Saturday: Hili dialogue

August 15, 2026 • 6:45 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

Da Nooz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judge Margaret M. Garnett accepted the plea and informed Mr. Mangione that he should expect to serve at least 85 percent of whatever sentence she gave him. Mr. Mangione showed virtually no emotion during the proceeding but answered questions clearly.

Mr. Mangione, 28, was not charged with murder in the federal case, which accused him only of stalking Mr. Thompson, who was the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. He still faces a murder charge in state court, where he is scheduled to go on trial next month, but his lawyers said they had filed a motion to dismiss the state indictment because it violated his legal protection against double jeopardy, which generally prevents a person from being tried twice for the same crime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Polish:

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

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

From Stacy:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From CinEmma:

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

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

Now here’s a thought:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jason Arday is dead

August 14, 2026 • 3:49 pm

This is the end of a sad story, and of a life.  The BBC (click screenshot below) announced that former Cambridge sociology professor Jason Arday was found dead:

Jason Arday, the former University of Cambridge professor at the centre of a plagiarism row, has been found dead.

Emergency services said a man was found “unresponsive” at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday afternoon.

Metropolitan Police officers were called by the London Ambulance Service. A 41-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene and his next of kin have been informed, the force said.

Arday resigned as a Cambridge professor of sociology of education last week after allegations of plagiarism and questions about some of his achievements. He had denied the claims.

In a statement, the Met Police said: “At this time his death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious.”

Cambridge University vice-chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice said: “We are desperately saddened to hear this tragic news”.

“Our heartfelt sympathies go to Jason Arday’s family and friends at this incredibly difficult time”, she said.

The rest you already know—the revelation of the unbelievable assertions he made about his life that led to his resignation from the University of Cambridge, with ongoing academic and journalistic investigations.

This is almost surely a suicide, with Arday deciding he no longer wanted to live in the face of humiliation now and more to come..

It is very sad, and I suspect that he could have cobbled together some kind of existence had he lived. But it is not for us to decide whose life is or is not worth living.

RIP, Dr. Arday

Investigation challenges Jason Arday’s claims that he was nonverbal until age eleven

August 14, 2026 • 9:45 am

Several people have realized that many of Jason Arday‘s extraordinary claims about his life could actually be tested empirically. These include his assertions that he was so autistic that he did not speak until he was eleven, could not read or write until he was eighteen, running 600 miles in six days, completing 30 marathons in 35 days (the last ten with a cracked fibula), his 5-million-pound donations to charity, and his academic jobs. (Some of the latter, like his claims of holding visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, and Nelson Mandela University, have already been discredited.)

But the claims of not speaking until he was eleven and being illiterate until eighteen have always baffled me. Not only do they not seem credible (he started university at age 20), but surely, if they were true, there would be records. Does he not have parents who will attest to this? What about friends or associates? Why did not of these people weigh in supporting Arday when the press began investigating him? Because he’s made these claims repeatedly and they’ve been a crucial part of the attention he got, it’s incumbent on journalists to investigate their truth.

Well, the Guardian, which unexpectedly broke a lot of the Arday stuff in the MSM, has done so. The results are mixed: some remember him being quite vocal in primary school, while others buttress his own story. Click below to read the story. Arday’s own biography, Great and Unfortunate Things, wass published in the U.S. Tuesday and is coming out in the UK on August 27.

I’ve indented some excerpts.

The story of Jason Arday’s extraordinary rise to becoming the youngest black professor in the history of the University of Cambridge is all the more remarkable for one claim: that he did not learn to speak until just shy of his 12th birthday.

This claim was mentioned in a letter announcing his resignation last week, which came amid mounting questions about his academic work and statements he had made about his past.

Arday wrote that becoming a professor at Cambridge was something he “could scarcely have imagined” as an autistic child who was “unable to speak until I was 11 years old”.

His memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, was published by Simon & Schuster in the US on Tuesday and is due to be published in the UK on 27 August. It tells the story of how he joined Cambridge aged 37 despite having been non-verbal throughout his childhood and only learning to read and write aged 18.

But interviews with former schoolmates have produced conflicting accounts of his childhood. Two remember him speaking at primary school, describing a chatty child who loved making jokes, while two others say they did not hear him speak until he reached secondary school.

Jonathan Stewart, 40, told the Guardian he remembered Arday from when they were children growing up in south London. He described him as a good mimic who entertained other pupils by putting on accents and singing songs.

Stewart, a YouTuber who says he was in the year below Arday at Heathbrook primary school in Nine Elms, south-west London, said the academic was known as the class clown. “He was always cracking jokes. He was the comedian guy, he would even put on voices,” claimed Stewart, who said he regularly attended church with Arday.

. . .Another man, 40, who was also in the year below Arday at Heathbrook and asked not to be named, said: “I don’t remember too much about him but I certainly recollect him being able to speak.” Both this man and Stewart said they were in touch with people who had been in Arday’s class.

Arday writes in his memoir that as he approached the age of 12 the local council was on the verge of pulling his speech therapy support because he had made so little progress.

“But miraculously, just a few days shy of my 12th birthday, I spoke. It was at the start of one of my sessions, and Katrina [his speech therapist] had just said: ‘Hello, Jason.’ At that moment, I was fiddling with my hearing aid, which was bothering me, and then I took it out of my ear and said hello back to her.”

But here’s some support:

Arday denied the accounts provided by Stewart and the second man and organised for the Guardian to be sent statements by two school friends, Nick Clark and Mike Freeman, who said the account in his memoir accurately reflected the boy they remembered at school.

Clark said: “As a boy, I remember Jason not speaking and being regularly removed from class for additional support throughout his time at Heathbrook. I was not in his secondary school, but we joined the same football team at 13, when we became great friends, playing football together ever since.”

Clark’s mother, Caroline Russell-Clark, also sent a statement saying she helped out at Heathbrook for a couple of years when Arday was very young.

. . .Russell-Clark said Arday remained in the same class as her son throughout primary school. “I do not remember him speaking until he was playing in the same football team as my son aged 14/15.”

Freeman said: “I remember him not speaking during our time at Heathbrook primary school. He was regularly taken out of class for his educational needs. His severe special needs didn’t stop him playing football and games with me and others as he was still friendly and could communicate through play and actions.”

. . .Arday claimed to have completed 30 marathons in 35 days, run 600 miles in six days and raised £5m for charity over several years. After facing questions, he revised some of those claims and instead said he was part of a fundraising group that he was unable to name for legal reasons.

He also told the Guardian he had been the target of threats after his Cambridge appointment, including having a severed pig’s head delivered to his parents’ home. Subsequent investigations found no evidence to support this claim.

Simon & Schuster, which bought Arday’s memoir for a seven-figure sum, according to the academic, is pressing on with its publication and launch in the UK. The publisher did not respond to requests for comment.

So there you have it.  The claims about marathons, running, and raising millions of pounds for charity were never credible and now he’s “revising” them. The proven claims about plagiarism Arday has fobbed off on a tendency to engage in “mimicry” because of his autism.

As I mentioned before, nearly all publishers, including mine, require when you publish a book, you’ve also signed a statement saying that what you assert in your text is, to the best of your knowledge, true. And surely Simon & Schuster would have done that, too. Presumably, even though many of Arday’s claims are questionable, Simon & Schuster could put that off on Arday and not their own fact-checking, which is usually minimal for most publishers. (Libel is an exception, and often mandates that a manuscript be given a “legal read.”)

What can we make of this? The plagiarism, which is extensive, is on its face unethical, and Arday’s excuses are not excusable. The marathon and charity claims are already being walked back, and the claims about recurring brain tumors, mini-strokes, and other physical ailments stretch credibility. As far as the autism and late speaking/literacy claims, well, they bear more investigation, but they’re certainly questionable. All this points to the man as a fabulist who may actually believe all the stories he told. If he doesn’t, he’s a grifter.

At least the Guardian had the moxie to investigate Arday’s claims, though there’s lots of room for more investigation—if anybody’s interested. (Apparently Simon & Schuster is not.) What is truly lame is the New York Times’ new article, “Takeaways from Jason Arday’s memoir” by Neil Vigdor (article archived here). No conclusions are reached, all judgment is suspended. The “takeaways” are simply the claims Arday makes in his book—claims we already know about.  The article is superfluous and bespeaks a lack critical acumen in even noting that Arday’s claims could be investigated.

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 14, 2026 • 8:15 am

In light of the absence of reader contribution, but delighted to show such lovely photos, I present some of Dr. Scott Ritchie‘s photos from last October (his FB page is here). Note that the photos include NUMBATS (Myrmecobius fasciatus), which are endangered. Scott hails from Cairns in Australia.

Scott’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Some really cute mammals from Dryandra, SE of Perth. The forest area is home to the critically endangered Numbat. I was really pleased to see this cute little fella, and get some decent pics. And here are a few birds from the area too.

Looking for his brother. He caught a bit of golden light before sunset.

Oh, there he is!

Hop to it!

Standing tall:

A Tassie tiger look, love it!:

A Varied Sittella (Daphoenositta chrysoptera) hops along a gum branch:

The Rufous Treecreeper (Climacteris rufus). This guy always seemed to be puffed up:

Here he goes again:

A Painted Buttonquail (Turnix varius), I think:

The Australian Ringneck (Barnardius zonarius; western subspecies):

Yellow-plumed Honeyeater (Ptilotula ornata) with flower frill:
Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo (Zanda latirostris):

Friday: Hili dialogue

August 14, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the tail end o’ the work week: Friday, August 14, 2026, and National Navajo Code Talkers Day.  (Wikipedia lists other Native American languages also used as codes during WWII.)  Here’s a short video of this remarkable endeavor:

It’s also National Creamsicle Day (do they still make this delectable frozen treat?), and National Tattoo Removal Day (it’s supposed ot be painful!).

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

Da Nooz:

*Have a look at The Washington Post‘s article “Sizing up the 2028 Democratic Presidential contenders” (archived here).  Here are the first-tier “standouts” (others are given but not shown here):

Jon Ossoff, Wes Moore, Raphael Warnock and other newish names: The Democratic base seems hungry for new leaders right now. Ossoff, the 39-year-old Democratic senator from Georgia, is fitting that bill in a big way. He’s getting millions of views for his sharp social media posts and campaign speeches that mercilessly criticize President Donald Trump.

“This is the cruelest and most arrogant group of people who have ever ascended to high office in modern American history,” Ossoff told supporters in July.

He is running for reelection in Georgia, and his race will be one of the most competitive in the country.

Other Democrats point to Ossoff’s fellow senator from Georgia, Raphael Warnock, as a potentially strong contender. (Warnock is not up for election in November.)

“For the first time since Obama, there’d be a candidate that unites the progressive Democratic lane and Black voters,” Texas-based Democratic pollster Nancy Zdunkewicz said.

Moore, the first-term Maryland governor and only sitting Black governor, is described by some Democrats as young and vibrant.

“Ossoff is currently on fire,” Anzalone said, “and Moore is also the type of guy who could really catch fire.”

Kamala Harris: This summer, Democrats recommended South Carolina vote first in the 2028 Democratic nominating process. That boosts Black voters’ representation in picking the nominee and Harris’s fortunes, given the former vice president and 2024 nominee is probably the candidate on this list with the most support among Black women. She’s been rallying voters for the midterm elections by touting her “controversial” plan to abolish the electoral college and add justices to the Supreme Court. “They are ruthless! We need to be ruthless too,” she said recently of Republicans. Some Democratic insiders don’t see her as a viable candidate, given she lost to Trump.

Gavin Newsom: The other California Democrat on this list aside from Harris has used his position as governor of the largest Democratic-run state to consistently oppose Trump. This summer he announced he and his wife were under federal investigation. (The Post has reported prosecutors are looking into potential tax crimes related to a nonprofit Newsom’s wife is linked to.) Newsom framed it as a compliment: “He’s coming after me because I’m considering running for president,” Newsom said of Trump.

Josh Shapiro: The popular Pennsylvania governor has had a relatively low-profile summer compared to other candidates on this list. He appeared in a music video. He has declined to take sides on the progressive-versus-centrist split in the party (at least for now). His breakout moment may be coming. He’s up for reelection in November and is trying to help Democrats take back control of the House by helping his party win four of the most competitive races in the nation, all in his state.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Democratic socialists are having their own moment. After helping elect New York City’s mayor earlier this year, they and the broader progressive movement ousted longtime members of Congress in deep blue cities and won a hard-fought primary in Michigan. Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman from New York, was one of the first members of the Democratic Socialists of America to win federal office, and she’s an obvious pick for the broader progressive movement to get behind if she runs for president. She hasn’t ruled it out, though she could also run for Senate.

Mark Kelly: The senatorfrom Arizona has emerged as a forceful pushback against his party’s turn to the left. He’s also a candidate some Republicans say scare them: He’s a former astronaut (at a time when astronauts are cool again) and an astronomical fundraiser from a swing state.

Pete Buttigieg: President Joe Biden’s transportation secretary is cited by Democrats as one of the party’s best messengers and another young candidate who can catch fire. Despite not currently holding office, he’s near the top of several polls of Democratic primary voters.
The only one of these I can get behind now is Buttigieg. I don’t know enough about Ossoff to give an opinion.

*As you know, Francesca Hong, a Democratic Socialist, was favored to win the Democratic primary for Governor in Wisconsin. She lost by a hair. And the winner was James Crowley, a moderate Democrat and, in the pre-voting polls, was a distant second.  The NYT explains “How the polls got it so wrong in Wisconsin” (the article is archived here).

Why were the polls so wrong?

Possible explanations range from a genuine, last-minute change in voter sentiment — Ms. Hong, a state representative, faced significant negative publicity in the closing days of the race — to miscalculations by pollsters about the makeup of the primary electorate.

The disparity between polls and results in Wisconsin and Michigan prompted Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and consultant, to jokingly call for “a total and complete shutdown of primary polling in the Midwestern United States until we can figure out what the hell is going on” in an early-morning X post on Wednesday.

. . . Polls failed to predict the outcome of Tuesday’s election, but they did not significantly overestimate Ms. Hong’s portion of the vote. Most surveys estimated she would win about 40 percent of the vote, and she ended up winning 39 percent.

What changed was Mr. Crowley’s support. In a ballot-counting marathon that stretched into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, he over-performed the Marquette poll’s estimate by more than 30 points.

Explanations:

Mr. Crowley may owe much of his success to the support of previously undecided voters.

Even after an internal poll found that Mr. Crowley was trailing Ms. Hong last week, his campaign manager predicted that polls would not reflect the primar

. . . Across elections, primary voters tend to be older, and Wisconsin is no exception. Older voters and moderates were also more likely to remain undecided until close to the end, Mr. Franklin said, based on his polling data.

Chaz Nuttycombe, executive director of the firm State Navigate, which conducted polls in Wisconsin, suggested that Ms. Hong’s early and enthusiastic supporters may simply have been more willing to respond to polls, thus skewing the results.

Conducting surveys in partisan primaries has long been a challenge for pollsters, requiring them to make assumptions about the partisan composition of who will actually turn out to vote.

That is particularly difficult in states like Wisconsin and Michigan that hold open primaries and where voters are not registered by party.

As pollsters attempt to target likely Democratic primary voters in surveys, they are often unsure about the percentage of

Conducting surveys in partisan primaries has long been a challenge for pollsters, requiring them to make assumptions about the partisan composition of who will actually turn out to vote.

That is particularly difficult in states like Wisconsin and Michigan that hold open primaries and where voters are not registered by party.

In other words, Republicans who voted in the primaries were not supporters of Hong. I suppose some of these explanations are empirical claims that could be tested, but I’m satisfied enough that Hong lost. It was a bright spot in a dark season of DSA and “progressive” candidates winning.

*Big trouble in Israel, and it doesn’t reflect well on the country. As the ToI reports, Israeli settlers have been blocking entrances to Palestinian homes on the West Bank, and the IDF can’t manage to free those homeowners.  And as Amit Segal writes at It’s Noon in Israel, “Israel is losing the battle for Judea and Samaria.”

First, from the Times of Israel:

The IDF on Thursday ordered the evacuation of 15 homes in the northern West Bank village of Qusra, as part of an operation that was purportedly aimed at clearing several Israeli illegal outposts surrounding the town.

But while Palestinians were ordered to leave the area, settlers from the outposts who have been laying siege to a pair of homes in Qusra since Sunday remained on site.

It was unclear why the IDF needed to remove Palestinians from their homes in order to clear settlers from the area, but the IDF rescinded the evacuation order shortly after it began making headlines.

Some Palestinians were allowed to return to their homes, but one of the two besieged families told The Times of Israel that they were still barred from reaching their house.

Meanwhile, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee slammed the settlers as “terrorists” and said Israeli security forces were in the area at the US Embassy’s request.

From It’s Noon in Israel:

For four days, the most capable military in the Middle East could not clear a path for a family to reach its own front door. The family lives on the outskirts of Qusra, south of Nablus. On Sunday, settlers from the encampments seeded by the Tel Talpiot outpost sealed the entrance to their home and would not let them in or out.

The most damning verdict of the event comes from Israel’s most faithful friend, Mike Huckabee. The most pro-settlement ambassador in the history of the post, a man who will not so much as use the word “settler”—called the men at Qusra “Israeli terrorists.” He described what they did as a deliberate act of intimidation and harassment against the family, with “no excuse for such thuggish behavior.” One of the besieged homes belongs to an American citizen, and Washington is rightly furious.

The army moved to end it. But the plan leaked to the press, and by the time the troops arrived, dozens of activists were waiting, blocking the roads with boulders. That a handful of stones could stop a military that routinely penetrates through tens of meters of solid rock deserves an explanation.

Start with the obvious. These are not Hezbollah fighters or Iranian operatives. For all their open contempt for state authority, they are Israeli citizens, and overwhelming military force is not an option.

Then consider who actually showed up. The first forces on the scene were not Border Police or infantry trained for this, but Home Front Command reservists—a consequence of the manpower shortage the army has been running on for three years. They did not understand the scenario they had walked into. Some of them joined the prayer at the outpost, which has since been reported as solidarity. It was ignorance.

. . . Settler violence is a sensitive issue in Israel. Only a vanishingly small share of the settler population supports or takes part in such acts, but because the problem is exaggerated and used to obscure Palestinian violence against them, they bristle at hearing about it—even from Israel’s greatest friends.

Yes, but the reason we should prevent such acts is not because they look bad, but because they are bad. Yes, Israel may be held to a higher standard than other countries, but the solution is for Israel to behave impeccably, not ask others to lower their standards.

*I’ve written a bit about why I don’t use AI to write and look down on those who do. It turns out that Bret Stephens agrees, and in his latest NYT column, “I’m begging you: Never write with A.I.,” tells us why (article archived here).

This column isn’t so much an argument as it is a plea: Don’t use artificial intelligence to help you write. Never let A.I. do your writing for you.

Don’t use it for school papers, work briefs, letters to your in-laws, speeches at your company gathering or emails (however perfunctory) to your colleagues or friends. Don’t let it organize your notes. Don’t let it suggest an opening sentence, a segue or a closing paragraph. Don’t ask it to write a first draft and pretend that editing that draft somehow makes it your own. It doesn’t.

Do none of these things not because they are unethical. Writing with A.I. is unethical when it’s a deception: when you pass off words, ideas and information as your own when they aren’t. An acknowledgment can largely address the problem. Do none of these things, either, not because you might be able to learn to write better than an A.I. can. Pretty soon, if not already, you won’t, just as you can’t outrun a car or outplay a chess app.

The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care. We’re already reckoning with the well-documented decline of reading; A.I. is accelerating the decline of writing, ushering us further into what The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch calls our “postliterate age.”

What, uniquely, does writing do? It compels thought. It compels thinking in ways that silent contemplation or spoken language rarely can. It compels us to subject our thinking to the effort of articulation, the rigor of grammar, the tests of intelligibility and coherence, the inspection of others. In doing so, it also enjoins us to be clear, logical, accurate — and accountable. People may easily forgive a word said in anger but not so easily one written in anger, precisely because the fact that it was written tells us that it was considered.

. . .We become better writers by the constant effort that mundane writing demands. We become better thinkers by investing into that writing a degree of attention we’d never give it if we relinquished the task to A.I. We become more creative when we learn how to put a personal stamp even on routine things, making them unmistakably our own.

These skills are now evaporating. A recent examination using A.I.-detection technology of 100 doctoral dissertations found that 56 percent of them contained “more than negligible” A.I.-generated writing and 19 percent had “more than 50 percent A.I.-generated text.” Anecdotal stories from college professors have a finger-in-the-dike feeling with regard to their efforts to hold back the flood of A.I.-generated student papers. It’s easy to treat the problem as one of mere cheating. But cheating doesn’t capture the real scope of the A.I. threat, which isn’t merely to academic integrity or personal betterment but also to democratic self-governance.

‘Nuff said! I will never use AI to write prose on this site, and when I use AI to answer questions, as I did today, I will of course inform people.

*Whan AOC announced she was freezing her eggs, I thought it wasn’t anybody’s business, and any criticism about that was dumb.  But if it’s just her businesss, why did she post all that information in a long Instagram video? Now, however, Caitlin Flanagan at the Free Press adds that AOC, who’d apparently just split from her fiancé, should, if she intended to empower other women to do the same, have added the success rate of the procedure.

Lately, it seems, every possible phenomenon can be categorized as something that should or should not be “normalized.” AOC feels strongly that egg freezing, and talking about egg freezing, should very much be normalized because: “We are not taught about our bodies, we are not prepared for our own lives, whether that is in puberty, whether that is in pregnancy, whether that is in perimenopause, menopause.”

Fifty years ago that was certainly true, but today we’re living in an information glut that has sandblasted any trace of mystery and manners from our lives. A few minutes on TikTok and you can learn how to deliver your own baby, naturally or by C-section. AOC is by no means the first woman to bring her followers along on her egg-freezing “journey.” And yet, she speaks of freezing eggs as taking radical action: “We’re going to take our power back and we’re going to talk about it.” That power lay in an array of medications on a coffee table, the ones that can increase the number of eggs a woman produces in a single cycle. Freezing your eggs is a strike against “an administration that is dedicated to politicizing women’s bodies and taking our choices away from us and punishing us around decisions to be pregnant or not be pregnant.”

. . .The legacy media has always been pro–egg freezing, and it was quick to repeat AOC’s message. “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is sharing her personal decision to preserve her ability to get pregnant later in life,” said an anchor on CBS New York, introducing a segment in which a fertility specialist named Jaime Knopman explained the meaning of the powerful “message” that AOC is giving women: “You can play multiple roles in your life. You can be [successful] professionally and be a mother. And if those times are not aligning because your career is advancing forward and you want to maintain the ability to have a genetic child”—what?—“then egg freezing is an excellent way to do that.”

No, it’s not. The truth is that many, many times, egg freezing can lead to heartbreak because it’s hardly foolproof, or even a likely way to get pregnant.

Women tend to have an optimistic view of egg freezing because at the time in a woman’s life when it first comes into view as a possibility, they’re not knee-deep—or even ankle-deep—in the research that suggests it’s actually a last best hope, not any kind of guarantee. We’ve known this for a long time, but it’s such a dream-buster that the media tends to steer clear of it until some event forces them to report on it. Egg freezing as a highly reliable way to preserve your fertility is something a lot of women want to be true. It would be a more equitable world if it were true. But as The New York Times reported in 2022, there was “sobering” news about egg freezing. A study conducted at the New York University Langone Fertility Center found that the overall success rate for a “live birth” using thawed eggs was 38 percent. As with almost everything with women’s fertility, youth is the most critical factor. Women who were younger than 38 when they froze their eggs had a 51 percent success rate. AOC is 36, young enough to be in that 51 percent. But it’s still only 51 percent.

Besides, these numbers may be moot: The vast majority of women who freeze their eggs never come back to the clinic to have them thawed and fertilized. Perhaps they have become pregnant in the interim; perhaps their desire wasn’t so much to have a baby as it was to put off the decision. Either way, if we are to start talking more about egg freezing, we should probably do the truly feminist act of sharing the full news of everything we know about it, so women can take power back from the industry that sells it.

The harsh truth is that a 36-year-old who wants a baby should probably start trying to get pregnant now, not freeze her eggs. The terrible, irreducible fact of the matter is that by the time you need to thaw those eggs, it will probably be very hard to get pregnant naturally. When you put off childbearing, even with your eggs on ice, you are more likely to find motherhood is out of reach. This, too, is a decision. There are three things I know about having a baby. The first is that it’s the most important thing you can ever do; the second is that nothing will ever come close to giving you as much joy as a baby; and the third is that it’s a young woman’s game.

I suppose there is always surrogate motherhood, which can be done by implanting a frozen, thawed, and then inseminated egg into a non-donor mother.  Flanagan doesn’t mention that possibility, though it results in a fetus just as genetically related to AOC as one she carried herself. Perhaps that’s what AOC had in mind.

Here is a longish Free Press video (55 min.) in which some interviewer whose name I don’t know interviews Dr. Debra Soh about, among other things, AOC and her announcement. The AOC part starts at 18:37.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is referring to the Jason Arday affair:

Hili: I’m noticing more and more plagiarism in sociologists’ publications.
Andrzej: Yes, it’s an interesting social phenomenon worth investigating.

In Polish:

Hili: Zauważam coraz więcej plagiatów w publikacjach socjologów.
Ja: Tak, to ciekawe zjawisko społeczne, warte zbadania.

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

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Clean, Funny, and Cute Animal Memes:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih, highlighting yet another Iranian protestor liable to be executed:

From Bryan, who adds, “I just about fell out of my chair (so to speak) when I caught this assertion in the following video clip of an interview.” The purported explanation is in the tweet below the first one, but that one’s really talking about “Islamism”, not “Islam.”  Islam has started off as a religion and is still a religion. 

From Malcolm, with plenty of notes adding that this is surely AI-generated, and it must be. But I’ve seen a cat-shaped cake being cut before, and it still freaks me out:

From the Number Ten Cat.

One from my feed. Note that some of the executed writers were accused of “Zionism”. Read the whole thing:

And two I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb. He says he hopes the first one is not AI but so far indications are that it’s real:

Chimpanzee and tortoise sharing an apple.

— DAPPER DON DHARSHI (@dapperdondharshi.bsky.social) 2026-08-12T13:33:12.482Z

A new species of “axolotl” juvenile barred tiger salamanders. The classic axolotl is a species of “mole salamander”, Ambystoma mexicanum, which is threatened in the wild.

Someone from Montana was telling me they had axolotls in Montana and it seemed odd so I finally googled it. Apparently they have alpine lakes with barred tiger salamanders that stay in a larval state and thus look like axolotls?

— Fossillocator (@fossillocator.bsky.social) 2026-08-10T04:13:48.100Z

Is there a construal of “anti-Zionism” that doesn’t mean “antisemitism”?

August 13, 2026 • 11:15 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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