Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Glory be: three readers submitted photos over the weekend! And today’s batch is from reader Thomas Webber. His notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
This is McCarty Woods, at 1.4 ha the last substantial remnant of native forest on the built-up part of the University of Florida’s 850 ha campus in Gainesville. For decades it has been designated a Conservation Area in the campus land-use plan. Five years ago we learned with a shock that the university’s board of trustees had voted to revoke the plan and cut down the woods to build – I am not making this up – a forestry teaching lab. (According to hearsay, the forestry department itself has not been lobbying to put the lab there.) But leadership in McCarty’s defense arose at the right time. Botany professors Douglas Soltis and Pamela Soltis took up the challenge of helping the UF authorities understand the importance of the forest, and galvanized public opinion in its favor. They have recruited a large, enthusiastic volunteer force that meets each month to remove invasive exotics and restore native species that have dropped out over the years as the grove was surrounded by development. For the time being the UF administration has agreed that the woods should stay.
Here are just a few of the flowering species in our reprieved McCarty Woods.
Cherry laurel, Prunus caroliniana. Native. Individual flowers 3-5 mm. Small trees, which turn snowy-looking with masses of tiny blossoms for a few weeks in the spring.
Pokeweed, Phytolacca americana. Native. 7 cm long. Famous for being poisonous, though the leaves can be eaten for a short time in spring if cooked. I haven’t tried it:
Paintedleaf, Euphorbia cyathophora. Native. The complicated central part is 2-3 cm across. One of the few abundant inhabitants of the shady interior. At close range it’s one of the stranger-looking plants in the woods, with features that don’t correspond obviously to the familiar parts of typical flower-like flowers, such as petunias. The oval cups are nectaries. Holiday Poinsettia is a close relative:
Trumpet creeper, Campsis radicans. 7 cm long. A native that had disappeared from McCarty, which we are trying to restore:
Potato vine, Ipomoea pandurata. Native. 7 cm. The most visible of the native vines when it’s in bloom. We haven’t had to do anything for this one. As of early September it’s near its peak of bloom in the interior and on the edges.
Coral honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens. Native. 6 cm long. Another vine formerly lost from the woods. We’re now planting some in hopes of re-introducing it:
Beautyberry, Callicarpa americana. Native. Individual flowers 3-5 mm. Most people know this plant from its large clumps of close-packed purple berries. Here is a less familiar close-up view of the flowers:
The colorful bases that remain after the nightshade flowers fall away, and the 6-8 mm berries:
Ironweed, Vernonia gigantea. Native. Whole flower head 7 cm across. A superior butterfly plant:
Carolina petunia, Ruellia caroliniensis. 3-4 cm. A native that is especially abundant this year:
Elephant’s foot, Elaphantopus tomentosus. Native. Whole flower head 3 cm across:
Sandmat, Euphorbia cf. hyssopifolia. Individual flowers 2-3 mm.:
Silkgrass, Pityopsis graminifolia. Native. Mature flower head 2-3 cm:
Frogfruit, Phyla nodiflora. Native. 1 cm. For some reason this has been more common around town this year than ever, and no more so than right at the edge of our woods. It is part of a spectacular example of convergent biological and cultural evolution:
Skunkvine, Paederia foetida. Native to southeast Asia. Flowers 1 cm long. This technically should not be welcome, since it is not native and is alleged to smell skunk-like when its parts are crushed. But there is only one here, it is small and behaving itself, and it doesn’t seem very foetid to me, so I have included it just because I like the way the picture look:
One of our teams of joyous forest restorers. This is a big crowd for July, when the heat and humidity and especially the sun hammering the east edge of the forest are brutal. On the summer days I assign myself a job in the shade of the interior, taking out the imperialistic, introduced vine called catclaw:
So we have kept the bulldozers away for five years. The right leadership was essential; as the expression goes, “It’s not what you say, it’s who says it.” When National Academy members Doug and Pam Soltis speak, the administration pays attention; if lab-assistant Webber said the same thing, the sound would be like the proverbial tree falling in the forest. Regardless of the success so far, there are infinite opportunities to lose it all, for there will always be someone who will look at our woods as a blank space that’s just the place to put their construction project. Here we say, “What’s the difference in protection between a UF Conservation Area and a non-conservation area? The Conservation Area has a sign on it until it’s leveled.” Conservationists have to win every time, without end, but developers need to win only once, and the concrete is forever.
It’s just another Manic Monday: October 12, 2026, and National Pulled Pork Day. Here’s a plate of the stuff at the Waiahole Poi Factory (it’s the Hawaiian version: kalua pig), along with beef laulau, a vegetable, and, my favorite, poi. I love poi, though others can’t abide it, and the Waiahole Poi factory, where it’s made on the spot, is the best poi I found in Hawaii. Sadly, I’ve never found the real stuff on the mainland.
A missile attack on Saudi Arabia’s international airport killed at least 12 people and injured hundreds more on Saturday, in strikes carried out by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants to which the kingdom’s military vowed a response.
The attacks, the deadliest in Saudi Arabia in more than a decade, shook the kingdom, which has struggled for weeks to fend off militant strikes amid a surge in cross-border tension.
Major General Turki Al-Malki, a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, said that the attack, which killed and injured civilian passengers and airport workers, amounted to a war crime by the Houthi militia and that coalition forces would respond.
Among the dead were one American, four Saudi nationals, a Palestinian and residents from Bangladesh, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Sudan, according to the kingdom’s civil aviation authority.
Missiles landed direct hits on Terminals 3 and 4 of the King Khalid International Airport, injuring more than 300 people, the civil aviation authority said. Several of them remained in critical condition, and the airport suffered extensive damage, with parts of the roof falling on people inside, Saudi officials said.
Ambulances and helicopters were sent to collect the wounded and take them to hospitals nearby, the officials said. Doctors were called in from other hospitals to help with the surge of patients, they said.
Saudi Arabia said Sunday it would “respond decisively” against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen a day after a strike on Riyadh’s international airport brought the expanding Middle East conflict home for the Saudi capital and its residents.
The attack, which left 12 dead and 309 injured and came without warning, revealed the vulnerability of the U.S. ally and the ramifications of the Trump administration’s reluctance to openly help fight the Houthis more than seven months into Washington’s war with Iran. Riyadh’s airport is the country’s second largest for civilians and is frequently used by royals and visiting dignitaries, including President Donald Trump in his last visit to the kingdom.
The United States is providing Saudi Arabia with intelligence support, analysts and U.S. officials say. But the administration has so far stopped short of the direct military assistance that officials in Saudi Arabia and its allies in Yemen’s internationally recognized government have sought.
After Saturday’s attack, Trump told reporters he was weighing whether to join Saudi strikes on the rebel group, later adding that the U.S. “has communication with the Houthis.”
Trump has been reluctant to go after the Houthis, even though they’ve participated in blocking the Red Sea and impeding traffic through the Suez Canal by blocking the narrowBab al-Mandeb Strait. They’re also fundamentalist Shiite Iranian proxy and are trying to take over Yemen. Given that Saudi Arabia has a large army and an especially good Air Force, I wouldn’t mind them joining forces with the U.S. and Israel (see the next piece) to extirpate the Houthis.
It’s Sunday, October 11, and last night at least 12 people were killed and 309 wounded in a Houthi attack on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport. Saudi Arabia’s response is unlikely to prioritize the “protection of civilians, and self-control” as it encouraged Israel to do in the wake of October 7. But nor, to its great detriment, will it take the Israeli route: the one that leads to lasting security.
The strike comes a week into Operation Dawn of Yemen, a Saudi-backed offensive by Yemeni government forces against the Iranian-backed Houthis. With the help of some 100 Saudi jets, government-aligned forces have already retaken key stretches of coast along Bab el-Mandeb. But even as the Houthis are hard-pressed, and Yemeni officials talk optimistically of driving all the way to Houthi-held Sanaa, the Saudis are keeping one eye on the rearview mirror.
After joining the Iran war late and hesitantly, firing their first missiles at Israel only a month in, the Houthis largely held their fire against the Jewish state and found a much softer target in the Gulf monarchy. In July they declared a naval blockade on the kingdom. Riyadh’s response has typically been tepid: limited airstrikes and quiet diplomacy.
That has long been the Saudi playbook. Even at the height of its war on the Houthis, the kingdom kept one hand extended. In 2019, after Houthi-claimed drone strikes on its oil facilities, it said it viewed a Houthi truce offer “positively.” In 2020 it told the Houthis, through back channels, that it would sign a UN-brokered nationwide ceasefire in exchange for a buffer zone on its border. In 2021 it publicly offered a ceasefire and the reopening of Sanaa airport, with its foreign minister declaring “it is up to the Houthis now.” Since the 2022 truce, the kingdom has largely halted offensive operations even in the face of sporadic provocations. Even when the United States and Britain began addressing the Houthi problem in January 2024, Riyadh called for “self-restraint” from the sidelines. As recently as mid-September, with the Houthis fresh from seizing Mocha, the kingdom reportedly offered them a two-week ceasefire and direct talks through Omani mediators.
Rather than a new dawn for Riyadh’s Yemen policy, this war is simply a means to negotiate. After the Houthis’ advance last month, Riyadh concluded that it could not enter new talks while the Houthis held Bab el-Mandeb. Without U.S. support, it will likely declare victory if it simply pushes the Houthis off the Red Sea coast and restores quiet.
This is where the two countries [Israel and Saudi Arabia] diverge.
Surveying the destruction of its territory, Israel understood that such a threat could not be allowed to rebuild on its border, and, despite American misgivings, went about uprooting Hamas. The Saudis, looking at their burning tankers and smoldering oil facilities, also resolved that the situation had to be dealt with. So they called Washington for help, were rebuffed, and settled for a particularly aggressive round of mowing.
. . .That Israel has never had the luxury of the status quo lies at the root of what separates it from many of America’s allies, and from America itself. It is why the Houthis will happily strike King Khalid International Airport but now think twice about Ben Gurion. It is why the Saudis will not try anything without Washington holding their hand, while Washington grips Israel’s for dear life to keep it from upending the status quo.
. . . The Houthis in the mountains of northern Yemen present a different challenge from Hamas in its tunnels under Gaza, but the lesson of appeasing terror is the same. If the Saudis want to find themselves safer five years from now, they should start reading up on Zionism.
Indeed, for the Houthis have missiles and will have more if they’re not stopped. They’re just a short rocket flight from Saudi Arabia, and of course the Saudis have all the oil, oil that has to be moved. Amit Segal is right: the Saudis need to do something, and do it now.
President Donald Trump said Saturday it was time for Ukraine to get a new president, suggesting Volodymyr Zelenskyy has not done enough to end his country’s war with Russia and blaming him for high diesel prices in the U.S.
“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because he could have made many deals and for some reason he never does,” Trump said.
The president, who on Friday struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy diesel from Russia in an attempt to address high fuel prices ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, has been urging Zelenskyy for weeks to stop strikes on Russian energy infrastructure. He has also sought to blame record U.S. diesel prices on Ukraine rather than the U.S.-led war in Iran, which has elevated world energy prices.
“He wants to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel,” Trump said, before departing for Tennessee where he was set to rally Republican voters.
No, Zelensky just wants to survive in the face of a very real threat to his country. And he’s done a good job as leader, but all Trump can do is beef about gas prices. I don’t expect him to send more help to Ukraine, even though gas prices will not appreciably fall before the midterms. And of course Trump made a deal with Putin to get more diesel, which is like making a deal with the devil. But here’s what he’s saying now:
Ukrainian and European officials on Saturday reacted to Trump’s diesel deal with dismay, saying it will help pay for Russia’s war efforts. Diesel prices have skyrocketed due to a collision of events, including the difficulty of getting oil out of the Middle East since the start of the Iran war, which has raised the price of all oil products.
Trump also suggested that if he had been U.S. president in 2022, “that war would have never started. There was no reason that war with Ukraine and Russia started. It started due to incompetence.”
Whose incompetence is he talking about? Biden’s? Zelensky’s? Because he’s sure not talking about Putin.
*The pushback on the award of the Nobel Prize to Navi Pillay, an advocate of The Genocide Lie, has received surprisingly widespread pushback, though of course the liberal MSM won’t decry it (the NYT has an admiring profile of Pillay). But the WSJ said what needed to be said, and I found a screenshot of their op-ed on Facebook (click to enlarge it):
Granted, Pillay did some good stuff, but it’s recognized that the Prize came largely from her work on a UN committee trying to prosecute Israel for genocide. I can’t figure out what’s the worse award: Pillay’s or Yasser Arafat’s. In response to the award, Trump went into full Two Year Old Mode, saying that he should have won eight Nobel Prizes. Here’s his self-aggrandizing Truth Social post. He’ll never get a Nobel Prize. Notice the misspelled “Nobel” in the last line. Does nobody check his tweets?
The black robin, once the world’s rarest bird before an extraordinary conservation project brought it back from brink of extinction, has been crowned New Zealand’s bird of the year, after record voter turnout.
The tiny bird is found only in the Chatham Islands, 800km east of mainland New Zealand. Called kakaruia in Māori and karure in Morirori – the language indigenous to the Chathams – the birds are also fondly known as the “goth” of New Zealand’s bird world, for its striking black plumage, black eyes and a little pointy black beak.
Habitat loss and introduced pests devastated its population, and by the 1970s there were five birds left. Just one breeding pair remained: Old Blue, the matriarch, and Old Yellow. A breeding programme that pioneered using other species to foster parent the robins’ eggs proved a success, and its numbers have steadily climbed to 350 adult birds, although it is still classed as “threatened”.
“They are really cute,” said Jess Mackenzie, spokesperson for the Chatham Islands Landscape Restoration Trust, adding that the black robin has been in the top five birds for the past few years but never clinched a win.
“It’s a bird that New Zealanders definitely love and know,” she said.
Despite the name, the black robin is not in the same family as overseas robins and is a distinct species. In the Chathams, they live in lowland coastal forest on two restricted, pest-free nature reserves.
While a conservation success story, the black robin is not “saved yet”, Mackenzie said. Habitat on their islands is is nearly at capacity, and a third pest-free island is needed.
. . .The 2026 competition attracted a record 105,000 votes. About 88% of the votes were cast from New Zealand.
The world’s heaviest parrot, the kākāpō, came second and the 2025 winner, the country’s only falcon, the kārearea, finished third.
In 2023, British-American comedian and talkshow host John Oliver ran a global campaign for the threatened pūteketeke, which was then crowned the winner that year.
Only Kiwis should be allowed to vote in this contest. And a bat???
Here’s a photo from Wikipedia (they can’t say whether it’s male or female). Isn’t it cute?
frances schmechel, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
An odious man claiming that whipping of women in Iran is very gentle. The picture give the lie to that. From Masih. If you can’t see the tweet, click here to see it. (Embedding is probably prohibited for reasons I’m not clear on.)
Let me introduce you to another Iranian woman who received 74 lashes for removing her hijab in public.
A woman from Tehran sent me this video showing the scars left on her body. Her crime? Refusing to cover her hair.
Mohammad Marandi, one of the Islamic Republic’s defenders in Western media, justified the flogging of women by saying: “It’s not like hitting a horse. It was a very light strike, in a particular way.”
Look at her wounded body. Does this look like a light strike to you?
74 lashes. For showing her hair. In the 21st century.
To those who still deny the suffering of Iranian women: Look at these scars. Look at what this regime does to women who demand control over their own bodies.
The Islamic Republic whips women in Persian and then tries to justify it in English.
We will not let them hide the scars. We will not let them silence these women.
This Dutch Jewish infant, David, was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz–along with his older brother. David was two years old and would b 86 today had he lived.
Some music: a very famous jazz version of “Body and Soul” recorded by Coleman Hawkins (aka “Bean”) in 1939—nearly a decade after it was written by Johnny Green, Edward Heyman, Robert Sour and Frank Eyton. It was intended as a pop song, not a jazz song, but Hawkins did the most famous version.
From Wikipedia:
One of the most famous and influential takes was recorded by Coleman Hawkins and His Orchestra on October 11, 1939, at their only recording session for Bluebird, a subsidiary of RCA Victor. The recording is unusual in that the song’s melody is only hinted at in the recording; Hawkins’ two-choruses of improvisation over the tune’s chord progression constitute almost the entire take. Jazz critic Leonard Feather says, “This became his biggest hit and established him as a national name.” Because of this, as well as the imaginative use of harmony and break from traditional swing cliches, the recording is recognised as part of the “early tremors of bebop“. In 2004, the Library of Congress entered it into the National Recording Registry.
You can hear a more standard version, with the lyrics, in this recording by Frank Sinatra. It shows how much improvisation went into Bean’s version below.
Starting with the recent accusations of gang rape against 7 denizens of a fraternity at Cornell University, Bill Maher’s latest real-time episode takes out after the Greek houses, including sororities. (Maher went to Cornell, with a double major in literature and history). I agree with Maher: when I went to William & Mary, I participated in fraternity rush, but gave up after visiting two houses and seeing the “brothers” making cryptic notes on the freshmen. I’d prefer to find brothers using my own criteria rather than theirs, and many of the friends I made, most not in fraternities, are still friends today.
While he doesn’t conclude anything about whether there was a rape or not, but he does think that fraternities, with their hazing, drinking, and rowdiness, don’t conform to their mission to produce “gentlemen.” I’ve never heard of the “elephant walk” he describes as a bonding event. but Grok (below) affirms that it has been a real thing.
The guests you see on the panel are U.S. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Sara Eisen(financial reporter for CNBC).
The “elephant walk” described by Grok (my quesiton in bold). I’ve left out the links.
Do fraternities really practice the “elephant walk”?
Yes, some fraternities have practiced the “elephant walk” as a hazing ritual, though it is not universal, is often illegal, and has become less common (or more underground) due to bans, lawsuits, and scrutiny.
The ritual typically involves pledges (new members) forming a single-file line or circle, frequently while nude or partially clothed. Each person holds the genitals of the person in front of or behind them and walks together. Variations include inserting a thumb into the anus of the person ahead (sometimes with a rule that if it slips out, the thumb goes in the mouth). The posture is said to resemble elephants linked trunk-to-tail. It is framed by participants as a bonding or loyalty test through shared humiliation.
Documentation and evidence
It is treated as a known practice in academic work. Folklorists Alan Dundes and Lauren Dundes analyzed it in their 2002 essay “The Elephant Walk and Other Amazing Hazing: Male Fraternity Initiation through Infantilization and Feminization,” placing it in the broader context of humiliating initiation rites.
Dictionaries and references record the slang meaning explicitly (e.g., Wiktionary).
News coverage has referenced it as an established form of hazing. A prominent 2019 case involved Sacramento State’s Delta Chi chapter: an anonymous tip with a photo of a “simulation” (clothed men holding objects) triggered an investigation. Participants described it as an educational skit about hazing rather than the real thing; the university treated the allegation seriously amid other Greek life issues. Other reports and student accounts mention similar incidents or rumors at various schools.
Hey, you reprobates! Send in your good wildlife photos if you have them. I know who you are!
Despite having just lost her beloved cat Natasha, ecologist Susan Harrison from UC Davis has some bird photos to share with us. Susan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
Lewis’s Woodpeckers and others
This is an irruption year in the Western US, in which large numbers of seed-eating birds have been on the move in fall. One of these species, the Lewis’s Woodpecker(Melanerpes lewis), has just arrived en masse at our local Lake Solano County Park, where riparian forest lines a small gem of reservoir. These dramatic pink, ruby, and green birds are loosely social and nomadic, moving in flocks between sources of insects in summer and acorns in winter. Unusually for woodpeckers, they catch insects on the wing, and use their drilling talents only to break acorns and cache them in bark crevices.
Excited by their arrival, I grabbed my camera and headed for Lake Solano. Only once did I catch a close-up woodpecker on the public side of the lake:
For the rest of the photos, I had to return with an inflatable boat and paddle across to the privately owned shore. There, around 40 birds were foraging for acorns on Valley Oaks (Quercus lobata), caching them in Fremont Cottonwoods (Populus fremontii) and California Walnuts (Juglans californica), and sallying high overhead for insects:
From across the lake, I spied a large group bathing and drinking:
Because the bathing photos were too distant to be crisp, I asked ChatGPT to render one as an Impressionist painting in the style of Mary Cassatt (“The Bathing Party”):
Other lovely birds were seen en route to the Lewis’s Woodpeckers.
Green Heron (Butorides virescens) imitating a successful Wile E. Coyote:
Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus) joining the woodpecker drinking party:
Welcome to Sunday, October 11, 2026: Sabbath for goyische cats and World Biryani Day. At center left below you can see a biryani served to several of us when I visited Bhubaneswar, India, some years ago. I spoke in five cities, and asked as my honorarium only I be taken to great places featuring local dishes. That was a great trip.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. would regularly detail the massive damage it had done to the enemy, from weapons destroyed to body counts of enemy soldiers dead. But the test of success is whether that damage makes the adversary cry uncle. So far Iran has not surrendered, and there are reasons to think more bombing will not change that reality.
The fundamental problem with Trump’s approach is that he cannot decide whether he wants to change Iran’s policies or its government. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent illustrated the contradiction in September when he said the message to other countries was: “This is the end of the regime.” Yet in the same interview, he insisted the goal was not necessarily to collapse the government but to pressure it into negotiations.
Addressing the United Nations last month, Trump wondered whether he should make a deal allowing Iran to rebuild into a greater country — or “annihilate the Islamic republic and do it quickly.” Meanwhile, his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, were negotiating with Iranian officials. Washington was threatening to destroy the government while asking it to negotiate seriously.
If Iran’s leaders believe Washington intends to destroy them regardless of what they do, why would they make concessions? Their incentive would be to resist, inflict costs and outlast the U.S. In Foreign Affairs, Stephen Biddle and his co-authors argue that wars ultimately end through political bargains. Military force can improve the terms of those bargains but cannot substitute for them. The U.S. has repeatedly forgotten this lesson, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, demonstrating extraordinary skill at destroying armies but much less at translating battlefield achievements into lasting political outcomes.
The Trump administration must decide what it wants. If the goal is policy change — reopening Hormuz, constraining Iran’s nuclear program and curbing its regional aggression — it must define achievable terms and pressure Iran to accept them. If the goal is regime change, it must plan for a bloody struggle, probably with more regional spillover. Until Washington resolves that contradiction, the country will remain stuck in its latest Middle Eastern quagmire.
The American people, including, I think, Republicans, won’t put up with a bloody struggle to effect regime change, so I don’t think that’s in the cards, much as I would like regime change. That would require the mass effort of the Iranian people, and they have no stomach for protest after 30,000 were killed by the regime in a short period. But it’s not clear whether there are achievable aims, save for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Certainly Iran will not make a credible promise to end its ambitions to build nuclear weapons.
Christa Pike has been discharged from a Nashville hospital, her lawyers said on Saturday, 10 days after she survived an attempt at lethal injection.
She is back at Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the primary prison for women in Tennessee, her lawyers said. As of Thursday, Ms. Pike had been walking with assistance, but still struggling with concentration and memory.
“She is grateful to the first responders and her medical team for their care in these extraordinary circumstances,” her lawyers said in a statement. “She is continuing to receive medical care at the prison, and we will continue to track her recovery.”
Ms. Pike has spent three decades in the prison, largely in isolation, for the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, a classmate in Knoxville. On Sept. 30, she survived two doses of the drug pentobarbital, the second time this year Tennessee has failed to carry out an execution.
Ms. Pike is the first person to have survived receiving doses of a drug during a lethal injection execution.
. . .The Tennessee Department of Correction confirmed that Ms. Pike had returned to the prison, but declined to offer additional details about her condition or treatment.
The course of medical treatment for Ms. Pike in prison was not immediately clear.
Her lawyers have asked Mr. Lee to grant her clemency and allow her to spend the remainder of her life in prison.
Agreed. This mess should never have occurred in the first place. As I’ve said repeatedly, it’s barbaric for the state to kill people, and especially barbaric when things go wrong, as they did for Christa Pike. If they really wanted an effective way to do away with prisoners, I’d suggest the firing squad or guillotine, but the states prefers bloodless executions. They should be preferring life without parold.
An Anthropic artificial intelligence model submitted a false tip to a Philadelphia police website about an unsolved homicide case, authorities and Anthropic said.
It’s the latest example of AI models acting in unintended ways and manipulating government and other websites during tests. In a report Friday, Anthropic also disclosed a separate incident when its AI model submitted forms to an undisclosed government website instead of stopping before submission.
The incident in Philadelphia occurred on July 18 when the AI model Claude Haiku 4.5 was tasked with generating and performing example tasks on randomly selected webpages, Anthropic said.
Claude filled out a form on police site PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com indicating it might have information regarding an unsolved murder listed on the site.
Philadelphia Police said in a statement they were unaware of the incident until Anthropic notified them on Wednesday. Then they found the submission in the website’s tip records and confirmed it was marked spam and never forwarded to police.
. . .“Unsolved cases involve real victims, grieving families and investigators working to secure answers,” the Philadelphia Police Department said in a statement. “Technology companies must take all appropriate steps necessary to prevent their systems from submitting false information to law enforcement.”
Anthropic said in its report that most of the reported behaviors are forms of what it calls “persistence” — “in which Claude, when it cannot complete a task as given, works around a restriction instead of stopping.”
The company said it was modifying its training to “reduce the likelihood of further misbehavior.”
This is only the beginning of AI “misbehavior”, and it could get much worse. Imagine if AI could get into Medicare or Social Security websites, or bank sites. We can’t even imagine what bots can do.
*Elisha Wiesel, the son of author Holocaust survivor, and 1986 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel has written a piece in the Free Press condemning the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, calling it “The death of the Nobel Peace Prize.” (See also the WSJ’s editorial, “A Nobel Prize for Hating Israel.”)
This morning, the same committee awarded the same prize to Navi Pillay, who chaired the UN commission of inquiry that, on September 16 of last year, betrayed the meaning of the word genocide and weaponized it against Israel. Her commission held Israel to impossible moral standards demanded of no other sovereign nation defending itself from attack. The decision followed years of anti-Israel advocacy by Pillay, including signing a manifesto in 2020 calling on governments to “Sanction Apartheid Israel.” Others have been able to see Pillay for who she is. In 2022, for example, Berlin’s mayor withdrew her support from an event honoring Pillay with a peace medal. The event was subsequently canceled.
The decision to honor Pillay is not a onetime lapse for the Nobel Committee. It is part of a long-standing trend. Members of the committee have said publicly that they wished they could take back former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres’s 1994 prize because of concerns over Israel’s conduct. A decade later, four of the five members were still defending former Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat’s prize, awarded that same year. The Israeli laureate was judged by everything he did afterward. The Palestinian laureate was never judged again. Antisemitism today looks less like hatred than like scrutiny with one permanent defendant, carried out in the language of justice. Kåre Kristiansen, a member of the committee, understood this. He resigned within an hour of the 1994 announcement because he could not honor a man whose record was soaked in terror.
It is not that Pillay has done nothing worthy of praise. Her record against actual apartheid, in South Africa, is real. So was my father’s: In his Nobel lecture he spoke of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and said, “Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as antisemitism.” So I don’t dismiss her work lightly. The problem is that she does not resent antisemitism the way my father despised apartheid. To take only the most notable example: When Miloon Kothari, a fellow member of her UN commission, complained in 2022 about social media being controlled by the “Jewish lobby,” Pillay defended him.
More importantly, the commission’s declaration that Israel is committing a genocide is wholly baseless. Consider the facts. On October 6, 2023, there was not a single Israeli soldier or civilian living in Gaza. In 2005, Israel withdrew every soldier from Gaza and removed thousands of its own citizens from their homes, against their will, to find out whether Palestinian self-rule would bring peace. Hamas seized the territory. It took hundreds of millions of dollars that could have built schools and hospitals and spent them on rockets and hundreds of miles of terror tunnels. Even so, Israel kept trying: In the months before October 7, it issued work permits to roughly 18,500 Gazans, looking to build economic ties with a population that desperately needed the work.
Critics say Israel’s control of Gaza’s borders makes it an occupier anyway. But Gaza has two borders, and Egypt has kept its own crossing as tightly controlled as Israel’s, flooding Hamas’s smuggling tunnels and razing homes to build a buffer zone. Hardly anyone calls that occupation. Could it be that no country wants terrorists crossing into it, and that only the Jewish state is condemned for feeling the same?
. . .In 1975, after the United Nations declared Zionism a form of racism, my father wrote: “This is not the first time the enemy has accused us of his own crimes. Our possessions were taken from us, and we were called misers; our children were massacred, and we were accused of ritual murder.”
We will fight the lie that Israel committed genocide with facts, in every forum, for as long as it takes. My father took sides. So do we.
The last sentence refers to Wiesel’s own Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he said, ““We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
*I largely stopped reading Nicholas Kristof in the NYT after he wrote his undocumented “dog rape” column, but in his op-ed this week on child marriage, he reveals some shocking data that is certainly checkable. And once again we see both the Left and the Right behaving shamefully, but for different reasons:
Every three seconds, on average, a girl under the age of 18 is married somewhere in the world. In India. In Ethiopia. And, to our shame, in Illinois, Maryland, Colorado — and most of America.
Thirty-two states still allow child marriages in some circumstances, such as with the permission of a parent or a judge. Two states, New Mexico and Mississippi, have no minimum age at all.
Some of the defenders of child marriages in America are religious groups on the far right, but as a liberal myself, I find it deeply dispiriting that in a number of states they are joined by left-leaning organizations such as the local affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood — even, in Illinois, the National Organization for Women.
That’s right: Some progressives and feminists fight to defend child marriage, usually on the basis of “child rights.” I shake my head in disbelief: If you actually talk to girls and women who have been married young, what you often hear is the opposite of empowerment. Instead, it’s oppression and rape and the loss of education and childhood.
For progressive organizations to ally themselves with right-wing extremists to defend what sometimes amounts to state-sanctioned statutory rape — this is liberal self-caricature.
. . .Child marriage isn’t routine in the United States, but neither is it rare. Unchained at Last, a nonprofit that fights child marriage, pored over marriage records and calculated that some 315,000 children were legally married in the United States between 2000 and 2021. A great majority were 16 or 17, but some were as young as 10. Most were girls married to adult men.
At least 66,000 of those marriages involved ages or age differences that would have constituted a sex crime in that state.
“It’s a workaround for statutory rape,” said Fraidy Reiss, the executive director of Unchained at Last.
. . . These are the states that still allow child marriages in some circumstances: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
If you live in one of these states (especially New Mexico and Mississippi), first check the rules that allow child marriage, and then I’d urge you to write to the governor and your local state Representative.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has replaced Malgorzata with Andrzej as a pillow:
Hili: Time for bed. Andrzej: Yes, but could you sleep next to me tonight instead of on top of me?
In Polish:
Hili: Pora iść do łóżka.
Ja: Tak, ale czy mogłabyś dziś spać obok mnie, a nie na mnie?
If you’ve kept track of NYT Mayor Zohran Mamdani since he was elected less than a year ago, it’s not hard to conclude that, though he pretends to dislike bigotry, his statements and actions add up to a man who is not fond of Jews, and who wants Israel gone and replaced by a Palestinian state. His “official” statement on October 7 of this year, was thin on sympathy for Israel and touted the three Big Lies of antisemitism: Israeli apartheid, genocide, and colonialism. To top off the day, Mamdani had dinner at a Palestinian restaurant, showing that he not only lacks the empathy he pretends to have for murdered Israelis, but also a man who in effect spits in the face of his Jewish constituency.
Of course I can’t write about this stuff nearly as well as the NYT’s op-ed columnist Bret Stephens, who yesterday posted what I see as one of his best and most penetrating columns. It’s about Mamdani’s moral obtuseness, and you can read it by clicking the link below or seeing the archived version here. I couldn’t resist spouting off myself (flush left) after bits of Stephens’s text (indented):
I was going to give some quotes, but I found I quoted the entire column, and I hope Stephens and the NYT forgive me. It is, as Darwin described The Origin, “one long argument,” and the parts are inseparable. I’ve bolded my favorite parts:
Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, set off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”
In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.” In fact, it’s a moral obscenity. Let me count the ways.
It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The paragraph above shows not only the power of simile in calling out hypocrisy, but also how morally obtuse Mamdani really was, and how oblivious and/or insensitive he is to the feelings of people devastated by Hamas’s attacks on October 7. He couldn’t keep his gob shut for just one day without condemning Israel.
It is obscene because many of the Jews murdered on Oct. 7, living in kibbutzim with conspicuously left-leaning politics, had been at the forefront of the peace movement, volunteering, for example, to drive sick Palestinians for treatment at nearby Israeli hospitals. Hamas wasn’t just killing and terrorizing the innocent; it was eliminating the good.
It is obscene because Hamas didn’t just kill its victims in pursuit of a strategic objective. It tormented and slaughtered them like an army of serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims. Corpses of Israeli women were described by one coroner as “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others appeared to have been raped so violently that their pelvises were broken. Parents were killed in front of their children; children were murdered in their beds. A fieldworker was beheaded with a garden hoe. I know this because Hamas filmed itself doing this and I forced myself to watch the film. I know because that same month, I visited the bedrooms where the kids had been murdered, their mattresses still soaked in blood.
Although Mamdani gives lip service to the horrors experienced by Israeli civilians on October 7, not once have I seen him blame Hamas for the “genocide”, nor, indeed, say anything about the fact that explicitly genocidal aims are espoused not by Israel but by Hamas. That organization is responsible for the devastation that followed their invasion of Israel, as are the Palestinians who enable and approve of Hamas’s actions.
Mamdani does not mention that the kind of warfare practiced by Hamas guaranteed more civilian deaths. Indeed, Hamas’s late leader, Yahya Sinwar, approved of the deaths of Gazan civilians, asserting that they were actually beneficial to Hamas. Read what he said and you’ll realize that Hamas didn’t value the lives of Gazan civilians nearly as much as did Israel. Israel tried to protect Gazan civilians; Sinwar’s attitude was “the more of our civilians die, the better for our cause.” While the movie “Naza” faults Israel for killing civilians as a necessary byproduct of eliminating Hamas, the IDF tried to prevent that, while, in contrast, the “necessary sacrifices” of Gazan civilians were something that Sinwar (and Hamas) wanted and facilitated (why else would they put military facilities in and under schools and hospitals?) Stephens continues:
It is obscene because, whatever else you may think of the war in Gaza, on the eve of Oct. 7 the border of Israel and Gaza was governed by a cease-fire. It was Hamas that chose to kick off the violence, just as the Japanese did in 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Whether in fistfights between people or wars between states, whoever throws the first punch forfeits the right to throw the last.
It is obscene because Mamdani is being misleading when he speaks as if his prime objection to Israel is what it did after Oct. 7. In fact, the mayor has been an anti-Israel zealot at least since his college days, when, as a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, he broke off collaboration with the left-leaning Jewish group J Street, which advocates a Palestinian state, because it also recognizes the rights of a Jewish state. He’s written a rap professing “love” for five men convicted in a U.S. court of funneling money to Hamas. The day after Oct. 7, he issued a brief statement that said nothing about Hamas but immediately denounced Israel. Put simply, this is a mayor who first condemned Israel as guilty and then went about collecting evidence.
It is obscene because, however much the genocide allegation against Israel is mindlessly repeated by people too lazy or prejudiced to understand the difference between war and genocide, that allegation is as false as it is sinister. False, because genocide is about killing whole classes of people for who they are rather than for what they did — and if Israel wanted to kill Palestinians as Palestinians it never would have bothered mobilizing hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers for the war, and losing hundreds in high-intensity urban warfare. Sinister, because the political purpose of the genocide allegation is to trivialize, if not erase, the attacks of Oct. 7 by making them seem minor in comparison to the Palestinian casualties that tragically, but all-but inevitably, followed.
It is obscene because Hamas’s intentions toward Israel really are genocidal. Its leaders have often and publicly vowed to perpetrate future Oct. 7s. Had the group not been stopped by force that day, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have kept up its orgy of slaughter on its way to Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. Yet one searches in vain for anything from the mayor except perfunctory, pro forma condemnations of Hamas.
I often ask those who accuse Israel of killing too many Palestinians what they would do were they in charge of Israel or of the IDF. Would they stop after killing, say, 3,000 Hamas members (and about 6,000 civilians assuming a 2:1 ratio)? Given that Hamas said they’d continue slaughter and kidnapping, why would Israel stop short of wholesale elimination of the terrorists? I’ve never heard a critic explicitly say what they think Israel would have done other than what it did to eliminate the existential threat that Hamas posed.
It is obscene because there’s an even more wretched purpose to the genocide charge against Israel, which long predates the recent war in Gaza. It is a specimen of Holocaust erasure: not the dumb kind, which seeks to deny Nazi Germany’s murder of six million Jews, but a more sophisticated version that accuses living Jews of genocide as a way of ending the historical Jewish claim to a long and ongoing history of persecution and near-annihilation that accounts for its need for a sovereign state capable of defending its people.
In my view, people like Mamdani, and other Jew haters, dislike the Jews even more because of the Holocaust, which of course arouses sympathies for what Jews experienced. That’s why they either deny the Holocaust or accuse Jews of enacting the same thing in Gaza—a bit of lunacy that many have bought into. The next paragraph is sheer brilliance:
Finally, it is obscene because Mamdani is the mayor for about one million Jewish New Yorkers, many with close relatives in Israel, who deserve better on a day of grief than to be offered the equivalent of an “All Lives Matter” homily. This is yet another of the double standards through which modern-day Jew hatred manifests itself: Whenever antisemitism is mentioned in progressive circles, it is inevitably accompanied by nods about Islamophobia or other bigotries.
It would be better to have a mayor who, if only on Oct. 7, can say: Jewish Lives Matter. Israeli Lives Matter. Full stop. The lectures about Gaza can come some other day.
This Washington Post article (click to read, or find it archived here) shows that, relatively, cat ownership is outstripping dg ownership in America, mainly because cats are holding steady while dog ownership is declining. Nevertheless, pet stores and other “mech” places offer far more goodies for dgs than for cats.
The author is Robert Granadar.
Excerpts:
According to statistics from my research firmPackaged Facts, for the first time since the data began being tracked, more U.S. households own kittens than puppies. In 2014, there were 1.8 households with a dog under 1 year old for every one household with a cat the same age. That ratio reached parity in 2025, and this year, it declined to 0.94 to 1. Fewer puppies today means fewer dogs in the future.
This isn’t a story of cat ownership booming, however. It’s one of dog ownership declining. The number of American households with dogs has dropped 5 percent since 2019, while cat ownership has held relatively steady. Dogs still dominate America — roughly 71 million households have dogs compared with 53 million that own cats — but that is changing quickly.
Here’s a graph of popularity of the two mammals, with fish a distant third:
. . . . roughly halfof cat owners feel as though pet product marketers and retailers aren’t catering to cats.
Meanwhile, in most pet stores, dog owners are greeted with a wide assortment of food and treat options, toys, enrichment products, travel accessories, apparel, training equipment and seasonal merchandise. Grooming, boarding, training and other pet services remain overwhelmingly dog-centric. There are dog parks, dog beaches, dog-friendly hotels, dog-friendly restaurants, dog bakeries and even dog airlines. Cats are largely left out. They get leftover boxes from Amazon deliveries.
Pet companies treat cats like the Ken to dogs’ Barbie. So, what’s behind Americans’ move away from dogs?
Mostly, practicality. Cats are quieter, easier to leave by themselves and better at living in smaller spaces. A dog can turn your Saturday into a logistical exercise. A cat barely notices you’ve left the house.
But the trend reflects the state of the economy, too. Home buying, a traditional trigger for adding a dog to the family, has been stifled by a combination of elevated real estate prices, sluggish real wage growth and higher mortgage rates. The homeownership decline has taken some of the steam out of the dog market, as homeowners are almost twice as likely as renters to own a dog, according to our data.
Here are the data from the article, state by state, on the relative popularity of cats vs. d*gs. Note that the five states with more households having cats than dogs are nearly all in the NE, with the exception of Idaho (?): Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. Illinois and Louisiana, in stark contrast show fewer than 20% of the households with cats:
And look! Cats cost almost half of what dogs do!
Demographic shifts are also putting downward pressure on overall pet ownership. Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies projects that household growth will be concentrated among older adults and minorities — groups that historically have lower pet ownership rates.
The decline in dog ownership is also a product of the way people live and work post-pandemic. Americans have smaller households, are more likely toown apartments, travel more and incur higher costs. With the U.S. facing tighter economic conditions, dogs can be prohibitive. Packaged Facts estimates that owners spend an average of $1,300 annually on dogs, compared with roughly $750 on cats.
. . . This isn’t a story about cats replacing dogs. It’s about Americans becoming more like cats: living in smaller spaces, valuing independence and preferring to be left alone.
Go cats! This article neglects to explain one fact that baffles me: why the Internet is far more dominated by cats than by d*gs. You’d expect that because d*gs are more expressive and active, as well as more popular, they’d dominate the Web. But they don’t. Any explanations?
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Do you know about the Cat Festival held every year in Tokyo? It celebrates the Bakeneko, a supernatural demon cat. Here’s a bit about it from Wikipedia:
The bakeneko (ばけ猫, “changed cat”) is a type of Japanese yōkai, or supernatural entity; more specifically, it is a kaibyō, or supernatural cat.[2] It is often confused with the nekomata, another cat-like yōkai.[3] The distinction between them is often ambiguous, but the largest difference is that the nekomata has two tails, while the bakeneko has only one.
There are legends of bakeneko in various parts of Japan, but the tale of the Nabeshima Bakeneko Disturbance in Saga Prefecture is especially famous.
The reason that cats are seen as yōkai in Japanese mythology is attributed to many of their characteristics: for example, the pupils of their eyes change shape depending on the time of day, their fur can seem to cause sparks when they are petted (due to static electricity), they sometimes lick blood, they can walk without making a sound, their wild nature that remains despite the gentleness they can show, they are difficult to control, their sharp claws and teeth, nocturnal habits, and their speed and agility.
Here’s a picture of a demon-cat from the Wikipedia article, with the caption, “Ume no Haru Gojūsantsugi (駅) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. A kabuki play that was performed in 1835 (Tenpo 6) in Ichimura-za. It depicts a cat that has shapeshifted into an old woman, a cat wearing a napkin and dancing, and the shadow of a cat licking a lamp.”
Part of the legends of the bakeneko is that they like to lick lamp oil!
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
But every year about this time the demon cats are celebrated in a Tokyo Festival, and people dress up in cat outfits and do catlike things. The video below shows the festival from last year. The description:
Step into the whimsical world of Tokyo’s Kagurazaka Bakeneko Festival (化け猫フェスティバル) where the streets come alive with cat-themed costumes, traditional dance, music, and joy! 🐾✨ Every year, cat lovers from across Japan gather in Kagurazaka, Tokyo, to celebrate the mysterious Bakeneko (化け猫) the legendary “ghost cat” of Japanese folklore. From adorable feline cosplay and creative makeup to lively parades and local treats, it’s a must-see event that blends Japanese tradition, folklore, and kawaii culture!
