The ultimate process clusterfuck.

So embarrassing:

Reporter: "Attorney General, on your Facebook page three days ago, you wrote, ‘What this young woman has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable. I'm holding her in my heart and in my prayers. To her and to all survivors, you're not alone. We stand with you.’ Why did… pic.twitter.com/AtHcuaPumE

— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) October 2, 2026

"Musk offered to donate his sperm to Zilis to conceive children through IVF in 2020, she testified, and the pair had twins in secret in 2021."

I'm reading "Elon Musk splits with longtime business confidante, co-parent 'with no warning'/Shivon Zilis, the mother of four children with Musk, said their breakup was sudden but wished him the best" (WaPo).

I don't understand what the "split" was from.

"The co-pilot who tried to hijack a flight bound for Israel... used a crash ax to attack the captain in the cockpit, UAE officials said."

"The co-pilot attempted to 'take control of the aircraft' and carry out a 'terrorist act,' UAE Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi said.... The UAE statement answers one of the questions over potential security lapses that emerged following the incident — how the co-pilot was able to access a weapon on board. A crash ax is normally used for emergency evacuations, Marco Chan, a former pilot, said in an interview. 'If none of the exit doors are available, the pilot can … use the ax to crack' designated parts of the plane’s structure which are designed to open more easily to create an exit route. In current Boeing 737 planes, the crash ax 'is usually located just behind the first officer or co-pilot' in the cockpit, said Chan...."

WaPo reports.

Great. There's an ax.

"Well, she’s still trying to proceed as normal, and she’s trying to tell herself that she can just go on with her life as if this didn’t happen."

"And she’s very excited about the Halloween party at Chi Phi at the fraternity. And you can tell from the text messages that she wants to go to the party. She’s getting ready for it. And then just before the party, there’s another moment that moves her thinking in this new direction. She gets a phone call from the president of the fraternity.... And he tells her, you can’t come to the party. You’re not invited. And he adds that it’s for her own good, because there are so many rumors swirling about what happened by both women and men. And there’s so much judgment about her. She shouldn’t come to the party. She sends a text message to one of the seven guys.... And she says to him, 'I knew this was going to happen. The women will always get the short end of the stick... You all... 'are not my friends....' This anger continues in the text messages... her telling of the events [has] now really changed...."

From yesterday's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "The Firestorm Over a Rape Allegation at Cornell/The New York Times has reviewed a trove of documents related to the case. Our reporter explains what we know."

I blogged about that podcast yesterday, but didn't have a transcript to excerpt. Today, I'm giving you the excerpt I wanted verbatim. 

Someone who styles himself ExHedgeFundGuy makes a TikTok clip out of a classic Camille Paglia interview and fails to include her name.

I'm not going to link to it because I don't want to reward this. TikTok is full of unidentified speakers taken out of context.

I'll link to this presentation at Real Clear Politics: "Camille Paglia on Frat Parties and Consent: 'He Is Right to Think You Have Consented.'" That went up on October 1st.

 

Camille Paglia, essentially, has the last word on the Cornell 7.

Don’t dive into the sea and act surprised when you get wet. pic.twitter.com/Poe3jpxvAZ

— Akhenaten 🇺🇦🏴‍☠️ (@SplendorEternal) September 30, 2026

RCP has the clip I'm seeing at TikTok plus the full interview, and we can see that it is from a BBC interview in 2017. But Paglia has made this point since the early 90s.

It's a good idea to talk about the Cornell case in light of the strong challenge presented by Paglia, and she deserves to be cited by name. There's a lot of material from 35 years ago, from various authors, that could enrich the present-day discussion. For example: "Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus."

This is a very old topic! Let's not act as though people are just noticing this problem. 

"Books that get called weird girl lit tend to deal in uncanny or dreamlike circumstances."

"In Ottessa Moshfegh’s 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation,' a woman uses drugs to hibernate her way through a deep depression. In Mona Awad’s 'Bunny,' a cult of women M.F.A. students make rabbits explode with the power of their creative minds. In Kate Folk’s 'Sky Daddy,' a woman is erotically fixated on airplanes. In an interview, Moshfegh said she finds the weird girl label 'patronizing,' 'conservative' and 'misogynistic.' She maintained that the word 'weird' in this context perpetuates oppressive expectations about what a woman should be. 'There’s nothing weird about interesting stories about people,' she said. 'That’s what novels are. And I would challenge anyone who’s using that term to tell me what a normal girl is supposed to read or write.'"

From "What Is ‘Weird Girl Lit,’ Anyway? Romantic delusion. Social alienation. Body horror. Just a few of the elements celebrated online — if not always by the writers who earn the label" (NYT).

Yeah, what is a normal girl supposed to read or write?

From the comments over there: "A lot of fiction is about weird people. Many have been male. Holden Caulfield, most of Philip Roth, most of Thomas Pynchon, Ignatius in 'A Confederacy of Dunces,' Sherlock Holmes, the whole Karamazov family. You could argue that Elizabeth Bennett is a weird girl, considering Regency norms. Oh, Lady MacBeth, Medea, definitely weird. It's an advantage to an author to have a weird character or two. It's like Tolstoy said, 'All happy families are the same.'"

Sunrise.

A new addition to the OED: "will-they-won't-they."

Why did we have to wait so long for that?

Definition: "Relating to or characterized by prolonged uncertainty about whether something is going to take place; spec. relating to whether a romantic relationship will develop between two people."

I see it counts as a TV trope:

This is a Fan Speak term used to describe any relationship that is obviously filled with Unresolved Sexual Tension but the characters resist going into a full blown relationship for a rather long time. Usually the two characters will be presented so that "they will" is the conclusion to root for; only rarely is the question of whether the writers think they should is in any real doubt....

"Will-they-won't-they" reminds me of "The Mock Turtle's Song": “Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?”

"Dale Byrne, Carmel’s mayor, called the issue a matter of public safety. In an interview, he recalled an episode from July when he was visiting a friend’s home..."

"... and the man suddenly turned pale, losing consciousness. Mr. Byrne called 911 and tried to describe the location where the ambulance should arrive, but the dispatcher did not understand how to find the home without an address. He was transferred to another dispatcher, then another. 'He could have had a heart attack, and you’re asking me to explain how my street address works,' Mr. Byrne recalled."

From "After 110 Years, a California Coastal Village Yields to Street Numbers/Driven by emergency response needs, Carmel-by-the-Sea reluctantly adopted street address numbers this summer, igniting concerns over its vanishing identity as a beachside village" (NYT).

"I was so badly hurt that I had fallen to the ground. But I knew I had to act. I could feel the aircraft was going down."

Said Capt. Smit Machchhar, from a hospital bed, quoted in "'I Couldn’t Let All of Them Die': Pilot on FlyDubai Flight Recalls Sudden Attack/Capt. Smit Machchhar, who was stabbed by his co-pilot midair between Dubai and Tel Aviv, said he 'had to act' to prevent a crash despite serious injuries" (NYT).

ADDED: More, from the translated transcript:

"Is that a racial stereotype I’m not aware of, that Hispanics are good at surviving long falls? Although for a man who started out labeling Hispanics as murderers and rapists, to end up at 'bouncy'...."

Said Jordan Klepper, who, I guess is a comedian, quoted in "Late Night Is Stunned by Trump’s New Stereotype/The president told attendees celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month at the White House to watch their step while touring the unfinished ballroom: 'Only a Hispanic could survive that fall'" (NYT).

Yes, I see, he's on "The Daily Show." Okay, then: comedy. How do you do comedy on top of a Trump statement that is already completely weird? 

Seth Meyer also had a go at it. He tried: "You’ve gotta be a platinum level racist to come out with stereotypes no one has ever heard before." And: "'Only a Hispanic could survive that fall'? Are you thinking of cats?"

If it were your job to write a joke based on "Only a Hispanic could survive that fall," what would you say. For the record, I think Trump's "joke" is racist. It's like a comment based on the notion that black people have a special ability to toil in the hot sun. The idea is that they're physically adapted to a job they are stereotyped as doing. 

What an ill-conceived demonstration!

"Trans activists inject themselves with hormones in viral stunt protesting Trump's DOJ deal with NYU" (Yahoo).

I think they mean to look virtuous and wholesome, but wielding needles on the street seems sleazy. It's something an addicted recreational drug user would do. And I instinctively covered my eyes, as I think many people do when they see an injection. 

Explanation by a speaker reading from a script: "We're taking our HRT here at the doors of the people who have given up to demystify, normalize, and celebrate our trans bodies in the face of NYU's cowardice." But medical treatments are normally taken indoors, in privacy. How can you "normalize" these treatments by performing a way that is not normal? It's normal for illicit drugs. And the administration of a medical treatment is not a "celebration" of the body. It's premised on the understanding that there is something wrong with the body. 

The demonstration is quite incoherent.

"For this person, the commitment to contesting the evil of whiteness is all-consuming, an ideological North Star that orients her entire worldview...."

Writes John McWhorter, in "When White People Like Hannah Gann Pretend to Be Black" (NYT).

To be the victim is to be not just innocent but also more interesting. It also can provide a sense of meaning in a modern world that no longer gives ready answers to the question of life’s purpose. “Who am I? What am I for? I’m … Black!”.... 

In the pre-woke days, I knew a couple of intermediate cases. These were white women who embraced Black culture, dated Black men exclusively, used “blaccents” spontaneously and deep down seemed to wish they were Black. (Why these cases seem to almost always involve women is an interesting question to which I don’t have an answer.).... 

That column was inspired by the new Rachel Dolezal, Hannah Gann.

"There was really no escape... I don’t remember the very end of the event where I was raped... I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped... I will never know who all touched me. I will not know."

I'm reading "Cornell Police Report Omitted Student’s Claim She Was Raped/Documents obtained by The New York Times show that the campus police at Cornell University sent a condensed statement to a prosecutor, who then declined to bring charges" in the NYT.

The woman spoke for hours with [a campus police department] officer;... The officer then condensed the interview into a six-page “voluntary statement” written from her perspective.... The student, after leaving about 20 handwritten corrections on a draft, signed a final version the next day. While the shorter statement explained that she felt some of that night’s events were a crime, it omitted some of the more forceful and definitive language she used. And it was missing her unequivocal statement that she had been raped....

More detail — better detail —  in today's episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily": "The Firestorm Over a Rape Allegation at Cornell." I wish I had a transcript so I could quote some things.

This is a complex story, and the news media seem to want us to look into it right now, for whatever reasons. The news media and key political actors: New York Governor Kathy Hochul appointed the state attorney general, Letitia James, as a special prosecutor in this case. There's a press conference going on right now:

Hochul said she was concerned to learn what information was taken from Jane Doe’s interview with police and passed to the district attorney. “In what world would the police learn from the victim that she had been literally been gang raped” and that she believed “100 percent” she had been raped and not elevate those allegations to the district attorney, Ms. Hochul asked.

Crane rise.

Photo by me, at the boat launch:

Video by Meade at the UW Marching Band practice field:

"These are terrible people, Link. They come right out of the ground. It’s disgusting."

@metal.may.fantasy oi #legendofzelda #link #nintendo #zelda ♬ original sound - Metal Fantasy