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.
When I visited Peru with a girlfriend many years ago, I traveled to Nazca, in the western desert, to see the famous Nazca lines, a series of large and mysterious geoglyphs that Wikipedia describes this way:
They were created between 500 BC and 500 AD by people making depressions or shallow incisions in the desert floor, removing pebbles and leaving different-colored dirt exposed. There are two major phases of the Nazca lines, Paracas phase, from 400 to 200 BC, and Nazca phase, from 200 BC to 500 AD. In the 21st century, several hundred new figures have been found with the use of drones, and archaeologists believe that there are more to be found.
Most lines run straight across the landscape, but there are also figurative designs of animals and plants. The combined length of all the lines is more than 1,300 km (800 mi), and the group covers an area of about 50 km2 (19 sq mi). The lines are typically 10 to 15 cm (4–6 in) deep. They were made by removing the top layer of reddish-brown ferric oxide–coated pebbles to reveal a yellow-grey subsoil.The width of the lines varies considerably, but more than half are slightly more than 33 cm (13 in) wide. In some places they may be only 30 cm (12 in) wide, and in others reach 1.8 m (6 ft) wide.
We hired a small plane for a pittance—about 30 bucks‚—to fly us over the lines, the only way to see them. They can be properly viewed only from above, which makes them all the more mysterious. There are many theories about their significance, including some who assert that they were made by those extraterrestrials who stubbornly refuse to make their presence known. The location of the lines is shown on the map below from Wikipedia:
They are still finding these lines, which have been effaces by time and by humans roaming around. Now, as the Guardian reveals (click on screenshot to read), a huge cat-shaped Nazca line has been found.Click below to read:
An excerpt:
The dun sands of southern Peru, etched centuries ago with geoglyphs of a hummingbird, a monkey, an orca – and a figure some would dearly love to believe is an astronaut – have now revealed the form of an enormous cat lounging across a desert hillside.
The feline Nazca line, dated to between 200BC and 100BC, emerged during work to improve access to one of the hills that provides a natural vantage point from which many of the designs can be seen.
A Unesco world heritage site since 1994, the Nazca Lines, which are made up of hundreds of geometric and zoomorphic images, were created by removing rocks and earth to reveal the contrasting materials below. They lie 250 miles (400km) south of Lima and cover about 450 sq km (175 sq miles) of Peru’s arid coastal plain.
. . .“The figure was scarcely visible and was about to disappear because it’s situated on quite a steep slope that’s prone to the effects of natural erosion,” Peru’s culture ministry said in a statement this week.
“Over the past week, the geoglyph was cleaned and conserved, and shows a feline figure in profile, with its head facing the front.” It said the cat was 37 metres long, with well-defined lines that varied in width between 30cm and 40cm.
Isla said between 80 and 100 new figures had emerged over recent years in the Nazca and Palpa valleys, all of which predated the Nazca culture (AD200-700). “These are smaller in size, drawn on to hillsides, and clearly belong to an earlier tradition.”
The archaeologist said the cat had been put out during the late Paracas era, which ran from 500BC to AD200. “We know that from comparing iconographies,” said Isla. “Paracas textiles, for example, show birds, cats and people that are easily comparable to these geoglyphs.”
The geoglyph was restored to its original condition; it was presumably made between 200-100 BC.
Here’s a four-minute video also showing the feline. I’m not sure what it is. It’s surely not a house cat, but, asking Grok, I got this:
[It] most likely represents the Andean cat (Leopardus jacobita, also known as the Andean mountain cat).
That species is a denizen of the mountains, not this area, and is now highly endangered. It’s the size of a large house cat. Here’s a four-minute video about the discovery:
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Here’s another Guardian article (click to read) about Japan’s cat obsession, and how capitalists have parlayed it into a lot of yen. Click to read (and go to the article, where there are lots of photos).
An excerpt:
Feline features stare out from the covers of umpteen novels, they have an officially designated day devoted to their mystique and popularity, and have outnumbered dogs as pets for a decade.
The influence of cats is evident across every corner of Japanese society, with a recent report crediting them with generating an expected ¥3tn ($18.8bn) in value to the Japanese economy this year – a phenomenon dubbed “catnomics”.
The power of the paw is especially evident in one retro neighbourhood of Tokyo, where on a recent afternoon North American, Australian and European visitors milled around the capital’s self-proclaimed “cat town”.
“There have always been cats in Yanaka because there are lots of Buddhist temples here,” says Yumiko Yamashita, owner of several cats and of the Neco Action store. “In the old days they roamed around and even went into different houses, but they’re less visible these days. They prefer to stay indoors on a hot day like this.”
The global boom in Japanese literature has turned the cat into a marketing juggernaut, more than a century after Natsume Sōseki wrote one of the country’s best-known novels, I Am a Cat, told from the point of view of a household cat.
Cats figure prominently in the surrealist novels of Haruki Murakami, and in dozens of other works, notably Hiro Arikawa’s The Travelling Cat Chronicles and Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat. Publishers have even exploited feline marketing power to create covers for books that have little or no connection to the animal.
. . . In a nation of pet lovers – where domesticated dogs and cats outnumber children aged under 15, Japanese households kept 8.8 million cats in 2025, compared with 6.8 million dogs, according to a survey by the Japan Pet Food Association. The average cat-owning household, the survey said, spends almost ¥1.8m ($11,300) over the course of their moggy’s life.
It is that level of devotion that makes cats big business. In his most recent report on “catnomics”, Katsuhiro Miyamoto, professor emeritus at Kansai University, estimates that animals will add just under ¥3tn ($18.8bn) in value to the Japanese economy in 2026.
Combining estimates of consumer spending at cat cafes and on items such as photo books with sales and salaries among cat food manufacturers and related companies, Miyamoto noted that the estimate fell just short of beating the economic impact of the 2025 World Exposition in Osaka.
He added, though, that cats were still generating “a comparable economic effect, demonstrating the significant contribution cats are making to the Japanese economy”.
High-profile cat owners in Japan include the emperor and empress, and the prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has expressed a preference for cats over dogs.
Here’s a short Indian video (in English) about Japan’s cat obsession:
But this is a better video; it’s 52 minutes long but very amusing and informative (the stuff about the maneki-neko figures is great):
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From IHeartCats, we hear about an American cat named Effie whose favorite food is mashed potatoes—potatoes that must contain the right amount of butter. Click below to read:
An excerpt:
Some pets become gentler with age, while others grow wonderfully stubborn about the things they love most. Effie, an adorable senior tabby with soft gray and white fur, has reached a point in life where she refuses to settle for anything less than exactly what she wants at mealtime. Her favorite comfort food happens to be mashed potatoes, but there is one very important condition. The potatoes must contain the perfect amount of butter. If they do not meet her standards, Effie will loudly let her family know she is disappointed until her dinner is prepared properly.
The lovable moment was shared on TikTok by @kateisaac25, where viewers quickly fell in love with the gray-and-white senior cat and her very specific dinner standards. According to the caption, Effie will loudly complain if her spoonful of mashed potatoes is missing the right amount of butter.
It is hard not to smile at the sight of her happily digging into the creamy meal with complete satisfaction. Sitting comfortably at the table, Effie looks like a tiny grandmother enjoying her favorite comfort food after a long day.
Her owner explained that the butter ratio is extremely important to Effie. If there is not enough melted goodness mixed into the potatoes, the senior cat wastes no time voicing her disappointment. The little demands have become part of her daily routine, and honestly, everyone in the house seems happy to spoil her.
. . .Effie’s strong opinions at dinnertime show just how comfortable and loved she feels in her home.
Her soft fur, relaxed posture, and determined little meows tell the story of a cat who knows she is safe. She has likely spent years building trust with her family, and now she confidently expects her meals to be prepared exactly the way she likes them.
The video captures more than just a funny moment. It highlights the special bond people share with aging pets. Small routines like preparing a favorite snack or responding to a familiar meow become treasured parts of everyday life.
. . . Viewers online could not get enough of Effie’s adorable behavior. Many related to her love of buttery comfort food, while others joked that she had earned the right to be demanding after so many years.
And here’s the TikTok video mentioned above (also here). Effie just gets a spoonful of mashed potatoes, but oy, is there butter!:
I have but one batch of photos left, and I’ll save them. But if you have some, be sure to send them in. In lieur of wildlife photos, I’ll substitute two items of local interest.
First, two pictures of consorting with my squirrels at Botany Pond. Since I’m oten there feeding or tending ducks, the resident squirrels (there are three) have sussed me out as a source of food. And, sure enough, I have bought good stuff to give them: walnuts in the shell, shelled almonds, and roasted but unsalted peanuts (I have to worry about their blood pressure).
Over a few months I have tamed them, starting with introducing them to walnuts (there’s nothing like seeing a squirrel’s first encounter with a walnut!), and then gradually allowing them to get closer. Finally, I’ve trained them to crawl up my body to get a nut or eat from my hand when I’m sititng down, as in the photos below. Having been severely bitten by a baby squirrel years ago, I proceeded very gradually, rebuking them when they gently nibbled my fingers. These photos are the result of several months of labor.
Now we are friends, and for the first time this week one of them allowed me to pet her. (She’s a lactating female.) When I was feeding her, a kind lady sitting on the facing bench took photos, and asked me if I wanted them. Of course I said yes, and here are two. In the first, the squirrel (unnamed) crawls onto my shoulder, and in the second I am petting a squirrel while she gets a nut.
Yes, I know it’s weird; you don’t have to tell me.
Madame Squirrel gets a peanut:
They have very soft fur:
Last night I was woken up at 1:40 in the morning, but didn’t know why, as I was sleeping well. Then I saw lights flashing on and off in my crib, like lights on a fire engine or police car. They were very regular, and so I prowled around to find the source. It took me a while to realize that they weren’t in my place, but coming from the outside. I went out on the balcony (just the landing of a fire escape) and saw repeated and semi-regular flashing behind the clouds. It must have been lightning, but there was no thunder.
I groggily found my iPhone and filmed some of the atmospheric fracas, which went on for a long time. Here is a bit over a minute of it, which I posted on YouTube (it briefly goes out of focus). The sound is on, but you won’t hear thunder.
It was cloudy, so you can’t see the lights of downtown.
Looking for “lightning, June 6” on the Internet, I found one video taken near downtown Chicago. Here you can see the lightning. The poster describes it as an “epic lightening storm”: There’s also a video similar to mine on reddit.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, June 6, shabbos for Jewish cats, Convocation Day at the University of Chicago (there’s a livestream at the link; festivities start at 9 a.m.), the anniversary of my late parents, and the anniversary of D-Day, the day the Allies landed on Normandy in 1944: the beginning of the end for the Nazis. Here’s an actual photograph of the landing called “Into the jaws of death,” with the Wikipedia caption:
Into the Jaws of Death by Robert F. Sargent. Original caption: Down the ramp of a Coast Guard landing barge Yankee soldiers storm toward the beach-sweeping fire of Nazi defenders in the D-Day invasion of the French Coast. Troops ahead may be seen laying flat under the deadly machinegun resistance of the Germans.
This was in fact at Omaha Beach, the deadliest of the beaches for landing, and the one depicted in the opening scene of Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (see below)
By Chief Photographer’s Mate (CPHoM) Robert F. Sargent. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Here’s the opening scene of “Saving Private Ryan,” depicting the landing on Omaha. Veterans who were there praise its accuracy, though landings were not this bloody on other beaches. WARNING: it’s bloody!
Here’s a young pineapple I photographed in 2022 in a botanical park in the Canary Islands:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Speaking of graduation here, the news is now saying that 14 U.S. colleges cost more than $100,000 per year to attend starting this fall, including fees, tuition, room and board, books, and other requisites. Business Insider has a list of the 30 most expensive colleges, and guess what? The University of Chicago is the second highest, though the figures given are for this year, and include tuition and fees at $79,395 and room and board: $21,414 for a total of $100,809. This fall will be more, but realize that U.S. students don’t really pay that much because of scholarships and the like. Chicago also has America’s highest tuition; Harvey Mudd is the most expensive At $102,312, but tuition is lower than Chicago and room and board costs more. Most of the colleges on the list are small and elite, and Harvard is not to be seen.
t’s Friday, June 5, and Hezbollah has officially rejected the ceasefire. Two days after Jerusalem and Beirut agreed to a conditional pause, Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem dismissed the deal as a “surrender,” vowing to maintain fire on northern Israel as long as strikes in Lebanon continue. This hardline stance certainly jeopardizes the “pilot zones” intended for the Lebanese Armed Forces to deploy. However, it hasn’t shifted the calculus in Tel Aviv; for the IDF’s top brass, the book on the terror organization has already largely been closed.
On the streets, it’s easy to spot the sourness and bitterness regarding the events on the northern front, from the children running to bomb shelters, to the devastating news from the drone fields across the border, all the way to slamming the brakes on an attack in Beirut. The difficult conversation between U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t help the feeling that there is a plan, either. These feelings do not reach the upper floors of the Kirya, Israel’s Pentagon. At the top of the military, they speak of an achievement unseen in years, and of an opportunity for peace and quiet for many long years. Reconciling these two pictures is impossible, but describing them is.
The IDF’s top brass is convinced that Hezbollah is a semi-dismantled organization that has absorbed the hardest blow in its history. It had 30,000 fighters on Oct. 6, 2023; since then, 8,000 have been killed and about the same number wounded. “Even a jihadist enemy is dying for a ceasefire.”
The chief of staff, for example, said in closed discussions that he is in favor, under the following conditions: One, Hezbollah’s withdrawal beyond the Litani River. Two, the destruction of all its infrastructure, this time not by the impotent Lebanese army but by an Israeli-American mechanism. Three, an IDF presence on the Yellow Line, which includes, for example, the infamous Beaufort Castle.
. . . It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a gap between the harsh public sentiment and the sweeping optimism at the top. How long? Twenty years minus two months, at the end of the Second Lebanon War. Back then, the public was right that the war was a dismal failure and Hezbollah had grown stronger; hopefully, this time the decision-makers are right.
And some news about women in the IDF:
Israeli special forces are navigating through broken shards as yet another glass ceiling shatters. Yesterday, the IDF announced that for the first time in history, a woman has graduated from the incredibly intensive special forces course for the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit (Sayeret Matkal)—Israel’s equivalent to Delta Force. She is now slated to join the unit’s operational activities.
As part of a pilot program launched in December 2024, this soldier spent 18 months enduring one of the most grueling training pipelines in the world to join Sayeret Matkal. Internal reports have revealed that certain entry thresholds were adjusted for women and that she bypassed the standard selection phase; still, her graduation remains a significant achievement. Step away from the broader debate over women in combat and you are left with a simple truth: she endured immense physical and mental strain, she passed the tests the IDF applied, and she earned her spot.
. . . This groundbreaking soldier joins a growing legacy of female combat heroes in the IDF. Her milestone echoes the bravery seen on October 7, when seven female tank crew members fought Hamas militants continuously for 17 hours. That battle marked the first time in modern military history that an all-female armored unit engaged in active combat, successfully eliminating roughly 50 terrorists. Those warriors—and the IDF’s newest special forces graduate—prove that when the nation needs them most, women can, and will, hold the line.
When I was in Israel, I was always impressed to see women in uniform—and a lot of them. Each Israeli woman, save Arabs and ultra-Orthodox, must spend two years in the military—one year less than the three required for men (a difference based on reproductive biology). Here’s a photo I took in Jerusalem in September, 2023. The might have been police rather than IDF soldiers, but they have the weapons and Jerusalem’s Old City, after all, is not the world’s safest place. Note that it’s on the Via Dolorosa.
Republicans managed to push through the $70 billion legislation, which would fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol through the end of Trump’s term, on a 52-47 vote after weeks of delays.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, was the only Republican to vote against the final package, which was also opposed by all Democrats. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., missed the vote.
Murkowski criticized the use of the budget reconciliation process, which allows senators to advance legislation related to taxes and spending with a simply majority vote rather than the usual 60-vote threshold needed to overcome legislative filibusters.
“I believe very strongly that we needed to fund ICE and CBP, but to completely bypass regular order and the appropriations process by funding for three and a half years, to me … it takes it out of the process that we have always looked to for funding our agencies,” Murkowski said.
She added that she also “had a problem with” including the “anti-weaponization” fund — a proposed settlement fund intended for payments to Americans who are allegedly targeted by the federal government — in the package. The payout fund was created by the Trump administration as part of the settlement of the president’s lawsuit against the IRS for the leak of his tax returns.
The bill includes$38.6 billion for ICE, $22.6 billion for the Border Patrol, $5 billion for the Department of Homeland Security and $108.5 million for child exploitation investigations.
It does not include security funding for the White House ballroom, or any guardrails on the creation of the pot of money seen by Democrats and some Republicans as a “slush fund” to funnel taxpayer money to potentially pay Jan. 6 rioters and other Trump allies.
The final vote, shortly before 5 a.m., followed an 18-hour “vote-a-rama” during which senators could offer amendments. Senators from both parties proposed 29 amendments and motions before voting on final passage, with some Republicans supporting amendments that broke with Trump’s priorities.
I don’t know much about the final bill and can’t offer comment save that like nearly all bills, it was decided on a vote almost eleanly split between the parties.
*In “Awakenings,” the Washington Post‘s religious newsletter I’ve subscribed to, a doctor describes how, as a nonbeliever, he came to God—through cancer. (I don’t have a link.) The doctor is John V. Campo, described as “a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
As an academic physician, trained first in pediatrics and then psychiatry, a field highly skeptical of religious faith, I was unprepared for a transcendent experience that followed what I will call a housecleaning misadventure last spring. I have since come to view my previous skepticism of religious experience — one that prevails across much of medicine — as something that can impair doctors’ understanding of patients and their needs.
. . . . Later that week, I awoke in the middle of the night, my wife sleeping quietly beside me. My mind was filled with a message that felt like it came from outside me, in words that were not my own: “Someday your body will fail you, and all you will have is me. It will be enough.” I pulled a piece of paper from my nightstand and wrote the words down.
Several months later, after a long walk on the beach during a family vacation, the symptoms I had while cleaning our shower recurred. It was a focal seizure, as I would later learn. An MRI scan showed a mass in the right posterior frontal lobe of my brain, abutting the motor strip. It was a glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor with a poor prognosis. Although I had noticed some facial weakness and a droopy eyelid on my left side while watching an interview I had done on a news program earlier that year, my wife and I dismissed it as part of getting older.
Glioblastomas are deadly: the five-year survival rate is about 6%, with a median survival time after diagnosis of 12-18 months. And so Campo gradually accepted God:
Whether this reflects a newfound stigma is hard to say, but taking our patients seriously requires physicians to explore issues of ultimate concern, suggesting that a spiritual history should be an expected component of any comprehensive clinical evaluation.
I have never been asked about my “spirituality” or “religious beliefs” by any physician, and I don’t buy the need to ask. Campo reveals that he’s a believer here:
One problem I faced was my belief that knowledge of God could be arrived at via the intellect, or not at all. The folly of this attitude would have been apparent to the philosopher Blaise Pascal, who on the night of Nov. 23, 1654, had a transcendent experience that he recorded on a scrap of paper.
One portion of that text read: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of philosophers and scholars.” Pascal did not meet God by constructing a proof for divine existence; he encountered God unexpectedly in the middle of the night.
Such a moment of sudden revelation or insight is often referred to as an epiphany, derived from the Greek “epipháneia,” meaning appearance or manifestation. Forty-five percent of U.S. adults report having such experiences. Discounting these occurrences as purely subjective has potential to limit practitioners’ connection with patients in medicine and psychiatry.
My story isn’t complete, but the words that came to me in the quiet of the night are true enough: Someday my body will fail. Indeed, that process has already begun. Following a craniotomy and partial surgical resection of the tumor, along with radiation and chemotherapy, I have experienced changes in sensation and strength on the left half of my body. Although the remaining words of the message contain some mystery, I’m hopeful and confident that the love of God surrounding me “will be enough.”
It appears that Dr. Campo has found God, and through experience alone, though had he not had a brain tumor I wonder if he would have “found” God. This newsletter, like the New York Times’s “Believing” newsletter, is one way that a paper can osculate faith without having to do so on its main pages. And you’ll never seen nonbelief touted in such newsletters.
*Nellie Bowles is back writing TGIF’s for the Free Press, and her news-and-snark column this week is called “TGIF: I would never have forgotten my drugs.” As usual, I will steal a few items. She begins it by saying, “No, I will not be commenting on 60 Minutes other than to say that there are 11,492,640 minutes until I am 60. Do with that what you will, Puck.”
→ But Trumpo giveth and Trumpo taketh away. He classes up the city with a deep clean of the fountains, and then he builds a giant UFC fight arena in front of the White House. He’s now suggesting that the White House UFC fight arena should be permanent, like the Eiffel Tower. This week he’s whipping out posters showing that after he gets his excavators in there, the Lincoln Memorial Reflection Pool is going to be bigger than a skyscraper. Just like the Founders intended.
Here is the White House from above. As an anonymous X user put it: “It’s like a meth family moved in.”
→ Them’s fake oysters: Graham Platner [the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine] is the flower that keeps on blooming. First, the part about him that people love most: He put a huge Nazi tattoo on his chest, the one that honors only the finest concentration camp guards. At this stage in the antisemitism cycle, that’s a plus for the average voter. Now to the negatives: According to his financial disclosures, our oysterman is—well, let’s just say he’s all shell and no belly. He’s all fringe and no gills, if you know what I mean. According to last year’s disclosure he made only $3,000 from his stipend as a town harbor master, which sounds more like a position in a frat house. As far as his oyster farm, for which he does not take a salary, his biggest client is his mom (cute) and almost all of his income seems to come from disability checks. He said he bought his house thanks to the VA, but it was actually thanks to a few hundred thousand dollars from his dad. I mean, guys, he went to Hotchkiss and did the richest thing ever, which is stop going to class—he was subsequently expelled! Just because he grew a beard and talks like a burly man instead of gay-like does not mean he isn’t still one of us. Your oysterman’s a debutante with a lemonade stand.
Then came the really bad news: The married man has an account on Kik. And he’d been messaging with “up to six” women prior to launching his Senate bid, his campaign said. Which is a kind of weird way to phrase it, like it’s some sort of quota to hit. Like he’s putting up infidelity numbers “in the six range.” Oh, also: The account was still online as of three days ago, though the campaign claims that Platner stopped his Kik activity when the campaign started. Which I, for one, think is very mature.
Can’t the Democrats find somebody NORMAL to run? If I were a Democrat in Maine, I’d be hard pressed to vote for this joker!
Watch the two videos to which Nellie links in this last item:
→ The killing of Henry Nowak: Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old in Southampton, UK, was stabbed to death by Vickrum Digwa. Vickrum’s brother then called the cops and said something brilliant. He said that they had just been “attacked racially by some white person.” Holy mackerel! A racism!!!! Every cop in the UK was called up for service. Then, when the police got there, Henry was weak, on the ground, saying to them over and over: “I’ve been stabbed.” And: “I can’t breathe.” In bodycam footage released this week, the police casually note that he has a mouthful of blood but don’t believe he’s been stabbed. “You’ve been stabbed? Don’t think you have, mate,” a cop says coldly. They don’t even look! They focus on Vickrum to make sure he’s okay, and he shows them a little scuff on his cheek. Poor thing! Then they force Henry to sit up, and cuff and drag him across the gravel. Henry Nowak eventually falls silent, unresponsive as a cop reads him his rights. “His pupils aren’t even reacting,” an officer says in the video, shining a light into his dead face, sounding more annoyed than worried, like of course this lazy racist can’t even be bothered to move his pupils a little. Typical.
The video is hard to watch but I do think you must, and also his father’s statement. As of June 1 (the stabbing happened in December of last year), the killing had received very, very little coverage. The New York Times eventually covered the story this week, begrudgingly, only as an event that’s been “increasingly politicized,” probably by bad, racist actors, like what Henry was said to be, by his stabber. You see, he died maybe racistly, is their argument, so really, could you even call it a stabbing? More like a self-inflicted wound, they’d say. You really can kill anyone you want if you say they did a racism. Fun to consider your options, and good to know for the next time you get cut off in traffic. Here’s how Sky News covered it:
When you are stabbed, you must die quietly in those handcuffs. Stop speculating about it or we’re going to tell the police watchdog on you. It means nothing. It signifies nothing. “I can’t breathe” was an obvious George Floyd copycat attempt. That rallying cry is already taken, mate.
Oh, one more:
→ Crimes against heterosexuality: A Mauritanian man allegedly entered the U.S. illegally in 2023 and then claimed asylum on the basis of being gay, a crime in his home country. Asylum granted, get in here ya Martian! But. . . oh no. Was he really gay? According to authorities, he was exposed as a fraud after marrying the sheriff’s stepdaughter in Portland, Indiana, where he’d been working as a corrections officer! Okay, now this is actually starting to seem like an awesome country song. (We covered an almost identical story to this just a little while back in TGIF! As a real gay, I will always track fake gays.)
As of this week the man is reportedly being held at an ICE detention facility in Indiana (as all heterosexuals should be), and is fighting deportation. He just had to go for the sheriff’s daughter. Couldn’t he have extinguished his unnatural, unholy desires with someone not related to the sheriff? Straight people, why are you like this? It sounds like a Pornhub title on page 14: Fake-gay refugee sneaks around with police boss’s hot daughter. But on a serious note, why do we only let in gay migrants? Everyone in Mauritania wants to be in Sonoma, California, instead! That’s life. I’m not saying don’t let gay men in; I’m saying what if there are other metrics we might consider in deciding who from Mauritania to let in? Maybe a points system where being gay gives you a few points, but other things count too? Just like college admissions!
The federal government’s Medicaid program is paying Native American shamans in California $826 a day to perform ancient rituals such as drum circles and spiritual dances to treat drug and alcohol addicts. The alternative treatments are part of Democratic governor Gavin Newsom’s embrace of “indigenous knowledge,” a pseudoscience that claims Native Americans have mystical healing powers that transcend the realm of traditional medicine.
The Biden Department of Health & Human Services gave its approval in October 2024 for California to reimburse Native American “Traditional Healers” with federal Medicaid dollars to treat addicts by drawing on their innate knowledge of ancestral healing rites. The treatments are an effort to combat alcohol and drug addiction in the Native American community, which has a significantly higher rate of substance use disorder than the general population.
Since then, 21 Indian Health Care Providers across the state have enrolled in the program, with the California Department of Health Care Services offering $826 per day to unlicensed “Traditional Healers” and “Natural Helpers” to host spiritual ceremonies, rituals, herbal remedies, and musical drum and dancing therapy for addicts.
But there’s little evidence these ancestral rituals are effective in helping Native Americans and other patients to recover from their drug and alcohol addiction, with some studies showing the alternative treatments may actually be harmful. One study reviewed by the National Institutes of Health found that a significant portion of participants in a Native American Drum Circle study reported drinking more alcohol than usual after participating in the intervention. Another study found that the use of Native American Sweat Lodge Ceremonies to treat alcoholics was mostly ineffective.
The California Department of Health Care Services has crafted the “Traditional Healers” program with a set of lax oversight rules that could render the program vulnerable to fraud and make it a target of the Trump administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. The task force has identified billions of dollars’ worth of federal government contracts that have been awarded to potentially fraudulent businesses, many of which are in the medical sector. Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance, who heads the task force, announced that the federal government has frozen $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California, in part because the state is not taking fraud seriously, he said.
“We’re talking about taxpayer-funded drum circles,” a senior White House official told the Washington Free Beacon. “Someone in the Biden administration said, ‘That sounds like a good idea.’ It’s disgusting. These were the experts running around telling everyone how much smarter they are. And they’re using taxpayer dollars for drum circles.”
They note that the “drum and dancer” healers need not have any qualifications to be eligible for Medicaid reimbursement. This is your taxpayer money being used for what can only be described as quackery. It of course reflects the sacralization of indigenous people, regarded as possessing knowledge different from but as efficacious as that used in modern medicine. That’s wrong. You might say that there’s a placebo effect involved, with Native Americans “healing” their own kind, but not only is the evidence against that, but I for one don’t want my taxes spent on placebos.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the kitchen is the center of the cats’ world:
Hili: He’s doing something in the kitchen. Szaron: I’ll go check.
In Polish:
Hili: On coś robi w kuchni.
Szaron. Pójdę sprawdzić.
*******************
From TherionArms, another medieval letter (I love the captions of these things:
Masih reposted this tweet from a woman who has her own “X” account. Translation from the Farsi:
A short excerpt from my speech at the “Vienna Court,” a theatrical-political event at the Vienna Festival.
«The moment he smirked…
and then fired at my eye.
I heard the sound of my eye bursting.
The world spun around my head.
Not darkness…
an explosion of pain.
I could hear people shouting:
Hot blood poured down my face”
and I… had just one wish:
to see the world again with my right eye.
This is not just a memory….»
بخش کوتاهی از سخنرانیم در «دادگاه وین» يك اتفاق نمايشى_سياسى در جشنواره وين.
«لحظهای که نیشخند زد…
و بعد شلیک کرد به چشمم.
صدای ترکیدن چشمم رو شنیدم.
دنیا دور سرم چرخید.
نه تاریکی… یک انفجار از درد.
— Kosar Eftekhari 🕊️ (@kosareftekharii) June 2, 2026
From Luana, more information about the murder of Henry Nowak. The Daily Fail reports that the murderer’s mother hid the murder weapon (a knife) in her home.
DIGWA TAUNTED AND TORTURED HENRY FOR 10 MINUTES!!
Henry lay dying, pleading for help. DIGWA AND the POLICE mocked and laughed at him.
They didn’t play the additional clips or recordings in court. They said “it’s too disturbing.”
6 June 1936 | A Czech Jewish girl, Eva Steindlerová, was born.She was deported to Auschwitz from Theresienstadt Ghetto on 16 October 1944 with her mother Gertruda. They were both probably murdered in a gas chamber after the selection.—▶ Gas chambers of Auschwitz: https://youtu.be/-A05i25j9Ck
And two from Dr. Cobb: He says the first one is “not entirely true” as one can see further down the thread. Sadly, I cannot see that post because I am blocked (BlueSky is famous for blocking people):
There are almost no crustaceans in the deep ocean.Not because they would get crushed, but because they would DISSOLVE.The cold & high pressure cause changes to water that make it very corrosive to calcium carbonate shells.But there's one crustacean who solves this problem with ALUMINUM ARMOR.
I may have posted this one before but can’t be arsed to check. Anyway, it’s beautiful:
Display of a Bohemian waxwing. These are largely found in the northern boreal forests of North America/Eurasia, and are social birds that form large noisy groups-sometimes in the 1000's- as they scour the landscape looking for fruit. 📹 wildsafarisaga on IG
When I asked Matthew how, in the tagging process, he found the hidden calves, he replied:
Typically the cow has a vaginal insert transmitter that comes out when the calf drops, which allows us to pinpoint the birth location. Several hours later the cow and calf move a short distance off the birth location where the calf conceals itself. Say, within 50-500 m. When we arrive, the cow leaves the area but will come back within 4-5 hrs. We systematically survey the area looking for it. Really hard game of hide and seek!
Example of an “activated” vaginal insert transmitter (“vit”) recovered at birth location.
More photos from the tagging process:
More: a wolf attacked another calf, but mom apparently drove it off. Matthew:
I’ve attached pics from yesterday of a five day old calf that survived a wolf attack only hrs before we arrived. Very lucky calf. It must have been a single wolf, and the cow was able to fend it off. If two or more wolves, the cow would have bailed to live to breed another day.
Reader Matthew Hill sent some photos taken during his tagging of elk calves (Cervus canadensis), and one of them qualifies as a “spot the. . . ” photo. Can you spot the elk calf, hiding from predators inconspicuously? The reveal will be at 10:30 Chicago time, along with other photos from Matthew’s endeavor. His words are indented:
I’m currently involved in tagging elk calves in northern Wisconsin. I thought one of today’s tags might be a fun one for an I spy post. Not super difficult. It’s a two-day-
old female.
Can you spot it? You can tell us in the comments if you did, but please don’t say where it was. Again, reveal is at 10:30 a.m. Click the photo to enlarge it.
The Jesus and Mo artist tells us that this strip is “a Friday flashback from 13 years ago today”. The boys abhor homosexuality, but are obsessed with it (remember, they share a bed):
Welcome to the First Friday in June: June 5, 2026 and National Doughnut Day, always on the first Friday in June. The doughnuts we know have their ancestors in Roman times, though the creation of the hole came later. There are now variants throughout the world; I like this Indian version called Makhan Bada, served a a dessert:. These are deep-fried in ghee (clarified butter) and dipped in sugar syrup.
It’s also National Fish and Chip Day (what? One chip?), National Gingerbread Day, National Ketchup Day (Heinz is the only acceptable one; if a restaurant serves another variety, it is stinting), National Veggie Burger Day, and Sausage Roll Day. Here is a video suggested to me by YouTube, and I watched a;; 40+ minutes, though Mark Wiens puts me off with his googly-eyed “yums.” But it does give four suggestions for good chippies in London, and I love a good chippy.
Finally, there’s a new Google Doodle announcing a Google Doodle contest for U.S. students. There are big prizes! Click to see where it goes. (The Doodle shown is the last prizewinner.)
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 5 Wikipedia page.
Yesterday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Hezbollah-affiliated media that Iran and Lebanon are “linked” and that the conflict with the United States and Israel will not end unless Israeli forces withdraw from southern Lebanon completely. It is a strange demand, given that the IDF’s presence wasn’t an insurmountable barrier to negotiations during the first two months of the process. Waiting for an unconditional withdrawal means waiting for the day Benjamin Netanyahu willingly commits political suicide and surrenders the premiership—which, in Israel, is just another way of saying it is never going to happen.
And that is precisely the point, buy time.
The two fronts are linked by more than just diplomacy; they are driven by the same playbook. Just as Hezbollah inflicts steady casualties to erode Israeli public support for the war, Iran is running its own parallel insurgency to break American resolve. By dragging out the conflict and inflicting mounting costs on the global economy, Tehran hopes to exhaust Washington’s patience.
Yet, there are key tactical differences. While Hezbollah knows it cannot convince Netanyahu to withdraw and therefore targets the Israeli population’s political will, Tehran believes it can bleed out Trump’s patience directly. By protracting the timeline, Iran aims to exhaust the president into lowering his demands on the nuclear file. Finally, where Hezbollah fights for territorial consolidation on the ground, Iran is using the delay to quietly cement de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz.
Much like a classic insurgency, Tehran’s goal is to turn local Gulf populations and governments against the American presence. By explicitly warning Gulf states, as it did this week after attacking Kuwait, that hosting U.S. forces makes their territory a target, Iran is using heavy-handed violence to drive a wedge between Washington and its regional allies.
The truth is, Iran has been running this exact playbook since the 1979 revolution: bolstering its proxy networks, inflicting mounting costs on the American military, and coercing regional acceptance of its hegemony. The current escalation in the Strait of Hormuz is just the latest, most aggressive phase of a decades-long strategy—all in service of a single, ultimate objective: expelling the United States from the Middle East.
. . .The Israeli security establishment holds a much higher assessment of Trump’s resolve than the Iranians do. They are deeply skeptical that he will simply throw his hands up in frustration and settle for the nuclear equivalent of a participation trophy—just to get a deal done.
All insurgent campaigns rely on one foundational premise: that the enemy’s political will must break first. If Trump’s reserves of patience are deeper than Tehran calculates, Iran’s entire strategy collapses. Its maritime insurgency is incurring a devastating economic cost. If Washington doesn’t blink, Tehran isn’t waiting Trump out—it is just bleeding itself dry.
Well, there you go. I have no idea what Trump will do, as he’s mercurial, though the House vote this week (and the Senate vote to come) might make him wary of continuing the war. As for expelling the U.S. from the Middle East, I don’t think that will work: we have bases there, and the Arab states have become more disenchanted with Iran than ever.
President Trump has vowed to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon — and central to that pledge is the fate of its highly enriched uranium, which could be used to build at least 10 bombs.
Much of the uranium is believed to be stored so far underground that even powerful U.S. bunker-buster bombs may not be able to destroy it. A raid by U.S. forces to retrieve the uranium would carry enormous risks, including from the material itself, which could become highly toxic if it were to leak and be exposed to moisture.
The Trump administration is now focusing on diplomatic efforts by trying to convince Iran to turn over the material in return for incentives.
“Iran is being sanctioned because they have highly enriched uranium, Iran is being sanctioned because of their nuclear activities,” said U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, while testifying Tuesday at a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “If they agree to give up those things, there will be sanctions relief associated with their commitment and compliance with those agreements.”
Iran had a stockpile of about 970 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent as of June 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency, or I.A.E.A., said in February. The material is often stored in canisters about the size of scuba tanks, allowing the stockpile to be split among several locations.
It is impossible to know exactly where Iran’s nuclear material is stored without full I.A.E.A. inspections. Here’s a look at where experts believe it may be, and why it would be so difficult to retrieve.
Some alternatives (there are maps and photos; numbering is mine).
1.) Most of Iran’s enriched uranium likely remains stored underground, near the Isfahan nuclear complex, according to Rafael Grossi, who leads the I.A.E.A. The material would require only a few weeks of processing to be usable for a nuclear weapon.
2.) A smaller share of the highly enriched uranium may be at Natanz, Iran’s largest enrichment site, according to Mr. Grossi, the I.A.E.A. head.
3.) The underground Fordo site was effectively destroyed when U.S. forces struck it with a dozen bunker-buster bombs in June 2025. In recent weeks, satellite imagery has indicated that Iran has added obstacles on the roads leading to buried tunnel entrances, in what could be an effort to slow down a potential attack, according to the Institute for Science and International Security.
And here’s the rub:
Iran also has more uranium than just its stocks enriched to 60 percent. In total, the country has more than 19,930 pounds of enriched uranium, according to the I.A.E.A.’s latest assessment, including 405 pounds enriched up to 20 percent and 13,280 pounds enriched up to 5 percent.
While it would take time to convert that uranium to bomb grade, Iran would retain the ability to do so as long as it retains an operational enrichment site.
And that, my friends, brothers and sisters and comrades, is the rub. There should be no operational enrichment site, for that guarantees that the lying and mendacious country of Iran will keep pursuing nuclear weapons.
*Konstantin Kisin of Triggernometry has a provocative article in the Free Press called “How America’s racial politics poisoned Britain.” Its them is the death of Henry Nowak, killed by a Sikh and who died in handcuffs because the Sikhs claimed that Nowak uttered a racial slur at them (he didn’t).
Five years [after the killing of George Floye], last December, an 18-year-old student named Henry Nowak was stabbed five times on a Southampton street after an altercation with a British Sikh man. As he lay bleeding, he told police officers who arrived at the scene exactly what had happened: He had been stabbed. Vickrum Digwa, who was standing nearby, and his brother told the officers something else: that Digwa had been the victim of a racist attack.
On the call to police, Digwa’s brother, Gurpreet, said to the dispatcher, “We’ve just been attacked by . . .”, paused, then finished, “someone racially.”
Minutes later, as police arrived on the scene, bodycam footage released by police late last night shows officers approaching a clearly incapacitated Nowak, who is bent over, his skin pale and his breathing labored. The officers believed Digwa, and handcuffed Nowak.
The footage ends just as we hear Henry Nowak’s last words, “I can’t breathe.” He said them while handcuffed on the pavement, bleeding from five stab wounds, to officers who had decided that the man who put those wounds in him was the real victim, that sarcastically dismissed him when he told them he’d been stabbed.
. . .The shocking footage has been met with statements of anger and disgust from politicians, amid calls for events “not to divide us.” Britain’s home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, called the footage a “disturbing and tragic thing to see.” But you are not likely to see Henry’s words stenciled on a mural. No corporation will change its logo. The same establishment that made a few words immortal when spoken by a black man in Minneapolis has met the same words, spoken by a white boy dying on a British street, with what can only be described as a determined, institutional silence.
That silence is not neutral. It is a statement. It tells you exactly whose suffering the system has decided counts, and whose does not. And it was produced not by the old racism—not by skinheads and hooligans—but by the people who spent six years telling you they had abolished it.
. . .The answr [to the question of what six years of British anti-racism has produced], if you’re willing to look at it honestly, is this: a new form of racism. A bureaucratic racism perpetrated by the lanyard class. An actual institutionalized racism. A racism so thoroughly laundered through the language of progress and inclusion that the people enforcing it genuinely believe they are on the right side of history.
What else do you call a system in which a dying teenager’s word counts for less than his killer’s because of the color of their skin? Where that teenager, who did not pose a threat as he bled out, was handcuffed and mocked rather than helped?
. . .What is particularly striking about this case is the way it mirrors, almost exactly, the injustice that movement was supposedly designed to prevent. George Floyd died saying “I can’t breathe” while a police officer knelt on his neck. Henry Nowak died saying “I can’t breathe” while police officers, kneeling on his back, handcuffed him. The British establishment that wept for Floyd has been conspicuously quiet about Nowak. Politicians who marched through London’s streets in 2020 have not rushed to the cameras. The corporations that changed their logos and funded diversity initiatives have not issued statements.
They will say, as they always say, that the real problem is that we haven’t gone far enough.
This is not an accident, or even a surprise. It is the logical consequence of an ideology that simply reassigns racism to new acceptable targets.
. . .What is particularly striking about this case is the way it mirrors, almost exactly, the injustice that movement was supposedly designed to prevent. George Floyd died saying “I can’t breathe” while a police officer knelt on his neck. Henry Nowak died saying “I can’t breathe” while police officers, kneeling on his back, handcuffed him. The British establishment that wept for Floyd has been conspicuously quiet about Nowak. Politicians who marched through London’s streets in 2020 have not rushed to the cameras. The corporations that changed their logos and funded diversity initiatives have not issued statements.
They will say, as they always say, that the real problem is that we haven’t gone far enough.
This is not an accident, or even a surprise. It is the logical consequence of an ideology that simply reassigns racism to new acceptable targets.
I admire Kisin because he’s a straight shooter, saying things like the above which are taboo in the “progressive” dictionary. Ibram Kendri didn’t know how ironic his statement was: “If you’re not an antiracist, you’re a racist.”
The statue wars that swept away monuments six years ago are back. This time, the battle is to restore them.
Traditionalists are suing and lobbying local governments to resurrect memorials to Confederate generals, Founding Fathers and European explorers. Many of the statues disappeared from town squares and other public places during the pandemic-era protests against police violence and racism following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
Ohio’s capital, named for Christopher Columbus, took down a 22-foot-high, 3-ton statue of its namesake from City Hall that year. Officials declared the 1955 gift from sister city Genoa, Italy, had come to represent “patriarchy, oppression and divisiveness.”
“We will no longer live in the shadow of our ugly past,” Mayor Andrew Ginther, a Democrat, said at the time. Columbus’s detractors tie the Italian explorer to the brutal subjugation of native civilizations in the Americas. His supporters say Columbus should be lauded for his discoveries, not blamed for what followed.
The city’s Columbus statue for now lies on its back inside a fenced storage facility, monitored by security cameras and adorned from head to toe with a strand of yellow caution tape. In April, a coalition of Italian-American groups filed a federal lawsuit claiming the statue’s removal was illegal and demanding its return.
“The silent majority is becoming vocal,” said Jack Conte, 67 years old, the lawsuit’s organizer. “You reach a point where this stuff is shoved down your throat, and you can only take so much of it.”
. . . The Trump administration is helping lead the charge ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary next month. In March, the administration erected a Columbus statue near the White House, a replica of one that protesters sank in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in 2020.
. . . The Interior Department recently installed a statue of Caesar Rodney, a Delaware signer of the Declaration of Independence and a slave owner, in Washington’s Freedom Plaza. The monument had been removed from its spot in Wilmington, Del., in 2020, and put into storage.
In December, a stone highway marker honoring Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, suddenly appeared in Marion Square, planted alongside a major thoroughfare in a hub of picnics, farmers markets and celebrations in Charleston, S.C.
. . .In March, the Texas Rangers baseball team announced on social media the return to public view of a “One Riot, One Ranger” statue at the ballpark. The 12-foot bronze sculpture of a Texas Ranger had been removed from Dallas Love Field airport in 2020 after claims that the officer who served as the model for the statue—a tribute to the law enforcement agency—sided with opponents to desegregation of a public high school in 1956.
There are other examples of such real or attempted restorations, but the big question is asked below:
. . . Nicole Moore said certain statues shouldn’t return to public spaces. She is president of the National Council on Public History, which represents historians and museum administrators. “Humans are complicated. But what’s not complicated is racism. What’s not complicated is genocide,” she said. “When we know the history, we have to ask ourselves, do we want to celebrate this person?”
I’ve given my views on whether statues or markers should be taken down. In general I lean on leaving them up, with qualifying material added when necessary. And it depends on having answers to these questions: First, was the person’s life on balance, helpful or hurtful to humanity? Second, if “helpful,” is the person being honored for that good stuff? If both answers are on the helpful side, leave the statue/memorial up, but qualify it by adding any educational bad stuff to provide balance. It is not an easy question, but some issues, like the Teddy Roosevelt statue removed from the American Museum of Natural History, were decided wrongly. And memorials to David Hume should stay up, too.(see this post and the included article).
With his shock of golden hair and trim 700-kilogram (1,500-pound) build, Donald Trump has been drawing crowds from across Bangladesh since he arrived at the national zoo last week.
The rare albino buffalo became a sensation when a farmer noticed that his blond tuft of hair resembled the distinctive locks of the U.S. president. After a video of the pale horned mammal went viral on social media, large numbers of people started showing up at the farm outside Dhaka to see him for themselves.
The animal was originally meant to be slaughtered for the Muslim festival of sacrifice. But citing security concerns, the government ordered him transferred to the zoo in the capital, where large crowds are now braving sweltering heat to see him.
On Tuesday, visitors pressed against the fence of the buffalo’s enclosure, filming with their phones as some fathers hoisted small children on their shoulders for a better view.
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A zoo worker pampered the animal, brushing his hair to one side and hosing him down with water to keep him cool as fans blew on him.
“There is a resemblance to Donald Trump in its eyes, hairstyle, and skin color,” said Mohammed Nasim, a student in Dhaka. “And just as Donald Trump has a distinctive personality and lifestyle, this buffalo, after going viral, is now living a similar kind of life, enjoying a lot of attention and special treatment.”
And of course you’ll want to see it. (It also probably resembles Trump because its mode of communication is bellowing):
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, editor Hili is getting lazy:
Andrzej: Back to work.
Hili: I’d rather lie in the sun.
In Polish:
Ja: Wracamy do pracy.
Hili: Wolę poleżeć na słońcu.
This is the 1st time I've seen a Flota swimming with the little stick legs fanned out. Usually they're moving fast and have them pulled in like little spikes @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 929 #Doldrums #MarineLife
