Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
A bit more than a week ago, I posted Rick Beato’s video critique of the NYTs list of the 30 Greatest Living Songwriters that you can find here (archived here). Many of their choices, like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, were no-brainers, but Beato deemed others, like Bad Bunny, as bizarre. I agree.
Here he’s gotten his hands on some podcast footage of NYT staffers—three critics and the project’s editor—who helped compile the list, and for once he discards his geniality to make fun of these people in a nine-minute video. Beato even mocks the way they talk. They do indeed come off as pompous and largely ignorant: Beato harps on their lack of formal musical education, though he says it’s not essential to evaluate music. (The participants went to Harvard, Yale, NYU, and Princeton; none has a degree in music.)
John Carmanica, the NYT’s pop music editor, is particularly annoying with his definition of a “songwriter” and his dismissal of Billy Joel as “not a hitmaker.”
As a whole, Beato says the NYT group is “Four Ivy League educated people—you’ve got two from Yale, one from Princeton, and Mr. Harvard there—that are the most pretentious, cork-sniffing, smug people that are all music critics with no background in music: exactly what you’d expect from a New York Times music critic.” He adds, “These people’s takes are absurd. All you need to watch them talk about music. It drove me nuts watching it.”
As for Carmanica’s claim that Billy Joel wasn’t a hitmaker but a person who wrote “one or 1.5 kinds of songs,” have a gander at this list:
Piano Man
It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me
She’s Always a Woman
Movin’ Out
My Life
Uptown Girls
Just the Way You Are
The Longest Time
Only the Good Die Young (This is my favorite of his; it’s extremely inventive and a good critique of Catholic repression of sexuality. The lyrics are a work of genius.)
New York State of Mind
And others. These run the gamut from hard rock to love ballads to biography, and how can you say his range is limited to one to 1.5 types of song? Cork-sniffing pedants!
Most of us probably see Christian doctrine as a monolithic set of ideas that emerged within a few decades of the purported death of Jesus. “Common wisdom” also maintains that Christianity transformed the world for the better, spreading a message of tolerance and love soon after the Roman emperor Constantine began promoting the new religion early in the fourth century A.D. Both of these views are exposed as myths in Catherine Nixey‘s new book Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God (2024; the book appears to be called Heresy in the UK).
This is Nixey’s second book, following the successful The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, a bestseller that was translated into quite a few languages. Like Darkening Age, which I haven’t yet read, this one dispels myths about Christianity. Wikipedia describes The Darkening Age‘s thesis this way:
In the book, Nixey argues that early Christians deliberately destroyed classical Greek and Roman cultures and contributed to the loss of classical knowledge
Heretic has had mixed reviews, both glowing ones (e.g., here, here, and here), and critical ones (e.g., here and here). The critical reviews often argue that what Nixey says is well known, so she’s simply reiterating the accepted history of early Christianity while pretending she’s forged a new thesis. That doesn’t bother me too much, as I was unfamiliar with this history and thought it eye-opening regardless of its novelty. I found Andrew Copson’s review pretty fair; here’s the ending (Copson is head of Humanists UK):
In a way the strange thing is how novel the premise of the book might seem to its readers. Classicists have always known that the mediterranean world was full of god-men, miracles, and magic so why should it be shocking to read this now? A lot is down to a conspiracy of silence (Nixey calls it a ‘gentleman’s agreement’) between theologians and classicists or ancient historians is real. I once asked one of my ancient history tutors at university what he thought about the historical Jesus and he scoffed. ‘That’s myth – not history’, was his view. You might as well investigate whether Vespasian rose to the heavens as an eagle. But he never said that in print to my knowledge and certainly not in his lectures. Nixey’s book breaks an important taboo in a well-crafted and eminently readable combination of scholarship and polemic.
The book describes the many competing sects of early Christianity, some of which saw Jesus as either a magician or sorcerer (sometimes with a wand!), or a figure of fun, and followed alternative scriptures that were very different from the canonical texts we know today. In some, God is depicted as of uncertain sex (sometimes suckling Jesus), female, or even as more than one figure. Creation stories differ, and accounts about how Jesus’s mother got pregnant vary wildly.
What happened over time, as Nixey argues, is that Christianity coalesced around the present version, discarding other “noncanonical” gospels for various reasons. She argues further that there’s been a tacit agreement among Christians and theologians to downplay or erase these earlier versions, pretending that the current version of Christianity emerged sui generis as a monolith after Jesus’s death.
Now we already know that earlier gospels existed (Elaine Pagels has written at length about them), so perhaps there’s some justice in the criticism that Nixey is reiterating what’s already known. But for those of us who don’t know the history of Christianity (and that includes most Christians!), it’s worthwhile to discover how the diversity of Christian faiths has been pruned away to its present form.
Nixey’s other thesis is that the idea that earlier faiths of the Romans and others repressed the rise of Christianity is misguided and wrong. In fact, she says, it’s the reverse. Nixey gives many examples of how Christians themselves repressed other faiths, including torturing and killing their adherents and burning their books. And some sects of Christianity repressed others. Far from Christianity coming to the fore because of its message of love, it dominated via repression and the sword. I’m not a historian, so insofar as what Nixey says is true, I was edified, even if she reprised what’s already known.
One of the best aspects of Heretic is Nixey’s lively and informal prose, something unusual in books of this type. She’s an engaging writer, and I’ll give two examples. The first is in a discussion about how early Christians opposed the idea of a spherical Earth, claiming that people would have fallen off the part that was upside down (p. 246):
. . . However, the idea that a spherical earth is somehow ‘pagan’, and its opponents Christian, crops up in several other authors, too. The fourth-century Christian author Lactantius—a man whose intellect and education were rated highly enough that he was appointed as tutor to the son of the emperor Constantine—also considered the idea of a spherical earth to be pagan bunk. In a typically zesty passage, after Lacantius has laid into Socrates (‘ many of his actions are not only undeserving of praise, but also most deserving of censure’) and had a good go at Plato (his arguments are ‘impossible’ and ‘unjust’), Lactantius turns his attention to the idea of a spherical world.
And from the Epilogue (p. 279):
This is a story about how ideas are born, and how they die. It is also a story about how they survive. It is about how ancient stories linger, and divine whispers persist. It is about how religions change and change again, as they travel, and age, and spread into other lands, and other ages. It is about how long memory is, and how short. It is about what was, and what might have been. It is also about what is. And it is about why, when midwinter falls, and cribs are set out, an ox and an ass stand and watch over the baby Jesus in the manger. (p. 279).
The breezy prose does not denote a lack of scholarship: the book is heavily documented and footnoted.
I’d recommend Heretic for its combination of history and fine writing. You can find the Amazon site by clicking on the cover below. (The title, by the way, refers to the way that the dominant form of Christianity prevailed by deeming adherent to other faith as heretics.)
Here’s Nixey in 2018. She was the daughter of a monk and a nun:
Reader Ephraim Heller has sent some lovely photos of humpback whales, including their recently-discovered and amazing behavior of bubble-netting. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) spend most of the year dispersed across the open North Pacific, but each spring they converge on Sitka Sound to spawn. The 2026 spawning biomass was estimated at roughly 233,000 tons of mature herring. This attracts commercial fishermen, fishing birds, Steller sea lions, gray whales, humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), and… me.
Here’s a humpback whale jumping for joy:
And here is Sitka Sound, with Mount Edgecumbe (a dormant volcano) in the background:
The scientific name of humpback whales is Megaptera novaeangliae, meaning “big-winged of New England,” due to their oversized pectoral flippers and first observations off of New England. These flippers increase their agility and enable their unique behavior: bubble-net feeding. Here are views of the baleen:
Bubble-net feeding is not a fixed behavioral pattern; it is a culturally transmitted skill, and not every humpback population practices it. The behavior has been documented extensively in Southeast Alaska, and a long-term study published in January 2026 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B tracked its spread in the Kitimat Fjord System of northern British Columbia over a 20-year period (2004–2023). Of 526 individually identified whales, roughly half were observed bubble-net feeding at least once, with more than 92% of those events occurring in a group context:
The behavior gained momentum after the 2014-2016 marine heat wave (“the blob”) that reduced prey availability across the northeastern Pacific. Researchers interpret this as whales adopting a more efficient foraging strategy in response to environmental stress, and transmitting that knowledge through their social networks:
The hunt begins when a group of humpbacks locates a school of small prey — herring, krill, or juvenile salmon. One whale, often referred to as the “bubble-blower,” dives beneath the school and begins exhaling air through its blowhole while swimming in a tightening upward spiral. The released air rises as a cylindrical curtain of bubbles. Fish do not readily cross this curtain, so as the spiral contracts, the school is compressed into an increasingly dense ball:
Meanwhile, one or more other whales in the group produce “food call” vocalizations: loud, frequency-modulated cries that vibrate the swim bladders of herring, causing them to clump even more tightly together. The calls also appear to serve a coordinating function among the whales themselves, signaling when to begin the final ascent. I could occasionally hear the food calls on the deck of my observation boat:
When the prey is sufficiently concentrated, the group orients below the net and lunges upward in near-unison, mouths agape, through the center of the bubble column. At the surface, each whale engulfs thousands of fish in a single pass, then strains the water out through its baleen plates as it rolls and closes its jaws. Groups involved in a single feeding event can range from two to around 16 individuals (according to the literature), each surfacing in roughly the same position relative to the others on every lunge. It’s hard to tell exactly how many bubble-netters are in this photo, but I think it is more than 16:
Quantitative work using drone footage and bio-logging tags has found that solitary humpbacks actively adjust the number of bubble rings, net diameter, and the spacing between individual bubbles from one dive to the next. This level of fine-tuning (“manufacturing” a tool and modifying it based on conditions) contributed to a 2024 study’s argument that bubble nets qualify as tools under standard definitions. On average, a well-constructed net can increase the prey density available in a single lunge by roughly sevenfold, without measurably increasing the whale’s energetic expenditure:
No other baleen whale species does this, and biomechanics research suggests morphology is the reason. A 2025 study comparing turning performance across seven mysticete species found that bubble-net feeding humpbacks achieved centripetal accelerations that exceeded the upper limits recorded in comparable maneuvers by all six other species tested. The humpback’s large pectoral flippers generate substantial lift, which helps the animal bank inward tightly and decrease its turning radius enough to close a spiral into a true net. Other whale species, even if they could theoretically attempt the maneuver, would likely burn too much energy to make the strategy worthwhile:
My next post will include photos of other animals that come to Sitka sound to enjoy the herring feast.
Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, May 12, 2026, and National Odometer Day. My 2000 Honda Civic, now 26 years old, has only about 83,000 miles on it, as I’m a little old man who drives it only on weekends. Feel free to give us your own odometer reading, especially if it shows your car has been intrepid (give the year and model).
Iran defended its demands in negotiations to end the war with the United States and Israel on Monday, hours after President Trump had denounced the latest Iranian position as “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE” on social media.
Esmail Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, told reporters that Iran did not “demand any concessions” but rather asserted the country’s “legitimate rights.” He added that Iran’s proposal would have ensured safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively blockaded since the U.S.-Israeli attacked Iran in late February.
Mr. Baghaei’s said that Iran had made “generous” and “reasonable and responsible” requests. But Iran’s own state broadcaster recounted a series of uncompromising conditions on Monday.
According to Iranian state media, Iran had called for the U.S. to pay “war damages” to Tehran and recognize Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Both are likely non-starters for the United States, which has called for an end to Iran’s grip over the strait, a critical passage for oil and gas.
Mr. Trump had initially conditioned the ongoing temporary cease-fire with Iran, which began last month, on free transit for ships through the strait. But Iran still insists that any ships that traverse the Persian Gulf waterway do so in coordination with its forces, and Mr. Trump has repeatedly pulled back from his threats to attack Iran in protest.
Last week, Mr. Trump announced a U.S. military effort to free ships trapped in the maritime bottleneck by the war, dubbed “Project Freedom.” But roughly a day later, the effort was abruptly suspended to allow for further negotiations and has not resumed.
The Iranian counterproposal also demanded that the U.S. end its punishing economic sanctions against Iran, Iranian state media said. Analysts said that it was unlikely unless U.S. officials received major concessions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange, compromises which Iran has so far ruled out.
The U.S. will not pay reparations to Iran, nor will they recognize Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz—sovereignty it didn’t have before. As for the U.S. offering major concession on Iran’s nukes, I don’t see that happening, either, despite Americans’ lack of support for the war. In the meantime, Iran is suffering big time inflation and other economic damage, so we’re seeing a game of political chicken going on. And, as usual, I’m not going to prognosticate about this one.
Will the Trump administration’s release of secret UFO documents prove more soap opera than space opera?
The first tranche of materials landed with a thud on Friday, with UFO believers and skeptics alike claiming to find support for their respective positions. True believers, underwhelmed though they were by the actual contents, called Friday’s files an important first step on the road to full disclosure. That road, however, appears to be a long one, stretching beyond the horizon and perhaps, as skeptics argue, leading nowhere.
The 162 released files are housed on a Defense Department website with a minimalist and vaguely cyberpunk aesthetic reminiscent of The X-Files. They include dozens of testimonials from civilians, federal agents, diplomats, and astronauts who reported seeing UFOs. Much of the material comprises redacted information. But there is some interesting stuff: What, for example, was the “bogey” Gemini VII astronaut Frank Borman reported seeing during his space flight? Or the “Eye of Sauron” witnessed by several federal agents in 2023 somewhere in the Western U.S.? (The files offer no conclusive answer.)
Well, was there anything in them? Nothing substantial, as far as I can see:
. . .Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, one of the leading lawmakers pushing for disclosure, said the release proved that Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), is “a documented liar” because he has said he never found proof of aliens. Kirkpatrick, who many UFO believers see as an agent of a massive cover-up, responded by telling reporter and UFO skeptic Steven Greenstreet that Luna should “stop inflicting her willful ignorance on the rest of us.”
We’ll see if future disclosures give us the long-promised hard evidence that we are not alone. But for now, we are where we’ve been all along: just guessing and groping for answers in the dark of the cosmos. The aliens may very well be out there. They might even come here on occasion. But for the time being, anyway, the ongoing saga of mainstream governmental UFO intrigue remains a distinctly human drama characterized by sweeping claims and few hard facts.
. . .If there’s one person holding this ragtag band of UFO boosters together, it’s probably the Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. When he isn’t teaching science in Cambridge, Loeb searches for alien technology through the sensors and telescopes of his Harvard-sanctioned Galileo Project.
The project’s list of affiliates includes everyone from Gallaudet, a sincere believer in extraterrestrial visitation, to Michael Shermer, the country’s leading UFO skeptic. He counts Luna, of whom he always speaks highly, as a comrade of sorts, but has also co-written a paper with her nemesis, Dr. Kirkpatrick, on the need for hard evidence before we believe UFOs are visitors from somewhere else.
So what did Loeb find in this latest release? He told me he and his team took Trump’s advice and had fun with it. Always an optimist, he said, “The best is yet to come, because higher quality data will take more vetting by layers of government bureaucracy before it is released.”
“The biggest impact of today’s release is psychological: This topic deserves to be within the mainstream of public or scientific discourse,” he told me. “Like any detective story, the mystery can be resolved with high-quality evidence.”
But of course we’re still waiting for that high-quality evidence to emerge, as Loeb freely admits.
There’s a Yiddish word for the contents of this report: bupkes. And supposedly the “high-quality evidence” already exists, in the form of wrecked UFOs and even bodies of aliens, sequestered somewhere secret in the northwest U.S. Or so the conspiracy theorists say.
*I’m quoting at length below from Amit Segal’s new post on It’s Noon in Israel, as I haven’t posted much on the West Bank. Here Segal talks about “the myth of settler violence,” which isn’t really a myth but, according to Segal, an exaggeration:
Ask 100 people to name the primary accusation leveled against Israel, and “genocide” would likely top the list, with “settler violence” a close second. Much like the first, it is a shame that an issue of such weight is so often defined by mistruths and exaggerations.
Before proceeding, it is important to state clearly: settler violence does exist, it is a serious problem, and it must be dealt with accordingly. However, as with much in the region, the reality and the narrative are simply miles apart.
Let’s begin with the data. The most often cited number comes from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which recorded 2,047 incidents of violence against Israelis and 6,285 against Palestinians between April 2023 and January 2026. A closer examination of these numbers reveals that the majority of the latter do not actually involve violence, and many don’t even include settlers.
Of the 6,285 alleged incidents against Palestinians, 1,704 occurred in Jerusalem, not in settlements. Another 1,361 relate either to Jewish visits to the Temple Mount or to clashes there between security forces and rioting Muslim worshipers. Neither settlers nor violence feature in these instances. Yet, in the UN’s ledger, a Jewish visit to Judaism’s holiest site is automatically classified as settler violence.
Of the remaining 3,220 reported incidents in Judea and Samaria, many consist of generalized complaints—such as “trespassing” during tours or hikes—involving no assault or damage to persons or property. Another 96 cases relate to state projects, like road and infrastructure construction, which involve neither violence nor settlers. 2,039 of the complaints allege property damage or assault without bodily harm; while unacceptable, this hardly aligns with the violent image frequently depicted in the media.
Beyond these questionable classifications, there is a fundamental problem with how data on these incidents is collected. This was highlighted in a 2024 defamation case involving the left-wing NGO B’Tselem. According to the testimony of a B’Tselem field researcher with 20 years of experience, the organization operates under a protocol where Palestinian accounts are not independently verified beyond a site visit and discussions with additional “eyewitnesses” (who may or may not have actually seen the event). In the specific episode at the center of the case, the “facts” published by B’Tselem were directly refuted by the victim’s medical files and contemporaneous IDF reports.
In this regard, B’Tselem is not unique. Most NGOs and UN agencies claiming to perform fact-finding in the Arab-Israeli conflict operate similarly. They frequently base their publications on hearsay and second-hand accounts without properly verifying the allegations. (Even if they intended to, these NGOs generally lack the tools, expertise, and access required for rigorous verification.)
Israel Police data shows that between 2014 and 2024, approximately 1,356 complaints of “Jewish violence” in Judea and Samaria were filed. Only about 40 percent (roughly 537 cases) met the threshold to open an investigation. Furthermore, a substantial share of these cases involved property offenses, vehicle theft, drug possession, and other criminal incidents entirely unrelated to nationalist violence.
A clear example of a false complaint generating headlines occurred in February 2026 regarding a fire in a sheep pen. The media widely reported that “settlers burned a sheep pen, killing dozens of animals,” and politicians leveraged these reports to make serious accusations that were amplified internationally. Within a day, Israel Police released its findings: the fire was actually caused by an illegal electrical connection installed by the owner himself.
Similarly, in 2024, the central investigator for Judea and Samaria testified that in the South Hebron Hills, roughly 90 out of 191 cases filed since the start of the October 7 war (nearly 50 percent) were found to be false complaints. In the Jordan Valley, a comparable half of all complaints proved to be false.
When exaggerations eclipse the facts, we sacrifice truth for impact. This does not solve the issue; it merely weaponizes it. It alienates those in the middle seeking practical change, while handing extremists on the fringes the perfect excuse to further entrench themselves. Ultimately, we cannot address a problem if we are fighting a narrative instead of reality.
As I always say, I don’t keep up with West Bank stuff, simply because I don’t have time. Unprovoked attacks against Palestinians are unconscionable, and clearly some occur. Segal above says they’re exaggerated, and the figures can be looked up. All I can say is that some Israelis are behaving abhorrently, and I am not sure how much of this, if any, is promoted by the government.
*On the debit site, the Times of Israel reports that a mother of one of the three Jewish hostages shot by the IDF while carrying white flags said this: the IDF was ordered to “open fire on sight.” This is in contrast to what the IDF itself says, calling the deaths a “tragic accident.”
When three Israeli hostages were killed in Gaza by Israel Defense Forces gunfire in December 2023, the military described it as a “tragic accident.” But in a recent interview, the mother of one of the hostages said the troops involved were given orders to shoot on sight, which ultimately resulted in her son’s death.
Speaking to Channel 13, Iris Haim, mother of Yotam, 28 — who was killed alongside Alon Shamriz, 26, and Samar Talalka, 25, during “intense fighting” in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood — recounted conversations she had with soldiers involved in the incident. She was interviewed for Channel 13’s investigative program HaMakor (The Source), which broadcast an hour-long documentary, “The truth behind the shooting of the hostages,” on Thursday.
“I heard this from every soldier who spoke to me… They received an unequivocal order: Everything you see — and you will not hesitate, even if they’re civilians — you shoot to kill,” she told the television station.
According to one of those soldiers, Talalka, an Arab hostage from the Bedouin town of Hura, had led the group of three in approaching Israeli forces.
“The moment you recognize an Arab face in Gaza, the first intuition is that these are Hamas terrorists trying to carry out an attack,” the soldier said in a recording published by the news outlet.
The soldiers then opened fire on the three, despite the fact that they were shirtless and one was waving a makeshift white flag.
Haim recounted a conversation with another soldier, in which he said he shot and wounded Yotam after Talalka and Shamriz had already been killed by gunfire from other troops, before his gun jammed. At that point another soldier shot and killed her son.
The soldier who spoke with Haim told her that he suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the incident.
This is clearly a “tragic error,” almost certainly reflecting the IDF’s experience that apparent Israelis might be either Hamas people under cover or real Israelis being used as bait by Hamas. Still, given the white flag, and the hostages speaking Hebrew, the soldiers should have held their fire. I think we can understand why they were scared, but it was a tragic mistake and certainly not an order by IDF to kill hostages, which would be something the IDF would never order. Saying “these things happen” will provide no consolation for the families and loved ones of the Israeli hostages, but yes, show me a war in which nobody is killed by friendly fire.
*Did you wonder, like I did, what happened to Spirit Airlines’ airplanes after the company went belly-up? I thought they’d be sold to other airlines, but the WSJ says that REPO MEN took them!
The first call came to Bob Allen’s phone at 6 p.m. ET on a Friday. The message: Get the repo men ready.
Spirit Airlines was still in operation and planes were in the air. But the aircraft leasing firms that own dozens of its bright yellow jets were getting anxious as Spirit barreled toward liquidation. They wanted their planes back.
“I had six hours to find 20 pilots,” Allen said.
Nomadic Aviation Group, his company, had been standing by for months as Spirit teetered closer to the brink. Allen and co-founder Steve Giordano quickly assembled a roster of pilots, most of whom had worked for Spirit. They made a WhatsApp group, which swelled to 40 pilots. One had just landed.
“He said, ‘can I fly in shorts?’” Giordano recalled. Not a problem. “We generally go khakis and polos, but you know, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” he told him.
By 9 a.m. the next day, with Spirit’s death now official, they were ready to go. Pilots had fanned out to airports in South Florida, Charlotte, Houston and Columbus, Ohio, to go pick up the stranded jets. Some were still at the gates where they’d parked after their final flights.
. . . . Nomadic operates like a miniature airline that ferries jets around the world for aircraft lessors, so it’s in high demand when airlines are both expanding and shrinking their fleets. In 2024 Giordano flew to Harbin, China—known for its ice festival—to collect a plane for a client who wanted its engines. The trip took over 24 hours on commercial flights. Their route to deliver the plane in Wales included stops in Calcutta, Muscat and Cairo.
“When things are bad we’re extremely busy,” Giordano said. “When things are good we’re extremely busy.”
ChatGPT says that even major airlines lease some planes (the bot’s bolding):
Major airlines like United Airlines and American Airlines use a mix of owned aircraft and leased aircraft. Most large airlines do both.
Here’s the basic picture:
Owned planes: The airline buys the aircraft outright (usually financed with debt). These become assets on the airline’s balance sheet.
Leased planes: The airline rents the aircraft from a leasing company for a long period, often 6–12 years or more.
Today, leasing is extremely common. Globally, roughly half of commercial airliners are leased rather than directly owned by the airline. Large leasing firms such as AerCap, Air Lease Corporation, and SMBC Aviation Capital own huge fleets and rent them to airlines.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, neither Hili nor Szaron have any use for the upstairs d*g:
Hili: Beautiful day, and there’s a dog in the garden.
Szaron: Maybe someone will finally take pity and shut him in a cage.
In Polish:
Hili: Piękna pogoda, a w ogrodzie pies.
Szaron: Może ktoś się zlituje i go wreszcie zamknie w klatce.
Masih talks about her mom on Mother’s Day. She hasn’t seen her mom in ages, but there’s some video of them together here:
My illiterate mother has been my role model. The regime forced her to disown me on state TV. She refused.
I haven’t seen her in more than a decade. Not because I committed a crime. Because I spoke.
Happy Mother’s Day 🌻💔
Ricky Gervais posted about a white donkey foal in Israel named after him:
Beautiful foal Gervais, named after comedian Ricky Gervais, says hello from our sanctuary in Israel where she was born to Deborah, rescued when heavily pregnant. Thank you for helping our donkeys have a safe home for life! pic.twitter.com/Bm0hZkSsFs
— Safe Haven for Donkeys (@safehaven4donks) May 11, 2026
. . and one from Doctor Cobb; note that there’s no audible sound here but see the seismograph recording below. This was taken by a drone.
Wait for it …. 11 seconds and BOOM! Some breathtaking footage from Fuego 🇬🇹 and @boisestate.bsky.social scientists in this great science update on infrasound sensors. eos.org/science-upda…
Here’s a live Falcon Cam in New Jersey showing a breeding pair of peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus). The FB post about it says that one egg has already started to hatch. The YouTube notes say this:
Conserve Wildlife Foundation of NJ is happy to partner with Union County to live stream the view of this peregrine falcon nest, which is located on the roof of the County Courthouse in Elizabeth, New Jersey. This view is from within the nestbox and captures more intimate moments between the breeding pair of falcons.
Reader Jeremy “Jez” Grove went to Saturday’s Rally Against Antisemitism in London (he’s not Jewish, but a friend of the Jews), and sent me a nice report, along with photographs. Although all of us know that England is full of antisemitism these days, what with Jews getting stabbed and having their ambulances and schools set on fire or vandalized, I myself know little about the complex world of British politics, encompassing multiple parties. I was thus able to learn some things about the major parties and their attitude towards Jews.
I’ve indented Jez’s commentary, and the photos are his.
I’m on my way home from the rally against anti-Semitism, which was held outside the gates of Downing Street. Unsurprisingly, our prime minister didn’t manage to make the short walk to address the crowd and stand up against the rampant Jew hatred in the UK. (Instead, the Labour Party was represented by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Pat McFadden, whose empty platitudes were barely audible over the shouts of “Where’s Keir?” and general booing.)
By contrast, Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, was met with rapturous applause and gave a barnstorming speech. I’d never vote Conservative, but Kemi has been outstanding on this issue and the fight for women’s rights.
Here’s part of Badenoch’s speech (you can see the full seven-minute version here):
I stand against antisemitism.
I stand against those people who want Jews to be afraid to go about their lives, and will never allow them to win.
The Liberal Democrats also sent their party leader, Ed Davey. He made the right sounds, but the response from the crowd was pretty lukewarm. That’s probably a reflection of his irrelevancy in British politics and his party’s invisibility on the issue. He’s best known for his ridiculous attention-grabbing stunts – the only surprise was that he didn’t arrive on the stage on a skateboard! (I’m barely joking, btw.)
The Reform UK party (generally seen as right of the Conservatives, but who just won big victories in Labour Party heartlands in our elections on Thursday) sent their deputy leader.
To no-one’s surprise, there was no representative from the (hugely anti-Semitic) Green Party, despite the boasts from their party leader, Zack Polanski, that he’s the only Jewish leader of a British political party.
It’s worth mentioning that there was a decent number of Iranian and Kurdish supporters of Israel present, who got the hearty applause that they deserved.
When I told Jez that it was ironic that the best speech of the day came from a Tory, he answered, “I guess the Tories aren’t much further to the right than your Dems. Maybe they’re even to the left of them – most Tories wouldn’t dare openly saying that they want to dismantle our (socialised) NHS. .”
It was good to be amongst so many like-minded people standing up against anti-Semitism. Hopefully, the full event will be available to watch at some point soon.
The airport-style security arches (I don’t believe that these have been required for pro-Palestine marches – because there has been no security threat posed to them): Note that the Jewish Community Security Trust (CST) felt it necessary to be present behind the London Metropolitan Police’s own barrier:
The view looking from Trafalgar Square towards the stage outside Downing Street. One of the speakers claimed that the crowd was 20,000 strong. That seemed high to me, but given the security arrangements may have been a more accurate figure than is usual for protests of this type:
The view looking from Downing Street towards Trafalgar Square . This photo was taken before everyone had arrived:
Support from the Iranians. The group were applauded as they left at the end of the event chanting “Long live Iran! Long live Israel”. They were also thanked for their presence from the stage as were those flying Kurdish flags:
Kemi Badenoch, the Leader of the Opposition (leader of the Conservative Party). Her speech is here: [JAC: it’s above along with a link to her full speech]:
The pale blue flags are held by non-Jews who signed the October Declaration in support of Jews following the 7th October atrocities:
A guy holding a “This Mensch is with You” sign:
More:
I can’t remember who today’s speaker was who said he’d recently met the prime minister. And the PM audibly gasped when he was told that one synogogue alone was spending £20,000 a month on security. And the PM assured him that the “full weight of the law” would be used against those who had tried to burn down another synagogue. The speaker told him, “The 17-year-old suspect has just been released on bail and the only condition is that he doesn’t enter any synogogue”. The prime minister gasped again. But he didn’t have the guts to show up today. And nor did the deputy prime minister, or the chancellor, or any of the big names from the government’s cabinet. Instead, the Labour Party sent Pat McFadden (Secretary of State for the department of Work and Pensions). Only a political geek (guilty as charged) would know who he is. (My politically engaged wife recognised his name but couldn’t name his post.)
Shame on Labour – but even more shame on the anti-Semitic Green Party of England and Wales, who had two electoral candidates arrested for horrendous social media posts. [From the Guardian link below, the posts came from Saiqa Ali, a Lambeth Green candidate for Streatham St Leonard’s ward, and Sabine Mairey, who was standing in Lambeth’s Clapham Town.]
When I asked Jez what those odious Green Party social media posts said, he responded:
The Guardian (!) reported (I can’t seem to do indented quotes, but what follows is all from The Guardian article archived here.
‘Ali’s Instagram account is set to private but screenshots indicated she had posted an image of an armed man wearing a headband of the banned Islamist group Hamas along with the slogan: “Resistance is freedom”.
Another screenshot indicated that Mairey had shared a post which included the text: “Ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism. It’s revenge.” ‘
Mark Sturtevant is back with some arthropod photos for us. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
Today we have another set of pictures of arthropods from my area in eastern Michigan. Some of these were taken in the field and others were in a staged setting on the faithful dining room table.
During recent summers, I have been using cheap black lights on the front and back porch to attract more insects, and many new species have arrived as a result. One was this floofy moth that is clearly in the tiger moth (Arctiidae) family, but it was new to me. I believe this to be Spilosoma latipennis. If so, it should have hot pink legs, as shown in the link, but I did not know at the time to check for that:
Another arrival was this species of chafer beetle. This is an Oriental Beetle (Anomala orientalis). It is an invasive species from Asia that is becoming a minor pest here on turf grasses and other plants:
Moving on to spiders, here is a new species of spider called the Western Lynx Spider (Oxyopes scalaris). Lynx spiders can be easily recognized by their form, and especially by those prominent leg spines. They are sit-and-wait predators on plants. This male was missing one of its pedipalps, so I used editing tricks to replace it:
Next up is a lovely Orchard Orbweaver (Leucauge venusta), which had built its web across a seldom-used path in the woods. I had to stand on tippy-toes to get several partial focus stacks, and this final picture was grafted together by hand, piece by piece from those pictures. I really like their iridescent abdomens that look like antique porcelain, and those beautiful green legs. She was eating an unidentified Syrphid fly:
The next two pictures show a flashy jumping spider that I have only seen a few times. This is the Thin-spined Jumping Spider (Tutelina elegans), but to me it will always be called ‘the purple jumper’. The pictures were both taken in a staged setting, where the first is a focus stack, again needing much assembly, and the second was a “lucky shot” single frame. Lucky because she never once stood still, and she was always waving her front legs. I wonder if these spiders are trying to be ant mimics:
Back to insects. Folks here will have seen this one many times now, but it is still special. This is the Wasp Mantidfly (Climaciella brunnea). I won’t repeat again the improbable life cycle it has as a parasitoid on spider egg sacs. You can clearly see that it shows convergent evolution on praying mantids, and at the same time it is a wasp mimic. More specifically, it mimics various species and regional color variations of paper wasps (Polistes sp.). A detail about that which I think is really neat are its two-toned pigmented wings, which is an ersatz way to get its wings to resemble the wings of its models.
I show our local model wasp (P. fuscatus) in the next picture for comparison. Paper wasps have an extra crease that folds their wings length-wise, so the wings are dark and narrow. The mantidfly does not have the crease, so it fakes it with pigment:
Speaking of mantids, I finish with an amusing story about the next picture. This is a Chinese Praying Mantis (Tenodera sinensis), in hand, and the picture was taken with the Opteka 15mm wide angle macro lens. This fully manual lens is the most difficult lens that I own since to get the depth of focus that is much of the point for this kind of photography, one has to stop down the aperture to about f/32. As a result you are taking pictures with a pinhole camera, and focusing is done by guesstimation. Meanwhile, the working distances are extremely short so an insect subject is practically touching the lens. Anyway, she wasn’t having any of it, and quite honestly I was having a hard time keeping this big girl under control. So I made a short movie about the struggle, and attached an appropriate sound track to it. For those who have handled one of these insects, you know they will do what they want to do, and what they want to do is climb:
