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.
I haven’t displayed a pair of cowboy boots here in a long time, but that’s because I’ve stopped buying them. I must now have over a hundred pair: one symptom of my addiction to buying certain items (viz. wine and cigars); but I’ve stopped. I do take credit for getting Steve Pinker to recognize the merits of cowboy boots, which I consider the only attractive item of male footwear. Women have a gazillion kinds of attractive shoes, but men do not. Except for cowboy boots, I find men’s shoes either plain or downright ugly.
During my boot-buying phase, I got most of my boots on eBay, where you could get some terrific bargains, sometimes nearly new boots at about 15% the retail price. I’ve published photos in the past, but most have been removed in the Big Photo Wipe when I had to take down every photo over more than a decade because of copyright claims (I can’t selectively removed photos).
One kind of boot I stayed away from, though, are those made from endangered species. The most prominent of these are boots made from sea turtle leather (they use the flipper). These were made in the U.S. and Mexico decades ago (they may still be making them in Mexico), but, as Grok tells us, selling anything made from sea turtle is now illegal in the U.S. Here’s a question I asked Grok, and its answer (along with references)
Is it illegal to sell anything made from sea turtle?
Yes, in the United States and most countries, it is generally illegal to sell products made from sea turtles (or their parts, such as shells, leather, or “tortoiseshell”).
fws.gov All seven living sea turtle species are protected. In the U.S., the six species found in U.S. waters (green, hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley, leatherback, loggerhead, and olive ridley) are listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). This makes it unlawful to sell or offer them for sale in interstate or foreign commerce, and the prohibitions extend to parts and products.
They are also listed on CITES Appendix I, which largely bans commercial international trade in the animals, their parts, or products. Import or export requires permits and is allowed only in exceptional (usually non-commercial) cases.
Key U.S. details from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Sea turtle shell and leather products (e.g., jewelry, combs, boots, belts, handbags, inlays) generally cannot be sold in interstate or international commerce. Limited exceptions may exist; contact the Service. Permits are required for import/export.
Sale within a single state may be allowed in some circumstances unless restricted by state law or CITES “use after import” rules. Many states prohibit it, and online sales frequently cross state lines (making them interstate).
I’ve seen sea turtle boots, and they’re easy to distinguish from sea turtle prints, which is simply leather stamped with the characteristic polygonal scale pattern of turtles (boots made from alligator and crocodile, not illegal, are easy to distingish because their scales are rectangular or square).
But I still get notices from eBay, as I’ve asked to be notified when “sea turtle boots” appear for sale. As a boot collector and a biologist who is conservation-minded, it steams me up when I see these things, and will report them if I see that they’re genuine turtle.
Sellers have learned that eBay doesn’t permit selling anything made with sea turtle, so they disguise the descriptions when they’re selling the real thing. Here’s an item I saw this morning, which looks like genuine sea turtle but whose identity is confirmed two ways. First, by the way they describe the item, with “print’ in quotes and a drawing of a turtle:
The “pre-ban” refers to this stipulation from CITES (Convention on International Trade in Engandered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) about what endangered-species items can be sold:
Antiques: Items that are at least 100 years old, composed in whole or part of an ESA-listed species, not repaired or modified with such material after December 27, 1973, and meeting other criteria (including documentation of age/provenance) may qualify for an ESA antiques exemption. These can sometimes be sold in interstate/foreign commerce (CITES paperwork may still apply). Proving qualification is strict.
fws.gov
But of course if the boots advertised are really “prints,” you don’t need to refer to the ban. Further, no “pre-ban” boots are exceptions unless they’re over 100 years old.
This is what real sea turtle looks like (a photo from the listing). Note the cracks between the scales and the irregularity of pattern between boots: a clue to their authenticity.
So we have eBay illegally selling boots made of protected species. What can one do to stop it? Well, I could just say that I know sea turtle and these are sea turtle, but eBay doesn’t usually take my word for it (after all these years, though, they should). So to prove their illegality, I write to the seller and simply ask what they are. Are they prints, as advertised, or real turtle? The seller will often admit to me that yes, they are real, but he/she has to disguise them because they know that they are listing illegal boots. Here’s my correspondence from this morning in which the seller admits that they’re real turtle:
That’s an arrant admission that they’re real turtle.
Armed with this correspondence, I reported the to eBay (there’s a small question mark at the bottom right of each eBay item where you can report items for various reasons). I asked eBay to take the item off sale. And I enclosed a copy of the incriminating correspondence.
You’d think that, seeing this, eBay would remove the item, as I asked in my report. But nooooo; they “reviewed” my report and, as they often do, they rejected it:
Did I give up? Of course not! But contacting eBay by phone is hard; using their phone number doesn’t work, so you have to go through the AI “assistant,” and eventually demand that they call you.
eBay farms out complaints to an Indian call center, and once you reach them you know that you’re in for at least twenty minutes of being put on hold and explaining the problem several times over. Sometimes it takes an hour, and I’ll put my phone on speaker while working away. Today the agent told me that they’ll kick my appeal upstairs and I’ll be informed of its disposition.
Really, eBay, if you’re reading this, I hope you start enforcing your policies about endangered species, especially when the seller admits flogging an endangered-species item. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is useless. They are responsible for enforcing the law, but my attempts to get them to do this with eBay have been futile.
This week’s Real Time with Bill Maher comedy-and-news bit takes up Rand Paul’s jihad against Anthony Fauci, which includes Paul’s publishing Fauci’s personal diary, which showed Fauci basking in his celebrity.
Maher concludes that Fauci is, at the same time, “an esteemed, dedicated public servant” and a “vain, flawed bureaucrat”. As Maher notes, Fauci got some stuff wrong, but was not deliberately lying; as Maher says, “science is complicated.” And I agree with Maher that “we should not call people criminals for just the part they got wrong.”
Yes, Fauci did pressure scientists to publish a “wet market” conclusion about the origin of covid, but its origin is irrelevant to how the pandemic should have been handled. But Fauci nevertheless fell prey, as did Trump, to the addiction to worship that comes with fame. In fact, Maher plays a game, giving quotes from either Trump or Fauci’s diary and asking the viewer to decide “who said it.” Maher gets a dig at “progressives,” noting that Julia Roberts called Fauci “Jesus with a Petri dixh.”
But in the end Maher concludes that Fauci put in a lot of service to the country, but was not a criminal, even though the adulation he received might have made him more dogmatic. It’s sad that Fauci became seduced by celebrity, but he’s human and that’s a human tendency.
Glory be—a few regulars have sent in some lovely wildlife photos, so I can post some critters today. These intertidal critters come from UC Davis math professor Abby Thompson, who does great marine photography on the California coast. Abby’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
These are probably the last of the summer tidepool photos. The (spectacular!) final nudibranch is one that I’ve only found once up here before- it’s usually a slightly more southerly species. If the El Niño comes through as predicted, we should see more this coming year.
The first four animals are chitons, the roly-poly’s of the ocean. They have a common structure- 8 shell plates, surrounded by a mantle. The structure of the mantle and the sculpturing on the shell plates, (sometimes) allows identification to species. The Mopalia (this seems to be a made-up word) chitons have some kind of hairs or feathery things on the mantle. The type/quantity/form of the hairs can be distinctive. The first three creatures are in this genus.
Genus Paranamertes (ribbon worm): There’s a specific local species called a “purple ribbon worm”, and one might think this one would qualify, but it turns out (thanks inaturalist experts!) that identifying to species is tricky in this genus:
Finishing up with some nudibranchs. . .
Corambe steinbergae – chomping on its favorite bryozoan prey, on which it is virtually invisible:
Welcome to Sunday, August 9, 2026, the Sabbath for goyische cats, and National Spirit of ’45 Day, meaning this:
National Spirit of ’45 Day honors the can-do attitude of an entire generation affected by the trials and hardships of World War II. Observed every year on second Sunday in August, communities around the country hold events and memorials. Each one honors those who have inspired us, sacrificed, and preserved our nation for future generations.
The image is best expressed in this poster, “We Can Do It!“, by J. Howard Miller, and although the poster is famous now, it wasn’t seen much during the war. (It is meant to show that women stepped into “men’s jobs” when the men went off to war.) As Wikipedia says, this image is “often mistakenly called “Rosie the Riveter“, which is a different depiction of a female war production worker.” See the “Rosie” link for the real images.
The United Arab Emirates said a ship affiliated with its national oil company came under an Iranian missile attack early Saturday while crossing the Strait of Hormuz, further muddying the outlook for a deal to open the strategic waterway.
The U.A.E. blamed the attack on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the paramilitary group tasked with protecting the regime and maintaining Tehran’s grip on the strait.
The attack comes as Iran’s top leaders weigh a draft agreement with Oman to set up new shipping lanes through the strait and gradually open it to traffic in exchange for concessions from the U.S. Iran is seeking sanctions waivers to sell its oil and an end to the U.S. blockade.
President Trump called off a wave of U.S. attacks last weekend citing progress in talks and has said a deal to reopen the strait was close. But mediators say it has stalled in recent days amid Iranian demands for financial relief and a U.S. insistence that shipping traffic not be impeded.
The Revolutionary Guard early in the war choked off traffic through the strait—the thoroughfare for a fifth of the world’s oil—and has kept it constrained with regular attacks on ships.
“For us, the Strait of Hormuz is not merely an economic waterway, but rather a key component of our geopolitical and strategic power,” the Revolutionary Guard’s spokesman said on state media Saturday.
The spokesman and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the agreement with Oman wouldn’t reopen the strait without concessions from the U.S.
Iran is vowing to bar U.S. Navy warships from passing through the strait as part of any agreement to reopen the waterway, pressing its goal of curtailing America’s decades-old military presence in the Persian Gulf.
U.S. officials have told mediators they won’t accept Iranian restrictions or tolls on Hormuz traffic.
Now Iran is just shooting itself in the foot, for they stand to gain nothing from such an attack. It does, however, show how persistent they are in their aim to gain some control (and money) from ships going through the Strait. The statement by the Revolutionary Guard Spokesman above is accurate. And if there’s a “ceasefire” that doesn’t take the Strait back to where it was before the war, Trump will have lost one of the big things he said he’d win.
A top Iranian national security official delivered a sweeping set of demands on Saturday that he said the United States must meet before the Strait of Hormuz can reopen to maritime traffic, throwing the fate of the critical trade waterway into question.
Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, issued a statement carried by state media laying out multiple requirements for reopening the strait. He called for the United States to lift its naval blockade and sanctions on Iran, withdraw the U.S. military from around Iran, pay war reparations and release frozen Iranian assets, as well as end attacks on Iran’s allies in the region and threats against the country.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Iran’s demands. A previous cease-fire between Iran and the United States, agreed to in June, had said that sanctions would be fully lifted only in the event of a final deal regarding Iran’s nuclear program. And U.S. officials have said in the past that Iran could access its frozen funds only if it committed to giving up its highly enriched uranium first.
The statement from Mr. Zolghadr came as Iran and Oman have been negotiating an agreement on the future management of the Strait of Hormuz, which sits between the two countries. Iran effectively closed the strait in retaliation for being attacked by the United States and Israel in February.
Mr. Zolghadr’s list of demands upended expectations that a deal with Oman would soon allow commerce to flow through the strait once more and ease global energy prices. They will likely put pressure on President Trump to consider Iran’s conditions if he wants to lower consumer prices for Americans, which pose a risk for Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections.
These will not stand, at least according to Trump’s latest statements. War reparations? Release of assets? And Iran still controlling transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump usually responds quickly and negatively to such nonsense, but his silence shows that he’s caught between a rock and a hard place. I expect some response today.
In the weeks leading up to the U.S. war with Iran, President Trump cheered on the Iranian protesters rising up against their government, telling them that they should “save the names of the killers and abusers” and that he would come to their aid.
But more than five months into the conflict, liberating the Iranian people has been one of the war’s most glaring unfulfilled objectives.
Iran has executed at least 26 people in connection with the January protests since Mr. Trump made his promise, with many more protesters potentially at risk, according to Amnesty International. U.S. officials believe Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is even more interested in pursuing a nuclear weapon than his father, who was killed in an airstrike on the opening day of the war.
And as Iranians remain locked in crisis, Mr. Trump is looking for a way out. Negotiators are working on a deal to restart shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively shut down, as Mr. Trump tries to extricate the United States from a conflict that has lasted far longer, and proved far more costly, than he anticipated.
In an interview this summer, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he never really believed that the uprising he encouraged would happen anyway because Iranian security forces would crush the demonstrators.
“I never thought, unless they could be completely armed, I never thought they’d have that kind of uprising, because these people are violent,” Mr. Trump told the conservative podcaster Hugh Hewitt.
But for Iranians who listened to Mr. Trump’s early promises, the sense of betrayal is real.
“I genuinely thought that help was on the way, but I was so wrong,” said Vahid, a 35-year-old from Tehran who works at a start-up company, echoing a sentiment expressed by numerous Iranians in interviews with The New York Times. All spoke on the condition that The Times identify them only by their first names, out of fear of reprisals from their government.
. . . The White House declined to answer questions about Mr. Trump’s promise to help liberate the Iranian people. Instead, officials cited Mr. Trump’s goal — which, as yet, is unmet — of ensuring that Iran never has a nuclear weapon, saying that objective would benefit the Iranian people as well.
Maybe a marginal benefit, but not nearly as much as helping with an uprising (remember yesterday I reported that a Kurdish rebellion was in the offing but was canceled after Fox News reported on it prematurely. It’s sad that America doesn’t care much about ending a dictatorship once we’re in a war with it, and of course we can’t start wars solely to end dictatorships (that’s not why this one was started). But once we’re at war with a dictatorship whose people fervently wish for its end, yes, we should try to end it.
*Fabulist Jason Arday’s new book, Great and Unfortunate Things, is scheduled to come out this week (August 11), and it puts the publisher, Simon & Schuster, in a difficult position. The book likely depicts many things that aren’t true, but it may sell like hotcakes to those who want to see what Arday says about his life. As the Guardian reports, the book hasn’t been withdrawn:
Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism and embellishment, claimed he was paid “1.4 million” for his forthcoming memoir detailing his extraordinary backstory.
Arday was dogged by a growing series of questions over his academic work and credentials before he resigned on Wednesday night, saying the “relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love”.
His resignation came after Cambridge announced it would launch an investigation following “new information” about his qualifications and career.
Despite allegations against Arday, Simon & Schuster said earlier this week it was planning to go ahead with the publication of his memoir on 11 August in the US and 27 August in the UK. Simon & Schuster US told the Guardian on Thursday night it was “proceeding with the publication of Great and Unfortunate Things by Jason Arday as planned”.
In a previous interview with the Guardian, Arday said Simon & Schuster had offered 1.4m for the book in a “pre-empt”, a type of deal in which a publisher is so keen on a book they put in a high offer to take it off the table before it can go to auction. Arday did not specify whether the 1.4m figure was in pound sterling or US dollars. Simon & Schuster did not respond to a request to comment on the sum.
One senior publisher said it was an utterly mad number, but that “madness sometimes happens”, so it was conceivable. They said a book such as Arday’s would normally be expected to sell about 5,000 copies, so with £2 of royalty per copy, that equates to an advance of £10,000, not 1.4 million dollars or pounds.
The Washington Free Beacon lists some edits the publisher made to defuse the storm they thought would come (and it did):
The wider public would not learn of the accusations against Arday, including those of pervasive plagiarism, until last month. But Simon & Schuster had been making telltale edits to his book since January.
The Free Beacon examined two pre-publication proofs of the book: a U.S. version dated Jan. 6, and the U.K. final edition, dated June 18. Comparing the two iterations reveals that Simon & Schuster made a series of changes, including altering verbatim quotes, that appear to have been an effort to protect his reputation—which is all the more valuable now that he stands accused of sweeping embellishments, dishonesty, and even academic fraud. One edit effectively acknowledges the possibility that he could lose his professorship.
The book, Great and Unfortunate Things, chronicles how, against all odds, a severely autistic, working-class British lad who didn’t learn to read until he was 18 earned a Ph.D. and reached the pinnacle of academia. The memoir was meant to be a literary victory lap after Arday, 41, in 2023 became the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s 800-year history.
Perhaps most notably, the book was edited to allow for the possibility that Arday would not be a “professor” indefinitely. In the earlier edition, he recalls marveling upon receiving his assistant professorship at Durham University in 2021: “I’m a professor. Whatever happens, that’s the salutation that I will carry with me for the rest of my days. That’s mad.” The later edition adds the word “professional” as a qualifier, saying he would carry the title “for the rest of my professional days.”
. . . Simon & Schuster’s edits also make it harder, perhaps deliberately, to corroborate or disprove Arday’s stories. The names of two publicists involved in his charitable efforts—and the names of certain professors and a disability officer—were replaced by pseudonyms, or the names were removed entirely.
The original:
What will be published:
It’s clear that Simon & Schuster knew that Arday had a problematic past and exaggerated his accomplishments. The Free Beacon ends this way:
Following the memoir’s mawkish conclusion, in which Arday gives advice to marginalized populations, the early edition tacks on a bio that touts Arday’s superlative academic bona fides. In its place, the updated draft simply includes a playlist of the pop songs he has sprinkled throughout the text as emotional anchor points.
. . . and a bit from theTimes of London article (archived link). yet another couple of speed bumps on his life’s road claimed by Arday:
Professor Jason Arday claimed in a book proposal for his memoir to have had testicular cancer and locked-in syndrome and to have almost died in a car accident when he was a teenager.
In the document pitching his autobiography, obtained by The Times, the Cambridge academic said he had been left in a coma by a car accident as a teenager.
According to his account, doctors at his bedside recommended that he be taken off life support “as an act of mercy”, but he was spared after his mother insisted that he was “going to do something with his life”.
Arday was able to report the episode because, he said, he had had locked-in syndrome, a rare neurological condition in which a person is physically paralysed but conscious.
The episode was omitted from the final version of his book, which will be released next week. The 45-page proposal has raised more questions about Arday’s life and professional achievements after he was accused of plagiarising his PhD thesis and exaggerating his athletic and fundraising feats.
I haven’t seen any real evidence for any of Arday’s medical claims—nor for his claims of late speaking (age 11) and late-developing literacy (age 18). It’s hard for me to believe that Simon and Schuster will still publish this book IF they suspected that his stories were made up. Did they omit these fables, or did Arday? We don’t know. But it’s clear the book is coming out: it’s still listed on Amazon (see screenshot below):
Chief among President Trump’s reasons for launching the war in Iran was preventing it from building a nuclear weapon. More than five months in, officials and experts say,the conflict may have slowed Iran’s nuclear program but not stopped it.
Because Iran has barred U.N. inspections of its most sensitive nuclear sites — a key part of any eventual peace deal — the precise fate of its highly enriched nuclear fuel is unknown. And despite strikes on three key nuclear sites in 2025 and 2026, Tehran appears to have retained a stockpile of enough near weapons-grade fuel to quickly develop as many as 10 nuclear bombs, according to U.N. inspectors.
. . .So far, the war has shown that Mr. Trump’s “‘maximum pressure’ policies and military misadventures did not, and cannot, destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity,” Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, wrote in a recent analysis.
“The capability is largely still there,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, author of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Iran Nuclear Monitor.
. . .James Acton, a physicist and Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said enough of Iran’s nuclear program still exists that, if left alone, “I would imagine they could produce a bomb in less than a year at this point, possibly substantially less than year.”
Ms. Geranmayeh stopped short of putting a timeline on Iran’s ability to rebuild. Still, “without monitoring, Iran could rapidly enrich its existing uranium stockpile to weapons-grade,” she wrote in her most recent analysis.
Iran will do anything, including lying about its actions and intentions, to keep its nuclear program going, for one of the regime’s big aims is to have a bomb they can use on Israel, or as a deterrent against being attacked. Even if they agree to something with Trump, he won’t be President forever, and if there are to be inspections, they should be done without warning, be thorough, and last forever. That’s a big ask.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej are in the dumps:
Hili: Life used to be better. Andrzej: Yes, but we didn’t know it then.
In Polish:
Hili: Życie było kiedyś lepsze.
Ja: Tak, ale wtedy o tym nie wiedzieliśmy.
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An image sent in by Jay Tanzman, showing “An anxious food truck.” It was taken in Saarbrücken, Germany:
From Masih. Apparently the Iranian man depicted below had a heart attack before he was going to be hanged, and they revived him just to hang him again. Masih has trouble getting through this without breaking up.
This video is only one minute. Alireza is dancing. Before they could hang him, his heart stopped, so he survived but now the Islamic Republic wants to hang him.😔
Please write to leaders and influential people to pick up their phone, call Iran or post publicly, demand they stop. pic.twitter.com/tfhmBU4eaV
From Luana. I will read this Atlantic article, but I’m not going to read Arday’s memoir. Look at what’s in it (read the whole tweet):
The Atlantic reads Jason Arday’s memoir, and finds his life story was even more inspirational than we thought
He was beaten so badly as a teen he became an epileptic. When the boys who did this were caught, he magnanimously told the judge he didn’t want them to go to prison.… pic.twitter.com/RsJaVd7AOz
Ein nur wenige Tage altes Lämmchen war verloren gegangen. Schaut nur wie glücklich beide sind, die Mutter und das Lamm, als sie wieder zusammen waren. pic.twitter.com/FhULz99LCi
Here a woman on Facebook, “CircuitCindy” designs and manufactures a treat-dispensing slot machine for her cat, who catches on quickly. My only question is whether the machine dispenses treats on every pull, regardless of whether the three designs match. If it does, then the cat will become addicted to gambling.
This is one talented woman, and you can see her website here. Her self ID is this:
Hi I’m Cindy! I like to make cute and mildly useful things to make my life more whimsical 😀
The machine:
Cindy explains in this video that there was a huge demand for these machines (of course), and if you want one you can put your name on a waitlist/information list by clicking on the screenshot below and then clicking on “notify me”. I’ve signed up, though I don’t have a cat; I will let readers know any updates.
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This article comes from The Washington Post, and reports on a poor kitten stuck in a car’s grille. It was disovered. . . well, I’ll put an excerpt below. Click on screenshot to read:
An excerpt:
On a sweltering day, an unusual call came into Central Iowa Towing and Recovery: A tiny kitten was trapped inside the grille of a car that was in line at a drive-through, and the cat seemed to be suffering.
“I’ve never gotten a call like that in my life,” said Jordan McKnight, 38, an employee at the tow company in Ames.
McKnight and his co-worker Cole Denning rushed to Scooter’s Coffee on July 27 and found people crowded around a car. A woman was in the drive-through line, they said, and after placing her coffee order, said she heard an animal crying from inside her car. She looked around and realized a tiny cat somehow was stuck behind the front grille of her Honda.
“You could hear the cat crying out,” said Kathy Pike, an animal services officer with Ames Animal Shelter, who arrived at the scene after a Scooter’s employee called and reported the situation. “We didn’t know how to get it out. I tried to crawl under and figure out where this little thing got into the small spot.”
A group of people waiting at the drive-through gathered around the car, trying to figure out how to free the cat. The driver of the car, who did not reply to an interview request from The Washington Post, told Pike the cat was not hers, and she did not know how the animal could have gotten into the body of her car.
. . .But they were running out of time to save the cat, who was panting and holding out her bright-red tongue.
“I was almost certain it was not going to make it,” Pike said, noting the 96-degree temperature that day that felt like 118 degrees with the humidity.
Pike was able to get only a few fingers through the grille before deciding she needed help. She called Central Iowa Towing and Recovery, figuring the front of the car would need to be taken apart.
“We rushed over,” Denning said.
Denning and McKnight raised the front of the car off the ground to get a better look underneath.
“We both came to the conclusion that the only possible way to get her out was to disassemble the whole front clip of the car,” McKnight said.
They worked quickly, removing panels around the hood and headlights, until there was enough of an opening for Denning to reach in and scoop the cat out. It took about 15 minutes to free the kitten.
Pike drenched the cat in water to cool her down and brought her directly to the vet.
“I wanted to get her as quickly as possible to the medical experts,” she said.
. . .The kitten, believed to be about 2 months old, is a domestic shorthair. She had a fever and a blister on one paw but was otherwise well after the rescue. She weighs just under two pounds.
Pike named her “Fika,” a Swedish word that describes a coffee break. She thought it was a fitting name.
“We all took a break from our lives to help this animal in need, and it was related to coffee,” she said.
Fika is being cared for at the Ames Animal Shelter and has become a favorite among staff.
Fika is okay, and there was a rush to adopt her. Here’s a news report showing the kitten.
From nicenews.com, we have another area besides Turkey where the residents are cat lovers. This time it’s Dubrovnik, a lovely town in Croatia that I visited in 1972. Here’s an article and some videos below.
An excerpt:
Coastal Dubrovnik in southeastern Croatia was originally founded over 1,400 years ago, but one demographic that’s been there for centuries had nothing to do with its incorporation. The city is home to a thriving stray cat community, and likely has been since the Middle Ages.
Today, photos of Dubrovnik’s felines are all over social media, and there’s an entire souvenir store dedicated to them in the ancient seaport. Locals and visitors can even take part in the SOS Dubrovnik Cat Safari 2026 this summer, a campaign encouraging people to snap pics of the kitties and share them online. Five winning shots will be selected for a charity postcard collection, with proceeds supporting an animal rescue that helps care for the cats.
But even before they were tourist attractions, the city’s cats played a very important role in its prosperity: pest control. While hard facts about their history are hard to find online, locals refer to the four-legged mainstays as Dubrovnik’s “oldest citizens,” suggesting they were brought there around the 13th century to hunt rats, which were believed to carry the bubonic plague and other diseases.
Indeed, a medieval manuscript from Dubrovnik marked with inky, feline paw prints made headlines over a decade ago. Photographed in 2011 by then-graduate student Emir O. Filipović, the manuscript dates back to the 1400s — capturing a cat quite literally “walk[ing] through history,” as National Geographic put it.
The cats now stick primarily to Dubrovnik’s Old Town, a seafront neighborhood largely encircled by medieval walls that once fortified it against attacks. Visitors list the Church of the Holy Annunciation, a Serbian Orthodox church at the center of the neighborhood, as a prime spot to see them, though they can also be found near restaurant doorways and lounging around the harbor.
, . .“They are very patient and rarely beg; they know that a small fish is usually coming their way as a ‘tax’ for their presence,” reads a post by local company Cava Tours.
Residents care for the kitties, and SOS Dubrovnik Cats, which is based outside of Croatia, assists from afar. The organization collects donations and arranges for medical care and foster homes where injured cats can recuperate.
Here are a few videos about Dubrovnik’s cats from social media. Sound up on all of them
Finally, lots of lagnaippe today—four items, to be exact. Click on screenshots to go to the originals, but these aren’t videos.
An ancient standoff:
And a ham-guarding moggy:
From Facebook with the caption:
A classic milk bar in Krakow, one of the old canteen-style spots, has a cat named Pierog who patrols the room like a floor manager and sits at the end of the counter watching the pierogi go out. He does not beg. He inspects.
The staff hung a small hand-written Polish sign by the register that reads: “The cat is on duty.” Regulars say he has a route – counter, then the window table, then back – and that he does it in the same order every day. He has never been fed at the counter, on principle, and disapproves of everyone who tries.
Below: from Fat Cat Art with the following caption:
The famous Belle Époque ad poster of a black cat sipping absinthe was created in 1902 by the renowned industrial designers Mourgue Frères (brothers) for the Bourgeois distillery in the French town of Pontarlier. They say there was no absinthe in the glass, but milk, to make the cat pose for the poster. The artwork was so popular that it is used as decoration in many bars and homes till nowadays. The story behind the poster is a hilarious cat art story. The cat’s surroundings are heavily based on a painting by Charles Maine, a local artist of the Pontarlier region. Maine’s painting depicted a table with an absinthe bottle, a decanter of water, glasses, and a folded copy of a Pontarlier newspaper. The painting was very popular and used for Émile Pernot distillery advertising. Evidently, Mourgue Frères, ironically remade the painting, including the cat, to beat the Bourgeois distillery’s competitors! And they succeeded with their art, which became much more popular than the original painting. Cats make everything better!
Interesting that you can still find the cat in advertising, but now on their former competitor’s heirs, Les Fils d’Émile Pernot’s absinthe bottle label
Today we have mostly videos of the ducks (I’m waiting for my photos to transfer to a new computer, and changing computers is always a horror). Photos will be coming. But in many ways the videos (about 1 minute each) give you a better idea of what the ducklings are like.
In short, the four ducklings are peachy, and growing very fast! You’ll see from the videos and two photos below that they have just started growing feathers on their tails, on their little stubby wings, and on their sides. In about ten days they’ll be in their awkward, scruffy teenage stage: half duckling, half adult. But I love them all. They are fat, happy (I think), and lively, and Miss Duck is taking great care of them. But look for yourself:
The caption of this video tells the tail; it’s the end of their mealtime when they get freeze-dried mealworms as dessert. That is their favorite nosh. Miss Duck looks on, supervising but also eating on her own. When ducklings are around, she always ensures that they eat before she does. She’s a great mom.
After a meal the family often repairs to what I call the Sacred Rocks, a place where they can nap and preen in the shade. Miss Duck is always watching over the brood, usually from above:
Sometimes they repair to another rock: a flat one at the north end of Botany Pond. This is quite close to a pair of benches where people sit to watch them (as well as the turtles, who occupy the rocks when the ducks are absent).
The caption:
Look at this fat little duckling, crop distended with food! (I feed them well.) His/her little black foot is sticking out, like duckling yoga. In the past two or three days, their feet have changed color from black to the adult orange. Botany Pond, the University of Chicago, August 6, 2026
Here’s the caption I gave this video. Be sure to listen for Miss Duck’s soft quacks meaning “Go away, turtle.”
Miss Duck does not like turtles, though they are harmless to her and her brood. My guess is that she has an instinct to avoid them, as in the wild some turtles, like snappers, can hurt or kill ducklings. You can hear her quack from time to time as a response to the red-eared slider sharing this rock. (The brood pays turtles no mind.) Botany Pond, The University of Chicago, August 6, 2026.
The caption:
The ducklings love to dabble (root around) in the dirt, especially in the plant pots whose contents have died. (The ducks do not eat the plants.) Here you can see their feathers developing, mostly on their stubby little wings, as patches of brown. Their tails are getting feathers, too, and resemble little paintbrushes. Botany Pond, the University of Chicago, August 7, 2026.
Here’s one shot showing the incipient feathers. It’s so exciting: they’re not even three weeks old. I think they’re past the vulnerable stage now, which makes me happy. Can you see the tiny brown feathers on their wings and on their sides? Notice also the orange feet.
Finally, I noticed that when I was feeding the brood from the bridge, a sparrow was picking up little duck food pellets and broken mealworms, feeding them to her importuning baby. Life is burgeoning at the pond.
Welcome to the Sabbath for Jewish cats: it’s CaturSaturday, August 8, 2026 and National Whataburger Day, celebrating the opening of the first store on this day in 1950. There’s a AA minor league ballpark for the Corpus Christi Hooks, a subsidiary of the Houston Astros. The stadium is called Whataburger Field (sign below):
Christopherhegg, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I saw a bunny (an Eastern cottontail) on my way to work this morning. It was dark so the resolution isn’t large with my iPhone, but it let me walk right by it without being spooked. It’s good luck! I think it is a young one.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 8 Wikipedia page.
President Trump signed two executive orders on Thursday aimed at limiting the number of people who are eligible for birthright citizenship and cracking down on “birth tourism,” in which women give birth in the United States to get automatic citizenship for their newborns.
The new orders came weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling, rejected the president’s previous efforts to end birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants through executive orders.
During an Oval Office event, Mr. Trump told reporters that the June 30 Supreme Court ruling was a “very, very unfortunate decision.”
“This was done right after the Civil War,” Mr. Trump said of the constitutional amendment granting automatic citizenship to infants born in the United States. “This was for the babies of slaves, and what’s happening now? People are building businesses around it.”
By “businesses,” he means “birthright tourism” outfits, who get pregnant women to pay to come to the U.S. to have their kids. This confers no immediate visa or citizenship benefits on the parents, but when the child becomes 21 he/she can petition for the parents to jump the queue and apply for a green card. But I digress; there’s more:
It was not immediately clear how the twin orders could realistically be enforced. They would restrict those who could qualify for birthright citizenship, to exclude children of staff working for foreign governments but serving in the United States, and the babies of mothers who lie about their intentions for visiting the country while pregnant. There is a third category, for babies born in U.S. territories, but that would first require congressional action.
And then there are children whose parents are tagged by the government as being part of known terrorist groups or who are “alien enemies.”
Mr. Trump has criticized birthright citizenship for years, using it as a political tool as he has repeatedly tried to restrict legal immigration. He has talked about trying to end it since his first presidency. And in an unusual move, he attended oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case at the Supreme Court, a presidential first.
Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser and the architect of much of his immigration platform, and Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary, described the orders as important correctives to the current system.
The court will probably rule this a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, as it did before, but I have to admit that deliberately coming to the U.S. to have a kid so you can benefit rubs me a bit the wrong way (I knew someone who did that and I didn’t find it wholly kosher). Still the benefits are a long way down the line, and I prefer to let the Supreme Court rule on this—if it hasn’t already.
A federal appeals panel ruled Friday that President Donald Trump must halt most construction of his planned White House ballroom, saying that he had exceeded his authority by moving ahead with the planned $400 million, privately funded addition.
In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with a federal judge’s April ruling requiring construction to halt until Congress expressly authorizes the project.
“Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence,” Judges Patricia A. Millett and Bradley N. Garcia wrote in their majority opinion.
They stayed their ruling for 14 days to allow the White House to appeal to the Supreme Court.The White House did not immediately say Friday whether it would do so.
Trump relied on private donations to begin the project without seeking an appropriation from Congress, touting the arrangement as a boon to taxpayers. But the courts have found that private financing did not allow him to bypass the separate requirement that Congress authorize major changes to the White House grounds.
Trump announced the 90,000-square-foot addition last year and swiftly demolished the White House’s East Wing without warning to make space for the project. He has said presidents have long needed a ballroom to host VIPs.
The project has drawn scrutiny from congressional Democrats, who have opened investigations into whether Trump has made promises to donors in exchange for their gifts. The ballroom has also been generally panned by the public, with polls finding that most Americans are against the project.
The Congress could, of course, pass a law allowing this demolition to take place, but what if it does and then the Supreme Court rules it unconstitutional? Then the building would have to be stopped again. At any rate, I don’t approve of this at all, and if either Congress or the Court stops the construction, what is to be done? Will they have to rebuild the East Wing that has already been torn down? It’s an unholy mess.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal reports on a shakeup at Israel’s prime intelligence agency: “The Mossad admits failure.”
It’s Friday, August 7, and Yitzchak Rabin once remarked that the future Mossad Chief Meir Dagan had “the unique capacity to invent antiterrorist operations that look like movie thrillers.” But what happens when the movie doesn’t have a happy ending?
Presumably, consequences for the writers.
Current Mossad Director Roman Gofman has removed the two officials most closely associated with the agency’s plan to topple the Iranian regime. One had run the Mossad’s intelligence directorate since December; the other headed the Iran division. This follows the ouster of the deputy director last month, who was similarly linked to the operation.
Their plan centered on Iran’s minority populations, built on the theory that armed pressure at the periphery would revive the mass protest movement at the center and finish the job. Removing the architects of this strategy amounts to acknowledging the obvious: the plan failed.
It appeared to start successfully. Israel conducted strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps positions along Iran’s border with Iraq, timed to open a corridor for Kurdish fighters to cross into Iranian Kurdistan and push toward northwestern cities. Thousands of young Kurds were expected to join them. They were slated to advance eastward while armed militias from other minority groups struck Iranian territory from all directions, pushing toward Tehran. The U.S. had armed these proxy forces, but the plan unraveled when Fox News reported the attack was imminent. Turkish President Erdogan phoned Trump and, in a furious call, talked him out of U.S. backing for the operation.
A pivot to military capability targets, several ceasefires, countless threats and reversals later, we are left with the Supreme Leader still alive and kicking, though only on one leg.
, , ,The dismissals are also part of a larger organizational shift inside the Mossad, which is facing significant internal resistance. Gofman is the first outsider to be appointed head of the agency since Dagan in 2002 and is attempting a similar internal reform; unsurprisingly, an organization founded on secrecy with a notorious and somewhat deserved ego is not a fan of people outside the family taking the reins. According to Dagan, 300 people quit after his appointment—so far, Gofman has only fired three, and only those with whom he reportedly had little to no chemistry.
Ultimately, Dagan was one of the most successful directors the Mossad has ever had, running it longer than anyone else in history except the legendary Isser Harel. That’s because he got results. Gofman’s tenure will be measured in exactly the same way.
Look! It’s Fox News that caused this plan to unravel! Trump was going to support a plan for the Kurds to topple the oppressive Iranian theocracy, but Fox News scuppered the whole thing. I hope they’re happy, for they foiled the once chance the Iranian people had to get their freedom. Of course it’s possible that this plan would not have worked, but now we’ll never know. And how does Segal know that Mojtaba Khamenei has only one leg now? I didn’t even know if the guy is still alive. ‘
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: With the exception of Pearl Harbor.” The first item gives the column its title:
→ Trump on the state of U.S.-Japanese affairs:Quote of the week (said on Sunday but we’ll count it):
Reporter: Mr. President, why is the U.S. intervening to support the Japan yen at this time?
Trump: To support who?
Reporter: To support the Japanese currency.
Trump: Because we have a good relationship with Japan. We’re very strong, very, very strong financially, and they are, you know, they have a weakening yen, and they wanted a little bit of help. And we’re always there for Japan. Japan’s been very good to us, with the exception, of course, of Pearl Harbor. They were not good.
The man never lets go of a grudge, and frankly, that’s not the worst quality in a president!
This is an excerpt from Nellie’s take on Jason Arday, now an ex-professor who sings with the Choir Invisible:
→ Jason Arday, a star: I’m sure one day, elite institutions will not allow themselves to be conned so thoroughly by hustlers that everyone, including the con man, is humiliated. Today is not that day. Jason Arday—professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge, the youngest ever black professor there—has resigned amid scandal, and it is a doozy, folks. He appears to have been a serial fabulist of the classic variety, but because he was black and had beautiful dreadlocks that fell below his hips, everyone around him just took what he said as The Truth. Those who looked askance at Arday and his dumbfounding achievements were clearly jealous and motivated by bigotry. It was the easiest, silliest con of all time. His story began to unravel with simple plagiarism claims, which I didn’t care about last week because all sociology professors just copy-paste their fake studies, back and forth. For me, it doesn’t matter if “A history of the London fashion scene through a transracial lens, 1914–1916” was plagiarized because it actually doesn’t matter at all. But this week things escalated: First, it looks like Arday truly just invented his research, and quite clumsily (read this from a University of Toronto professor digging through it, or this from the UK Times). Then it snowballed. People started looking into his super believable bio: He says he has autism and didn’t speak until he was 11, then at 18 he learned to read and write and went to university. Seems odd. Kind of miraculous. The claims go on. He says he did volunteer work overseas for a particular water charity (the charity says it never sends volunteers abroad). He says he ran 600 miles between Edinburgh and London in six days. Oh! Also that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, adding that he did the last nine marathons on a broken leg. Right. Prior to his Cambridge appointment, he claimed he was a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, and an honorary professor at Durham University. All of these institutions have deniedthat he held such positions. The man is freestyling extracurriculars. The list goes on. Was he even a mute? How much of this is a lie? And how come I had never heard of Arday, who is apparently one of the most accomplished athletes of all time?
When people started to question all this, the defenses were robust, with a group of famous professors, politicians, and other luminaries writing indignantly: “We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Arday. We call on universities not only to defend academic freedom and robust scholarship, but also to confront racism wherever it manifests itself, whether overtly or through persistent attempts to discredit exceptional Black academics.” I’m not sure you want to stake all of black academics on Jason Arday and these broken-leg marathons.
→ Can Israelis listen to music? Definitely no: Current Affairspublished a piece arguing that Israelis like dance festivals because they’re distracting themselves from their unique and evil crimes. “For decades, a combination of EDM and drug culture have helped to numb the horror of occupation, apartheid, and genocide,” the article says. This logic is used to justify the attacks on Israelis at the Nova Music Festival on October 7, since that music festival was part of their numbing genocide dance, I guess. Here’s how the author describes the attacks on those unarmed young people at the festival:
Palestinians “fight through another smaller festival” as though the dancers at Psyduck are a group of combatants. People have gotten mad about this take, which the author thinks is odd considering that this is her moderate take: “Already, thousands of Zionist hasbara comments have flooded Instagram for an article which isn’t even as #FreePalestine as I am in everyday life.” Oh, honey; we can imagine what you say at dinner! That’s the whole point. You’re telling me that #FreePalestine is just a palatable stand-in for “I want to do unspeakable things to the Jews”? No way!
*Clickbait: Robert Lynch, a bio-cultural anthropologist and postdoc at Penn State, takes on his own discipline in a Quillette article called “What is the point of anthropology?” He sees a huge gap between biological anthropology and cultural anthropology, with the latter field by and large peddling garbage.
The founding premise of anthropology was audacious: that you could actually go and find out what humans are like, rather than simply assume it from the comfort of your own tiny corner of the world. Franz Boas, the discipline’s American founder, rejected the racial hierarchies earlier scholars had simply assumed instead of testing, and he demanded that anthropologists spend years in the field before making any claims about another culture.
. . . My postdoc advisor at the University of Missouri, Napoleon Chagnon, came straight out of that tradition. He spent more than a decade among the Yanomamö in the Venezuelan Amazon, testing fundamental questions about kinship, violence, and reproduction. He once told me that he awoke in his hammock to find the village headman standing over him with an axe raised over his head ready to strike. Do more violent men have more wives and children? It turns out that—in Yanomamö villages, at least—they do. I spent three years working and publishing with Chagnon, and in his day he was one of the most famous anthropologists alive. Because that’s what anthropologists did in the 1960s and ’70s. They asked the most interesting questions they could think of about people and their cultures, then they conducted field work in an attempt to answer them. Today, asking those same questions can get you labelled a racist or colonialist, and studying small-scale societies at all is dismissed as cultural voyeurism.
. . .What are universities for? They used to be places where humans would search for truth. “It is well worth searching for truth,” the philosopher Karl Popper once remarked; “and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we have to correct them.” My cultural anthropology classmates believed that people like Chagnon, Trivers, and Popper had it backwards. Truth is not an empirical matter of correct or incorrect, it is a moral matter of right and wrong. Objective truths cannot be sought, relative truths can only be defended. And those who demand empirical support for assertions are attempting to destabilise moral truths, usually in the interests of some powerful interest or other.
Carolyn Rouse is the president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Earlier this year, a Chronicle of Higher Education reporter offered her the chance to respond to a report that alleged an extreme politicisation of anthropology. The authors of that report found “a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” By the time of the interview, Quillette had already published most of the report.
Rather than reckon with these findings, Rouse doubled down on the very claims the report had flagged as most absurd. No criticism that I could offer—not this essay, not the report itself—was as damning as simply letting the discipline’s most prominent member speak for herself. In 2023, her organisation cancelled a panel discussion at its annual conference about the importance of biological sex as an analytic category in anthropology on the grounds that it might have harmed members’ “safety and dignity”, and that its premise contradicted “settled science”. Asked if she regretted that decision, Rouse said:
All you need to do is literally type into Google and see that we know, factually, that there are different types of “sexes” and “genders”. You can have XY and you present as a woman, you can have XXY—they’re all variations, genetic variations. So the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department. So I don’t know why we’re debating that.
Rouse goes on to call the belief that biological sex is binary “nonsensical” while admitting, in the next sentence, that she doesn’t actually know what people mean by the claim, or “why that matters to people so much”. The whole thing, she says, is “very strange”. The field of anthropology was built to understand unfamiliar beliefs and worldviews, but here was its president dismissing one of the most widely held convictions in human history as “nonsensical.”
Rouse’s response was the culmination of a process that had been gathering momentum in social-science departments for the past two decades. In 2006, I was at a colloquium at Rutgers where the primatologist Ryne Palombit was giving a talk on infanticide in Chacma baboons, a lot of which was devoted to sex differences in baboon behaviour. When it came time for questions, the chair of the department, a cultural anthropologist, raised his hand like someone about to blow a gaping hole through the whole talk and asked, “What exactly do you mean by these so-called males and females?” It is dismaying to hear a question that ignorant in a forum like the one in which it was asked when the scientific answer is so simple and well established.
Note that the deeply misguided sex-is-a-spectrum activist Agustín Fuentes was one of three people who wrote the Society a letter that helped get the sex panel cancelled. That’s news to me, but I’m not surprised. Lynch’s conclusion:
What is the purpose of a field like anthropology? The people who trained me were some of the most curious people I have ever known. They were people like Robert Trivers, whose observations of pigeons jockeying for position on a railing outside his Cambridge apartment window led to deep insights into parental investment and sexual selection—and why the categories of “male” and “female” were never a matter of chromosomes. They were people like Napoleon Chagnon, who at the age of 26 crawled through a low gap in a palisade wall into a shabono of “burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring … down the shafts of their drawn arrows,” and lived with them for more than a decade. Anthropologists never used to need to be reminded that this curiosity was the very heart of their discipline. The Vanderbilt report accused them of losing it. An hour with its president was the only confirmation anyone needed.
Cultural anthropology, at least now, seems totally captured, but there is hope for physical anthropology. Or is there? The studies of human fossils, their genetics, and their meaning, at least, continues.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is having a moment of wonder:
Hili: What is wonder? Andrzej: That moment when you stop meowing and just stare.
In Polish:
Hili: Co to jest zachwyt?
Ja: Moment kiedy przestajesz miauczeć i tylko się patrzysz.
From Masih: three men scheduled to be executed. Two were hanged, but the third had a heart attack before being executed. (Masih breaks down in the middle of the segment.
English translation:
The painful story of Alireza Sepahi, who suffered a heart attack before being taken to the gallows, on CNN…
The world’s media remained silent about the execution machine in Iran; let’s not allow that.
I will do my utmost to stand against this silence and censorship of the killing and execution of Iranian youth.
قصهی پر دردِ علیرضا سپاهی که قبل از رفتن پای چوبهیدار سکته قلبی کرد در سیانان….
رسانههای جهان در مورد ماشین اعدام در ایران سکوت کردند، اجازه ندهیم.
در حد توانم تلاش میکنم در برابر این به سکوت و سانسورِ کشتار و اعدام جوانان ایرانی بایستم. pic.twitter.com/dP0UgqMKs3
From Malcom: a cat gets loose on the field at Yankee Stadium. Poor thing! I hope it was not only rescued, but adopted. You can see a longer video here, but with no indication about what happened to the kitty.
Two from my feed. First, the Jason Arday saga: a gift that never stops giving:
This is wild. The Atlantic has obtained a copy of Jason Arday’s book proposal. In it, he claims to have:
– Experienced ‘locked-in’ syndrome for several months after being hit by a car. Doctors advised his family to have the life support machine turned off, but he awakened…
As if we needed proof that crows are wicked smart. Translation from the Chinese:
A guy feeds four cookies to a crow all at once, to see how the crow takes them all away. After watching, you can’t help but feel that crows are just too smart!
This French Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was five years old, and would have been 89 today had she lived. https://t.co/x4Rnch5aGY
From Matthew. I prefer to watch ducklings nap on a rock:
Sometimes in life it is necessary to spend an hour (maybe even two) doing nothing but sitting and watching a baby newt eat worms on top of a waterlily leaf. 🪷
