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.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej has written a new book, whose cover is below (the title translates to Sisyphus’s Blue Stone. Sadly, it’s unlikely to be translated into English). I had an idea that this might be a memoir or autobiography, but I knew that Andrzej, who did have a varied and fascinating life (for example, as a newborn his life was saved by a Nazi doctor), could not limit his writing to autobiographical details. I asked him what it was about and when it would appear, and got this reply:
I still don’t know when the book will be published, probably not until the fall. And what it actually is, I don’t really know myself, because it’s supposedly a memoir, partly literature (but with zero fiction), partly essays, because there’s a lot of politics in it. A troublesome mix for a bookseller.
And I was pleased to see that the cover featured a picture that I took on January 4, 2014, on my first visit to Andrzej and Malgorzata (Andrzej had asked me before, and I said SURE!)
I remember that we were all walking together, and I dropped behind them. When they walked ahead in a loving pose, I couldn’t resist taking the photo. Andrzej remembered the occasion but got the date slightly wrong:
As I recall, it was the fall of 2013, and we were at the Dobrzyń harbor. We wanted to show you the place where we had scattered Małgorzata’s mother ashes, and the hill where the stronghold had once stood when the Teutonic Order was brought here. You fell behind because you were taking photos of some ducks, and we went ahead, talking about our own concerns.
And while I’m at it, I’ll add my other favorite picture of my surrogate parents, along with the late Cyrus on the porch and Hii at lower left. This was taken on July 24, 2024. Good times.
Since free will is apparently boring, how about some movie recommendations? The other day I called my sister to get film recommendations, knowing that she often goes to the movies with her son Steven (my nephew), an ardent cinemaphile who makes his living writing about movies. I think his taste in cinema is quite impeccable, and so, when he emailed me with some recommendations, I asked if he’d give us a list of his favorite movies. What he sent me is indented below: a list of his 11 “greatest films ever made”, along with seven runners-up. I’ve put an asterisk next to the ones I’ve seen and have added links to each movie.
I’d pay serious attention to this list, for Steven’s recommendations have led me to some terrific films. Here we go (the list is in descending order):
Every ten years, the British magazine Sight and Sound releases two definitive lists of the greatest films ever made, the results of polling hundreds of critics (for list #1) and hundreds of filmmakers (for list #2). Everyone submits their top ten, and the ballots are aggregated. It’s a dream of mine to participate in the critics’ poll. Here, in case I’m ever invited, is my current list of 11 favorite films, presented in roughly descending order. (I’d have to eliminate one, but I can’t do it without rewatching all of them.) The list is more a record of my own subjective tastes (and what’s continued to resonate from childhood into middle age) than a syllabus for a “milestones in cinema” survey course. You’re welcome to use or share it if you think people might find it useful. I think it’s best to present them without explanation, as any buildup or interpretation I provide might color the impressions of first-time viewers.
When I asked where Tokyo Story was (one of my two favorite foreign films, made by Yasujirō Ozu), I got this reply:
Probably the very next runner-up. But Make Way for Tomorrow (roughly my #5) is actually the film that inspired Tokyo Story, and I must say I find it even more affecting. Orson Welles said it could make a stone cry.
I was appalled to discover that I’d seen only ten of the eighteen films, so I do have some watching to do. In general, the ones I’ve seen on the list are great, and I was glad to see that the largely neglected film “The Last Picture Show” was in the top eleven. I still think it’s the best American film ever, but I emphasize that Steven ranks three films I haven’t seen higher than that one.
Below is one of my favorite scenes from that movie: Sam the Lion (played by Ben Johnson) reveals a bit of his history to Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) as they’re fishing. Sam’s son, played by Sam Bottoms (yes, Timothy’s younger brother) is depicted as mentally disabled. For his performance in this movie, Johnson won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1971.
To me—and this will rile people up—this scene is the modern-day equivalent of Shakespeare, but spoken in Texas jargon. I find it extremely moving when Sam confesses, in a low-key manner, that he was hugely in love with a married woman that they all know. I was so taken with this movie that when I went to a wedding in Texas, I made a special side trip to Archer City, Texas, where the movie was filmed. It’s the same as in the movie. It’s a great film and you should see it.
Many of the actors in the movie were making their first appearance and then went on to do well in movies, though Ben Johnson was already well known from his previous appearance in western movies (he started off ). Still, this casting by Bogdanovich is sheer genius:
Taste is subjective, but my taste in movies is largely congruent with Steven’s. But please give your reaction to the list, suggest movies that you think should be on it, and note the movies you don’t think should be on it.
Today we have two videos from Tara Tanaka, who has been absent a while due to a drought Florida that dried up much of the wetlands on the family property, creating an absence of wading birds that she used to feature. Fortunately, as she writes below, the drought may be over. In the meantime, we have a kayaking video and a video featuring a BOBCAT.
In 2024 when we had a swamp full of water, we got a sit-on-top kayak that I could use to shoot from and that my husband could use to get out into the swamp to manage exotic plants. I chose this one because it’s incredibly stable, and I wanted an open deck to be able to paddle without having the camera in front of me. This kayak has a seat that swivels 360 degrees, allowing me to mount my tripod with a 500mm lens in the stern, and then just pivot around between paddling and videoing. This was the maiden voyage in our Nucanoe kayak.
I was able to make quite a few trips out during the 2024 nesting season, and after a relatively dry winter and then one good rain, made a few trips out in 2025. I stopped going out not because there wasn’t enough water to float the kayak, but because it was getting so shallow and our alligators that patrol the rookery for raccoons and snakes are so big that I didn’t feel comfortable paddling right over one with just a couple of feet between us. It wasn’t long after that that a couple in a canoe in Lake Kissimmee paddled over an 11’ gator in 2’ of water causing the gator to thrash and overturn the canoe, with a tragic ending.
The swamp has been dry for at least 9 months, with only a few pools of water, and now that it’s really starting to rain I’m hoping that the water level will return to normal and the birds will return to nest next spring.
A 5-minute YouTube video, narrated by Tara, showing the maiden voyage of the canoe (sound up.) You can see there are still birds around. Can you identify them?
And here’s a Vimeo video with an animal encounter. Enlarge this as you can see a lot more detail on full screen.
We had seen one or two coyotes around 9:30 the last two mornings. Hoping they would return for a third day. I got my camera ready in the living room to try to record them. About 9:00 my husband said he saw one, so I made some final adjustments for the lighting and began to search for something moving in the distance. When I finally centered the subject in the viewfinder, I said “I think I’m looking at a bobcat.” Almost immediately the cat stood up and as I panned with it I was shocked when two coyotes ran into the frame, one on each side of the cat. Enjoy the interactions between the two species and between the very bonded pair of coyotes. I believe the female is pregnant.
After I finished filming I just sat in disbelief that I had had the opportunity to record something so unique – and from my living room! I feel like I could have gone to Yellowstone and spent a month in the field and not witnessed an encounter like this. Because of the dramatic temperature difference between the thawing ground and the sun heating the brown grass, the waves of heat shimmer intensified as the sun got higher and you can see them rippling across the screen. Despite the extreme conditions, I was thrilled that I was able to record the interaction so clearly from 1000’ away, and through a double-paned window.
We should have a pond full of water with waders arriving to nest right now, however due to a severe drought that started over a year ago the entire swamp is dry. Without water to allow our large alligators to patrol under the nests and protect them from predators, I’m afraid that our hundreds of waders that nest here every year will not feel safe and will likely nest elsewhere.
Filmed with a Panasonic GH6 + Nikon 500mm f2.8 lens. Since I filmed it from inside the house, I used the audio from a video I shot from the yard last year.
Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s back to work we go; after at three-day holiday weekend in America (“Juneteenth”), it’s back to the grind today: Monday, June 22, 2026 and World Rainforest Day. Here’s a flower and a stick insect I photographed in the Parque Amistad in Costa Rica in 2012. I know neither species:
Los Angeles, where the last game was played, is full of Iranian exiles. The crowd booed as the Iranian national anthem was played, but (contrary to FIFA rules), plenty of Iranian flags were displayed: the pre-revolution “lion flag”. Props for the dissidents and exiles.
There was simply no debate over the moment of the match and it is one that Iran will cherish, even more so if they are to progress to the World Cup knockout stages for the first time. Every angle of Alireza Beiranvand’s preposterous save to prevent Belgium taking the lead approaching the hour added to the miraculousness of it all. Perhaps the most ludicrous element was that Beiranvand appeared to have been eliminated from the game when the ball dropped at the feet of Maxim De Cuyper inside the six-yard box, the goal gaping. Yet, while scrambling on the turf after seesawing to his left in an attempt to intercept Kevin De Bruyne’s rolled cross, Beiranvand stuck out a strong left hand to shut the door in the face of De Cuyper, before smothering the ball.
Here are 15 minutes of highlights of the Belgium-Iran game. The “preposterous save” by Beiranvand is at 7:35.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain announced his resignation on Monday, bowing to a mutiny inside his party and a challenge to his leadership of the country.
Mr. Starmer said he would remain as prime minister until a new party leader is selected, by September, rather than fight to remain in the job he won almost two years ago. His decision clears the way for Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade, extending a period of political turmoil for the country since it voted to leave the European Union in 2016.
“The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election,” Mr. Starmer said in brief remarks in front of No. 10 Downing Street, his voice breaking with emotion at times.
“I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace,” he said. “That is why I will resign as leader of the Labour Party. I have spoken to His Majesty the King this morning to inform him of my decision.”
The most likely replacement for Mr. Starmer is Andy Burnham, whose resounding victory last week in a special election energized his bid to oust the prime minister. Mr. Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester and one of Labour’s most popular politicians, received almost 55 percent of the vote in the Makerfield district.
The UK has never recovered from the Brexit referendum. Also:
*As Veep J. D. Vance is in Switzerland trying to lubricate the U.S./Iran talks, it still looks as if Trump is not only desperate to cut a deal (perhaps more desperate than is Iran), but the deal in the offing looks bad for the U.S.:
President Donald Trump’s effort to strike a deal with Iran faced significant headwinds on Sunday, as Tehran flexed its control of the Strait of Hormuz, Israel and Hezbollah traded strikes and the right flank of Trump’s party continued to accuse him of making too many concessions to secure an agreement.
The challenges underscored the difficulty of Trump’s task as he seeks to turn a fragile ceasefire into a lasting agreement after months of war sent energy prices skyrocketing.
Ending the fighting addressed Trump’s immediate concerns about oil prices and the stock markets, but it left unresolved the question at the heart of the conflict: what limits, if any, Iran will accept on its nuclear program. Vice President JD Vance is meeting Sunday with senior Iranian leadersin hopes of keeping Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon in exchange for sanctions relief.
Trump may have less leverage than he did during talks in February before the war. Then, Iranian leaders feared a U.S. attack could topple the regime. Now the government has proved it can survive, even after the Feb. 28 killing of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Trump has made clear that a halt to oil shipping out of the Persian Gulf is a pressure point. And Tehran has shown that it can send shocks through global energy markets with just the threat of attacks on ships.
Vance and other senior U.S. officials seeking a breakthrough at the bargaining table must haggle over the many issues Trump deferred to halt the fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz — restoring what amounted to the status quo before the initial U.S. strikes on Feb. 28. The concessions the White House has already offered to get back to the bargaining table havebecome a central line of attack for Trump’s critics.
Trump is no longer demanding regime change, despite promising Iranians that help was on the way. He says he understands why the country needs ballistic missiles, upsetting U.S. allies who feel threatened by those weapons. And he has made clear he wants to avoid anything that would derail the stock market’s upward trajectory.
“There’s not a lot of room now for him to maneuver to go back and punch back at the Iranians,” said Aaron David Miller, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations, who has advised Republican and Democratic administrations on Middle East policy.
Well, yes, there is room to go back and punch back; all Trump has to do is say that he didn’t get the deal he wanted (and touted in his announcement of the war), and therefore he had to continue attacking the Iranian military and the country’s oil facilities. He’s gone back and forth so often that I don’t understand how Aaron Miller can say that he’s now stuck in a position and can’t change it. In fact he has, as the next item shows:
*Now that the cease-fire talks are messed up because of Lebanon and other things, Trump has once again threatened to attack Iran. See? He can at least threaten to go back, even if he doesn’t mean it:
President Trump warned the U.S. could strike Iran over its support for Hezbollah, as fighting between the militant group and Israel threatened to upend the preliminary peace deal he signed last week and close the strategic Strait of Hormuz.
Trump’s comments on social media came as Vice President JD Vance was in Switzerland for talks with Iran that had been diverted to focusing on last week’s flare-up in Lebanon instead of the discussion on Iran’s nuclear program that the administration had wanted.
Last week, Trump and Vance aired the administration’s frustration with Israel after what they called a heavy-handed retaliatory strike nearly derailed their deal with Iran. Israel has argued that it will keep fighting as long as Hezbollah does.
Trump’s new comments Sunday focused on Iran instead.
“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump said on social media Sunday. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”
Iranian state media said Trump’s comments violated the preliminary peace deal signed Wednesday, which bars the two sides from attacking or threatening each other.
The deal also opens the Strait of Hormuz, sets up talks on Iran’s nuclear program and calls for an end to the fighting in Lebanon—a key Iranian demand—in its opening paragraph. But fighting over the past two days led Iran to announce Saturday it had closed the strategic waterway and to say it would focus the talks on resolving the situation in Lebanon.
Fox News reported that Trump said in an interview that he had spoken with Iranian officials Saturday night and warned them not to close the strait.
“You close it, and you won’t have a country,” Fox said, quoting Trump. “You won’t even make it back to your f—ing country.”
Well, it’s not clear to me who started the lastest dust-up between Israel and Hezbollah, but I still can’t understand why the U.S. is demanding that Israel tolerate a terrorist group who will continue to go after northern Israel after the so-called cease-fire. Do note that Israel has discovered a huge Hezbollah base that is in, yes, tunnels in southern Lebanon. Will Hezbollah vacate it voluntarily? Of course not. The ceasefire agreement should actually specify that Hezbollah should disband and disarm itself within a short period of time. Here’s a video:
*It’s been half a century since The Selfish Gene was published by Richard Dawkins, a book that brought the gene-centered view of evolution, and its implications for competition and cooperation, to the public view, but also influenced evolutionary biologists themselves. Now, at the UK’s Freethinker site, evolutionary biologist Jamie C. Weir celebrates this anniversary with an essay called “Crystallizing Darwinism” (access is free).
The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, marks the end, or culmination, of a long scientific revolution that began with Darwin’s own book, On the Origin of Species, more than a century earlier in 1859.
And it did mark the end of reasoning that prevailed throughout the early 20th century, including ideas about the prevalence of group selection, and forms of Lamarckian inheritance (the latter still persists among evolutionary miscreants and overzealous advocates of epigenetics).
Most conspicuously, if evolution selects the fittest individuals, how could we explain the occurrence of unselfish, altruistic behaviour in nature? Why do some animals share resources within a group—like wolves or wild dogs sharing meat with the rest of their pack—when it would make sense for an individual to monopolise a resource for their own benefit? Why should a bee sting a predator in defence of its hive, when that act means certain death?
If natural selection is all about survival, why sacrifice anything that could increase your chances in the high-stakes game of life?
Perhaps, through so-called ‘group selection’, bands of individuals within a species competed against one another, propagating the attributes of successful groups into the future. A co-operating, unselfish group might well defeat a group of treacherous, back-stabbing individuals. The question became one of what natural selection was actually selecting. The individual or the group? Or something else?
Group selectionists were in good company. Even Darwin himself occasionally drifted into group-based reasoning—the subtitle of the Origin talks not about the survival of the fittest individuals, but the ‘preservation of favoured races in the struggle for existence’. But even as a group-level framework seemed to solve some evolutionary problems, it raised others.
. . . . The vulnerability of co-operating groups to invasion by cheats posed a major challenge to early group selection explanations. It is not enough to say individuals work ‘for the good of the group’, let alone, as some of the more extreme group selectionists argued, that they regulate their own population size ‘for the good of the species’. There must be something more.
The key to solving the problem of altruism came from looking within individuals, at the genetic information that acts as the recipe for building every organism.
. . .Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection, then, acts not at the level of species or groups, nor even, in truth, at the level of individual organisms, but on the invisible genetic units that are the building blocks of all life. Genes work together to build bodies: automata in which they ride, do battle, and engineer their own proliferation. Genes endure—the ‘immortal replicators’—passed down from individual to individual through the generations, and we are merely their ‘survival machines’.
In The Selfish Gene, that vision—the gene-centric view of evolution—is painted in vivid prose, and with such clarity of reasoning that it has become far more than a classic of popular science. Just as evolution did not begin with Darwin, the gene’s-eye view did not begin with Richard Dawkins. One finds it being painfully pieced together throughout the mid-twentieth century, by R. A. Fisher (The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, 1930), W. D. Hamilton (‘The evolution of altruistic behavior’, 1963), G. C. Williams (Adaptation and Natural Selection, 1966), and many others. Indeed, these names are among those most frequently cited in Dawkins’s oeuvre, particularly in The Selfish Gene.
And yet, more than any other single work, The Selfish Gene crystallises the synthesis of natural selection and genetics, making the most coherent extended explanation of the fundamental, gene-based mechanics underlying evolution. With a gift for crafting a turn of phrase, Dawkins coined expressions and concepts in the book that have since proven highly successful replicators of their own, spreading vigorously in the public imagination. Through clarity of reasoning and metaphor, Dawkins not only popularised evolutionary theory but also solidified a genuine shift in the conceptual paradigm of the field.
Remember that natural selection and genetics were precisely what the “modern synthesis”, begun by Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1937, combined. So, by tying together how behaviors and other organismal traits not discussed in that era, The Selfish Gene didn’t really end the synthesis, but gave it a huge push forward. It’s a pity that this article didn’t mention the beginning of that synthesis, but it does call our attention to how well the gene-centered view of Dawkins’s book has held up in the last half-century. I should add that while that is probably Dawkins’s most influential book, and deservedly so, my favorite Dawkins book—because of its beautiful writing and more popular style (The Selfish Gene is not easy going!)—is The Blind Watchmaker. ˆRichard’s own favorite is The Extended Phenotype, probably because it introduces a point of view that was original with him.
*I’ve mentioned quite a few times how much I fear that Zohran Mamdani’s combination of “democratic socialism,” performative wokeness, and anti-semitism will overtake the Democratic Party, and I’m pretty sure that this Islamist has ambitions beyond being mayor of New York City. Other Democrats fear that, too, as Mamdani, once again neglecting his job as Mayor, is out on the hustings for others like himself.
A year ago this week, Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in the Democratic primary for mayor upended New York politics.
Now, in the closing days of another primary season, he has thrown himself back onto the campaign trail, this time risking his political capital in a high-stakes bid to catapult fellow leftists to primary victories against the old Democratic guard.
Mr. Mamdani and allies are attempting to unseat two Democratic incumbents, Representatives Daniel Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, whom they view as too friendly to corporate donors and Israel. They want to lay claim to a third House seat. And down the ballot, they have designs on expanding the democratic socialist bloc in Albany.
If he prevails on Tuesday, Mr. Mamdani, 34, will go a long way toward establishing socialists as a major faction in New York City politics and himself as a kingmaker capable of vaulting relatively unknown candidates to victory and sidelining erstwhile power brokers.
But a string of losses could be disastrous, weakening the mayor’s political standing just six months into his term, empowering political opponents and creating new ones.
His involvement has already alienated Black and Latino progressives, powerful labor unions and the left-leaning Working Families Party, all of which helped him get to City Hall and partnered with him as mayor. Some, like Representative Nydia Velázquez, have taken the rare step of publicly declaring they have lost trust in him.
“I have a pit in my stomach because of secondhand anxiety,” said Michael Lange, an elections analyst and fellow democratic socialist who rose to prominence chronicling Mr. Mamdani’s ascent.
“This is a way to remake the Democratic Party,” he said. “But if he loses, the knives would be out. They would be really out. The risk is that they’ll say this is more man than movement.”
The mayor’s support goes further than mere endorsements. With his popularity never higher, Mr. Mamdani has personally involved himself in everything from candidate recruitment and fund-raising to ad shoots and private strategy sessions. A pair of his top political aides are helping run two of the campaigns. And the mayor attempted to push labor unions into backing at least one of his candidates.
I have a pit in my stomach, too, and it isn’t from eating cherries. I hope he has that string of losses, as I want to see Mamdani marginalized within the Democratic Party. Note the bit where he’s against candidates that “are too friendly to Israel”. That’s one symptom of his antisemitism, which of course he’d deny.
*The AP has more on the Reflecting Pool kerfuffle. Although people have been arrested for vandalism, which Trump claims is the reason the pool is full of algae and the new coat of blue paint is peeling off, details are sketchy. I think that the algal bloom and other problems are simply the result of lack of expertise and poor planning (there was some nepotism involved in the noncompetitive choice of a contractor), just like the algal bloom in Botany Pond. We’ll see what evidence emerges in court.
President Donald Trump on Saturday announced that federal authorities had made “multiple arrests” of people he said were vandalizing the Reflecting Pool as he struggled to explain why the $14-million-plus rehabilitation project he launched for the nation’s 250th anniversary seemingly backfired.
An algae bloom has turned the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool green days after the completion of President Donald Trump’s renovation project that aimed for the shade “American flag blue.” (AP Video: Nathan Ellgren)
Trump said his predecessors had let the pool turn an algae-stained green and that he’d line it with “American flag blue” so it better reflected the Washington Monument. But after the new pool was unveiled, its blue tinge quickly became a familiar green. Workers treated it with chemicals to kill the algae, but then the painted blue lining on the bottom began to peel.
. . . “We’ve had some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool,” [Trump] posted on his social media site Friday night. “Just like three days ago, they destroyed the grass outside of the Pool, they’ve also done everything possible to hurt the inside surface that was just installed.”
I suppose it’s possible, given the hatred that many harbor for Trump, that there was vandalism, but I also think that it would have been more obvious given that it involves the whole pool.
He offered no details to substantiate his claim.
Agencies responsible for law enforcement and upkeep on the National Mall — the U.S. Park Police, National Park Service and Interior Department — did not respond to requests for comment. Trump on Saturday followed up by posting that Park Police “have arrested multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll,” correcting his spelling to “Pool” later.
He went on: “Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail!”
Lock ’em up! I find it telling that law-enforcement agencies won’t comment. At least they could tell us how many people were arrested, and for what. I also don’t understand why this issue, which, granted, is distressing, is making such big news, news comparable to that of the cease-fire deal with Iran. At least I’m pretty sure that the Reflecting Pool issue will be resolved, though perhaps not during Trump’s administration.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili beefs that she has been overlooked:
Hili: I don’t want to meddle in your work, but there’s too little about me in that book.
Andrzej: Honey, don’t disturb us right now.
See more about the book later today.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie chcę się wtrącać do waszej pracy, ale w tej książce jest za mało o mnie.Ja: Kochanie, nie przeszkadzaj teraz.
Emma is puzzled by this thing. Go to the thread if you want to learn what it is:
What is this in my two-week old micropond?
It’s a few mm long, and darts around very quickly just under the surface, forward locomotion, short spurts in a zig zag. If you change the surface light, it dives down to the pebbles, then comes back up.
Two from my feed: This first one is so cool; it make me tear up. Translation from the Polish:
While the infertile owl was away from her nest, the caregivers replaced her dead eggs with orphaned chicks… the little owl nearly went mad with happiness…
Podczas gdy bezpłodna sowa była poza swoim gniazdem, opiekunowie zamienili jej martwe jaja na osierocone pisklęta…
“This student brought their cat along to the graduation ceremony as a gesture of gratitude and appreciation, because during exam days, they would stay up all night with it. I believe that people who possess such delicate sentiments are exemplary individuals with their conscience and compassion.”
“Bu öğrenci, mezuniyet törenine kedisini de yanında götürmüş, teşekkür ve minnettarlık olarak, çünkü sınav günlerinde onunla sabaha kadar uyanık kalıyormuş.
Ben bu ince duygulara sahip insanlar vicdan ve merhametleri ile örnek insanlardır.” pic.twitter.com/0qhK0GrY36
This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was four years old, and would have been 86 today had she lived. https://t.co/umyYcoo6oC
And two food tweets from Dr. Cobb, now safely ensconced in Old Blighty:
Tonight we ate at the Gueule du Loup in Arles. The best meal we have eaten in ages. Simple entrées (raw veg and anchouiade, polenta and chickpea chips with fromage blanc aioli), exquisite pollock with a subtle ginger sauce, Camargue black rice and a vegetable paté, with champagne and a local red.
Desserts – nougat glacé and millefeuilles – were equally surprising and subtle. Not sweet, full of complex tastes. Delightful and reasonably priced €110 for two, incl drinks. We chatted to the chef, David Prugne, and his équipe. If you are in Arles, go there! http://www.restaurant-lagueuleduloup.fr
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, they cannot “disintegrate like a body does.” Our souls must live forever! 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 with either logic or empirical observations and experiments. Thus does faith make a hash of rationality.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.”
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:
This is a brilliant idea:
“A student’s transcript would show two overall grade-point averages. Next to the traditional GPA will appear a second number that adjusts course grades based on the median grade in each class. A student who earns an A in a course where the median grade… https://t.co/Zwiix9LPgr
From Maarten Boudry (the short piece by Blakemore et al. is here):
“Free communication of information and ideas has historically been significant in the liberalization of autocratic regimes — for example, it was a factor leading to the end of totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe. Authoritarian governments try to suppress the flow of… pic.twitter.com/lYlFo6XjHH
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.”
المتحدثة بلسان جيش الدفاع الإسرائيلي، اللفتينانت كولونيل إيلا واوية: “مستقبل لبنان يبدأ يوم يتوقف حزب الله عن احتجاز الدولة رهينة، ويمنح لبنان الفرصة لاختيار طريقه بنفسه”.
Khalas ba2a. El lebnene ma bado yedal rahinet 2ararat Hezbollah.
