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.
It’s time for another report on the ducks of Botany Pond. (No turtle report today, but we now have six after two new ones were put into the Pond.)
The Brood of Four, having hatched on July 18 and entered the Pond the next day, are thriving, as you can see below. They have turned into miniatures of Miss Duck, though a bit smaller and lacking their flight feathers. But they are vigorous, healthy, and have good appetites. They have been on the water six weeks and two days, and should be making the first tentative efforts at flight within two weeks. Miss Duck is doing well, too, and is as attentive as always, though she allows her brood somewhat more independence than before (they often swim all over the pond without alarming her.)
Look at these lovely “ducklings” (click photos to enlarge them, and also enlarge the video):
All the photos and the video below were made at the end of August. Here’s a duckling looking happy. It doesn’t yet know that it will soon be flying.
Often Miss Duck and the brood repair to the edge of the pond for a nap after a meal. Here she is alone, waiting for the ducklings to join her. People love to watch the ducks, as you can see below. Sometimes I have to tell people not to get too close to the resting mallards lest they disturb the naps.
Very often now Miss Duck and her brood engage in zooming after a meal. It looks as if they’re having fun, and they may well be, but I think this is also preparation for flight. Miss Duck often leads the way, flying in a short hop in front of her brood. They zoom along towards her, flapping their growing but still ineffectual wings. Listen for the “quack” in this two-minute video, and be sure to watch the whole thing, as it shows dunking, flying, and zooming.
. . . and a few action shots of Miss Duck splashing in the water and preening:
x
x
Preening:
Preening in focus:
Soon they will be flying, and perhaps flying away, and I’ll feel like a parent whose kid has gone off to college. I will be, literally, an empty nester.
Welcome to Tuesday, the Cruelest Day and also September first. Yep, we’re into another month, starting with National Acne Positivity Day. Given the demographics of our readers, I doubt that acne is a pervasive problem, but if you have it, embrace the face you have.
Here’s the depiction of September from the 15th-century manuscript Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, along with the beautiful illustration. In the foreground is the grape harvest and in the background is the Château de Saumur, which still stands in altered form. As Wikipedia notes:
The page for September in the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry depicts the Château as it looked in 1410. It states that René of Anjou lived there until his death in 1480. The castle changed hands several times until 1589 when the Protestant King Henry IV (of France and Navarre) gave the castle to Duplessis-Mornay.
The Chateau originally had 4 wings that enclosed the courtyard; one of the wings fell apart in the 1600s. The courtyard also has a source of groundwater for its inhabitants during the Chateau’s occupancy period.
In the Très Riches Heures, note the peasant showing his butt:
Limbourg brothers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
And the Château today; you can see that the towers in the illustration are pretty accurate:
U.S. forces attacked two Iranian rocket launchers attempting to disperse sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, U.S. Central Command said on Sunday.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said early Monday, local time, that it had fired missiles at American fighter jets at air bases in Jordan in response to a U.S. attack on Iran. Several thousand U.S. military personnel are stationed at bases in Jordan.
The Jordanian military said it had intercepted eight missiles that violated the country’s airspace at dawn on Monday. It did not report any injuries or damage. A person familiar with the Iranian attack, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly, said that all of the Iranian missiles fired toward Jordan had been intercepted.
The U.S. attack was the first by the United States against Iran in a month and appeared to be limited rather than a resumption of large-scale American bombing. But the back-and-forth raises the risk of a new round military strikes by both sides.
Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for Central Command, said that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps forces had been observed preparing to launch rockets armed with mines from Larak Island into the waters of the surrounding strait, a vital shipping waterway for oil and gas.
As of last week, U.S. forces had cleared the mines that Iran had planted in the strait, according to Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of Central Command.
. . . The Trump administration has urged commercial vessels to make the passage, with the U.S. Navy guiding them through the southern part of the strait in Omani waters.
Iran has promised retaliation, of course. The Strait of Hormuz still has nowhere near the traffic it had before the war, with about five ships going through per day compared to roughly 100-150 before the war. Trump hasn’t accomplished that aim, either.
. . . . according to a senior intelligence source, amid economic upheaval senior Iranian officials are eyeing their escape from a rapidly deteriorating Islamic Republic.
While my sources report major unrest, expect a resumption of protests in the near future, and note that several officials are considering escape, you don’t need intelligence connections to see the strain on the Islamic Republic.
Mojtaba Khamenei recently issued a statement warning officials against “disappointing speech” and artificial binaries such as “war or negotiation” and “compromise or warmongering.” That is an interesting directive. It appears that, despite the pressure, rather than returning to war or the negotiating table, they see stabilizing the neither-war-nor-peace status quo as the best path for regime survival.
Meanwhile, on the ground, gas stations across Iran are facing miles-long queues, with people waiting for hours only to find the pumps closed after stations run dry. Motorists report engine trouble after refueling and suspect that authorities are cutting supplies with water and excessive methanol to stretch what little fuel remains. The shortages are one symptom of a broader reckoning: the Iranian rial now trades at over 2 million to the dollar, point-to-point inflation runs near 88 percent, and even regime-friendly media concede that most families can no longer afford basic goods. Most frightening to the regime, they can no longer afford the gas subsidy and allotments. They remember how the 2019 gasoline price hike and rationing triggered what was then an unprecedented nationwide uprising, when security forces killed roughly 1,500 unarmed protesters under a total internet blackout. Both the economic distress and the regime’s brutality have grown far more severe since.
Mojtaba’s statement was directed at the regime’s own officials who are increasingly revealing their rapidly deteriorating hand. Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani claimed authorities cannot publish some poverty statistics because of “security considerations,” while Ghalibaf warned that the Islamic Republic “will not last” if public hardship persists. Police Chief Ahmad-Reza Radan cautioned that economic decline could fuel renewed unrest. Leaked audio has captured security forces discussing preparations for fuel-related protests, and units are already being deployed preemptively across major cities—with the security services quietly prioritizing their own access to fuel even as ordinary Iranians go without.
. . . Protests are inevitable, and the Islamic Republic is cracking down preemptively to restrict their scale.
. . . People will come out into the streets, and when they do, they will meet implacable resistance from a regime intent above all on its own survival—one with a recent track record of massacre. That resistance has to be met by an equally earnest will from the Americans: material support, air cover, and ensuring the internet stays on. It may be eight months late, but Trump still has the opportunity to make good on his promise to “have the back” of the protesters.
The last round of protests saw over 30,000 people killed, and I don’t think that’s going to happen on such a scale (Iranians aren’t suicidal). Also, Segal always seems very optimistic about the downfall of Iran. This kind of stuff has not been reported in the legacy media, and I’m wondering if Segal has better sources than, say, the New York Times. At any rate, we should know, from Masih and others, whether people really do “come out into the streets.” Perhaps Segal harbors an unwarranted optimism.
*The jury is still deliberating (since August 27) the verdict in the case of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman who killed her three young children and then jumped out a window, apparently trying to kill herself (she’s paralyzed from the waist down now). She is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity (“postpartum psychosis”). Over at the Free Press, Jed Rubenfeld argues that, by a quirk of Massachusetts law, “The law is inadequate to judge Lindsay Clancy.” (The subtitle is “What makes the case impossible for a jury is that Massachusetts law only allows for bad options when ruling on an insanity defense. The one sensible solution, voluntary manslaughter, is off the table.”)
But if you’re wondering what the law actually says about Clancy’s case, well, let me cut to the punch line: Because the case is being tried in Massachusetts state court, the law offers surprisingly little help in arriving at a just response to what Clancy did.
In fact, due to peculiarities of Massachusetts law, the Clancy jury is almost certain to come out the wrong way—no matter what the jurors decide.
The initial problem—and it’s a big one—is that Massachusetts law is weird when it comes to cases in which the defendant pleads insanity. In most of the country—and in federal prosecutions as well—when criminal defendants plead insanity, it’s up to them to prove it. But in Massachusetts, the state has to prove that Clancy was not insane, and it must do so beyond a reasonable doubt.
Think about that: If there’s any reasonable doubt about her sanity, Clancy must be acquitted. And how could there not be reasonable doubt about Clancy’s sanity? The psychiatric “experts” who are testifying sharply disagree about it. All across the country, Americans sharply disagree about it.
What’s more, Massachusetts’ definition of insanity is barely comprehensible. Under the law, Clancy must be considered insane if, due to a mental disease or defect, she could not distinguish right from wrong or lacked a substantial capacity to conform her conduct to the law when she killed her children. The meaning of every significant term in that definition can be (and has been) prolifically argued about. I’m a law professor who has taught criminal law for decades, and I have my doubts about how to apply that definition to a case like Clancy’s.
As a result, a complete acquittal is quite possible, simply on the ground that the jurors have doubts about her sanity. Which would be a travesty.
. . .So when is insanity a proper defense to a criminal charge?
The insanity defense is appropriate when a defendant’s psychotic delusions prevent him from understanding what he’s doing. If a person actually believes his neighbors are space aliens who are plotting against humankind, he’s not guilty of murder if, in his derangement, he kills them. Murder is the intentional killing of another human being, and he doesn’t know that he is killing a human being.
Similarly, some mentally ill people uncontrollably attack anyone who comes near them; that’s why they’re put in straitjackets. Those people too—the “stark, raving mad”—should be acquitted when they injure or kill, because they have no control over their actions.
But Clancy’s case is not like either of those. It seems indisputable that she knew she was killing her children, and she demonstrated very considerable control over her situation, including by persuading her husband to get takeout food from a restaurant far enough away that she would have time to do the terrible deed.
No matter how horrifically depressed and troubled Clancy was, she deliberately took the most innocent of lives—with at least one of her three children having to watch as she killed the first one. There must be criminal consequences for that.
And here’s the rub:
There is a crime that fits this dreadful bill. It’s not murder. It’s called voluntary manslaughter. As Massachusetts courts themselves have put it, voluntary manslaughter is an “unlawful homicide arising not from malice, but ‘from the frailty of human nature.’ ” No phrase in criminal law better captures a case like Clancy’s. If convicted of voluntary manslaughter, Clancy could serve up to 20 years.
But under Massachusetts law, the jury doesn’t have the option of convicting Clancy of this crime.
But what is “the frailty of human nature”, for crying out loud? Even for a determinist like me, this is a tough one. Clearly she had no “choice” here, but given that she was physically responsible for the deed, what is the proper treatment? Incarceration seems to be what Rubenfeld wants, as he sees confinement in a mental institution as “care, not punishment,” and he appears to want “punishment” for reasons he doesn’t specify. The three reasons for incarceration that I see as valid inslude deterrence of others, sequestration of a bad person from society, or rehabilitation. Which of these does Clancy need? The first two don’t seem appropriate.
*This editorial-board op-ed in the Washington Post, which tells us something we should already know, is really an excuse to show the video below. The.op-ed is called “Trump’s tariffs aren’t reducing the trade deficit” (article archived here):
The trade deficit doesn’t matter, but even if it did, tariffs aren’t an effective way to reduce it.
In July, the monthly trade deficit in goods hit its highest level since March 2025, the Commerce Department revealed on Thursday. That was the month before President Donald Trump’s announcement last year of massive tariffs on products from nearly every country in the world.
The Supreme Court’s February ruling against Trump struck down only tariffs he imposed under one law. He has imposed import duties under other laws before and after that ruling. They remain in effect. The average tariff rate is currently about 11 percent, which is more than four times higher than it was when Trump started his second term.
A key argument the administration made to the justices was that the trade deficit is a national emergency, and tariffs are necessary to reduce it.
Intuition suggests tariffs could bring down the trade deficit. Tariffs are a tax on imported goods, and taxing something more means people will buy less of it. Fewer imports with the same amount of exports would therefore lower the trade deficit.
Absurdly, the Trump administration simultaneously claims that tariffs aren’t taxes and don’t raise prices.
The problem for the Trump team is that imports and exports often move together. In other words, reducing imports also reduces exports, so the difference between them — the trade deficit — hardly changes.
. . .Another reason that a fall in imports did not cause a significant reduction in the trade deficit is that Americans were stocking up before the tariffs came into effect, so imports fell to their normal level when they did.
A figure from the article:
If tariffs worked as the administration would have had the Supreme Court believe, imports should have fallen well below their 2023 to 2024 levels as Americans switched from buying foreign goods to domestic ones.
Instead, there was more total trade but roughly the same deficit. In the past few months, exports have fallen while imports have remained high, leading to the higher deficit in July.
Tariffs are never good, and the consumer always suffers. What Trump has done is madness.
Here’s a cute video about the U.S./Canada “trade war,” which began when Trump recently imposed 50% tariffs on a range of Canadian goods. The beaver Mounties are awesome:
Facing an intense backlash, the influential fashion designer John Galliano has taken the unprecedented step of withdrawing from a planned exhibition in his honor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“After much reflection and discussion with all those involved, I have decided, with great sadness, that it is best for the exhibition not to take place at this time,” Galliano wrote in a statement posted to his Instagram page.
He also expressed “profound and enduring” gratitude to the museum’s leadership, and acknowledged the pain his past words had caused.
“I do not want the debate surrounding me to place the Met in a difficult position or distract from the remarkable work of the Costume Institute,” he wrote. “I also recognize and respect that an exhibition honoring my work would be painful for some.”
In a statement on Monday, Max Hollein, the director of the Met, said, “Following thoughtful discussions with John Galliano, we have together decided not to proceed with the exhibition.”
The offensive act:
In 2011, a French tribunal ruled that Galliano had made hateful remarks about Jews and Asians in two incidents at a bar near his home in Paris. At roughly the same time, a video circulated showing Galliano saying “I love Hitler” and telling appalled patrons that “your mothers, your forefathers” would all be “gassed.”
He was fired from his job as the creative director of Dior, a post he had held for 15 years, when the video surfaced. In 2014, after Galliano had gone through a stint in rehab and discussed Judaism and its history with rabbis and the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, he became the creative director of Maison Margiela and was re-embraced by the fashion world.
Galliano does not have free speech here, as the Met is a private and not a government organization, and has the right to call off an exhibition. Fortunately, Galliano pulled the exhibit himself, which must have been a big relief for the Met. However, if the exhibit had been at the Smithsonian or similar government venue, they could not have canceled it as it would violate Galliano’s rights. His speech was odious, and illegal in France, but would not have been illegal in the U.S.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is back on board with science. And look at her lovely photo!
Andrzej: According to experts, cat hair in food is unhealthy. Hili: That’s an argument from authority, you need to test it.
In Polish:
Ja: Zdaniem ekspertów kocia sierść w jedzeniu jest niezdrowa.
Hili: To argument z autorytetu, musisz to przetestować.
*******************
A Thing With Faces from Peggy, who found this face-like rock in Canada and said, “A winking face – we found it this way, we did not add the moss:”
This was posted on FB by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
From Masih; a man defends a woman who is kept out of the bazaar by the black-clad Morality Police because her hair isn’t covered. Yay for both of them!
Breaking: The same morality police whose enforcement of compulsory hijab led to the killing Mahsa Amini in 2022 are back on the streets of Iran.
This video was filmed at one of the entrances to Tehran’s Grand Bazaar. Hijab enforcers are blocking a woman from entering simply… pic.twitter.com/TWyjcR6vvL
— Nurses Against Dick Pics. 🪷🇺🇦 (@ClaudetteGGibs1) August 31, 2026
From Luana. This is a long tweet but worth reading; it shows an English university trying to chill the speech of a faculty member who is discussing assisted dying online.
🚨BREAKING: CAF has instructed a leading employment law firm to act for an Emeritus Professor after his University warned him to “reflect carefully” on his lawful online interventions on assisted dying — leaving him fearing that further public comment on an issue directly related… pic.twitter.com/31BeonVGRP
— Committee for Academic Freedom (@ComAcFreedom) August 29, 2026
In 1939, a graduate student named George Dantzig arrived late to his statistics class at UC Berkeley. Two problems were already written on the blackboard when he walked in.
Assuming they were the night’s homework, he copied them down and went home to work through them. It took… pic.twitter.com/rCMkn5bJcF
This Dutch Jewish woman was gassed to death, together with her infant daughter, as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. The woman was 19 years old. https://t.co/BKqpPBY5Tx
And one that Matthew tweeted. “Michael” was Linus Pauling’s son, away at boarding school. “Rosalind” is Franklin, of course, and “Sydney” is Sydney Brenner.
Crick’s diary Nov 19541 – Tea at home (Rosalind rang)3 – Rosalind (early) stayed to supper4 – Pauling (Nobel Prize) Party. Up late7 – Rearranged books in new bookcase20 – Visited Michael. Climbed tree. Back same day23 – Sydney arrived24 – With Sydney25 – Talked with Sydney28 – Sydney left
Well, I suspect that the magazine Scientific American, now 121 years old, has one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel. Apparently it’s been going downhill for some time, losing revenue and subscribers, and went even farther downhill content-wise under the previous editor Laura Helmuth, who decided to use the magazine as a “progressive ideological” mouthpiece (see my posts on this issue here).
Research Information (RI) and Legal Insurrection (LI) are among the several places announcing that Scientific American, until recently owned by Springer Nature, has been sold to another company because it was unprofitable (h/t Howie). There’s no announcement on the journal’s website itself, but the content looks tepid, as it has been for some time. Scientific American used to have articles on real science written by real scientists, but that pretty much stopped a lont time ago. As Wikipedia notes, the journal was founded in 1845, and:
Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Prize-winners having been featured since its inception.
This is sad, but the morbidity of the journal probably reflects waning interest in magazines and especially in popular-science journalism. The only newspaper I can think of that still has a dedicated science section is The New York Times (every Tuesday), though I may be missing some venues because I don’t read newspapers on paper. To me, another sign of this waning interest is the lack of science books in many compilations of “best books of the year,” and I don’t think that’s due to a paucity of good science books.
From RI:
Springer Nature has announced the sale of its consumer media businesses, including the science publication Scientific Americani n the United States and Spektrum der Wissenschaft in Germany.
The publisher says the move forms part of a strategic decision to focus on its core global publishing activities across research, health and education, while supporting the long-term development of the two consumer-facing brands.
According to Springer Nature, both titles are being acquired by new owners with significant consumer media expertise and the capacity to support their future growth.
Frank Vrancken Peeters, Chief Executive Officer of Springer Nature, said: “Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft are respected and loved science media brands with a long and valued history, and we are grateful to the teams who have built and sustained them. We have taken the time to ensure these strong brands find the right homes – organisations with the consumer media expertise and ambition to invest in their future.”
Springer Nature said it is working with both buyers to ensure continuity of publication throughout the transition process. Scientific American is to be acquired by LabX Media Group, a global science-focused media company; the transaction will complete on 24 June 2026.
You can read about LabXMedia group on Wikipedia or its own web page; the organization already publishes The Scientist, a trade journal for working biologists rather than a popular-science magazine.
Author Leslie Eastman at LI is not as kind to the magazine:
I have been following the antics of Scientific American, the Bud Light of science journals, for quite some time now.
Scientific American colluding with other media to normalize “climate emergency” terminology, despite vast swaths of scientific evidence showing the Earth’s climate has continuously changed over 4 billion years.
Now comes news that Springer Nature, the publisher, announced it is divesting both of its flagship consumer science magazines, Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft (Spectrum of Science) in Germany. The company says that the sales are part of a strategic pivot to concentrate exclusively on its core academic, health, and education publishing business.
. . .The decline of Scientific American in both respect and profits offers a cautionary tale: when a once-venerable science publication abandons rigorous, evidence-based journalism in favor of ideological advocacy by endorsing political candidates, adopting contested social terminology, and framing sports injuries through a racial lens, it erodes the very credibility that made it indispensable to its readers.
Had the magazine’s leadership chosen to trust its audience’s intelligence and doubled down on accessible, accurate science coverage rooted in empirical reality, it would have retained the broad American readership that sustained it for nearly 180 years, rather than shrinking into a niche ideological outlet.
The sale to LabX Media Group may yet represent a second chance, but only if new ownership recognizes that scientific literacy and editorial integrity are the foundation on which a sustainable, respected science publication must be built. Based on the union drama, I fear it will be a significant challenge.
If the new owners don’t reset the publication’s priorities, they will find it harder to rebrand the product than Bud Light did.
I asked two AI bots for information about the profits and circulation of Scientific American over time.
From Claude:
Bottom line: the reliable, roughly comparable data points suggest the US print/print+digital base fell from around 550,000–650,000 in the mid-2000s to around 300,000 by 2020 — a decline of roughly 50%, consistent with the broader magazine industry’s collapse over that period.
From Grok:
Detailed standalone profit-and-loss numbers for Scientific American are not published. It was a small unit inside Springer Nature (and previously Nature Publishing Group/Holtzbrinck) and was not broken out in annual reports.
Third-party estimates put Scientific American revenue in the ~$29.5 million range, consistent with the combined €25 million figure for both titles.
Circulation was reported at roughly 300,000 in 2020 (about 240,000 print + digital and 22,000 digital-only). Earlier peaks were higher (around 450,000 paid subscribers mentioned in mid-2010s coverage). Print readership (including pass-along) was cited at 2.2 million in recent media kits.
Print advertising pages and newsstand sales have declined over decades, as they have across most consumer magazines. Digital traffic and subscriptions exist but operate in a lower-margin environment than Springer Nature’s research journals.
Judging from readers’ comments, Scientific American has been lame for a long time, well before Helmuth took over. For some reason it stopped using well known scientists to write articles (or those scientists didn’t want to write for the magazine). And under Helmuth the magazine hit rock bottom because it was not only lacking good articles by good scientists, but became ideologically captured. Will LabX Media Group bring it back? I doubt it; perhaps the days of public interest in science are gone.
Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts might be the only high-profile Democrat in America eagerly campaigning as a supporter of transgender rights.
Even as many other top Democrats have grown cagey on the issue, Mr. Markey is offering a passionate defense of transgender athletes as he runs in a primary contest on Tuesday against Representative Seth Moulton, a more moderate challenger.
Mr. Markey has argued in particular that Mr. Moulton “threw trans kids under the bus” when, shortly after the 2024 election, the congressman attributed Democrats’ defeat in part to their position on transgender issues. Mr. Moulton long defended his remarks but expressed some contrition for them this month.
“Trans athletes should be able to play,” Mr. Markey said in an interview this past week. “That reflects Massachusetts and who we are. And Seth Moulton does not.”
Mr. Markey, 80, has staked out his ardent pro-trans rights position at a moment when the rest of his party is grappling with the issue, which President Trump and other Republicans have used as a cultural wedge. Ambitious younger Democrats who are likely to run for president — including Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary — have edged away from defending the participation of transgender athletes in women’s and girls’ sports.
Other prominent Democrats have sought to defuse the issue by not talking about it or punting responsibility while trying to pivot to more favorable issues like the economy.
Mr. Markey has leaned in. He is, according to Charlotte Clymer, a liberal activist and strategist who is transgender and supports the senator, “the only one who is really talking about this front and center.”
Markey, while presumably expressing his moral conviction, is not only out of step with most Americans on transgender “right” in sports (see below), but I think is also pushing a policy that is palpably unfair to biological women in sports. While most Americans, like me, favor banning discrimination against trans people in jobs, housing, and other public accommodations (56%, to be precise), most Americans don’t favor transgender athletes competing on sports teams that don’t match their natal sex.
Dozens of Israeli settlers burst into a Palestinian man’s house in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, trapping and attacking people inside, the Israeli military and Palestinian witnesses said. It was the latest in a series of assaults by Israeli extremists that have drawn international condemnation.
The attack took place near the Palestinian town of Qusra in the northern West Bank, where groups of Israeli settlers recently besieged the homes of several other Palestinians, including an American citizen. Violence has snowballed in the Israeli-occupied territory over the past several months, with Palestinians saying the Israeli authorities frequently look the other way.
But the intensity of Saturday’s assault drew a rare condemnation from Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who has largely played down the attacks as the actions of a small minority.
The Israeli military said soldiers were sent to both Qusra and nearby Jalud after reports of violent clashes and Israeli rioters hurling stones toward Palestinians. Dozens of rioters had “barricaded themselves” inside a Palestinian house, the military said, leading Israeli forces to remove the attackers and confiscate their vehicles. It was not clear whether any Israelis were arrested.
The house’s owner, Luay Beyrouti, 29, said that around noon on Saturday, a handful of settlers had approached the structure, throwing stones. Mr. Beyrouti’s family does not live in the house at the moment; he had gone there along with several other Palestinians to renovate it.
. . . A separate attack unfolded about four miles away in the Palestinian town of Jalud. A group of masked Israeli settlers attacked and injured reporters with NBC News who were interviewing a Palestinian woman driven out of her home, the outlet said. Settlers in a car approached the group as they were walking down a hill, hitting them with sticks and throwing rocks, according to NBC, which said three of its staff and the woman were hurt.
Members of Israel’s right-wing, pro-settler government have frequently argued that concerns about settler violence are overblown, and officials have sometimes signaled their support for Israelis accused of attacks.
But on Saturday, Mr. Netanyahu said the attackers were not only “breaking the law” but also harming Israel’s reputation abroad, causing “immense harm to the law-abiding settler community” and damaging “Israel’s standing in the world.”
“I expect law enforcement authorities to arrest the rioters and bring them to justice as soon as possible,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
Netantyahu is of course right here: nobody should be inflicting violence on somebody else or intimidating them, and those who do should be punished. (He seems more fixated on Israel’s reputation than on the attacked Palestinians.) However, I think it’s debatable whether Israelis who settle in area C of the West Bank should be called “settlers”, as there’s a credible case to be made that their presence in this area is not illegal (many think that “settling” is illegal under international law).
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal has a piece called, “‘Not as Naive as you think’: America’s Gaza Gamble.” The statement refers to the U.S. who, according to Segal, is giving away the store in Gaza.
t’s Sunday, August 30, and over the past year the Americans have talked with almost every lowlife in the Middle East. The Iranians are like the don of the crime family. Hamas is his debt collector, way down at the end of the chain, on some street in New Jersey.
While everyone fixates on the dons, the Americans are once again talking to the debt collectors. On the face of it, Hamas got a big prize: Jared Kushner met with senior figures of the murderous terror organization that murdered and kidnapped dozens of Americans on October 7. The Americans have an answer: last year we met with them to extract 56 hostages; now—the kidnapped Gaza Strip itself.
We’re not as naive as you think, they keep repeating. Time and again we said Hamas will have no weapons and no control over the Strip. The means matter less to us than the end. People forget the meetings with senior Hamas figures, they say. And in the same breath they note that a very, very senior figure in the defense establishment spoke directly, by phone, with the heads of the Nazi organization during the negotiations to free hostages. Why is it permitted for you and not for us, they say.
In Israel people are appalled at the thought of Qatar and Turkey being involved in the Strip. Contrary to what the opposition says, the two hostile states won’t send soldiers into the Strip. But their very presence on the oversight council—the body meant to determine whether Israel is meeting the agreement or not—is untenable, practically and morally.
Most of Israel’s concerns were laid to rest after some back-and-forth with the Americans. What remains is the fear that the international body, instead of demilitarizing Hamas, will separate the IDF from Hamas and effectively constrain Israel’s movements in the Strip.
At the White House they’re angry with Benjamin Netanyahu, but they’ve fallen in line with most of his demands. Trump himself has, for months now, pointedly refrained from declaring support for him in the election. But his people are preparing a victory image for Likud: a handover of weapons in the Strip, into American hands, before the elections. The payment, in the form of a partial withdrawal, will be on credit—after the ballot boxes close.
Agreed: first Hamas must completely disarm, and then the IDF will withdraw. Why? Because Hamas has proven itself untrustworthy, because they are sworn to destroy Israel and its Jews, and because if Israel agrees to withdraw if Hamas scrupulously meet the conditions of the agreement, then Israel will indeed withdraw.
Finland has chosen not to renew its multi-year funding agreement with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) after it expires this year, Finnish Foreign Trade Minister Ville Tavio announced on Thursday.The multi-year agreement, which was signed in March 2023, included Finland contributing a total of 20 million euros to UNRWA. It followed a previous 2019-2022 agreement, throughout which Finland provided 5 million euros to the agency each year.
In a post on X/Twitter, Tavio clarified that his country will not reduce its funding for humanitarian efforts in Palestinian territories and will instead contribute to organizations like the World Food Programme.
Tavio previously ordered Finland to suspend its contributions to the agency in 2024 over allegations that UNRWA employees participated in Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre against Israel.
In a January 2024 press release, Tavio asserted that his country “must make sure that not a single euro of Finland’s money goes to Hamas or other terrorists” and urged that the allegations be seriously investigated.
. . . Since the 2024 allegations, UNRWA has been plagued by additional accusations and investigations, with multiple employees being found to have participated in the October 7 massacre and maintained ties to terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
In late January 2024, roughly 16–18 countries plus the EU temporarily paused or delayed new funding pending investigations. These included Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, and others. Almost all of those that paused later resumed contributions in 2024 after UNRWA fired accused staff, launched probes, and pledged reforms. The Netherlands briefly planned a phase-out but restored full annual funding (€19 million) in 2026.
Funding for UNRWA should be suspended not just because it’s a refuge for Palestinian terrorism, but also because it is the only UN agency for refugees that is designated for a specific group of people. All the rest of the world’s refugees are dealt with by a single agency, the The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which works in more than 130 countries.
*The battle between the U.S. and Canada continues about what Lake Ontario is supposed to be called. As you remember, in a move of his unusual stupidity, even for Trump, our “President” decided to change the name of “Lake Ontario” to “Lake America,” even though only American agencies have to use the new name. But Canada is fighting back!
Donald Trump and Canada continued a verbal duel on Saturday over the US government’s administrative renaming of Lake Ontario, with the country erecting a giant sign saying “Lake Ontario. Now and Always” – and the American president posting a video of him tearing down an avatar of that sign, erecting a replacement saying Lake America, and dancing to YMCA.
Rhetoric over the naming of Lake Ontario is the public face of an escalating trade dispute between the US and its northern neighbor involving a 50% US tariff on Canadian steel and retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa.
Trump’s order for the US government to refer to Lake Ontario as Lake America by Sunday had at least one prominent impact. Google Maps had changed Lake Ontario’s name to Lake America for US users to reflect the president’s executive renaming order.
Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney has flat-out rejected the renaming, explaining that Lake Ontario derives from an Indigenous Wendat word meaning “the lake is beautiful, the lake is great” that dates back more than 400 years.
. . . In a statement explaining why it was acquiescing to Trump’s desired name for Lake Ontario, Google said its practice is to “reflect name changes in official government sources”. Trump’s order affects the US’s federal Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), “which sets the standard for official US maps”, the tech company said.
. . .Meanwhile, on Saturday, the US president raised the volume again by resorting to the kind of AI-generated imagery for which he has shown a penchant.
He posted one such video of an army of Canada geese with Trump-like blond hair firing rifles in protection of Lake America. He published another of himself kicking over a Lake Ontario sign and replacing it with Lake America while he danced in his distinctive to a soundtrack of the Village People hit YMCA, which he has implemented into his public appearances for years.
Across the US’s northern border, Ontario premier Doug Ford replied with a two-stories high billboard declaring “Lake Ontario. Now and Always,” near Grimsby, Ontario. Ford said Trump was trying to rename the lake because Ontario and Canada were “standing up for ourselves”, and he argued the name would outlast the president.
“Long after President Trump is gone, it will still be called Lake Ontario,” Ford said in a video posted on social media.
You go, Canada! Here’s a video of Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, unveiling the sign.
And a short spoof video of the name change with an original song. I quite like this one:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili objects to one part of science:
Hili: What is science? Andrzej: A method of systematically seeking the truth, combined with the ability to admit when one is wrong.
Hili: Not for me.
In Polish:
Hili: Co to jest nauka?
Ja: Metoda systematycznego dociekania prawdy, połączona ze zdolnością przyznania się do błędu.
Hili: To nie dla mnie.
*******************
Talking about things with faces, reader Colin sent me a photo he took of a “rather sad banana, who had just heard about Dolly Parton’s death.”:
From Masih: a condemned protestor in Iran tells his family, in a last message, not to believe anything the regime says about him:
Before the Islamic Republic of Iran hanged Majid Adineh, they gave him one last chance to speak to his family and his final message to his mother, he exposed the“confession” broadcast by the regime.
From J. K. Rowling, whose daughter will be signing her mom’s autographs:
My signature and my youngest daughter’s first attempt at forging my signature. I’ve seen enough bogus ‘signed’ Potters to know she’s a real criminal talent. Very proud. pic.twitter.com/EPkxbLNICb
From Matthew, who loves sprites. Translation from the Russian:
“Red sprites near Sayre, Oklahoma, on August 15. I specifically planned my trip from Arizona to catch this show!”
🔭 «Красные спрайты возле города Сэйр, Оклахома, 15 августа. Cпециально спланировал свою поездку из Аризоны так, чтобы попасть на это шоу!» – делится Джим Тан
I noticed, while preparing tomorrow’s Hili Dialogue, that tomorrow is We Love Memoirs Day. Well, I’m not a fan of memoirs so much as of biographies, for memoirs can easily be distorted because the writer is the subject. That’s not so true of biographies, and it got me thinking about the biographies I’ve loved the most. I’ll mention just four (three of them comprise more than one volume), and I encourage you to note your own selections in the comments.
My criteria are simply that the subject of the biography be an interesting person—or, in the case of the first two, made interesting by the author’s research—and that the book be written very well, so the prose is a pleasure to read.
These are listed in no particular order.
1.)_ The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro (1974). I read this behemoth (1,336 pages!) soon after it came out, and I couldn’t put it down. One wouldn’t think that Robert Moses, an urban planner who held a number of powerful positions in New York City, would be such an interesting subject for a biography, but Robert Moses made it so. As Wikipedia notes,
Moses’ construction projects transformed the New York area and revolutionized the way urban areas across the United States were designed and built. His philosophy of urban development influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners across the United States.
I won’t summarize what he did, as you can read the Wikipedia link to the book above or Moses’s short biography on the site. It’s a mesmerizing read, although some critics complain it has a number of errors (Moses, who was still alive when it came out, shares that opinion). You can look up these allegations after you read the book, but if you like biography you must read it. It won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1975.
Here’s the cover; click to get the Amazon link. At $16.47 for the huge paperback, it’s a great bargain:
2.) What Caro did for Robert Moses—making an unlikely subject seem fascinating—he also did for Lyndon Johnson, in a four-volume work that’s supposed to end at volume five. The Years of Lyndon Johnson (first volume from 1982), currently over 3,000 pages, and is another series of books that are hard to put down. The first volume covers Johnson’s youth through his first campaign for the Senate, the second up to his successful election to the Senate in 1947, the third his control of the Senate and passage of the Civil Rights act of 1957 (this volume won both the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award), and the fourth up to Johnson’s attaining the Presidency after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
Unfortunately, the fifth and final volume, up to Johnson’s death, is still in the works, and, like the book below, it’s a race against time as Caro is now 90 and has been saying for several decades that the book is nearly finished. Caro notes that he’s written a lot of the book, and I hope he’ll finish, as the final volume will cover Johnson’s tenure during the Vietnam War and his resignation from the Presidency in 1969. This is a crucial volume in the set, and we all hope Caro finishes it.
Here’s the set on Amazon, with the boxed hardcover set going for $113 and the paperbacks from $11-14, those being great bargains as well.
3.)The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill by William Manchwster (I am speaking of the first two volumes). Manchester completed two volumes in 1983 and 1988, and I devoured them. He died of stomach cancer before the third volume could be completed, so his unfinished manuscript was co-published with Paul Reid as the final volume. I haven’t read it.
You’re drawn into the series by the first chapter of the first book, which simply recounts a day in Churchill’s life as PM at his home in Chartwell, Kent. What a life the man had! Soldier, journalist, prisoner of war and escapee, holder of many big government positions (including First Lord of the Admiralty, during which he was humiliated by the Dardanelles fiasco and had to resign), parliamentarian, Prime Minister (twice), and elder statesman. He could write very well, was a prolifie author, and his books The Second World War and A History of the English Speaking Peoples won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. (I can’t think of another British PM who won a Nobel Prize for Literature.)
Unfortunately, the second volume of the biography, Alone, ends just when Churchill takes the reins as Prime Minister during WWII, and I was greatly looking forward to see the account of Churchill helming the UK during that war. But because Manchester died before that volume was published, I never read it, even though it came out with Reid’s help. Even so, you might read the first two volumes and see if you want to go on to the co-authored third.
Here’s the Amazon link to the trio: another bargain for the hardbacks at $79 (nearly 50% off), with the paperbacks around $15.
4.The two-volume biography of Charles Darwin by Janet Browne, comprising Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995), and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002). The first book covers Darwin’s life up to 1856, when he was starting On the Origin of Species, and the second his life at Down House, the publication of The Origin and his other books, ending, of course, with his death in 1882.
I may be biased in this selection because it is after all about Darwin, but it’s an extraordinarily well written duo, with a lot about the science. Janet has now condensed the two books into one, Darwin: A Biography, which just came out on June 30. I haven’t read it, so what I’m recommending is the two-volume set. Do read it. The cover below links to the Amazon site of the first volume
Now it’s your turn, and I look forward to hearing what biographies the readers recommend (I use those as a source of future reading).
Although the respected New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has the right to publish what it wants, and African-American gynecological oncologist Kemi Doll has the right to write about what she thinks, their intersection in a new NEJM “voices” piece is hyperbolic and misguided to the point of toxicity. Doll’s article simply poisons the debate about merit versus “equity” in America by simply asserting that there are “structural” intentions held by academics to kill—literally exterminate—black professors. The thesis is in Doll’s first sentence—her topic sentence:
“They are trying to kill us.”
And yes, she means that literally.
Doll’s short op-ed, which you can access below, is so over the top that the NEJM has itself gone off the rails, embarrassing itself by publishing it. Its assertions are either distorted or wrong, and there’s no evidence of a conspiracy to exterminate black scholars. Doll’s “evidence” rests on two academics who committed suicide, one being Jason Arday, the Cambridge University professor of sociology who apparently committed suicide after his plagiarism and made-up stories came to light (see my posts about him here). To Kemi Doll, Arday died because the allegations against him were intended to kill him.
That, of course, is nonsense. The story is complicated, but to couch it as people wanting Arday to die is a ridiculous simplification. There may have been a bit of racism motivating some of Arday’s critics, but most of it came from the realization that Arday, a professor without much merit as well as a serial liar, was promoted largely because of his ethnicity and his claimed disability (he said he was severely autistic). It was an obvious case of ideological capture of academia, a case so clear that it has now become acceptable to talk and write about ethnicity versus quality—a topic previously taboo.
You can read the NEJM piece by clicking on the screenshot below.
I’ll quote a lot of it starting from the beginning. The quotes are indented, and my comments are flush left.
They are trying to kill us.
When Black academics say this, I imagine folks outside of our community think we are being hyperbolic. We are not. I think my non-Black colleagues are starting to get a taste of this as they realize how diabolically opposed to our own well-being most of the movements of our federal health agencies seem to be these days. It’s appalling and scary and also — yes, welcome. This is how it feels to know that there are systemic pressures working against your success, your well-being, and in the case of Jason Arday — your life.
Note that Doll cites racist “systemic pressures” that are aimed at ruining the carers of black academics and even killing them. In fact, the opposite is true. Affirmative action, DEI, and the “racial reckoning” that’s been occurring for a long time have given minority academics, including women, a leg up. These initiatives, which led to Arday’s promotion and, indeed, sacralization, is clearly what got him the Cambridge professorship in the first place. Until Arday’s fabulism and plagiarism were revealed (starting with a post by Nathan Cofnas, who clearly didn’t want Arday to die), Arday was on a pedestal, told by his own chairperson at Cambridge that “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” Doll continues:
Jason Arday had the distinction of being the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. His publications specifically focused on race and racism in the British educational system, and he didn’t shy away from using his own life in his examples. After the deliberate targeting of his veracity as an academic by another former Cambridge professor, dismissed due to his racism and white supremacist views, Prof. Arday came under intense scrutiny with regard to his Ph.D. thesis and the stories in his memoir. Besides making the point that his Ph.D. advisor and the university cleared him of any deliberate plagiarism allegations, I want to be clear that I don’t care whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true. None of them were worth his career. And certainly not his life.
Note the penultimate statement: Doll didn’t care whether any allegations against Arday were true. But if they were true (they include made-up positions he put on his c.v.), and they seem to be, then he was unqualified for his position at Cambridge. Remember that Arday killed himself only after Cambridge decided to investigate the allegations. Did anybody predict that those allegations would lead to his (presumed) suicide? I don’t think so, but Doll argues that his death was not only predictable, but engineered by academia and the media:
But Black academics know that we will always be held to a different standard, and it will look “fair” to most until perhaps we are dead. Dr. Antoinette “Bonnie” Candia-Bailey of Lincoln University expressed the severe stress, pressure, and undue criticism she weathered in her position before her suicide in 2024. Dr. JoAnne A. Epps, Executive Vice President and Provost of Temple University, and Dr. Orinthia T. Montague, President of Volunteer State Community College, died enduring the unique stressors of their jobs. Prof. Claudine Gay was hounded by accusations of plagiarism and ousted by Harvard, who bent to those who simply could not stomach a world where a Black woman was president of such a storied institution. Today, I took a moment to appreciate that she is still with us, thank God.
I urge you to check those references for suicide caused by stress, pressure, and criticism. Yes, Candia-Bailey killed herself after claiming she was bullied in academia, but Epps “died. . . . after becoming ill onstage at a memorial service, the university said.” The reference to Orinthia Montague says nothing about suicide, and I can find nothing about that in other places (e.g., here) What is ludicrous about Doll’s claims here is that she simply asserts that the last two died because of “stress and pressure”. But, for crying out loud, being a president or provost of any college is a stressful job, and there is no evidence that Montague or Epps had sufficiently more stress than other administrators because they were black, crossing a stress threshhold that led to death. Neither death is attributed to suicide, so Doll simply asserts that they were due to blackness-induced pressure. Didn’t the NEJM even check the links?
As for Claudine Gay, she was asked to resign by the Harvard Corporation because she did not handle well the allegations of antisemitism at Harvard (she had to clarify her position several times), because she was credibly accused of plagiarism, and because she could no longer lead the University effectively. Rather than boot her out of the Presidency, Harvard stood by her (even dismissing her plagiarism accusations as only examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution“) until the pressure from the Corporation became too great. Indeed, some people, as in NYT link I just gave, argued that Harvard was going easier on Gay than it was on students who might have done the same thing. I see no evidence that Harvard wanted to dump Gay because she was black. Indeed, why was she appointed President if there were structural pressures to ruin her career?
At any rate, Gay landed on her feet. Though she resigned the Presidency, Harvard Magazinesays that Gay returned to the faculty as professor of government and of African and American studies, earning “a base salary of $1,397,749, plus other compensation of $150,802 (again, principally the value of a University-provided official residence)”. I don’t know another regular humanities professor making nearly $1.5 million per year! Clearly, Harvard was not trying to ruin her career.
More:
The message to Black academics is clear. Come in, be great and indeed be excellent, but don’t dare dream too big. Don’t dare shine too bright. Walk the line of excellence and humility with perfect grace, and be ready to fight for your life.
The lesson is really that your ethnicity (and, in Arday’s class, his claimed early disability) can elevate you to prestige. Beyond Arday and Candia-Bailey, the argument that universities and academia are trying to exterminate black people is nonexistent.
Doll does mention one white man who lost his job after accusations of falsified data:
In contrast, as a white man, you can rise to be president of Stanford University, and after your falsified data is found and has set back an entire field of research for years — you will only lose your job and then quickly find another one as the CEO of a $1 billion biopharma start-up. Beyond this single story of nauseating privilege, it is a fantasy to act like plagiarism, falsified data, and suspicious, unreproducible results are not major and common problems in academia. We have entire websites devoted to attempting to keep pace with the number of scientific papers retracted amid scandal. Scroll through the recent posts on Retraction Watch and let me know how many of those investigators have been hounded, literally, to death by the news media. I hear the assertions that the British press is particularly vicious and unabashedly racist, which contributed to hundreds of articles attacking Prof. Arday in a matter of days. However, this country is not far behind. The New York Times, before his body was even laid to rest, asserted on social media that Arday’s death was a result of “race, diversity, and academic hiring.” Sure.
I won’t list other white academics who lost their jobs for plagiarism or other accusations, or even killed themselves as a result, as that’s just playing an anecdotes game. Yes, Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned from Stanford after wonky and apparently falsified data were found in a paper he co-authored, but, like Claudine Gay, he landed on his feet. And remember, the attention directed to Arday was only tangentially because he was black, for it was his ethnicity and claimed disability, as well as the accusations of fabulism and plagiarism that Cambridge University at first ignored, that gave the story its viral status. The striking part was the realization of how far ideological capture had gone in academia—so far that a man totally unqualified for a professorship had gotten there without anybody looking too closely at his qualifications. (Indeed, I think the NEJM publishing Doll’s palpably ludicrous analysis is itself an example of ideological capture of the journal.)
At the end, Doll bemoans her own fate, telling us that she pretty much has it as bad as did Arday, although that cannot be true. She also analogizes her accusations of racism to lynching, for lynching is the subject of the song “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday in 1939 (bolding below is mine):
As someone who introduced herself here as being in it for the long haul in academia, I am in contemplation this week. Not because I am considering leaving, but because it’s important to query whether my systems and boundaries for my own well-being are strong enough to withstand the ever-present winds of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Are my bonds with my fellow Black academics well-tended to? Are my filters to keep nonsense out of my inbox tight enough? Do I need to ratchet up my “No”s even further?
In these times where trees bearing strange fruit are on the rise (again) in the U.S. South, where Black mothers everywhere heard about Nolan Wells long before it was in the mainstream media, I don’t believe there is such thing as hyperbole. They are trying to kill us. They always have been.
And yet, we are still here.
Rest in peace, Jason Arday.
Ask yourself if you’re an academic: are colleges and universities trying to deny jobs to minorities, impede their progress, or even trying to kill them by putting in motion processes that they know will result in suicide? I’d say that, in these days of DEI, it’s the precise opposite.
But why did the NEJM even publish such a palpably misguided and hyperbolic piece? I would answer this way: the journal’s editors were trying to signal their virtue. And that’s ideological capture.
Welcome to Sunday, August 30, 2026: Sabbath for goyische cats and the sixth weekiversary since Miss Duck and her brood came to Botany Pond. Here are the babies on July 20, the second day after they came to the pond (they presumably hatched one day before Pond Entry Day). There are few animals more adorable than a baby mallard.
And here they are sex days ago. In two more weeks they’ll be eight weeks old, and about ready able to fly. They may hang around a while, but they may also leave quickly, and then I’ll feel like a parent whose kid goes off to college—except I’ll never see most of the kids again. They’ll be out in the real world, having obtained jobs as Being Mallards.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 30 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Well, the U.S. finally got some benefit from leaving a political heir of Maduro, Delcy Rodríguez, in power in Venezuela. Now we can take their oil!
President Trump confirmed late Friday that the U.S. reached a deal with Venezuela to secure control of a big chunk of the Latin American country’s oil reserves.
“At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer,” the president said on social media.
The country’s oil industry has fallen into widespread disarray following years of mismanagement during the regimes of the late Hugo Chávez and former President Nicolás Maduro.
Friday’s deal would give the U.S. a foothold in some of the most promising oil-and-gas fields. The country says it has some 300 billion barrels of proven reserves, the largest in the world. In comparison, the U.S. has about 46 billion.
Trump also said the agreement would substantially lower gas prices for all Americans. He and his team have been trying to shore up energy security in the Western Hemisphere while the Iran war has locked a big portion of the world’s oil and gas behind the Strait of Hormuz.
Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, has granted a private company—a joint project of the U.S. government and a private operator in Venezuela—a 100-year lease for the oil fields, a U.S. official said. The entity would be the world’s second-largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco.
This of course is a way for Trump to try to boost support, as surely rising gas prices are one reason why Trump’s approval rating has fallen, and why Republicans are in trouble for the midterms. But oil experts on the news last night said it would take months to years before this agreement would reach the gas pumps to lower prices. But I’m sure that Nobel Peace Prize laureate (2025) María Corina Machado, wherever she’s living (she dare not return to Venezuela for fear of assassination), is looking on in horror.
A federal judge in California ruled that the Trump administration violated the constitutional rights of international students when it sought to deport them for criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza.
In a 90-page ruling, Judge Noël Wise found that the key legal foundations that the Trump administration had relied on to arrest and deport foreign students were unconstitutional, because Trump officials had wielded them to target students who used their freedom of speech to express opinions that the government did not like.
“In the United States,” Judge Wise wrote, “free speech, including the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength.
“That strength is diminished when members of our society — citizens and noncitizens alike — must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation,” she wrote. “This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognizes our right to speak freely. Here you can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it.”
Judge Wise, who was appointed to the Northern District of California by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., effectively declared that a section of immigration law frequently invoked by the Trump administration violated the First and Fifth Amendments, reasoning that the provision was vague and allowed the secretary of state to remove noncitizens for speech and other activities protected by the First Amendment.
Conor Fitzpatrick, the chief supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which brought the lawsuit, celebrated the ruling.
“Today’s ruling proves that free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child,” he said in a statement.
Yay for FIRE, and YAY for the appropriately named Judge Wise. I’m wondering whether the government will appeal this to the Supreme Court, but there’s nothing in the First Amendment that limits free speech only to Americans who are citizens:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
*We all know that Dolly Parton refused to say anything about politics; she maintained that she was an entertainer and not a politician, and she didn’t want to alienate her fans. But Fox News shows how deep her resistance to taking public stands went (Ricky Gervais would be happy):
“I don’t like to get involved in politics, because first of all, I have as many Republican fans as I do Democrats,” Parton told USA Today. “I don’t want to offend anybody, I have a right to myself.”
“Like God gave us free will, America gave us free speech, but you’ve got to be responsible for anything you say and do,” she added.
“I have a lot of fans out there, and I don’t want to offend anybody,” Parton said.
When Wright attempted to draw a parallel between Trump and the sexually abusive boss in Parton’s 1980 film “9 to 5,” she refused to bite.
“I’m not addressing that,” Parton said. “I learned a long time ago, keep your damn mouth shut if you want to stay in show business. … I’m not in politics, I’m an entertainer.”
When Wright pointed out that Parton was also a role model, she responded: “Yes I am. That’s why I don’t talk about people.”
Her aversion to political camps did not mean she kept quiet about everything she believed.
“I know whatever I say, people are going to listen, and they’re going to make more of it than maybe what I meant. So I have to be careful,” Parton told People in 2021. “Of course I have my opinion, but I’m not an opinionated person as a rule. You’re allowed your own beliefs and your own faith, but you don’t have to use it like a weapon when it could be a tool.”
Parton’s political neutrality was something she could joke about.
“My daddy was a Republican, my mama was a Democrat, and I’m a hypocrite!” Parton famously quipped, pronouncing “hypocrite” as “hypo-crat” in her iconic Tennessee drawl.
I’ve seen several posts on social media however, that Parton’s refusal to take political positions constituted her own “dark side,” an accusation that began in 2021 in a Vox article by Constance Grady called “How Dolly Parton became a secular American saint.” Grady’s claim was that you have to take sides in a “post-Trump America,” To wit:
Dolly Parton is beloved because she has devoted her career to standing for love. And, usefully, she is willing to be ambiguous about what exactly that love means and how much it includes people that those on different sides of the political aisle consider their enemies. But in a post-Trump America, is Dolly Parton’s love enough?
But America in the 21st century is no time for a secular pop saint. And there’s a dark side to Dolly’s ability to appeal, Christ-like, to all people at all times.
Well, I have no time for this kind of stuff. Parton did speak out in favor of LGBTQ rights, and rather than taking performative stands, she helped people: giving them money after natural disasters, and handing out books by the millions. I have no time for people now who are going after her for being nonpolitical.
Dolly Parton’s Wikipedia page was allegedly targeted by vandals with antisemitic content and offensive modifications within an hour of the public announcement of her death at age 80 on Tuesday.As millions around the world mourned the loss of the legendary cultural icon, social media users shared screenshots of modifications to her profile.
Here’s one tweet:
This is depraved.
Dolly Parton’s Wikipedia page was vandalised with a swastika and the words ‘Jew lover’ just hours after she died, we understand.
These vile edits are no longer there, but the idea that someone would choose to exploit her death to spread antisemitic abuse is… pic.twitter.com/3ZKbgJBqPa
— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) August 26, 2026
More:
The alterations included replacing her profile photo with an image of a Nazi swastika, changing her name to “Jew lover,” and altering her display title to reference Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that claimed the lives of 20 children and six adult staff members.
One screenshot shared on X/Twitter captured a Google search result listing her Wikipedia page title as “Dolly Parton – Adam Lanza was a hero.” The edits were quickly identified and reversed using Wikipedia’s revision history safeguards, restoring the page to its proper state.
And another tweet:
Whoever hacked Dolly Parton’s wikipedia to re-route it to the sandy hook shooter genuinely i hope you rot for the rest of your life pic.twitter.com/CaSSZ0tihj
As far as I know, Parton never said anything about Jews or Israel, though she had at least one close Jewish friend. It’s a sign of the times that the worst thing you can say about a beloved American icon after she died was that she was a “Jew lover.”
*Finally, reader βPer sent me this: “A CBC editor has responded to the ‘terrorism’ kerfuffle with a blog post and I think you may find it interesting” with the reader noting that I may find the final six paragraphs edifying. Indeed! (Remember that the CBC has been criticized recently for refusing to use the word “terrorist” and “terrorism” without attribution, saying the words were “loaded” and “controversial.” The CBC editor defends his organization’s position (the bolding is mine). Here are the final paragraphs:
And we intend to mark the forthcoming 25th anniversary of 9/11 with extensive, special coverage that will continue to respectfully and thoughtfully reflect on the monumental nature of this tragedy.
CBC’s reporting on terrorism, wherever it occurs, has always been guided by the principle of attribution, and like other major news organizations, it has been our practice for decades. The reason for the extreme care around the use of the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” was detailed in this earlier editor’s blog.
But to be clear, CBC News has never said what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, was not terrorism, as some commentators have stated in recent days. We have reported fully and accurately on the reasons and motivations for those attacks as determined by police, governments and an independent commission. We’ve just made sure to do it with attribution.
Clarity and understanding are at the heart of our journalism. The leaked excerpt without context or explanation has raised more questions for the public that we must now answer.
After reviewing our current language guidance, we have decided to adjust it to clarify that direct attribution is not required for describing the historic events of 9/11 as terrorism.
We are doing so to remove what has unfortunately (and unintentionally) become an impediment to clarity and public understanding.
At the same time, as new acts of politically or ideologically motivated violence occur in our world, we will continue to follow the journalistically sound practice of attributing causes and motivations to officials and experts.
So now 9/11 is terrorism, but only that one event. Are the perpetrators of 9/11 still not “terrorists”? I don’t buy it; this is a woke language prohibition to avoid stigmatizing people who kill noncombatants for ideological gain. My reader added this:
I think, reading between the lines, this may be the editors trying to rein in their woke reporter’s unprofessional tendencies to inject their personal beliefs in hot-button issues. For example, a reporter casually describing a murderer as a ‘psychopath’ instead of doing the journalistic basics of seeking out a professional’s opinion of the murderer’s mental state. In particular, I wonder if the editors have been frustrated by their reporters showing their pro-Palestinian tendencies by using ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ incorrectly.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Kulka, bitter enemies, are acting like Israel and Palestine, with Kulka playing the role of Palestine (Hili is a Jewish cat):
Hili: You again? Kulka: Yes, I propose a ceasefire on my terms.
In Polish:
Hili: Ty znowu tu?
Kulka: Tak, proponuję zawieszenie broni na moich warunkach.
This Belgian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz. She was two years old, and would be 85 today had she lived. https://t.co/Wj3OI9NE2v
