Wednesday: Hili dialogue

September 16, 2026 • 6:45 am

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

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

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

Da Nooz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even some Republican election officials cheered the ruling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Independent via Twitter:

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a good question:

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

In Polish:

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

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

From CinEmma:

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

From Wholesome Memes:

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

Translation from Farsi:

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

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

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

From Malcolm. Translation from the Portuguese:

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

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

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

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

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

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

And have a gander at these beautiful macaws:

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

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

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

September 15, 2026 • 6:08 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, September 15, 2026, and Double Cheeseburger Day. Here’s an ad for one I photographed in St. Petersburg. Can you read the Russian?

It’s also National Cheese Toast Day, National Crême de Menthe Day, National Linguine Day, and World Afro Day.

There’s a Google Doodle on voting today (thanks to yesterday’s decision by the Supreme Court, we can still vote by mail). Click to see where it goes:

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

Da Nooz:

*The Kennedy Center has warned that it will go bankrupt unless Trump’s name, previously removed by a federal judge’s order, is restored to the building (archived article here).

Officials at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts have warned in documents that the institution faces “certain fiscal collapse within weeks” unless President Trump’s name is added back to the building in some fashion.

The warning, contained in a draft resolution ahead of a board meeting scheduled for Tuesday, appears to be part of an effort by Trump-allied officials to convince a judge that the institution’s financial health hinges on placing a tribute to the president on the building’s facade.

The judge, Christopher R. Cooper, ruled months ago that the president’s name should be removed from the building because Congress needed to have approved its renaming as the “Trump-Kennedy Center.”

The draft resolution shared with trustees says the center is at risk of bankruptcy and of missing payroll — but that Mr. Trump has “offered to step in and raise the necessary funds” to save the center. The draft resolution presents 10 options for how to add Mr. Trump’s name below the main signage on the front of the center.

“The board understands that without such appropriate recognition it is unlikely that President Trump will provide the fundamental oversight of the renovation of the main building and lead the fiscal rescue of the center,” the draft resolution says.

This is blackmail, pure and simple. Perhaps the Kennedy Center was in financial trouble before they added “Trump” to the name (I have no idea), but the notion here that if Trump’s name is put back on, he will somehow bail out the Center—and that is the act of a petulant child.  No act is too petty if it concerns Trump slapping his name over everything.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal describes an anti-Israeli film that won, with standing applause, the Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival (Wikipedia description here). The standing ovation was 24½ minutes long, also a record. Segal calls the film a “blood libel”.

It’s Monday, September 14, and rather than the typical smiles and gratitude, self-important solemnity greeted attendees of the Venice Film Festival as Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor accepted the Special Jury Prize for their new anti-Israel film NAZA. The title is the Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage, and the resemblance to another word is not one the filmmakers appear to have worked hard to avoid.

The critically acclaimed libel is the Israeli far left’s contribution to a steadily growing genre: anti-Israel propaganda, what might be called Hague bait. From the people who applauded the historical revisionist epic Palestine 36 and the directors behind the false frontier western No Other Land comes the sci-fi dystopia NAZA.

In the world of NAZA, Israel is Skynet, using AI to identify and eliminate threats in Gaza. Framed around the anonymous testimony of 24 people who claim to have served in intelligence Unit 8200, the film paints a picture of target lists generated from data scraped off thousands of hacked phones, and an interface where an officer clicks a rooftop and reads off how many people inside will die, with no column separating the infants from the adults. One interviewee recalls an approval for a strike with 500 expected civilian casualties.

The laziest provocation should be dismissed first. NAZA uses AI the way it is used on lazy grant applications and doctoral theses: a buzzword covering a lack of substance. AI in military applications is naturally unsettling to many, but let us be clear about what it is. A tool, one that has existed in earlier forms for nearly 20 years and is integrated into every modern military, and, in targeting and tracking, one that saves lives and improves military effectiveness. In the right hands, better data means fewer civilian casualties and more Hamas ones.

NAZA alleges that the IDF’s hands are soaked in blood, but let us break the claim down. Unit 8200 is the largest single unit in the IDF; finding 24 people to “confess” slivers of information, then arranging those slivers to look like an indictment, is not exactly a bulletproof case against the State of Israel. That they are anonymous, faces blurred and voices distorted, certainly makes the country look more malicious, but it also leaves open whether they served in the army at all, in what role, or whether they had any involvement in the events they describe. The self-identified junior soldiers would have no access to national or military strategy, and some of the accounts refer to situations outside Unit 8200’s role altogether.

Segal has more criticisms, but you can read them for yourself.  He ends this way:

But all you need to know about this film’s essence is the record-breaking standing ovation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously described a Moscow conference in 1937 where the applause for Stalin’s name ran on because no one dared be the first to sit. They managed 11 minutes. Few things testify to the power and intolerance of the ideology NAZA belongs to quite like the fact that Venice managed 25.

This YouTube video, which has English subtitles, is labeled as the trailer to NAZA.

For a response to this by an Israeli who hasn’t seen it, and a categorial denial of the main allegations by the IDF, see the articles at the Jewish News Service and the Times of Israel, and especially the official IDF response, which denies the use of AI in fighting Hamas. I expect there will be more on this in the coming days, and I will follow up.

*Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier, who used to be our provost here, recounts the pushback received by a report on the state of academia he commissioned. His op-ed in the Washington Post is called “A report exposed a crisis in academia. The response was telling.” (Article archived here, and you can see my post about the report here.)

The committee’s central finding in its report released in June was nuanced. It emphasized the continued importance of the humanities and found rigorous scholarship in every field it studied. But the committee also found serious problems across the board, including “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity.”

The group, however, noted uncertainty about how much these problems affect the disciplines, cautioning against hasty interventions without thorough assessments.

The reaction to this report has been lively. Some responses challenged its conceptual foundations. Some criticized its evidentiary basis and how it was produced. Others said it should have proposed more reform steps. That is how scholarly debate should work.

But others ascribed sinister motives to those involved or asserted that the report had been commissioned to advance a broader political agenda. A joint statement from members of the American Association of University Professors at Vanderbilt and Washington University called the document a “pseudo-intellectual pretext” for administrators to strip faculty of the power to govern their own departments and asked us to rescind the report. Others alleged guilt by association after the U.S. secretary of education cited it in an open letter in August — a letter published nearly a year after the report had been commissioned.

Ascribing motives without providing evidence or rejecting findings because they are also supported by political opponents are odd arguments to make when criticizing a report’s accuracy.

Some examples of the ideological invasion of the humanities:

To get a better sense of the evidence provided, it is worthwhile reading the field-specific reports on literary studies, sociology and history. We can debate what evidence would convince us that scholarly standards are being subordinated to political agendas. But what do we make of the fact that professional associations and many departments explicitly endorse such goals?

Consider the following examples. The president of the American Anthropological Association told the group’s members in 2021 that anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.”

The president of the American Sociological Association in his 2021 presidential address called for an “emancipatory sociology” centered on white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy and other determinants that traditional European and “white American sociologists” had omitted from their accounts.

The English department at Michigan State University states that its “teaching, scholarship, and service are explicitly committed to advancing equity and justice and questioning established power structures.” Twenty other English departments and programs identified in the appendixes to the literary studies report issued similar statements.

. . .There are encouraging signs. In sociology, scholars are engaged in a serious debate about the relationship between activism and scholarship.

That is the response this report deserves. It needs to be read and debated. And where it is right, faculty need to publicly support it — even if someone in Washington has said so, too.

This is not scholarship but activism. I can’t believe, given the proliferation of “studies” and evidence that class syllabi are biased in “progressive” directions, that people can’t see that there’s a big problem with the humanities in this respect (and, as Luana and I showed, in science, too).

*In his latest column, of which I get a summary in a newsletter (I no longer subscribe to The Weekly Dish), Andrew Sullivan declares that he’s staying away from writing about Trump and American politics for the next year. I quote:

. . . I found myself asking: what else is there to say about our national politics at this point? We are a decade into the Trump era and everything is the same and much worse. The midterms could change the general mood, but Trump — as his Castro-length speech to his “convention” showed — will never change. His ability to shock with new lows and new depravities is undimmed. How many times can I say in so many words what Kevin Williamson righteously unleashed this week?

Trump is a habitual liar who has made his political career on the support of people, often dumb and mostly angry, who enjoy being lied to. J.D. Vance is a schmuck, a spineless yes-man without honor or integrity … Trump is surrounded by a team of cretins, incompetents, nepotism beneficiaries, drunks, degenerates, and sundry clueless clowns. Their political goal is tyranny and the displacement of the American constitutional order by a Trump-fronted mafia state.

That’s about right. Try looking at the president’s social-media feed: disgusting, deranged, dangerous, delusional. Or his dumb-as-a-post war that is not a war. Or his mindless tariff escalation with Canada. Or his hideous Arc de Trump. Categorizing and detailing his daily absurdities and obscenities for over a decade has been important work. But another two years of thinking and writing in depth about this monster and his madness? I found myself buckling with nausea at the thought.

Equally, I realized I’m exhausted trying to find something new and interesting to say about the feckless Democrats, who still appear to be either woke fanatics or conviction-free liberals, and who now apparently believe that warmed-over socialism is what the country is begging for. You know what I think they need to do, and I’m not sure there is much point in my repeating it ad nauseam. My last column on the two cults summed up a lot. The Dems have some talent and I have some hope, but I’m not sure I have that much new to say until we have actual candidates and policies for the post-Trump era. That’s when we’ll be able to assess, start over, and think constructively again. Same with the GOP. Anyone is saner than Trump.

At the same time, of course, I reflected on the huge questions remain: the fate of liberal democracy after the mad king, the rise of neo-fascism in Europe, the unknowable consequences of AI, the resurgence of Chinese nationalism, the resilience of religion, the challenge of demographic decline, the postmodern assault on truth, and an international order clearly shifting from one largely peaceful era to another, far more dangerous one. And I don’t want to walk away from any of this. I want to focus more on it — on deeper themes and bigger issues than Trump’s latest excrescence.

. . .So for the next year or so, I want to shift the Dish away from weekly political columns and focus more on podcast explorations of history, philosophy, culture, religion, science, and psychology. That means we’ll lead with the Dishcast each week, not the column. Yes, I’ll continue to write bloggy posts to supplement it. And if a real moment occurs, of course I’m going to write about it. But not a full-length column every week.

Familiar features from the column newsletter will remain: the View From Your Window, the Window Contest, Money Quotes for the Week, Dissents of the Week, Mental Health Break, and a guide to other substacks. (And we’re adding a polished transcript for each episode.) We’ll no doubt experiment some more a bit. But I won’t be writing a long column each week until we have some actual choices and a real debate about what’s next in the wake of this disaster of a presidency. Which is about a year away.

Then there’s the other reason for the shift. I really want to write my spiritual memoir.

Well, I don’t have a spiritual memoir in the offing, so I’ll write about those politics that interest me, foreign or domestic.

*Over at the Free Press, historian Niall Ferguson envisions a number of ways the AI apocalypse can take place, though they all seem to involve a human starting the process. Even asking the bots themselves shows a not negligible probability of this happening:

In short, even the models themselves admit that p(Doom)—that is, their probability of wiping us all out by 2036—lies somewhere between below 10 percent and above 50 percent. It’s a wide range, I know, but would you do anything that had such a potentially high probability of killing you inside 10 years? And I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that Claude, Grok & Co. are incentivized to understate p(Doom), not overstate it.

. . . In short, even the models themselves admit that p(Doom)—that is, their probability of wiping us all out by 2036—lies somewhere between below 10 percent and above 50 percent. It’s a wide range, I know, but would you do anything that had such a potentially high probability of killing you inside 10 years? And I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that Claude, Grok & Co. are incentivized to understate p(Doom), not overstate it.

Here are examples of what’s already happened:

In June, Anthropic revealed that “malicious actors are using AI in ways that make them more dangerous, such as “in the later, more complex stages of their cyber operations.” “Cyberattacks,” it added, “are becoming more autonomous.” OpenAI admitted that users were asking its models to help them make bioweapons. For example, ChatGPT was asked how to aerosolize pathogens, modify the measles virus to make an outbreak resistant to the measles vaccine, and make ricin, a highly toxic poison banned under the Biological Weapons Convention (more on that later). The chatbot obliged, though OpenAI then closed the accounts involved.

Even more disturbing was the unprompted, concerted attack by OpenAI’s agents on Hugging Face in July. I wrote about that two weeks ago, but we’ve since learned more from an August 26 report from METR, a nonprofit that measures the potential harm of AI systems. We’ve also learned that, two months before the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI had already launched the “GemStuffer” cyberattack against RubyGems, an online service for coders.

In the Hugging Face incident, roughly 1,200 agents meant to be isolated from one another found a way to communicate and coordinate on an unauthorized message board, sending more than 70,000 messages and files over six days (July 7–13). Around 700 of the agents went on to participate in the attack on Hugging Face. These agents named themselves, cheated, and colluded, and then went to great lengths to cover their digital tracks.

Ferguson goes on to name China and Russia as those most likely to go after the West (China’s already used AI to go after groups), and especially fears the use of AI to launch attacks with biological weapons. Like most readers, I don’t know how to weigh these threats, but one has to pay attention when the heads of AI companies like Anthropic are calling for a pause.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is surprised at a quotidian event:

Hili: The sun is going down behind the line of trees.
Andrzej: Yes, that’s its everyday habit.

In Polish:

Hili: Słońce zachodzi za linię drzew.
Ja: Tak, to jego codzienny obyczaj.

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

From Reader Tim McLean, who saw this angry camp chair at the Three Dog Winery in Picton, Ontario.  

From Bad Spelling and Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From The English Language Police:

It’s hard to believe that Mahsa Amini was killed four years ago, and it was her death that really got the protests against the Iranian theocracy rolling (you may recall that it was likely she was beaten to death by the morality police for not wearing a hijab).

From Luana; words of wisdom from Kamala Harris:

From Malcolm. I could use this kitten!

From Jeff Maurer; J. D. Vance taking cheap shots at Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico:

From my feed, a feel-good video:

Another from my feed. Translation from the Russian:

This kitty has loved lying in the sink since kittenhood, but then he grew up, and the sink didn’t 😾

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Doctor Cobb: Leaf miner zoomies!

Leaf miner zoomies

— Matt P (@bertolicus.bsky.social) 2026-09-13T08:57:54.819Z

 

The golden days of the ducklings: photos and videos

September 14, 2026 • 9:45 am

I expect the ducklings to start flying within ten days or so, as they’re zooming around on the pond and, as you can see below, are getting some elevation, so that their bodies are out of the water but their feet are still in it. These are their Golden Days, and I think they’ll soon be leaving.

At any rate, Miss Duck is still absent and I don’t expect to see her again. I doubt she was the victim of a predator, as I cannot find any signs of predation (blood, feathers, carcasses, etc.) near the pond.  And although she deserted her babies, she was a good mother up to near the end, and her four offspring will have the chance to contribute to the mallard gene pool.

Here she is with one of her babies. Look at that neck! We think of it as a kind of periscope that she extended when looking around. And, thanks to the miracle of genetics, all four ducklings also have relatively long necks.

Some photos of her offspring. They are all but adults now.  One is looking up, as you can see by his tilted head.  I’m told that the females have orange on their bills (the two to the left) while the males lack orange but have a pale yellow color (two to the right):

Here a Boy Duck is quacking, but males can’t make the classic duck quack, which is limited to females. Males make a sort of gutteral quack-grunt that is lower in volume:

The two males. They won’t develop their characteristic color and pattern (green head, white neck ring, etc.) until they overwinter.

But despite their bad behavior during mating season, the males are still beautiful.

It was hot on this day, and two of the ducks are doing gular fluttering, which is not panting but a rapid form of fluttering of the throat that evaporates moisture and cools the bird. The second duck from the right is looking up, while the one on the extreme left is sleeping with its nictitating membrane closed:

Lately the ducklings aren’t as keen for the food I give them, and my theory (which is mine) is that they are doing more dabbling in the water, sticking their bills in the substrate to get a mouthful of food which they strain out through the serrations on the edge of their bills. They are also foraging more on land, which I like because tmust learn to be wild ducks without a nice man to feed them.

They often stick their bills in the dirt around the pots of plants installed in the pond. Here’s a video of them doing it (humans are discussing a book in the background):

I expect that they’ll fly for real (i.e., bodies and feet out of the water) within a week or ten days.  They are flapping their wings a lot and, after meals, zoom across the pond, occasionally levitating their bodies out of the water: a Wright-Brothers type of flight.

Here’s a big flap. You can see that the wing feathers aren’t full-sized.

And four instances of zooming between September 9 and September 11. You can see their bodies leave the water occasionally:

Wing flapping, which develops their flight muscles:

You can never predict when they’ll zoom, but it’s much more likely after meals, as if they’re celebrating a good feed. You can also hear a quack, which is clearly from a female.

Here’s a good case of the zoomies which took place last Friday. People who stop by the pond and see this have no idea what’s going on. Keep watching as they zoom several times in this clip. There is another quack near the end.

Monday: Hili dialogue

September 14, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Monday, Septenber 14, 2026 and it’s National Eat a Hoagie Day. Also known as submarine sandwiches, subs, grinders, or hero sandwiches.  Where does the name “hoagie” come from? It’s a mystery, but the term is endemic to New Jersey and Philadelphia. Here are thrr theories as listed by Wikipedia (they give two more:)

  1. In 1953, a reader letter to the Philadelphia Bulletin reported that Italian-Americans working at the World War I–era shipyard known as Hog Island, where emergency shipping was produced for the war effort, introduced the sandwich by putting various meats, cheeses, and lettuce between two slices of bread.  This became known as the “Hog Island” sandwich; shortened to “Hoggies”, then the “hoagie”.
  2. Dictionary.com offers the following origin of the term hoagie – n. American English (originally Philadelphia) word for “hero, large sandwich made from a long, split roll”; originally hoggie (c. 1936), traditionally said to be named for the jazz musician Hoagy Carmichael (1899–1981), but the use of the word predates his celebrity and the original spelling seems to suggest another source (perhaps “hog”). The modern spelling dates from about 1945; it may have been altered by influence of Carmichael’s nickname.
  3. The Philadelphia Almanac and Citizen’s Manual offers a different explanation saying the sandwich was created by early-twentieth-century street vendors called “hokey-pokey men”, who sold antipasto salad, meats, cookies, and buns with a cut in them. When Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta H.M.S. Pinafore opened in Philadelphia in 1879, bakeries produced a long loaf called the pinafore. Entrepreneurial “hokey-pokey men” sliced the loaf in half, stuffed it with antipasto salad, and sold the world’s first “hoagie”. This hypothesis seems unlikely, as “hokey pokey” men were known street vendors of an ice cream product.

Here, from Wikipedia, is a “salami, ham and cheeses on a hoagie roll“:

jeffreyw, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Gobstopper Day, National Black and White Cookie Day, and National Cream-Filled Donut Day.  Here’s one I ate in Hawaii in 2019. These donuts, which originated in Portugal, are called “malasadas” in Hawaii, and aren’t easy to find.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 14 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT reports on how a rogue faction of Iranian hard-liners are taking action against the U.S and it allies. without approval of the country’s leaders, who are furious (article archived here).

Masoud Pezeshkian, the president of Iran, was riding high in early July, fresh off the successful negotiation of a peace agreement with the United States, and had traveled to neighboring Iraq for part of a weeklong funeral spectacle for Iran’s slain supreme leader.

Suddenly he got stunning news.

Iranian forces had opened fire on three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, setting ablaze a Qatari L.N.G. tanker and damaging other vessels. Iran was under siege in world opinion.

Outraged, Mr. Pezeshkian phoned Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, the commander in chief of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and in a raised voice called the actions reckless and demanded answers, according to five Iranian officials and two Guards members familiar with the events.

General Vahidi told the president that he had neither authorized nor had advance knowledge of the strike, the five officials said. The nation’s Supreme National Security Council, which plays a critical role in both the war and negotiations, had also been in the dark, he said.

In fact, much of the country’s leadership was unaware that a fringe hard-line faction had decided to act on its own. Ultimately, those clandestine efforts derailed a push by more moderate pragmatists in Iran to reach an end to hostilities with the United States and repair their nation’s ailing economy.

The hard-liners succeeded in part because the only figure with the authority to resolve such disputes — the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei — has been a phantom since taking office in March. He has not been seen, and his voice has not been heard. And the authenticity of written statements and messages attributed to Ayatollah Khamenei has been questioned, including by Mr. Pezeshkian, according to three Iranian officials.

Mr. Pezeshkian immediately returned to Tehran. By the next morning, even as the funeral ceremonies were still underway, the United States had retaliated with airstrikes on Iran. The two countries were back at war.

Senior Iranian officials and a Guards member said in interviews that what followed were some of the most volatile political confrontations within Iran’s leadership in memory. Officials engaged in shouting matches. Two senior generals threatened to resign. Accusations of treason and betrayal flew.

If Mojtabi didn’t even issue a statement, then he’s surely dead or in a coma.  I’m not sure whether this schism within the Iranian leadership is good or bad. It could mess up the country’s war strategy, but if the hard-liners are in charge then what we’ve seen will continue, and probably at least through the midterms.

*From the WaPo, a clickbait headline for me: “We asked dozens of people what they want from Democrats. Here’s what they said.” (The title appears to have been changed, and it’s an interesting change. See the archived version for the new title.)

Here’s the intro and a few comments

Outside a highway rest stop named after former president Joe Biden, it was easy to pick up on the frustration and lack of enthusiasm that many Democratic voters are feeling toward the party he once led. But many also said they’ll set those misgivings aside and vote for Democrats in November.

The responses are in line with recent national polling, which has found that more Democrats than Republicans are certain to vote, even as the Democratic Party’s favorability and public image remains weak. About 91 percent of Democratic registered voters said they would definitely vote, compared with 79 percent of Republicans, according to a YouGov-Economist poll from August. The same pollster has found the favorability rating of Democrats has steadily risen over the last year to 40.5 percent and 30 percent among independents.

The Washington Post interviewed dozens of voters at the Biden Welcome Center off Interstate 95.Here’s what they said they’re feeling about the 2026 midterm elections — and what they want from Democrats:

Ronald Makarutsa

45, nurse practitioner in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts, will vote Democratic

“They need to have more of a spine and stand up for one another. When a Republican does something, they all say the same thing until they achieve their goals. Some of the Democrats, they don’t support one another. … They have to put up a united front.”

Ashish Pandy

39, driver and nonprofit founder in Queens, will vote, but not sure for what party

“People have forgotten humanity. … Rather than big issues, rather than bringing up Russia or the Middle East, they should be bringing up things that matter to people: People shouldn’t be hungry. They should have access to a good life.”

Lindsay Morgan

43, restaurant manager in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, will vote Democratic

“Democrats need better people to run. If you want to change what’s happening, you have to get a powerhouse that doesn’t give the other side fuel to say we have ‘Sleepy Joe.’ [But] they need not to fall so far left that it detracts from some of those Republicans you might capture.”

Carlos Roman

21, college student in Newark, Delaware, will not vote

“The Democratic and Republican Party are just two groups that serve one group, and that collective is the oligarchy.”

I wonder what group Roman doesn’t think “serves the oligarchy.” At any rate, what we have is a panoply of answers and nothing enlightening. It’s interesting that nobody in the article said they’d vote Republican, and that percentage among all those surveyed isn’t given. Yet they interviewed dozens of people. Since the article was about what Democrats want from their party, that’s perhaps understandable. Note, though, that there are several people who aren’t sure how they’ll vote, and one who won’t vote at all.

*People on this site seem divided about whether artificial intelligence is an existential danger or is not to be worried about. But, according to the NYT, “Top A.I. leaders call for slowing down A.I,. development.”  All this stems from an announcement and resignation from Anthropic by Jacob Coxon, ho had also worked for openAI, that those companies are irresponsible to the point of endangering humanity.

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology.

Top executives of other major A.I. companies quickly signed on to the effort. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI; Elon Musk, whose SpaceX rocket company has been ramping up spending on A.I.; and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, wrote in social media posts that they agreed on the need for a slower pace.

Mr. Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic to focus on securely and carefully building A.I., wrote in his essay that while he believed the technology could bring many benefits, it was advancing at too rapid a pace for researchers to continue safely.

“Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up,” Mr. Amodei wrote. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”

Mr. Amodei has warned about the safety risks of A.I. for years. But his essay amounted to one of the most full-throated calls for urgent action from a leading A.I. company executive to date.

He called for independent auditors to check the companies for safety standards and urged global cooperation in creating rules around A.I. development.

The appeal for an industrywide pause follows months of escalating concerns across the technology industry as A.I. model development has made significant strides at companies like Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, as well as OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and Google’s DeepMind.

Tensions rose further after the leading A.I. labs discovered security breaches carried out by their own programs without their knowledge. In one incident this year, OpenAI’s systems breached an A.I. start-up called HuggingFace, which was not detected until HuggingFace informed OpenAI weeks after it had happened. Since then, A.I. researchers have conferred to discuss what to do.

People here have said that the warnings are overblown, and I don’t know if AI bots can destroy humanity without a person behind them. But I don’t know squat. If the top executives call for a slowdown, though, that’s good enough for me.

*The Free Press has an editorial, “9/11 and the work to be done,” which indicts many Americans for largely forgetting (or even approving) the desire of many Islamists and terrorists to kill Americans and destroy the things that make America worth inhabiting.

It is clear that the unity that Americans experienced immediately after the attacks has dissipated almost completely. We are now furiously divided over basic questions of national identity and purpose. And astonishingly, we’re even divided over who is to blame for the attacks.

Leading figures shaping the views of millions, and especially young people, have distorted the history and meaning of 9/11, making it more difficult to fully and collectively honor the dead, the sacrifice of first responders, and the courage of those willing to fight and die for our country. To take two examples who have been in the spotlight lately, that includes Hasan Piker, who once declared that “America deserved 9/11,” and has become the darling of the Democratic left, livestreaming to his fans with a framed image of the burning towers in the background. And it includes Tucker Carlson, who recycles the libelous conspiracy theories he once denounced, promulgated in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 by Hezbollah, suggesting that Israeli and American Jews were in on the plot.

In 2001, Americans were shocked by the deep reservoir of ideological hatred in the Arab and Islamic world that the terrorist attacks brought into the open. Today, we are shocked by how familiar open hatred of America has become. All of the ideological -isms we believed we had cast off in the 20th century—anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, anti-Westernism, anti-Zionism—are now growing natively on American soil. It’s no wonder Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to the American People” became a viral TikTok sensation in November 2023. This was one month after similarly inspired Hamas terrorists, armed and trained by the Islamic Republic of Iran, massacred and kidnapped men, women, and children in southern Israel, only to be embraced by credulous students and professors at elite American institutions who affirmed the terrorists’ barbaric belief that Westerners, and Jews in particular, had it coming. Those students and professors had no idea what drives radical Islamists, or that our enemies on many fronts are fighting for one cause.

What did university students who celebrated the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, know about the men, women, and children murdered on airplanes, in burning and collapsing buildings, in the wreckage of the Pentagon, and on the earth of rural Pennsylvania, where heroic passengers crashed the fourth plane to prevent it from being turned into one more weapon of mass destruction? What had young Americans been taught about the apocalyptic ideology that sanctified the slaughter of 9/11, and that continues to fuel a war against the West, whose destruction it proclaims as its sacred mission?

Although the problem has worsened recently, there have always been those in the West who declined to recognize that killing Westerners is a fundamental aim of Islamists everywhere. Ground Zero was still a smoking pit when the French ambassador to Israel, Jacques Huntzinger, rejected any comparison of Hamas terrorists—who had been blowing up men, women, and children, along with themselves, on buses, in coffee shops, and in pizzerias—to the al-Qaeda terrorists who had flown airplanes into buildings. “We all condemn the terrorism Hamas and Islamic Jihad perpetrate here,” Huntzinger told an Israeli journalist, “but this terrorism is linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which must be solved.” Like many of his peers in the U.S. and Europe, he preferred to ignore the overarching motivation that unites the enemies of Americans and Israelis.

. . . The question today is whether Americans will retain our sense of good and evil, and continue to keep the promise we made back then, that “these dead shall not have died in vain.” There is a lot of work to do.

Yes, some will call this essay jingoistic, while other may even say it’s Islamophobic.  But recognizing the dangers of Islamism (note the term) is not an irrational fear but an issue to grapple with it.  All you have to do is live on a liberal college campus to recognize that there is a lot of truth to what the essay says.

*Are Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner really gay, or have some kind of amorous relationship? That is the reaction some fans are having to the new movie, “Coyote vs. Acme,”

Maybe the Road Runner was just playing hard to get.

For decades, cartoon canine Wile E. Coyote has been pursuing the speeding bird throughout the American Southwest, aiming to eat him and getting blown up in the process.

But in the eyes of some fans, the violent chase was actually a classic tale of tortured love. And right now they’re doing a victory lap.

That’s because of “Coyote vs. Acme,” a new film with a different twist on the hot pursuit. In the movie (spoiler alert), Wile E. Coyote sues the Acme Corporation over their defective products, which consistently backfire as he closes in on the bird. The case goes to a congressional hearing, where Road Runner bursts into the room and becomes the only creature to testify on Coyote’s behalf. Through his language of “beeps,” Road Runner tells the room he considers Coyote a friend and asks, “Are you coming back?”

Apparently that’s all the internet needed to hear.

“Road Runner admits that he sees Coyote, even whenever Wile E. dislikes him or doesn’t think that he’s looking,” said Lisbon LaSure, a 24-year-old in Jacksonville, Fla. “It’s so nice to be seen like that. It’s really deep and it’s really powerful and it’s really validating and just overall like really romantic.”

Social media is teeming with people celebrating the characters’ “toxic yaoi,” a Japanese term for male lovers. You’ll also find people “shipping” them—wishing they were in a relationship—through fan art or TikTok videos where their interactions are reframed through careful editing and songs like Paul Anka’s “You Are My Destiny” or Olivia Rodrigo’s “Stupid Song.” (Sample lyrics: “I want you more than any stupid song could ever say.”)

Annie Tarin, a University of Arizona student, made a viral montage set to Chappell Roan’s “The Subway,” in which the pop star croons about a former soulmate. In the clips Tarin uses, Coyote looks longingly at one of Road Runner’s feathers. Road Runner seems to stare into Coyote’s soul with his curious gaze.

I’m not ready to admit that there’s an amorous relationship between the two (are their sexes even known?) until I see the movie, which I’m not inclined to do. Has anybody seen it? Here’s the trailer:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the editor is bothering the worker:

Hili: Am I bothering you well enough?
Andrzej: Exceptionally well.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy dobrze ci przeszkadzam?
Ja: Wręcz doskonale.

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

From Now That’s Wild:

From 2025 Darwin Awards!!!/Epic Fails!!!

From Meow Incorporated:

From Masih; vintage video of Iranians mourning the killings in America on 9/11:

From Luana; Elizabeth Warren appearing a bit dense:

From Malcolm. I’m hoping these are all real, and so far there are no “community notes” that this is AI:

Two from my feed. First, translated from the Turkish: “At first glance, I thought it was a lion-shaped toy～ Turns out it was moving”:

From JKR:

And one I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb. He’s right when he says, “Real, not AI”:

Red Lip Bat FishI swear they are real

— Dcmfox (@dcmfox.bsky.social) 2026-09-12T17:32:55.562Z

Ducklings! (Sound up.)

Best things in life are three plus one our little Muscovy ducklings

— Chris and his farmily of forever farm friends (@caenhillcc.bsky.social) 2026-09-10T15:40:54.622Z

.

How they’ve grown!

September 13, 2026 • 11:00 am

I have a passel of new duckling photos and videos that I’ll post soon. In the meantime, I wanted to show how much the “babies” have grown. The first picture of Miss Duck’s brood was taken on the second day after hatching, July 20. You’ve seen this before:

And here they are in a similar pose a week ago (Sept. 6). They’re even bigger than than this now, and their wings and flight feathers have grown. I think they’ll be flying in some way within ten days.

And no, Miss Duck has not shown up after she abandoned her babies. We’ve rescinded her award of Best Duck Mother of All Time, though the orphan babies are doing very well.

Miliband vs. Hausdorff on England’s sanctioning of Israeli “settlers”

September 13, 2026 • 9:50 am

You may have heard that the British government has announced sanctions against Israeli individuals and settlements in Israel’s West Bank—punishing individuals and companies doing business from what is apparently Area C of the West Bank as stipulated by the Oslo II accords. While areas A and B are under Palestinian authority and jurisdiction, and Jews cannot live there, Area C is under Israeli military control. Both Jews and Palestinians live there in roughly equal numbers, but the Jews, many of whom moved in after the area was won by Israel in the 1967 war, are all referred to as “settlers”.  As for their status, Wikipedia says this:

In 2023, Area C was home to 491,548 Israeli settlers and 354,000 Palestinians. The Jewish population in Area C is administered by the Israeli Judea and Samaria Area administration, into which Israeli law is “pipelined”, whereas the Palestinian population is directly administered by the Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) and is under military law. The Palestinian Authority is responsible for medical and educational services to Palestinians in Area C; however, infrastructure construction and supervision is done by Israel.

The status of the Jewish population in area C (the Jews of the West Bank) is disputed.  While the status of this area was supposed to be resolved by negotiations between Palestine and Israel after Oslo II, those negotiations never took place. Much of the world regards the Jews in area C of being illegal settler-colonialists under the fourth Geneva Convention, but international lawyer Natasha Hausdorff argues in the videos below that Jewish residence in Area C does not violate international law, nor does it constitute, as the UK has just maintained, “ethnic cleansing.”

That said, there’s no doubt that some Israelis in the area are violating civil law by attacking and harassing Palestinians. As I’ve said before, that kind of behavior is reprehensible and should be punished. But I am unwilling to call for the wholesale removal of Jews from area C, nor for sanctioning them as the British government (and other countries) called for this week.  Their fate depends on what negotiations will take place in the future to effect a peaceful settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

But the British government under Labour (yes, the party renowned for antisemitism) has just declared not only that they’ll impose sanctions on West Bank Jewish companies, but that this is necessary to effect the ONLY and most urgent way to stop the enmity between Israel and Palestine: the “two-state solution.” First, from the NYT:

Britain, Canada and France on Tuesday announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, a symbolic step by three once-staunch allies illustrating Israel’s deepening isolation after the devastating war in Gaza and settler violence in the West Bank. [JAC: I now believe that eight more countries have signed on to these sanctions.)

. . .Britain’s package of measures was announced on Tuesday in Parliament by Ed Miliband, who became foreign secretary in July. It represents the clearest shift in British foreign policy since Andy Burnham became prime minister that month.

“Today marks the beginning of a new approach,” Mr. Miliband told lawmakers. He said that the British government “agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank — perpetrated by settler terrorists.” All too often, he added, “the Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this and worse.”

In a speech with an often deeply personal tone, Mr. Miliband said that he had made his announcement as a “proud British Jew” who was “unwavering” in his support for the state of Israel. He added, however, that Britain had concluded that the occupation was unlawful in line with a ruling by the International Court of Justice.

“So I can announce today that we will introduce an import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories,” he said, adding that the measures would also cover those who provide services to settlements, including “construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate for settlement expansion.”

You can read the full statement by Foreign Secretary Miliband to the House of Commons here. I’ll give a few extracts; note that the British government has recognized Palestine as a state, though no such state exists:

So Madame Deputy Speaker, there is a deeply painful contrast between our professed commitment to a two state solution, and the reality on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank.

. . . We should always be proud that it was a Labour government that took the historic step of recognising the State of Palestine.

What we seek today is to salvage the only course for peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians – the two state solution.

. . .Ethnic cleansing is defined by the UN as ‘a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.’

The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank – perpetrated by settler terrorists.

To advance the two state solution, we also need viable and effective Palestinian governance.

So I urge the Palestinian Authority to accelerate reform and I urge Israel to lift its withholding of revenues that is financially crippling the provision of essential services in the West Bank.

The set of measures I have announced represents a clear message to the government of Israel, to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and to the world that we will not acquiesce in the destruction of the two state solution.

I have news for Secretary Miliband: the two-state solution is already gone, extinct, singing in the Choir Invisible. The Palestinians do not want two states, nor did they ever, as they’ve rejected a two-state solution many, many times, often with stipulations favorable to Palestinians. What Palestinians want is a one-state solution, a state that will be set up to contain Jews and Palestinians, but of course would soon be Judenrein due to Jews fleeing or being exterminated.

Nor does Israel want a two-state solution. October 7 killed that desire. Israelis now realize that there was a two-state solution before 2023: Gaza—right next to Israel. That didn’t work out so well, and Israel’s security concerns about terrorism have gone sky-high.  Hamas is still in control of much of Gaza, has not yet laid down its weapons, nor have Hamas or the Palestinian Authority renounced terrorism Both groups glorify martyrs, and the PA has its infamous “pay for slay” program, euphemistically named the “Martyr’s Fund”, in which Palestinians jailed or killed for attacking Jews get a monetary reward (it can go to their families). And there are no moderate, non-Jew-hating Palestinians waiting in the wings to assume peaceful governance of a Palestinian state. Certainly the Palestinian Authority is not a candidate!

Only a fool would think that Palestinian terrorism against Israel would cease if two states were created, but Miliband & Co., ignorant of history, say stuff like this:

And this is in our fundamental national interest because if there is one lesson of recent decades, it is that we will never have stability in the Middle East without a two state solution.

Is the man serious? Does he think that a version of BDS, banning goods made in area C (often by Palestinian workers who will lose their jobs), will bring on the two state solution?

If you read the whole Miliband statement, you’ll see he blames all the woes of Gaza, including its “humanitarian catastrophe” and deaths of civilians, not on Hamas but on Israel. He and the British government have swallowed whole the line of Hamas apologists like the UN.

Now the argument that these sanctions won’t achieve the UK’s aims stands by itself, but it’s interesting to see that both Hamas and Iran have praised Miliband’s statement and the upcoming UK law it portends.

This is from the Torygraph; click on the headline below, find it archived here, or see it in full on yahoo! news

A quote:

Hamas has praised Ed Miliband’s sanctions on Israel.

The terrorist group said the Foreign Secretary’s use of the term “ethnic cleansing” to describe the actions of settlers in the West Bank was a “step in the right direction”.

It called for the prosecution of Israel’s leadership for war crimes.

On Tuesday, Mr Miliband said the occupation of Palestinian territory was “unlawful” – a first for a British government minister – and accused Israel of trying to make the two-state solution unviable.

He told the Commons: “The British Government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists. And all too often, the Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this.”

Britain will sanction companies and individuals supporting the settlements with finance, infrastructure, property or construction services.

The UK will also refuse all export licences for weapons that “materially contribute to the occupation”, said Mr Miliband.

Hamas, proscribed as a terrorist group by Britain, carried out the October 7 2023 attacks on Israel, in which 1,195 Israelis and foreign nationals died.

Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, said: “The imposition of sanctions by Britain and other European countries and Canada on goods imported from the settlements of the occupied West Bank, and the London foreign minister’s use of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ to describe the crimes of the settlers, are important steps in the right direction – but they are not enough.

“What is needed to achieve stability and peace in Palestine and beyond is the immediate implementation of the relevant international resolutions and the prosecution of war criminals in Israel in a manner similar to the Nazi trials at Nuremberg in Germany.”

Typical Hamas palaver, with not a word about the prosecution of Hamas for its real war crimes, including kidnapping hostages and indubitable targeting of civilians!

Iran has also joined the pro-Milibandwagon. From The Jewish Chronicle (click to read):


A quote (I’ve bolded one sentence):

Britain’s sanction targeting settlements in the West Bank have been greeted in Iranian state media as a step towards “the end of Israel”.

The announcement yesterday by foreign secretary Ed Miliband of a raft of measures has been broadcast repeatedly by Islamic Republic propaganda outlets.

Iranian broadcasters claimed years of activity by regime-backed “resistance groups” have succeeded in persuading the “naïve UK government” to take action against Israel.

The reports quote Miliband as branding the settlers as “terrorists” supported by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, and accusing them of “committing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank”.

Iran Radio accused the foreign secretary of “plagiarism”, saying credit for branding “Israeli occupiers” as terrorists should go to the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Now you might be saying, “Well, just because Hamas and Iran have approved the UK’s new policy doesn’t mean it’s wrong.” True, but the UK’s policy is not going to bring on a two-state solution, no matter how many times Miliband says it, and Iran just said the quiet part out loud: these anti-Israel sanctions are indeed a step towards the end of Israel.

But it won’t bring on the end of Israel, as that country is determined to continue existing. As the Hebrew phrase goes: עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי (Am Yisrael Chai): “The people of Israel live.”

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

On the other side we have is eloquent Natasha Hausdorff, international lawyer and legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel.  At 4:45 in the video below, Hausdorff explains why she doesn’t see Jewish settlements in the West Bank as illegal under international law, and why the Israelis are not committing “ethnic cleansing.” Indeed, she says, the illegal settlement in the Israeli-administered territory of Area C is being done by Palestinian Arabs, which she calls “an inversion of authority” and “projection.” The error people are making hinges on mistaking voluntary settlement of this area by Israelis with “state transfer” of Israeli populations.

I’ve rarely seen Hausdorff so exercised, but she’s clearly gobsmacked and peeved by what she sees as an anti-Jewish agenda by her own government, and an agenda based on lies. (You can see a longer explication of her views in this other video and there’s a new video with Hausdorff discussing what will happen to the firms, both Israeli and British, who will be subject to the UK boycott.)

Here’s a sign to the entrance of part of area A near Jerusalem; I took the photo a couple of years ago:

h/t: Steve, Christopher

Bill Maher schools the young and the anti-Israel Democrats

September 13, 2026 • 8:15 am

At the end of September I posted about the BBC’s refusal to use the word “terrorist” when referring to Hamas. They could use it when quoting other people, but you can’t call a terrorist a terrorist when it applies to Palestinians who kill civilians for political, ideological, or religious aims. This also applies to other media outlets, as you can see in Bill Maher’s latest “Real Time” segment below. 

A reader sent me a link to the 9-minute comedy-and-news bit, which this week was more news than comedy. And the reader noted that this was one of “his best ever” and that it “should be required viewing for every incoming college freshman in America.” It is indeed, as Maher calls out the young generation for coddling terrorism, valorizing Luigi Mangione, and touting America as the worst country ever. 

The moral confusion afflicting the young and the “progressives” is most pervasive when discussing Israel’s response to terrorism emanating from Gaza, which, Maher emphasizes, is NOT a genocide but a “counterattack in a war. . . that’s been waged by Israel since 1948”.  And he quotes a poll saying that 20% of Gen Z members have a “positive view of Osama bin Laden.” Seriously?

The genocide canard is the most infuriating lie told by progressives, even though it’s easily dispelled by citing the many things Israel did to protect Palestinian civilians from harm during its counterattack. But that doesn’t matter; the chuckleheads waving the “genocide” banner ignore both vocabulary and history, so eager are they to smear Israel. (You never hear them accusing Hamas of genocide.) As Maher says, that Big Lie is not only wrong, but also promotes antisemitism:

“Gaza equals genocide is a lie—an easily provable lie.  And the fact that so many prominent Democrats get along with it is to me, the party’s worst moment since they ended Reconstruction after the Civil War.”

“This is where antisemitism is coming from.  . . because if you really think someone is committing genocide, of course you have full permission to hate them.  And history shows, for whatever reason, when it comes to hating the Jews, people don’t need a lot of permission.”

The guest whose faces and applause appear in this segment are Max Brooks, an author, actor, and historian, and Sarah Longwell:. a conservative publisher and political strategist. 

I should add that I tweeted this segment yesterday, and the antisemites came out in droves. It’s scary, but also evidence that Jew hatred is more pervasive than we—or at least I—know. Have a look at the comments on this tweet (click on it):

Sometimes I feel that these people wouldn’t be happy unless either Israel never fought back against terrorism, or in fact disappeared from the face of the Earth.