Michael Egnor responds to my critique of his free will-ism, and I discover a disturbing case of plagiarism

June 26, 2026 • 9:45 am

A few days ago I got a “pingback” from a site on the “Skeptic Society Magazine,” showing that someone had linked to my post that criticized ID advocate Michael Egnor’s video defense of libertarian free will. I went to the Skeptic Magazine site, and, as you’ll see, became puzzled. First of all, I’d never heard of the Skeptic Society. Here’s a bit from the Society about its mission and the magazine

Skeptic Society is an independent, secular online magazine dedicated to original ideas, free thought, and freedom of speech. We regularly publish articles on a variety of subjects, including politics, religion, book reviews, science, and technology. We welcome any material that is truly thought-provoking.

We are not affiliated with Skeptic Magazine or The Skeptics Society. This blog started as half joke and half serious notion about promoting scientific articles that are worth reading.

We don’t have membership, and we don’t discriminate no matter what political orientation you may have. If you have a valid point that is rational, we would love to hear about it.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to publish here.

And then I read the pinbacked article in that magazine, which you can also read by clicking below. As you can see, the piece says that it’s “written by Jenni Sidey”. (I’ve archived the article here).

This article is apparently the first in a four-part defense of Egnor’s talk and a critique of my piece I posted on my website.  What struck me immediately, beyond its misleading arguments, was that it was written in the first person, as if it was produced by Egnor himself.  I goes on and on using the first-person “I” in the response. Here are a couple of excerpts showing that:

University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne has now posted, at his blog, Why Evolution Is True, a reply to a talk I gave in March at the 2026 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. In the talk, presented by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, I discussed the reality of free will, and criticized the coterie of scientists, specifically neuroscientist Sam Harris, primatologist Robert Sapolsky, and Coyne himself, who deny it.

. . .I offer four strong arguments to support that view:

  1. Everyone believes in free will. Even free will deniers do.
  2. Denial of free will is self-refuting.
  3. Determinism, which is the ideological basis for contemporary free will denial, has been disproven by modern physics.
  4. Neuroscience supports the inference that free will is real.

Those are Egnor’s arguments, not “Jenni Sidey’s”.   At any rate, the first part of “Sidey’s” four-part critique maintains that I don’t “walk my talk” when it comes to free will. “Sidey’s” accusation is that although I have argued that you can still have morality without libertarian you-could-have-done-otherwise free will, I am a hypocrite, for nobody can be held “morally responsible” unless you have free will. From “Sidey’s” piece (indented):

First, morality presupposes free will. No person can be held morally accountable for an act he did not choose. It is self-evident that every sentient human being invokes morality. Even serial killers get offended if you steal from them. Everyone invokes moral law in everyday life.  Everyone has a moral sense, of varying degrees, so everyone at some real level believes in free will. What we believe is not merely what we say. What we believe is how we live our lives. Every free will denier, Jerry Coyne included, invokes moral law day in and day out. Morality presupposes freedom to choose right and wrong.

Apparently “Jenni Sidey” (you’ll see the reason for the quotes shortly) hasn’t read my own work on free will. I have never said that people are or should be deemed “morally responsible” for their good and bad acts. That would assume the ability to freely choose to be moral or immoral, but I am a determinist who rejects that kind of “choice.” What I have said, and which anybody who reads what I’ve written will know, is that you should be held responsible for what you do, but not morally responsible.  That is, you are responsible if you are the person who performed the act. That, to anyone with two neurons to rub together, is absolutely compatible with determinism.

You can also have a morality without determinism, for morality is just the social code that deems actions good (a consequentialist would say “having overall good consequences for society”) or bad.  In my view, you are “immoral” if you kill someone without a good reason like self-defense.  That means you’re doing something that society deems not only bad but worthy of punishment, but you don’t have to have made a libertarian decision to kill or not to kill.  And society enforces its “morality” through punishment and reward, both of which can change people’s behavior, whether they be the person at issue issue or onlookers.

Changed behavior is also perfectly compatible with determinism: if you’re rewarded for good behavior or punished for bad—or see someone else undergo these consequences—you will be more likely to do good things and less likely to do bad things.  I’m sure that “Jenni Sidey” would agree that rewarding dogs for good behavior or punishing them for bad behavior will, in the future, change their behavior; and yet I don’t think that “Sidey”, being religious (see below), would say that dogs have free will.

I explain this again because “Sidey” attacks me for going after people who do bad things and praising people for doing good things, even though I deny free will. That, “Sidey” thinks, is me not “walking the talk.”  “Jenni” gives an example:

In Coyne’s case, there is an element of self-contradiction. Some years ago, he authored a blog post lamenting the moral impropriety of a guy who dented his car in a parking lot and drove off. If Coyne is right that there is no free will and we are meat machines, then all that happened is that a meat machine in a car machine collided with a parked car machine owned by a subsequently unhappy meat machine. If free will isn’t real, the guy who hit Coyne’s car and drove off is no more morally culpable than the car he was driving. Coyne, in his justified moral indignation at the other driver’s moral lapse, affirms his own belief in free will, at least free will in parking lots.

But my chastising someone for hitting my car does not mean I’ve sneakily “affirmed free will ,” nor did I say it at the time. If you read my post, I say nothing about free will or morality. Instead, I talk about selfish and altruistic behaviors, though I could have used “immoral” in the way I construe above. It makes no difference, for what I call “selfish”, “altruistic” or “immoral” has nothing to do with libertarian free will. “Sidey” continues:

Second, in some sense Coyne is right that I am making an argumentum ad populum. But it is actually better understood as an argumentum ad omnes — I’m arguing that everyone believes in free will, including Coyne. I’m saying that Coyne doesn’t walk his talk. On the one hand, he writes sophistry denying free will and on the other hand, he rails at the moral reprobate who dented his fender. In general, his blog is full of moral proclamations — Coyne is a moralizing scold on everything you can imagine. Of course, the fact that Coyne doesn’t really believe his own arguments against free will doesn’t prove that the arguments are wrong. But, as Carl Sagan noted, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Coyne’s claim that every human being, including Coyne himself, is always wrong about the experience of free will is a very extraordinary claim, for which Coyne offers no ordinary, let alone extraordinary, evidence. My suggestion to Coyne is: if you want to be taken seriously in your denial of free will, stop invoking morality. Walk your talk.

Note the “I” in the first sentence, which seems to come not from a “Jenni Sidey” but from Egnor himself.  Once again, if I, Jerry, criticize or praise someone, that doesn’t mean I believe in libertarian free will. I may not have been able to do something other than criticize or praise, but merely deeming something good or bad is not a “choice” I made freely. I had no such choice.  I am constituted so as to defend actions I think are salubrious and damn those that I deem harmful.  I do not understand why “Sidey” doesn’t get this—it’s not rocket science.

Anyway, you have probably concluded that “Jenni Sidey” is none other than Michael Egnor himself, perhaps writing under a pseudonym. And you’d be partly right: all the words in that article do indeed come from Egnor, as I found out when I got a second pingback from the Discovery Institute site Mind Matters—this time to a piece identical to “Sidey’s” at the Skeptic Society Magazine site, but written by Egnor himself (click screenshot to read:

So yes, Egnor did write the talk at the Skeptic Society Magazine site.  But who, then, is Jenni Sidey? Is she a pseudonym for Egnor himself, writing at Skeptic Society Magazine, or was the article stolen by Skeptic Magazine and given another title?

It turns out it’s the second possibility.  First, there is no record on the Internet of a Jenni Sidey, though there is a Canadian astronaut named Jenni Sidey-Gibbons, but this is clearly not the person who wrote the Skeptic Magazine article—and several other articles in the magazine on unrelated topics, so it’s clear that the author is not a real person, much less the Canadian astronaut. But is it a pseudonym for Egnor?

I don’t think so. What seems to be the case is that Skeptic Society Magazine is simply plagiarizing articles from other places and changing the author to a nonexistent “Jenni Sidey.” That is outright plagiarism: attributing Egnor’s words to someone else (“written by Jenni Sidey”). That’s why I archived the article as well as the one below, because it’s proof that Skeptic Society Magazine is engaged in wholesale plagiarism.

You can see the plagiarism simply by Googling sentences from Jenni Sidey’s articles and seeing where they came from.  Here’s another article that was plagiarized; it came from the site Artnews.com and you can read it by clicking on the link below:

Here are the first two paragraphs of Vollaard’s article:

Weaving may be the world’s oldest way of reproducing information—and computing is poised to become its final one. Across millennia, surprising similarities persist: both media operate on binary logic (over/under, on/off), are intrinsically based on counting, and are characterized by patterns that emerge structurally, not on the surface. In fact, the first automated machine, the Jacquard machine, was a loom, and weaving was a favorite metaphor employed by Ada Lovelace while she was working with early computers and algorithms. Even language betrays this lineage: etymologically, before “text” became “textual,” it was “textile.”

Diné weaver Marilou Schultz has been probing the harmonies and dissonances between these technologies since the 1960s. Her first retrospective opens this week at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in upstate New York, where curator Candice Hopkins has brought together some 55 works, threading them together with contextual archival materials. The show highlights Schultz’s range as a weaver, from her command of traditional styles to her penchant for formal experimentation, and hones in on one subject that has preoccupied her practice over the last thirty years: computer chips.

And it’s easy to find that Lua Vollaard is a real person. But Jenni Sidey, on the Skeptic Society Magazine site, has plagiarized Vollaard’s piece, too. Click below to see the plagiarism, which I’ve archived here. Note that “Sidey” has changed the title of the article, but the content is the same:


“Sidey’s” first two paragarphs are identical to those of Vollaard’s piece. This is big-time plagiarism, attributing Vollaard’s words to someone else.

Weaving may be the world’s oldest way of reproducing information—and computing is poised to become its final one. Across millennia, surprising similarities persist: both media operate on binary logic (over/under, on/off), are intrinsically based on counting, and are characterized by patterns that emerge structurally, not on the surface. In fact, the first automated machine, the Jacquard machine, was a loom, and weaving was a favorite metaphor employed by Ada Lovelace while she was working with early computers and algorithms. Even language betrays this lineage: etymologically, before “text” became “textual,” it was “textile.”

Diné weaver Marilou Schultz has been probing the harmonies and dissonances between these technologies since the 1960s. Her first retrospective opens this week at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in upstate New York, where curator Candice Hopkins has brought together some 55 works, threading them together with contextual archival materials. The show highlights Schultz’s range as a weaver, from her command of traditional styles to her penchant for formal experimentation, and hones in on one subject that has preoccupied her practice over the last thirty years: computer chips.

Note again the authorship: “written by Jenni Sidey.”

What can we conclude? First, that Egnor is not writing at a different place using a pseudonym.  Second, that “Jenni Sidey” is a pseudonym—for someone who re-publishes articles stolen from other places, and attributing them to an author at Skeptic Society Magazine. (I haven’t checked “Jenni’s” other articles, but you can bet that they are also stolen from elsewhere and given Jenni’s name as an author.)

The upshot:  Skeptic Society Magazine is engaged in wholesale plagiarism. Nowhere does it say that it’s republishing articles from other sites and giving them a new author.  Real authors, like Egnor and Vollaard, should go after the magazine for stealing their words. Readers might want to investigate the website and see if other authors’ words are being stolen.

And of course this form of plagiarism is IMMORAL, whether or not you believe in libertarian free will.  The magazine should first admit what it did, and then vanish.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 26, 2026 • 8:30 am

We can keep going for two days after this, but if you got photos, please send ’em. Thanks.

Today’s batch is from Ephraim Heller, continuing his photos from a recent trip to Namibia. Ephraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his pictures by clicking on them. Don’t miss the chameleon with its tongue extended!

Today I continue my series on a May-June 2026 visit to Namibia. I’m organizing the posts by habitat, in the order of our visits, so that you get a sense of the ecosystems. My last post focused on the Namib desert. This post focuses on my next destination, Swakopmund, a cold, fog-covered town along the Namib desert’s Atlantic coast.

Annual rainfall is less than 20 mm, but the town experiences ~180 days/year of thick fog, generated offshore when the cold Benguela Current contacts warm desert air. The fog typically settles in the early morning hours and burns off by mid-morning. The fog provides moisture that enables some vegetation to grow in a strip along the ocean. In addition, there is a small, brackish estuary at the mouth of the ephemeral Swakop River that supports marine birds. This photo, taken with my iPhone on an after-dinner stroll from a restaurant to our hotel, gives you a sense of the fog:

A herd of dromedary camels (Camelus dromedarius) grazing along the shoreline often startles visitors to Swakopmund. Dromedaries are not native to Africa. The species was domesticated on the southeastern Arabian Peninsula about 4,000 years ago and has not occurred naturally in the wild for nearly 2,000 years. They were imported to Namibia by the German colonial troops in 1889 for use as military pack animals in what was then German South West Africa. The animals I saw grazing along the shore are used by a local company for tourist rides. This is a handsome individual:

However, not everyone gets to ride the camels:

The most impressive aspect of our stay in Swakopmund was a short “living desert” safari. A guide took us on a walk and drive in the sand dunes immediately around the town. Where I saw pristine sand, the guide saw the telltale marks of animals burrowed in the sand.

The first individual he unearthed was a desert sidewinding adder (Bitis peringueyi), a small, ambush predator. The one he found was about 15 cm (6 in) in length. The eyes are positioned on top of the head rather than on the sides, adapted to allow the adder to bury itself in loose sand, leaving only the eyes exposed at the surface while waiting for prey. Prey includes sand lizards and barking geckos, which also provide most of the adder’s water needs. I took these close-up photos with my macro lens – kids, don’t try this at home:

Next, our guide uncovered a buried Namib sand gecko (Pachydactylus rangei), certainly the most charismatic of the desert critters. The large feet with webbed toes are good for running on loose sand and for excavating burrows. They burrow into dunes by day to escape the heat, emerging after dark to hunt insects and spiders.

These geckos also emerge during fog events and allow droplets to condense on their skin, then lick water from their own faces and bodies. In 2021 researchers reported that P. rangei produces a neon-green biofluorescence under UV and moonlight conditions using a new mechanism in terrestrial vertebrates. I wish I had known this at the time so I could have photographed them under moonlight. Regardless, these are clearly very happy creatures:

Of course, no visit to the Namib desert dunes is complete without a FitzSimon’s burrowing skink (Typhlacontias brevipes). The FBS is blind, legless, just a few inches long, and spends its entire life burrowed in the sand. The species has reduced eyes without eyelids and no visible external ear openings. It detects prey (ants, termites, ant-lions, and small beetles) by sensing the vibrations they produce when moving through sand:

Finally, our living desert guide found surface critter: a Namaqua chameleon (Chamaeleo namaquensis). The Namaqua chameleon is one of the largest chameleons in southern Africa (up to 25 cm or 9.8 in), and unusual in the family for being terrestrial rather than arboreal. In the early morning, this chameleon darkens to near black to maximize heat uptake; as body temperature rises, it lightens toward grey-brown to reduce absorption. Water is obtained through the diet, from morning dew, and through hygroscopic skin that absorbs moisture by capillary action (wow!). Nasal salt glands excrete excess sodium chloride and potassium, allowing salts to be processed without renal water loss:

The eyes can move independently, looking in different directions:

The tail is shorter than those of arboreal chameleons, and has lost its prehensile abilities:

The guide had some mealworms with which to entice the chameleon. It’s tongue was so fast its movement was hard to see with the naked eye:

Now for the birds. First up, a colorful common waxbill (Estrilda astrild):

Next, a common but lovely speckled pigeon (Columba guinea) with an excellent hair stylist and makeup artist:

A portrait of another common but colorful bird, the helmeted guinea fowl (Numida meleagris). This one looks pensive:

We took a tourist boat cruise to see the Cape fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus) colony near Walvis Bay. The Cape fur seal population along the southwest African coast is estimated at 1.5 – 2 million animals, roughly two-thirds of which occur along the Namibian coast.

Cape fur seals are eared seals (family Otariidae) rather than true seals. Unlike true seals, which move on land by undulating their bodies, otariids can rotate their hind flippers forward and walk on all four limbs, giving them considerably more agility.

During breeding season, bulls fight to establish territories and maintain harems of 5 to 25 females. A bull may lose nearly half his body mass over the six-week breeding season without leaving his territory to feed. Mothers leave their pups on shore while they feed in the ocean. When they return to shore, mothers and pups find each other by making unique vocalizations, amazing in colonies of tens of thousands of animals.

Seal colonies on land are predated by black-backed jackals and brown hyenas, who target pups. At sea, they are preyed upon by white sharks and killer whales. Here’s a photo from the boat:

I’ll have more cape fur seal photos in a future post.

Our guide on the boat feeds fish to the great white pelicans (Pelecanus onocrotalus). While I don’t support baiting, one of the pelicans landed on the boat for its free meal, enabling me to get this portrait:

Friday: Hili dialogue

June 26, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, June 26, 2026 and National Barcode Day, a great innovation that is now universally used.

Barcodes became commercially successful after they were adopted to automate supermarket checkout systems, a task for which they have become almost universal. The Uniform Grocery Product Code Council had chosen, in 1973, the barcode design developed by George Laurer. Laurer’s barcode, with vertical bars, printed better than the circular barcode developed by Woodland and Silver.

And the June 26 date comes from this:

The modern linear Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode (a refined, standardized version) was first used commercially when a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum was scanned at a supermarket in Ohio on June 26.
Here’s one example. You can see these at all stores, in hospitals, where they’re on your wristband, and on my faculty ID card, which I scan at the library to retrieve or check out books.
toguro, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

There are many other types of abstract codes shown on the Wikipedia page, but the barcode above is the most popular.  Imagine how much it improved the lives of cashiers!

It’s also National Canoe Day (in Canada), National Chocolate Pudding Day, National Cream Tea Day, and National Coconut Day.

Speaking of coconuts, here is a Presidential candidate who brought “great joy” to Democrats a while back. How deluded they were!

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

Footy news:  It was a bad day for Team U.S.A. soccer fans, as we lost 3-2 to Turkey in a squeaker:

Mauricio Pochettino said he was happy. He said it in English, he said it in his native Spanish. He swore he was happy.

He didn’t sound happy. And really, there wasn’t much of a reason to be.

A little more than an hour before his post-match press conference in the bowels of SoFi Stadium, Pochettino watched his USA team give up a last-second goal to Turkey that ensured a 3-2 defeat in this final match of the group stage. A weakened US side – nine changes were made from the team that faced Australia last week in Seattle – had scored quickly, gave up two first-half goals and then equalized in a strong second half.

But a goal from Kaan Ayhan, scored with the last kick of the game, handed the US its first defeat after two dominant victories to open the tournament. And with it, he may have ended the honeymoon for this USA team.

Pochettino’s surly mood after the game – brushing off questions about momentum, chastising American journalists for not congratulating him for winning Group D – was a marked change from the gregarious figure who sat in the same chair a little more than 24 hours before. The question now is if that mood was indicative of the vibes around this US team changing ahead of the knockout stages now that the bubble of invincibility has been popped.

U.S.A. is still in the knockout round, which means that the American team could still win the World Cup. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. Here are the highlights, with goals on the video at 1:30, 2:37, 5:10, 8:27, and Turkey’s last-minute winning goal at 14:43:

*The death toll in two big earthquakes that struck Venezuela on Wednesday keeps rising, and now it’s over 160.

Rescue teams clawed through collapsed buildings across Venezuela on Thursday in a desperate hunt for survivors after two powerful earthquakes left at least 164 people dead, with thousands more feared dead.

The U.S. Geological Survey warned the earthquake had the potential to become one of the deadliest and costliest in the country’s history, projecting a death toll in the tens of thousands and billions of dollars in losses.

Felt as far away as Brazil and Colombia, the quakes were the strongest to hit Venezuela in more than a century, ripping through a country already battered by years of economic collapse and political turmoil just as Washington was trying to stabilize the South American nation. The quakes were measured at magnitude 7.2 and 7.5.

At least 100 buildings collapsed in the worst-hit coastal state of La Guaira, according to the United Nations, while at least 10 buildings were toppled in the capital Caracas some 20 miles south. Nearly 1,000 people were injured in the quakes, according to an initial estimate by Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez early Thursday.

The U.S., China and countries from Germany to Qatar rushed to pledge support, but damaged roads and bridges, power outages and the closure of the country’s main international airport have complicated early rescue efforts.

President Trump said the U.S. stood “ready, willing, and able to help” and had ordered federal agencies to prepare a rapid response. The reconstruction effort is also expected to create opportunities for Washington and U.S. companies to play a larger role in rebuilding Venezuela after years of Chinese influence. The Defense Department is expected to play a major part.

Venezuela has been in a fragile political transition since U.S. forces captured President Nicolás Maduro in January, leaving Rodríguez, who has worked with the Trump administration to reopen the country’s oil sector, now facing the daunting task of leading the disaster response.

I have no editorial comment on this save to say that it’s horrible. As of this morning, the death toll is 188 and the headline says “thousands feared dead.”

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal reports that Iran’s “Hacker in Chief” was killed in March.

For more than two years, a barefoot cartoon boy was the mascot of “Handala,” a self-described pro-Palestinian hacktivist collective that leaked the private photos of Israeli generals, wiped the servers of a Fortune 500 company, and broke into the personal inbox of the FBI director. The group insisted it was a grassroots resistance movement. It was not—and the IRGC has now confirmed that the man who actually ran it faced kinetic consequences for his digital warfare.

Here’s that mascot:

Seyed Yahya Hosseini Panjaki, who operated under the alias Yahya Hamidi, was killed in early March 2026 during the opening phase of Israel’s strikes on Iran. The Israeli military confirmed he died in a strike on the headquarters of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), part of a wave of precision operations against senior intelligence figures.

What was the leader of a grassroots hacktivist collective doing inside Iran’s intelligence nerve center? The answer is that he had never really been one. As Western intelligence had long suspected, “Handala” was a front for the MOIS. Cybersecurity firm Check Point named the underlying unit Void Manticore; others label it Banished Kitten, Storm-0842, Dune, Red Sandstorm, or TAG-145. The names differ, but they converge on the same entity: a state cyber-warfare unit embedded within Iran’s intelligence ministry.

Yesterday, for the first time, an IRGC-linked channel publicly tied Panjaki to the leadership of the hacking operation—a rare instance of Tehran acknowledging what Western intelligence had assessed for years. His death marks one of the most significant blows in years to Iran’s cyber-espionage apparatus and its overseas covert-operations network.

Handala surfaced in December 2023, just weeks after October 7, taking its name and imagery from the barefoot child drawn by Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali in 1969, a symbol of the Palestinian national movement. Early posts cast the group as “a small fighter” aligned with Hamas before it pivoted to broader anti-Israel and anti-American messaging.

Its notoriety came from a relentless cadence of breaches and leaks designed to humiliate Iran’s enemies. In April 2026, it published what it said were more than 19,000 confidential images and videos pulled over years from the phone of former IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi—including imagery from undisclosed meetings abroad. Earlier leaks targeted former PM Naftali Bennett, former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, Netanyahu’s chief of staff Tzachi Braverman, and figures such as Benny Gantz and Natan Sharansky.

In March 2026, it claimed to have breached the personal Gmail of FBI Director Kash Patel. Washington, in response, offered up to $10 million for information on the group’s members. The most consequential operation, however, was a destructive wiper attack on Stryker Corporation, the Michigan-based Fortune 500 medical-device maker, which reportedly wiped devices across the company’s global footprint—described as the most significant wartime cyberattack ever carried out against the United States.

Panjaki’s reach went well beyond cyber, into the wider machinery of Iran’s “grey-zone” warfare; that murky space that is neither open war nor peace, where a state attacks its enemies but stays just below the line that would trigger a military or legal response.

In Iran’s case—and Panjaki’s specifically—that meant operations to assassinate Iranian dissidents living abroad, along with kidnappings and sabotage against regime opponents and Israeli targets around the world. His fingerprints are on a recent wave of Iranian plots that hire local criminal gangs to attack Jewish targets globally—schemes that have been broken up in Spain, the United Kingdom, Australia, and even Sweden. That outsourcing is a microcosm of the whole grey-zone game: by paying a hired crew to do the killing instead of using its own officers, Tehran can deny involvement, make the attack hard to trace back, and slow down any response.

As the article says, cyberwarfare is sometimes ambiguous under international law. As Grok told me, “Cyber operations that cause (or are reasonably likely to cause) physical damage to property, loss of life, or injury to persons — directly or indirectly — generally qualify as a prohibited use of force.” And operations to kill people in other countries or attempts to kill or kidnap “regime opponents” or non-combatants in other countries clearly violate that. The report that Punjaki faces “kinetic consequences” of his actions includes a euphemism I’ve not heard before. 

*You may well have heard about the terrible heat wave that’s affecting Europe. At first I thought it was just warm-on-the-verge-of-hot, and that Europeans simply couldn’t tolerate high temperatures, but no, it’s worse than that: it’s really hot, and Europe, lacking extensive air-conditioning, is experiences deaths by both heat and water:

As Europe broiled under heat that is testing the continent’s ability to adapt to extreme weather, temperatures in Britain on Thursday broke records that were set just a day prior. In southwest England, temperatures of 36.4 degrees Celsius, or 97.5 Fahrenheit, were recorded in the early afternoon and were expected to rise.

The stifling heat wave — the second in two months — has disrupted education, transportation and other aspects of daily life for millions of people, with officials warning that older people or those who work outdoors, like on construction sites, are most vulnerable to the effects of extreme heat.

The heat has also proved deadly.

In Spain, where temperatures soared past 38 degrees Celsius, or 100 Fahrenheit, over several days, government statistical models suggest more than 200 deaths ultimately could be attributed to the heat wave. The institute cautioned that the figures were estimates but officials and experts say there is a clear correlation between extreme temperatures and serious health issues.

In Italy, five people have died from heat exposure this week, according to the country’s main news agency, ANSA. Several of the victims died while they were working outside, and a homeless man died in Naples, highlighting the vulnerability of those who had little choice but to be outside. In France, at least 40 people have drowned since the latest heat wave began in the middle of last week, many of them teenagers swimming in unsupervised areas.

Across much of Western Europe, temperatures remained in the high 30s to low 40s Celsius, or around 100 Fahrenheit, on Thursday afternoon. Paris reached 39.6 Celsius, or 103.3 Fahrenheit, and was forecast to reach 42 Celsius later in the day.

More than a dozen countries were under high-level heat warnings on Thursday, including Austria, Belgium, Britain, Croatia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Serbia and Sweden.

Extreme weather events are becoming increasingly common and severe because of climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels, experts say.

Europe is warming faster than any other continent, including in countries that are some of the least accustomed to extreme heat. In Britain and France, for instance, many buildings don’t just lack air conditioning — they are also designed to retain heat.

Today is clearly a day to feel sorry for people in both Europe and South America who are victims of circumstances beyond their control (though of course global warming is anthropogenic). Here’s a temperature map for yesterday from Fox Weather. Look at those temperatures in France!

*In one of the first Supreme Court decisions that will soon come out on Trump’s actions, the Justices have voted along ideological lines to allow Trump to deport immigrants temporarily here for humanitarian reasons.

The Trump administration can cancel temporary humanitarian protections for Haitian and Syrian immigrants living legally in the United States, the Supreme Court found on Thursday, a decision that could allow the government to deport hundreds of thousands of people starting this year.

The effects are likely to be immediate and ripple beyond Haitians and Syrians to affect approximately 1.3 million immigrants from 17 countries who had temporary protected status when President Donald Trump took office. Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has sought to eliminate protections for 13 of those countries, including Haiti, Syria and several others that the State Department considers highly dangerous.

In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the conservative justices found that courts do not have authority to review determinations by DHS to end temporary protected status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants.

Congress created temporary protected status (TPS) in 1990 to shield immigrants in the United States from being deported to countries engulfed in armed conflict, a natural disaster or another extraordinary crisis, allowing them to work legally in the U.S. for up to 18 months.

Applicants to the program cannot have serious criminal records, and they must pay fees and pass a background check.

The U.S. government can renew the protections — and it has, multiple times, for several countries. That has provoked criticism from Trump and his base for allowing the provisional status to last for years, even decades.

“Keep in mind, this is temporary protected status,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court during oral arguments in April. “The word temporary is used again and again in the statute, including its title.”

The cases tested a key part of Trump’s immigration agenda, which has not only sought to deport undocumented immigrants but also to narrow the legal pathways for immigrants to reside in the U.S.

. . . The justices also decidedThursday that migrants on the Mexican side of the southern border are not entitled to apply for asylum.

I presume that the migrants in the last sentence above also refer to those fleeing Haiti and Syria.  I can understand why Haitians want to apply for asylum, as that country is lawless, poor, and dangerous, but unless you have a personal or political reason to fear recriminations, you don’t qualify for permanent asylum.  Of course many migrants claiming asylum are immigrating for economic reasons, but it still seems coldhearted to, say, deport Haitians back to a moribund country that’s dangerous for everyone. On the other hand, these were legally temporary visas, and the government can do what it wants. Because of the Democrats’ total failure to do anything about immigration, I have mixed feelings about this decision.  Other decisions coming up are clearer to me, like birthright citizenship, which Trump tried to ban but is clearly described as a right the Constitution.

*And more on the upcoming Congresswoman who is, according to National Review author Charles Cooke, nuts (this seems to be a consensus). The article: “Darializa Avila Chevalier is an enemy of the American creed.”

Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is now the Democratic Party’s candidate for New York’s 13th congressional district, has some rather ambitious goals. She wishes to prevent all deportations of illegal immigrants, irrespective of the severity of the crimes they have committed; she hopes to abolish prisons entirely, including for convicted murderers; and — oh yes, this one jumped out at me — she is “fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization.” “Our intifada,” she said two years ago, while at Columbia (where else?), “is an Internationalist one.”

I see. Question: Do I get a vote on that?

I ask because, all told, that seems somewhat extreme. Western civilization is me. It’s my wife and children. It’s my town, my state, my country. It’s the Constitution to which I have taken an oath. “Intifada,” in Arabic, means “to shake off.” Were Western civilization to be shaken off, all that I cherish would fall with it. I’m against that.

By and large, I am an ecumenical sort of chap. I have strong political views, but they are grounded in a classically liberal outlook and an understanding that pluralism is the fastest road to peace. “Intifada,” however, is not on my bingo card. Which leads me to wonder how I am supposed to react to this. In recent years, calls such as Chevalier’s have become common within the DSA set, and yet I have noticed that they engender far less outrage than other provocative views that seem comparatively innocuous. In the present era, at least, there seems to exist an assumption not only that the progressive movement will occasionally go completely crazy, but that when it does, it should be treated as if it were filled with impetuous children. Thus we are expected to ignore the fact that many current candidates for office embraced abolishing the police or suggested that white people are a virus or waved around a Hamas headband while insisting that 9/11 was America’s fault — and to ignore them on the grounds that those words were uttered in the past, as if the mere passage of time grants one immunity, provided that one is really left-wing.

Well, it doesn’t. Chevalier is seeking a federal position in the federal legislature that makes the federal laws by which I am bound. And she is crazy. For various reasons, a good number of our commentators seem to have become inured to this, so let me say it once again in slightly different words: Pretty much nobody who has lived in the United States during its 250-year history would ever, under any circumstances, have said or thought that they were “fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization.” I am not talking here about Congress, which is a much smaller subset. I am talking about the entire population of this country, from sea to shining sea, in every moment since the convention at Philadelphia. Chevalier’s declarations are the product of a diseased mind. They represent an unequivocal confirmation that the speaker is incapable of participating in society and of engaging with her fellow citizens on equal terms. So far as I can tell, she has never had a job outside of left-wing activism, which is appropriate, because her worldview ought to make her unemployable in every other arena. That her foray into the world of work may be as one of 435 U.S. representatives defies belief.

The literal answer to my question — “Do I get a vote?” — is that I do not. Thankfully, I do not live in New York’s 13th congressional district. But I do get to decide whether to tolerate this trend as if it were a curiosity or a foible or, instead, to use my voice to characterize it for what it is. I choose the latter. There is nothing charming or interesting or harmless about Darializa Avila Chevalier. She is not amusing. She is an enemy of the American creed. Those who wish to keep the sickness that she represents from spreading outside of New York ought to begin the process of repudiation posthaste.

Avila Chevalier is the most extreme Democratic candidate I’ve seen, but yes, the Democrats have a tendency to excuse lunatics like her because, after all, Trump is worse.  That is likely true because, after all, she will probably be only a Representative while Trump as President has immense power. But I for one don’t want a less extreme “progressive” like AOC as President, and it’s likely that neither do other Americans, including many Democrats positioned more towards the center. It’s a Hobson’s choice, but at least we should have the guts to call out lunacy and irrationality when we see it in in our party. Or are the Democratic Socialists really our party (see third tweet below)?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Editor has lost patience with Andrzej’s parsing of words:

Hili: Don’t you have any other problems than arguing over whether the sentence should use the word “more quietly” or the phrase “less firmly”?
Andrzej: At the moment, no.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy wy nie macie innych problemów jak spierać się o to, czy w zdaniu ma być słowo „ciszej”, czy określenie „mniej stanowczo”?
Ja: Chwilowo, nie.

Photo by D. M.

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

From Funny and Strange Signs:

Another great medieval letter from TherionArms:

From: CinEmma:

Masih is quiet today, but The Number Ten Cat, clad in fur, is beefing about the heat:

From Jeff Maurer, highlighted yesterday morning:

From the DSA co-chair. That party is no longer hiding its aims, so shouldn’t it count as a third party?

One I screwed up trying to repost yesterday:

Two from my feed. First, an elephant is born and the herd helps it to its feet:

This is a wonderful rescue, marred only by the fact that the rescuers were out to kill other animals. Still, they are heroes of a sort:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Dr. Cobb; wonderful pipefish:

Two very different-looking ghost pipefish. Sometimes it can be very difficult to determine the exact species, as there’s a lot of visual overlap between halimeda, robust, and velvet.#ghostpipefish #tulamben #tulambenbali #muckdiving #scubadiving

— Chris Gug (@gugunderwater.bsky.social) 2026-06-24T12:25:50.386Z

A bull-goose looney: one of the three Mamdani-endorsed Democratic Socialists who will likely sit in Congress

June 25, 2026 • 9:45 am

If you follow political news at all, you’ll know that three Democratic candidates, all progressives and all endorsed by Bernie Sanders and NYC antisemite mayor Zohran Mamdani, just won their primaries. And with New York being a Democratic state, that means that, with near certainty, they’ll all be seated in Congress next year.

Let’s talk about the youngest and craziest one, a Democratic Socialist with no experience and a past that is, to put it mildly, checkered. As The Atlantic notes:

The mayor made a much bigger bet in backing Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist challenging Espaillat, a five-term incumbent whom Mamdani had initially promised to endorse. Avila Chevalier has taken positions that could make her the most far-left Democrat elected to Congress in the past decade; she has said that “all deportations are wrong,” describes herself as a prison abolitionist, and attended a rally on the day after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that was widely perceived as expressing support for the attack. (Lander, who now accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, condemned the event at the time.) Avila Chevalier narrowly defeated Espaillat, who had the support of Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, among other establishment figures.

Now left-centrist and centrist Democrats, like me, might be distressed by this, as all the winning candidates were not only “progressives” (we need a new word for that ilk), but also opponents of Israel, desiring Palestine to expand from the river to the sea, forcing Jews to don inner tubes.  But perhaps Avila Chevalier’s kind of lunacy is limited to deep-blue states like New York, so Jews don’t need to start applying for citizenship in Israel.  Still, the Democrats as a whole are turning against the only democratic country in the Middle East, and that’s worrisome. When they get power, like Avila Chevalier, it’s more worrisome.

One reaction is to wring your hands and wail. Another, which is a purgative, is sarcasm, and that’s the direction Jeff Maurer takes in his website post below. Read and laugh (or weep). Quotes are indented, and I quote in extenso because the guy is good and may induce literal LOL:

It’s funny and might offend some, but look at her record (this was written before she won):

How crazy is Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Zohran Mamdani-backed socialist trying to unseat incumbent Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th congressional district in the Democratic primary today? Well…how much time do you have? My challenge in this article is not to establish that Chevalier is crazy; my challenge is to find words to describe just how bonkers this Cirque du Soleil-level shit shows truly is.

Like virtually every socialist candidate, Avila Chevalier has a social media feed full of statements crazy enough to make their as-yet-unborn descendents [sic] feel shame. Here are some of her greatest hits:

  • She called for abolishing police, prisons, and borders.
  • She clarified her position on defunding the police by writing that her vision “means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever.”
  • She retweeted posts saying “yes, literally abolish the border” and “all deportation is wrong”.
  • She called the United States “a fucking disgrace”, referred to the US as “occupied” Native American land, and joked about wiping her dirty hands on the American flag.
  • She wrote favorably about communism, wrote “seize the means of production”, called for nationalizing utilities, pharmaceutical companies, and “seiz[ing] all properties from landlords”, and wrote that “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me.”
  • She called Joe Biden a “rapist” and a “war criminal” and said she wouldn’t vote for him, said “fuck Kamala Harris”, and criticized Bernie Sanders and AOC for being too pro-Israel.
  • She retweeted a post saying “Israel doesn’t exist”.
  • She wrote that Black and Arab men “[fetishize] ugly colonizer women”.

This type of stuff is why I’ve argued that we need to bring back the word “retard”. “Moron” or “ninny” doesn’t capture the intensity of what we’re dealing with here — those words are a pea shooter when we need an elephant gun. And, just as I use the words “moron” and “idiot” in a non-literal way, my use of “retard” does not refer to anyone with a cognitive impairment, but only to people who could lead normal lives but choose to have cognition similar to that of an oyster or a termite-infested log.

That being said: Chevalier’s posts are deep retard stuff. This is a type of retard that we don’t normally encounter; physicists have previously only theorized that this level of retardation might exist somewhere in the universe. Beyond the event horizon of this level of retard, the laws of space-time are ripped apart, and each new particle of retard that crosses the event horizon destroys intelligence somewhere else in the universe. Chevalier is less of a politician and more of fascinating phenomenon of the physical world — kind of like the Higgs-Boson particle or Ötzi the Iceman — and every newspaper should be running Pearl Harbor-sized headlines that read “QUANTUM RETARD ACHIEVED!!!”

Chevalier says that she has “grown considerably” since those tweets. She also hilariously accused her opponent of “re-litigating social media posts from half a decade ago” — yeah, who can even remember as far back as half a decade!?!?!? Half a decade ago is the early 2020s, a mostly-forgotten, black-and-white era so antiquated that many of us had slightly different haircuts and our around-the-house jeans were still our out-on-the-town jeans. Five years ago, I was a Mormon communist who thought that the global economy was run by the Keebler Elves — just like everybody back then!!! It was the early ‘20s, baby! Chevalier wants us to believe that people change dramatically in five years, and would also like us to elect her to represent a D+32 district, which has an expected incumbency period of 70-90 years.

Go listen to the embedded video in which she recounts the “apartheid” she witnessed when visiting the West Bank and Israel. (I should add that people never explain what they mean by Israel’s apartheid, especially given that 20% of Israeli citizen are Arabs, and of course totally neglect the serious apartheid of Palestine and other Arab states. How many Jews live in Gaza–a land that used to be almost completely Jewish? What would happen to a Jew who wished to live in Gaza?)

But wait! There’s more! (And do look at her interview in New York magazine.)

It actually seems that Chevalier hasn’t changed her extreme views at all. The New York Editorial Board tried to get Chevalier to sanewash her position on prison abolition — they did the thing that Fox News does with Trump where they try to walk him towards sanity but he stubbornly refuses — but Chevalier couldn’t give a straight answer to questions as simple as “What happens to the murderer?” Chevalier has maintained that it is always wrong to deport anyone, even if they’ve committed a crime. And Chevalier failed to get the endorsement of a left-wing New York group (that endorsed Zohran Mamdani) because when they met with her, she “[refused] to condemn Hamas or anything about it.” (my emphasis!) Really…she didn’t have any criticisms of Hamas? Not even, like…the outfits? Just “five stars, no notes” across the board? Even Sgt. Pepper has a few ho-hum tracks — the fact that Chevalier couldn’t find anything to criticize about Hamas forces me to conclude that she’s either unbelievably ignorant or should be contained by some sort of Hannibal Lecter-type prison setup.

So, pick you adjective of choice — “half-wit”, “lunatic”, “certified, notarized nut job” — this person should obviously not have power. I think that anyone who votes for a candidate like Chevalier should have to wear a diaper and a frilly bonnet, and be made to skip around town holding a big lolly and singing “I went boom boom at the ballot box!” Because that is just how egregiously that person has shirked their responsibilities as an adult. I could only imaging voting for Chevalier in the unlikely event that her opponent was somehow worse, such as if she was running against Reanimated Hitler or a robot programmed to skin and eat every human it encounters.

Maurer gives Avila Chevalier his highest rating for lunacy: five Marjorie Greenes.

In another post on his site, Maurer concludes this:

But now for the bad news: These three — especially Chevalier — are a glorious gift to Republican flaks. What Michael Jordan was to Nike, Chevalier is to anyone whose job is to portray Democrats as radical, anti-America lunatics. And that is because she is a radical, anti-America lunatic; I hope normie Democrats loudly denounce her bullshit instead of trying to sanewash it [JAC: remember the sanctification of Kamala Harris?). I would also remind Democrats that considerations about party unity and maintaining a big tent don’t really apply when the core thesis of the person you’re dealing with is that you, personally, are a corrupt monster who is abetting genocide. In fact, you look like a dickless loser when Chevalier calls you a handmaiden of the Epstein class and you respond by saying “I’m more focused on opposing the failed presidency of Donald Trump.”

I also think that this makes the AOC presidential run that I’m dreading like a prostate exam during an earthquake more likely. For starters: Socialists are riding high, they’ll surely want to turn that (real or perceived) mojo into a presidential run. And it’s also probably true that Chevalier is such a freak show that AOC looks downright stateswoman-like in comparison. There is a (maybe true) story that the actress Marlene Dietrich wanted to appear in a scene with a camel because juxtaposing her with a camel would make her look beautiful. I think the same logic applies here; AOC seems sensible when compared to one of the most delusional weirdos our society has ever produced.

And one of the main downsides of an AOC presidential run also just got worse: Democrats will face pressure to take unpopular policy positions. It will be 2020 all over again; we’ll recreate the dynamic of that year’s primary, in which Pete Buttigeig was denounced as a neoliberal monster because he only wanted to create a public health care option (that would not have passed in a zillion parallel universes). The DSA will have a laundry list of terrible ideas, and they’ll push candidates to speak to those ideas, and some candidates will take the bait and make the Democratic brand so toxic that candidates would be better off running as part of the Anal Bleaching For Seniors Party.

Finally, there’s the rather banal belief that our country should not be governed by crazy people. I really am baffled by people who say “This is our Tea Party!” in a positive way!!! The Tea Party was bad! It’s a problem that our government contains so many delusional nincompoops! And that problem got a little worse yesterday. Time will tell just how bad this development turns out to be, but — in the immortal words of Pete Campbell — it’s not great, Bob!

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Below is the candidate explaining all her old “bad tweets”.  She deleted her entire Twitter account but doesn’t really apologize for her sentiments. Instead, she fabricates “regrets” about her past language, saying “I certainly wouldn’t use a lot of language that I used back then today. If you think she’s recanted the views that she expressed in that language, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you.  In another radio interview, conducted in Spanish, she walked out in a huff when confronted with those old social media posts (there’s a video at the site).

Maurer has a good sense of humor and is willing to tell it like it is. You should read his website, as I’ll be doing as the midterms approach. (His X feed identifies says he “wrote for John Oliver back when his show was…different.”)

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 25, 2026 • 8:20 am

Today we have photos of Finland from ecologist Susan Harrison of UC Davis. Susan’s captions and IDs are indented and you can enlarge them by clicking on them.

Midsummer in the Åland Islands, Finland

On the tiny Åland Islands in the Baltic Sea, humans observe Midsummer Eve in traditional Swedish style.  Towering, vine-decorated maypoles are raised in an hourlong process of pole-pushing and rope-pulling, followed by folk music and dancing.

Midsummer Eve at around 9 pm, Kastelholm, Åland:

Birds, meanwhile, have even more urgent preoccupations than celebrating the summer solstice.  Parents are feeding screaming chicks, who jostle for the front of the chow line.

Mute Swans (Cygnus olor) pulling up seaweed for their cygnets:

Great Crested Grebes (Podiceps cristatus) providing transportation and food delivery:

Common Terns (Sterna hirundo), one pair feeding their sole chick fish and insects, while absent adults at the neighboring nest are awaited by two noisy chicks:

Jackdaws (Coloelus modedula), adult and ravenous juvenile:

Barnacle Geese (Branta leucopsis) defending their young against a passing human:

Black Woodpecker (Dendrocopus major), foraging to feed chicks that I didn’t manage to capture in this picture:

These species all have identical or near-identical sexes who share in raising the young, in contrast to the many bird species in which males are flashier and contribute less at the nest than females.

Thursday: Hili dialogue

June 25, 2026 • 6:26 am

Welcome to Thursday, June 25, 2026, and it’s Bourdain Day, celebrating the affable and engaging Anthony Bourdain, chef, writer, presenter, and foodie traveler, who was born on this day in 1956 (he committed suicide in 2018). Here he is visiting and reviewing the Waffle House:

It’s also Color TV day, celebrating the first color television broadcast on this day in 1951, National Catfish Day, National Strawberry Parfait Day, and Global Beatles Day, explained this way:

The day was founded in 2009 by Faith Cohen. It takes place on June 25th, because that marks the day that the first live satellite production was broadcasted globally. It was a British program titledOur World [1967], and it ended with the Beatles’ performance of “All You Need Is Love”. Artists from nineteen countries were included in the program, and it is estimated that at least 400 million people watched it, which was the largest television audience up until that time.

Here’s the performance (stop it after you’ve heard enough or it will play continuously). Note George Martin in the control ro

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 25 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

Footy News:  Another first: South Africa beat Korea 1-0, advancing to the knockout stage for the first time:

As South Africa’s football team danced the night away in Guadalupe’s Monterrey Stadium after making World Cup history, fans in Johannesburg were celebrating in the streets long before the sun came out and heralded what would become an unparalleled day in the nation’s football history.

Two red cards, one loss, a draw and a win later, South Africa did it all in their group stage matches at the World Cup and advanced to the knockout round of the tournament for the first time.

Thapelo Maseko fired into the net in the 63rd minute to give Bafana Bafana a stunning 1-0 win over South Korea, who now straddle the uncertain line between possible round of 32 qualification or elimination.

Monterrey Stadium will long reverberate with the raw emotions of South Africa fans and players celebrating the win in a fairy-tale ending to their group stage run that began with a disastrous opening match loss for Hugo Broos’ side.

While much of the nation had yet to wake up to the team’s historic achievement, die-hard football fanatics sacrificed sleep to watch the South Korea kickoff at 3am, oblivious to the quiet countdown of history about to be made.

Below are the game’s highlights.  The play that scored the one goal for South Africa begins at 6:13 on the video:

*Is the “progressive” Left, or even their more radical allies, the Democratic Socialists, ready to take over the Democratic Party? That’s what the victory of three Mamdani-endorsed New York Democratic primary candidates suggests, with Mamdani, a man I detest, now described as a “kingmaker”. It’s a scenario that brings chills up my spine.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his allies swept a series of congressional primaries in New York City on Tuesday in a remarkable show of strength for the insurgent left that sent shock waves through the Democratic Party.

Mr. Mamdani’s candidates toppled a pair of incumbents backed by the city’s political establishment, including major labor unions and the House Democratic leader. Another candidate backed by the mayor won an open House seat, and a handful of democratic socialist challengers he supported were winning down the ballot.

For months, Mr. Mamdani threw himself and his energized political organization into the three marquee congressional contests, campaigning late into the night in the race’s final days and calling the election a referendum on the direction of the party.

All the winning candidates share Mr. Mamdani’s progressive economic platform, and they each ran campaigns that focused intently on ending American support for Israel, a sign of how far public opinion has shifted on the issue, even in New York.

Late Tuesday night, the mayor stood beaming at a victory party in Brooklyn, where supporters chanted “Free, free Palestine” and “D.S.A.” After embracing many of the same advisers who led his own successful campaign last year, he declared “a new chapter in our party’s history.”

“A year ago, it was not the end of a political movement,” he said. “It was the beginning.”

Mr. Mamdani’s deep involvement amounted to an audacious gamble for a brand-new mayor trying to lead an already fractious city. He alienated key allies along the way, but the payoffs were far-reaching.

Indeed, and the thought crossed my mind “If I was much younger, I’d contemplate moving to Israel.” Or, as a friend of mine—a long time liberal Democrat but now an independent—emailed me mournfully, “We are homeless.” It’s not just the Jewish Democrats who are becoming homeless, but the centrist Democrats as well. The chant of “Free, free Palestine” at the victory party really means “Erase, erase Israel.” It’s appalling. See the post on one of the victorious Democrats later today.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal tells us about “The peace Washington missed.”

It’s Wednesday, June 24, and there is a famous phrase: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” For Israel, the experience has been closer to “If you want peace, be at war.” While fighting still raged in Gaza, while Israel was striking Syria, and while another war with Iran loomed, peace with two of those countries looked genuinely within reach. Lebanon might finally be rid of Hezbollah; a newly independent Syria might normalize with Israel. Now that the fronts have gone relatively quiet, both of those options are off the table.

At the outset of yesterday’s talks—the fifth round between Lebanon and Israel—Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Leiter remarked that “we all got on the same train.”

“We sat in the same car and traveled to the same destination, with the United States serving as the locomotive. The train was heading in a very clear direction: full peace between the countries, Iran and its malign influence out of Lebanon, the disarmament of Hezbollah, and peace and security for Lebanon and Israel. Today, this train is in danger of derailing. I hope we can get it back on track,” Leiter said.

The truth is, it’s already a wreck. What began in April as a desperate Lebanese effort to stop Israel’s advance on Hezbollah has completely inverted. The supplicant now makes demands: President Joseph Aoun set the tone before talks even started—”we accept nothing less than an end to the Israeli occupation”—and Lebanon is reportedly now pressing for a complete Israeli withdrawal, with Hezbollah’s disarmament looking less and less like a precondition it is willing to accept.

The roads to peace have largely disintegrated because, instead of peace going forth from Jerusalem, it is being dictated by Washington.

. . .Egypt and Saudi Arabia are currently pushing a plan to integrate Hezbollah into the armed forces—which, apart from being unlikely, seems to require a complete Israeli withdrawal as a precondition. It’s unclear whether the plan is even being discussed in higher circles, but the question remains: Why are Egypt and Saudi Arabia effectively helping Iran?

Because, contrary to what some might assume, there are not two axes in the region but three. There is the anti-Iran axis, with Israel at its center; there is the Axis of Resistance, with Iran at its head; and then there is the go-along-to-get-along axis, which includes Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

. . . Personally, I’ve got a suggestion for President Aoun: if you want to regain the south, start with the north and work your way down. Once you’ve reclaimed sovereignty in the Bekaa Valley and Dahiyeh, I’m sure Israel will be happy to hand you the land south of the Litani.

Let us suppose, for a moment, that the U.S. had demanded normalization from Syria as a precondition for sanctions relief, or that it had maintained overt pressure on Iran rather than opening negotiations. There is a real possibility that an Israeli embassy would now be under construction in Damascus—while, with no other option remaining and plenty of regional backing, Hezbollah was being driven out of Beirut. As the vice president has been fond of saying recently, the U.S.’s and Israel’s interests are not always aligned—but I believe that would be a region better for all involved.

It looks like Lebanon is now aligning itself with Hezbollah, and may have plans to use Hezbollah as the Lebanese army, which would be a serious mistake for Lebanon, which used to be a great country and well worth visiting. Now it’s ridden with terrorism that it doesn’t seem keen to expel. As long as Hezbollah’s there, it will be trying to erase Israel.

*The NY Post reports that “Left-leaning Wikipedia blocked founder from editing site—after he campaigned to make it more balanced.”

Left-leaning website Wikipedia has taken the drastic action of permanently blocking one of its founders from editing pages — after he had campaigned to make it more balanced and fair.

Last month, Larry Sanger launched WikiProject Intellectual Diversity (WID), a group designed to help reinforce the online encyclopedia’s “original, firm commitment to intellectual diversity,” by emphasizing neutrality and transparency.

However, Sanger — who coined the name “Wikipedia,” drafted the site’s foundational set of rules and guidelines, and launched the site alongside Jimmy Wales in 2001 — is now indefinitely blocked from editing, the most drastic action the site can take against an editor.

“I am flabbergasted,” Sanger told The Post, saying the decision was made by a group of the site’s volunteer editors. He described the modern Wikipedia community as being like a “mob or a blob,” noting users do not feel obligated to a specific vision of the rules, but rather to each other.

“They are constantly trying to gauge what other people think, and this is the way ultimately these people are able to influence each other,” Sanger said. “Even a lot of the hard and fast policies are regarded as just guidelines if everybody is on board.”

Sanger became unpopular among the site’s most prolific editors for making public calls for those whose viewpoints have typically been underrepresented — Hindus prominently, but also, most pointedly, American conservatives — to be more involved. The exact reason for his blocking was not given.

Wikipedia makes a lot of noise about how its content is created by volunteer users, citing a figure of 267,000 people contributing or editing over the last 30 days on its website.

However, Sanger has long argued the real power rests with a small, largely anonymous class of Wikipedia administrators — who he has identified as being just 62 accounts, which he calls the “Power 62,” of which 85% hide behind their screennames and have never revealed their true identities.

For Sanger, the swiftness of the block highlights a glaring lack of procedural fairness. “There is no due process,” he argued. “People are being blocked—in other words, disciplined—and yet there is no respect for certain expectations that any other serious disciplinary procedure would be held to.”

He likened the platform’s arbitration to being judged by a “faceless mob,” with the absence of basic structural safeguards like a distinct prosecutor, jury, or opportunity to mount a formal defense.

After making the fact he had been blocked public on X Monday, Sanger was permanently banned from Wikipedia and any avenue for appeal was closed by the site.

, , ,The campaign to oust him was instigated by one of the most combative editors on the platform, who goes by the handle TarnishedPath. The same editor was a driving force behind one of the most controversial maneuvers in Wikipedia’s recent history: a 12-month “moratorium” that froze the lead of the site’s “Zionism” article, locking in a sentence that critics — and this reporter, in Tablet Magazine — have documented as effectively equating the movement for Jewish self-determination with ethnic cleansing.

TarnishedPath has been extremely active in gender issues on Wikipedia, pushing strongly to have JK Rowling labeled “anti-trans” or “transexclusionary radical feminist” (TERF). The editor eventually placed a banner on Rowling’s entry alleging it expressed a non-neutral point of view. “She should be referred to as having ‘anti-trans’ or ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’ views,” the editor wrote last June.

Whaddya know? The progressives have taken over Wikipedia!  Luana recommends Grokipedia as an alternative, but I haven’t yet investigated it.  It of course uses AI to write entries.

*The Reflecting Pool Story continues: the latest is that there seems to be no evidence of vandalism that resulted in the pool’s peeling paint and fulminating algae growth.

President Trump says the peeling blue coating and algae blooms that mar his $16.4 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are the fault of vandals working with “knives” in the “dark of night.”

But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that while National Park Service workers found two cuts in sections of foam between the pool’s expansion joints, those were not directly related to the “American flag blue” coating that is now peeling, or to the algae that has turned the pool a bright shade of green.

Even as the documents show workers were attempting to address deteriorating conditions, Trump administration officials were insisting publicly that the pool was pristine.

The pool had been drained, resealed and then refilled by June 5. Four days later, Park Service workers discovered holes, cracks and peeling caulking in parts of the pool, along with cuts in sections of the foam, according to the documents.

The cause of the cuts was unclear. While a June 9 report by the U.S. Park Police described the cuts as “razor blade slashes” made along a 20-foot-long stretch of the foam, the administration has yet to present evidence supporting that assertion. The documents reviewed by The Times described them as two 171-foot blade cuts but did not address how they were made.

By June 16, workers had noticed that chunks of blue sealant that covered the pool’s bottom were peeling and floating to the surface, the documents show. That sealant was separate from the foam in the pool’s expansion joints, which allow its concrete slabs to expand and contract.

The workers had also discovered that some devices installed to kill algae were not working as intended, according to the documents. And enormous algae blooms had turned portions of the pool bright green instead of dark blue.

. . . . Mr. Trump also told reporters on Monday, without offering evidence, that vandals had poured fertilizer into the pool to feed the algae.

Neither the Interior Department nor the White House would provide charging documents, citations or the names of anyone arrested. They did share the Park Police incident report, which said any suspect or suspects were unknown. The report also did not mention any damage to the pool’s blue sealant, nor did it describe any vandals dumping fertilizer.

Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, did not answer specific questions about the government documents but said in an email on Tuesday that the pool was “clear” and “reflecting beautifully.”

I now think that nobody has been arrested, or have been arrested and there’s not enough evidence to mount a case against them.  But I’m still wondering why this one issue is dominating the news!

*Daily anti-Semitism news: NBC News reported that a Jewish congressman in New York has been attacked by and barred from a local coffeeshop because he’s a “genocide enabler”.  He went in to find a restroom for his daughter, and bought about $10 worth of coffee to compensate. He was treated cordially (the man was one of the Democrats who lost to a Mamdani-endorsed candidate), but then got this from the coffee shop:

A New York coffee shop said on Instagram that Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., should never return to it because of his pro-Israel views

The post came just ahead of Tuesday’s primary elections in New York, where Goldman was defeated by former City Comptroller Brad Lander, NBC News projects, in one of the most notable races in the state.

Both candidates are Jewish, and Goldman had been endorsed by pro-Israel lobbying groups J Street and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, while Lander was backed by progressives like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

In the harshly worded post, Poetica Coffee alluded to Goldman’s stance in support of Israel, which progressives like Lander and human rights groups have strongly criticized over the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, and mentioned genocide and AIPAC.

“Do you see how it doesn’t taste like genocide juice?” the post said, accompanied by what appeared to be a security image of Goldman looking at his phone while he was at the register.

“See, here at Poetica, we don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers, or anyone in between,” the post continued, according to screenshots that circulated on social media and were reported by several news outlets. “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”

. . . . Goldman wrote in response that he was “sorry to see this post,” adding that the barista “could not have been nicer to my 7-yr-old daughter and me” because the shop allowed her to use the bathroom without making a purchase first.

“I made sure to buy a coffee in return for her kindness,” he added. “I hope you at least make sure she gets the tip that she deserved.”

Poetica Coffee and its founder, Parviz Mukhamadkulov, could not be reached for comment. The coffee shop’s Instagram account appears to have been deactivated.

On its website, Poetica Coffee says it goes by the credo that “whoever walks through the door is treated with unconditional dignity.”

In an interview with NBC News on Tuesday afternoon, Goldman said he was shocked by the post, “because the interaction in the shop could not have been nicer.”

“I walked in, a woman, who, the only employee there was a woman in a hijab. She was exceptionally nice,” he added.

Goldman said that he “certainly had no problem” if the coffee shop wanted to oppose the Israeli government.

“I do too, and I’m really, really upset and angered by what this Israeli government has been doing in many ways. And I voiced that a lot. But to take out frustration or opposition to what another country’s government is doing on American citizens who are only affiliated to that country based on religion is outright discrimination and prejudice,” Goldman said.

. . . . “Now, I may disagree as to whether or not there’s a genocide, but come on, we’re better than this, and we need to be better than this,” he told CNN in a separate interview.

The Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into this incident. This makes me really angry; it’s like a bad joke: “A Jew and his daughter walk into a coffeeshop.”  And how did they find out who the guy was?  Goldman’s temperate response is admirable, and it’s sad he was defeated by a Jew-hating Mamdani supporter.  I hope the shop is found to have violated the civil rights laws (imagine if a black customer got a similar response based on their ethnicity!).   Every Jew and Israel supporter should simply stop patronizing Poetica Coffee.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili becomes Taxi Driver Cat. Look at that wistful expression!

Andrzej: Get off the table.
Hili: Are you talking to me?’

In Polish:

Ja: Zejdź ze stołu.
Hili: Do mnie mówisz?

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

From somewhere on Facebook:

From Funny and Strange Signs:

From Richard:

 

Another Iranian protestor held without proper counsel, tortued, and even subjected to two “mock hangings”!  The regime that did this is the one we’re supporting:

From Luana: scientific misconduct by promoters of “affirmative care”, including the falsification of data:

From the Number Ten Cat, who’s hot. I didn’t realize England was as hot as this:

One from my feed. First, a final flight for a Southwest Pilot, announced by his First Officer, who happens to be his daughter!

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a mystery:

Small fish in the tarn at Sunnegga trying to get close to the inflow, presumably because of higher O2 and nutrient levels. How did the fish get there? The traditional answer is as eggs on bird’s feet or plumage. But has anyone observed this?

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-06-15T13:18:26.898Z

And a squidworm!

The squidworm (Teuthidodrilus samae) isn't a squid. It's a swimming polychaete from ~3,000 m down in the Celebes Sea. The ten "tentacles" off its head are sensory appendages as long as its body, used to smell and feel through the dark. #WormWednesday #marinelife Images from doi.org/10.1098/rsbl…

— Dr Craig R McClain (@drcraigmc.bsky.social) 2026-06-24T14:15:46.204Z