath. What Netanyahu will be able to do, assuming he’s in a caretaker government, is a little less clear.

The Americans have other matters on their plate. A senior figure from the worlds of politics and technology warned at the conference that the whole world “is now digging its own grave through a misunderstanding of AI. In 20 years humanity could be wiped out by the combination of quantum computers.” He added that the only chance of survival is if the quantum computers conclude that they still need humans to supply them with electricity. If we’re going to be wiped out within 20 years anyway, then suddenly rebuilding Gaza and eliminating the Iranian nuclear program seem a touch less urgent.

Well, Trump could descend on a fury of wrath, but somehow I  doubt that. I do hope that we win this war, and that we don’t withdraw with our tails between our legs. And I hope the Iranian people are freed from being under the yoke of theocracy.

*Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that Trump cannot involve the government in screening ballots so that only “approved” voters could get mail-in ballots. It’s a big loss from Trump (the vote appears to have been 7-2), and he deserved it:

The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a Trump administration plan to dramatically change how Americans vote by mail in the lead-up to the midterm elections, a major loss for President Trump, who has long claimed without evidence that fraud is rampant in mail voting.

The ruling was a resounding win for Democratic-led states and voting rights groups, which had argued that the plan was unconstitutional and an existential threat to the democratic process.

The Trump administration’s efforts, they had said, would introduce chaos and confusion as early voting gears up in many states.

Still, the weekslong legal tussle over the issue may have sown its own kind of confusion, a victory of sorts for Mr. Trump as he seeks to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote in an election his party might lose.

In a one-paragraph explanation, the court’s majority wrote that the government was “unlikely to succeed on the merits” at the conclusion of additional litigation on the issue.

The majority’s order was unsigned, which is typical in emergency rulings. It gave no vote count.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, one of the court’s conservatives, wrote a one-paragraph concurrence. Writing for himself alone, he said that there was “at least a fair prospect” that new mail ballot rules issued by the Postal Service fell within its purview under federal statutes, but that allowing those changes so close to the midterms “would be arbitrary and capricious.” State and local elections officials, he wrote, would not have “sufficient time to reasonably implement” the changes.

In an eight-page dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that he would have allowed the Trump administration plan to go into effect for the midterms. Justice Alito called the legal challenge a “Hail Mary” pass that was unlikely to succeed and that he believed the administration would ultimately win the case because the Postal Service has “broad authority to regulate the mail.”

Even some Republican election officials cheered the ruling.

Ricky Hatch, the Republican clerk in Weber County, Utah, said he felt “relief.” Utah almost exclusively votes by mail, and Mr. Hatch had been preparing a contingency plan to abandon mail voting if the Supreme Court allowed the Postal Service to restrict the practic

The whole purpose of this, of course is to curb the so-called “voter fraud” that Trump pretends cost him the election in 2020. It didn’t, but he’s a big bully and is trying to throw his weight around. Fortunately, the Supreme Court—which the Democratic Socialists of America want to eliminate—curbed the bullying.

*Speaking of lawsuits, the Justice Department has found evidence that, despite the Supreme Court ruling of 2023 that race cannot be a factor in college admissions, UC Berkeley is still discriminating against white and Asian students in favor of other minorities. (The article is archived here.)

The University of California, Berkeley, discriminated against white and Asian applicants to its law school, the Justice Department and the Education Department said Wednesday.

The move expands the Trump administration’s effort to enforce its contested interpretation of a three-year-old Supreme Court ruling that struck down race-conscious admissions programs. It also escalates the government’s clash with the University of California system. All 10 of its campuses have come under federal scrutiny.

The Justice Department based its findings, in part, on applicant data provided by the law school, which it said showed that the school had a bias against Asian and white applicants and in favor of Black applicants.

Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil rights official, wrote in a letter to a lawyer for Berkeley that the patterns “could not reasonably have occurred by chance and provide substantial evidence of intentional discrimination.”

Berkeley fired back soon after the Justice Department released Ms. Dhillon’s letter.

“Berkeley is committed to ensuring that every student is admitted based on their merit, and not on their race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin,” the university said in a statement, adding that it would “spare no effort to provide ample evidence showing that the university complies with all relevant laws, policies and rules governing admissions.”

Everyone knew that colleges would try to get around the Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard restrictions, so this isn’t really a surprise. Harvard lost because it used hokey criteria to guarantee equity, deeming Asian students, for example, to be deficient in their personality traits. Now these data come from the law school, where it’s easier to judge merit-based admissions since the LSAT test is required.  But if Berkeley is wholly committed to merit-based admissions, why does it explicitly not ask for standardized test results like the ACT or SAT for undergraduate admissions?  And if applicannts do send those results, they are not considered. You’d think that a school that committed to merit-based admissions would want every scrap of information about merit it could get.

*Over at the Free Press, Amanda Knox is still milking her jail time in Italy in a piece on the Lindsay Clancy trial. She deals with the ludicrous conspiracy claim that Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s ex-husband, could have been complicit in the murder of their three children. And of course Know almost immediately manages to work her own case into the narrative. It starts with Patrick running the Boston Marathon to raise money for Boston Children’s Hospital, where one of his murdered kids was declared dead:

Here was a man who had lost everything, and wasn’t hiding it. At the time, strangers cheered his name along the course. But two years later, the internet, which spent this summer obsessively watching the trial for his children’s murders, dug up the footage and turned against him. Patrick Clancy was coping too well. This isn’t how someone who’s grieving should act. He should be too busy crying to train for a marathon. He must have done it.

Seeing this gave me flashbacks to the relentless scrutiny of my own behavior in the wake of my roommate’s murder in Perugia, Italy, in 2007, for which I was falsely imprisoned. There is no one “right” way to react to trauma, or to grieve, but when the lens of suspicion falls on you, everything is wrong. When I cried, they were crocodile tears; when I didn’t, I was cold and unfeeling. When I smiled at my family in the courtroom—a brief glimpse to let them know I was okay—I was a whore for the cameras.

Remember that her trial was in 2009. And notice how Knox continues to drag her own experience into the Clancy case:

It’s tempting to think conspiracy theories arise when it isn’t immediately clear what happened or who caused it, but that’s often not the case. Consider Sandy Hook, or 9/11: What happened was patently obvious. The same was true in my own case. Within two weeks of my roommate Meredith Kercher’s murder, her true killer, Rudy Guede, had been identified. His DNA was all over the crime scene, and inside her body; he’d left his fingerprints in her blood. And yet all of that incontrovertible evidence was displaced by a leery focus on my behavior; facts were ignored in favor of vibes. To this day, there are people who claim my acquittal was the result not of the collapse of the prosecution’s ludicrous case, but the secret machinations of Hillary Clinton. So it is with the Clancy case.

On January 24, 2023, Patrick’s wife, Lindsay, strangled all three of their children in their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, while Patrick was out picking up dinner and her prescription for postpartum depression. Nobody in the courtroom disputed that. Not the prosecution, not her defense lawyer, and not Lindsay herself, who pleaded insanity. Patrick was ruled out as a suspect in the first days of the investigation. The judge declared a mistrial last week, because the jurors couldn’t agree on a verdict.

But while the court of law tried Lindsay, the court of public opinion tried Patrick. Online sleuths have picked over every twitch of his face in the courtroom, every iota of footage that shows him going about his life, every decision he’s made since the death of his children. Online sleuths parsed the time stamps on his pharmacy receipt and the surveillance footage of him buying dinner, claiming that his jacket in the CVS video had a different zipper style (three-quarter zip as opposed to full zip) than the one he wore at the restaurant, and speculated that he had swapped his clothes to hide bloodstains. They theorized about the data on Lindsay’s Apple Watch, claiming it would be physically impossible for a person with a heart rate of 57 bpm to succumb to a psychotic episode. Some even consulted astrology: Lindsay couldn’t have done it because she’s a Leo, whereas Patrick’s a Gemini who almost has the same birthday as Donald Trump. Guilters seem particularly peeved with the fact that he’s remarried since the death of his children, and when paparazzi stalked Patrick and his new wife through the streets of New York, they treated every photograph as an evidence exhibit.

This is the conspiracy, in a nutshell: Patrick was having an affair. He drugged his wife, killed the children himself, and convinced her she’d done it when she survived having her throat and wrists cut and falling from a second-story window.

. . . I’ve had to deal with this unending focus on my behavior for nearly 20 years now, from the cranks on Reddit to so-called body-language experts parading their pseudoscience on YouTube and dissecting my every facial expression for signs of guilt, to best-selling and respected authors like Gladwell. It takes a toll.

Knox has nothing to add to the Clancy case; the putative guilt of Patrick Clancy has been dispelled over and over again. And we all know about Knox’s case because she wrote two books about it and has banged on about it endlessly in the media. If she truly was not guilty, then yes, she suffered a grueling and unfair ordeal and I feel sorry for her (she was in prison for four years).  But it’s time for her to move on. You might think she has, as she’s become a stand-up comedian. But what is her material? Her court case, of course, and her comedy deemed by the BBC to be “not very funny.”

*After strong criticism and the refusal of stadium owners to provide a venue, musician Ed Sheeran has dropped rapper Macklemore from his concerts. Before this kerfuffle happened, I didn’t know who either of them were, but I know now.  And the deep-sixing of Macklemore is due not to his tastelessness, but to  $$, of course.

The rapper Macklemore has been dropped as an opening act from Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour after he said “Free Palestine” onstage before performing a protest song at two concerts this month.

Macklemore, whose 2012 hit “Thrift Shop,” released with his former producer Ryan Lewis, helped the duo win four Grammy Awards, performed on Sheeran’s tour at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on Sept. 4 and 5.

“I wanted to stand up on here on stages and stadiums across America,” he said on the second night, “and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine.”

At the concert, Macklemore performed “Hind’s Hall,” his 2024 protest song against the war in Gaza, which began after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. In the song, Macklemore described Israel’s destruction in Gaza as a “genocide.” He also showed the track’s music video, which includes scenes from Gaza and student protests in the United States. “You can ban TikTok, take us out the algorithm,” he raps. “But it’s too late, we’ve seen the truth, we bear witness.”

Macklemore immediately came under criticism, including from the Anti-Defamation League and the group StopAntisemitism.

The Israeli-American Council published a petition online calling on Sheeran and the venues hosting his tour to drop Macklemore, saying that Macklemore had used “selective imagery, biased messaging and disputed claims.” The petition added, “Keep Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour about music — not political propaganda.”

Macklemore and the Messina Touring Group, the promoter of Sheeran’s tour, confirmed in statements on Monday that he had been removed from the tour.

In a statement posted online, Macklemore said that Robert Kraft, whose company owns the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium outside of Boston, where the tour is set to play, had been instrumental in his removal.

. . . “Ed also told me,” Macklemore continued, “that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.”

So it goes. Macklemore has the right to say what he wants in public, for that is free speech. But this is not public; it is a commercial venue and he can’t say anything he wants. Nor was it appropriate to criticize Jews in this venue. I’d say exactly the same thing if he criticized Palestinians. It’s a concert, not a political rally. But, as you can see below, he has some antisemitic tendencies, and if he’s going on stage dressed like Shylock, he can expect to suffer the consequences:

From the Independent via Twitter:

Macklemore’s statement apologising for his ‘anti-Semitic Jew costume’ has been accepted by the Anti-Defamation League, who work to protect Jewish people from prejudice.

The US rapper donned a fake dark wig, beard and nose for a Seattle gig last week, prompting accusations of racism.

But the 30-year-old insisted he did not intent to mock Jewish culture and that his offensive fancy dress was “random”.

“Random”?  Seriously? Can you believe that after you take a look at the picture of the Jewfaced Macklemore below? Think of it as equivalent to blackface, for which there is little forgiveness these days, no matter how long ago it occurred.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a good question:

Hili: Do bats see with their ears?
Me: Hmm, that’s an interesting way of putting it.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy nietoperze widzą uszami?
Ja: Hm, to ciekawe określenie.

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

From CinEmma:

From Silly Signs, Funny Signs, Dumb Signs, Stupid Signs:

From Wholesome Memes:

From Masih. Today is the fourth anniversary of the murder of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian beaten to death for not wearing a hijab (she’s called “Zhina,” which means “life-giving person” in Farsi. The translation of Mahsi’s tweet below:

Translation from Farsi:

We are on the eve of the anniversary of the state murder of Zhina and the start of the Mahsa Revolution, or the same uprising of “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Zhina was 22 years old when, on September 16, 2022—two days after her arrest by the Guidance Patrol—for the blows inflicted on her head, she lost her dear life. Her death became the spark of a revolution that, four years later, is still alive, and the government of the killers has still not been able to extinguish it. In memory of Mahsa, Nika, Abolfazl, and Sarina, and thousands of dear ones who sacrificed their precious lives for the freedom of Iran and its people. 💔✌🏻 #مهسا_امینی #زن_زندگی_آزادی

در آستانه سالروز قتل حکومتی ژينا و شروع انقلاب مهسا، يا همان خيزش «زن، زندگی آزادى»، هستيم.
ژينا ٢٢ ساله بود كه روز ٢٥ شهريور ١۴٠١، دو روز پس از بازداشت به دست گشت ارشاد به خاطر ضرباتى كه به سرش وارد كردند، جان عزيزش را از دست داد. مرگ او شراره انقلابى شد كه چهار سال بعد، هنوز… pic.twitter.com/W81TFBG4JM

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 15, 2026

From Luana. Harrison spoke at Williams College and Luana attended.  Healthy at any size!

Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s post-Socialism 2026 update is that he’ll be speaking at Harvard Medical School later this month on how fat bodies are “pathologized by medical professionals” and how doctors can more ethically treat fat patients. https://t.co/xB1a9jABpL pic.twitter.com/nAEYZWgTak

— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) September 15, 2026

A sad video from the Number Ten Cat on the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease:

Alzheimer’s disease is called the long goodbye. The loved ones of those afflicted with it are forced to surrender the people they love long before they die.

It’s a cruel illness that doesn’t care who you are or how much you’ll be missed and it leaves devastation in its wake.

My…

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) September 14, 2026

From Malcolm. Translation from the Portuguese:

The puppies playing peacefully until the one who really runs the house shows up and the mood changes completely.

os cachorros brincando tranquilamente até que quem realmente manda na casa aparece e o clima muda completamente pic.twitter.com/8TPVi9yaEg

— mauro henri (@xtinohenri) September 9, 2026

One from my feed. Winston is a very bad boy!

“Fuck’s sake Winston ” pic.twitter.com/FcLIKfErae

— Dyslexic_aDve (@Dyslexic_aDve_) September 15, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This french Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz. She was 9 years old. https://t.co/Og0XxRxFkz

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 16, 2026

Two from Doctor Cobb. First is his own take on space weapons:

We've just gone through the jump cut in Kubrick's 2001 where the bone hurled into the air turns into an orbiting nuclear weapon.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-09-15T13:27:52.632Z

And have a gander at these beautiful macaws:

@diche_mideros captures two red and green macaws flying side by side, their wings touching as they soar: #AGoodPlace

— Michelle says: Be kind. Always. ❤️ (@snarkysillysad.bsky.social) 2026-09-14T12:03:24.357Z

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Puckeldagen” in Swedish), Wednesday, September 9, 2026 and it’s National Teddy Bear Day.  Here is my teddy bear, whose name you should know if you’ve read this site for a while (put it below if you remember0.  The first person to send a photo of their teddy along with a few words of description will have it posted below. I got this bear when I was born, and here he is nearly eight decades later, battered, head sewed back on, new eyes, and nearly devoid of fur. That makes two of us (save for the head part).

Reader Normansent a stuffed doggy, but it’s close enough to Toasty that I’ll post it. His comments:

Not a bear, so this may not count, but this is Sooty. My cousin Michael, exactly 15 years to the day older than me, gave this to me when I was born. I’ve had it ever since and now have it in a display case. Its eyes are gone. Its stuffing is gone. But it’s still Sooty to me.

It’s also National “I Love Food” Day (why the quotation marks? are we only supposed to pretend we love food?), National Steak Au Poivre Day, International Buy a Priest a Beer Day, and National Wiener Schnitzel Day. Here’s a schnitzel mit Kartoffel I had in Israel of all places—in an Austrian restaurant where I was taken.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 9 Wikipedia page.

Again I note that posting will be light for a while. Not only do I have a writing assignment, but my insomnia has returned big time. And I’m still anxious about the ducklings, though I think they’ll be all right.

Da Nooz:

*Canada began putting new tariffs on American goods, and there’s no end in sight to this trade war (article archived here):

New Canadian tariffs targeting roughly $20 billion in U.S. imports officially snapped into place on Tuesday, the latest escalation in an increasingly costly trade war that has ensnarled two longtime allies.

The duties apply to a variety of U.S. goods, including clothing, cheese, metal parts and wood products. The approach is meant to mimic the taxes that President Trump imposed on Canada after trade talks between the two neighbors collapsed in acrimony last month.

For now, the economic effects of the tit-for-tat may be limited because the tariffs encompass only a small portion of the annual trade between the United States and Canada. The more pressing concern is a potential cycle of retaliation, one that results in even higher and more exhaustive duties that harm families and businesses on both sides of the border.

In Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney has sought to position himself as a bulwark against Mr. Trump’s trade aggression, describing his nation as “at war.” Canadian officials generally have pledged to respond “dollar for dollar” to any U.S. duties.

In Washington, the president and his aides have repeatedly mocked their Canadian counterparts and the size of their ally’s economy and military. Mr. Trump has already threatened additional tariffs on auto imports from Canada, and on Friday, he even suggested he could try to halt bilateral trade outright.

Then, hours before Canada’s new tariffs took effect, Mr. Trump took to social media to continue his attack. He singled out Bombardier, a Canadian plane manufacturer, claiming there would be “NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES!”

Bombardier said in a statement that aerospace products are a top American export and that the company makes crucial components like wings in California and Texas. “Bombardier is a strong contributor to the sector, creating tens of thousands of jobs across the United States,” it said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The spat with Canada offered the latest evidence that Mr. Trump remains as committed as ever to his disruptive strategy of trade brinkmanship. Despite nearly two years of blistering court defeats, vicious international disputes and mounting domestic blowback, tariffs remain the president’s preferred tool to try to boost domestic manufacturing and broker better trade deals.

Trump is not only dead wrong about tariffs, but is also alienating our friendly neighbor to the north. It galls me that Canadians may think that most Americans are anti-Canadian, but in reality most Americans have taken a dim view of Trump’s tariff rampage. This is not going to be good for Trump or the Republicans in the midterm elections.

*There’s a new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the now jailed creator of  the blood-testing company Theranos. The documentary, called “You Can See Everything”, is are somewhat secret as even the NYT doesn’t want to give away the spoilers, the film doesn’t open until October, and the trailer, below, is just over one minute long. (In 2023 Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in the federal pen.) An excerpt from the NYT piece, which is archived here.

Thirty-four days before Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the medical testing company Theranos, reported to prison to begin her 11-year sentence for defrauding investors, she invited a camera crew into her rented home in Southern California in an effort to clear her name. Yet the two people she chose to chronicle her life were Nathan Fielder, the absurdist comedian behind “Nathan for You,” and the documentary director Lance Oppenheim.

That decision turned into a three-year odyssey for the filmmakers and a three-hour documentary called “You Can See Everything” that may upend the documentary genre itself. The film had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in a secret screening on Sunday night that was not revealed until audience members took their seats. It will make its theatrical debut, courtesy of A24, on Oct. 16.

The movie features long, intense conversations between Fielder and Holmes with extreme close-ups. It also reveals that while Holmes serves her time at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, she and her partner, Billy Evans, are making plans “to launch a new and improved Theranos,” the company that collapsed after its deceptive claims about blood-testing technology were exposed in The Wall Street Journal in 2015.

What can’t be featured in on-camera interviews is depicted in innovative recreations. Two weeks before she leaves for prison, Fielder moves into the home and is there for moments many would consider off limits. There’s also a surprise plot point that shouldn’t be spoiled.

“I don’t know why I’m there,” Fielder said in a post-screening question-and-answer session at Telluride. Throughout the film he gives the couple many opportunities to turn off the cameras, he noted. “I’m really struggling to this day to understand what I experienced,” he added. “I’m excited for this movie to come out and for people to help me with what I experienced.”

That’s a plenty weird documentary, and the trailer, below, is equally weird.  I don’t believe for a minute she’s telling the truth; what she has to gain is burnishing her image:

As for “launching a new and improved Theranos, Holmes should forget about it. I think she may be forbidden to do that kind of stuff for a while, and who, in view of her deception and crimes, would invest in it?

*Here are the results of yesterday’s poll on Lindsay Clancy. There were some good comments, too. The votes weren’t numerous—another sign of the dying of this site—but to my surprise the most votes went to “guilty” with “not criminally responsible” in second place (as you can see from the yellow bar, I voted “no opinion or unsure” as I wasn’t on the jury and really don’t have an opinion).  As I note below, I think the jury was going to render a verdict like “not guilty by reason of mental illness,” which still would have put Clancy in jail for a long time.

As the NYT revealed, three of the jurors spoke and demonized the one holdout man who wouldn’t vote “not guilty” (article archived here):

It had looked like the end of deliberations in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy.

Eleven of twelve jurors had agreed not to convict Ms. Clancy. Then the one holdout “admitted he had reasonable doubt,” the jury’s forewoman, Roni Carlson, said in an interview with the television station NBC10 in Boston on Tuesday.

According to the judge’s instructions, if jurors had considered all the evidence but still had reasonable doubt about the charges against Ms. Clancy, they had to acquit her.

So Ms. Carlson, a retired teacher, started to fill out the three verdict forms, she said in the interview. She got as far as writing her signature on each sheet. But then, Ms. Carlson recalled, the holdout juror said, “I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.”

In the first public statements by jurors since the monthlong trial, Ms. Carlson and two other jurors opened up about the grueling week of deliberations in which the jury of nine women and three men were deadlocked, prompting Judge William Sullivan to declare a mistrial

Now I’m not sure whether “not guilty by reason of insanity” equates to “not criminally responsible for murder,” but I

Apropos, over at the City Journal Christina Buttons describes the effect that housing criminal defendants has had on psychiatric facilities (a lot more violence and assaults on staff). She favors a hybrid jail/treatment option:

States should take a different approach. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Stephen Eide argues that they should invest in psychiatric care inside jails rather than continually moving offenders into state hospitals. Jails already have legal obligations to provide health care, and competency restoration often consists of psychiatric stabilization along with teaching defendants enough about the legal process to participate in their cases. States can fund specialized restoration programs within secure correctional settings while reserving hospital transfer for defendants whose conditions actually require hospital-level treatment. The ACLU has opposed this approach, calling jail-based competency treatment “inhumane” and arguing that defendants should instead receive restoration in a therapeutic setting.

Eide’s proposal recognizes that treatment and criminal accountability can coexist. A defendant can suffer from serious mental illness and still belong within the criminal-justice system. Improving psychiatric care in jails would allow states to provide treatment without turning ordinary psychiatric hospitals into de facto correctional facilities. It would also preserve scarce civil beds and reduce the burden on staff and patients when hospitals are asked to manage forensic populations they were not designed to house.

The debate over Lindsay Clancy reflects the same tendency to treat compassion for the offender as incompatible with criminal accountability. Much of the public response has centered on her suffering rather than on the three children she killed. The same priorities appear in policy when the needs of offenders take precedence over crime victims, hospital workers, and psychiatric patients who committed no crime.

*The head of the Smithsonian Institution is stepping down, though he denies that Trump’s efforts to reshape the Institution’s message had anything to do with the premature retirement:

Bunch plans to depart by the end of the year, the Smithsonian said in a statement.

Bunch’s resignation comes at one of the most politically fraught moments in the Smithsonian’s 180-year history. Since March 2025, Trump has sought to purge what he calls “improper ideology” from its museums, while his administration has threatened the institution’s federal funding, tried to fire a museum director and challenged its authority over personnel and exhibitions.

But the president does not choose the Smithsonian secretary. That power belongs to its governing body, the Board of Regents, which is made up of high-level government officials, members of Congress and citizens appointed by Congress. As vice president, JD Vance sits on that 17-member board, which currently includes two vacant seats.

Bunch said in an interview with The Washington Post on Monday that the administration’s pressure played no role in his decision and that he was still ready to do battle to protect the Smithsonian’s autonomy.

“We’re at a time when people are challenging that independence,” he said, “but I feel very strongly that it is as independent as we were before, and that I will continue to fight — for as long as I’m in this chair — for the independence of the Smithsonian.”

*More renaming insanity from the President: Trump has now posted a map suggesting that the state of New Mexico be renamed “New America.”

President Trump appeared to suggest on Sunday that New Mexico should be renamed “New America,” prompting swift backlash from the state’s Democratic leaders over his latest effort to put an American stamp on geographic names.

On social media, Mr. Trump shared an image of a map of New Mexico with the word “Mexico” crossed out with a red X and replaced with “America.” The White House re-shared the image shortly after on its official X account.

The president posted again several hours later, with what appeared to be an A.I. video of him placing a label with the word “America” over “Mexico” on a “Welcome to New Mexico” road sign.

Mr. Trump has no legal authority to rename any state, which in New Mexico’s case is written into its Constitution. Any proposed change would have to originate within the state, a prospect that New Mexico’s Democratic leaders rejected forcefully on Sunday.

“New Mexico’s name isn’t up for debate — it’s been ours since before the United States existed,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham wrote on social media.

Representative Melanie Stansbury was more blunt: “Oh hell no!” she wrote on X, adding, “Our state’s name carries generations of history, culture, and family — and it belongs to us.”

Here’s the map Trump posted, though the El Paso Times notes that it originated at a parody account:

The “New America” map was previously posted on Sept. 1 on the parody account Daily Noud, which posted a fake image falsely claiming Trump had signed an executive order renaming New Mexico. Daily Noud account on X states, “These are fake stories.”

And the AI video showing Trump posting the new name. Are we taxpayers funding someone in the White House to make these videos?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili demands attention.

Hili: Did you really forget I was here?
Andrzej: Sometimes, when I’m reading, I even forget about you.

In Polish:

Hili: Naprawdę zapomniałeś, że tu jestem?
Ja: Czasem, czytając zapominam nawet o tobie.

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

From Stacy:

From Give Me a Sign:

From Things With Faces:

From Masih: a rapper was hanged for doing nothing besides peacefully protesting—the same old story in the odious theocracy of Iran:

Heartbreaking 💔

They killed a 21-year-old rapper in prison. No one knows how.

Erfan Mirzaei, a 21-year-old rapper arrested during Iran’s January protests.

His “crime”? A video on his phone showing that he had attended protests.

The regime used that video to accuse him of… https://t.co/c9aAYrM52P pic.twitter.com/BFqN2nwTwT

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 8, 2026

From Bryan, two views of Chicago from space (“LED vs sodium vapor”) showing our famous grid street design:

Chicago, USA 2024 vs 2003

The grid street layout of Chicago is immediately recognizable from orbit, and characteristic of many North American cities, and emphasize the change in color intensity. pic.twitter.com/JO1uRZBUyq

— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) September 7, 2026

From Luana, three minutes of academic insanity, this time involving “body fascism”:

🚨 Da’Shaun L. Harrison at Socialism 2026 argues that the policing of “Black fat flesh” is foundational to broader “entire systems of governance.”

“Without a population to discipline, there would be no BMI, no obesity epidemic, and no medical or scientific institutions organized… pic.twitter.com/GP4foaTgUJ

— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) September 5, 2026

Two from my feed. I probably posted this one before but, if so, here it is again. I love the sign!

In parts of Japan, drivers are warned to watch for cats that may suddenly run into the road

The signs are real, and I love how something so simple got such a memorable design pic.twitter.com/8L3LXsus2g

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) September 7, 2026

Only in Japan:

A DEVELOPER IN JAPAN CREATED AN APP WHERE A FAT CAT POPS UP ON YOUR SCREEN AND MAKES YOU TAKE A BREAK. pic.twitter.com/Tsrig5i8yJ

— Antidepressant Content (@depressionlesss) September 7, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was about six years old, and would be 88 today had she lived. https://t.co/WGOn13jthS

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 9, 2026

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, the most important job at 10 Downing Street:

Welcome to the most important job you'll ever have @andyburnham.bsky.social Cartoon brilliance by @bjennings90.bsky.social for @theguardian.com

— Larry the Cat (@number10cat.bsky.social) 2026-07-17T12:21:20.263Z

Matthew’s just published a brief biography of J. D. Watson in an Indian journal aimed at schoolchildren:

I just published a brief account of Jim Watson’s life, aimed at students. It leans heavily on the insights of @nccomfort.bsky.social, whose biography of Watson will be out next year. Free link here: rdcu.be/M91CnnE3N4wa

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-09-07T08:33:32.981Z