Before the bodies were buried, before Israel’s ground war had even begun, before anyone could possibly know how the war would unfold, millions of people had already reached the verdict: genocide. Deliberate starvation. Mass expulsion. Israel targets hospitals. Israel killed its own people. Israel wanted Oct. 7. Maybe Israel even engineered it.

These weren’t tentative suspicions. They were accusations of the worst crimes imaginable, made almost instantly and with total certainty.

Being wrong is ordinary. This was different.

If, after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, your first move is to accuse Jews of secretly committing even greater crimes — and then spend years cramming every new fact into that story — you’ve told everyone something about your judgment.

So save the posts. Save the videos. Save the headlines. Remember who said what.

The same people who lectured everyone else about misinformation, racism, fascism, human rights and moral decency spent years making accusations they could not possibly have known were true.

They took the Great 10/7 Litmus Test.

And failed.

Christian and Muslim states began secularizing in earnest during roughly the same historical window—the nineteenth century. The Muslim-world curve then rose faster, substantially closing the gap by the mid-twentieth century.

The data are inevitably sparse and the historical classifications coarse, but the broad pattern is clear. (The final Muslim data point is partly an artifact of many newly independent Muslim-majority states entering the dataset.)

— Metin M. Coşgel, Matthew Histen, Thomas J. Miceli & Sadullah Yıldırım, “State and Religion over Time”
https://media.economics.uconn.edu/working/2015-07.pdf

These weren’t little factual mistakes. They put their judgment, their moral seriousness, and their entire reputations on the table. They went all in. And they were absurdly and disgracefully wrong.

We were all raised to be on the lookout for exactly this kind of Jew-hatred: Jews accused of monstrous collective crimes, accusations spreading everywhere, evidence barely mattering. And yet millions of supposedly sophisticated people fell straight into the same damned thing.

So hold them to account. Don’t let the people who spent years pushing this stuff quietly move on as though none of it happened. They failed the Great 10/7 Litmus Test, and none should ever recover.

Here were some of their biggest claims.

(1) “ISRAEL DID OCT. 7 TO ITSELF.”

Almost immediately came the conspiracies. Israel funded Hamas. Israel secretly wanted the massacre. Israel conspired with Hamas. Israel let it happen so it could take Gaza. Israel killed its own people under the Hannibal Directive.

No. Hamas planned the massacre, carried it out, filmed it, and bragged about it. Israel suffered a catastrophic intelligence and military failure. There is zero evidence Israel conspired with Hamas to make Oct. 7 happen, and only a vile Jew-hater could ever jump to such a conclusion without extraordinary evidence, much less without evidence at all.

“Israel funded Hamas” is also grotesquely misleading. Israel allowed Qatari money into Gaza under a disastrous policy meant to buy quiet and keep Gaza functioning. Had Israel prevented the money from getting through, many of the same people would have called that a crime.

And Hamas wasn’t alone in the war it started. The Islamic Republic had armed and funded it for years. Hezbollah opened a second front against Israel the very next day, explicitly in support of Hamas’ attack. The IR’s other proxies soon joined in. Were all those coordinated Islamist attacks ackshyually all part of Israel’s cagey plan?

Israeli friendly fire almost certainly killed some Israelis in the chaos. A UN commission found that Israeli forces likely killed up to about 14 civilians in specific incidents. The same investigation could not confirm the viral claim that Israeli attack helicopters fired on civilians or civilian cars at Nova. Those are stories only Jew-haters in a mania could possibly just lap up.

(2) “ISRAEL IS COMMITTING GENOCIDE.”

The genocide accusation started before the blood of 10/7 had dried — before the ground war and before the casualty numbers later used as proof even existed.

Then came the endless claim that the dead were overwhelmingly civilians. Gaza Health Ministry totals were routinely cited as though they were civilian death counts. They aren’t. They do not separate fighters from civilians.

And Hamas’s conduct kept getting left out: fighting from dense civilian areas, embedding among civilians, and dressing as civilians. Those are war crimes, and of course they increase civilian deaths.

Genocide requires specific intent to destroy a protected group. Despite endless claims to the contrary, the ICJ did NOT rule that Israel was committing genocide — or even that the genocide claim itself was “plausible.”

Israel issued warnings, ordered evacuations, reviewed targets, used precision weapons, and repeatedly took measures intended to reduce civilian harm — not the behavior of a military trying to exterminate the Gazan population.

For some sense of scale, Iranian health officials reportedly estimated that as many as 30,000 Iranians were killed by their own regime in just two days during the January 2026 uprising. The figure of 70,000 total deaths in Gaza bandied about was over two years, and close to half were Hamas combatants and personnel.

(3) “ISRAEL IS EXPELLING THE GAZANS.”

Evacuation orders, expanding Israeli control, and stupid remarks by individual Israeli politicians were repeatedly turned into claims that Israel was carrying out a mass expulsion of Gaza’s population.

There was enormous internal displacement. Of course there was. This was a dense urban war. Moving civilians out of active battle zones is exactly what Israel was supposed to try to do. Had Israel simply left civilians sitting in areas where it was about to conduct major military operations, many of the same people would have accused it of a war crime for that.

What did not happen was the mass expulsion of Gazans out of Gaza that people kept saying was coming.

(4) “ISRAEL TARGETS HOSPITALS.”

A hospital, school, mosque, clinic, or apartment building gets hit, and that alone was presented as proof that Israel deliberately targets civilians.

There is substantial evidence that Hamas used hospitals and other civilian sites for tunnels, weapons, command activity, hostages, and fighting positions. At Shifa, for example, investigators confirmed a tunnel and shaft on the hospital grounds, confirmed that hostages had been brought there, and documented exchanges of fire on the hospital premises. Released hostages also said they had been held in hospitals. This was not an Israeli excuse invented after the buildings were hit.

And Israel did not simply start bombing hospitals without warning. In major cases it issued evacuation orders, warned staff and civilians, and gave people time to leave.

(5) “ISRAEL IS STARVING GAZA.”

The story was screamed for years: Israel was deliberately sealing Gaza off from food and starving the population to death. In August 2025, the IPC went so far as to classify Gaza as being in famine.

But the predicted mass-starvation death toll never appeared. And when UNICEF later conducted a population-based SMART survey in 2026, it found relatively low acute child malnutrition in the accessible population.

And Israel was not “blocking the aid.” It allowed and facilitated enormous quantities of food, medicine, fuel, and other supplies into Gaza — territory controlled by the enemy it was actively fighting. How many countries at war are expected to keep facilitating humanitarian supplies into enemy-controlled territory while that enemy is still attacking them?

(6) “UNRWA IS JUST A NEUTRAL AID AGENCY.”

When Israel said Hamas had penetrated UNRWA, this was widely waved away as another Israeli smear.

U.S. investigators have now referred more than 100 current or former UNRWA employees over participation in Oct. 7 and/or alleged affiliation with Hamas’s military wing. The referrals include teachers, school principals, security personnel, counselors, and medical staff. One former UNRWA employee has already received a 10-year U.S. government-wide debarment after investigators found that he participated in Oct. 7, and additional cases are proceeding.

(7) “GAZA WAS AN OPEN-AIR PRISON.”

This was repeated for years as though Israel had simply locked two million people in a cage.

But Gaza was much closer to a badly governed, heavily constrained proto-state than a “prison.” It had its own government, police, courts, universities, hospitals, hotels, restaurants, shopping centers, farms, businesses, construction, telecommunications, imports and exports. People worked, studied, married, opened businesses, built homes, went to restaurants and beaches, and tried to build ordinary lives and an economy.

And that economy was developing despite Hamas. Gaza had private businesses, manufacturing, agriculture, fishing, construction and trade. It received enormous amounts of foreign aid and had substantial infrastructure and a young, educated population. Gaza’s living standards were within the broad range of poorer Middle Eastern societies, and substantially above places such as Yemen and Syria.

Israel had withdrawn its soldiers and settlements from Gaza in 2005. Hamas seized power in 2007 and then devoted enormous resources to rockets, weapons, tunnels and repeated wars with Israel. Israel imposed severe restrictions in that security context. Egypt restricted its border too.

Calling the whole place a “prison” also conveniently removed Hamas from the causal story, who had begun attacking Israel immediately after coming to power (and, actually, before). The “Free Palestine” community desperately wanted to make it seem as if Israel’s restrictions just appeared from nowhere, as another inexplicable cruelty inflicted by Jews.

(8) “HAMAS ARE GAZAN FREEDOM FIGHTERS.”

One of the nastier tricks is pretending Hamas simply is Gaza. Even the 2006 election gets sanitized. Hamas was already an armed Islamist movement operating in a climate where political opponents could be threatened, beaten, or killed. This was not some normal liberal-democratic election where everyone could safely campaign against them. Then Hamas murdered and tortured its Fatah rivals and took Gaza by force in 2007. No Palestinian national election since. And even all that was a generation ago.

Lebanese people don’t generally want Hezbollah. We Iranians don’t generally want the Islamic Republic. Afghans don’t generally want the Taliban. People living under armed Islamist dictatorships are not the same as the regimes ruling them.

But “Free Palestine” people somehow grant Gazans less humanity than everyone else. They just presume Gazans must want Hamas — the jihadist movement that killed its rivals, crushed dissent, and built its whole project around war with Israel. They hate Gazans so much they can’t even imagine that Gazans might want something better.

⸻

So save the posts. Save the videos. Save the headlines. Remember who said what. Because these weren’t people cautiously saying, “We don’t know yet.” They weren’t merely arguing that Israel had made terrible decisions or that particular Israeli attacks might have been unlawful.

They instead accused Israel of genocide, deliberate starvation, mass expulsion, intentionally bombing hospitals, massacring its own citizens, and even engineering or deliberately allowing the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. They did so almost immediately. And they did so with 110% certainty.

Being wrong is normal. This was something else. If you are willing to accuse people of the most monstrous crimes imaginable on evidence that does not remotely warrant your certainty, that tells the rest of us something about your judgment.

So remember who did it. When these same people next appoint themselves authorities on misinformation, racism, human rights, fascism, morality, or anything else, their record comes with them. They used their free speech. Now everybody else gets to use theirs. That’s how reputation works.

Sudan is burning, and the victims are overwhelmingly Muslim.

Villages torched. Civilians executed in the streets. Entire communities erased by Islamist militias and paramilitaries. The horror unfolding there should stop every observer cold, especially those eager to reduce the Muslim world to a single label.

If Islam itself were the root cause of the violence, why are Muslims so often the ones being slaughtered by other Muslims?

Sudan exposes the weakness in both dominant Western narratives. The Left barely looks because there are no Jews, no capitalism, and no America to blame. The Right looks, but too often rushes to blame “Islam” as a whole.

Islamism is a political ideology operating within Muslim societies, often against the Muslims who live in them. The authoritarian impulse behind it is one that human societies have produced in many forms.

Islam Versus Islamism

Nearly a quarter of humanity lives within the broad cultural world of Islam. Yet “Muslim” does not describe a single civilization any more than “Christian” does. The Islam of Senegal differs profoundly from the Islam of Indonesia, which differs from the Islam of Iran, which differs again from the Islam of Bosnia. Each reflects centuries of local history, culture, and institutions layered together with a shared religious tradition.

Islamism is the political project of organizing society around religious authority and Islamic law. Like many movements built around political purity and centralized authority, it has repeatedly produced repression, censorship, violence, and persecution, often directed first and foremost at fellow Muslims.

Treating Islamism as Islam itself makes about as much sense as treating Franco’s Spain or Cromwell’s England as Christianity itself.

Defining a Religion by Its Authoritarians

A common argument goes something like this: the more Muslim a country is, the more authoritarian it becomes.

But the conclusion is often smuggled into the premise. If “more Muslim” quietly comes to mean “more Islamist”—more committed to theocratic government and religious law as state law—then authoritarianism has already been built into the category.

We could play exactly the same game with Christianity. We could declare that the “truest” Christians were those who most aggressively used Christian narratives to justify authoritarian rule. Nazi Germany promoted a racialized “Positive Christianity.” Franco fused Catholicism with dictatorship and Spanish nationalism. Salazar grounded his corporatist state in God, family, hierarchy, and order. Tiso governed Slovakia as a Catholic priest-president.

On that standard, the most authoritarian Christian regimes would conveniently become the most authentically Christian ones. No serious person would accept that reasoning.

Their authoritarianism did not make them more Christian. They drew upon Christian symbols, institutions, scripture, and moral language to legitimize power. The same reasoning should apply to Islamism. It is one political movement within the Muslim world and cannot serve as the yardstick for who counts as a “real” Muslim.

The Human Pattern

The deeper pattern is collectivism: the recurring belief that the individual must submit to some higher collective—nation, race, class, church, revolution, or ummah. Different societies have wrapped that belief in different language, but the political impulse is familiar.

Christian societies were hardly immune. As recently as 1975, half of Europe still lived under communist rule. Spain and Portugal remained dictatorships. Greece had only just emerged from military rule. Across Latin America, authoritarian governments routinely justified themselves through Christian language and institutions.

Christianity did not inoculate the Western world against political religion. Western societies simply passed through much of that history earlier. The difference is largely one of timing rather than theology.

COVID Should Have Humbled Us

If anyone still doubts that authoritarian impulses are universal, COVID should have settled the matter.

Across much of the West, societies rapidly embraced purity rituals, moralized dress codes, speech taboos, public shaming, medical coercion, and sweeping restrictions on civil liberties. These policies were treated as moral obligations as much as emergency measures. Dissent became contamination. Skepticism became vice.

Whatever one thinks about the particulars of pandemic policy, the episode showed how quickly authoritarian habits can return in societies that believe they have outgrown them. Fear, crisis, and moral certainty were enough to bring them back at scale.

Having just lived through that, it is difficult to argue with a straight face that authoritarianism belongs uniquely to distant cultures or particular religions.

The Language Quietly Misleads Us

Even our vocabulary nudges us toward a false picture.

We speak of “the Muslim world,” but almost never of “the Christian world.” We explain authoritarian movements in Muslim societies through religious labels like “Islamism,” yet authoritarian movements in historically Christian societies become nationalism, fascism, military dictatorship, or simply politics.

Christianity quietly fades into the background while Islam remains in the foreground. The result is that Islam is treated as an explanation for political outcomes, while Christianity is treated as little more than scenery.

Ancient Texts Don’t Run Civilizations

There is another mistake underneath all this: the assumption that finding the “correct” interpretation of an ancient religious text somehow explains an entire civilization.

Scientists, working from modern data, shared methods, and formal logic, still disagree constantly about interpretation. It should surprise no one that communities separated by centuries, continents, languages, and cultures draw radically different meanings from texts written for worlds that no longer exist.

Ancient scriptures acquire meaning through their interpreters. The diversity of Muslim societies reflects that fact. There is no single, inevitable political order waiting inside the text to be extracted.

What History Actually Shows

For all the discussion of caliphates and Islamic fascism, genuinely Islamist totalitarian governments have been remarkably few. Iran’s Islamic Republic and the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate are the clearest modern examples. Pakistan occupies a more ambiguous middle ground, with Islamic constitutional features alongside long periods of military and civilian rule rather than full clerical government.

Most authoritarian governments across the Muslim world have instead been military dictatorships, secular nationalist regimes, monarchies, socialist governments, revolutionary strongmen, or patronage states. Their organizing ideologies were often nationalist, military, socialist, dynastic, or some combination of these.

Authoritarianism has been the dominant problem. Religion has sometimes supplied convenient symbolism, just as it has in Christian societies, but it has hardly been the only available language of power.

Replacing one authoritarian system with another does little for the people forced to live under it, whatever vocabulary the new rulers prefer.

The Wrong Question

We keep asking why Islam produces authoritarianism.

History points toward a broader question: why do human societies repeatedly produce authoritarian movements, and why do those movements so readily borrow whatever moral language is most persuasive to the people they hope to rule?

Sometimes that language is religious. Sometimes it is nationalist. Sometimes it is socialist. Sometimes it is scientific. Sometimes it is humanitarian.

The people being murdered in Sudan are being killed by authoritarians who speak the language of Islam. History is full of rulers who have used Christianity, socialism, nationalism, science, or humanitarianism in much the same way.

Islamism belongs to a familiar human pattern. No civilization has been free of it, and none has any reason to assume it always will be.

People on the Left love making fun of conspiracy theories on the Right. And, sure, there is plenty to make fun of. Satanic elites. Baby-eating pedophile rings. Secret Jewish cabals. 5G mind control. The Great Reset. Plandemic. Deep-state puppeteers. Ritual blood. Hidden symbols. It is easy to look at all that and think, “Wow, those people are nuts.”

Careful.

The Left is crawling with conspiracy theories too. They just don’t usually come with horns and pentagrams. They arrive as policy, expertise, compassion, public health, climate, equity, safety, science, and democracy. The Left doesn’t usually say, “A demonic cabal is secretly controlling the world.” It says, “A benevolent expert class must be empowered to control the world.” It sounds different, but it starts from the same mistake. In both cases the mind looks at some enormous decentralized order — markets, truth, disease, panic, climate, prices, norms, culture, reputation, prosperity — and refuses to believe that it could be arising from a billion local collisions. So it invents authors. The Right invents Demon Cabals. The Left invents God Cabals.

The Right-wing version is easier to see because it keeps the spooky stuff close to the surface. Somewhere behind the curtain is a hidden band of evildoers. They control banks, media, elections, courts, universities, medicine, Hollywood, schools, intelligence agencies, wars, platforms, and whatever else needs explaining that day. They don’t merely hide the truth. They manufacture perceived truth. They don’t merely censor ideas. They decide what goes viral, what disappears, what the public notices, what the public forgets, what everyone suddenly believes by next Tuesday. They prey on innocence. They corrupt children. They perform rituals. They coordinate impossibly. They hide in plain sight. The awakened can read the signs. Everyone else is asleep, bought, brainwashed, blackmailed, or in on it.

And watch what happens once the theory gets going. The villains cannot remain ordinary villains. Ordinary villains cannot do the job. You cannot have six guys in a basement secretly coordinating banks, elections, wars, schools, media, medicine, social trends, and the emotional weather of the planet. So the villains have to inflate. Rich people become bankers. Bankers become globalists. Globalists become bloodlines. Bloodlines become Satanists. Satanists become demons. The more work the conspiracy has to do, the less human the conspirators are allowed to be. By the end, you are no longer talking about people with bad incentives. You are talking about devils wearing people suits.

That is why the blood-libel form is the lurid endpoint. The claim is no longer merely that “they” are taking your money, rigging your elections, manipulating your institutions, or turning the truth dial against you. They are sacrificing the children. Disorder is no longer something that emerges from history, incentives, fear, stupidity, bureaucracy, fashion, tribalism, bad models, media dynamics, and ordinary corruption. It comes from ritual evil. The enemy is not just wrong. He is unclean. He is metaphysical pollution. He must be exposed, purged, defeated, cleansed.

Now look at the Left-wing mirror. It does not usually say, “They are secretly sacrificing the children.” It says, “We are the only ones saving the children.” And grandma. And democracy. And truth. And the planet. And public health. And the vulnerable. And the economy. And civilization. The mirror image of blood libel is a salvation myth: children are not secretly consumed by the villains, but endlessly invoked by the saviors. The Right gives impossible evil and coordination to hidden enemies. The Left gives impossible goodness and competence to approved authorities. The Right says hidden devils are running the world. The Left says visible angels must be allowed to run the world. The moral story changes, but the same mistake is still underneath.

The economy gives you the template. The paranoid Right says the economy is secretly controlled by bankers, Jews, billionaires, globalists, corporations, the WEF, or some Davos priesthood. Prices rise because evil people turned up the greed knob. Recessions happen because the cabal wanted one. Shortages are engineered. Markets are puppet theaters. That is Demon Cabal economics. But the Left-wing mirror is not nearly as different as it thinks. It says the economy must be morally authored from above. Without the state, planners, regulators, central banks, expert agencies, redistribution machines, price controls, industrial policy boards, and heroic emergency interventions, there can be no justice, no order, no decent wages, no fair prices, no humane medicine, no livable housing, no civilization. In one version, evil bankers secretly pull the levers. In the other, good managers must openly pull the levers. Both picture the economy as a beast with a control panel. But an economy is a vast, half-blind, error-ridden, genius-level coordination system made of prices, scarcity, substitution, local knowledge, risk, habit, trust, transport, weather, regulation, law, fraud, invention, competition, and millions of people solving their own tiny problems. It is neither holy nor demonic. And there is no little man inside it turning the egg-price dial.

Truth works the same way. The Right-wing conspiracist says the media, universities, intelligence agencies, Jews, globalists, platforms, or regime operatives manufacture reality. They decide which ideas explode, which claims are buried, which questions are made unaskable, which stories become “what everyone knows.” The official story is installed. The truth dial is real, and the devils are misusing it. The Left-wing mirror agrees that the dial is real, but wants better hands on it. Fact-checkers, platforms, journalists, academic panels, misinformation researchers, institutional experts, and government-adjacent NGOs must certify reality for the public. Otherwise falsehood will infect the masses. One side imagines evil priests manufacturing truth. The other imagines good priests administering truth. Both are priesthood theories. Both distrust the ugly, distributed, humiliating machinery by which humans actually inch toward truth: argument, replication, open criticism, memory, adversarial pressure, reputation, embarrassment, incentives, and the world eventually refusing to cooperate with your story. Experts can know things. Institutions can preserve knowledge. Fact-checkers can sometimes help. But once they stop helping the argument and start deciding what counts as reality, they have become priests.

Climate is another version. The Right-wing paranoid says climate change is a hoax by globalists to control humanity. The models are fake, the scientists are bought, the treaties are chains, the whole thing is a plot. Familiar Demon Cabal. But the Left-wing mirror often turns climate into a planetary thermostat with a moral dial. Carbon becomes a kind of moral stain. Offsets become indulgences. Targets, bans, treaties, taxes, summits, emergency powers, and lifestyle sacrifices become rituals by which the sky is purified. None of this requires denying that climate is real, or that energy choices matter, or that policy can have effects. The point is that the human-climate-energy-technology system is not a household furnace. It is a planetary-scale tangle of measurement, modeling, energy density, wealth, agriculture, innovation, adaptation, tradeoffs, infrastructure, incentives, geopolitics, risk, and behavior. The control-room mind hates that. It wants sin, priesthood, sacrifice, and redemption. The crude conspiracist says the climate priests are lying to enslave us. The respectable conspiracist says the climate priests can save the weather if enough sinners obey.

Pandemics made the symmetry almost too obvious. The Right-wing version says the pandemic — disease or no disease, lab leak or natural spillover, serious threat or overblown threat — was all part of a plan. A plan for digital IDs, forced vaccines, depopulation, mail-in ballots, social credit, obedience training, Big Pharma profits, global government, microchips, the Great Reset, or whatever scheme was filling the slot that week. Disease becomes plot. The panic itself gets folded back in as evidence of the plan. Medicine becomes a control mechanism. Public health becomes tyranny in a lab coat. But the Left-wing mirror treated the state as if it could become society’s immune system. Health could be centrally administered if only the population obeyed the priesthood. Dissent was contamination. Speech was infection. Bodies were purity risks. Compliance was cleanliness. So we got arrows on floors, six-foot magic, plexiglass shields against an airborne pathogen, masks between bites, outdoor masking, sanitizer theater, and the moral sorting of the clean and unclean. Some interventions had uses in some settings; the issue is how fast the public meaning slid from mechanism into ritual. Once a pathogen enters society, the event is no longer merely biological. It becomes a biological-social panic event involving age, immunity, seasonality, prior exposure, ventilation, hospitals, treatment, testing, incentives, networks, fear, media, institutions, and political feedback. Too much for the control-room mind. So one side says evil plotters planned the whole thing. The other says benevolent authorities could have controlled the whole thing, if everyone had submitted hard enough.

Once you see the pattern, it is everywhere, and not just in the grand theories. Anti-emergence thinking produces myth piles: respectable old wives’ tales, institutional superstitions, fake causal tokens. Cold air makes you sick. A/C is dangerous. Greed causes inflation. Misinformation spreads like a virus. Speech causes violence. Disparities prove hidden design. Credentials consecrate truth. Recycling this object heals the planet. The algorithm hypnotizes society. “The system” explains everything while explaining nothing. These are not all equally false, which is how they survive. Most contain some shard of reality. Cold and humidity can matter around illness. Greed exists. Algorithms matter. Speech matters. Disparities can reflect injustice. But the mythic version strips out the machinery and leaves behind a named force that seems to explain everything.

Respectable occultism does not announce itself as occultism. It arrives as common sense. As compassion. As safety. As expertise. As consensus. As emergency. As “what responsible people know.” But the machinery is recognizable once you look: invisible contaminant, authorized priesthood, purification ritual, sacred seal, forbidden question, endangered innocent, emergency power, heretic to be managed. The demon might be “misinformation,” “capital,” “hate,” “the algorithm,” “denialism,” “extremism,” “greed,” “the unvaccinated,” “the market,” “white supremacy,” “Zionists,” “fossil fuels,” or “the system.” Sometimes the word points to something real. But when it becomes the answer to everything, when it explains without mechanism, when it turns dissent into pollution and control into salvation, you are no longer explaining the world. You are scapegoating.

The Right’s occult politics usually looks like demonology. The Left’s usually looks like angelology. One side says hidden monsters cause all evil. The other says authorized saviors are needed to cause all good. One side imagines a secret cabal with impossible wickedness. The other imagines a managerial priesthood with impossible wisdom. The Right wants the demons purged. The Left wants the priests empowered.

Rejecting conspiracy theory does not require becoming a child who trusts every institutional seal. Governments lie. Experts fail. Companies collude. Agencies protect themselves. Media institutions herd. Intelligence services manipulate. Officials cover their asses. Conspiracies happen. The real alternative is to understand mechanisms, especially the mechanisms no one controls.

Markets. Science. Language. Culture. Law. Reputation. Trust. Disease. Panic. Morality. Fashion. Prices. Norms. Knowledge. These are not centrally authored. They emerge. They can be ugly, brilliant, fragile, cruel, corrective, deranged, smarter than the people inside them, and too large for anyone to see whole. That makes them look magical. The great mistake is deciding they are magic.

The Right looks at the world and says, “Someone evil must be behind this.”

The Left looks at the world and says, “Someone good must be put in charge of this.”

Both are frightened by the same fact: nobody is in the control room.

The Right says, “Demons are secretly running everything.”

The Left says, “Angels must be allowed to run everything.”

The emergent view says: nobody is running everything.

That is the terrifying part.

And also the miracle.

That’s how you know you’re not in one.

Cute. Except you probably are.

The modern version skips the robes. It runs on podcasts, hashtags, “experts,” NGO reports, Telegram channels, faculty lounges, Substacks. The smarter ones never name a date — that was the one honest thing about the old cults. At least they were wrong on schedule.

Today’s version is more convenient: the end is always near, never near enough to falsify. The enemy is everywhere and nowhere. Your opponents are stupid, evil, or bought. Normal tradeoffs are cowardice. Panic is wisdom. And when the famine doesn’t come, the oceans don’t boil, COVID doesn’t level society, the vaccines don’t wipe out humanity by next winter — nobody says, “Huh, maybe I overdid it.” They revise. The failed prediction becomes a “warning.” The flop becomes proof the plot ran deeper than we knew.

On the Left: climate apocalypse, overpopulation, capitalism as the root of every evil from melting ice to your dog’s anxiety. COVID was sacred panic — a respiratory virus turned into a civilizational threat, where normal life was murder and compliance was enlightenment.

On the Right, the mirror image: Plandemic, Great Reset, 5G mind control, vaccine depopulation, elites engineering slavery via bugs, fake meat, and your dishwasher. Every migrant wave, pronoun, or DEI absurdity is the fall of Rome. Muslims become the civilizational threat, the invading horde, a bad remake of the Reconquista.

Then the oldest classic, the one that outlives every trend: Jews run the world. Zionists explain everything.

These aren’t identical. Some wear lab coats, some wrap themselves in the flag, some preach compassion, some call it realism, some are “just asking questions.” But the move is the same: take a real problem, inflate it into the secret engine of history, turn opponents into agents of doom, and pat yourself on the back for seeing what the herd can’t.

Everyone spots the cult across the aisle. The Left mocks plandemicers. The Right mocks climate zealots. Seculars mock end-timers. Believers mock secular apocalypse with charts.

No one notices their own little apocalypse club, because theirs doesn’t say “cult” on the door. It says Emergency. Justice. Freedom. Science. The children. The planet. The West.

Doomsday thinking feels good. It hands you villains, purity, a starring role. It turns messy reality into a movie where you’re the awake one.

But most of the time the world isn’t ending. It’s changing — badly sometimes, stupidly sometimes, messily always.

Markets aren’t demons. Elites aren’t omniscient. Viruses aren’t automatically plots. Immigrants aren’t barbarians. Muslims aren’t a hive. Jews aren’t the control panel. Your favorite apocalypse probably isn’t the exception that proves you right.

Spotting the doomsday cult in robes is easy. Spotting it across the aisle is even easier.

The trick is noticing the little Jim Jones in yourself — minus the Kool-Aid, plus better branding.

But put the water across the room?

It just sits there.

No searching. No seeking. No recognition that its desperate internal state has anything to do with that stuff over there.

That sounds impossible. Thirst is the ultimate primal drive, right? Your body gets low on water, you feel it, you go get a drink. Pure instinct.

Wrong.

Nearly twenty-five years ago, my colleagues and I helped show that this basic story is wrong — for both thirst and hunger.

Young rats, before about four weeks of age, have a strange split in their behavior. If you put water in their mouths when they are dehydrated, they drink eagerly. Their bodies know what to do with water once it arrives.

But if the water is across the room?

Nothing.

They do not go looking for it.

They are dehydrated. They can drink. They have drunk before. They know where water has been. And yet they do not behave as if their internal state means, “Go find water.”

That is the distinction at the heart of the paper: consuming is not the same as seeking.

A lot of animal behavior looks automatic because we usually see the whole chain already assembled. Hunger leads to searching, searching leads to food, food leads to eating. Thirst leads to searching, searching leads to water, water leads to drinking.

But those are not single behaviors. They are sequences. And the pieces can come apart.

The mouth may already know what to do.

The body may already know that water, or food, is useful.

But the animal may still not know how to connect the feeling inside to the thing outside.

To test this, we needed to separate finding from consuming. Normally, if a hungry or thirsty rat bumps into food or water, it consumes it. Then it looks as though the animal had been intelligently seeking it all along. But maybe it had only wandered into it.

So we built a little world for the rats.

There was a nest area, a play area, and two approach alleys leading to two different chambers. One chamber normally contained food. The other normally contained water. To get to either one, the rat had to leave the safe area, choose a side, travel down an alley, and enter a brighter, less comfortable chamber.

Then came the trick.

At test time, we removed the food and water.

Now there was nothing to eat and nothing to drink. So if a rat spent time in the water chamber, it was not because it was drinking. If it spent time in the food chamber, it was not because it was eating.

We were measuring something purer: where the animal was directing itself.

Was it seeking?

For thirst, the answer depended on experience. Rats that had previously been dehydrated and then allowed to drink later behaved like thirsty animals. When dehydrated again, they spent more time in the water chamber.

But rats that had never had that paired experience — dehydration followed by drinking — did not. Even when dehydrated, they did not preferentially seek water.

They were not ignorant of water. They had drunk before.

They were ignorant of what dehydration meant.

The same pattern held for hunger. Food-deprived young rats became more active. They moved around more. They were, in a loose sense, agitated. But general activity is not the same as seeking food.

Only rats that had previously experienced food deprivation followed by eating showed directed food-seeking. When deprived again, they went to the food chamber. Inexperienced deprived rats did not.

So hunger, too, was not born fully formed.

The body’s need was there.

The eating response was there.

But the directed appetite — the “go find the thing that will fix this” behavior — had to be learned.

That is the surprising idea: appetite is not merely a fuel gauge. It is an interpretation.

Your body produces internal states. Dry mouth. Cellular dehydration. Metabolic need. Gut signals. Fatigue. Agitation. But those signals do not automatically arrive with labels and instructions.

The animal has to learn what they mean.

It has to learn that this feeling is relieved by that substance, found in that place, with those smells and cues.

Only after that pairing does the inner state become motivational in the familiar sense. Dehydration becomes thirst. Food deprivation becomes hunger. Not merely as physiology, but as behavior.

That was the deeper point of the paper.

Instinct is not always a complete script. Sometimes it is a kit.

The animal is born with pieces: internal signals, reflexive consumption, arousal, movement, sensory capacities, learning mechanisms. But the meaningful sequence — when you feel this, go seek that — can be assembled through experience.

So a young rat does not simply discover water, or food.

It discovers what thirst and hunger are for.

And perhaps that is true more broadly. The most basic appetites feel ancient, automatic, and obvious only because we learned their meanings so early that we mistake the assembled machinery for instinct itself.

Paper…

https://www.changizi.com/uploads/8/3/4/4/83445868/rat.pdf

The “Free Palestine” movement is so soaked in ethical failure that its signature move almost had to be something enormous: “GENOCIDE!” Not really an argument so much as a Hail Mary accusation and membership signal. Scream the worst crime imaginable at Israel, then make everyone else spend forever disproving it. Meanwhile, the movement has spent years excusing, romanticizing, or simply looking away from some of the ugliest evil of our era. So spare us the trial. You have some explaining to do.

(1) YOUR “FREEDOM FIGHTERS” — Your heroes deliberately massacred about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, raped women, kidnapped and tortured hostages, murdered children, filmed themselves doing it, and celebrated it. One called home from a murdered woman’s phone to brag to Dad that he’d killed ten Jews. Dad congratulated him. Some arrived with Hebrew commands like “take off your pants” and “spread your legs.” And you call these people “resistance.”

(2) YOU’RE PART OF THE STRATEGY — Hamas fights from civilian areas, dresses fighters as civilians, booby-traps buildings, and knows perfectly well that every dead Gazan becomes ammunition against Israel. And there you are, right on cue, doing exactly what they counted on.

(3) NICE “LIBERATION” MOVEMENT — You romanticize a brutal Islamist dictatorship that murdered its political rivals, still murders opposition voices, plundered Gaza, and poured vast resources into hundreds of miles of tunnels for fighters and weapons — not civilian bomb shelters. It seized power by force, hasn’t faced a national election in a generation, holds hostages, and could stop enormous suffering by releasing them and surrendering. Somehow that never makes your protest sign.

(4) SUCH SELECTIVE HUMANITY — Hamas is backed by the Islamic Republic, a regime that has spent nearly half a century brutalizing Iranians and that TIME reported may have killed around 30,000 Iranians in two days in January 2026. Thirty thousand in 48 hours. Weird how the moral emergency seems to depend on who’s doing the killing.

(5) THE PERFECT REVERSAL — Your “freedom fighters” carried out an attempted genocidal massacre on October 7, straight out of Hamas’s own eliminationist worldview. But by then you’d spent years tying your identity to anti-Israel politics. So what were you going to do? Admit what your side had become? Easier to scream “genocide” at Israel.

(6) BEFORE THE BLOOD DRIED — And you started almost immediately. The genocide charge was already being thrown around within days of October 7, long before the later Gaza death toll existed. So no, the accusation wasn’t the product of some careful moral reckoning. You already had the answer.

(7) SOME “ETHNOSTATE” — Roughly 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab. They vote, hold office, become judges, doctors, professors, and live permanently inside the state you keep describing as an ethnic-cleansing machine. Not a great fit for the slogan.

(8) YOU JUST MOVED THE BLOOD LIBELS OVER TO “ZIONIST” — You insist you’re not antisemitic, just “anti-Zionist.” Fine. Then why do the same old accusations keep showing up? Secret control, bloodlust, money, media, lobbying, dual loyalty, conspiracies — only now “Jew” has been replaced with “Zionist.” It’s not exactly subtle.

And now you want to put Israel in the dock for “gEnOciDe!”? Spare me. You’ve spent years excusing the people who massacred civilians, defending the regime that turned Gaza into a fortress, rewarding the strategy that gets Gazans killed, ignoring Hamas’s Iranian patrons, and recycling the same old anti-Jewish garbage under the word “Zionist.” The genocide charge was there almost from the start. It wasn’t where your reasoning led you. It was the accusation you needed.

~ Free markets are enslaving humanity and destroying the planet.

~ Overpopulation will soon bring mass famine, resource wars, and collapse.

~ Climate change means civilization is ending any day now.

~ COVID was a wholly novel, uniquely apocalyptic plague unlike anything in history.

~ Plandemic: the virus, real or fake, was engineered for decades to impose tyranny.

~ 5G, vaccines, or “the elites” are part of a grand depopulation or mind-control scheme.

~ The Great Reset is a coordinated elite plan to use crises as the road to global tyranny.

~ AI and automation will soon make most humans obsolete, unemployed, or irrelevant.

~ Jews, Israel, or “Zionists” secretly run the world, control U.S. policy, and explain most global evils.

~ Islam, or “the Muslims,” are the root of essentially all the world’s problems.

~ The West is collapsing any minute now because of immigration, wokeness, moral decay, or Fall of Rome 2.0.

Maybe Americans are not stupid for liking Fahrenheit.

Maybe feet, inches, pounds, cups, and miles are not just embarrassing relics from the pre-scientific past.

Maybe they are fossils of something smarter: a measurement system shaped by bodies, hands, kitchens, fields, weather, roads, and ordinary human life.

Metric is magnificent. No serious person should deny that. It is clean, decimal, universal, and ideal for science, engineering, medicine, manufacturing, and calculation across scales. If you are building a bridge, mixing chemicals, or sending a probe to Mars, use metric.

But if you are asking how tall a person is, how hot the day feels, how far the store is, how much flour to add, how big the room is, how much a package weighs, or whether a board is easy to cut into halves, thirds, or quarters, the old system starts to look less idiotic.

It starts to look human.

An inch is roughly a thumb-width. A foot is, of course, roughly a foot. A yard is close to a long step, or a stride-like human distance. A fathom is the span of two outstretched arms. A hand, still used for horses, is a palm-scale unit for an animal one physically approaches and sizes by touch and sight. A mile is not a scientific abstraction. It is a travel-scale distance, large enough to be a journey but small enough to imagine bodily.

These are not perfect correspondences, and one should not over-romanticize their origins. But that is not the point. The point is that many customary units cluster near human extents and human actions. They give us handles at the places where we tend to grasp the world.

Even the “ugly” divisibility of Imperial units becomes less ugly at the human scale. Twelve inches in a foot seems irrational if one’s only criterion is decimal conversion. But twelve is wonderfully divisible: halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths all fall cleanly. Sixteen ounces in a pound gives repeated halving: half-pound, quarter-pound, eighth-pound. In a kitchen, workshop, market, or construction site, dividing by two, three, four, eight, twelve, and sixteen can be more useful than dividing by ten.

Volume shows the same pattern. Teaspoon, tablespoon, cup, pint, quart, gallon: these are not elegant scientific units. But they live near familiar acts and objects. A spoonful. A serving. A cup. A pot. A jug. A household container. They describe how liquids and ingredients appear in domestic life. “Two cups” and “a tablespoon” are not merely measurements. They are gestures.

Weight is subtler, because a pound is not a body part in the way a foot is. But it is still a human-scale unit. A pound is a meaningful hand-held quantity: a small parcel, a lump of food, a market amount, a weight one can easily imagine picking up. An ounce is small enough for ingredients, spices, letters, and portions. A pound is large enough to matter but still small enough to grasp. A stone, where it survives, is a coarse body-weight unit, oddly natural for talking about people in a way that is less falsely precise than saying someone weighs 86.2 kilograms.

Land units, too, often come from work rather than abstraction. An acre is tied to the scale of land that could be worked. A furlong is a furrow-long. These are task-sized units. They did not emerge from someone asking what would make multiplication easiest. They emerged from plowing, walking, carrying, cooking, trading, building, and living.

Temperature may be one of the best examples. Celsius is magnificent if the anchor is water: zero is freezing, one hundred is boiling. That is elegant physics. But Fahrenheit is arguably better tuned to ordinary human weather. In many four-season climates, the lived outdoor world is roughly contained between 0 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Zero is bitter cold. One hundred is oppressive heat. In between, the scale reads almost like a human comfort meter: 30s are freezing, 40s chilly, 50s cool, 60s mild, 70s pleasant, 80s warm, 90s hot.

Converted into Celsius, that same familiar weather band becomes something like -18 to 38 degrees. Perfectly usable, of course, but less naturally framed as a bounded human range. Celsius gives us water’s drama. Fahrenheit gives us weather’s drama. Celsius tells you what water is doing. Fahrenheit tells you what the weather is doing to you.

This is the deeper distinction. Metric is optimized for universal conversion. Customary units are often optimized, accidentally and culturally, for local description. Metric asks: How do we make all quantities part of one clean decimal ladder? Customary units evolved as if asking: What are the recurring sizes of human action?

That is why Imperial and customary units can feel stupid in a textbook and yet strangely natural in the kitchen, the workshop, the street, and the body. They are full of historical clutter, yes. But clutter is not always noise. Sometimes clutter is memory. Sometimes it is the residue of countless human encounters with the world.

One way to put this is information-theoretic. A good code is not necessarily the most uniform code. A good code is one that fits the distribution of things it needs to describe. If the world we measured every day were uniformly distributed across powers of ten, metric would be hard to improve upon. But ordinary life is not distributed that way. We measure thumb-width things, foot-length things, stride-length things, room-sized things, cup-sized things, hand-held weights, body weights, walking distances, and weather as felt by skin.

So the real question is not which system is better in the abstract. The real question is: better for what?

Metric is the better scientific code. It is coherent, scalable, and clean. But Imperial and customary units may be a better vernacular code, a patchwork of measures tuned to the scales at which humans actually meet the world.

Different tools for different jobs. Metric for the lab and the blueprint. Something more bodily, irregular, and human for the kitchen, the workshop, and the street.

I put together this info sheet because I’ve had to repeat these points a gazillion times to Jew-haters. It shows the Gaza civilian-to-combatant ratio, the extraordinary measures Israel takes to reduce civilian casualties, and the striking age/sex distribution of the dead.

And for perspective: the Islamic Republic slaughtered roughly 30,000 protesters in just two days in January. Imagine what Israel could have done in two years if killing civilians were actually the objective.

We cheer for evolution, markets, free speech, and brains doing their thing… until something feels too remarkable. Then suddenly the decentralized process “can’t be enough” and we invent a designer, a planner, a cabal, a fact-checker, a metaphysical free-will steerer, a consciousness watcher, or a special human essence.

Same template. Same cognitive reflex. Different domains.

My Science Moment 637 points the finger at all of us.

People often don’t understand the difference between a race, a religion, and a people.

They tend to focus on the first two. But much of human history is really about the third.

A people is not simply a race. It is not simply a religion. And yet it is usually entangled with both. A people is a long-lived human community, bound by ancestry, memory, language, custom, ritual, homeland, sacred places, humiliations, victories, migrations, enemies, and obligations passed from one generation to the next.

Those of us in the New World are often slower to grasp this, because New World nations are not usually organized around a single historic people. The United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and others absorbed vast numbers of diverse peoples and built nations out of them. Americans can be called “a people,” but usually in a thinner and more recent sense than the word carries through much of the Old World.

The rest of the world is teeming with peoples.

Some have states. Some are stateless. Most states contain multiple peoples, often with one principal historic people at the center. Germans, Koreans, Persians, Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Kurds, Basques, Copts, Assyrians, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Tamils, Pashtuns, Han Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, Berbers, Somalis, Yoruba, Igbo, Amhara, Oromo, Zulu, and countless others are not merely “races” or “religions.” They are peoples.

This is why New World categories so often fail when projected onto the rest of the planet.

“White people” are not a people. They are not defined by a shared religion. And they are not even a race in any deep biological sense. “White” is a racialized umbrella term, something like using “seafood” to group fish, crabs, and octopus — creatures that may share a marketplace category, but not a single lineage.

Black Americans, by contrast, have a stronger claim to being a people, because they were forged through a shared historical ordeal: slavery, segregation, prejudice, civil-rights struggle, and the creation of distinct institutions, dialects, music, religious traditions, and political memory. But even there, “Black” is not a race in the simplistic biological sense people imagine. Africa contains more genetic diversity than the rest of humanity combined, and “Black” collapses vast ancestral worlds into a single American social category.

In much of the rest of the world, the more basic unit is the people.

Peoples are shaped by culture, religion, ancestry, memory, homeland, and continuity. Not by cartoon notions of race. A people can absorb outsiders. It can change genetically. It can convert religiously. It can migrate, intermarry, fragment, reform, and still remain recognizably itself, because what persists is not a pure bloodline but an inherited civilization.

That inheritance tells people who they are, where they came from, whom they mourn, what they owe their children, what lands are sacred to them, what language carries their grandparents’ ghosts, and what catastrophes they refuse to let happen again.

Race is too crude. Religion is too narrow. Citizenship is often too recent. Ideology is too thin.

Peoples are the deep structure.

Ignore peoples, and much of history becomes unintelligible. You cannot understand Jews, Armenians, Kurds, Persians, Greeks, Tibetans, Koreans, Japanese, Ukrainians, Copts, Assyrians, or countless others merely by asking what race they are or what religion they practice. Those questions miss the thing itself.

A people is the human vessel through which ancestry, memory, culture, religion, language, homeland, and obligation are carried forward.

Which raises a fun question: What if nobody had ever hit the brakes

?

This graph is a thought experiment, not a forecast. Take the historical rise in cumulative recommended childhood vaccine doses through age 18 and fit an exponential curve to it. The striking thing is that it actually fits extremely well — about R² = .986 for the data plotted here.

Then simply let the curve keep going.

By 2050: ~175 doses per child.

By 2100: ~1,200.

By 2150: ~8,000.

Eight thousand doses by your 18th birthday. At that point childhood would presumably consist mainly of eating, sleeping, and stopping by CVS for your 1.2 daily vaccines.

Obviously, nobody seriously thinks we were headed for 8,000 childhood vaccine doses. That’s the point. Exponential extrapolation eventually becomes absurd because real systems encounter constraints and course corrections.

But there’s also something recognizable here about unchecked government growth: each individual addition can be defended on its own terms, while almost nobody is institutionally responsible for asking whether the accumulating whole has become ridiculous. Add one recommendation. Then another. Then another. Each has a rationale; the ratchet keeps turning.

You don’t have to be anti-vaccine to recognize that this kind of institutional ratcheting can itself become an illness.

The absurd 8,000-dose child is just the reductio ad absurdum: eventually somebody has to question the curve.

While many surviving Jews fled Europe to Israel after the Holocaust, much of the rest of the world had either…

~ Perpetrated it — Germany, Romania, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Fascist Italy

~ Collaborated with it — Vichy France, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Greece, parts of Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and Poland

~ Stood aside — Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey

~ Fought Germany, but did not prioritize rescuing Jews — United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union

~ Restricted or refused Jewish refugees — United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, France, and most Évian Conference states

~ Restricted Jewish escape to Palestine — United Kingdom

~ Opposed or fought the creation of a Jewish state — Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen

And if your country somehow escapes that list but sits in the New World, there is a good chance your own society was built through conquest and settlement of somebody else’s homeland.

Jews, meanwhile, are a people whose history, religion, language, archaeology, and ancestry all originate in Judea.

So spare us the lectures about the supposed moral stain of Jews establishing a state there 80 years ago. Much of the world had just murdered them, helped murder them, abandoned them, shut its doors to them, or fought to prevent them from having a country of their own. And many of the people now shouting “colonizer” live on continents colonized far more recently by their own societies.

Seriously: STFU.

Why do insects have six legs? Why do spiders have eight? Why do centipedes have so many that children eventually stop trying to count?

The standard answer is ancestry. Insects inherited six. Spiders inherited eight. Vertebrates inherited four. Centipedes inherited a repeated, segmented body plan. That answer is right, but nearly thirty years ago I wondered whether it was also incomplete.

Maybe limb number is not just a frozen accident of evolutionary history. Maybe animal bodies are solving a geometry problem.

The idea begins with a well-known fact about minimal spanning trees.

Imagine a point with wires radiating out to other points in the plane. If the network must use the least total wire, there is a local limit on how many wires can meet at that point. More than six cannot work. If two wires leave at too small an angle, the two outer endpoints end up closer to each other than at least one of them is to the center. You can then shorten the whole network by deleting one spoke and connecting those two outer points directly.

So a point-like node in a Euclidean minimal spanning tree can have at most six edges. In the generic case — exact 60-degree arrangements are nongeneric — the practical maximum is usually five.

That is the old point-node result.

But animals are not points.

Animals have bodies with radius and circumference. The “central node” is not a mathematical dot. It is fat.

That single change was the move.

What happens to the minimal-spanning-tree constraint when the central node has real size?

A limb is not merely a limb. It is a biological reach-wire. It costs tissue, energy, maintenance, neural wiring, and control. Yet it also lets the animal reach out — to walk, grasp, swim, cling, fight, taste, and feel.

There is a simple tension: more limbs give more ways to reach the world, but they also add more biological cable. How many reach-wires can an animal afford before the arrangement stops being locally economical?

Treat the animal as a body-limb network. The body is the central structure. The limb tips are the reach-points. The animal wants as many outward reach-points as possible, but only so long as the resulting network still behaves like a minimal spanning tree — only so long as no cheaper wiring exists by shortcutting between neighboring tips.

If two adjacent reach-points are too close, two separate limbs are no longer justified. You could replace one limb with a direct connection between the tips. If the reach-points are far enough apart, each limb remains the economical choice.

For a point-like body, that logic recovers the classical six-spoke limit.

For a body with nonzero radius, the same logic produces a new result.

In the simplest circular case, the predicted number of limbs is:

N = π / arcsin(k/2)

where k = X / (R + X).

Here X is the length of the limb beyond the body wall and R is the body radius. So k is the limb’s reach beyond the body divided by the distance from the body’s center to the limb tip.

When the body shrinks toward a mathematical point (R → 0), k → 1 and the equation becomes:

N = π / arcsin(1/2) = 6

The old theorem falls out as the limiting case.

Point node → at most about six spokes.

Fat node → the number of spokes depends on body radius relative to limb length.

When the body is large compared with limb length, k becomes small and the equation approximates:

N ≈ 2π / k

That is the little equation hiding under the animal.

Long limbs imply fewer limbs. Short limbs imply more limbs. If your reach-wires are long, a small number can cover the directions around you. If they are short, you need more of them.

That was the core idea of my 2001 paper, later developed in the first chapter of The Brain From 25,000 Feet.

The model knows nothing about whether the animal is an insect, spider, starfish, centipede, vertebrate, or worm-like creature with repeated appendages. It knows nothing about what the limbs are made of, what they are used for, the genes, the muscles, the ecology, or the history.

It only asks a higher-level question:

Given this body and this relative limb length, how many economical reach-points should there be?

When I tested the prediction against real animals — 190 species across 15 classes and 7 phyla — the pattern was much cleaner than expected. Long-limbed animals tended to have fewer limbs. Short-limbed animals tended to have more.

Not perfectly. Nothing in comparative biology is perfect. Animals carry ancestry, developmental constraints, specializations, accidents, and compromises. But under all that clutter the broad relationship was visible: a simple local economy.

That is why the best description of the idea is not merely “limbs are reach-wires,” although they are. It is this:

Animals are locally trying to be minimal spanning trees — but with fat nodes.

The classical theorem tells you what happens when the node is a point. The question was what happens when the node has circumference. Once the node has circumference, the theorem stops looking like abstract graph theory and starts looking like animal morphology.

A six-legged insect is not just an inherited accident. An eight-legged spider is not just an inherited accident. A many-legged centipede is not just an inherited accident. They are, in part, different solutions to the same local economy constraint under different body geometries.

There is also a small corollary worth its own essay.

Digits are little limbs. Fingers are reach-wires arrayed around the edge of the hand. The fact that humans have five fingers per hand — and therefore tend to count in base ten — may ultimately trace back to the geometry of reach rather than to culture alone.

But that is for another day.

Questions that sound childish are often the ones adults have learned not to ask. Why six legs? Why eight? Why hundreds? Why five fingers? Why ten?

Sometimes the answer is ancestry.

Sometimes the answer is geometry.

And sometimes, under the animal, there is a theorem.

—

Publication: https://www.changizi.com/uploads/8/3/4/4/83445868/limb.pdf

Further development in Brain from 25000 Feet: https://www.changizi.com/uploads/8/3/4/4/83445868/changizibrain25000chapter1.pdf

Not in the movies. Not in the fantasy.

In real life. At the beginning. In the parking lot.

They’re hot, heavy, unstable, embarrassing, and constantly threatening to turn one tiny clutch mistake into a medical event.

And then something strange happens.

You get up to speed.

The physics changes. The bike lightens. It wakes up.

And suddenly the awful machine becomes magic.

That was the mystery that eventually became Motorcycle Mind.

So, how did I end up writing a book about motorcycles? I’m a math PhD who has concentrated on understanding design and evolution in biology, brain and culture, with six previous books about my discoveries, and none about motorcycles!

Well I, too, had spent decades passing parked motorcycles, gawking in awe and feeling unworthy. So, when a friend signed up for a motorcycle course and asked if I’d like to join, I jumped at the chance. It had always been something I wanted to do, but while raising kids it had never seemed the right time. My kids were now nearly grown, and I was ready to earn the privilege of lifting Thor’s Hammer and thereby earning an occasional diversion, a romantic ride with my wife at my back, the wind in our hair, going fast. What’s not to like? Motorcycling surely would be fun

.

But the course was not fun.

No air conditioning: It was summer and we were required to wear leather jackets, thick jeans, gloves, and a helmet. We trained six hours a day for two days on a sun-baked parking lot, moving so slowly there was never a breeze.

Manual transmission: I have driven manual transmission cars my whole life, but manual for a motorcycle brings unique challenges. First, everything is in the wrong place: the clutch at my left hand squeeze rather than my left foot press, the gear shift at my left foot rather than right hand, the accelerator (throttle) at my right hand rotation rather than right foot press, and the brakes at my right hand and right foot. At every moment I was struggling not to accidentally let up on the clutch and rocket across the lot, up the embankment and onto Interstate 71 into the path of the constant truck traffic. Second, dealing with parking-lot speeds in a manual transmission requires being in the “friction zone” where you must hold the clutch part way in and balance the throttle so as to achieve just the right slow speed for the task at hand. This is something anyone who drives manual transmission cars understands, but because a motorcycle’s engine is so strong relative to the overall weight of the bike, a failure to get just the right balance leads to much exaggerated sputtering and rocking compared to when in a car.

Slow speeds: Parking-lot speed is slow, and a key thing to know about motorcycles is that their magic only emerges once you’re moving beyond parking lot speeds. With speed the physics changes and the bike lightens, waking from its slumber it becomes stable, coordinated, yet supple and reactive to the barest of touches. Utterly and magically weightless, it flies. But at slow speeds motorcycles are unstable, wonky and ungovernable. At slow speeds motorcycles suck.

Sharp turns without putting a foot down: Every motorcycle course inevitably requires that you practice super tight right angle turns between cones without ever putting a foot down. It’s a cute parlor trick, and riders eventually get good at it, but there’s rarely a need. Although, living the last couple years in Miami, which floods a lot, I actually do fairly often have to drive very slowly, and sometimes turn, without putting my feet down. The water is so high at times I drive with my feet way up in the air!

Parking lot: And, needless to say, nothing could be less thrilling than riding in an empty parking lot; practically no optic flow, no obstacles, no city, no country roads, no risks.

So, there we were in the sweltering heat on our oppressively heavy bikes enjoying only our exposure to the risks of humiliation and injury, all on the promise that later — much later — this will totally be a cool thing to do. Because it was assuredly not cool then. If motorcycles were summarized by our experiences during a motorcycle course, there’d be no cult of cool about motorcycles. If books were written about them, they’d be satire. All the cool of motorcycles is bled out into the black top smattered with cheap orange cones. No mojo. It’s a wonder we bothered ourselves to continue riding after that. One in our class of ten dropped out. Wasn’t his thing. Perhaps it was the uncomfortable lameness of the parking lot rides that convinced him.

Luckily I was still motivated to keep on keeping on. With my course under my belt I began riding in Columbus, Ohio, where I lived at the time. I avoided highways at first, and began taking my bike, a 950cc 2019 Yamaha Bolt, a cruiser, to the gym every day. Looking back, I rode poorly and am amazed I never had an accident or even set the bike down. In the first months I remember thinking I was really moving, and then some more experienced rider would buzz by and I’d wonder how that speed — which I’d now view as unremarkable — on that road in those conditions was even possible. It didn’t take long to get comfortable; in a few months I found highways less menacing, and began to take them rather than the long way.

After about two years my wife and I moved to Miami, and my experience level — and joy — skyrocketed. We quickly realized our cars were a handicap in the heart of the city, and sold them. The motorcycle was enough. And so I rode pretty much every day, all year round. Not only was I getting an explosion of riding time compared to before, but the Miami road habitat is an altogether different animal, filled with impatient cars and swarms of scooters of all kinds. And in Miami we lane split, i.e., ride around and in between lines of cars, whether they’re waiting at a light or moving. No, lane splitting is not legal like it is in California, but — ahem — it’s tolerated. Point being, when you’re lane-splitting through Miami traffic an hour or so a day, you get good real quick!

At the start, my wife would cry from behind me, “Don’t try going through that gap! Too small! Slow down!” But after a few months, if the gap and timing was even theoretically possible I would get an ear full about why I wasn’t already through it and on our way. I became a whole new level of good. Still not like the riders who grew up on dirt bikes and can do pirouettes while they wheelie, but I had become one with the bike. I had even become one with the bike+wife!

Unlike the excruciatingly bad parking lot experience, actually being an experienced motorcyclist driving fast on real roads amongst real traffic is… awesome! For those non-rider readers, it is difficult to relate to you the full extent to which the motorcycle experience goes way WAY beyond the car experience, but your love of bicycles relative to pedal cars does go some way toward that, as we discussed earlier. But only part way.

And that’s why I wrote this book! To carefully describe what exactly the experience is, and to explain why it “works,” i.e., to explain why we like it. You see, the thing about me is that I’m a cognitive scientist, and one of my weird areas of expertise, such as it is, is on making sense of the human experience. Why we see illusions, why we see in color, why our eyes face forward, why we have emotional expressions. That sort of thing.

And, even weirder, I have focused on how culture creates “machinery” — evolves it — to fit our brains and bodies. These “machines” are sometimes not physical machines at all. They are “software” that harnesses us, like writing, language, music and the arts. For example, I have argued that we can read only because writing culturally evolved to “look like nature,” i.e., to look like the contour conglomerations that are found in natural scenes, thereby harnessing our visual object recognition systems for reading. See my books Vision Revolution, Harnessed, On the Origin of Art, and Human 3.0.

While that’s an example of cultural “software” that harnesses our brain mechanisms, cultural evolution also creates physical artifacts that harness us, whether it’s more optimally designed clothing, glasses, watches, sports equipment, chairs, video game consoles…

…and motorcycles.

When a technology finds its hold within human culture, it’s always because it has come to find via cultural selection some sweet spot in the way it plugs in to human brains, bodies, and groups. This book is the story about in what ways motorcycles have culturally evolved to fit us.

[This is an excerpt from Motorcycle Mind: The Secrets Behind the Coolest Invention Ever]

Robert Redford won a major acting award for a performance with almost no dialogue.

The entire movie contains only twenty words.

In an hour and forty-five minutes.

How is that even possible? And what does it reveal about the real language humans - and every other intelligent social animal - actually relied on for millions of years?

In the riveting 2013 movie All Is Lost, Robert Redford plays a captain alone on his sailboat trying to stay afloat after it’s been struck by another vessel. It was a physically demanding role for the seventy-seven-year-old, and his compelling work earned him the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actor.

So far that sounds pretty unremarkable. A devastatingly handsome, Academy Award-nominated veteran actor wins yet another award for acting. Yawn.

But that movie wasn’t like your typical movie. And Redford’s acting requirements weren’t quite, uhm, normal. Usually we imagine how difficult it is for actors to memorize all those lines. Well, in this case, Redford basically didn’t have any lines. In fact, the entire movie contained only twenty words. Total. In the entire hour and forty-five minutes. Yet he still won an acting award!

That is weird.

A movie without words is indeed a rare novelty. When such modern movies are made, many are modeled after old-fashioned silent films (ones where we can see, but not hear, the characters talking), are about a deaf character (who is usually signing), or feature animals for their leads. All Is Lost doesn’t fall into any of these categories.

As weird as this movie is, it’s great for inspiring some thought experiments about how real life is even more weird. While a movie without dialogue is very rare - and usually carries an extremely limited market appeal - up until relatively recently humans lived without dialogue altogether.

We don’t know exactly when we gained language skills. Estimates are in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands of years ago. Prior to that, while humans were basically identical to today, biologically, they spoke nary a peep. We were ready for language, but in lingo limbo.

Sit back and let that sink in. Imagine going even one whole day among your family and friends with no one speaking. (It would be wonderful, yes?!) Of course, that would mean no texting or writing of any kind either. You still have to prepare a lasagna, though. So you need your spouse to run to the store to grab ground beef and tomato sauce. You need to get your son to chop the onions (because he’s the one with cry-proof contact lenses) and find the pasta you accidentally left in the wrong place in the scary part of the basement. And you need to talk on the phone to your mom about grandma’s recipe, which is what makes the lasagna worth doing. Going even one day without language feels almost unimaginable. So, visualize a week of that. Imagine one month. A whole year. An entire life!

And it’s not just us humans who, before the advent of language, dealt with the deafening silence. Our prehuman ancestors and our hominid cousins were basically like us - similarly toiling through their lives… wordlessly.

The more you think about this, the more difficult it might be to imagine. Nearly the entire history of our human lineage is one long movie without dialogue. Borrrrring!!

Words are the newcomer. Emotional expression was our original language - an ancient, richly structured signaling system that let intelligent social creatures negotiate conflict, cooperate, reconcile, threaten, reassure, deceive, forgive, and bond long before anyone uttered a sentence.

Expressly Human develops a unified theory explaining why our expressions have the precise forms they do, how they evolved, and why they’re still the language we rely on most today, even if we rarely notice we’re speaking it.

(This was an adapted excerpt from Expressly Human.)

I’m in Cartagena, staying at the Hotel Charleston Santa Teresa, and I’m still astounded by how far ahead the Spanish already were in what is now Colombia while the future United States was still barely a glint in history’s eye.

The building that is now this hotel began as a Carmelite convent. Its founding act was signed in 1609. By then, Cartagena had already been a functioning Spanish city for 76 years—founded in 1533 as a major Caribbean port, with walls, churches, trade, and enough accumulated wealth to support a new religious house.

Meanwhile, in 1609, on the other side of the continent that would one day become the United States, the English had managed exactly one permanent settlement: Jamestown. It was two years old, staggering into the Starving Time, and about to lose most of its people to hunger, disease, and desperation. There were no other English towns. Plymouth was still eleven years away. The very idea of a lasting English colonial society remained mostly theoretical.

So while Cartagena was founding convents, the English experiment in North America was still trying not to die.

The gap is almost comic.