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“These people are frauds and they are grifters and they do not deserve your time.” That’s conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro at the December 2025 Turning Point USA conference anchored by the conservative student organization’s new leader, Erika Kirk, who took over after her husband Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Who are these frauds and grifters Shapiro is referring to? It was two of his fellow conservatives and (former) friends: Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who he went on to describe as “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”

Owens, in fact, was Shapiro’s colleague at The Daily Wire until the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, when she suggested that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had prior knowledge of the attack and—in 9/11 conspiracism parlance—Let It Happen On Purpose (LIHOP) for political reasons, which include the “ethnic cleansing” of Gazans that was the “real holocaust.” She left the organization five months later to start her own independent show. 

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination she has accused Erika Kirk of somehow being connected to or orchestrating his murder—most likely connected to Israel and the Jews, of course—but before this incident Owens was already trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories, alleging Jewish involvement in 9/11 and the assassination of JFK, hinting that Jeffrey Epstein might have been involved in the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad (and, of course, that he was murdered in prison) and referencing “a cabal of Jews in Hollywood” she thinks control Kanye West (Ye), after the rapper tweeted he was going “death con 3 on Jewish people.”

Owens also blamed the move to ban TikTok on “powerful Jews” like the Anti-Defamation League, accused George Soros (who is Jewish) of funding the Black Lives Matter movement to destabilize the United States, described Israel as an “occult nation” that shields “child abusers,” and has her doubts about the Holocaust when suggesting that Josef Mengele’s medical experiments were so extreme that “it sounds like bizarre propaganda” because “it would be a tremendous waste of time and supplies.”

Then there is Owens’s conspiracy theory of who was really behind the Atlantic Slave Trade—the Jews, of course—to which I responded on X by calling her “the Louis Farrakhan of our time” for repeating the lies from the Nation of Islam’s 1991 book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (that claimed “monumental Jewish culpability” in the evils of the Atlantic slave trade that Farrakhan called the “Black African Holocaust”), followed by my assessment of her loose association with the truth and her probable motivation (anti-Semitism). In response, Owens repeated her assertion that “Jews enslaved black people” and instructed me to apologize or, in common social media parlance, shut the fuck up (STFU). Five million views later Owens doubled down on her choice options for me (“Say sorry, or STFU”), apparently believing that (1) I’m Jewish (I’m not) and (2) I use unspecified “Hollywood movies” and “classroom brainwashing” (presumably Schindler’s List and the classroom materials produced after the film’s release) to brainwash people into believing the crimes of my ancestors onto White men (Jews are not White?).

For younger readers unfamiliar with Louis Farrakhan, he’s the Candace Owens of the 1990s, famous for his Million Man March on Washington, DC, in 1995 in which he regaled his audience (numbering 600,000 according to the National Park Service) for two and a half hours about how adding a “1” to the “pregnant number 9” results in the number 19, which is the sum of the 3rd President Thomas Jefferson and the 16th President Abraham Lincoln whose monuments are on the mall over which Farrakhan looked, “each one of which is 19 feet high,” and how adding the number “1” to the 555-feet height of the Washington Monument and “we get 1555, the year that our first fathers landed on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, as slaves.”

Then there is Farrakhan’s conspiracy theory about international bankers (guess who?) that orchestrated the New World Order to control the media, Hollywood, and the Zionist Occupied Government that runs the United States. Jews are “bloodsuckers” responsible for the slave trade, plantation slavery, sharecropping, and Jim Crow, and so it is no coincidence that Jewish building owner Larry Silverstein was involved in 9/11 in a plot to collect insurance money for the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings that fateful day. There is so much numerological nonsense and anti-Semitic codswallop from Louis Farrakhan that we published a cover story in Skeptic in 1996 with the Nation of Islam minister on the cover, but the point here is to imagine what his influence would be if he had a podcast audience of millions, and tens of millions more consuming clips on social media platforms!

As for the claim that Jews enslaved Black people, its partial veracity is instructive. Yes, a handful of Jews participated in the slave trade. But historians estimate that Jews owned roughly 1.25 percent of enslaved people in the Southern United States in 1860—a figure in proportion to their tiny share of the population (0.2–0.4 percent). And as with other activists who claim that the Atlantic slave trade was orchestrated by Whites who profited exclusively from the practice, Farrakhan and Owens fail to mention from whom Whites and Jews (and everyone else) purchased African slaves—from Black slave traders on the continent.

I have defined pseudohistory as the purposeful distortion of the past for present political or ideological reasons. First among equals in this new pseudohistory is the podcaster (and former Fox News host) Tucker Carlson, whose substantial audience matches and sometimes exceeds that of Owens. He traffics in the same anti-Semitic tropes on a daily basis, and featured on his show the podcaster and blogger Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson described as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

Cooper, in fact, has no formal training as a historian and attended undergraduate college for only three semesters before joining the Navy where he served as an electronics technician. Nevertheless, Carlson uncritically entertained Cooper’s ahistorical conspiracism about who was really “the chief villain of the Second World War”—none other than Winston Churchill. Cooper described the British Prime Minister as a “psychopath” and warmonger who cajoled Hitler into an unwanted war with the West even though he, Churchill, knew that Hitler only ever wanted to combat Russian Communism by invading the USSR after, you know, annexing Austria, the Sudetenland, Bohemia, Lithuania, and Czechoslovakia, and then invading Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece.

As for the Holocaust, Cooper is echoing David Irving and other pseudohistorians and Holocaust deniers when he claims that the camps were built to house all the prisoners of war captured in the early and successful days of the good and necessary war against the Russians and, says Cooper, “were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead.”

Ended up dead. I wonder how that happened? Oh, maybe those gas chambers with the Zyklon-B blue staining on the bricks gives us a clue? And has Cooper never heard of the Holocaust by Bullets? This is the millions of Jews, gypsies, and other ethnic groups in Poland, Ukraine, and other territories murdered by the Einsatzgruppen—the special police battalions that followed the Wehrmacht into these conquered lands, going through every city, town, and village, rounding up Jews and others, and murdering them one at a time or lining them up in front of pits they were forced to dig and shooting them all at once.

For example, in a report from Einsatzgruppe A during the winter of 1941–1942, 2,000 Jews were killed in Estonia, 70,000 in Latvia, 136,421 in Lithuania, and 41,000 in Belarus. On November 14, 1941, Einsatzgruppe B reported an additional 45,467 shootings, and on July 31, 1942, the governor of Belarus reported 65,000 Jews were killed the previous two months. Einsatzgruppe C estimated they had killed 95,000 by December 1941. Finally, Einsatzgruppe D reported on April 8, 1942, a total of 92,000 killed, for a grand total of 546,888 dead, or half a million plus in less than one year.

On some level they must know they are lying.

As for the rest of his so-called revisionism about the Second World War, Darryl Cooper is cribbing from political commentator (and one-time POTUS candidate) Patrick Buchanan’s 2008 book Church, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, which denies that the Second World War pitted freedom against tyranny. Instead, these new deniers assert that the U.S. allies of Britain and the USSR were the most imperial and tyrannical (respectively) nations on earth. Here is Mark Weber, the head of the Institute for Historical Review (the leading Holocaust denial organization), in a lecture I attended in Orange County at which David Irving also spoke:

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Britain ruled over the largest colonial empire in history, holding more millions of people against their will than any regime before or since. America’s other great wartime ally, the Soviet Union, was, by any objective measure, the most tyrannical or oppressive regime of its time, and a vastly more cruel despotism than Hitler’s Germany.

The myth holds that in World War II we witnessed the triumph of good over evil, whereas in reality, Weber says, the Allies’ goodness was indistinguishable from their opponents’ evil:

In fact, the record of Allied misdeeds is a long one, and includes the British-American bombing of German cities, a terroristic campaign that took the lives of more than half a million civilians, the genocidal “ethnic cleansing” of millions of civilians in eastern and central Europe, and the large-scale postwar mistreatment of German prisoners.

Deniers have long drawn the moral equation of Auschwitz = Dresden, Treblinka = Hiroshima. David Irving, for example, made the equivalency argument in his 1971 book Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden. Calling the attack on Dresden “the worst single massacre in European history,” Irving asks, “Is there any parallel between Dresden and Auschwitz?” His answer has the nuance of a moral sledgehammer: “To my mind both teach one lesson: that the real crime of war and peace alike is not Genocide—with its implicit requirement that posterity reserve its sympathy and condolences for a chosen race—but Innocenticide. It was not the Jewishness of the victims that made Auschwitz a crime, but their innocence.”

The Allies may have killed innocents on the road to victory, but the killing stopped the moment the Germans and the Japanese were defeated. The genocide of Jews by Germans ended on VE day, and the genocide of Chinese by Japanese ended on VJ day. Auschwitz and Nanking were no more. The Allies killed in order to stop the killing by the Axis, and for no other reason. The Axis killed for geography, for political control, for economic power, for living space, for racial purification, and for pleasure, and the killing would have gone on and on were it not for the Allies. Anyone unable to see the difference should have their license to practice history revoked.

Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are obviously bright and gifted public commentators who fully understand the dynamics of the new media landscape and are using it to great success, as measured by clicks and eyeballs (and, by extension, subscriptions and advertising revenue), but on some level they must know they are lying. I am only one of many who have bombarded them with such facts and statistics to correct their many false claims. So what is going on here? 

Are Candace and Carlson just performatively punking us all into talking about them to keep the spotlight on their shows (and here I am writing about them!), or are they purposefully deceitful in service of deep anti-Semitic hatred of all things Jewish (including and especially Israel)? I don’t know. No one knows what is in someone else’s mind (the “other minds problem”), but based on their words and actions, which is all any of us have to go on with other minds, anyone who would join a Fair Play for Candace and Carlson Committee needs a reality check with history.

Candace and Carlson are bad actors with no principles beyond, perhaps, a coordinated effort to increase their audience size through outrageousness, a strategy proven to work wonders in the age of social media—studies show that social media algorithms prioritize emotionally charged and outrageous content that, in an autocatalyzing feedback loop, contributes to the growth and profitability of the platforms that most employ the strategy, which drives more eyeballs to the sites, which generates more clicks, which produces more revenue …

Don’t think for a moment that the process is intellectually neutral and that the questioners are innocent inquisitors just curious about the world.

Now, let’s address the verisimilitude of the claims themselves, for that is how their millions of followers respond to such criticisms—“what if they’re right?!” They’re not right. They’re wrong. And none of these claims are new. I’ve heard them all before, starting in the early 1990s with the emergence into public consciousness of the Holocaust deniers, most notably David Irving, who Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Darryl Cooper are channeling in the “Just Asking Questions” (called “JAQing off”) mode. Cooper cites Irving’s controversial book Hitler’s War, which didn’t deny the Holocaust but suggested Hitler was unaware of it. To highlight the method, I posted a series of JAQs on X, explaining that “I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, but …” followed by a series of questions right out of the deniers’ playbook:

• How many bodies could the crematoria at Auschwitz incinerate in a day? I’m not saying the Holocaust never happened, I’m just asking how those death figures could be real … 
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just wondering why the lock on the door in the gas chamber at the Mauthausen concentration camp doesn’t lock? Wouldn’t the Jews have just pushed open the door and escaped?
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just asking where is the order from Hitler to exterminate the Jews?
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just asking why the Zyklon-B levels on the bricks at Auschwitz are not as high as they are for the delousing gas chambers to kill lice? Wouldn’t it take more gas to kill people than lice? Just curious. Asking for a friend.
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just asking why there are no holes in the ceilings of the gas chambers at Auschwitz where the SS allegedly poured the Zyklon-B pellets into the room to gas the Jews?
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just asking why no one will debate me on national television on the specifics of the Holocaust? What’s wrong with just asking questions and debating all sides of an issue?

Because these were individual posts on X, many of my followers thought I’d lost my mind. So I followed up explaining that these and many other such talking points are refuted in my book Denying History, co-authored with Holocaust historian Alex Grobman, and addressed point-by-point in my lecture on Holocaust Denial.

I also highly recommend the book by Richard Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust and the David Irving Trial, in which the preeminent historian of Nazi Germany poignantly captures the difference between negligence and deception: 

There is a difference between, as it were, negligence, which is random in its effects, i.e., if you are a sloppy or bad historian, the mistakes you make will be all over the place. They will not actually support any particular point of view … On the other hand, if all the mistakes are in the same direction in the support of a particular thesis, then I do not think that is mere negligence. I think that is a deliberate manipulation and deception.

One JAQ claim is especially instructive for understanding what deniers like David Irving—channeled by Candace, Carlson, and Cooper—are up to. It concerns the gas chambers at Auschwitz–Birkenau, about which Irving offered a memorable one-liner during his libel trial against historian Deborah Lipstadt, whom he sued for calling him a Holocaust denier: “No Holes. No Holocaust.” Here is the syllogistic logic of this claim:

• Eyewitness accounts after the war reported that SS guards poured Zyklon-B pellets into induction ports on top of the subterranean gas chambers.
• If you go to Auschwitz–Birkenau and examine the gas chambers you will not find induction port holes on the gas chamber ceilings.
• If those eyewitness accounts are false, maybe other eyewitness accounts are false.
• Maybe the Holocaust is not what we think it is.
• Maybe the Holocaust never happened.

Alex Grobman and I devote a long section of our chapter on Auschwitz–Birkenau in our book to this issue (and how, precisely, the Nazis gassed people at the death camp), so let me here briefly refute the claim that if there are no holes in the gas chamber ceilings at Auschwitz then the Holocaust never happened, starting with the state of the gas chamber ruins today, which the Nazis destroyed on the eve of the Soviet army liberation of the camp in January 1945. Below are my own black-and-white photographs (Figures 1 and 2), showing one of the possible induction port holes, along with an aerial photograph (Figures 3 and 4) of the ruins of one of the crematoria from the site museum archives.

Figure 5 (below) is a ground-level photograph of one of the crematoria at Auschwitz–Birkenau (note the tall chimney in the background) showing the four induction ports on ceiling of the gas chamber. Figure 6 (below) is an aerial photograph of Crematoria 2 and 3, revealing the shadows cast by the four induction ports on each of the two gas chamber ceilings. 

The deniers’ rebuttal to this clear refutation of their claim is that the photographs were doctored after the war to fit the eyewitness testimony of the war crimes committed at the death camp, so Alex and I went to the archives at Yad Vashem in Israel and reviewed the original photographs to see with our own eyes that they were not doctored. In the case of the aerial photographs, these came from B-17s on a bombing run to destroy the industrial factory at Auschwitz III (Buna), and we spent hours scrolling through thousands of images in a filming run that mostly included farms, villages, and empty landscape. We also had the aerial images examined by an expert on aerial photography at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who confirmed that they had not been doctored in any way.

They are unprincipled actors with an agenda and should be denounced as such.

The point of this exercise is to highlight the consequences of “just asking questions.” It takes a few minutes to ask such questions, whereas it can take days, weeks, months, and even years to refute them in detail with evidence and sources. 

Yes, of course, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are free to ask any questions they like, and we are free to refute their lies and distortions of the truth—that is what it means to live in a free society. But don’t think for a moment that the process is intellectually neutral and that the questioners are innocent inquisitors just curious about the world. They are unprincipled actors with an agenda and should be denounced as such. That some conservatives refuse to do so is understandable (who likes to admonish friends?), but in a counterfactual test, would they demur to comment if liberal public commentators refused to reproach anti-Semitic comments and conspiracism by prominent liberal figures? Everyone knows the answer. And everyone knows that everyone knows the answer (common knowledge), so I stand with Ben Shapiro and his concluding remarks at the Turning Point USA conference: “Friendship with public figures who say or do evil things is not an excuse for silence on the matter.”

Amen, brother.

I always find Sam Harris’s writings absorbing, but in today’s piece he’s really hit his stride, telling us why, despite his own criticisms of Israel, he won’t debate those people—he calls them “scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics”—who demonize Israel as not only morally worse than its enemies, but the worst country in the world.

In a way, the piece below is a bookend to the superb piece he posted on November 7, 2023: “The bright line between good and evil.”  In between then and now, Hamas has lost the war, Gaza has been largely wrecked because of Hamas’s tactics, and yet the terrorists are still in power. What has changed is that despite the efforts of Israel to limit civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon, antisemitism and hatred of Israel have ballooned.  To Sam, and to me, this spate of criticism of Jews and Israel, parading under the flag of “anti-Zionism”. shows that the “river-to-the-sea” gang has lost its moral compass. And the encampers and drum-bangers have dragged a lot of academics and journalists along with them.

What is missing in all the debate is what Sam has bookended: the moral compass that points clearly to which side in the conflict is on the side of morality and justice.  It might be salutary for you to read his 2023 piece  first (I posted about it here), but it’s imperative to read the piece he just put on his Substack. You can it for free by clicking on the screenshot below.

What shines in Sam’s analysis is his laserlike focus on the most important question—right versus wrong—and his refusal to be distracted from that focus.  This is truly a superb piece, and I recommend it highly. Today you should be reading Sam Harris, not me.  I’ll put a few quotes in indents below, but you really need to click above and spend a while pondering Sam’s views.

Excerpts:

Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession. The Making Sense Community seems to have inherited this infatuation, leading to some heated exchanges in recent days. I’ve explained my position on Israel across several podcasts and in my public talks, but it might help to summarize it here.

First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.

Next, a simple heuristic: As I suggested in at least one Community thread already, if my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise). My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.

However, you can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.

The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.

He then explains his unwillingness to engage in debate about the war. I’ve put a critical bit in bold:

I won’t debate the history of the Middle East because it is irrelevant to resolving the conflict there. Of course, many people insist that we must disentangle and reconsider every strand of this history, going back at least a century. The reason I’m convinced that this is a fool’s errand is simple: Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of study or debate will reconcile them.

What’s far more important to understand—and I think it really is the only thing worth considering—is what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now. (Not what they pretend to want or what a handful of royal families want, while their populations want something quite different.) What do the Jews and Muslims in the region really yearn to accomplish? What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?

When we focus on the present this way, if we’re being honest, we must concede that there are two very different realities on either side of this conflict: culturally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually—in every way that matters. Yes, Israel has its religious fanatics too. But they aren’t the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah, and they’re far less representative of the surrounding culture. Notwithstanding everything that can be said against Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli far right, and the settlers in the West Bank—and there is much to condemn—I believe the following remains true:

If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. There could be a two-state solution; there could even be a one-state solution; it wouldn’t matter. If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There could have been one eighty years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel.

Those who demonize Israel and lionize terrorists, or those Palestinians who lionize terrorism—and there are many of them—must deal with this point, which seems palpably true.  But requiring Hamas to lay down its arms, as well as demanding that Palestinian society lay aside Jew hatred and then aspire to peace and prosperity, is a tough ask, and we won’t see it in our lifetimes. For even the younger generation of Palestinians have been brainwashed into Jew hatred, and they aren’t even teenagers yet.

There’s more, but Sam ends this way:

Why does antisemitism matter? Well, for the Jews, it’s obvious why it matters, but why should it matter to everyone else? It matters because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. Real antisemites bring with them more than just their hatred of Jews: they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating. So decrying antisemitism is not an act of special pleading. It is a defense of the moral and institutional architecture that free societies require.

Let me close with another general point to members of the Making Sense Community: Many of you have written to tell me that you’ve lost respect for me over this issue (or that you still value my work and are giving me “a pass” on Israel). I reject this framing, and you should too. No one should be a part of Community just because they agree with me. I’m not running a political party, and there is no line for me, or for anyone else, to toe. If I’ve fallen off a pedestal because I said something you don’t agree with, the pedestal was the problem, not the disagreement. Of course, if you think I am lying to you, or that I otherwise lack integrity, you should leave and never look back. But if you just think I happen to be wrong, even about something important—especially about something important—I encourage you to keep showing up with better evidence and argu

The first paragraph makes the point that antisemitism (aka “anti-Zionism”) is a hatred not just of Jews, but of the liberal, democratic societies built by the West.  The grifters and maniacs will never admit that, but look at what is happening to liberal European democracies like Belgium and the Netherlands—countries that have admitted floods of Muslims who have imported hatred of the very societies to which they’ve fled.

I have not lost respect for Sam: I admire him all the more, and have told him so.  Of course this piece, one of the best on the current Middle East situation, will itself be demonized and ignored, probably by invoking things Sam has said in the past. We will hear, “But he favors torture!” Or “He’s a neuroscientist, and not qualified to pronounce on politics.”  Or, “Sam has been too hard on religious people.”   Those are all distractions. Yes, I’ve had my differences with Sam—I think his view that there is an objective morality is misguided—but that is irrelevant.  Regardless of whether Israel’s morality is objectively better than that of the morality of its critics, it’s true that those of us who are rational want to live in a society based on liberal democracy than in a dysfunctional one based on jihadism and Jew hatred.  Jihad is more than a struggle to live a holy life by the lights of Islam: it’s also a struggle to destroy Western values.

Researchers have finally resolved a key problem in a 100-year-old theory of color, showing that the qualities we perceive in colors are intrinsic to the mathematics of color space itself. The discovery sharpens our understanding of human vision and could lead to more precise color technologies and visualizations.

Scientists at the SETI Institute searched for technological signals from 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object observed in our Solar System. Using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California, the team scanned a wide range of radio frequencies for signs of extraterrestrial technology and found none, as expected based on other astronomical observations showing that the object exhibits natural comet-like composition and behavior. “Eventually, our own Voyager spacecraft will be extraterrestrial artifacts in other stellar systems,” said Dr. Sofia Sheikh, lead author on the paper. “Given that, it is important that we understand the natural distribution of interstellar objects so that we will be able to identify any anomalies that could one day be signs of an artificial interstellar object.” The team observed 3I/ATLAS for more than seven hours with the ATA, covering 1 to 9 gigahertz. This broad range allows scientists to search for narrowband radio signals, which are not produced by in nature and would be evidence of technology.

A look at why a cyclic, eternally repeating universe is such an appealing idea, and why the first serious attempt to build one, Richard Tolman's 1930s model of endless big bangs and big crunches, collapsed under the weight of entropy. The Big Bang keeps demanding a beginning.

When I visited Peru with a girlfriend many years ago, I traveled to Nazca, in the western desert, to see the famous Nazca lines, a series of large and mysterious geoglyphs that Wikipedia describes this way:

They were created between 500 BC and 500 AD by people making depressions or shallow incisions in the desert floor, removing pebbles and leaving different-colored dirt exposed.  There are two major phases of the Nazca lines, Paracas phase, from 400 to 200 BC, and Nazca phase, from 200 BC to 500 AD. In the 21st century, several hundred new figures have been found with the use of drones, and archaeologists believe that there are more to be found.

Most lines run straight across the landscape, but there are also figurative designs of animals and plants. The combined length of all the lines is more than 1,300 km (800 mi), and the group covers an area of about 50 km2 (19 sq mi). The lines are typically 10 to 15 cm (4–6 in) deep. They were made by removing the top layer of reddish-brown ferric oxide–coated pebbles to reveal a yellow-grey subsoil.The width of the lines varies considerably, but more than half are slightly more than 33 cm (13 in) wide. In some places they may be only 30 cm (12 in) wide, and in others reach 1.8 m (6 ft) wide.

We hired a small plane for a pittance—about 30 bucks‚—to fly us over the lines, the only way to see them.  They can be properly viewed only from above, which makes them all the more mysterious. There are many theories about their significance, including some who assert that they were made by those extraterrestrials who stubbornly refuse to make their presence known.  The location of the lines is shown on the map below from Wikipedia:

From Shuttle radar topography mission, Wikimedia Commons

They are still finding these lines, which have been effaces by time and by humans roaming around. Now, as the Guardian reveals (click on screenshot to read), a huge cat-shaped Nazca line has been found.Click below to read:

An excerpt:

The dun sands of southern Peru, etched centuries ago with geoglyphs of a hummingbird, a monkey, an orca – and a figure some would dearly love to believe is an astronaut – have now revealed the form of an enormous cat lounging across a desert hillside.

The feline Nazca line, dated to between 200BC and 100BC, emerged during work to improve access to one of the hills that provides a natural vantage point from which many of the designs can be seen.

A Unesco world heritage site since 1994, the Nazca Lines, which are made up of hundreds of geometric and zoomorphic images, were created by removing rocks and earth to reveal the contrasting materials below. They lie 250 miles (400km) south of Lima and cover about 450 sq km (175 sq miles) of Peru’s arid coastal plain.

. . .“The figure was scarcely visible and was about to disappear because it’s situated on quite a steep slope that’s prone to the effects of natural erosion,” Peru’s culture ministry said in a statement this week.

“Over the past week, the geoglyph was cleaned and conserved, and shows a feline figure in profile, with its head facing the front.” It said the cat was 37 metres long, with well-defined lines that varied in width between 30cm and 40cm.

. . .“Over the past few years, the use of drones has allowed us to take images of hillsides.”

Isla said between 80 and 100 new figures had emerged over recent years in the Nazca and Palpa valleys, all of which predated the Nazca culture (AD200-700). “These are smaller in size, drawn on to hillsides, and clearly belong to an earlier tradition.”

The archaeologist said the cat had been put out during the late Paracas era, which ran from 500BC to AD200. “We know that from comparing iconographies,” said Isla. “Paracas textiles, for example, show birds, cats and people that are easily comparable to these geoglyphs.”

Enough palaver. Here is the cat:

From Facebook’s Cat Overlords site:

The geoglyph was restored to its original condition; it was presumably made between 200-100 BC.

Here’s a four-minute video also showing the feline.  I’m not sure what it is. It’s surely not a house cat, but, asking Grok, I got this:

[It] most likely represents the Andean cat (Leopardus jacobita, also known as the Andean mountain cat). That species is a denizen of the mountains, not this area, and is now highly endangered. It’s the size of a large house cat. Here’s a four-minute video about the discovery:

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Here’s another Guardian article (click to read) about Japan’s cat obsession, and how capitalists have parlayed it into a lot of yen. Click to read (and go to the article, where there are lots of photos).

An excerpt:

Feline features stare out from the covers of umpteen novels, they have an officially designated day devoted to their mystique and popularity, and have outnumbered dogs as pets for a decade.

The influence of cats is evident across every corner of Japanese society, with a recent report crediting them with generating an expected ¥3tn ($18.8bn) in value to the Japanese economy this year – a phenomenon dubbed “catnomics”.

The power of the paw is especially evident in one retro neighbourhood of Tokyo, where on a recent afternoon North American, Australian and European visitors milled around the capital’s self-proclaimed “cat town”.

“There have always been cats in Yanaka because there are lots of Buddhist temples here,” says Yumiko Yamashita, owner of several cats and of the Neco Action store. “In the old days they roamed around and even went into different houses, but they’re less visible these days. They prefer to stay indoors on a hot day like this.”

The global boom in Japanese literature has turned the cat into a marketing juggernaut, more than a century after Natsume Sōseki wrote one of the country’s best-known novels, I Am a Cat, told from the point of view of a household cat.

Cats figure prominently in the surrealist novels of Haruki Murakami, and in dozens of other works, notably Hiro Arikawa’s The Travelling Cat Chronicles and Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat. Publishers have even exploited feline marketing power to create covers for books that have little or no connection to the animal.

. . . In a nation of pet lovers – where domesticated dogs and cats outnumber children aged under 15, Japanese households kept 8.8 million cats in 2025, compared with 6.8 million dogs, according to a survey by the Japan Pet Food Association. The average cat-owning household, the survey said, spends almost ¥1.8m ($11,300) over the course of their moggy’s life.

It is that level of devotion that makes cats big business. In his most recent report on “catnomics”, Katsuhiro Miyamoto, professor emeritus at Kansai University, estimates that animals will add just under ¥3tn ($18.8bn) in value to the Japanese economy in 2026.

Combining estimates of consumer spending at cat cafes and on items such as photo books with sales and salaries among cat food manufacturers and related companies, Miyamoto noted that the estimate fell just short of beating the economic impact of the 2025 World Exposition in Osaka.

He added, though, that cats were still generating “a comparable economic effect, demonstrating the significant contribution cats are making to the Japanese economy”.

High-profile cat owners in Japan include the emperor and empress, and the prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has expressed a preference for cats over dogs.

Here’s a short Indian video (in English) about Japan’s cat obsession:

But this is a better video; it’s 52 minutes long but very amusing and informative (the stuff about the maneki-neko figures is great):

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From IHeartCats, we hear about an American cat named Effie whose favorite food is mashed potatoes—potatoes that must contain the right amount of butter. Click below to read:

An excerpt:

Some pets become gentler with age, while others grow wonderfully stubborn about the things they love most. Effie, an adorable senior tabby with soft gray and white fur, has reached a point in life where she refuses to settle for anything less than exactly what she wants at mealtime. Her favorite comfort food happens to be mashed potatoes, but there is one very important condition. The potatoes must contain the perfect amount of butter. If they do not meet her standards, Effie will loudly let her family know she is disappointed until her dinner is prepared properly.

The lovable moment was shared on TikTok by @kateisaac25, where viewers quickly fell in love with the gray-and-white senior cat and her very specific dinner standards. According to the caption, Effie will loudly complain if her spoonful of mashed potatoes is missing the right amount of butter.

It is hard not to smile at the sight of her happily digging into the creamy meal with complete satisfaction. Sitting comfortably at the table, Effie looks like a tiny grandmother enjoying her favorite comfort food after a long day.

Her owner explained that the butter ratio is extremely important to Effie. If there is not enough melted goodness mixed into the potatoes, the senior cat wastes no time voicing her disappointment. The little demands have become part of her daily routine, and honestly, everyone in the house seems happy to spoil her.

. . .Effie’s strong opinions at dinnertime show just how comfortable and loved she feels in her home.

Her soft fur, relaxed posture, and determined little meows tell the story of a cat who knows she is safe. She has likely spent years building trust with her family, and now she confidently expects her meals to be prepared exactly the way she likes them.

The video captures more than just a funny moment. It highlights the special bond people share with aging pets. Small routines like preparing a favorite snack or responding to a familiar meow become treasured parts of everyday life.

. . . Viewers online could not get enough of Effie’s adorable behavior. Many related to her love of buttery comfort food, while others joked that she had earned the right to be demanding after so many years.

And here’s the TikTok video mentioned above (also here).  Effie just gets a spoonful of mashed potatoes, but oy, is there butter!:

@kateisaac25

#onthisday

♬ original sound – Katelyn Claire Isaac

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Lagniappe: a new song by Kiffness:

h/t: Loretta

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A team at the University of Chicago has discovered a surprisingly simple way to create powerful quantum states that are normally difficult to produce. By making small adjustments to the energy levels of atoms inside an optical cavity, researchers can generate a wide variety of highly entangled states without adding complicated hardware.

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The post The Authors of the Book “The War on Science” Won Their War. Are They Happy Now? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

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Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside have produced the most detailed map of the cosmic web ever made, tracing the network of galaxies all the way back to when the universe was one billion years old.

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