Wednesday: Hili dialogue

August 12, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Woensdag” in Dutch): Wednesday, August 12, 2026, and World Elephant Day. I can’t post my own pictures of elephants as my transfer to a new computer has temporarily left my own photos in limbo, but here’s one by David Hughes that appeared in a “Readers’ Wildlife Photo” post from 2024. The caption was “A mother elephant and her calf enjoy the wetter environment along the Khwai River”:

It’s also National Sewing Machine Day, IBM PC Day, National Julienne Fries Day (remember “Freedom Fries”?), Truck Driver Day, Baseball Fans Day, and World Calligraphy Day. In honor of baseball, which has been very, very good to me, I present one aspect of the game: a choice of the ten greatest Major League Baseball outfield throws of all time:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 1 Wikipedia page.

Posting will be light today as I have an appointment downtown. Bear with me; I do my best.

Da Nooz:

Breaking news ripped from the headlines:  At last a Democratic Socialist has been defeated. Francesca Hong, predicted to win, actually lost the governorship of Wisconsin to a moderate Democrat, though it was a squeaker and in another election a progressive won a nomination to run for the Senate:

David Crowley, the moderate Milwaukee County executive, won an upset victory for the Democratic nomination for governor in Wisconsin early Wednesday, prevailing over Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who had led in opinion polls but faced questions about whether she could win the swing state in the general election. Mr. Crowley will face Representative Tom Tiffany, a Trump-endorsed Republican, in November.

But another Midwest progressive, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan of neighboring Minnesota, won the high-profile Democratic Senate primary there, giving the party’s left wing a mixed showing on a busy night of primaries in six states. In South Carolina, Senator Darline Graham, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, advanced to a Republican primary runoff against Representative Ralph Norman, a hard-line conservative, to run for a full term in November.

In Wisconsin, Mr. Crowley, who had the endorsement of Gov. Tony Evers, scored a surprising win over Ms. Hong, a chef and state lawmaker who energized left-wing voters. But her candidacy worried moderate Democrats: Ms. Hong had come under fire for writing on social media in 2020 that Thanksgiving should be canceled, though she recently walked back the statement. She also supported abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and increasing taxes on people who make more than $750,000 per year.

Hong can request a recount since the margin of victory is less than 1%. More on her from the WSJ:

The 37-year-old state representative and part-time bartender backs legalizing marijuana to fund high-speed broadband. She also supports a state-run development bank, taxpayer-subsidized child care, government-run grocery stores, the elimination of all college debt, Medicare for All, a 32-hour workweek with no pay cut, abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, restoring voting rights to felons and the eventual elimination—or at least reduction—of prisons and police.

*The WSJ reports that the U.S. fired on a Panama-flagged ship running the blockade we’ve imposed on Iran. And we may have fired on another ship:

U.S. forces fired on a Panama-flagged ship that attempted to run the American blockade of Iranian ports early Tuesday, a U.S. official said, stepping up enforcement as the Trump administration attempts to squeeze the regime economically.

A U.S. military helicopter fired at the rudder of the ship after its crew ignored warnings from American personnel working to enforce the naval blockade of Iran’s ports, the official said.

There were no immediate reports of any casualties in the incident, which took place before dawn on Tuesday. The U.S. official said the ship appeared to be attempting to transfer its crew to another civilian vessel after the attack.

Earlier Tuesday, maritime security firm Vanguard reported that a Panama-flagged containership called Vela Nova was struck by a missile fired from a helicopter while transiting westbound through the Gulf of Oman about 71 nautical miles from the coast of Pakistan.

“The missile struck the vessel, causing a fire that was subsequently extinguished,” said Vanguard in an initial report on the incident. All 17 crew were accounted for, it added.

. . .The U.S. attack on the ship comes during a relative lull in hostilities in the war with Iran, including attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has choked off traffic with attacks on ships.

Control over the strait, the transit route for about a fifth of the world’s oil, has become the central sticking point in negotiations to de-escalate tensions with Iran.

. . .With talks toward a deal to reopen the waterway having been stalled for days, President Trump has turned back to the economic pressure of sanctions and the U.S. blockade.

Trump first declared a blockade of Iran in April before lifting it as part of an earlier deal to open the strait and start winding down the war in June. He reimposed the blockade in July after Iran started attacking ships again to assert its control over the strait.

As of Monday, the U.S. Central Command, which oversees American forces in the Middle East, had redirected 55 commercial ships, disabled two and boarded two to enforce the blockade. It redirected 194 vessels and disabled nine in the first round of the blockade as of mid-June.

Of course Iran is reported to have fired at a ship transiting the Strait on Monday, so I guess it’s tit for tat. The main issue is that the Strait, which should at the very least revert to how it was before the war, has become a sticking point in ceasefire negotiations—and that doesn’t even consider the nuclear stuff, which Trump put in the foreground in his initial announcement.

*New reports reveal that, when leaving a NATO summit in Turkey last month, Trump was smuggled out in a catering container on a military jet because of threats from Iran.

Top administration officials engaged in an elaborate deception to spirit President Trump out of Turkey during the NATO summit there last month, transporting him in a catering container to a military jet because of a threat against him and Air Force One from Iran, two senior U.S. officials said on Monday.

Mr. Trump and other officials had said publicly that he would be leaving Turkey on July 8 aboard one of the older versions of Air Force One rather than a luxury 747-8 donated by Qatar that he had flown in on. Mr. Trump told reporters at the time that he was making the switch for “old time’s sake.”

Mr. Trump boarded the older plane from the left-side door in view of cameras, and news organizations, including The New York Times, reported that he had traveled on it to Britain, where he switched back to the newer plane. The Times reported at the time that the decision was driven in part by concern about the security of the new plane donated by Qatar, which had not been equipped with all of the defensive capabilities of older versions.

But instead of flying out aboard that older, powder blue, modified 747, Mr. Trump was whisked off that plane via a catering container that had been lifted to the opposite side of the plane from where the journalists traveling with him boarded, one of the U.S. officials said. The president was then taken to a third plane, which he flew in secret to Britain, the official with knowledge of the matter said.

Reporters on the older plane were not told that Mr. Trump had not flown with them from Turkey to an air base in Britain, making them unwitting participants in the ruse and leaving them, along with some White House staff members, to serve as unknowing decoys.

After Mr. Trump arrived in Britain, he was secretly moved back to the older version of Air Force One. He then disembarked in view of reporters and walked across the tarmac to the plane donated by Qatar, which he flew to Washington.

The elaborate plan appears to have been developed in a matter of hours after officials determined that a threat against Mr. Trump from Iran was credible. It came after years of threats against Mr. Trump from Iran and amid the war he launched against that country. And it was an unusual instance of the public being deceived about a president’s whereabouts.

I have to say that this is pretty clever, though the thought of Trump being ferried to a fighter inside a big steel box of cookies and Diet Coke is amusing, though it may be his idea of paradise!

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal reports that “Trump gets the nuclear dust“. This refers to a felicitous removal of nuclear material from Syria, of all places.

It’s Tuesday, August 11, and with Israeli help, the Trump administration has reached a deal to denuclearize an Islamist nation: Syria. According to Axios’ Barak Ravid, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will soon remove nuclear material stored at a clandestine site in the country.

But first, context.

It was 2007, a simpler time, when disabling a nuclear program and deterring a genocidal dictator from rebuilding it took a single resolute strike. Israel showed the evidence of a secret reactor to the Bush administration, hoping for support. At the time when the Bush administration feared the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” the way today’s administrations fear “boots on the ground,” Israel went it alone. It destroyed the reactor in Operation Out of the Box, and in the aftermath the United States, Israel, and Syria all officially pretended nothing had happened. Syria denied the reactor had ever existed—even after IAEA inspectors found evidence of undeclared nuclear material and declared the country in noncompliance with the NPT.

Bring us to the late days of 2024 when the Assad regime collapsed, Israel—suspicious of the ex-jihadist government that replaced it—set about crippling Syria’s military. A country it wouldn’t trust with fighter jets it certainly wouldn’t trust with nuclear material, so it kept the old reactor site under watch.

According to the report, that monitoring picked up movement around the site a few weeks ago—enough to suspect the new government was reneging on understandings and trying to reach the nuclear material. Israel wasn’t going to let that stand. It told the Trump administration it would strike the site again if the material wasn’t removed, or if there were any sign Damascus was trying to get to it.

Syria’s new government, for its part, is eager to clear away the sensitive files it inherited from Assad—the nuclear and chemical weapons programs chief among them—that could sabotage its bid to rehabilitate the country’s international standing. The ultimatum handed it the perfect opportunity to look responsible, especially set against other Islamist states in the region.

This is great news. The last thing we need is another unstable Middle Eastern country with nuclear weapons. But Syria, unlike Iran, is not sworn to destroy Israel. It doesn’t like Israel, but is hewing to a non-conflict status with respect to the Jewish state. So, it’s pretty good.

*Trump’s and RFK Jr.’s war against vaccines continued, as Trump signed an executive order recommending fewer vaccines and more spaced-out immunizations. Health experts object strenuously.

For the third time in less than a year, President Trump on Monday issued an executive order that calls for American children to be routinely immunized against fewer diseases, as they are in countries like Denmark.

The latest version embraces more explicitly than its predecessors a revised schedule that recommends immunizing children against 11 diseases, rather than the 17 that are currently recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The order also “directs the attorney general to advance legal challenges against states that violate children’s rights to religious or medical vaccination exemptions,” Mr. Trump said.

Speaking in the Oval Office before signing the executive order, Mr. Trump said he was motivated in part by concerns over whether vaccines were tied to autism, even though dozens of studies have found no link between the two.

It is unclear whether the order has any legal power. Vaccine recommendations in the United States are made by a committee of experts who advise the C.D.C., and are then adopted by the agency’s director. But only states can require vaccinations for children to enter school or day care.

The administration’s previous attempt at implementing a shorter vaccination schedule was already frozen once by a federal court. That ruling is part of a continuing lawsuit, brought by medical organizations, that argued that the administration did not follow proper procedure and that it made “arbitrary and capricious” decisions. A judge agreed with that claim, saying the government had bypassed the careful, evidence-based practice that has traditionally underpinned vaccine recommendations.

“This is not likely to address the court’s concern, and is not a legally valid way to fill the statutory requirements about vaccine recommendations, it’s just not,” said Dorit Reiss, an expert on vaccine policy and law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.

The president cannot legally circumvent the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which is empowered by Congress to make vaccine recommendations, she said. Attempts to enforce the order are likely to run into the same legal challenges, Ms. Reiss said.

I’m heartened that Trump cannot circumvent the immunization committee, and that experts are criticizing this order:

Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that harm was “inherent” in the executive order, because ignoring evidence-based vaccine recommendations would lead to more children getting sick.

The executive order recommends splitting the vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella into individual shots, rather than administering them in combination as is now the case. “Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal, and separately, it looks like they are not at all lethal, but just very effective,” Mr. Trump claimed on Monday.

There is no evidence that the M.M.R. shot is lethal, and many decades of evidence for its overall safety. The combination shot has been associated with a small risk of seizures if a child develops a fever, but that type of seizure does not cause long-term harm, according to the C.D.C.

Individual vaccines are available in some countries, but would need to be tested in the United States before they can be administered.

My only question is why some European countries recommend fewer vaccines than the U.S. Are some diseases less prevalent in those countries? Regardless, I presume there is evidence underlying the recommendations of the immunization committee, and Trump should keep his nose out of places where it doesn’t belong, like medical advice. He’s the President, not a doctor.

*“In the U.S. we don’t hear much news about author J. K. Rowling, but she’s still busy defending women’s rights from her home in Edinburgh. Quillette summarizes her latest campain in an article called, J. K. Rowling vs. Amnesty“, with “Amnesty” being Amnesty International.  Here’s what’s happening:

On 31 July, Amnesty International publicly apologised for publishing an “anti-rights” briefing at the heart of a weeks-long public clash with author J.K. Rowling. The document, “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK,” purported to map a nationwide “anti-rights ecosystem” that included Beira’s Place, the Edinburgh sexual-violence support service established by Rowling in 2022. Transgender-rights activists have long criticised the charity for excluding transgender women from its services.

Rowling was having none of it, and she launched a scathing public attack on an NGO that she said has “become a tyrant that persecutes those who don’t espouse what it decrees acceptable beliefs.” She invited any of the groups named on what she called Amnesty’s “blacklist” to apply to the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund for legal support. Amnesty quickly realised that it had picked the wrong fight. Its earlier, carefully calibrated expression of “regret” collapsed into a full mea culpa; it withdrew the briefing. The document had been uploaded by mistake, the organisation said, bypassing its established and normally rigorous internal-review processes. An internal investigation was announced, to be followed by an independent external review.

Her tweet:

At a glance, Amnesty’s climbdown seems to close a brief but turbulent chapter in the history of one of the world’s most influential human-rights organisations. But if it hopes that its procedural explanation will satisfy critics and end scrutiny of its operations, it is mistaken; it only raises more questions. How, for instance, does a document of this significance—which named more than a hundred British organisations and might have seriously damaged their reputations and funding—reach publication without passing through the oversight that Amnesty claims it applies to all its work? And if that process failed here, why should anyone assume that it has not failed elsewhere?

As senior editor at Human Rights Watch (HRW), I saw the machinery behind major human-rights publications up close. It beggars belief that a complex document like this one about a highly sensitive issue simply slipped out of the door unnoticed. A less fantastical explanation is that it was not a rogue briefing, but the most legally exposed expression of a settled institutional view. In May, Amnesty published a related report titled “Like a Snowball: The Growth and Impact of the Gender-Critical Movement in the UK,” which included comparable characterisations of many of the same organisations and was finally withdrawn on 31 July. Also withdrawn was a parliamentary briefing produced for Pride Month this year that likewise described 51 gender-critical organisations as “anti-trans.”

Amnesty’s approach in the Rowling affair followed the familiar NGO playbook that has allowed human-rights organisations to survive crises for decades to preserve their moral authority and avoid meaningful accountability. First, downplay the incident by framing it as a regrettable breakdown in an otherwise scrupulous system; second, promise an investigation; third, wait for the news cycle to move on. But maybe that won’t work this time. Is it too much to hope that Rowling’s stand-off with Amnesty will finally produce a reckoning for an increasingly unaccountable sector?

Amnesty has, of course, also demonized Israel:

We found that the conclusions of NGO investigations were sometimes determined before completion, including Amnesty’s 2024 “genocide” report, which was already moving through internal systems under its pre-agreed heading while research was supposedly still underway. We also found that research was bent to the demands of ideology, buried, or delayed for political reasons. While Amnesty issued a report accusing Israel of “genocide” a year after Hamas’s 2023 massacres, it took more than two years to release a report on the 7 October atrocities. Internal documents show that staff were concerned an earlier publication date might generate sympathy for Israel.

Other NGOs like Doctors Without Borders have been subject to the same ideological capture. Amnesty can be added to the list of agencies that you might not want to donate to. As for Rowling, she abides and persists.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is concerned. Did Szaron eat the spider?

Hili: There’s been a dead fly in that spiderweb for two days.
Andrzej: So what?
Hili: I’m afraid someone ate the spider.

In Polish:

Hili: W tej pajęczynie od dwóch dni jest martwa mucha
Ja: I co z tego?
Hili: Boję się, że ktoś zjadł pająka.

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

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From CinEmma:

From Things With Faces:

From Masih; another female political prisoner about to be executed:

From Maarten Boudry, another piece about performative academic purity tests, this time at Bates College in Maine (Atlantic article here).

The Number Ten cat points out a coincidence:

One from Malcolm, who says this is not for him. But I’d ride it!

One from my feed. I love border collies!

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Matthew. The first one shows a dying person hoping for reincarnation as a better being. There are others in the series, but I like this one best.

— Skol Squatch (@skolsquatch.bsky.social) 2026-08-11T03:59:47.223Z

Once an eyesore, The Headington Shark is now a national treasure:

The Headington Shark, installed 40 years ago, initially a source of anger, confusion, complaints then extended legal combat with the council, now on an Historic England register due to the efforts of that same civic body.📷 Roger Close

— Bruce Gorrie (@bsrg1.bsky.social) 2026-08-11T16:57:48.106Z

Naps and tornadoes

August 11, 2026 • 11:00 am

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

John McWhorter on Jason Arday

August 11, 2026 • 10:00 am

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.

The folly of the DSA

August 11, 2026 • 8:30 am

If you already think the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are bad, have a gander at this interview.  An article in the Times of Israel (click screenshot below) summarizes a New Yorker interview, also on video (below), with Megan Romer, current co-chair of the DSA. As you know, DSA members or affiliates are winning important Democratic primaries throughout America, and so, especially if you’re a Democrat, you’ll want to know their platform and their leadership. (The platform is summarized here in a post about it.)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are the members of the DSA in Congress, but come November there will likely be more. (I do predict that the ambitious AOC will quit the DSA and become a Democrat plain and simple.) Bernie Sanders identifies as a Democratic Socialist but is not a DSA member.  Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, is also a card-carrying member.

And remember the follies of their platform, which include abolishing the Senate, replacing the Presidency and the Supreme Court with an organization subservient to a unicameral legislature, and putting all the means of production (including large corporations) into the hands of the public, as well as eliminating bills, providing free and equal housing for all, and, of course, getting rid of Israel.  But the ToI below gives a summary

The ToI article is mostly about the DSA’s damnation of Israel and support of Hamas (!):

The co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has defended rallying in support of Hamas and disputed Israel’s right to self defense during a recent interview.

Megan Romer, the United States’ national co-chair of the DSA, told The New Yorker in an interview published Friday that she “probably would have” joined an anti-Israel rally in New York City the day after the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel, had she lived in the city.

“One day after the slaughter of 1,200 people and taking of over 200 hostages, you would have come and rallied behind Hamas?” New Yorker editor David Remnick asked Romer.

“I think that October 7th was largely inevitable. If you put people in an open-air concentration camp and you deprive them of rights, of dignity, of food, of the ability to live in safety, you have to expect that they are going to not take that for that long,” she said.

If there was ever a Palestinian state, it was Gaza, and any restrictions on travel out of Gaza (also imposed by Egypt) were the results of Hamas, which governed the territory, spent its money building tunnels, and fostered terrorism. In fact, the October 7 attack on Israel did express dissatisfaction, but not with the governance of Gaza (blame those problems on Hamas), but with the existence of Israel, which Hamas has sworn to destroy.  A bit more from the ToI:

At the October 8, 2023, rallies in New York City, anti-Zionist protesters chanted in support of Hamas killings, mocked and threatened Jewish counter-demonstrators, celebrated the taking of Israeli hostages, and called for the destruction of Israel.

Romer is one of two co-chairs of the national DSA, making her a central figure in the ascendant far-left movement, which has made anti-Zionist activism central to its politics.

. . . The DSA candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won her congressional primary in New York City in June, attended the rally. Chevalier refused to condemn Hamas or the October 7 attack during her campaign.

Romer told The New Yorker that any defense or economic support for Israel was a “solid red line” for the DSA, and that the movement sought a “free Palestine with the capital in Jerusalem,” which she described as a “one-state solution.”

As you’ll see from the 30-minute New Yorker interview with Romer below, she is either ignorant of many things she should know, or she refuses to be specific about what the DSA thinks. But it’s clear that she’s an anti-Zionist (e.g., antisemite) and favors the erasure of Israel. More from the ToI:

Romer was unfamiliar with former US president Bill Clinton’s Camp David Summit, during which Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat walked away from a proposed Palestinian state.

Asked if she would have been “satisfied” with the terms at the Camp David Summit, Romer said, “I don’t know them off the top of my head.”

She also disputed Israel’s right to defend itself, saying, “People, humans, peoples have the right to life in safety. But if that safety means doing genocide to somebody else, then no, that’s not defensible.”

Of course she doesn’t define “genocide”, so it’s not clear what, if anything, Israel could have done after October 7 to defend itself against Hamas’s terrorist attack. She simply implies that Israel didn’t defend itself “properly” because it committed “genocide”. Philosopher Maarten Boudry has a much better take on this issue than Romer.

The New Yorker also pressed Romer about supporting both “queer-friendly” politics and the anti-LGBTQ Hamas.

“I would not call Hamas queer-friendly. I would not say that you can get a lot of social rights when you’re under siege,” she said.

Again. with the excuses: Hamas has to kill gay people because Gaza was “under seige”, ego they had to throw gay people off buildings. Does that make any sense? No, it’s just an excuse for the excesses of Islamist governance.  Finally, she refuses to condemn Hamas, and a refusal to condemn terrorism doesn’t bode well for DSA’s governance of the U.S.

Romer also defended Hamas in 2024, saying that “no socialist should” condemn the terrorist group.

The ADL has its say.

The Anti-Defamation League said Romer’s rhetoric “puts every Jewish American at risk” due to her justification of violence against the Jewish state.

“The DSA co-chair does not and will not condemn a US-designated foreign terrorist organization responsible for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and whose charter calls for the destruction of the state of Israel,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement.

But listen to this half-hour video, which should both appall you and frighten you. Ms. Romer is one of the two heads of the DSA.  She’s questioned by David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who does a good job trying to get her to be explicit about her beliefs and the DSA platform.  The ludicrous views she espouses are masked by her genial demeanor, and is further hidden by her claims that much of the DSA’s platform will be enacted at some time in the future (e.g., getting rid of the police)

Now much of what the DSA wants is in principle admirable, like public medical care and and end to the Electoral College. The problem is how to do this. But much of the rest of their platform involves amending the Constitution, which, according to Remnick,  has a chance of “about zero.” As for getting rid of Israel and supporting Hamas, well, you know my position on that, which is that it both instantiates and demonstrates anti-Semitism.

I oppose the DSA for several reasons. It wants to abolish capitalism, which, though the system has some bad effects, can be modified to ameliorate those effects (Social Security and Medicare).  It wants to get rid of America’s balance of power, a crucial aspect of American government that has served us well. It wants to get rid of cops and prisons, and no government in the West had done that or wants to—the effects are predictable, as seen in the 1969 M0ntreal Police Strike.

And it wants to get rid of Israel and, for all I know, the Jews. The DSA is not yet at the stage of camps and gassing, but already Canadians are leaving their country because of antisemitism and repairing to Israel.  If the DSA controlled America, we’d see a similar exodus.

Finally, as a Democrat, I think the DSA will fracture and perhaps destroy the Democratic Party, ushering in Republican governance, something I don’t want. Already prominent centrist Democrats, like Rahm Emanuel and J. D. Pritzker, my own governor, are holding their tongues about the DSA and its anti-Israel policies.

Although the DSA doesn’t represent most of the Left, they are loud, promise Pie in the Sky, and above all are performative, talking a good game but not accomplishing much. They are not really “democratic socialists” in the European sense: capitalist democracies with some socialistic aspects. Nope, they are Marxists, pure and simple, and I will not vote for one.

h/t: Bat

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

August 11, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day, Tuesday, August 11, 2026, and Ingersoll Day, celebrating  the life of “The Great Agnostic,” born on this day in 1833 (died 1899). Today he’d be called “The Great Atheist.” Ingersoll was an eloquent speaker, great writer, and by all accounts, a genial and lovely man.  My favorite quote from Ingersoll, which I often used on lectures about the incompatibility of science and faith, is this:

“There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: ‘Let us be friends.’ It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: ‘Let us agree not to step on each other’s feet’.”

Here he is:

Photo by Matthew Brady, public domain

It’s also National Panini Day, National Raspberry Bombe Day, and National Raspberry Tart Day.

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

Da Nooz:

*The Strait of Hormuz remains a sticking point in the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran.  Trump thought the opening was imminent, but that wasn’t Iran’s plan.

For weeks, President Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory in the Iran war should Tehran fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, even floating the idea privately to senior aides that he’s willing to walk away without a nuclear deal, U.S. officials said.

But that scaled-back objective became more difficult when Iran insisted Saturday on its highest price yet for permitting the free flow of traffic in the waterway, seeking billions of dollars in U.S. payments, the removal of American troops from the region and an end of the U.S. naval blockade, among other things.

This rapid chain of events suggests Trump’s options for walking away from the conflict have again narrowed. Trump has repeatedly threatened—and then backed away from—a massive escalation of its bombing campaign. But the recent chaos in negotiations signaled Tehran is prepared for a long and grinding conflict.

“Iran’s recent hardline demands for reopening the strait make it increasingly difficult for the president to manufacture a face-saving off-ramp from the conflict,” said Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Gregory Brew, an Iran expert at the Eurasia Group consulting firm, said, “The Iranians fully believe Trump wants out and is focused on opening the strait, which is why they are playing hardball.”

Hanging over diplomatic talks since April has been the White House’s ultimatum that Iran will never obtain a nuclear weapon. Trump sought to include nuclear talks as part of broader negotiations with Iran, but those have proven too difficult, leading the White House in recent weeks to focus more on reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

There we have it: Trump is willing to “walk away without a nuclear deal”—the deal he said was the most important issue for the U.S. Iran was never going to get nuclear weapos,  Well, forget about that; all he wants now is an open Strait of Hormuz, and you don’t have to be a genius to realize that Iran is going to delay that and deny it. This “war” may last a while, but Trump will never be able to declare victory on the terms he wanted.

*Now here’s a clickbait headline in the NYT (click to read, or find article archived here):

An excerpt:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York posted a series of video clips on social media Saturday night saying that she would freeze her eggs despite what she called a “political risk” for sharing her decision.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 36, a Democrat who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, made the announcement hours before saying in a TV interview Sunday that she is open to running for president or the Senate.

“There is very strangely a political risk, or a political tax, that comes with sharing this info,” she said of her decision to freeze her eggs. She added that she had shared the information “to show more depictions of women having full lives in every context and every choice.” The announcement further fueled speculation on social media that she is gearing up for a presidential run.

Asked on ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday morning if she would consider a White House bid, she said, “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” adding that she was “humbled” by the support she is receiving.

She also suggested she would consider running for the Senate seat held by the minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, telling host Jonathan Karl that “anything is possible at this juncture.” But, she added, “I think that we have a responsibility to remain focused on the midterms and not on our individual aspirations or plans.”

Her interview Sunday — her first appearance on a major Sunday news show since 2024 — marked her most public suggestion yet of aspirations for higher office. First elected in 2018, she rapidly became a top voice in her party’s ascendant progressive wing.

While Ms. Ocasio-Cortez identifies as a democratic socialist, she distanced herself in the interview from some of the more radical positions of the Democratic Socialists of America. Asked if she supports all of the tenets of the group’s guiding document, including abolishing the Senate, police and prisons, she said no. She also said she was a member of her local D.S.A. chapter, but not the national group.

I don’t care if she freezes her eggs or not, and I don’t understand why anybody else should care, either. The time has passed when women would be criticized for deciding not to have children, or for delaying that decision. What bothers me instead about AOC is her arrant careerism, combined with no sign that she has leadership abilities to warrant elevation to the Senate, much less the Presidency.  From the beginning it was clear that she wanted a Big Time Political Position, but she’s been primary sponsor of zero bills that have become law, though she’s been a co-sponsor of such bills, and has introduced minor amendments that became law. Her main activity in Congress apepars to be self-promotion. And I predicted that she’d back away from her Democratic Socialist positions when she realized that would impede her rise to the Senate. That is exactly what she’s doing now.  If she does run for higher office, I hope she gets primaried.

*The Wall Street Journal describes a squabble among Democrats over the huge welfare scandal in Minnesota,

Democrats are lashing out at fellow Democrats for the nation’s largest pandemic-era welfare fraud, theft that handed Republicans a potent example of government waste from Democratic mismanagement.

In a recent debate, Rep. Angie Craig flashed anger as she connected the scandal to progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, her opponent in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.

“It pisses me off that you completely put all of the responsibility on the governor of Minnesota when you were the No. 2 elected leader in Minnesota during that period of time,” she said. “Republicans, they are going to have a field day with this with you.”

Flanagan was alongside Gov. Tim Walz when the fraud was uncovered. Craig, who represents a swing district, added she felt it was her “responsibility to warn Democratic primary voters that Republicans are dying to run against you because they believe that you have a unique vulnerability on fraud.”

Flanagan has tried to play down her role in the scandal, saying at the debate that “the governor has taken the lead” in addressing fraud fallout.

. . .Democrats are lashing out at fellow Democrats for the nation’s largest pandemic-era welfare fraud, theft that handed Republicans a potent example of government waste from Democratic mismanagement.

In a recent debate, Rep. Angie Craig flashed anger as she connected the scandal to progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, her opponent in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.

“It pisses me off that you completely put all of the responsibility on the governor of Minnesota when you were the No. 2 elected leader in Minnesota during that period of time,” she said. “Republicans, they are going to have a field day with this with you.”

. . . The swindling, perpetrated mostly by Somali immigrants, has been jarring to many longtime residents because they had long clung to an unofficial Minnesota motto: Our taxes may be high, but we have good government and services.

Former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson, a Republican who served as a state auditor for 12 years before he led the state, said it was stunning how many officials missed major warning signs or looked the other way.

“You’ve got to have a culture that is protective of the dollar, and that culture had long disappeared,” he said.

The reason the Democrats didn’t come down hard on this fraud is because it was done largely, as noted above, by Somali immigrants. Somalis are deemed an oppressed group, and therefore any fraud on their part must be overlooked. This is one result of wokeness among Democrats. The fault is not that the culture is not protective of the dollar, but that it is protective of those perceived to be oppressed, who are treated lightly according to a “progressive” double standard.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal discusses the Board of Peace’s U.S.-inspired plan in a piece called “Destroying the tunnels will take a decade.”

t’s Monday, August 10 and within hours of Benjamin Netanyahu announcing that Israel rejects the 15-point roadmap, Nickolay Mladenov—Director General of the Board of Peace, the Trump-led body meant to oversee postwar Gaza—sat down with me to explain why Israel should want the very thing Bibi had just rejected.

His entire case reduces to one word: verification. Nobody is required to do anything, he insists, “last of all Israel,” before verified steps on the ground. The IDF sits at the yellow line agreed under the comprehensive plan; the Board’s ask is only that it hold there and not fire across unless troops face a real threat. The line moves back only after individual sectors are cleared and their weapons certified, stored, and rendered unusable. If the next stage’s commitments go unmet, “the process stops.”

Why store the weapons in warehouses inside Gaza, where Hamas is “always one wall away from rearming”? Because they will be rendered unusable, he says, by the Board’s National Committee for the Administration of Gaza with backing from the international force. More a reassurance than an answer.

Who destroys the tunnels? Contractors, but at this rate it will take more than a decade, and, he adds, this is precisely why Israel needs the Board of Peace: together it will go faster.

What counts as the “personal arms” Gazans may keep—might that quietly include the Kalashnikovs that actually govern the Strip? No, he says; the framework covers everything, heavy weapons to personal ones. He acknowledges that Gaza is ruled from the barrel of a Kalashnikov—which is why, he insists, those rifles and every other weapon must pass to civilian authority.

And Turkey and Qatar—the two governments Israelis least want inside Gaza? Without Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar, he says flatly, Hamas would never have agreed to the roadmap at all; their role was critical. Told that letting them help dismantle Hamas is the fox guarding the henhouse, he answers: “If I have to speak to the devil, I will speak to the devil”—to make sure no second October 7 ever occurs. The verification mechanism, he stresses, is American-led, backed by the ISF and, on paper, by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Morocco.

Pressed on whether Hamas will really disarm itself—whether the whole thing is too good to be true—he offers the tell. “I’m not building any of this on the basis of trust. And none of us are.” Clear-eyed about the risks, he says, and building on verification instead. If it doesn’t work, the process stops.

Yet despite this, Segal is in favor of at least starting to implement this plan:

My take: In contrast to the entire political establishment, I support this plan. It won’t dismantle Hamas—nothing will, not completely. But if it nets a third of the tunnels and half the Kalashnikovs, I’ll take it. Will 100,000 Kalashnikovs be handed in? Of course not. But 40,000 collected and another 300 kilometers of tunnel mapped is not nothing—and the next round, which everyone knows is coming, gets fought on considerably more favorable terms.

I’m not sure why the “next round” will be more favorable to Israel, much less the U.S. Yes, half the guns is “not nothing’, but it’s not far from nothing. We’re a long, long way from peace in Gaza.

*The famous “Furthur” bus documented in Tom Wolfe’s book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in which the Merry Pranksters, Neil Cassady, and Ken Kesey took their act on the road, is getting ready for one more trip (article archived here). I had no idea that it still existed. (Wikipedia’s article on Furthur notes that there have been two buses, but this trip will use the original, the one in Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test )

Among the rolling hills outside Eugene, Ore., down a winding gravel path and inside a big barn sits a school bus built in 1939. Its once-blazing colors have faded. Its roof is crumbling. Its windows are cracked. The only regular occupants these days are insects.

It might look like a hunk of junk, but the muted technicolor splotches tell the story of one of the most exuberant periods of San Francisco history.

Sixty years ago, this bus symbolized the city’s counterculture revolution, the embrace of psychedelic drugs and the live-out-loud, love-your-neighbor ethos for which the era is remembered.

With the nation once again facing war, polarized politics and cultural battles, Zane Kesey thinks some of that old bus magic is needed. And that is why he has agreed to send the bus, the one he helped cover in swirls of Day-Glo paint when he was 3, back to the city that spawned a movement.

“I would love to see it adored again,” he said. “And for people to feel that pure, innocent love that came out of it.”

His father, Ken Kesey, who died in 2001, had just written the novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” when he purchased the former school bus that a large Bay Area family had tricked out with beds, benches and a refrigerator for road trips. Mr. Kesey and his freethinking friends, called the Merry Pranksters, painted the bus in psychedelic colors, cut a sun roof into it, added a powerful sound system and installed a balcony on top.

. . .So later this month, it will leave the Kesey family farm in Pleasant Hill, Ore., a short drive from Eugene, for the first time since 1969. A flatbed truck will carry it down Interstate 5 to California, over the Bay Bridge and into the city. In the dead of night, when the streets are quiet, it will trundle into Golden Gate Park and into its Hall of Flowers alongside the botanical gardens.

There, starting Sept. 5, the bus will be on display as part of a show called “Forever Grateful, Golden Gate Park,” put on by the Haight Street Art Center, which aims to preserve and showcase art and cultural artifacts from the city’s counterculture movement. The exhibit will also feature Jerry Garcia’s BMW, live performers, puppetry and storytelling.

I’d love to see this iconic bus, but if you’re in SF and a Wolfe/Kesey/Cassady fan, go see it!  The NYT article has lots of cool photos (see the archived version), but I’ll show two from the Wikipedia article as well as the whole movie about the original trip.

Here’s the original Further in 1964:

Rcarlberg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

And the inside, also from Wikipedia; note the psychedelic painting (the bus was of course loaded with drugs). You can see more in the movie below. Cassady, of course, was the driver, and the only driver.

Here’s the video “Magic Trip” (out in 2011) with Ken Kesey, my hero Neal Cassady, and the Merry Pranksters. I’m so glad this is free on YouTube. Click on “watch on YouTube”, or go here.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cats are making Big Plans:

Szaron: Got any plans for tomorrow?
Hili: Yes, I’ll be lying in a different spot.

In Polish:

Szaron: Masz jakieś plany na jutro?
Hili: Tak, będę leżała w innym miejscu.

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

From Funny and Strange Signs, this one in Times Square:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Meow Incorporated:

From Masih; an Iranian woman hanged for defending herself against sexual assault and killing the assailant.

From Luana, the sad state of math proficiency in UCSD students (read the whole tweet):

The Number Ten Cat apparently doesn’t like Ricky Gervais’s new animation, “Alley Cat”, and he strikes back at Gervais:

From Malcolm, a Japanese school bus. So cool, and look at the little girl bow before she gets on! (Sound up.)

Translation from the Spanish: “Japan’s school buses are causing a sensation abroad.”

One from my feed; it is a sin to disturb a sleeping cat:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Dr. Cobb. Matthew says that in the first one, the grouper just wants a cuddle:

— Standplaats Kraków could really use some cash! (@standplaatskrk.pl) 2026-08-10T11:55:42.419Z

Matthew sent me this yesterday and told me that perhaps the answer would appear soon. But it hasn’t, and it may be a mistake:

Ok the answer to this is apparently 40 but I have no idea why. Any ideas? 🧪 #academicsky

— John Stott (@jpsastro.bsky.social) 2026-08-09T09:33:56.351Z

 

The first MSM reviews of Jason Arday’s book, and a Dawkins take

August 10, 2026 • 9:45 am

Not long ago I wrote about the bizarre tale of Jason Arday, a University of Cambridge professor accused of multiple instances of plagiarism as well as bizarre behavior and fabulism, involving stories about his background, appointments at other universities, physical feats, maladies, charity donations, and so on, all or many of them probably false. After the accusations mounted and Arday produced no evidence backing up his stories, he resigned his full professorship at Cambridge, admitting no wrong and blaming racism for the brouhaha.

But the tale isn’t done. On August 11 of this week, Simon & Schuster is issuing Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, a book for which Arday reportedly got a six-figure advance (curiously, the publisher is no longer listed on the Amazon page but the publisher’s page is here).

So far there are only a couple of reviews of the book, and the main ones, from the Torygraph, Times of London, and the Atlantic, I’ve put below. All are archived so you can read them. Click on the screenshots to do so. I’ll put a brief excerpt of each review below the title.

The Torygraph:

Excerpts:

Earlier this year, shortly after it was announced that the publisher Simon & Schuster had bought the rights to Jason Arday’s memoir, the then professor of sociology of education at Cambridge University gave an interview to The Bookseller. “I always wanted to be a person who flew close to the sun,” Arday mused. “But sometimes I wonder: did I fly too close?”

On the evidence of his book – due to be published in the UK on August 27 – and all that has emerged about Arday in recent weeks, the answer is probably yes. Titled Great and Unfortunate Things, the memoir might have been more honestly named Great and Improbable Things. This week, suspicions were raised about whether Arday’s resignation letter, in which he announced his intention to leave his post at Cambridge, was written by AI; the casual reader of Great and Unfortunate Things might suspect the ghostly hand of AI too – although the book was apparently written in collaboration with the definitely human writer Eve Claxton.

. . . What is slightly unexpected about the book that Arday has actually written is that it is – at least on the surface – painfully, mind-numbingly dull. Anyone with a passing familiarity with LinkedIn will find much to recognise in its tone: gushing, earnest, slyly self-promotional, oddly impersonal. The book feels powered by a grim determination to inspire readers come what may, and to settle the debate once and for all about the absolute awesomeness of its subject, Jason Arday. Yet to do so it relies on a narrative that, with everything we now know about his habitual false claims, stretches credulity to breaking point.

. . . One striking feature is that the book is suspiciously stingy on detail: years, ages and last names are often withheld. Much of the kind of information, in short, that journalists and suspicious academics might have liked to be able to check is not included. The amount of money that Arday has raised for charity over the years, for instance, is kept ambiguous. Instead, the reader is fed platitudes such as “It was ingrained in me to devote myself to charity work whenever I could”, and “I’d taken part in all kinds of fundraising drives”.

. . . A more amusing thread running through the book is Arday’s almost impressive ability to draw parallels between himself and major figures from cultural history, all while ambiently stressing his humbleness and simplicity of heart. He was named by his mother after Jason and the Argonauts – a good thing too, he notes: “She couldn’t have known then that my life would involve so many trials, obstacles and tests of courage, just like that of my mythological namesake with his quest for the Golden Fleece.”

. . . Readers hoping to find vivid descriptions of some of Arday’s more colourful tales about his life will, alas, be disappointed. Arday has claimed that a severed pig’s head was delivered to his family home in south London, but the incident is not recorded here. Nor is there any mention of the bananas and bullets he has said he was sent in the post after starting in his role at Cambridge. The claim that a knifeman turned up at the university twice to threaten to harm him unless he resigned is also left out of the book, but would surely have made for absorbing reading. As would the car crash and subsequent three-month coma that he recounted in his initial proposal for the autobiography, but which didn’t make the final book.

We are treated, however, to regretful sermons about the scrutiny Arday has been subjected to because of the fateful combination of his skin colour and his success. When a professor implies that he might be cheating in his coursework (the cheek of it), Arday seizes the opportunity to note that “people who are Black or from other disadvantaged groups” commonly face such scepticism.

We are treated, however, to regretful sermons about the scrutiny Arday has been subjected to because of the fateful combination of his skin colour and his success. When a professor implies that he might be cheating in his coursework (the cheek of it), Arday seizes the opportunity to note that “people who are Black or from other disadvantaged groups” commonly face such scepticism.

The review leaves out some of the incidents that have surfaced during the reporting of Arday’s fabulism, including the pig’s head, bullets, and bananas he said were delivered to his family’s home, as well as Arday’s claim, in his book proposal, that he was in a car crash that put him in a coma for three months.

On to the Times of London, which pulls no punches in its title:

Excerpts (the Times, like the Torygraph, calls attention to the fact that Arday describes detailed memories when he was young—well before age 11 when he was able, he said, to speak):

Maybe I should turn myself in to the nearest cop shop now, because this review is not going to improve Arday’s mood. Great and Unfortunate Things is mawkish, self-aggrandising and hard to believe. Extraordinary claims are made with no supporting evidence. Arday’s story — regardless of its authenticity — feels precision-tooled to flatter the biases of the sappiest white liberals.

One notable feature of the book is what it omits. Several of Arday’s more incredible achievements are either not mentioned or included in a softened form. His adolescent football career doesn’t figure, and nor does the 600 miles in six days challenge. His remarkable fundraising achievements are alluded to, but no definitive figure is given. Perhaps his co-writer, Eve Claxton, did a little judicious fact-checking.

. . . There are, however, some new additions to the Arday canon. The brain tumour, for example — treatment for which caused him to lose his memory just before his viva, so he had to relearn his whole thesis from scratch. He also writes that he was severely beaten at the age of 18 by four youths in an unprovoked attack, causing him to have lifelong seizures.

. . . Even for the not-notably-modest genre of the inspirational poverty-porn memoir, Arday lays it on a bit thick. He compares himself at various points with Rocky (driven, gritty), Forrest Gump (simple, wise) and God. Seriously: his mother apparently believed that “just because God wasn’t always visible, that didn’t mean he wasn’t there”, and held that the same must be true for Arday’s intelligence.

And that points to the ultimate cruelty of this story. Arday’s self-mythologising is very funny, but it has done real damage — most significantly to nonverbal children and their families. By promoting the medically unusual story of his own late-childhood flourishing, Arday is creating false hope. Parents will blame themselves, wrongly, for not living up to the impossible standard of Giff.

. . . And that points to the ultimate cruelty of this story. Arday’s self-mythologising is very funny, but it has done real damage — most significantly to nonverbal children and their families. By promoting the medically unusual story of his own late-childhood flourishing, Arday is creating false hope. Parents will blame themselves, wrongly, for not living up to the impossible standard of Giff.

. . . Nor do I have any sympathy for his publisher. Fact-checking works of non-fiction should be standard practice. Instead, as we know from The Salt Path, it’s often no more than an exercise in libel-proofing: reality doesn’t matter. Arday still has defenders who claim he is the victim of a racist stitch-up. In a post-truth world, audacity beats veracity every time.

My understanding is that publishers commonly make authors, in their contract, attest that what they wrote is their own work, is not plagiarized, and is factually true. (I had to do that with my trade books.) But publishers themselves do not have the time nor the money to do their own extensive fact-checking, ergo the contract. (Sometimes, if there’s a chance of lawsuits for libel or defamation against the publisher, they do a “legal read” using a lawyer. This may be why they changed two names in Arday’s book.)

Regardless of whether Simon & Schuster fact-checked Arday’s book, surely the University of Cambridge should have checked his credentials more thoroughly. When claims about Arday’s fabulism surfaced, Cambridge just sloughed them off, saying that investigations of plagiarism belonged to Arday’s Ph.D. university, not Cambridge. That is a dereliction of duty on the part of Cambridge. Only when the ruckus became more prominent did they launch their own investigation, whereupon Arday resigned.

I’ve found one book that was withdrawn because of factual inaccuracy, a memoir of an Australian police officer published by Hachette.  Presumably Arday’s book could also be withdrawn if they find factual inaccuracies. But how can you check some of his claims if there’s no evidence one way or another. I could say “I flew up to the Moon and back yesterday, though nobody saw me,” and that is uncheckable. It’s unlikely, but how do you say it didn’t happen?

Another book, The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, made dubious claims according to the Observer, but was not withdrawn.

The Atlantic has perhaps the most extensive take on the book, but also gives it a thumbs-down:

Excerpts:

 . . . A year later, [Arday] set out to sell his memoir. According to a cover letter that his agent sent to publishers at the time, Arday’s book, to be titled Great and Unfortunate Things, would be “an awe-inspiring tale of near mythic proportions.”

That now appears to be an understatement. Arday’s story was indeed astonishing: As a toddler, he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delays; he didn’t fully speak until the age of 11; he learned to read and write only as an adult. Arday’s parents are Ghanaian immigrants; he grew up wearing homemade clothes and hustling for cash by playing snooker. Yet in spite of all these obstacles and many, many others he has recounted over the years, Arday found a way to go to university and then to graduate school. Eventually, he got his Ph.D., and then he became a star. “We are so lucky to have you,” Cambridge’s head of faculty for education, Hilary Cremin, told him in a clip shown on BBC shortly after his hiring was announced. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

Arday’s claims have now fallen apart, of course, and Cambridge should be embarrassed. The Atlantic made inquiries:

Arday did not respond to questions from The Atlantic, but he told The Timeslast week that he is not a “liar” or a “fantasist” and that he’d been given insufficient supervision as a graduate student, especially in light of his learning disabilities: “It’s more likely that I’ve made a mistake, there’s a clerical error. It’s not that I’ve fabricated.” He also seemed to address such allegations at a conference in April for the British Sociological Association, where he gave a talk about pervasive efforts to discredit Black scholars including himself. “These people are brilliant, perversely brilliant,” he told his colleagues. “There are times when you look at what they’re doing and you say to yourself, Well done, well played, very good. You’ve caught me [in] a thousand knots—how do I get myself out of this situation?”

. . . Great and Unfortunate Things, which Arday co-wrote with Eve Claxton, is still scheduled to come out next week from Simon & Schuster. The story that it tells should not be taken at face value; it differs notably from other versions of his life that Arday has shared in public and in private, including in the original proposal he sent out with his agent. But the book is also, in a way, very honest and quite telling: It provides a vivid portrait of a man who was always manifestly ill-equipped for academia yet found a way to reach its upper levels. This is not someone else’s cruel assessment of Arday’s tragic and improbable career. It’s his own.

The reviewer, Daniel Engbber, recounts the now-familiar obstacles that Arday faced and apparently overcame. Here’s one that the Atlantic tried to fact-check, but failed:

The book sticks mostly to this frantic register, and coincidence abounds. Arday claims, for instance, that when the kids who beat him up at the bus stop were arrested, he told the judge that they shouldn’t go to prison. Then, years later, when he took a brief teaching job at an unnamed London university, two of the muggers turned out to be his students. They’d been so moved by his act of mercy that they’d turned their lives around, and now they were coaching other at-risk youths. “Both of them gave me a huge hug, which I returned,” he writes. One asked Arday to be the godfather of his child.

Is that really true? I reached out to the book’s fact-checker to ask whether this and several other stories from the book had been verified, but she did not respond. Even asking that question places me on the wrong side of Arday’s moral ledger. Again and again, the book acknowledges his “impossible” success, yet his indignation at anyone who ever doubted him remains a running theme throughout the book. These are Arday’s villains—the Ivan Dragos and the Clubber Langs of academia, who dared to wonder whether his work was really so original, or questioned whether he did it on his own. He swallowed his “feelings of offense,” he says in reference to one lecturer who insisted on drilling him about subject material in person, “but I have never forgotten them.”

. . . But the most disturbing inconsistencies arise from Arday’s book proposal, a copy of which was obtained by The Atlantic. That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.

Could that be due to legal fact-checking? Who knows? And Arday cannot be sued for what he claims in the book proposal but not in the book. But he and the publisher can be sued, and the book withdrawn, if the book does contains factual claims that are false.

As a publishing veteran told me, “If this guy applied for a job with our company, we’d check his references. Did Cambridge?” In the end, the damage is mostly not to Simon & Schuster, who may make a pile, or to the reader, who may like a good tale even if it’s false, or even to Arday himself, who simply cannot believe he did anything wrong, and also got a tidy sum for his book. The real damage is done to Cambridge University for apparently hiring on background rather than merit, as well as to black scholars of real quality, who are now subject to being denigrated as “DEI hires”.  I often wonder if Arday believes the tales he tells, in which case he is mentally ill, or is he simply a grifter getting by on outrageous tales, with doubts dispelled by his accusations of racism. Who knows?

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t call attention to those who defended Arday and echoed his claim that this affair was simply a racist witch hunt. Here’s one article from The Guardian, which, in other articles, did a lot to call attention to Arday’s unbelievable claims (click to read):

This article doesn’t defend Arday so much as criticize the people who brought him down, and even implies that Arday’s fall wasn’t so bad because “there’s lot of people who don’t deserve to be where they are.” If that’s meant to defend Arday, it’s shameful. (“Andrews” below refers to “Kehinde Andrews, who was the first Black Studies professor in the UK but was recently made redundant from Birmingham City University.”)

A quote:

“It’s not just about Black people – any minoritised group, our success is generally seen as not being genuine,” said one academic, speaking anonymously.

“[The row] will make the small number of Black people in the field feel much more vulnerable. It will give licence for a while to people who don’t want Black people in the academic space and it may give pause to people who want to redress the massive [racial] imbalance in academia.

“But it’s a mistake to think of any of this as a meritocracy – there’s lots of people in academia who don’t deserve to be where they are, and there’s lots of people who should be more advanced in their careers than they are.”

Andrews said he was setting up an independent Black Studies centre, describing the university sector as “toxic”.

“Academia is set up so that there’s these few places and we’re all fighting over scraps to get into these places,” he said. “It might just be time to say, let’s do it ourselves and let’s not keep relying on these institutions.”

But while Arday’s case – and cuts to the humanities – negatively affect morale, many academics emphasised the proud history of Black scholarship, insisting the Arday affair must not be allowed to tarnish it.

“Black British academics – like Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby and Isaac Julien – punch way above their weight globally. The idea that this one incident in some way reflects Black British academia in general is bonkers,” one academic said.

“There’s a bunch of people out there who think Black people are less intelligent than white people, and that the only way they can get anywhere is by being forced into situations that they are unqualified for. For those people, being Black is the definition of being unqualified. It’s an old racist wine in a new bottle.”

That’s fine: Arday’s fall should not in the least affect other black scholars. But it’s weird that the author uses the fall as a reason to call out academia for racism.

Finally, Richard Dawkins has an interesting piece in UnHerd (click to read) arguingthat Arday’s prose is obscurantist and stilted: a sign that he didn’t have much to say:

One short excerpt:

Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic discipline expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Modern physics is genuinely difficult. Natural selection of Pleistocene man did not prepare our poor brains for Einstein or Heisenberg. Common sense, forged in a world of middle-sized objects travelling at medium speeds, must be sent away on compassionate leave when we open a book on quantum mechanics or relativity. Physicists have no need to language-up their writing. Their subject is intrinsically difficult. Naming no names, practitioners of a subject that any fool can understand may suffer from what has been called “physics-envy”. Longing to sound more profound than they are, what recourse have they but obscurantist language? Look, for example, at the following passage from Arday’s thesis:

“An important consideration which also formed part of the theoretical paradigm for the research recognised that the mentoring process is socially constructed, and therefore the relationship between the participants and the researcher needed to be tailored towards supporting the professional development of the student teachers, and making them autonomous social actors in this process, hence the researcher adopting the secondary position of facilitator within the research.”

I must ask: did the examiners at Liverpool John Moores University, who judged his thesis worthy of a PhD, actually read it? One trivial give-away: the thesis contains 332 instances where a plural noun’s terminal “s” is incorrectly followed by an apostrophe. There’s even one in the thesis title: “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” Where I come from, a PhD candidate has a research supervisor, with a duty of care. It’s hard to believe even he read the thesis before letting it go forward to examination.

There’s more at the site, and stay tuned as other reviews of Arday’s book appear.  Will I read it? I don’t think so. I’ll let others do that job, as three reviewers above have kindly done.

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 10, 2026 • 8:15 am

Stalwart regular and crack arthopod photographer Mark Sturtevant has sent us photos of spiders, lepidopterans, and assorted insects. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The various arthropods shown here were all photographed from my area in eastern Michigan. Most were taken in the field, but a couple were staged shots. Let’s begin with spiders.

The first is a new species for me. This is the Butterfly Orbweaver, Araneus pegnia. The name comes from the white four-lobed marking on the abdomen. Although very stretched in this gravid female, in thinner individuals it does look like a four-winged butterfly.

Next up is my highly reliable always-there-for-me-in-case-I-need-it jumping spider, usually called the Tan Jumping Spider (Platycryptus undatus). They are common on our shed, but lately they are also turning up on our front and back porches. This is perhaps because I often leave the porch lights on these days to draw in nocturnal insects. This adorable male was photographed as a manual focus stack on the dining room table. You can see the reflection of my home-made flash diffuser in the eyes, along with the black outline of the lens. As usual, I forgot to remove the clamp of the Raynox diopter lens that is used to boost magnification, and so you can see that too in the reflection.

A small obsession with me lately is shown with the next spider. This is the Candy-striped Spider, Enoplognatha ovata, and she has the remains of a small Hemipteran on a daisy flower where she was hanging out. Candy-striped Spiders are in the family of cobweb-weaving spiders (which includes our common house spiders and widows), but this species lives our in the sunshine, and is commonly seen lurking just under the flowers of herbaceous plants. One item of notoriety about them is that they prowl around their plants at night, looking for sleeping insects which then never wake up. So, I regularly scour our gardens to keep track of the known spiders to see what they have been up to. They almost always have prey on hand, and after a good night they may have several insects with them. I call these collections “a little shop of horrors”, inspired by their nocturnal habit of dining out.

The last of the spiders is a Hammock Spider, Pityohyphantes costatus. They build untidy hammock-like webs on plants in forests, and they too seem to do quite well. This one got a Long-legged Fly (Dolichopodidae), which are super alert flies with very fast reflexes as any macrophotographer will know:

That will be all for spiders. Next up are Odonates. This little damselfly is the Eastern Forktail (Ischnura verticalis). I really need to get more damselfly pictures since there are so many species that I have never photographed. A long focal length macro lens would help immensely!

The next Odonate is one of my favorites. This is the Calico Pennant Dragonfly (Celithemis elisa). Mature males like this one are stunningly colored with deep reds, while the similar females have yellow coloration:

A place that I call the Magic Field has a very dense population of grasshoppers. One of my favorite species commonly seen out there are the Carolina Grasshoppers (Dissosteira carolina), But surely everyone in the U.S. and parts of Canada are familiar with them. Adults have boldly contrasting black and yellow hind wings, as shown in the linked picture, but with wings folded at rest they are well camouflaged. The grasshoppers are divided about evenly into two color morphs, and these are shown here as nymphs that were picked up in the Magic Field for staged pictures on the dining room table. The combined picture is a bit of post-processing trickery since they were photographed separately:

The next picture is a katydid that was also found in the Magic Field. This is a nymph of the Fork-tailed Bush Katydid (Scudderia furcate). It was systematically cleaning all 6 feet without any concern about my proximity:

The little planthopper in the next picture was pulled in from the porch lights mentioned above. This is Tylozygus bifidus:

Lets’ wrap this up with Lepidopterans. It is always a special day to find the caterpillars of giant silk moths, but the species that seems almost common are Promethea Moth caterpillars (Callosamia promethea). These grow into beautiful pastel colored caterpillars the size of large pickles, and later into a palm-sized moth like the one shown in the link. But for now, these youngsters were the size of rice grains. The younger caterpillars tend to stay together through their early instars. It was neat that they had even molted together.

The swarm of recently hatched caterpillars in the next picture were found on a swamp milkweed leaf, so they should be Milkweed Tussock Moth caterpillars (Euchaetes egle). These don’t look like much now, but later they grow into flamboyantly furry caterpillars.

Lastly, we have our largest butterfly, the Giant Swallowtail (Papilio cresphontes). I was following it for some time, taking pictures, and here it was nicely photo-bombed by a Common Eastern Bumblebee (Bombus impatiens):