Welcome to CaturSaturday, August 15, 2026: shabbos for Jewish cats and I Love Cowboys and Cowgirls Day.  Here for the Sabbath is a photo of a Jewish cowboy that I post periodically. As I said when I last posted it, “A rare Jewish cowboy, photo in the Eastern California Museum in Independence. The last time I went the photo was gone and nobody knew about it or even remembered it. I’d kill to have it”.

He looks like he belongs in a yeshiva, not on a horse!:

It’s also the Assumption of Mary (i.e., the myth that she was taken bodily to heaven when she died), International Homeless Animals’ Day, National Best Friends Day, National Failures Day, National Relaxation Day, World Honey Bee Day, and National Lemon Meringue Pie Day.

Sadly, there will be no Caturday felids this week, but I haven’t given up on the feature; I just haven’t had time to prepare a good one and, as you know, comments are few. The cat items will, I hope, return in a week in full force.

I also urge readers to send me in some photos for the readers’ wildlife feature, which is already critically endangered. Don’t make me guilt-trip you by pointing out all the work I do for your enjoyment, and note that there is little reciprocity!

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 15 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Luigi Mangione, accused of killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, may plead guilty in his upcoming federal trial, which poses complications for his upcoming state trial on different charges (article archived here).

Here’s what we know about Mr. Mangione’s legal cases, and how his lawyers are handling them.

What charges is Mr. Mangione facing?

In his federal case, Mr. Mangione faced two stalking charges resulting in death. If he had not pleaded guilty on Friday, that trial most likely would have begun in January.

In state court, Mr. Mangione is charged with several counts, including second-degree murder, which could lead to a possible sentence of 25 years to life. That trial is scheduled to start next month.

Why are there two cases, and is that unusual?

The law does allow for someone to face state and federal charges stemming from the same alleged crime.

The federal charges were brought during the Biden administration, when the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York said the state prosecution would happen first. But shortly after President Trump returned to office, his attorney general said she would seek the death penalty for Mr. Mangione, signaling that her prosecutors were moving quickly to trial. (A judge later dismissed two federal charges, including one that carried a potential death penalty if Mr. Mangione was convicted.)

The judges overseeing the cases have each said that they are proceeding as if the case in their court were the only one.

What about double jeopardy?

From the moment Mr. Mangione was charged by state and federal prosecutors, his legal team had argued that being tried in both jurisdictions violated his rights.

“One plus one is two,” Mr. Mangione declared in February as he was led out of a Manhattan courtroom in handcuffs. “Double jeopardy by any common-sense definition.”

Legal experts, though, say that double jeopardy protections are not always clear-cut.

Now that he has pleaded guilty in federal court, his lawyers are expected to argue that under New York’s double jeopardy law, state prosecutors cannot try him for murder because the state charges stem from the same criminal act as the federal case.

However, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, could counter that the state murder case addresses a different harm than the federal stalking case, and that it should therefore be allowed to proceed to trial.

And that’s what I think the state prosecutor will argue; one case is “stalking with death” and the other is second-degree murder.  These seem superficially like the same charges, but the prosecution says “they are different harms.”  That may be a distinction without a difference, but the legal system will sort it out. For sure Mangione should spend a long, long time behind bars, and it would be a crime itself if he gets only a short sentence for “stalking with death” and the state case therefore can’t go to trial.  It may be that higher courts—even the Supremes—may have to sort this out, as New York has special laws dealing with double jeopardy.  Although Mangione is assumed to be innocent, if he strikes a plea deal he’ll have to tell the judge that he did the killing.

Ripped from the headlines: Mangione did take the plea deal and made the admission:

Luigi Mangione admitted on Friday that he shot and killed a health care executive, Brian Thompson, outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan in 2024, as he pleaded guilty to two federal charges of stalking resulting in death.

“I shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan,” Mr. Mangione told the judge. “I understood that my actions would place him in fear of death or bodily injury. I knew what I was doing was illegal.” Federal prosecutors said they would seek the maximum sentence of life in prison when Mr. Mangione is sentenced in December.

*Here’s a NYT article that bears reading: “Afghan women erased from public life in five years of Taliban rule” (article archived here).

The Taliban regained control of Afghanistan five years ago this week, returning to power after two decades and restoring an Islamic government that had severely restricted women’s rights.

In those few years, women and girls have been systematically erased from most public life, experts say. And, some add, the limitations imposed on half the population could hobble Afghanistan far into the future.

The harsh restrictions on women and girls are a return to conditions that prevailed the previous time the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, in the late 1990s. More than 160 decrees have been issued targeting women and girls, barring them from secondary and higher education and restricting their employment, movement, dress, speech and decision-making.

“No other country in modern times has dismantled the rights of half its population through law, policy and practice to the same extent,” the United Nations agency on women said on Wednesday. “At the same time, overlapping humanitarian and economic crises and deepening poverty are also having a disproportionate impact on women and girls.”

The official restrictions have reinforced social pressures, and many women say their communities increasingly press them to conform, a new U.N. Women report found, based on recent surveys. “Half a decade of escalating restrictions has narrowed where Afghan women can go, what they can do and how they can live,” it said. “The results are alarming.”

. . .Many Afghans surveyed expressed disappointment with the course of their lives in recent years. Still, women reported levels of isolation and distress that suggest a growing mental health crisis, the U.N. report said.

More than half of men surveyed — about 55 percent — said their lives were worse than they had expected they would be before August 2021, compared with 65 percent of women who reported a similar sentiment. But their reasoning was starkly different.

Male respondents reported frustration with a lack of economic opportunities, while many women also blamed reduced access to education, for themselves or their children, and rules restricting women’s jobs and lives.

. . . The report highlights the isolation many Afghan women now experience as a result of the restrictions. A vast majority of the women surveyed — 90 percent — said they must have a male family member’s permission to leave the house. And more than half said they went out only once or twice a month. Among male survey respondents, more than 95 percent reported leaving their homes daily.

The Taliban promised that women’s education would not be harmed when they took over, and I saw that as an arrant lie. And so it proved to be. Women can’t even get secondary education, and are.largely confined to their homes. There are two quotes I will add from the piece. First, “Afghanistan is the only country in the world to formally prohibit access to education for girls and women beyond the primary level.”  The only country in the world!  Second, ““The greatest danger facing Afghanistan today is not only that 20 million women and girls are being systematically erased from public life,” Ms. Ahmadi wrote. “It is that the world is slowly learning to live with it.” Indeed.

That is the saddest part. We must not forget the women of Afghanistan, and yet I don’t know what we can do about it except keep it before people’s eyes.  Do look at the photos accompanying the article. Every woman is in a burqa. This cloth sack symbolizes the way women have been sequenstered and forgotten under the Taliban. And this is, of course, because of religion.

*Over at the Washington Post, curmudgeonly columnist George Will makes fun of the University of Michigan’s new policy of not telling students their grades during their first semester—a policy designed to improve students’ mental health (see my report on it here, and the article is archived here).

This autumn, when the student-athletes who compose the University of Michigan’s football team are girding their loins in preparation for Armageddon, a.k.a. the Ohio State game, suppose some freshman players make mistakes in practice. They miss blocking assignments, fumble handoffs, run the wrong pass routes.

Do we think Michigan’s coaches will respond therapeutically? If they emulate the university’s administration, the coaches will soothe their freshmen by saying:

Golly, to err is human, to forgive is to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.” It is unfolding even among individuals who will not line up across the line of scrimmage from Ohio State’s stress-inducing student-athletes. As your coaches, our priority is to allow you freshmen to “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys.” So, we will not respond to your mistakes with extrinsic motivations — e.g., criticism. We coaches are here to help you transition to academia. Thrashing OSU would be fun, but first and foremost we are “investing in students’ well-being and growth by fostering a culture of connection and collaboration — rather than competition.”

Granted, the quoted words do not sound like coach-speak from those responsible for filling the Big House, the nation’s largest stadium (capacity 109,901). The words sound like what they are, an emanation of today’s academic mind.

They are from the official explanation of why, beginning in autumn 2027, classes in Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts will be pass/fail for first-semester freshmen, who will be spared the stress of final letter grades. The grades will be given but hidden. They will not appear on transcripts. And they will not be factored into grade point averages. The least surprising news from Ann Arbor, the self-described “Athens of the Midwest,” is that students like the new policy.

. . .The Chronicle quotes one expert who thinks Michigan’s change could relieve undergraduates of “undue” pressure. But how much, if any, pressure is proper if competition is regrettable, and collaboration and cooperation are aspirations?

And if the spirits of today’s presumptively fragile freshmen can be crushed by grading their work, will they mature out of this “formative” period by second semester? Or by senior year?

Other universities have or have had variations of Michigan’s new policy. Johns Hopkins University abandoned its policy when, the administration said, it delayed “development of study skills and adaptation to college-level work.” But delay is obviously Michigan’s spirit-protecting intention.

. . .Is it not possible that Michigan’s postulated “mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals” is a self-fulfilling diagnosis? Tell young people that their professors presume them to be crisis-afflicted, and young people might conform to authority figures’ expectations.

And if “intrinsic motivations” are sufficient for learning, and are, as Michigan implies, somehow superior to dictated motivations, such as grades, supplied by professors, the university itself seems almost superfluous. Other than as an excuse for the football team.

The more I think about this policy, the dumber it seems. It delays for a semester the regimen a student will face, and then throws them into the same maelstrom the second half of their junior year. It is coddling students when they should be pushed to grow up. But that should have started a lot earlier—in secondary school.

*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column at the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: For now, we polka.” Sadly, Nellie’s taking a break this week, this week’s column is really by Will Rahn.

→ Speaking of Abdul: Or AES, as he’s come to be known. Unlike Hong, he enjoyed the full backing of Bernie and AOC, who campaigned with him. He built his campaign around Israel (duh) and Medicare for All, which is the idea that a country that is rapidly running out of money for the current Medicare system will somehow expand it to insure everyone in America. (And by everyone, needless to say, I also mean all the people who are here illegally.) Much like the notion that Israel will somehow be replaced by a People’s Republic of Palestine, it’s all pure fantasy, the kind of thing you have to have attended grad school to be stupid enough to believe.

Anyway, AES, a stocky little landlord with a patchy beard and a lot of money, first came to national attention when he decided to campaign with Hasan Piker, the communist millionaire and Hamas enthusiast who plays video games in a suit, praises Mao Zedong, and allegedly (he denies it)electrocuted his dog on camera. Democrats, do you really want Chairman Dogzap to be your kingmaker?

→ A stupid new New York Times word: I love New York Times trend pieces. The basic idea is this: Find three people and/or one celebrity doing a thing that people have always done, and you can call it a cool new trend. Here’s one from 2011 on people eating chicken pot pie. Here’s a 2015 banger about people wearing T-shirts in the fall. And, from long ago, the piece that popularized the then-ubiquitous early aughts term metrosexual.

Now we have a new addition to the lexicon: Hobbyamory, which is basically just when single people have hobbies. Let’s allow the paper of record to fill us in on this hot new phenomenon:

[Some guy] is among a growing number of singles emphasizing multiple hobbies over dating. Rather than spending hours swiping and messaging on apps, these singles are investing their time, energy, and disposable income in passions like rock climbing, cake decorating, and cyanotype printmaking. They say their social calendars are packed, their friend groups are expanding, and their lives feel rich, with or without a romantic partner.

Wow! Hobbies! What a concept! And single people pursuing them? Stop the presses! Listen, as a guy who used to play a lot of Warhammer 40,000, a tabletop war game played with little space marines you lovingly build and paint, I can attest that there are many hobbyists who have never dated anyone. It wasn’t a hobby for cool, sexy people in the traditional sense—unlike my current, middle-aged-dad avocation, which is collecting Casio watches. . .

→ Speaking of lesbians: I keep hearing that the WNBA is falling apart. But what I find odd about this is for the first time in my nearly twoscore years on this planet, people are actually talking about the WNBA. As Peter Thiel reminds us, the biggest leap is from zero to one, and now all of America can name at least one WNBA player: the Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark. And then there are Sophie Cunningham and Angel Reese. The league’s been around for 30 years and it’s never been more talked about or more watched. It’s having its best season by just about every metric.

The “WNBA in disarray” narrative stems from the idea that the league is beset with fraught racial dynamics and the ongoing battles over transwomen playing in women’s sports. But it seems a win that we’re talking about the WNBA at all. Besides, I think these “scandals” have more to do with the people who cover the WNBA, who seem a little cuckoo. A USA Today columnist invoked the lynching of Emmett Till in a piece criticizing Clark. And Cunningham’s breakout year has, of course, had something to do with her belief that while everyone deserves respect, she doesn’t think biological men should play women’s sports.

The belief that people born male should not be allowed to compete against people who were born female is not a controversial one. Or, rather, it is controversial only among a very vocal segment of the population, namely radical activists and the aforementioned sports columnists. “Sophie Cunningham Got a Bitter Taste of Karma After Drawing Flagrant Foul in Fever-Sky,” read a Sports Illustrated headline on Saturday after Cunningham was clotheslined and bloodied on Saturday. (The publication, which had Cunningham pose in its swimsuit issue this year, later toned down the headline.)

Thankfully, the WNBA has put together a “task force” to address the trans issue and, potentially, solve the long-standing mystery of what a woman is. An answer finally seemed at hand. And then, Wednesday evening, the task force statement landed:

Today’s meeting covered a wide range of topics, including ongoing discussions on transgender athletes and the continued hate and vitriol directed at players online. We will continue to engage all league stakeholders in the coming weeks and months. We will approach these important conversations thoughtfully and in alignment with the values of our league. There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA and we strongly denounce the bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.

Okay! No answer yet on what a woman is. . . .

Yes, Rahn’s items are too long and nobody, no matter how hard they try, can imitate Nellie. Check back next week!

*The WSJ reports on Britain’s newest women’s chess champion, a girl only eleven years old!

Less than a minute remained on the clock during the biggest chess match of Bodhana Sivanandan’s short career last weekend, but to her, it was practically an eternity.

As Sivanandan stared at the board, with Britain’s women’s chess championship on the line, it took her all of 12 seconds to calculate the decisive move: a knight sacrifice that would result in her capturing the queen. Understanding what was about to happen, her opponent had little choice but to extend her hand and resign.

The only thing more stunning than the move was the age of the person who made it. At 11 years old, Sivanandan had just been crowned as Britain’s youngest ever women’s chess champion.

“I didn’t have much time,” she says. “But I had enough to see that move and look for it and make sure it was good. So I didn’t doubt myself.”

Since taking up the game six years ago, Sivanandan has emerged as one of the greatest prodigies chess has ever seen. She is already the highest-rated woman in England, and the sight of her toppling much older and more experienced men and women has become the norm. Last year, Sivanandan became the youngest girl to defeat a grandmaster in classical chess when she bested 60-year-old Peter Wells. She recently toppled France’s No. 3-rated player, grandmaster Marc’Andria Maurizzi.

“She’s an absolute rock star, regardless of the fact that she’s a young girl, and on pace to be one of the best players in the world, regardless of gender,” says Danny Rensch, Chess.com’s chief chess officer. “She has a presence of like, ‘I’m gonna kill you no matter what.’”

Sivanadan’s Wikipedia biography is here, and here’s a short interview with her. She is so young! And she’s so small she has to sit on a pad when she plays in so she can reach the board:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili seems to ask a silly question, but it isn’t so silly. Andrzej explains: “The flood that inundated the Sumerians was real, but it happened before biblical times, meaning before the ‘creation of the world’.”

Hili: I need to check something real quick.
Andrzej: What is it?
Hili: Was that biblical flood before the creation of the world, or after?

In Polish:

Hili: Muszę szybko coś sprawdzić.
Ja: co takiego?
Hili: Czy ten biblijny potop był jeszcze przed stworzeniem świata, czy już po?

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

From Stacy:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From CinEmma:

From Masih, another ridiculous persecution by the theocracy of Iran:

Authorities shut down a blogger’s Instagram page and opened a criminal case against her family for feeding stray dogs.

Their crime? A religious song was playing, a government chant used to fund religious pilgrimages to Iraq. They called it blasphemy. pic.twitter.com/tetqgkOsHu

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) August 14, 2026

From the Number Ten Cat. I presume that the inside of 10 Downing Street has air-conditioning:

Notice many people wearing fur coats today? This weather is no fun for cats. https://t.co/g2rFba7SO1

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) August 13, 2026

Now here’s a thought:

damn pic.twitter.com/bifQmovsHB

— 🇺🇸 (@spagati727) August 13, 2026

What is “Woke 1”?  Jeff Maurer discusses this, but I can’t see his full post on his Substack. Here’s what’s visible for “WHY was Woke 1?“:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently tried to giggle away Francesca Hong’s old tweets by observing that “Woke 1 was crazyyyy!” People’s heads fucking exploded in response to that. And I get it: Woke 1 — which people called “The Great Woke” before Woke War 2 — was not a giggle-worthy event if you lost your job, were socially excommunicated, or worse. And now AOC — who was a four star general in Woke War 1 — is breezily laughing off the era like she’s looking at a picture of herself in low-rise jeans and a Mumford & Sons t-shirt. You bet your sweet bippy that’ll evoke a “fuck you”.

Many people have used this moment to ask: “What was Woke 1?” Matt Yglesias gave what I thought was a good definition, Idrees Kahloon, Dave Weigel, and Michael Bahareen offered long-form thoughts, and Tyler Austin Harper gave us the view from inside academia. Personally, I’d define Woke 1 as “An attempt to use social pressure to coerce people to endorse far-left views.” Or, if you’d prefer a more jokey definition: “A reign of extremely polite terror carried out by people with ‘Be Kind’ stickers on their laptops.”

But I’ll let other people hammer out the definition — I’d like to ask: Why did Woke 1 happen? This was far from the first time that people have used social pressure to try to compel behavior — in fact, you could argue that a series of relationships designed to compel behavior is the very definition of society. Everyone would love to brow-beat others into agreeing with them — Woke 1 is now a proper noun because people succeeded to an uncommon extent. Why did that happen?

From James Maurer a good ad. Ken Paxton, you may remember, is running as a Republican for a U.S. Senatorial seat this fall, while Talarico is the Democrat who will opppose him in a race that looks tight.

This is a good ad and I’m guessing that it will become the template for all four-figure-pen-theft incidents in politics going forward. https://t.co/PT71XY5ozI

— Jeff Maurer (@JeffMightBWrong) August 14, 2026

From Malcolm; I don’t know why orange cats are supposed to be weird. All cats could do this:

orange cat behaviour 😺 pic.twitter.com/qGgSZzXgEw

— We don’t deserve cats 😺 (@catsareblessing) August 4, 2026

One from my feed. This was on the news last night. I hope the guy didn’t hurt the octopus; it looks as if it was okay:

A Filipino fisherman reeled in more than he bargained for, when an octopus attached itself to his face, leaving him battling to free himself of the tentacled troublemaker. pic.twitter.com/yohImNTOUi

— ABC News (@ABC) August 14, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was 9 years old and would be 91 had she lived. https://t.co/wIeZ3mrS6V

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) August 15, 2026

Two from Matthew. First, the search for Amelia Earhart continues:

TIL: This October, Purdue University is finally going to send its expedition to Nikumaroro (Kiribati) in an effort to definitively learn what happened to Amelia Earhart and her plane, which have gone missing since 1937.She departed Oakland in May 1937.www.usatoday.com/story/graphi…

— Cyrus Farivar (@cfarivar.bsky.social) 2026-08-14T17:04:02.165Z

Monkeys make interspecific friends; the article in Primates can be found here:

Monkeys make friends with other species, and that can tell us a lot about how keeping pets came about.Great article by @cyrilgrueter.bsky.social et al., reporting friendly primate interactions with a whopping 55 non-primate species!🧪🐒🐕link.springer.com/article/10.1…

— Joanna Bagniewska (@joannabagniewska.com) 2026-08-14T09:57:41.163Z

Here I am writing about Jews and words again, but I can’t get this issue resolved in my mind. I wrote about it before, and I still can’t find a construal of “anti-Zionism” that is not equivalent to “antisemitism”? I ask because people who throw the term “anti-Zionist” around, like Zohran Mamdani, adamantly deny that they mean “antisemite.” So that makes it okay for them to tar people as “Zionists” and deny that they mean “Jews.”  Or to say that “anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism”.

I figure it’s best to look at Jewish interpretations of the words, and the Jewish Center for Justice (JCJ) has a definition that’s similar to that of many Jewish organizations, as well as to the  (non-Jew-written) definition in the Oxford English Dictionary.  Here’s the JCJ definition:

Today, supporting Zionism means promoting the continued existence of a Jewish state and upholding the right of Jews to live freely in their historic homeland.

As I’ve said before, denying that this is antisemitism makes no sense, for the Jewish sovereign state is already in existence and if you don’t support Zionism then you are denying what already exists—saying, in effect, that the UN made a mistake. You are implicitly arguing that Israel should no longer exist. Yes, there are some Jews, including ultra-Orthodox ones, who don’t think Israel should exist, and you can say they’re anti-Zionist and not antisemitic, but I’d say these people are confused or addled by faith.

As for those who say “anti-Zionists” are simply those who think that Palestinians should have the vaunted “right of return”, that ship too has already sailed. For if that right were exercised as Palestinians mean it, there would be a “one-state solution” in which Jews would eventually either be killed or expelled. That is also antisemitism.

Zionism as a political movement came to an end in 1948, as Israel now exists. This is why I claim that anybody who throws around the term “Zionista” usually just means “Jews.”

Here’s what Grok said in answer to my question, “How many Jews are anti-Zionist: that is, don’t believe the state of Israel should exist?”

A small minority—typically in the low single digits to around 7% in major diaspora surveys, and near zero among Israeli Jews—with the absolute number in the low hundreds of thousands at most out of a global Jewish population of roughly 15.8 million.

Anti-Zionism here is defined (as in the query) as rejecting the idea that the State of Israel should exist, particularly as a Jewish state. Polling distinguishes this from criticism of Israeli governments/policies, emotional distance, or reluctance to use the “Zionist” label (which has become loaded for many). Self-identification as “anti-Zionist” and direct questions on Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish/democratic state track closely.

Quarrel with any policy you want held by Israel (save the right to exist and defend itself), and beef all you want about Netanyahu (you can join me in that). But doing those things is not antisemitism.  For sure anyone who said that Pakistanis or Iranians had no right to live in their countries beginning with “The Islamic Republic of. . . ” would be called “Islamophobes.”  And I’ve never heard that.

It’s funny: I’ve never heard anyone say that those who say that neither “The Islamic Republic of Iran” not “The Islamic Republic of Pakistan” have a right to exist are not called “Islamophobes.”

The weather is threatening a hard rain, and we not only received tornado warnings, accompanied by loud sirens, on our phones, but there’s a big siren blaring at the university.

But the ducks don’t care; this is their weather. In fact, all five were napping together on the Second Sacred Rock. It’s rare for them to all be sleeping, but it’s dark with clouds and Miss Duck decided to join her brood in forty (or is it 200?) winks.  Note how fast the ducklings are getting feathered:

The warning

I wasn’t quite sure what John McWhorter’s take on l’affaire Ardey would be, but given that he is sensible, heterodox, and has himself been somewhat sidelined by his circle of linguistic scholars, I’m not surprised that he doesn’t see the affair as demonstrating racism as much as showing “the soft bigotry of low expectation” towards black scholars. Arday, he says, wasn’t really a scholar, but a mimic who got by with calling out the racism of his peers.

What does surprise me is that McWhorter chose to publish his views in the City Journal, which is generally conservative and Right-leaning. I don’t know if he tried to publish it in his regular column in the New York Times, but I suspect that it wouldn’t fly there, even if he is heterodox.

Click below to read McWhorter’s take. I’ll give a few excerpts

Excerpts:

. . . Compared with some other examples of the genre, Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying. But he is nonetheless a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.

The main theme of Arday’s work is that racism is grievously determinative in the lives of black Britons; his Ph.D. dissertation describes racism that black scholars must grapple with endlessly. In presentations, his manner, in his usual way, suggests that no decent person could disagree with this take, and that in a just world he wouldn’t even have to spell it out. Racism’s ubiquity and power is obvious, and anyone who questions this has an ulterior motive (maintaining power, inability to process The Other as fully human, etc.). In this, what Arday has in common with Ibram Kendi is not just dreadlocks but an assumption that his view is one that everyone would share if not compromised by hatred of the subaltern.

The problem is that what is obvious is probably not very complicated—never mind that what Arday thinks is obvious is a vast and self-indulgent exaggeration. Within this mental universe, Arday’s academic focus was not on learning new things and fashioning new ways of processing existence but on criticizing others’ morals. This is not intellection but advocacy, and that is frankly much easier than thinking. The term “scholar-activist” tries to finesse this by making the two appear to be alternate forms of the same endeavor. But the scholar-activist is often more activist than scholar, and Arday was an extreme example of the type.

Nothing in his work suggests intense engagement with a body of data (Arday himself has claimed that because of his dyslexia, he can engage only one page of academic prose in a sitting) or with a challenging way of analyzing that data. In academia, what is interesting is the counterintuitive, the discovery. Arday merely reinforced long-established and simplistic pieties. He became the equivalent of a full professor at Cambridge based on doing interviews with acquaintances about the racism they experienced, and then largely just presenting what they said. At its highest level, this could be good (but not great) journalism; it could not be academic work. On the level Arday worked, my 14-year-old could best him after some quick training in Latinate, Judith Butler-esque prose.

Arday was defrocked after the revelation that most of even this incurious nattering in the guise of research was plagiarized from others’ work. Claiming that his supposed autism made him think that learning was mimicry, he composed most of his work from generous tranches of cut-and-paste from other sources, often (but certainly not always) lightly reworded. But even if this performance art disguised as thought were all his own work, his elevation to such heights by Cambridge was an abomination.

As I might say (with palms out and widened eyes), arguing for the obvious is not brilliance. Even when it’s about black people.

. . .Even worse than Arday’s work displaying no actual excellence is the consequence that characters like him wind up passing the torch to the next generation of black scholars. In a career spent in and around academia, I’ve seen this happen too many times. I refer to nothing like all black academics. But this is a vortex that young black scholars are sadly vulnerable to being pulled into, aided and abetted by white fellow travelers.

Especially if they have a certain stage presence, people like Arday attract mentees, who often value sitting at the feet of someone of their own race, who may understand their experiences more readily than other professors. But what happens when the Arday types don’t have anything actually to teach? Some of his former students are demanding redress.

Arday had no original ideas. He can’t teach someone how to write because his writing consists of, well, “mimicry.” (Even his resignation letter seems likely to have been generated by AI.) There are reports that—big surprise—Arday had no idea what actual teaching was and couldn’t be bothered with supervising students’ work, probably because he had never done any himself. People taught by versions of this type end up occupying an alternative academic universe, where cultural fellowship and advocacy are the North Star, and learning and curiosity get lip service but are beside the point.

When eager young black students gravitate to people like Arday, they learn that, for black academics, their race is more important than having anything to say. Sadly, white colleagues reinforce this by treating black academics this way at conferences and in hiring. One typical result: Carolyn Rouse being appointed president of the American Anthropological Association, despite her inability to answer civil but serious questions about charges of ideological takeover in her discipline with anything beyond verbal coleslaw. Arday was treated as brilliant for his self-involved, unfocused, underinformed drivel—and his resignation letter shows no awareness that anything was amiss about that.

I have to stop myself from reposting the entire article, as it’s eloquent and sensible. But you can read it all for yourself. McWhorter can get away saying this stuff because he himself is a black academic, though he’s somewhat suffered for his “anti-wokeness.”  Here’s a bit more from the long piece:

No, it is only because he is black that Arday was elevated in this way. The idea is that being black and triumphing over obstacles merits being appointed a Cambridge professor. This means that race determined his appointment.

. . .The youngest-ever black professor at Cambridge properly should have been a physical education teacher who did some after-hours tutoring. A make-believe academic who misspelled paltry as poultry in the title slide of a keynote address instead scaled the heights of Britain’s Harvard because of his skin color and his exceptionally long dreadlocks.

There is a certain mercy in the impression that he won’t perceive how those who elevated him saw him as a performing monkey. Still, it’s long past time for Anglophone academia to stop thinking that it’s immoral to evaluate black scholars on the basis of whether they are—get ready!—intelligent.

It really is time for academia to have a reckoning of this sort, judging scholars not by ethnicity or background but on accomplishment and merit. The first paragraph in the excerpt above, beginning “it is only because he is black that Arday was elevated in this way,” is something that everybody knows but that nobody—save “heterodox” blacks like McWhorter—can say.  It is an “Emperor has no clothes” statement that we need to discuss openly.

I should add that several black academics express the opposite view: yes, tthey say, there is a double standard in academia, but it leads to harsher evaluation of black than of white scholars (see this Guardian article). But given that Arday got by—actually, got so high—for so long with so little, that view doesn’t hold water.

I haven’t displayed a pair of cowboy boots here in a long time, but that’s because I’ve stopped buying them. I must now have over a hundred pair: one symptom of my addiction to buying certain items (viz. wine and cigars); but I’ve stopped.  I do take credit for getting Steve Pinker to recognize the merits of cowboy boots, which I consider the only attractive item of male footwear. Women have a gazillion kinds of attractive shoes, but men do not. Except for cowboy boots, I find men’s shoes either plain or downright ugly.

During my boot-buying phase, I got most of my boots on eBay, where you could get some terrific bargains, sometimes nearly new boots at about 15% the retail price. I’ve published photos in the past, but most have been removed in the Big Photo Wipe when I had to take down every photo over more than a decade because of copyright claims (I can’t selectively removed photos).

One kind of boot I stayed away from, though, are those made from endangered species.  The most prominent of these are boots made from sea turtle leather (they use the flipper). These were made in the U.S. and Mexico decades ago (they may still be making them in Mexico), but, as Grok tells us, selling anything made from sea turtle is now illegal in the U.S. Here’s a question I asked Grok, and its answer (along with references)

This Jesus and Mo strip, called “meter,” came with the caption, “A Friday Flashback from 2013, back when irony meters were a thing.”

I think Jesus is referring to this incident that Grok looked up:

In early 2013, Abbot Cuthbert Johnson, OSB (former Abbot of Quarr Abbey, advisor to the Vatican’s Vox Clara committee, and consultor to the Congregation for Divine Worship), publicly commented on the new English translation of the Roman Missal (third typical edition, implemented in English-speaking countries from Advent 2011).

Responding to an online survey by The Tablet on the reception of the translation, he said:

These remarks stood out because they came from someone inside the Vatican’s translation-oversight structures. The new translation (following the principles of Liturgiam authenticam) had been controversial among some clergy and laity for its more formal, Latinate style; Johnson’s comments were seen as an acknowledgment of criticisms about awkward phrasing or overly elevated vocabulary while still noting some positive reception. He also observed that English texts sometimes need adjustment for musical settings (drawing a parallel to permissions Solesmes Abbey had received for Latin chant).

Johnson (1946–2017) was a respected liturgist and musician who had worked in the Congregation for Divine Worship, contributed extensively to scholarly work on the sources of the Roman Missal, and in 2011 authored Understanding the Roman Missal: The New Translation (Catholic Truth Society), which explained and supported the revised texts.

Well, you have to work hard to find iron in there!

As always, we see the classic Mo behavior here: he exemplifies exactly what he’s criticizing.

It’s Saturday, and besides the Caturday felid post (coming up) we have a photo and three videos of Miss Duck and her babies having a postprandial rest on the rockes. This is the first weekiversity of their hatching, as they must have hatched last Saturday and made their way to Botany Pond in the morning. All four babies are doing well, and my hopes for their long-term survival and fledging have risen.

It’s typical for ducks, after a hearty feed, to find a quiet place to sleep.  Miss Duck and her Brood of Four like to rest on a rock at the north end of the pond, with Miss Duck taking a position on the ledge above to watch and guard the brood. First, a photo:

And three short (one-minute) videos of the ducklings resting.  “Rest” is hardly the word, for although they sleep, they also move around, stretch, wake up to have a drink of water, and flap their tiny wings.  Here’s a view of the whole scene”

A closeup of the resting brood. Notice the black feetsies extending out, the scratching and preening, and the nictitating membranes closing when they sleep.

Here they’re more or less sound asleep, and you can measure their breathing rate (I counted 32 breaths in 30 second for the duck in the foreground).  Notice the leg stretch 17 seconds in and a double leg stretch at 42 seconds.

I find watching sleeping ducks very restful, and could do it for hours (I often watch for the one hour that their naps usually last, both to relax and to prevent people from interrupting their nap).

Oh, and a first yesterday: I kissed a squirrel! They are now so tame they climb all over me to get a nut, whether or not I have nuts with me.  One of them, “Skinnytail”, crawls all over my body, climbing up my leg and sometimes perching on my shoulder. Yesterday he sniffed my ear and I could hear him breathe, and when his back was by my mouth, I kissed it to see if I could. This is a first! (Yes, you’ll think me crazy, but I don’t care.)