Welcome to Sunday, September 13, 2026; it’s the last day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which ends at sunset.

It’s also National Peanut Day, celebrating a legume best eaten in two forms: peanut butter and as boiled green peanuts. It’s nearly impossible to get the latter anywhere besides roadside stands in the South, but if you see a sign like the one below, stop immediately and buy some. They taste nothing like regular peanuts, but are terrific. This was taken (and peanuts consumed) on a seminar trip I gave in early 2013. That was the trip when I had to have a bodyguard (packing heat) when I lectured on evolution at the Augusta Public Library. Sure enough, two people (unarmed) charged the stage. I was talking only about evolution!

It’s also Bald Is Beautiful Day, International Chocolate Day, National Cachaça Day, celebrating Brazil’s iconic drink, Snack a Pickle Day (half sours for me) and Fortune Cookie Day.

Here’s a pastrami sandwich from the famous and overtouristed Katz’s Deli in NYC. It’s expensive and crowded, but their pastrami is excellent, and you get plenty of pickles. (Katz’s is of course the site of the famous “fake orgasm” scene from the movie “When Harry Met Sally”. The woman who says to the waiter afterwards, “I’ll have what she’s having,” is Estelle Reiner, the mother of director Rob Reiner.

Notice the half sours dominating the pickles, as well as the Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray (celery-flavored soda), the must-have accompaniment to corned beef or pastrami.

If you haven’t read my essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Jason Arday and the corruption of science”, it’s no longer paywalled and you can read it on the Chronicle’s Substack here for free.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 13 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Houthi terrorists, backed by Iran, seized an island in the southern narrows of the Red Sea, further cutting off movement of oil-carrying ships from the Middle East (article archived here).

The Iranian-backed Houthi militia seized an island in a choke point of the Red Sea after days of fierce fighting, two Yemeni government officials said Friday, giving Iran and its allies sway over the two main routes for shipping oil out of the Middle East.

The capture of Perim Island came as Saudi Arabia announced that it had shut down a critical oil pipeline, a day after Houthi forces swept into the strategic port city of Mokha in Yemen. Both were major setbacks for the Saudi kingdom, which exports most of its oil through the Red Sea. The kingdom’s foreign ministry said the pipeline was hit on Thursday by drones launched from Iraq.

Perim Island sits in the middle of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the narrow pathway at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. Its seizure adds a new dimension in the war between the United States and Iran. The Islamic republic has already largely cut off the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and leveraged that influence to demand concessions from Washington.

Now, the Houthi militia, Iran’s ally, has a foothold at a bottleneck in the Red Sea and could further disrupt shipping there.

The island’s capture came after intense ground battles in Yemen as the Houthis have staged a lightning advance against forces allied with the internationally recognized Yemeni government, which is backed by Saudi Arabia. The kingdom has faced frequent Houthi attacks on its tankers and energy facilities, even as its leaders have tried to avoid a direct war with the group, analysts say.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia spoke to President Trump about the escalation in Yemen in calls this week, and urged the United States to take military action against the Houthis, according to officials with knowledge of the conversations. Mr. Trump told him he was not willing to do so, the officials said.

We don’t have the wherewithal to intitiate yet another war, but it would be nice if some of the allies helped, for, after all, they have to move their goods through the Red Sea and Suez Canal.

Here from Wikipedia is a map showing Perim Island in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, next to Cheikh Saïd peninsula of Yemen, with Djibouti and Eritrea to the west across the strait. A zoomed-out map is inset at the lower right. The distance from the island to Yemen is about 2-3 km, while that to the coast of Eritrea or Djibouti is about 26-30 km.  Not much space.

*According to the Guardian, this takeover is concurrent with about 50,000 Yemeni civilians fleeing before the advancing Houthi.

Nearly 50,000 people have fled a sudden advance by Houthi forces in western Yemen, with entire villages emptied and families trapped near frontline fighting with depleting food supplies, according to aid workers.

Civilians in the Middle East’s poorest country have found themselves victims of a global struggle for control over one of the most important shipping routes in the world, which threatens to turn Yemen’s on-off conflict into a forever war.

In a lightning advance this week, the Iran-backed Houthi militants have seized a string of towns along the Red Sea coast from forces aligned with the US- and Saudi-backed Yemeni government. Hundreds of people are reported to have been killed. Many fear a return to the full-scale civil war that killed 150,000 and brought many others to the brink of famine.

The UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Friday that 46,000 people had been displaced across the governates of Taiz and Hodeidah, where steep verdant mountain ridges give way to arid coastal plains. For many families, this was their second or even third time they had been forced out of their homes.

A significant number of people were observed to be leaving the city with their belongings. Fighting has cut key roads, while phone lines are down in some areas. “The scale of displacement is increasing rapidly,” said Joe Lowry, IOM’s Middle East and north Africa spokesperson in Cairo.

. . .By taking control of key areas this week, including islands off the coast, the anti-west Houthis hope to gain a direct presence near the Bab al-Mandab strait, a 20-mile stretch of water and vital trade and energy route that connects Asia with Europe. ​

The strait’s name is roughly translated as “the gate of tears” or “the gate of grief”, and its strong currents and winds made the passage between the Arabian peninsula and Africa’s east coast hazardous for centuries. Modern-day cargo ships have no physical issue passing through.

​But if ​the Houthis were to close the natural chokepoint, the impact on the global economy could be disastrous. Ships would have to reroute around the southern tip of Africa, adding thousands of extra nautical miles. The fighting has already contributed to the price of oil rising above $100 a barrel after weeks when it was trading closer to $80.

More bad news, but we can’t let terrorists control the flow of shipping in the Middle East.

*The WSJ reports that Chinese support for Iran in its war with the U.S. and Israel has extended to the Chinese supplying Iran with high-resolution satellite images of a U.S. base in Jordan that Iran attacked several times with ballistic missiles.

Before Iran carried out its attack that killed three U.S. troops in July, Tehran acquired high-resolution satellite images of the base in Jordan from Chinese entities, according to U.S. officials familiar with details of the incident.

It is the clearest evidence so far that Chinese support for Iran during the war has had lethal consequences for U.S. forces, according to the officials, who say the U.S. has connected the imagery to the attack.

The U.S. officials declined to identify the Chinese entities that supplied the imagery to Iran and didn’t allege direct involvement by Beijing. Tehran procured the images both before and after the attack.

But the finding could deepen U.S.-China tensions ahead of the planned summit between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Sept. 24, after months of frustration with Beijing’s rejection of U.S. warnings about Chinese companies providing imagery to Iran.

Senior U.S. officials raised the imagery linked to the July 17 attack with their Chinese counterparts, who pushed back and demanded proof, the U.S. officials said. China has repeatedly dismissed Washington’s concerns, refusing to acknowledge that any Chinese companies are engaged in such activity, the officials said.

The strikes on the base came after senior Trump officials spent months warning their Chinese counterparts that Chinese companies were providing satellite imagery Iran could use to target U.S. personnel and assets in the region, officials say. The Trump administration sanctioned several Chinese companies in May, saying that supplying satellite imagery to Iran “threatens American and partner personnel.”

Within three days of the July attack, Iran released high-resolution images showing damage to three separate areas of the base. Publicly available lower-resolution satellite imagery analyzed by The Wall Street Journal showed damage to more than 20 structures across the three areas of the base.

Here are the images, with translation from the Farsi below:

New images of Iran’s damages to #America‘s assets in the region

تصاویر جدید از خسارات ایران به دارایی‌های #آمریکا در منطقه pic.twitter.com/Z8FmluCT2j

— کامران شیرازی (@kamranshirazii) July 20, 2026

Well if this doesn’t involve the government of China, I’d be very surprised.  Do NGOs in China have spy satellites, and sold the photos to the Iranians? Even if they did they’d need permission of the Chinese government.

*Douglas Murray, now a correspondent for the Free Press, analyzes the victory of the “far right” Alternative for Germany (“AfD”) party in one small state. His article is called “Who’s afraid of the ‘far right?“, with the subtitle, “German leaders enabled the rise of a populist party through their failures. Now those leaders cling to power by branding their challengers as extreme.”  As I suspected, the MSM has played down the role of immigration in Europe’s move to the right.

For people concerned with the future of Europe, the AfD is a vital as well as a special case. As such, it requires special attention. Unfortunately, most of the people writing about the party from outside Germany are intent on performing this feat of political analysis with all the care of a brain surgeon attempting to operate while wearing boxing gloves.

To start with, it is not the case that the AfD is a far-right party. Which is not to say that it does not have people within it who could be described as far right, or that it could not become such a party in the future.

There is a simple explanation for why the AfD has risen to become the leading opposition party in Germany: mass immigration, legal and illegal. But it took years for that issue to dominate. When the AfD was founded in 2013, it was mainly focused on addressing the fallout from the Eurozone crisis. The new party rejected the European Union’s extraordinarily optimistic belief that a single European currency could combine Greek balance sheets with German bookkeeping.

But in 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to open the gates of Europe and Germany to anyone from North Africa or the Middle East who wanted to walk in and call it home, particularly those fleeing the Syrian civil war. Normal border protocols were abandoned. More than a million migrants arrived in a matter of months. Germany, and in particular its welfare state, was overwhelmed by the surge and attempted, too late, to stem it. The vast majority of the arrivals from those years remain a net drain on the German state. In addition to this economic reality, a small but significant number of arrivals have brought extremism, terrorism, and petty as well as large-scale criminality. It might also be noted that the movement has brought a mass importation of antisemitism into a country that did not exactly need a boost in this area.

Given the extraordinary consensus that existed over the past decade among the mainstream parties of the right, center, and left, it was inevitable that some political movement would arise in Germany to point out and oppose the folly of Merkel’s policy. The AfD was well-placed to do so, and, in time, the economists who had dominated the party in its early years were replaced by people who believed that immigration was the number one challenge facing Germany.

Their success in the years since 2015 has been remarkable

. . .But in 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to open the gates of Europe and Germany to anyone from North Africa or the Middle East who wanted to walk in and call it home, particularly those fleeing the Syrian civil war. Normal border protocols were abandoned. More than a million migrants arrived in a matter of months. Germany, and in particular its welfare state, was overwhelmed by the surge and attempted, too late, to stem it. The vast majority of the arrivals from those years remain a net drain on the German state. In addition to this economic reality, a small but significant number of arrivals have brought extremism, terrorism, and petty as well as large-scale criminality. It might also be noted that the movement has brought a mass importation of antisemitism into a country that did not exactly need a boost in this area.

Given the extraordinary consensus that existed over the past decade among the mainstream parties of the right, center, and left, it was inevitable that some political movement would arise in Germany to point out and oppose the folly of Merkel’s policy. The AfD was well-placed to do so, and, in time, the economists who had dominated the party in its early years were replaced by people who believed that immigration was the number one challenge facing Germany.

Their success in the years since 2015 has been remarkable.

. . . It is for these reasons, among others, that the foreign coverage of Germany’s political shifts is so unsatisfactory. In the aftermath of this weekend’s election, the easiest thing in the world is to say—as almost every headline writer has—that “the far-right AfD” won the regional election. The fact that these same publications, from the BBC to The New York Times, rarely, if ever, use the same scary monikers to describe far-left parties gaining support across the continent is a matter for another day. But the hope appears to be that the public will be sufficiently uninterested in the details and that the prospect of the Nazis returning will be enough to spook readers into reflexive opposition.

. . . If all opposition to the migration crisis can be said to be the work of German neo-Nazis, then Europe is lost. Because no party of opposition will be untainted. If Germany can be saved, then Europe can be saved. But in order for that to happen, people—including the international press—need to listen to what is actually happening in Germany, take notice, and recognize the situation as it is, not the strange Nazi-haunted fever dream that they curiously seem to wish it to be.

The problem of course is that the Western MSM, at least of the liberal stripe, is afraid of saying the I-word, much less recognizing the effect on people of mass immigration, often of people who simply don’t integrate into European society. Ergo the movement of nearly every country in Europe to the right.  If people don’t wake up and at least recognize the problems, including the drain on local economies and the erosion of Western institutions and values, Europe as we know it will be gone when the next generation of children grows up.

*When I was a kid, I was allowed to walk to and from elementary school starting when I was about 9 years old, and that was a longish walk along major roads. I was also allowed, when I got home, to get on my bike and go visit friends. Those days are gone: such unsupervised activity by children is regarding as endangering them, even though the rate of such endangerment has dropped as the rules get toughter. In early June a mother in Williamsburg, Virginia let her five-year-old walk alone a half mile to a pond in their gated and security-patrolled community in Virginia; his goal was to collect goose feathers. She was summarily arrested, charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor (!), and given a six-month suspended jail sentence. This is the subject of a WaPo op-ed called, “A 5-year-old’s nighborhood walk shouldn’t be a crime” (article archived here).

While everyone wants kids to grow up healthy and happy, people have different ideas about how to achieve that. Until the past generation or so, a sunny upbringing usually included a fair amount of free, unsupervised time. One book I cherish from 1981, “Your Six-Year-Old: Loving and Defiant,” provides a checklist of the things a neurotypical child was expected to be able to do upon entering first grade. “Can he count eight to ten pennies correctly?” and “Can he tell left hand from right?” Perhaps the most salient query: “Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home?”

Compare that with a survey released this year by the Institute for Family Studies, which asked nearly 24,000 parents at what age they’d let their kids do things on their own. Eleven percent of 14-year-olds aren’t able to leave the house unsupervised. Fifty-five percent can’t go beyond their block. In other words, today’s high school freshmen have a fraction of the freedom that used to be given to first-graders. It’s little wonder they’re so anxious.

This new, limited idea of what kids are capable of explains why a 5-year-old walking around his neighborhood at lunchtime can look like a baby crawling along I-95 at midnight. Thanks to Karyann’s transgression — trusting her son — she was placed on Virginia’s child abuse and neglect registry for seven years. In court, she was found guilty of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” — a Class 1 misdemeanor — and given a six-month suspended jail sentence.

. . . over the years, parents started to contact me when they got penalized for giving their kids the same freedom they’d grown up with. That included Brittany Patterson of Fannin County, Georgia, who was arrested when her son, 10, walked to town without telling her. Mallerie Shirley received similar treatment when she was investigated after her son, 6, rode his scooter unsupervised in Atlanta. Danielle and Alexander Meitiv were likewise investigated for letting their kids, 6 and 10, walk home from a park in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Those stories and others have thankfully given the public pause. They’ve helped move 13 states to pass “reasonable childhood independence” laws, which clarify that “neglect” happens only when kids are put in serious, obvious danger, not any time their parents take their eyes off them. Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) and Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-Virginia) are seeking to enshrine that protection nationwide with their Promoting Childhood Independence and Resilience Act.

When Karyann let her son collect feathers, she wasn’t ignoring danger. She was ignoring cultural norms that are keeping kids indoors, and parents in fear. For the sake of our families and our collective mental health: Let kids roam.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron isn’t going on the beat:

Hili: You were supposed to go on your rounds.
Szaron: I changed my mind, I’ll sit here with you for a while.

In Polish:

Hili: Miałeś iść na obchód.
Szaron: Rozmyśliłem się, posiedzą sobie tutaj razem z tobą.

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

From Merilee:

From Wholesome Memes:

And Bat sent this amazing image from the International Space Station showing the 9/11 attacks on New York City; it appeared on Space.com. 

A quote:

Frank Culbertson had a birds-eye view of one of the most memorable and tragic events in American history.

The NASA astronaut was the only American off of Earth on Sept. 11, 2001. He was circling the planet aboard the International Space Station (ISS) when terrorists flew commercial jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing more than 2,700 people.

The ISS passed over New York shortly after the attacks took place, so Culbertson saw the devastation from an eerie remove. He shared his thoughts with Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in real time, chronicling the tragedy like no one else could.

“We could see New York City and the smoke from the fires,” Culbertson said. “Our prayers and thoughts go out to all the people there and everywhere else here — I’m looking up and down the East Coast to see if I can see anything else — and to the people in Washington.”

There’s more information at the site.

From Masih, who’s rightly pleased at the progress she’s inspired.

Translation from the Farsi:

There’s no greater pleasure than seeing your efforts bear fruit—watch closely, brave woman: you were alone and singular here, but now women like you have multiplied, because courage is contagious! From 2014 until today, I was cursed at and attacked for launching campaigns against compulsory veiling and calling on women to send videos of themselves unveiled. Thousands of women in Iran were attacked for removing their veils and engaging in civil disobedience. We faced mass assaults from all sides for “White Wednesdays,” for “Our Camera Is Our Weapon”—assaults from those who were the minority! They arrested us, beat us, threw us in prison, threatened us, sent assassins abroad to murder us, and said this resistance was pointless. But today, every woman who walks unveiled in the streets is a continuation of that same disobedience. This isn’t just about removing a piece of fabric; it’s about reclaiming control over a woman’s body, life, and dignity, and tearing down the wall of fear. Compulsory veiling may still be law on paper, but in the streets of Iran, women have been issuing its death sentence for years. We are the echo of each other’s voices, and we persist until the day of liberation. These videos are from the #دوربین_ما_اسلحه_ما  [“our camera is our weapon”] campaign and are being reposted to humiliate the zealots who these days are rampant on Twitter and Instagram, railing against women’s free dress in Iran’s streets—so they can understand the rugged, winding path Iranian women have traveled, and that we never give an inch!

هیچ لذتی بالاتر از نتیجه دادن تلاشهایت نیست، خوب تماشا کن زن شجاع، اینجا یکه و تنها بودی ولی حالا زنانی مثل تو تکثیر شدند، چون شجاعت مسریه!

از سال ۲۰۱۴ تا امروز، من به خاطر راه اندازی کمپین‌های ضد حجاب اجباری و دعوت از زنان برای ارسال ویدیوهای بی‌حجاب فحش خوردم و‌مورد حمله… pic.twitter.com/6T0GgLwkN6

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 12, 2026

From Luana; two tweets showing double-takes of people who learn that the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy case was black (and male):

🚨 Stunning revelation: Lindsay Clancy juror Paula Devlin says the lone holdout who blocked an 11-1 insanity acquittal was the jury’s only Black member. The other 11 jurors were white.

Gayle’s reaction is something else! pic.twitter.com/aWEkaSdc7E

— Brandon Tatum (@TheOfficerTatum) September 11, 2026

Here is a stupefied “non-practicing white”. What doest that mean?

Lindsay Clancy fan discovering that the lone juror is black might be the greatest video in history pic.twitter.com/jIAjIvMcU5

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 11, 2026

Larry was left out at first!

Fixed it. pic.twitter.com/qGo6MerFVS

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

From Malcolm; cats doing the crab walk:

pic.twitter.com/cGlreYGIAB

— cute cat 😺 (@CartoonCraze37) September 9, 2026

Two from my feed. LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THIS EAGLE!

👀 WOW… This Is A Female, Full Grown Harpy Eagle
She Is Beautiful❣️🤍 pic.twitter.com/Mf7Yik8HgY

— ✨ Bee ✨ 🐝🌿 (@BeeAwake1) September 11, 2026

An “awwww!” moment:

A mother cat reassuring her kittens that the golden retriever is harmless pic.twitter.com/cFjncgx9KW

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 11, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

A must-watch from Bill Maher. He dismantles the Gaza “genocide” canard in 9 minutes, holding it reponsible for the antisemitism sweeping the West—as well as the erosion through cowardice of the credibility of the Democratic party. https://t.co/W3j5Zc7IvQ

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 12, 2026

And one from Doctor Cobb in Manchester; a beautiful potter wasp:

Red DevilPotter wasp in Lanzarote Canary Islands 🇮🇨 Canon R5 and Sigma 150mm f2.8 macroSS1/3200 F7.1 ISO3200#macro #wasp # insect # arthropod #entolomology

— @macro_action (@birdzandbees.bsky.social) 2026-09-11T19:15:26.158Z

 

Welcome to CaturSaturday, September 12, 2026 and shabbos for Jewish cats as well as the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, with the holiday ending tomorrow at sundown. The shofar, or ram’s horn, is blown at various points during the holiday; here’s an example:

This reminds me of a joke, but since it’s not family-friendly I can’t write it down here.

It’s also German Language Day, National Blackberry Day, National Chocolate Milkshake Day, and World Dolphin Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 12 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

There were plenty of memoriams and articles about the 9/11 attacks that occured 25 years ago yesterday.  I will only mention one short piece from the NYT below, as you can find the pieces everywhere, and I have little to add to them. Like nearly all Americans, I watched the attacks on television (turning it o0n after the North tower was hit; we had a b&w television in the lab back then), and saw the South Tower hit live, which made clear it was a terrorist attack. Processing it mentally took days, like the JFK assassination, and I was glad they caught the perpetrators, though I would have liked to see Bin Laden captured alive and tried. The people jumping off the buildings to their deaths, the recordings of phone calls of people about to die, calling their loved ones to say goodbye—all this was ineffably heartbreaking. And because it’s ineffable, I don’t have much to say about it that hasn’t been said by others.

*Yesterday’s New York Times morning newsletter discusses the “meaning” of 9/11, as if their lucubrations carried weight, but there is also a section about what remains unresolved about the attack:

What remains unresolved:

The forever war. Al Qaeda, the terrorist group American troops went abroad to fight in the weeks after 9/11, is still a force in Afghanistan. By one estimate, the war on terror cost more than $8 trillion and 900,000 lives. This collection of images from 25 years of conflict is sobering. (The photograph from a 2009 suicide bombing in Kabul, in particular, has stayed with me all this time.)

The site. A quarter-century after the attack, the apartment building designed to replace 5 World Trade Center still hasn’t gone up. Around the corner, the 9/11 Museum is struggling to stay afloat. About one in three Americans was born after Sept. 11; it may have shaped their lives, but their memories are not seared.

The historical significance. At the time, it seemed that something was ending and another thing, maybe worse, was beginning. But was it? Charles Homans argues that life does not divide into neat geopolitical demarcations. Instead, 9/11 “is a middle chapter in the story of American fracture rather than the pyrotechnic beginning.”

For more

*Rather than reiterate the NYT’s extensive memories of 9/11, here’s an oped by a WSJ editor, “September 11 changed the world order. But not for the reason we may think.” (The NYT has an editors’ op-ed that makes the same point.)

When the World Trade Center towers crashed to the ground 25 years ago, they triggered a seismic wave that seemed to smash the world order.

It was now “a different world,” President George W. Bush warned Congress. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared: “It was before 9/11 and after 9/11.” Vice President Dick Cheney added: “That day changed everything.”

They were right, with a caveat. The attacks were a monumental tragedy. The world order did change. But it was the aftermath—the U.S. response to 9/11, not the terrorism itself—that made the difference.

Sept. 11 marked a shockingly successful attack by a stateless and relatively small group of Islamist militants. The U.S., though, launched a massive military response: a War on Terror. It attacked two countries, one uninvolved with 9/11. The rhetoric was so sweeping, Washington borrowed language from World War II and the Cold War. America was now confronting an Axis of Evil.

Consumed by the War on Terror, the U.S. had less capacity to address other global priorities such as the pivotal rise of China and an increasingly hostile Russia. That inattention to shifting global forces was what really changed the world.

U.S. leaders were “certainly distracted” and “we continually found ourselves sucked back into the morass of our misadventures in the Middle East,” William Burns, who served in several administrations and later became director of the CIA, said in 2019. “Imagine if a bigger part of the time, energy and resources spent on the Global War on Terror had instead been spent on giving form to an affirmative vision for America’s role in Asia.”

“China and Russia have welcomed” the War on Terror, the scholar Robert Kagan wrote in 2008, “because it has distracted the United States’ strategic focus away from them.”

And this is blamed on the U.S. response to 9/11:

“While the U.S. was heavily involved in the Middle East and South Asia…the geopolitical balance moved against the U.S. in both Europe and East Asia thanks to the emergence of a more aggressive Russia and a more capable and assertive China,” Richard Haass, former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in 2021.

When Russia invaded Georgia (during George W. Bush’s presidency) and then seized Crimea (during Barack Obama’s presidency), Western responses failed to prevent further expansionism. Russia later launched a full-scale war against Ukraine. Many analysts say the West should have imposed much tougher sanctions on Russia, and done a better job arming vulnerable neighbors, among other measures.

“Russia’s war against Ukraine is what failed deterrence looks like,” writes Ben Hodges, former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe. “We were not ready or united in recognizing that Russia was a real threat.”

*Trump made another stupid gesture at the “Republican midterm convention” on Thursday, a promise to give all American five thousand bucks if the GOP retains both houses of Congress after the midterms. It’s not only dumb and impossibly expensive, but we all know Trump is not serious.

President Donald Trump pledged Wednesday to send every American adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, an extraordinary gambit to reverse his party’s sagging fortunes in November.

The dubious promise would most likely cost more than $1 trillion and require congressional approval, and would further exacerbate the country’s nearly $1.8 trillion annual budget deficit and concerns about inflation.

“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump said during the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas. “It will be called the Trump Dividend.”

He likened the payments to a corporation’s distributions to shareholders, citing “our tremendous strength and success economically.”

Within an hour, Vice President JD Vance appeared to try to walk back Trump’s proposal — at least in part — by suggesting the dividend payments would not go to the wealthy. Vance suggested it could be paid for by U.S. tariff revenues, though the suggested payment dwarfs what the U.S. has taken in through the protectionist measures.

This is nothing more than a bribe to vote Republican, and I pity the fools who do so expecting to line their pockets. It’s a promise that won’t be kept, as so many of Trump’s other promises. I swear—every day, when I think he can’t do anything more stupid than he’s done, he goes ahead and crosses another line. Now he’s running scared because voter sentiment and his low approval rating portends bit Republican losses in the midterms.

*The founding editor of Ms. Magazine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, has a nice memoriam in the NYT, “My 55 year friendship with Gloria Steinem” (archived here).

“What’s Gloria really like?”

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked that question since Gloria Steinem and I teamed up with a group of other editors to start Ms. magazine and, in the process, launched our 55-year friendship. As opposed to, “What’s Gloria’s cell number?”, to which my usual reply was, “You’ve got to be kidding,” when queried about the “real” Gloria, I always answered: “What you see is what I get; only I get more of it, up close.”

People find it hard to believe that someone as famous as Gloria had spent most of her life trying to evade the spotlight. She hated her celebrity status and was plagued by stage fright. What most clearly defined her was not a quote, gift, gesture or anecdote. It was her intrepid, lifelong resistance to being made the face of the women’s movement. Cameras ceaselessly sought her out; interviewers behaved as if hers was the definitive voice to speak on women’s issues or American feminism. Instead, she consistently deflected credit to women who couldn’t command media attention for their urgent work in, say, women’s health, reproductive rights, academia, labor unions or rape crisis counseling.

Put plainly, for Gloria, the personal was political and the political was personal. The warm, eloquent, witty writer and activist the world came to know was the same person in every setting: at a friend’s dinner table, where she’d rattle off puns and remind us to lobby our Congress members on an anti-discrimination bill, or in her living room hosting a “talking circle” of young women, none of whom she’d ever met before.

I didn’t know she was half Jewish (her dad was, her mom wasn’t):

. . . . Gloria loved our seder’s boldly revisionist, women-focused ceremonies, starting with an opening ritual of introducing ourselves by our matrilineage. Gloria’s voice was as loud as the rest of ours when we called out contributions to our list of the Ten Plagues (or more) suffered by women and the Four Questions (or more) that women never got to ask. She used to say, “Never in my life have I identified myself as a Christian, but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”

. . .She once told her friends the line she wanted engraved on her tombstone: “Wait! I’m not done.” Gloria showed us the virtues of building a movement one person, one new coalition, one rebellious action and one act of kindness at a time.

Last year, she gave her friends beaded bracelets that proclaimed, “We are linked, not ranked.” The message was directed at us, but also at everyone who might see it. We’re not done.

It is a lovely paean to a woman who avoided the limelight as much as she could.

*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: I am not satisfied that the appellant is bisexual.”

→ AI will steal your work: After rumors swirled about a solution to a Millennium Problem, a set of famously unsolved math problems, OpenAI spun up all its resources to solve it first. And they did, I guess. Congrats! Or, um, how dare you? The internet is divided!

Sam Altman admits they solved the problem because they heard a solution was coming: “It is true that we tried this because there were rumors on the internet last week that Anthropic’s models had solved a [M]illennium [P]roblem and we were curious if ours could do it too.” Guys, don’t be jerks just for the fun of it. Like, let those weird professors whose names no one knows solve their one math puzzle across decades in peace so they can eventually go to the awards lunch and have a turkey sandwich. But no. And the best part is that the mathematicians were using OpenAI tools in some capacity, and so it’s possible these AI tools took their human knowledge and then borrowed it on the side to solve the equation in full. The company writes: “We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly—in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models⁠.” OpenAI tools are one big mind. If you give them something, they know that information and will use it anywhere else. It is a collective consciousness. It would be like Google Docs deciding to publish that book you’re working on as a Google Doc production; like, I guess it’s technically true.

The sad, forgotten human names: Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster. Sorry guys. You can read Tristan’s statement about all this drama. It’s long and detailed and hard to parse, because he’s a brilliant mathematician and that’s kind of their thing. I’ll get ChatGPT to summarize it later.

→ Perhaps some of the asylum claims are less than genuine: Only about 1 in 100 asylum claims in the UK is credible, according to one UK Home Office official and whistleblower. The whistleblower, identified as “J” in The Times, says many asylum seekers arrive with what are called “package claims,” suspiciously similar asylum narratives. He says Iraqi Kurds, for example, often claim the same story of having had a romantic relationship with the daughter of the prime minister of the Kurdistan Region. So many claim this, he says, that it’s become a “running joke” among co-workers. I don’t judge the princess of Kurdistan, but I do have some logistical questions. Then tons of Pakistani asylum seekers, J says, have claimed they were in a homosexual relationship (yes, we’ve covered this before, but there’s a twist this time) with the same man! Who provided letters supporting their claims! The whistleblower said those homosexuality claims also featured photos from the same London gay hot spot, Legs 800 Club, which closed last year, of Pakistani men “standing there topless in the club with their arms around each other taking pictures to try and prove they are gay.” This is an amazing pitch for a Vogue centerfold editorial.

And what of the Bangladeshi asylum seekers? Many of those applicants allegedly claim they were part of a political party called the Awami League, but can’t answer basic questions about the party or their role in it. Weird!

→ Speaking of bogus asylum claims: This week in bizarro Daily Mail headlines: “Shameless failed asylum seeker who raped a 14-year-old girl is NOT bisexual—and must leave Britain, judge rules.” I guess if he were bisexual, he could stay. But not a straight man. It’s a bridge too far. The immigration tribunal found his evidence of bisexuality was suspect. Judge R. Abdar said in the immigration tribunal’s conclusion: “I am satisfied that the appellant has failed to rebut the presumption of the appellant posing a danger to the community. I am not satisfied that the appellant is bisexual.” I am not satisfied that the appellant is bisexual. Can you imagine a tribunal about your bisexual status? You have to place yourself on a spectrum of fruity to bland, name five women and five men you’re equally attracted to, demonstrate proficiency in mouth stuff to both sexes (hell), and then a verdict is delivered. I mean, my college co-op was a tribunal about bisexual status every night, but can you imagine like, a real British judge doing this? Do you think he wears the wig when he asks defendants which cast member they identify with most on Queer Eye? “I am not satisfied that the appellant is bisexual” sounds like the judge had a bad night with the appellant. Honestly, it sounds like the appellant is just experimenting in college and will probably grow out of it, which means deportation.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is checking out the situation:

Hili: Where are you going?
Szaron: To make the rounds of the local reality.

In Polish:

Hili: Dokąd idziesz?
Szaron: Na obchód lokalnej rzeczywistości.

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

From Fat Cat Art: security throughout the world

From Things With Faces:

From Clean, Funny & Cute Animal Memes:

Masih turned fifty yesterday, and had some thoughts on turning a half-century old:

Today is my birthday. And somehow, I am beginning fifty suspended between earth and sky.

I had a flight to catch, so here I am, looking down at the world from an airplane window, thinking about the woman I have become and all the women we are still fighting to be free enough to… pic.twitter.com/8HqyoWQBFZ

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 11, 2026

From Larry the Cat about Trump’s offer of $5K dollars to Americans for, in effect, voting for Republicans. As Hamlet said, “The funeral baked meats/Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. 

Handing out free money to win elections is wrong https://t.co/haTyPqNjL4

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) September 10, 2026

From Malcolm. This is a bit grim, but it’s biology, Jake! Translation from the Turkish: “This snapping turtle uses its tongue like a live bait to catch fish.”

Bu kapan kaplumbağası, balıkları yakalamak için dilini canlı bir yem gibi kullanıyor. pic.twitter.com/l09gjHZiV1

— Belgesel Dünyası (@belgeseIdunyasi) September 8, 2026

Two from my feed. I don’t think this first one is AI or fake:

Mamdani and AOC are spotted laughing with each other as people cry while the names of those who died are read during the 9/11 Memorial in New York City. pic.twitter.com/Ib5lm57fmV

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 11, 2026

I love this one. It’s been so much fun controlling Hollywood!

Agents,

As the sun sets on 5786, we would like to thank you for another successful year of controlling the weather, the media, the banks, Hollywood, global shipping, your neighbor’s Wi-Fi and the price of eggs.

We have an ambitious operational schedule for 5787:

✅ Convince… pic.twitter.com/5lyfpBKNO8

— The Mossad: Satirical and Awesome (@TheMossadIL) September 11, 2026

Translation from the Spanish:

How do I explain to the psychologist that I saw a lost little kitten and its mom found her, scolded her, and after checking that she was okay, gave her a smack and took her home.

Cómo le explico al psicólogo que vi una gatita perdida y su mamá la encontró, le dió una regañada y después de ver que estuviera bien, le dió una cachetada y se la llevó a la casa. pic.twitter.com/5A15hxLo7Q

— El CondeNado (@elconde_nad0) September 10, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was three years old and would be 87 today had she lived. https://t.co/e2y6FgIvkE

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 12, 2026

Two from Matthew. First, a lovely millipede:

Take a stroll along a mossy log with this Euryurus leachii, one of eastern North America’s beautiful native millipedes.

— invertebrate (@crevicedwelling.bsky.social) 2026-09-11T14:22:47.240Z

I don’t know if the dogs like this song. Click screenshot to hear it:

 

Welcome to Friday, September 11, 2026, and the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in which 19 people hijacked four aircraft, two hitting the World Trade Center towers and bringing them down, cone rashing into the Pentagon and the last, after passengers attacked the terrorist pilots of United 93, crashed into the ground.  There were 2,977 innocent victims on top of the 19 terrorists.

Here’s a video of the second plane hitting the South Tower while the first is on fire, and then both buildings collapsing. You may not want to watch it if it evokes strong feelings:

It’s also National Emergency Responders Day, National Hot Cross Bun Day, and National Women’s Baseball Day.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins at sundown tonight and extends to sundown on Sunday.

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

Da Nooz:

*An article in the Free Press by Daniel Kokotajlo, who worked at OpenAI, says that AI may really destroy all of humanity. I did not take such scenarios seriously until I read this article and found that this possibility is openly discussed in AI firms.

On Tuesday, AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic in a mega-viral post on X: “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic,” he began. (Pretraining is an important part of the training process for AI models like Claude and GPT-6.)

He continued: “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. . . . These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. . . . The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

He’s right. I know this because I worked at OpenAI for two years, forecasting AI progress internally and working on model evaluations and alignment research, and because I still talk with friends at OpenAI and Anthropic.

But you don’t need insider knowledge to understand where Jacob and I are coming from. The argument is straightforward:

1. Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to train self-improving AIs, ultimately superintelligent ones—meaning models that exceed the cognitive capacity of humans—as fast as they can. (This is not a secret. They talk about this in interviews and on their websites.)
2. If they actually succeed at training self-improving, superintelligent AIs, that would be a reckless gamble with our lives. (This part is fairly obvious, but has been explained at length by many people over the years, including the world’s two most-cited living AI scientists.)
3. They may actually succeed soon.

Many people doubt the third premise. AI companies have an incentive to overhype their products. After all, it’s common for tech companies to overpromise and underdeliver, so why should we trust their forecasts?

To that I say: We shouldn’t. Instead, we should look at publicly available evidence and forecasts made by independent experts. Unfortunately, that evidence base supports the third premise.

. . .The recent rogue AI cyberattack—in which AI agents in a controlled OpenAI experiment escaped of their own volition and hacked the company Hugging Face—illustrates these realities. OpenAI tried to spin the incident in a self-serving way. (Go watch their presentation at the Black Hat USA conference; they basically use the cyberattack as a reason to encourage customers to buy their AI protection services.)

But should we therefore conclude that the whole thing was a setup, a conspiracy by OpenAI to make their product seem scary and therefore powerful? No. OpenAI didn’t want their models to attack another company. It happened anyway, due to inadequate alignment and security practices at OpenAI. And the Hugging Face affair isn’t an anomaly. Smaller-scale incidents have been happening at other companies (and third-party evaluators) for months.

. . .Once the frontier AI companies have fully automated the AI research process, things will start moving very quickly. AI will get rapidly smarter than us in a variety of different ways, oversight of AI will be itself delegated to the models, and it will be all too easy for things to go wrong in a way that we can’t recover from.

The U.S. military is planning to integrate AI into many aspects of its operations. Businesses are planning to use AI for many things, including to design new technologies and run robot factories that build more robot factories. Superintelligent AI wouldn’t even need to take over by force; the current plan is essentially to put it in charge.

If Kokotajlo thinks it’s possible, well, it’s possible, as I know almost nothing about this. But some human malefactor would have to be behind a wholesale attack on humanity.  Kokitajlo’s solution is transparency and oversight forced upon AI companies, for “These companies cannot control their own AIs today, and should not be trusted to do so in the future.” All of us are ignorant about this, but if the doomsayers are right, we should at least pay attention.

*Mirabile dictu (again): the Supreme Court upheld a Missouri Supreme Court decision invalidating a redistricting of the state that favored Republicans.

Holding a general election with a different map than what was used in the primary is rare legal territory, with no specific guidance so far from the courts on how nominees should be selected.

Thursday’s ruling landed just as a hearing about remapping was about to begin at the Missouri Supreme Court in Jefferson City.

That court’s judges were considering whether to hold the secretary of state, Denny Hoskins, in contempt for not following their order to use the previous House map, which would position Democrats to retain a seat in the Kansas City area.

Before Thursday’s order from Washington, Missouri Republican leaders had been insisting they would stick with their preferred map for the general election.

In Jefferson City, a lawyer from the Missouri attorney general’s office, William J. Seidleck, said the secretary of state’s office was “evaluating next steps.”

*There’s a new report in our student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, noting that the proportion of males admitted to the school is at its highest rate in decades: 58%. (I would have thought that the proportion of women (42%) would exceed that of men. Further, the proportion of black and Hispanic students has dropped pretty substantially since 2022, with black admissions being halved: from 10% to 5%.

The share of incoming students in the College identifying as Black fell for the third consecutive year in academic year 2025–26, while the proportion who were male increased to its highest level in decades, according to detailed UChicago enrollment data released last week.

The University reports data on its first-year classes annually in the Common Data Set (CDS), a standardized survey that asks institutions nationwide to disclose student demographics, high school academic performance, and financial aid awards, among other statistics.

The College enrolled just 71 Black first-year students last year, down from 97 in 2024 and over 150 three years ago, the University reported in the CDS. The number of white students showed a corresponding slight increase, while enrollment among other demographic groups stayed roughly unchanged year over year. Black students made up about five percent of domestic students of known race in the Class of 2029.

. . .The CDS release comes two admissions cycles after the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that colleges and universities could not explicitly factor applicants’ race into their admissions decisions, effectively banning affirmative action policies favoring historically disadvantaged demographic groups. The University had submitted a brief in the case opposing an affirmative action ban.

Without affirmative action, many selective universities have admitted fewer Black and Hispanic students and more white and Asian students, though those shifts have been uneven across institutions. At UChicago, white and Asian shares of domestic first-time enrollment have climbed by about three percentage points each since the decision took effect, while Black and Hispanic enrollment shares have dropped by three and four points respectively.

The number of new first-years who did not report their race to the University jumped sharply last year, from 52 to 126, or seven percent of the Class of 2029.

You can see the change for race below; the vertical line marks the legal prohibition of race-based admissions:

The College also continued a years-long climb in male enrollment, the CDS release showed: more than 58 percent of the Class of 2029 identified as male, a three-point jump from the previous year and up from 52 percent for the Class of 2025. That weight toward male students persisted even as the College reported nearly 5,000 more female applicants than male ones.

UChicago had not welcomed an incoming undergraduate class with as high a proportion of male students since fall 1987, according to National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data.

The University is an outlier when it comes to gender breakdown. Nationally, women comprised 57 percent of undergraduates in fall 2022. The only other Ivy Plus institutions with more male than female first-year enrollees last year—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, and Dartmouth College—also had more male than female applicants. Even so, none had a higher share of male first-year enrollees than UChicago.

The decline in Hispanic and black students is surely connected with the Supreme Court ruling, though it can be circumvented in various ways. But schools are afraid of being sued like Harvard was. The increasing number of male applicants, and the increasing disparity between the sexes here is mysterious to me.  (Note that the Maroon says the numbers of “genders” is two, and what they really mean is sexes.)

*The British Museum has opened its exhibit of the Bayeux Tapestry, a project that’s been in the works a long time. I’ve longed to see this 70-meter embroidery of the Norman Conquest of England (dated to the 11th century), but never got to Normandy to see it.

Here, from the tapestry, is the death of King Harold of England, apparently struck in the eye by an arrow or spear. The legend says (Hic) Harold rex interfectus est, “[Here] King Harold was killed”. The King is apparently the unmounted figure in the middle, holding onto the spear or arrow. But some people say he’s the figure on the right, also apparently struck by a sword. We do not know.

Halley’s Comet also appears in the tapestry, and we know it showed up in 1066, the year Harold was crowned King of England but also died at the Battle of Hastings. Here’s the comet in the tapestry: people are looking at it with the caption, in Latin, “These men marvel at the star,” while Harold gets the news of the phenomenon.

Were I a Brit (or going to England), I’d do everything I could to see this exhibit. But who knows–it may be sold out until it closes.

*The WSJ reports that two people (Roland Fryer and Bill Ackman) are giving a million-dollar award to scholars who have the courage to tell the truth about “taboo” topics.

One of us (Mr. Fryer) released a study in 2016—later published in the Journal of Political Economy—finding that police aren’t more likely to shoot black Americans than white Americans, after accounting for the relevant context. Colleagues who read the draft warned him not to publish: “You’ll ruin your career.” The paper was denounced on social media within minutes of release, and Mr. Fryer needed armed protection for more than a month. Privately, scholars who read the study called it rigorous, honest work. Publicly, many of the same scholars said nothing. No single study settles a question this large—but silence isn’t how science advances.

That silence is the problem—a cultural and an economic one. When the professional cost of publishing an unwelcome finding exceeds the cost of suppressing it, rational scholars suppress it. The result is that social-science literature reflects what researchers are permitted to say rather than what they actually discover. The scope of the problem is difficult to measure, because its most important effects are invisible—though the data we have suggest it is getting worse. In a 2024 survey of more than 6,000 professors by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, 35% said they had toned down their written work for fear of controversy—roughly four times the share of social scientists who admitted the same at the height of McCarthyism.

Mr. Fryer raised the alarm about suppression of inconvenient findings in a November 2024 Wall Street Journal essay. He called for something like a MacArthur Fellowship or an X Prize for academic truth-telling. The prize should be large enough to matter, prestigious enough to serve as a public credential for scholars who were right when it was costly to be right. Shortly after that piece ran, we found each other and decided to launch the Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage.

The prize awards $1 million each to as many as five social scientists a year who have demonstrated intellectual independence, published findings that were attacked rather than answered, and been validated by the evidence—despite the professional cost. The selection criteria are designed to distinguish courage from contrarianism: Nominees must show a sustained commitment to following logic and evidence regardless of pressure, a willingness to ask questions others avoid, and work that has shifted academic debate, public discourse or policy—often despite being misread, mischaracterized or vilified at the time of publication.

The inaugural prize is limited to the social sciences; in future years we hope to broaden it to additional disciplines and to add a category for institutional leadership. Nominations are open through Nov. 1, and the first winners will be announced in early 2027.

Well, good for them.  The prize is enormous (up to $5 million per year, and must reflect the money or fundraising of billionaire Bill Ackman, as Roland Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard. They emphasize in their editorial that the prize will not be partisan; it will reflect simply those who publish credible findings that are considered taboo. In the end, of course, this will largely involve findings demonized by the Left.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is ethnically cleansing her territory:

Hili: Let’s try to settle this diplomatically.
Kulka: What do you mean?
Hili: Go back to your home.

In Polish:

Hili: Spróbujmy to załatwić dyplomatycznie.
Kulka: Co masz na myśli?
Hili: Wracaj do swojego domu.

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

From Stacy:

nchanged: Unchanged:

From The Non Sequitur Assemblage of the World:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Masih: a mother talks about her daughter murdered and mutilated for protesting. The mother (sans hijab) vows to take revenge for her daughter. This is heartbreaking.

Translation from the Farsi:

What a nightmare these people lived through. What crimes did the Islamic Republic commit during those two days to cling to power, and the full extent of it remains hidden. Listen to the harrowing words of Javidnameh’s mother, Maedeh Moradi-Kian. The 22-year-old bride whose wedding was just one week past. On the 19th of Dey, when the people of Iran took to the streets in Qaemshahr for freedom, agents of the Islamic Republic fired a military bullet into this girl’s head. The little bride of Iran fell to the pavement. Her mother says that when they found Maedeh’s body, one of her hands had been severed with a machete, and her body was missing a hand. We still don’t know if they cut off her hand before shooting her in the head or after. What we do know is that this crime, this mutilation of the body of this young woman who had come to the streets empty-handed, was the work of Khamenei’s thugs. Her mother lit a candle by her daughter’s grave and said, Maedeh is my hero. I won’t find peace until I take revenge for her. Mother, we hear your voice. She is the hero of us all, and you are not alone. We will carry the story of this atrocity and Maedeh’s brutal killing to the entire world.

چه کابوسی را زندگی کردند این مردم. چه جنایاتی جمهوری اسلامی در آن دو روز مرتکب شد تا در قدرت بماند و ابعادش هنوز پنهان است.
صحبتهای تکان دهنده مادر جاویدنام مائده مرادی‌کیان را بشنوید.
نو عروس بیست و دو ساله که فقط یک هفته از عروسی‌اش گذشته بود.

نوزدهم دی، وقتی مردم ایران برای…

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) September 10, 2026

My repost (and riposte) to Steak-Umm, whose account Jeff Maurer touts as “The Standout Philosopher of Our Time”.  Bosh!

This is totally bogus. Which one you choose is determined by the laws of physics.

Steak-umm is a lousy philosopher. https://t.co/ypvzE0jUm9

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 10, 2026

From Luana; how DNA analysis helps us reconstruct human history:

Here’s a better map tbh using both Qpadm and G25 https://t.co/vmbM6uaABb pic.twitter.com/JUlvJIvVL6

— SuN (@SuN_BR0NZ3) September 8, 2026

A good and surprising video about suicide prevention posted by the Number Ten Cat:

Every 90 minutes, someone in the UK or Ireland dies by suicide.

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. Suicide is not inevitable. You can interrupt someone’s suicidal thoughts. You could save a life.

I’ve shared this video before; it’s message remains as important and powerful…

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) September 10, 2026

From Malcolm: Cat yoga!

The cat 🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/jnhIxp0X3t

— Rob (@_ROB_29) September 8, 2026

One from my feed; and a sad one:

🕊 The missing Twin Towers returned to New York for a few minutes

A light show was held on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

The drones first rose into the night sky in a spiral, then formed the outlines of the destroyed World Trade Center towers.… pic.twitter.com/obSuNKuAX0

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) September 10, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auchwitz. He was four years old and would be 89 today had he lived. https://t.co/3K68Fmx3Xb

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) September 11, 2026

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a cat “tattoo” that may be AI. Who knows?

Le chat a un tatouage de son ex.

— Johnney (@johnneygirard.bsky.social) 2026-09-10T01:24:13.636Z

. . . and the world’s tallest horse. He’s a big ‘un!

everyone, meet Hugowww.bbc.co.uk/news/article…

— The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) (@themerl.bsky.social) 2026-09-10T13:54:20.024Z