ID advocate Michael Egnor defends free will, misleads his audience

June 21, 2026 • 9:30 am

I don’t usually respond to attacks on me from the Discovery Institute and its flacks, but I couldn’t resist listening to this 25-minute talk on free will from pediatric neurosurgeon and Intelligent Design advocate Michael Egnor, who’s been going after me for years (read the last link to Wikipedia, and his Discovery Institute biography here).

This talk was given “at the 2026 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith presented by Discovery Institute’s Center on Science & Culture”.  The title of that conference, which featured lots of religionists, was “Endowed By Our Creator: Science,Faith, and the American Idea,” and the conference—and Egnor—made no bones about their a priori belief in God.  And if you believe in God the way these people do, there has to be free will:  otherwise you cannot freely choose to accept God, to behave according to his/her/its dictates, or, if you’re a Catholic like Egnor, choose Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. 

Egnor was once an atheist but then converted to Catholicism in his forties,after he had a “Damascus Road moment” involving hearing a voice.  As Grok says, Egnor “has spoken about falling in love with Catholic theology and the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (Thomism), which he integrates with his scientific and philosophical views on topics like the mind-body problem, dualism, consciousness, and intelligent design.” He’s abandoned the idea of materialism and, as you’ll see in this video, touts the existence a non-materialistic soul that could only have been created by God (who, by the way, has also gotten credit from Egnor for “creating” the Big Bang).

The talk is briefly summarized by David Klinghoffer, another ID advocated, at the Discovery Institute’s Science & Culture Today site. Click on the screenshot below to read the DI’s idea of humor:

Who are the atheist scientists? N0ne other than your host, Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky (whom Egnor repeatedly misspells and mispronounces as “Saplosky”). You’d think that Egnor could at least get Sapolsky’s name right; it is not a typo. But I am honored to be lumped together with these two smart guys.

And before the video, I want to give an example from Klinghoffer’s piece of Egnor’s quasi-humorous sarcasm, which makes the religious audience roar with laughter:

Regarding Harris, Coyne, Sapolsky and the books they’ve authored, Dr. Egnor says, “The people who deny free will, the authors of these books, if you want to find out out if they believe in morality, and therefore if they believe in free will, all you have to do is tear up their royalty checks from their books. And tell them, ‘Hey, I didn’t have any choice, it’s just an act of nature.’” That’s funny.

He also offers a proposal for a book to be co-authored by the esteemed free will deniers, to be titled, We Can’t Control Our Thoughts and We Don’t Know Where They’re Coming From: Three Scientists Who Didn’t Choose to Write This Book, to be published by The Atheist Press. That made me laugh out loud. Enjoy:

Apparently the idea that we could not do other than what we did is hugely funny to these people: all you have to do is say it and they laugh. But sarcasm is not a determinant of truth.

Well, enough. If you have 25 minutes to listen to a religious argument for free will, with some misguided science thrown in, click below:

I can summarize the talk if you don’t want to listen to it.  Egnor’s point is that there are four (actually five) arguments against free will. I’ll summarize them in bold (my take) and then address them in a few words. Those of you who have read my writings on free will (or Sapolsky’s or Harris’s books) should be able to refute these easily. I conceive of “free will”, as does Egnor, in the libertarian sense: if you have it, at a given moment you could have done or thought something other that what you did.

a.) Every human who has lived, is living, and will live believes in free will.  Most people believe in God, too.

This is simply the argumentum ad populum: something becomes more true if more people believe it.  There is no need to refute this contention; it asserts the truth of a proposition without evidence. However, Egnor goes on to present what he does see as evidence. 

b.) Morality supports free will. “We all believe in some kind of morality.” “If you believe in morality, you have to believe in free will, because without free will there is no morality.”

Nope. I can frame “morality” as simply “the tenets that a society or faith considers laudable or deleterious because they facilitate or impede the smooth running of society”.  Abrogating these tenets is considered bad, and they can be promoted simply by praising those who abide by the tenets or criticizing and punishing those who violate them. There need be no “free will” to have morality, for even though we lack free will, we are still malleable beings and can alter our behavior depending on society’s “moral code” and the praise and punishment that go with it.

c.)  Denial of free will is self-refuting. Here’s Egnor’s trope: “If you deny free will then you can’t choose to tell the truth, so why would you believe somebody when they say they deny free will.”  This is a crazy argument, for the denial of free will is based on evidence—evidence for determinism and the lack of evidence for free will. The data involve a growing body of experiments showing that decisions are made in the brain before we become conscious of them.  Other experiments involve psychological manipulation of people so that they think they have acted freely when they didn’t (brain stimulation), or they think they acted without agency when they actually did (e.g., Ouija boards).

d.) There is room for free will in nature.  As Egnor maintains, there are some “aspects of nature that aren’t completely determined by the state of physics.”  What are they?  Quantum physics, of course, and here Egnor cites entanglement. The problem, which he ignores, is that the purely unpredictable aspects of quantum physics involve things on a micro level (movement of electrons, etc.), and those cannot be affected by your “will”.  But Egnor, citing quantum physics, says it shows that “At any moment there’s room for will.” But since he sees free will as the product of an immaterial soul, he shouldn’t be using any aspect of physics to support it.

e.) Neuroscience points to the reality of free will. Since Egnor is a neuroscientist, the audience probably buys this the most.  Egnor cites two bits of evidence here.  First, as he says, during operations that involve stimulating parts of the brain, he says,  “Patients asked to raise their arms at some point could tell whether they raised arm voluntarily or due to electrical stimulation.”  And they could tell the difference.

But that is not “free will”, for your brain simply lets you know whether something you don’t understand is making you raise your arm, or whether, under orders from the doctor, you have to raise your arm at some point.  It’s similar to Libet’s button-pushing experiments, when you push a button at a time your brain determines, and think you did it of your own “free will.” The problem with that, and the reason Libet and his successors have done such provocative studies, is that brain signals (fMRI, etc.) say you’re about to push a button before you become conscious of making that decision. Like Libet’s experiments, being able to distinguish something that comes from your brain’s own workings from something imposed on your brain from the outside is not “free will”. It is not the exercise of agency, but the detection of agency.

For example, sometimes the brain is stimulated and a patient waves his arm or hand. When asked by the surgeon why the patient did that, he may aver that he was waving at a nurse across the room. Egnor completely ignores the various classes of observations and experiments in which stimulation of the brain produces a false illusion of intention or false agency. These need not involve brain stimulation, but can involve psychologically tricking a subject.

I should add that Benjamin Libet (last name mispronounced by Egnor, who uses a long “i”), who became famous for detecting the signals of action before the subject was aware of “deciding” to act, wound up believing, as Egnor says, in “free won’t.”  That is, though Libet accepted that decisions to do something were made deterministically in the brain, he concluded later that there was “free won’t”: patients could decide freely to cancel an action that they had already decided to do. Libet says that this veto instantiates free will because there is no neurological signal of the veto!  (This is about 14 minutes into the lecture.)

The problem with this—and this must reflect deliberate misrepresentation by Egnor—is that later work involving brain-scanning shows that you can indeed predict whether a patient would veto an action or not from brain activity.  Here’s the paper from PLOS One (brought to my attention by Grok) that showed this (click to read):

You can read the abstract and see that these researchers used electrical signals in the brain to show that decision to veto an action are also decided in advance.  Here is the authors’ summary:

Neuroscience cannot straightforwardly accommodate a concept of “conscious free will”, independent of brain activity [42]. However, the belief that humans have free will is fundamental to human society [43]. This belief has profound top-down effects on cognition [44] and even on brain activity itself [45]. The dualistic view that decisions to inhibit reflect a special “conscious veto” or “free won’t” mechanism [46] is scientifically unwarranted. Instead, conscious decisions to check and delay our actions may themselves be consequences of specific brain mechanisms linked to action preparation and action monitoring [19]. Recent neuroscientific studies have strongly questioned the concept of free will, but have had difficulty addressing the alternative concept of free won’t, largely because of the absence of behavioural markers of inhibition. Our results suggest that an important aspect of “free” decisions to inhibit can be explained without recourse to an endogenous, ”uncaused” process: the cause of our “free decisions” may at least in part, be simply the background stochastic fluctuations of cortical excitability. Our results suggest that free won’t may be no more free than free will.

Unless you think Egnor simply missed a paper that refutes his thesis, because he didn’t have a grasp of the literature, then he must be leaving it out deliberately: a scientific misrepresentation of a field by a neuroscientists who has supposedly studied the data thoroughly. This is why the word “Egnorance” is often used in connection with the man’s writings. But I won’t use it. . .

The rest is religious pilpul: Egnor immediately goes on to cite Aquinas, his hero, and to show this slide:

Where, asks Egnor, does free will come from? God, of course. His lucubrations lead him to conclude that “The Universe is more like a mind than a thing.”  Therefore, he says, there must then be free will involved in the foundation of the universe (“we cannot be free if everything around us is not free”).  After making the Big Bang, he believes, God created us with the ability to freely choose between right and wrong.

But wait! There’s more! He says that our possession of libertarian free will, which he claims to have proven in this lecture, also has implications for our immortality: for what happens to us after death!  His “telling” argument is that since human souls, whatever they may be, are immaterial, and thus cannot “disintegrate like a body does.”   He concludes, to rousing applause, that “Free will is God’s fingerprint in us.”

Here we see that religion, tricked out in the trappings of science, has led Egnor to reject determinism and materialism because they don’t involve his Catholic God. But his arguments can be refuted either with logic or with empirical observations or experiments.  Thus does faith make a hash of rationality.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 21, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today’s collection is from math prof Abby Thompson at UC Davis, who sends us intertidal photos from California. Abby’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

The photos were taken at Dillon Beach.

Orienthella piunca (nudibranch), with eggs (the white squiggly things), and a small crab spectating”:

Crab tracks- these always look to me like some complicated bicycle tire track, but apparently it’s just what happens if you skitter sideways on your claws. The crab is buried in the sand at the end of the trail, close-up in the next photo:

Crab- probably Romaleon antennarium, Pacific rock crab. Hunkering down, waiting for the tide to come back in:

Epiactis handi (sea anemone).  This is the unusual species of Epiactis which seems to occur only in a single (and hard-to-access) location near me.   I like to check in on them periodically:

Aegires albopunctatus (nudibranch) Salt-and-pepper nudibranch:

Pycnogonum stearnsi (Sea spider). Nestled into the seaweed, completely out of the water, on top of a rock:

Emerita analoga (Pacific sand crabs). Walking the beach at low tide sometimes it looks as though the sand is puckered- that’s likely to be bevy of some kind of tiny sand crab.     This photo shows the “puckering” from a distance of a few feet:

Pacific sand crabs from close up. A footstep will spook them, and they bury themselves completely in a split second.  Not a great photo, but if you look carefully I think you can see each one has its stalked eyes poking up:

Mopalia muscosa (mossy chiton). The inside of the shell- the animal is long gone, leaving these beautiful interior colors:

The beach at sunrise.

Sunday: Hili dialogue

June 21, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, June 21: the FIRST DAY OF SUMMER and the longest day of the year. Summer officially began at 3:24 a.m. Chicago time and, sadly, rain is predicted for our area. It’s also Father’s Day, so my ducks will be fêting me, I hope.  The unnamed pair of ducks is still at Botany Pond and the female is gone the first half of the day, perhaps because she’s laying eggs. I’m still hoping for a batch of ducklings, and now that only the aggressors (the pair we have) remain in the Pond, perhaps a new brood could survive. Here is Vashti, who has disappeared. Note the dent in her head, probably from being pecked:

There’s a Google Doodle (a gif) for Father’s Day. Click the screenshot below to see where it goes:

It’s also International Day of Yoga, National Peaches and Cream Day, National Smoothie Day, National Turkey Lovers’ Day, National Wagyu Day,  World Lambrusco Day, World Humanist Day, and World Giraffe Day. Here’s a photo I took of giraffes crossing the road in Kruger National Park in August, 2024:

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

Da Nooz:

Footy news: Japan defeated Tunisia 4-0 in yesterday’s World Cup match: the 1000th match in the event’s history.

Japan moved one step closer to reaching the knockout stages of the World Cup for the fourth consecutive time after pummeling Tunisia 4-0 in Group F, securing a milestone victory in the tournament’s 1,000th men’s match.

Japan’s four goals were the most the Samurai Blue have ever scored in a World Cup game, as it comfortably dismantled a Tunisia side that became the first to ever fire its coach after the opening match.

Ayase Ueda scored twice, along with Daichi Kamada and Junya Itō to put Japan level with the Netherlands on four points. The Dutch are currently on top of the group due to having scored one more goal than Japan across its two matches.

Even after leading 2-0 just over half an hour into the match, Japan continued to apply pressure to a disjointed Tunisian defense.

Here are 12 minutes of highlights (goals at 1:43 and 4:14):

Even after leading 2-0 just over half an hour into the match, Japan continued to apply pressure to a disjointed Tunisian defense.

*Well, the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah is still going on, and because of that Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Iranian security officials said they had closed the Strait of Hormuz, citing a U.S. failure to stop the fighting in Lebanon as required under the agreement signed earlier this week by President Trump.

The announcement by Iran’s joint military command came as clashes between Israel and Hezbollah flared again in Lebanon on Saturday, just hours after the two sides agreed to a renewed ceasefire. It undid for now the main achievement of the deal, which was to set the stage for reopening a waterway vital to world energy markets.

The U.S. Central Command, which oversees forces in the Middle East, said Saturday that traffic continued to flow and that the military was monitoring to make sure that remained the case.

Even before Iran’s announcement, the recovery of traffic through the strait had been halting. Iran had imposed new procedures, including a demand that ships register to cross two days in advance, and wary shipowners were monitoring the still-uncertain environment in the waterway.

The flare-up in fighting comes as the U.S. and Iran work to get their next round of peace talks back on track. Iran said Saturday its delegation would attend talks in Switzerland after postponing plans to travel Friday, a hiccup that followed an earlier round of heavy Israeli strikes carried out in retaliation for a Hezbollah drone attack that killed four Israeli soldiers.

Iran said its delegation would include chief negotiator and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and oil officials. The U.S. was expected to send Vice President JD Vance, who said in an interview on Fox News that envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were already there engaging in technical discussions.

The memorandum of understanding that aims to reopen the strait and end the fighting, signed Wednesday by Trump, says at the outset that the war on the Lebanese front must end as well. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said Saturday the country’s negotiators would press the U.S. to meet those obligations.

Trump also said this, though I was under the impression that Iran would start charging tolls to transit the Strait after the so-called “negotiation period” of 60 days:

Trump said on Saturday no tolls could be imposed in the strait except by the U.S. “There will be NO TOLLS in the Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period, and there will be NO TOLLS after the 60 day period has expired, unless they are imposed by and for the United States of America,” he wrote on social media.

It was a mistake to tie the peace deal to the cessation of hostilities in Lebanon. That, as I’ve said, is a tacit admission by Iran that it wants Hezbollah’s terrorism to continue unimpeded. But of course Iran wants to hold onto the Strait as tightly as it can, so we can’t know the real reason for what’s going on. All we can guess is that the war will continue longer than we thought, and the two-month period of negotiations will probably drag on much longer.

*Washington Post op-ed columnist David Willick tells us “Three lessons from the failed war in Iran.”

That the costs of an all-out, preemptive war with Iran were likely to outweigh the benefits was foreseeable from the start. Yet the campaign’s unhappy conclusion — most of the war’s strongest supporters are appalled by the terms of the deal struck to end it — is an opportunity to review some of the reasons for the debacle. They need to be digested to put American strategy on a better footing.

The first is that regime change is a perilous war aim. It’s astonishing that this lesson had to be learned again, but here we are. After the war to topple Iraq’s government came to pieces for the George W. Bush administration in the 2000s — and after Donald Trump ran against that fiasco — it seemed unlikely the U.S. would pin its strategic hopes again on political transformation in the Middle East at the barrel of a gun.

Yet that’s exactly what Trump did, announcing at the war’s outset that “all I want is freedom for the people,” echoing Bush’s Operation Iraqi Freedom. There were more realistic objectives too, of course, but the march to war was precipitated by Iran’s brutal repression of widespread anti-regime protests in January. The opening salvos in the U.S.-Israeli assault killed Iran’s political leadership. The Israelis reportedly told Trump that regime change was a real possibility.

Trump did not emphasize freedom for the Iranian people in his formal address. He emphasized nukes and told the people that the “regime was theirs for the taking,” or something like that.  Regime change was not, and never has been, one of Trump’s main war aims.

The second is that the U.S. is constrained. One constraint is military: Even in an air and naval war with mercifully few U.S. casualties, burning through air defenses and precision bombs will eventually leave the U.S. and its allies dangerously exposed to attack. Another is political: The American people won’t indefinitely tolerate a war that is making their lives worse if there isn’t a politically compelling objective.

Like Vietnam? What was the “politically compelling objective” there?  Preventing the domino effect of communism? And I still believe we could have done significantly more damage to Iran without sending in troops—like bombing Kharg Island, depriving Iran of the ability to export any oil.

The third lesson from the war’s disappointing conclusion is that it was not waged constitutionally. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war precisely because the president can’t assume the country’s political resolve is unlimited. As Ilya Somin wrote in Reason: “The constitutional requirement of congressional authorization helps ensure we don’t start a major conflict without having a commitment strong enough to prevail.”

The lack of debate among the American people’s elected representatives is one reason the obvious flaws in the plan — Who, exactly, is going to run Iran if its leaders are killed?

Well, there’s a point here, but remember that a simple majority in both Houses of Congress is all that’s required to declare a war. (That would likely have happened after acrimonious debate.) Also, wars not approved by Congress beyond Vietnam include the Korean War and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Willick is of course speaking in hindsight, and he could have made the list much longer. I could add three or four items. myself  But I’m getting tired of these recriminations, and of course Willick opposed the war from the start and now is making up reasons why it failed. In my view, it’s because Trump was mercurial and not willing to strike at really important military targets like Kharg Island. But what do I know? Maybe Bret Stephens knows more, and he said this:

I write this as someone who supported the war from the outset and hoped to see Trump carry it through to a decisive result: if not regime change, then at least a deal in which Iran would be forced to relinquish all of its enrichment capabilities and access to the Strait was unfettered. Those goals were well within the president’s reach, particularly if he had continued to attack Iran’s military-industrial infrastructure until it agreed to terms, rather than conducting most of the negotiations after the fighting had mostly stopped.

But Trump got spooked after the regime didn’t instantly crumble and energy prices shot up. He then effectively abandoned the war he had started after less than six weeks of sustained combat — combat in which the United States lost fewer service members than in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. He compounded the error with an almost comical succession of military threats and last-minute climb-downs, each of them signaling indecision and weakness to Iranian adversaries practiced in the study of weakness.

*The Lancet, perhaps the wokest journal in science and certainly the wokest in medicine (see my posts here, and remember the cover below?) has now come out with an editorial that one could interpret as favoring free migration between countries without restrictions, “Migration: A reality, not an emergency” (pdf here).

This gap [“between what the evidence shows and what governments do”] reflects how profoundly the world has changed since 2018. A pandemic, wars, and the retreat of development aid have transformed the migration landscape—and the political response has hardened. The EU’s new Migration and Asylum Pact, which took effect on June 12, 2026, is Europe’s most substantial asylum overhaul in more than a decade. Human Rights Watch warns that it will weaken the right to asylum, curtail safeguards, and expand detention. As 2026 marks the 75th anniversary of the Refugee Convention, the contradiction is stark: even as governments affirm migrants’ rights in their declarations, their policies do the opposite, narrowing protections in practice. The health community now operates in a far more contested environment.

From calls to “stop the boats” to even harsher asylum policies, migration is framed in the language of control, deterrence, and exclusion. Yet migrants are workers and taxpayers, carers and neighbours. In many countries, the very people portrayed as burdens are those staffing hospitals and caring for ageing populations—often the worst paid, in the highest-risk jobs, and with the least access to the care they provide for others. In England, around one in five National Health Service staff report a non-British nationality, rising to more than a third among doctors. As workforces age, societies will depend even more on the people they are currently trying to exclude. These are not arguments to be won but facts already woven into how societies function. The fact that they must still be defended shows how much fear sets the terms above evidence.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed that, with political will, migrant-inclusive policy is not only possible but effective. Governments expanded access to health care, vaccination, and legal protection. For example, Colombia regularised undocumented Venezuelan migrants, enabling access to COVID-19 vaccinations and care, while several European countries fast-tracked recognition of foreign health-care qualifications to shore up overstretched systems. At the height of the crisis, governments briefly grasped that protecting migrants was essential to protecting everyone. The question is not whether migrant-inclusive policies can work, but whether governments have the will to pursue them.

As more people are on the move, they cannot be left out of health-system planning. The Review’s renewed call is clear: embed health in every migration and displacement policy, strengthen data systems and support research, and confront the political determinants of who is protected and who is not. The health community must keep making the case for equity, inclusion, and the right to health—but in a debate ruled by fear, how it is made matters as much as the case itself. That will take courage and leadership. Good policy cannot turn back the clock; it can only meet the world as it is, and as it will be—one in which the health of migrants and the health of all are indivisible.

They couch this in the language of health-care equity, but no country must admit immigrants on the grounds that the health care in their natal lands is not as good as in the target country.  And of course the editorial totally  ignores the reasons why immigration restrictions are being put in place in Europe: protection of culture and Western values.  Richard Horton has been editor of the Lancet for 31 years, he instantiates performative wokeness (see here). It’s time for an editor who doesn’t impose his “progressive” ideology on medicine.

The Lancet’s infamous cover from 2023:

*There are multiple problems with Washington D.C.’s Reflecting Pool (reflecting the Washington Memorial) since Trump decided to give it a makeover. Not only is it full of algae now, but the chemicals they put in the pool to control the algae are peeling off the new blue paint job. It reminds me of Australia introducing cane toads to control native beetles damaging the sugarcane. And you know what happened with those toads.

First, the new paint job appeared uneven. Then, an algae bloom turned the water an acid green. Now, large chunks of coating are peeling off the basin, creating islands of “American flag blue” alongside patches of pea green in a dark, murky soup.

The Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial seems to be rejecting its makeover.

President Trump’s project to reseal and paint the concrete basin of the century-old pool that stretches between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington was finished nearly two weeks ago, in time for the country’s 250th birthday, as he demanded. But it has been nothing but a headache for the administration since.

The Interior Department said on social media this week that its workers had “killed the algae” that had been hastened on by the heat and humidity. The water, it boasted, was now “crystal clear.” The posts were accompanied by images of the Washington Monument reflected in deep blue waters, an apparent rebuttal to criticism from experts who say the pool’s waters will not appear a brilliant blue until the government tackles the underlying problems that have stumped previous presidential administrations.But on Friday afternoon, the murky water was stained by loose clumps of algae even where National Park Service staff members had scrubbed away the bright green blooms along the bottom of the basin. The new coating was also missing at least two large sections — one gap was about the size of a park bench, with a sheet several inches long flapping in the waves. Underneath appeared to be the original concrete basin.

Alex Hobe, 52, was standing at the pool’s edge, waving a small chip of paint. He had been making food deliveries in the area when he decided to see the pool renovations. When he spotted the chip floating in the water, he fished it out. It was semitransparent and rough to the touch.

Mr. Hobe called the pool renovation “a complete failure,” but expressed sympathy for 10 workers who were standing knee-deep in the green water and scrubbing away under the hot sun. “They’ve been out here for days,” he said.

On Friday night, Mr. Trump blamed at least some of the problems on “vandalism” by people who he said were out “to destroy and demean our beautiful work.”

UPDATE: Now Trump is crying “vandalism” even louder, and people have been arrested:

President Trump said on Saturday that “multiple individuals” had been arrested for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and that problems with a more than $14 million renovation project had become so severe that the pool would likely have to be at least partly drained for “necessary repairs.”

The president’s announcement late Saturday, made on social media, was his starkest acknowledgment of the pool’s rapid deterioration in recent days. The water this week became covered by clouds of blooming algae, which were obscuring a floor that had just been painted a shade that Mr. Trump has called “American flag blue.” The paint then began to peel off, making it a tourist destination for unusual reasons.

Among those accused of vandalism was David Carter Hearn, 67, a cyclist and three-time Olympian as a canoeist who says he stopped at the site on Friday just to have a look, then reached down to touch a strip of peeling blue paint mixed with the algae.

The U.S. Park Police arrested Mr. Hearn shortly after, accusing him of destroying government property, a crime that can carry up to a 10-year prison sentence. Mr. Hearn denies the charge.

The water is not crystal clear and even if there has been vandalism, that can’t account for the algae bloom.  They just screwed up the renovation and I suspect that pouring gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the pool (rendering it dangerous to birds like ducks). They need to start over.  Need I mention that the contractor in charge of renovating the pool was “tied to a longtime supporter of President Trump,” and that the contract was given without competitive bidding to a firm that had received only one previous federal contract?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is referring to the Hili dialogue, but he also sent me a photo of the cover of his new autobiographical book:

Hili: Sit on the sofa with a book.
Andrzej: Okay, just let me send a letter to Jerry.

In Polish:

Hili: Usiądź z książką na sofie.
Ja: Dobrze, tylko pozwól mi wysłać list do Jerrego.

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

From Laurie Ann; more wit at the London Underground (it’s hot there, which means above 80°F):

From Stacy:

From Mark; the last line is hilarious:

Screenshot

*Masih shows a woman being whipped by the Taliban for trying to exist as a human being. It looks painful. I couldn’t embed it, so click on the screenshot to go to the video.

From Luana: how transcripts should appear in this era of rampant grade inflation:

From Maarten Boudry (the short piece by Blakemore et al. is here):

From “Captain Ella” (now a Lt. Col.), the Arabic spokeswoman for the IDF. Translation from her Arabic:

“Lebanon’s future begins the day Hezbollah stops holding the state hostage and gives Lebanon the chance to choose its own path.”

Of all dog breeds that exist, my favorite is the border collie, and this video (sound up) show you why:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Dr. Cobb, now back in the UK. First, one from Arles, France:

The Alyscamp Roman/Christian necropolis at Arles. Quite extraordinary. Parts felt like something out of The Tombs of Atuan.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-06-18T09:22:39.492Z

And I love this one:

Life goal: Get a plaque this good

— Jonty Wareing (@jonty.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T15:10:05.493Z

Last night’s “Real Time” with Bill Maher

June 20, 2026 • 11:00 am

Reader Enrico alerted me to last night’s “Real Time” with Bill Maher, whose guests were t.v. producer and writer Sam Levinson, California Democratic congressman Ro Khanna, and political journalist Jonathan Martin. Maher’s two-minute opening monologue, below, deals with the abject failure of the U.S. to achieve any of Trump’s aims in our war with Iran. As he says, “I just hope we play Iran in the World Cup so we can beat them at something.”

Below is the big (9-minute) monologue, this time celebrating America’s 250th birthday (“America is Ours”).  His theme is that while Trump will try to make the anniversary about himself, we should resist it.   Maher:  “He [Trump] isn’t America—he’s the temporary caretaker of America—America’s employee.” He concludes, “For all of Trump’s nonsense, America is still here: Still incredibly prosperous by world standards, still the place where people want to get to, still free enough to let me put the word ‘nonsense’ next to the President’s name.” (Yay for free speech!)

Maher then lists some of Trump’s failures (court losses, no big changes in the budget, no name on the Kennedy Canter), and declares, “America may right now be the country Donald Trump is President of, but America is everything that keeps Trump from being the king he wishes he were.”

It’s a paean to American democratic principles. As Maher says, “The message that most threatens authoritarians isn’t ‘America sucks’: it’s ‘America is ours too’.”  There’s a litany of progress that’s been made since America’s 200th anniversary in 1976, as if Steve Pinker became a comedian.

The upshot is that, as Maher maintains, there’s nothing embarrassing about being a patriot if you’re an American, and we should go out and celebrate on July 4. It’s not Trump we’re celebrating, but America, flawed but still the destination of many immigrants.

Caturday felids trifecta: kitten rescued after tornado; brave cat spooks bear; why cats can’t taste sweetness; and lagniappe

June 20, 2026 • 9:45 am

On May 9, the AP’s odd news site recounted a kitten rescue (click on screenshot to read):

An excerpt:

As storm chaser Ashton Lemley picked his way through a tornado-ravaged Mississippi trailer park, he heard the unmistakable meow of a kitten pierce the predawn darkness.

The homes were flattened just hours earlier as storms spawned at least three tornadoes across the bottom half of Mississippi, injuring a dozen at the trailer park in the rural community of Bogue Chitto.

Lemley had no idea where the kitten was, but he was determined to find it. After a few minutes, the meowing stopped, and Lemley feared the worst.

Then, five minutes later, he heard it again.

“I said, ‘Oh, he’s still alive!’” Lemley told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Lemley quickly dug under insulation from a flattened wall until his flashlight beam found the kitten — wet, scared and hiding between two wooden posts.

Lemley captured the moment on video: “Oh my goodness, I found him!” he says to the camera. “Are you OK? Come here – it’s OK. … We’ll get you cleaned up, baby. Don’t you worry.”

Lemley held the kitten in his arms for a few minutes before handing it off to the commander of the United Cajun Navy, a volunteer disaster-response group, who dried it off and took it to safety. Lemley marveled that it didn’t appear to be injured.“I’ve been in these situations so many times,” said Lemley, who has been chasing storms since 2010. “I don’t try to get overly emotional. But it is very heartbreaking to see any type of animal or human go through something like that.”

Lemley says there’s already a lot of interest from people who want to adopt the kitten if its owners are not located. Some, he said, want to name it Tornado.

It won’t be coming home with him, though: Lemley is allergic to cats.

Here’s a short video of the rescue. Look at that sodden little moggy! But it will be okay.

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From PetHelpful, we have a Tik Tok video and the video notes (indented below).

Little Bear Visits My Bedroom Window

An unexpected guest can make for a delightful surprise, and nothing illustrates this better than when I found a little black bear gazing curiously through my bedroom window. This moment was not only adorable but also a wonderful reminder of the beauty of wildlife right at our doorstep.

Bears are fascinating creatures known for their intelligence and curiosity. When a bear approaches residential areas, it often piques curiosity and concern among homeowners. Observing animals in their natural habitat can lead to valuable insights about their behavior. In this case, Little Bear seemed intrigued by what was happening inside the house, highlighting the need for a peaceful coexistence with wildlife..It’s important to remember that while these encounters can be entertaining, maintaining a safe distance from wild animals is essential for both human and animal safety. Living close to nature offers unique experiences, but it also requires responsibility. If you find yourself in a similar situation, enjoy the moment, take pictures if safe, but avoid feeding or trying to interact directly with wild animals.

In closing, this little bear visiting my window was a charming experience that reminded me of the vibrant wildlife that surrounds us. Have you had any wildlife encounters in your area? Share your stories or tips on safely observing animals in nature!

Here’s a very short video of the cat, safely inside, lashing out with its paw at the bear. Bear heads for the hills!

@missashleyrubes

I was reading in bed when I looked over to Little Bear looking into my window 🪟🐻 #bear #blackbear #animal #nature #wildlife

♬ Curious Animals – Eitan Epstein Music

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If you own a cat, you probably know that they can’t taste sweetness in food. This article from Space Daily (click on screenshot) explains why. Well, it’s not rocket science: cats don’t have the rcceptors to taste sweetness. Or rather, they have the genes that allowed their ancestors (and their living mammalian relatives) to taste sweetness, but the genes are broken. (This is, of course, proof of evolution: why else would a cat have genes that function in its relatives, but that are broken in felids?

An excerpt:

Cats are notoriously indifferent to sweet things. Pour syrup near a dog and the dog will investigate. Pour syrup near a cat and the cat will ignore it. Veterinarians and cat-food companies have long noted that cats show no preference for sugar in feeding tests, no matter how much sugar is presented. The reason is not a behavioural quirk or a learned aversion. It is genetic, and it traces back tens of millions of years to the point at which the ancestors of modern cats became obligate carnivores, eating only meat. The gene that produces a working sweet receptor on the tongue, called Tas1r2, has been broken in cats for so long that it no longer functions at all. A cat looking at a sugar cube is in the same sensory position as a human looking at an ultraviolet light source: the signal exists, but the receptor that would detect it does not.

The molecular discovery came in 2005 from a team led by Xia Li and Joseph Brand at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, in collaboration with colleagues at the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition in the United Kingdom. Their paper in PLOS Genetics, titled “Pseudogenization of a Sweet-Receptor Gene Accounts for Cats’ Indifference toward Sugar,” established that the cat sweet receptor is not just inefficient. It is, at the genetic level, non-functional.

. . . The animals affected included the California sea lion, the southern fur seal, the Pacific harbor seal, the Asian small-clawed otter, the spotted hyena, the fossa (Madagascar’s largest carnivore), and the banded linsang. Crucially, the disabling mutations in each of these species occurred in different places within the Tas1r2 gene, indicating that the losses happened independently in each lineage, not via inheritance from a common ancestor. The same evolutionary pressure that turned off the gene in cats turned it off, separately, in at least seven other carnivorous lineages over the same broad timeframe. Behavioural testing of two of the genotyped species — the Asian small-clawed otter (broken Tas1r2) and the spectacled bear (intact Tas1r2, and predominantly herbivorous despite its order) — confirmed the pattern. The otter showed no preference for sweet compounds. The bear preferred sugars and even some non-caloric sweeteners.

. . . The animals affected included the California sea lion, the southern fur seal, the Pacific harbor seal, the Asian small-clawed otter, the spotted hyena, the fossa (Madagascar’s largest carnivore), and the banded linsang. Crucially, the disabling mutations in each of these species occurred in different places within the Tas1r2 gene, indicating that the losses happened independently in each lineage, not via inheritance from a common ancestor. The same evolutionary pressure that turned off the gene in cats turned it off, separately, in at least seven other carnivorous lineages over the same broad timeframe. Behavioural testing of two of the genotyped species — the Asian small-clawed otter (broken Tas1r2) and the spectacled bear (intact Tas1r2, and predominantly herbivorous despite its order) — confirmed the pattern. The otter showed no preference for sweet compounds. The bear preferred sugars and even some non-caloric sweeteners.

And since people here should know some science, you’ll be able to understand this from the paper’s abstract:

Because the mammalian sweet-taste receptor is formed by the dimerization of two proteins (T1R2 and T1R3; gene symbols Tas1r2 and Tas1r3), we identified and sequenced both genes in the cat by screening a feline genomic BAC library and by performing PCR with degenerate primers on cat genomic DNA. Gene expression was assessed by RT-PCR of taste tissue, in situ hybridization, and immunohistochemistry. The cat Tas1r3 gene shows high sequence similarity with functional Tas1r3 genes of other species. Message from Tas1r3 was detected by RT-PCR of taste tissue. In situ hybridization and immunohistochemical studies demonstrate that Tas1r3 is expressed, as expected, in taste buds. However, the cat Tas1r2 gene shows a 247-base pair microdeletion in exon 3 and stop codons in exons 4 and 6. There was no evidence of detectable mRNA from cat Tas1r2 by RT-PCR or in situ hybridization, and no evidence of protein expression by immunohistochemistry. Tas1r2 in tiger and cheetah and in six healthy adult domestic cats all show the similar deletion and stop codons. We conclude that cat Tas1r3 is an apparently functional and expressed receptor but that cat Tas1r2 is an unexpressed pseudogene. A functional sweet-taste receptor heteromer cannot form, and thus the cat lacks the receptor likely necessary for detection of sweet stimuli. This molecular change was very likely an important event in the evolution of the cat’s carnivorous behavior.

The upshot: tasting sweetness in mammals requires a protein that is a dimer made from the product of two genes. In house cats (and some other carnivores), one of the genes is expressed normally but the other is nonfunctional because of a large deletion of the DNA sequence, so that the dimer itself isn’t formed. Ergo cats can’t detect sweetness, and thus you shouldn’t expect your cats to like sweets (they shouldn’t get them anyway). If your cat licks ice cream, it is tasting not the sweetness but the dairy-ness: fats and proteins.  Cheetahs and tigers also lack the dimeric protein.

Why do dogs taste sweetness and cats don’t? Because dogs produce the dimer and cats don’t.  Somewhere in the ancestor of all felids, the gene for Tastr2 experienced a deletion.  Because all cats are obligate carnivores, and don’t eat stuff like berries, they have no “need” to taste sweetness, so a deleted gene is not a deleterious gene. It just continued to mutate, staying in the DNA but doing nothing.

I suppose d*g ancestors, and mammals like bears and hedgehogs, do benefit from sugar in their diet and so have retained the genes to detect it. (We do, too: sugars were valuable components of the diet in us and our primate relatives, and so our taste chemistry evolved to not only detect sweetness, but also find it pleasurable so that we seek out a needed nutrient. Unfortunately, sugars are much more common now than in the millions of years of our ancestry since we diverged from the chimp/bonobo lineage; and so we eat too many of them and get cavities and grow obese.)

The alternative theory is that God decided to make cats obligate meat-eaters, and so he left out their ability to detect sugar. But that doesn’t work because why would God give cats genes that are very similar to those of their sweetness-tasting relatives, but don’t work?  The creation-by-God theory fails, and we’re left only with common ancestry, i.e., evolution.

We have a similar broken gene, as I describe in Why Evolution is True:

The most famous human pseudogene is GLO, so called because in other species it produces an enzyme called L-gulono-γ-lactone oxidase. This enzyme is used in making vitamin C (ascorbic acid) from the simple sugar glucose. Vitamin C is essential for proper metabolism, and virtually all mammals have the pathway to make it—all, that is, except for primates, fruit bats, and guinea pigs. In these species, vitamin C is obtained directly from their food, and normal diets usually have enough. If we don’t ingest enough vitamin C, we get sick: scurvy was common among fruit-deprived seamen of the nineteenth century.

The reason why primates and these few other mammals don’t make their own vitamin C is because they don’t need to. Yet DNA sequencing tells us that primates still carry most of the genetic information needed to make the vitamin.

It turns out that the pathway for making vitamin C from glucose involves a sequence of four steps, each promoted by the product of a different gene. Primates and guinea pigs still have active genes for the first three steps, but the last step, which requires the GLO enzyme, doesn’t take place: GLO has been inactivated by a mutation. It has become a pseudogene, called ¯ψGLO” (ψ is the Greek letter psi, standing for “pseudo”). ψGLO doesn’t work because a single nucleotide in the gene’s DNA sequence is missing. And it’s exactly the same nucleotide that is missing in other primates. This shows that the mutation that destroyed our ability to make vitamin C was present in the ancestor of all primates, and was passed on to its descendants. The inactivation of GLO in guinea pigs happened independently, since it involves different mutations. It’s highly likely that since fruit bats, guinea pigs, and primates got plenty of vitamin C in their diet, there was no penalty for inactivating the pathway that made it. This could even have been beneficial since it eliminated a protein that might have been costly to produce.

A dead gene in one species that is active in its relatives is evidence for evolution, but there’s more. When you look at ψGLO in living primates, you find out that its sequence is more similar between close relatives than between more distant ones. The sequences of human and chimp ψGLO, for example, resemble each other closely, but differ more from the ψGLO of orangutans, which are more distant relatives. What’s more, the sequence of guinea pig ψGLO is very different from that of all primates.

Only evolution and common ancestry can explain these facts.

Inactive pseudogenes that are functional in relatives constitute some of the strongest evidence for evolution, as there is no alternative theory that explains them. The article above alludes to the gene loss being a product of evolution, but doesn’t mention something that I see as crucial given Americans’ reluctance to accept evolution: the nature of the gene loss and the sequence similarity among pseudogenes is strong evidence for evolution.

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Lagniappe:  From an Archaeology and Art Facebook post:  Draw a cat using only straight lines.  Here you go:

And extra lagniappe (is that redundant?). Only in Turkey will there be spectators!

h/t: Ginger K.,

Reader’s wildlife photo: gosling rescue

June 20, 2026 • 8:35 am

On my way to the grocery store early this morning, I came across a guy sitting on a low wall on 57th Street, and there was a wet gosling lingering around his feet. Of course I asked him what was going on, and he told me, in a foreign accent, that the gosling had followed him to the street from Botany Pond.  I asked him if there were any others in the Pond, and he said “no” (of course I verified that later).  He told me he didn’t know what to do with the gosling, who was lively and, as I found out when I picked it up, strong.

But I knew what to do; I’m a veteran of waterfowl orphan rescues. I told him I could have it taken to rehab and that would save its life. He readily agreed, and I told him I was a biologist and would take the gosling upstairs into my lab, where there are several “duckling boxes” prepared for such an emergency: small cardboard boxes with a couple of my old (clean) teeshirts in the bottom.

The gosling peeped (and even seemed to make a tiny honk) as I boxed it and, within five minutes, it was taken to the apartment of the lovely woman who works for Chicago Bird Collision Monitors (I had called her to get an okay). She took the box, and I continued on to the grocery store.

I feel better now that I’ve helped save a life, but these things are still emotionally taxing. It was peeping and had followed the guy to the street because it wanted its mom.  But it is Father’s Day, so this is one of my many offspring.

Here are two pictures; one of me taken by the guy who found the bird, and a gosling selfie.  I am disheveled and unshaven because it’s the weekend and I ain’t going to see anybody.

It really was a beautiful baby; it’s a pity that these fluffballs grow up into big, mean honkers:

That’s the second gosling rescue this year, making a total of eight ducklings and two goslings taken to rehab.  I hope the days of rescue are over for the summer, but they seem to go on and on. . .

Saturday: Hili dialogue

June 20, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, June, 20, 2026, shabbos for Jewish cats, and World Juggling Day.  Here’s a short performance by a man who’s been called “the best juggler in the world”:

It’s also American Eagle Day, National Ice Cream Soda Day,  National Kouign Amann Day (celebrating the world’s fattiest pastry), National Vanilla Milkshake Day, and Plain Yogurt Day (try Cabot’s if you can get it).

There’s another Google World Cup Doodle today. Click to see the results of yesterday’s games and today’s upcoming games:

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

Da Nooz:

Footy news: The U.S. beat Australia 2-0, winning its second game and advancing to the knockout stage in the World Cup. From yesterday’s ESPN:

The United States were back in FIFA World Cup action today in Seattle as they took on Australia.

Following its impressive 4-1 win last week against Paraguay in its group stage opener, Mauricio Pochettino’s team continued their winning streak by defeating the Socceroos 2-0, with an own goal from Cameron Burgess and another from Alex Freeman as they have now booked their spots into the next round.

The highlights (the two U.S. goals are at 2:22 and 5:35):

*How many of us keep the war between Ukraine and Russia in mind, a war that is clearly unjust because Russia justi invaded the country and claiming territory? Ukraine is going after Russia big time, and yesterday bombed Moscow with drones.

Black smoke from a burning oil refinery filled the Moscow sky. The city’s four airports were urgently closed. And part of the busy highway that rings the Russian capital, a metropolis of 13 million people, was shut down.

As Ukraine escalated its effort to bring the war home for Russians, the strikes on Thursday appeared to be the largest drone attack on the Russian capital since President Vladimir V. Putin launched the war more than four years ago.

No deaths were immediately reported. But the large-scale assault seemed likely to feed fears among Russians that the Kremlin’s ability to isolate society from the impacts of the war was sharply eroding. That would usher in a new stage for a conflict that has now run longer than World War I.

For days, lines have formed and rationing has been implemented at gas stations in dozens of Russian regions, as persistent Ukrainian drone attacks on oil refineries and processing facilities have threatened a fuel shortage.

Ukraine has taken particular aim at Crimea, the peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014, with a range of strikes aimed at cutting off the region’s supply lines. The Russian economy has also begun suffering from the costs of the war in a way that the Kremlin had managed to avoid for years.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in a voice memo shared with journalists on Thursday, warned, “If Ukraine burns, then your Moscow will burn as well.”

I wonder where Zelenskyy is getting his drones, but I had no idea they would go so far: the distance between the Ukrainian border and Moscow is over 11oo km.  The Russian invasion was over four years ago, and scrappy Ukraine is striking back hard. I had no idea that the fightiong would go on this long; as I recall, I predicted that Russia would take over all of Ukraine within a year or two.

*Israel, appalled by the softball deal that Trump offered Iran, see the Memorandum of Understanding a “catastrophic capitulation.”  The fighting continues, with a four-person IDF tank crew killed by a Hebollah drone in southern Lebanon. At It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal sees the Israel/Hezbollah confrontation as “inevitable.”

From the Times of Israel, a loss that big for the IDF:

Four IDF soldiers were killed overnight in a Hezbollah attack in the southern Lebanese village of Kfar Tebnit, and five soldiers were wounded there hours later, the military said Friday.

Lebanon’s health ministry, meanwhile, reported at least 18 people killed by Israeli strikes. The tally does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

The violence was the latest in deadly clashes between Israel and the Iran-backed terror group that have continued in Lebanon since the US and Iran this week reached a memorandum of understanding that committed them and their allies to halt hostilities in the country.

Israel, which was not party to the MOU, has rebuffed Iranian demands that it withdraw from a buffer zone in south Lebanon meant to protect border towns against Hezbollah attacks. A US official told Axios that Iranian anger over Israeli military activity there may be the reason US-Iranian talks scheduled for Friday were canceled.

In the Hezbollah attack shortly past midnight, a suspected drone or anti-tank missile struck the tank of Lt. Col. Dor Gedalia Ben Simhon, commander of the 401st Armored Brigade’s 52nd Battalion, killing all four crew members, the IDF said.

The names of the three other soldiers killed in the incident will be published later. The exact cause of the explosion is under further investigation by the IDF.

All the news I get implies that Hezbollah struck first and Israel was retaliating, but I’m pretty sure that Israel is not going to listen to Trump’s demands that it stop attacking Hezbollah as it could scupper the misguided “MoI.” This is an existential fight for Israel, and it won’t tolerate the northern part of the country being under continuous attack.  Yesterday a cease-fire was supposed to go into effect, but it is not holding in Lebanon.

From the NYT:

Israel awoke to a frightening new reality on Thursday as it absorbed, with disbelief and largely in silence, the terms of President Trump’s preliminary agreement to end the war with Iran.

It accomplishes none of Israel’s war aims, analysts and officials said, and arguably leaves the country in worse shape on each of them.

Regime change? The government in Tehran is emerging from the war even more hard-line and emboldened, despite being decapitated at the outset of the conflict in late February. The deal’s requirement that American forces retreat from the “proximity” of Iran within 30 days means that Iran can boast that it has chased the U.S. military out of the region.

Ballistic missiles and proxy militias? The agreement does nothing to address Iran’s missile arsenal or its support of Israel’s enemies, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

Worse still for Israel, by constraining its military in Lebanon — indeed, by requiring that Israel withdraw its forces from that country — the agreement seeks to handcuff Israel in a way that it was not before the war.

The hundreds of billions of dollars that Iran may receive in sanctions relief, unfrozen assets, or reconstruction aid could wind up funding more missiles in Iran and aiding Tehran’s militia allies around the Middle East.

And from Amit Segal:

It’s Friday, June 19, and overnight Hezbollah has continued its campaign against IDF forces in southern Lebanon. A commander’s tank was struck by a drone or missile, killing four—among them the battalion commander, while in another sector of the front five Israeli soldiers were badly wounded by an explosive drone. In response, the Israeli Air Force has carried out an extensive bombing campaign across numerous villages.

The fallout was swift. Talks scheduled for today in Switzerland between the United States and Iran—meant to implement the peace deal—were canceled, with Iran citing the IDF’s actions in its fiefdom in southern Lebanon.

This confrontation was inevitable from the moment digital ink hit digital paper on the Memorandum of Understanding. Neither Hezbollah nor Israel is a signatory to the agreement, and the two have been touting entirely different versions of it. Iran has assured its proxy that an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon is written into the U.S.-Iran MoU, to unfold over a phased 60-day period. Israel, meanwhile, has declared that it will not evacuate its positions in southern Lebanon—and insists it has not been asked to—while U.S. officials have reportedly told it that its right to respond to threats will not be infringed.

The larger question—whether Israel may strike “emerging” threats—isn’t addressed here directly, since this was a response to an attack, not a buildup of Hezbollah forces. But if the Trump administration won’t tolerate an Israeli reprisal to a Hezbollah strike, it certainly won’t stomach Israel hitting a growing missile storage facility on its border.

Trump’s own comments have been ambiguous. Beyond an endorsement of the “precise and humanitarian” warfighting style of Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa—the former ISIS leader—he has not told Israel to stop outright. Most of his remarks echo the sentiment he offered two days ago: “I want Israel to be able to protect themselves, but I do want them to use good judgment.” “Good judgment,” one suspects, means Trump’s judgment—a phrase I’ve lately found hard to pair with so flattering an adjective. When the president wakes up, I imagine Truth Social will feature a more profane word for Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision-making.

For all that, the recent conversation between Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was surprisingly friendly. On the outside, they reported—and quite rightly so—a rift in relations, about throwing Israel under the bus, but between the driver and the one being run over, a calm and quiet conversation took place. For listeners, it brought to mind the story of King David, who fasted and prayed for his sick son. Precisely when the son died, he arose and shook off his mourning: “Why should I fast? Can I bring him back again?”

Trump’s MoI and his behavior is unprecedented, as it demands that an (erstwhile) U.S. ally stop defending itself against terrorists who aren’t even soldiers of a sovereign nation.  And it tacitly allows Iran to keep funding terrorism against Israel.  I keep saying that Israel is the only country on earth that is prevented from winning a defensive war, and that’s what we see now.

*Vice President J. D. Vance has given Israel a verbal spanking, as he did with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine last year.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance on Thursday lashed out at members of Israel’s government, saying that the country is deeply isolated and its leaders have failed to appreciate American diplomatic and military support.

The comments deepened a rift that has emerged between the two allies over the interim deal reached by the United States and Iran to end their war.

“Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time,” Vance said during a a news briefing at the White House. “The problem for Israel is not Donald J. Trump, and anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the president of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in.”

Israel and the U.S. jointly launched the war against Iran on Feb. 28, closely coordinating the more than monthlong military operation.

But disagreements quickly emerged following a preliminary April 8 ceasefire agreement, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushing to continue the campaign and Trump moving to wind down a war that was deeply unpopular in the U.S. and rattled the global economy.

Vance of course is acting on Trump’s orders, but I’m sick of him rebuking Israel, just as he rebuked Zelensky for not being “grateful enough” for U.S. aid. It’s like Roosevelt demanding that Churchill show gratitude to the U.S. during WWII for the huge amount of aid we gave the Brits.

But just wait what you see if a Democrat becomes President in a few years.  I suspect that Israel will become our enemy and Palestine our ally.  (I’m not a one-issue voter, but where the Democrats stand on Israel is pretty clear.)  And Israel is isolated because of antisemitism and ignorance, not because of Netanyahu, who, while he has serious political problems, will be replaced by some other PM who will be equally demonized and made the focus of the world’s ire.  Are the Palestinian territories “deeply isolated”?  I don’t think so.  Hamas, as you know, is still in control of Gaza despite Trump’s “peace plan” there. That plan called for them to have disarmed and disbanded by now.

*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column in the Free Press, call this week, “TGIF: No one is getting left behind this time.”

→ Now you’re just gay-baiting: Sometimes I think President Trump reads TGIF and wants to give me fodder—I call this joke laundering—then I remember he only consumes visual media (animated videos of smiling jumping vegetables, Megyn Kelly’s podcast, and Rosie O’Donnell’s Instagram stories). But here is Trump talking about Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi: “He was in a hotel and I met him, and we fell in love, deeply in love. . . . we didn’t know each other before that. We had great chemistry, and I stayed twice as long as I was supposed to.” Are you sure you’re not just sprinkling in these quotes every week to taunt me? If you’re reading this, T, how many Big Macs am I holding up?

→ Nick Kristof investigation: Nicholas Kristof—beloved mascot of The New York Times, moral beacon for all young writers who wonder if they, too, could claim that Israel is training dogs to rape humans—is in trouble. Remember how he briefly took a hiatus to run for governor of Oregon? Well, people donated to that campaign. And now he’s back at The New York Times paying those donors back by quoting them, a ton, very positively, in the newspaper of record. A little tit-for-tat, if you will. “Previous political donations made by some people Nick Kristof mentioned in his columns should have been made more clear to readers,” the paper’s spokesperson told Semafor when called on to comment. Nothing will happen. This scandal will disappear. If your politics are seen as good by America’s intelligentsia, you can literally be a journalist taking money from sources. . . and it won’t touch you. Me, I do no crimes, and I give it a 50/50 chance I end up in literal jail when this is all over.

→ I wonder what they have in common?: The Zohran Mamdani–endorsed candidate for New York’s 13th Congressional District is socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier. She has fun hobbies, like championing a convicted terrorist behind an Israeli supermarket bombing that killed two people. Oh, and she co-founded the Columbia University Apartheid Divest group that posted things like “Death to America.” At their debate this Tuesday, she also had to apologize for posting “fuck Kamala Harris” and attempted to explain why she attended a Times Square rally celebrating the October 7 massacre (she got lost on her way out of the M&M’s store after the purple M&M’s turned hallucinogenic). And just a million posts like this:

Soon, she’ll be paid by those taxpayers she hates so much. It’s perfect.

→ The rape commission: The independent rape gang inquiry report, spearheaded by United Kingdom MP Rupert Lowe, was released this week and it’s a very tough read. It claims that 250,000 British girls have been abused by these grooming gangs since the 1950s, that Prime Minister Keir Starmer let off 13,000 alleged rapists with just a warning letter, and London mayor Sadiq Khan was made personally aware of the rape gangs but publicly denied their existence. At one point, when a victim’s mother called the police, they reportedly told her: “You should just be glad your child is being taught a different culture.” It’s a very imperfect document, relying on unverified testimonies from victims. Still, it’s damning.

Labour doesn’t want to release data on who occupies social housing, fearing that the information will lead to “racism” on social media. And according to this Daily Mail article, the UK’s Research, Information, and Communications Unit (RICU), which was originally created in 2007 to help monitor and curb al-Qaeda and Islamist propaganda, is now being used to influence public opinion around immigration. The agency allegedly handed out flowers in the wake of the 2017 London Bridge terrorist attacks to promote an environment of “grief” instead of anti-Muslim anger. Aww. . . so thoughtful. And by “thoughtful” I mean tactical and villainous. The group influences families of the rape gang victims not to reference race or religion in their statements. And as recently as last week, when protests spread across Northern Ireland after the stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie, allegedly by Sudanese asylum seeker Hadi Alodid, RICU allegedly advised police to remove any mention of Alodid’s background from their messaging and to paint the protesters as thugs.

*Antisemitism of the Day: Olivia Reingold of the Free Press has a pretty horrifying tale: “How Vermont became ground zero for the anti-Israel movement.”  A short excerpt:

Three other Vermont towns [besides Bristol]—Hardwick, Hartford, and Underhill—also passed the four-part resolution this spring. It states:

WE AFFIRM our commitment to freedom, justice, and equality for the Palestinian people and all people;

WE OPPOSE all forms of racism, bigotry, discrimination, and oppression; and

WE DECLARE ourselves an apartheid-free community and to that end,

WE PLEDGE to join others in working to end all support to Israel’s apartheid regime, settler colonialism, and military occupation.

The ultimate goal of the campaign, according to both public and internal materials reviewed by The Free Press, is to build support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, and ultimately isolate the Jewish state financially, politically, and culturally.

Since the October 7, 2023, attack against Israel, American entities have embraced BDS with open arms. In May, a Brooklyn food co-op voted to strip Israeli products from the shelves after a push that dates back to 2009. More than a thousand artists and labels, including Björk, Lorde, and Paramore, have pledged to block and remove their music from “genocidal Israel,” since September 2025, according to No Music for Genocide organizers. Earlier this month, a group of Stanford students walked out of their graduation ceremony while Google CEO Sundar Pichai delivered the commencement address in protest of the company’s $1.2 billion contract with Israel.

“This is BDS on steroids,” said Jonathan Schanzer, a former counterterrorism analyst for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, who now runs the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “It’s happening on Main Street, Wall Street, and college campuses. There is a breathless effort to isolate Israel at this moment.”

. . . Vermont, a state estimated to have fewer than 17,000 Jews, is an unlikely epicenter for the anti-Israel grassroots movement. Ten out of the 12 U.S. towns that have passed anti-apartheid pledges are in Vermont. And it’s already spreading beyond New England. Hundreds of unions, houses of worship, and businesses across the country have adopted the pledge, according to the Apartheid-Free network, an anti-Israel coalition led by the American Friends Service Committee. That includes an animal hospital in Florida, an Emmy-winning production company whose founder directed Taylor Swift’s documentary, Miss Americana, and NYU Women Founders, a student club at New York University dedicated to ending “gender inequality in the business sphere.”

Many Vermont residents I spoke with said these abstract pledges about a faraway conflict have created a tense environment in the towns they once loved for their progressive values.

But the question of “why Vermont’ has been asked and answered.  “Progressive” values now include demonization of Jews and Israel, masquerading as “anti-Zionism” or “Netanyahu is evil.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej and Hili both miss Malgorzata, who died just a bit over a year ago:

Hili: This is Małgorzata’s phone.
Andrzej: Yes, sometimes people call her.

In Polish:

Hili: To jest Małgorzaty telefon.
Ja: Tak, czasem do niej ktoś dzwoni.

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

From CinEmma:

From Funny and Strange Signs:

From TherionArms (I love that site), another great medieval letter:

Masih tries to arouse the audience by singing! (Muslim men are assumed to be sexually uncontrollable.)

Nellie Bowles quoted this one:

I’ve been following this but haven’t written about it. Luigi Mangione, accused murderer, changed his plea from “not guilty” to a “psychiatric” defense: a tacit admission that he did indeed kill Brian Thompson.  But a day after that, they withdrew the psychiatric defense.  Can they withdraw the public impression that Mangione in effect pleaded guilty?

The Number Ten Cat calls attention to algae in D.C.’s reflecting pool. I suppose it’s from Trump ordering the pool’s bottom to be pained dark blue, which makes the water warmer, but I’m not sure. (We have a refractory algae problem in Botany Pond).

One from my feed. Where did the crow learn this?

And one I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Doc Cobb en France.  First, a cave-adapted wasp, already evolutionarily losing wings and eyes:

Introducing the world's only known cave-adapted spider wasp… Troglopompilus miracaecatus (Pompilidae) from the caves of the Nullarbor, Australia.A world first: Eyeless, long limbs and antennae, highly reduced wings.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/…#cave #wasp #biodiversity

— Jess Marsh (@jessmarsh.bsky.social) 2026-06-16T02:35:06.783Z

A very weird plant, but one related to “regular” plants including rhododendrons and cranberries.

Dried Ghost pipe – Indian PipeThis fascinating plant (Monotropa uniflora) is definitely one of nature’s weird wonders. Because it has no chlorophyll and doesn’t depend on photosynthesis, this ghostly white plant is able to grow in the darkest of forests.

— SubRosa )✿( Magick (chat to book a reading) (@subrosamagick.bsky.social) 2026-06-15T04:21:37.040Z