Welcome to Tuesday, January 21, 2025, the Cruelest Day and Trump’s first full day as President. What lies in store for us? It’s also National Squirrel Appreciation Day, and please feed these lovely and fluffy rodents, especially when it’s cold (it’s -6°F or -21°C as I write this, and my face froze on my walk to work). Here: do what I am doing, for the animals are cold today!
It’s also International Sweatpants Day. National New England Clam Chowder Day (the ONLY edible form of chowder), National Granola Bar Day (they’re morphing into candy bars), and National Hugging Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 21 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*A good friend called me up at 12:43 and said, “Well, we can be happy that there are 43 fewer minutes left in Trump’s presidency.” I told him that yes, he can’t be gone too soon but if we count it out in pieces that small, we’ll go nuts, and I don’t plan to spend all my time fretting about the Orange Man, or writing about his missteps on this site. (Of course I’ll single out the dumber ones, but there are plenty of places, and you know them, where you can read ALL BAD TRUMP 24/7. At any rate, he’s now the President for four years. and the braggadocio has already started:
“The golden age of America begins right now,” Mr. Trump declared as he began a 29-minute Inaugural Address, shortly after he and Vice President JD Vance took their oaths in the Capitol Rotunda. He added: “My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all these many betrayals that have taken place and give people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy and indeed their freedom. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”
Much as Mr. Trump did eight years ago, when he decried “American carnage” in his address, he painted a grim portrait of a country on its knees that only he can revive. But even more than in 2017, he largely dispensed with lofty themes and the broad unifying strokes favored by most presidents in their Inaugural Addresses, and outlined a series of often-divisive policies.
He vowed to immediately declare a national emergency at the border and send the military to guard it. He said he would end government programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. He said he would rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and promised to seize the Panama Canal. “We’re taking it back,” he said.
And he’s already issuing a blitz of executive orders:
From the Free Press’s morning newsletter:
His promised day-one executive orders included:
- Declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, unlocking federal funding for a border wall, reinstating the “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, and designating drug cartels as “global terrorists.”
- Cutting regulations around oil and gas production by declaring another national emergency, this one on energy. (“We will drill, baby, drill.”)
- Ending the environmental rules he calls “Biden’s electric vehicle mandate.”
- Establishing an “external revenue service” to collect tariffs.
- And ending the “government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” (You read about Trump’s repudiation of gender ideology in the federal government first in The Free Press on Sunday.)
Later in the day, Trump signed these orders. He also pardoned members of the mob who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. Trump’s January 6 pardons went further than his closest allies appear to have anticipated. Earlier this month, J.D. Vance said that those who committed violence during the riot “obviously” should not be pardoned. But Trump has commuted the sentences of members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and granted “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Oy! Some good actions and some bad ones, but we need to see how things shake out.
*Three female hostages have been returned to Israel, all in pretty good condition save one young woman who appears to have lost two fingers (no information about that is available). From CNN:
Emily Damari, one of the three hostages released by Hamas on Sunday, is the “happiest girl in the world” now that she is out of Gaza, according to her mother.
“Yesterday, I was finally able to give Emily the hug that I have been dreaming of,” Mandy Damari said in a statement on Monday.
“I am relieved to report that after her release, Emily is doing much better than any of us could ever have anticipated. I am also happy that during her release, the world was given a glimpse of her feisty and charismatic personality,” she added.
Emily Damari, a 28-year-old British-Israeli national, was released by Hamas alongside hostages Romi Gonen, 24, and Doron Steinbrecher, 31, on Sunday, in the first phase of the ceasefire-hostage deal between Israel and Hamas. Israel also returned 90 Palestinian prisoners – including 69 women and nine children.
Damari’s mother said that, while this is an “incredibly happy moment for our family, we must also remember that 94 other hostages still remain (in Gaza).
“The ceasefire must continue and every last hostage must be returned to their families,” she said.
A photo:
The swap for Palestinian prisoners, many of them convicted terrorists, was grossly uneven:
As the Gaza cease-fire took hold, one aspect of the agreement was strikingly lopsided: Hamas released three Israeli women held in Gaza on Sunday, while Israel was expected to release 90 Palestinian women and minors held in its prisons later in the day.
Further exchanges will likely follow a similar formula, with tens of Palestinians freed from prisons in Israel for each hostage held in the Gaza Strip by militants. Over the six-week first phase of the truce, Hamas is expected to release 33 captives and Israel is slated to free about 1,900 Palestinians.
Such an uneven swap is not unusual. Israeli governments have long been determined to bring back captured civilians and soldiers, including dead ones, even at steep costs. The terms of such trades have often prompted fierce criticism domestically, much as a hostage release deal in November 2023 — part of an earlier cease-fire — did within Israel’s governing coalition.
The exchange of civilian hostages for prisoners, including some whom Israel has accused of terrorism, has also raised the ire of some Israelis. In a statement celebrating the release of the three Israeli hostages on Sunday, an Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, hinted at some of that underlying frustration, saying the latest trade was not “a true like-for-like exchange.”
You will hear no claims of “disproportionality” for such an uneven and wrongheaded swap. But if that’s what Israel wants, that’s what it will get. Remember, though, that in a similar but even more uneven swap for an Israeli soldier, one of the Palestinian terrorists released was Yayha Sinwar, who, as the military head of Hamas, planned the October 7 massacre. 1,026 of Sinwar’s mates were also released to get a single Israeli soldier back. Then Sinwar planned a massacre that killed over 1200 people, mostly Israelis.
Finally, as expected, many Israelis had mixe emotions at the prisoner release, which turned into a spectacle (there are some reports that Gazans spat on the three women), with Hamas turning out in full regalia with bandanas, facemasks, and of course AK47s:
Israelis said they felt conflicted emotions seeing the hostages handed over by Hamas militants, who posted their own choreographed video of the release. The video showed the three women posed with printed certificates declaring their release from captivity. In bags sporting the Hamas military wing’s logo, the group gave the women a map Hamas labeled Palestine, a certificate for learning to read Arabic and pictures of their time in captivity, an Israeli military official said.
The volatility of Sunday’s exchange reinforces doubts about whether the parties can reach additional agreements that would release all the hostages and end the war, and even whether the current phase of the deal will hold for the full six weeks to set the first 33 hostages free.
*Among the executive orders that Trump plans is a change in how sex and gender are treated in America by Emily Yoffe (h/t Luana). This was reported yesterday, before Trump took office, so I don’t know if it was issued (it appears to have been signed; see a later post):
Here is what the order sets out:
- The Executive Order establishes Government-wide the biological reality of two sexes and clearly defines male and female.
- All radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms are removed.
- Agencies will cease pretending that men can be women and women can be men when enforcing laws that protect against sex discrimination.
- “Woman” means an “adult human female.”
- The Executive Order directs that Government identification like passports and personnel records will reflect biological reality and not self-assessed gender identity.
- The Executive Order ends the practice of housing men in women’s prisons and taxpayer funded “transition” for male prisoners.
- The Executive Order ends the forced recitation of “preferred pronouns” and protects Americans’ First Amendment and statutory rights to recognize the biological and binary nature of sex.
- This includes protection in the workplace and in federal funded entities like schools.]
. . . . . Asked why Trump is making sex-based policy a day one priority of his administration, an incoming senior administration official said, “This really was a defining issue of the campaign. The president is going to be fulfilling the promises he made on the trail.” The executive order puts it more bluntly: “Radical gender ideology has devastated biological truth and women’s safety and opportunity.”
It is becoming something of a presidential tradition to begin a term with sweeping directives regarding “gender identity.” President Biden, on his first day in office, demanded the federal government “review all existing orders, regulations, guidance documents, policies, programs, or other agency actions” that could impinge on transgender rights. Language and rules about transgender identities became embedded in the vast federal bureaucracy.
Now, Trump has ordered a reversal of all this. In an exclusive briefing with The Free Press, two senior officials provided a summary of the executive order. “Women deserve protections, they deserve dignity, they deserve fairness, they deserve safety,” said a senior policy adviser explaining why the order explicitly embraces the necessity of special treatment for women. “And so this is going to help establish that in federal policy and in federal laws.”
But this will not go gentle, because there will be challenges.
In reading the order, it’s clear that lawsuits challenging the new directives will start stacking up quickly. The order, for example, asserts that “All radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms are removed.” This is far from mere symbolism. United States passports—which since 2022 have allowed citizens to choose “X” as their gender—will revert to offering exclusively male and female options, with the proviso that what people select must “reflect biological reality and not self-assessed gender identity.”
. . . and there’s one thing missing, though this is the subject of an ongoing Supreme Court case
The executive order does not address one of the most contentious areas of transgender activism: “gender-affirming care” for minors, meaning putting gender-distressed young people on a swift course to transition and lifetime medication. The Biden administration ardently supported such treatments, even as other Western nations began to restrict them, and dozens of U.S. states began to ban them.\
In general I think the tone of these changes is positive—no surprise to the readers who know my views—but I want to see how the laws are written. And I don’t really like the government decreeing that there are two sexes, for that is a biological observation. They can “recognize” them, but the government is not in the business of establishing biological fact, as the courts tried to do when saying that the FDA’s approval of day-after pills was faulty.
*Pollster, statistician, and Democrat Nate Silver has a new take in his “Silver Bulletin” newsletter, “Why Biden Failed.”
I have hardly any recollection of January 20, 2021, the day that Joe Biden took the Oath of Office. That may be because his speech wasn’t very memorable. In staccato bursts and simple sentences, delivered to a sparse, socially-distanced crowd, it didn’t contain much soaring rhetoric or policy substance. But it did offer a lot of promises, promises that Biden was never going to be able to keep.
The speech echoed a framing Biden had used in his acceptance speech that summer at the Democratic convention: that of a polycrisis. At the DNC, Biden had spoken of “four historic crises, all at the same time, a perfect storm”:
The worst pandemic in over 100 years. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
The most compelling call for racial justice since the 60’s. And the undeniable realities and accelerating threats of climate change.
In his Inaugural Address, Biden again pledged to “resolve the cascading crises of our era.” In fact, he upped the ante. The speech wasn’t humble: Biden compared himself to Abraham Lincoln after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, promising a solution to “systemic racism.” “The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer,” he said. And with the inauguration conducted in the shadow of January 6, there was a new addition, a fifth critical threat: an “attack on democracy and on truth” and a “rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.”
Silver’s view is that Biden wanted to be a hero, but faced a “polycrisis” of the pandemic, rising inflation, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, immigration, and a rise in crime.
In high-risk, high-stakes times like these, where you’re well outside the parameters of the usual playbook, it can be tempting to be a hero. And if you listen to his inaugural address, that’s clearly how Biden saw himself. Or perhaps even as a savior: the speech contains quite a bit of religious rhetoric. “The Bible says weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning,” Biden said. He asked Americans to place their faith in him: “Take a measure of me and my heart.”
But trying to be a savior — ending the pandemic, saving democracy, and, on top of that, delivering justice from systematic racism! — is precisely what you don’t want to do during extraordinary circumstances or under exceptional stress. I explore this theme at length in my book, which includes interviews with dozens of risk-takers, both quant types and people like former astronauts and fighter pilots. “Don’t be a hero” is advice I heard consistently. Instead, stick to basic blocking-and-tackling. Identify the most critical problem and laser-focus on it until it’s solved. Probably not two problems at a time, but sometimes that can’t be avoided. Certainly not five simultaneous crises, though. Especially if you have no plan other than “unity,” which Biden described as the “elusive” ingredient to “overcome these challenges.”
Silver concludes that even by 2020 voters perceived that Biden had lost enough of his mental capacity to govern effectively, and in fact he didn’t. Remember, this is Silver’s view, not mine. I was never a huge fan of Biden, as he turned out weaker and also woker than I perceived, nor did I like him, in the latter part of his term, trying to tell Israel how to run the war. But how much happier I’d be now if Gretchen Whitmer (or even Mayor Pete) had won the Democratic voters’ esteem in stead of inheriting the nomination like Harris did!
*I just learned that Biden issued a passel of pardons in his very last minutes in office (article archived here):
President Biden pardoned five members of his family in his last minutes in office, saying in a statement that he did so not because they did anything wrong but because he feared political attacks from incoming President Donald J. Trump.
“My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me — the worst kind of partisan politics,” he said in his last statement as president. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.”
Mr. Biden’s action pardoned James B. Biden, his brother; Sara Jones Biden, James’s wife; Valerie Biden Owens, Mr. Biden’s sister; John T. Owens, Ms. Owens’s husband; and Francis W. Biden, Mr. Biden’s brother.
The White House announced the pardons with less than 20 minutes left in Mr. Biden’s presidency, after he had already walked into the Capitol Rotunda to witness the swearing-in of Mr. Trump before leaving the Capitol for the last time as president.
The pardons were a remarkable coda to Mr. Biden’s 50-year political career, underscoring the mistrust and anger that the president feels about Mr. Trump, the man who preceded and will succeed him in office.
Mr. Biden had repeatedly warned that Mr. Trump was a threat to democracy in America. But he also said that he believed in the rule of law, and was confident in the stability of the institutions of law enforcement. The pardons — like one that he did earlier for his son, Hunter Biden, threatened to challenge that assertion.
It did challenge that assertion, but it’s unlikely that any of Biden’s family were going to be charged with anything. These pardons, then, were bad optics, but Biden’s had that for a while now, and I can’t get worked up about it.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, an atheist cat, want her noms:
Hili: If God does not exist we have to eat something anyway.A: Not by bread alone…Hili: And who is asking for bread?
Hili: Jeśli Boga nie ma to i tak trzeba coś zjeść.Ja: Nie samym chlebem.Hili: A kto prosi o chleb?
*******************
From Jesus of the Day:
From David Jorling, and especially for Diana:
From Cat Memes:
From Titania, tweeted last Christmas Eve:
Can you see it yet? 👀 pic.twitter.com/nu8lJPf6l1
— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) December 12, 2024
From the wonderful Sarah Haider, spotted by Luana:
Some of the most celebrated atheist scientists stand up for the reality of biological sex, and Atheist/Humanist organizations pretend they are being attacked by “religious extremists” espousing bigotry.
Astonishing. Shameful. Openly anti-science. https://t.co/YSdl9yanCS
— Sarah Haider 👾 (@SarahTheHaider) January 19, 2025
Two more heartwarming pet tweets in a thread found by Jez (sound up on first one):
11. Such a wholesome memory pic.twitter.com/XzPJQMgtcj
— Wolf of X (@tradingMaxiSL) January 17, 2025
From Malcolm. I have mixed feelings about this one as the guy is apparently trying to kill the mouse. Sound up.
bro lied on his resume 😂 pic.twitter.com/s84IebYRXj
— Punch Cat (@PunchingCat) December 31, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
A young French man who died soon after arriving at Auschwitz. He was deported the day before his 20th birthday.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-01-21T11:23:24.629Z
Two posts from Professor Cobb, who may teach one more course. First, a lovely spider egg sac:
This is the mystery spider egg sac covered with a veil of pink silk that was determined to be woven by a Poltys based on several rounds of discussion on iNaturalist and Twitter. Thanks to @arachnonaut.bsky.social for the lead!
— Nicky Bay (@nickybay.bsky.social) 2025-01-20T14:21:01.165Z
Matthew says that Dent is a famous lexicographer:
You can read the executive order here.
“Recognise” is indeed the wording used. “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.”
The order is actually pretty good, it’s obviously had input from someone competent (as in, not written by Trump himself). E.g:
“(a) “Sex” shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. “Sex” is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity.”
(b) “Women” or “woman” and “girls” or “girl” shall mean adult and juvenile human females, respectively.
(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(f) “Gender ideology” replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, … “
There’s much to not like in Trump’s agenda, but on this issue he’s spot on. That the Dems are making Trump look sane should give them serious pause for thought. As the NYT said the other day, “Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump”: https://archive.is/IZu9N
Exactly. Biden picked some unpopular policies (presumably pressured by loud activists who do not represent the general population.)
At The Free Press, the article on gender ideology attracted a huge number of comments. Reading through the comments I noticed how many had a child or niece or nephew who were caught up in this.
There’s an excellent chance those kids will grow as gay but not transgender. Since puberty blockers and especially surgery have permanent effects I can understand how they feel.
Several said they had been lifelong Dems and switched to Trump solely on this issue.
I really hope that this EO will stop a lot of these kids transing away their reality as the parents may start removing their approval and support for the nonsense. Is it really worth it honey?
The ending of an absurd social contagion is a great wish for many especially women.
The optics on the last minute pardons are, indeed, bad. I suspect that Biden, or his surrogates, knew full well that this was the case, and that is why they did them late on the last Sunday.
Belatedly, the Supreme Court’s opinion in Burdick v. The United States has been resurrected:
How much more must this be the case of prospective pardons?
According to The (London) Times, at least two Democrat members of the Jan 6 enquiry committee, Adam Schiff and Pete Aguilar, had previously said that they would not accept the offer of a pardon because it would be seen as an admission that the enquiry was a witch-hunt.
I’m more upset by the slew of Biden’s pardons of the worse of the worse fed prisoners. (taking them off death row, not actually springing them).
The list of truly evil people he pardoned was amazing and sickening and I’m not even particularly in favor of the death penalty (though I don’t get all worked up about it. Some other civilized countries have it: Japan, Korea, Israel theoretically).
We have to respect the laws and sentences from the times they were handed out and these prisoners were scheduled to die.
D.A.
NYC
Biden commuted the sentences, he did not pardon them. They serve life without parole because commuted. If pardoned, they would be leaving prison, which is not the case.
Again with the Mayor Pete thing – because it is sure to come up again in future years.
I think he’s great and even donated a (very) few bucks to a campaign of his once.
But for president…we’d lose the black church lady vote immediately – dooming the Dems.
LGBT is fine in MOST of America but not in edge areas necessary for a win.
That is… assuming the Dems have reinvented themselves by then b/c absent Trump I’d have voted GoP for the first time in my life last time. Given a Romney, say, I’d have picked him.
Sick of woke.
D.A.
NYC
No. You won’t read any cries of disproportionality. Three young women simply living their lives are exchanged for 90 criminals and criminal suspects seems about right to the Israel haters. I don’t like Israel’s practice of administrative detentions, but some 2000 criminals will eventually be released in the arrangement. (It’s not a “deal,” as Alan Dershowitz says. It’s an extortion.)
To me, the great question is whether or not Hamas will remain a political and military power in Gaza. If so, Israel has lost the war. Part of Hamas’s strategy in this arrangement with Israel is to get Israel and the world used to the idea of calm in the hope that the Israeli people and government—weary of war—will decide to leave Gaza with Hamas in place. This is a huge risk.
Absolutely. Apparently the
dealextortion sets the ratio of 30 prisoners per civilian female hostage and 50 prisoners per female IDF hostage.Meanwhile, those prisoners released are thankful for Hamas taking the hostages in the first place: “The hostages meant I got out. As long as there are hostages, prisoners like me will get their freedom.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp9x1yvmm0no
Pretty sure Hamas will remain. After all, how can they get rid of them now?
People wanting “X” gender passports might not realize that they may prevent entry to many countries. I can think of quite a few who’d turn down “X” gender passport holders even though (I think) the Netherlands and Germany issue them.
I don’t know what they’ll do with the current “X”ers in the US. Let them be valid till expiry I presume and not issue new ones.
D.A.
NYC
How we ever got to the stage where such nonsense can be included on official government-issued documents is beyond me.
Unless I’m mistaken, an additional (“diverse”) category in Germany came about as a result of a court decision, not a law passed by parliament, and was aimed at “true intersexual people”, not trans, and is independent of the recent self-ID law. It is not improbable that the CDU (the main, traditional conservative party) will head the next government, and they have said that they will repeal the self-ID law.
In more and more countries, even those with a many-party system, the effective choice is between right-wing and non-woke or left-wing and woke. And we are in this mess because of “progressive” left-wingers. And, I think because sensible left-wingers cut them too much slack. I still think that playing along with the pronoun nonsense AT ALL is a slippery slope leading to the castration of children.
From the Executive Order DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT:
The entire thing is refreshingly sane — and Trump signing it on Day 1 is I think a brilliant strategy.
First, it appeals to people on both sides of the political spectrum, actually uniting rather than dividing. Many Democrats and Harris voters were at the very least concerned about the gender policies strengthened under Biden. And, of course, they involved control and trust issues that go beyond the actual controversy.
And second, it’s going to elicit a bunch of unhinged legal challenges in broad daylight and firmly tie the Democratic Party to what can be argued as being its most demonstrably false and/or ideologically extreme platform. I want to weep. We need strong Democratic candidates.
As it is, they’re already doubling down. Look at what’s happening in regard to keeping the boy/girl division in sports sex-based. A simple requirement that could easily be fulfilled by a pediatrician marking M or F on a routine school physical form or by doing a cheek swab is being idiotically framed as “forced genital inspections by pedophiles” as one Democratic politician after another gnashes their teeth and bites the dust.
Gender ideology is completely entrenched amongst the Dems.
The Free Press had an article on Ritchie Torres. He’s become sensible on issues like defunding the police (says it’s a terrible idea).
However, a couple of readers linked to his tweets on gender ideology: he’s completely on board with “trans women are women.”
What a disappointment to learn this about him (being on board with the “trans women are women”).
It’s discouraging all right.
The whole concept is still deeply entrenched in Canada.
(Our government is MIA as Trump threatens tariffs. Trudeau prorogued Parliament until March, leaving us leaderless. The current crop of pols in both countries is disappointing.)
Elon Musk is now working in the White House.
https://bsky.app/profile/mohusseini.com/post/3lgb4t45i5c2m
“Drill baby drill” I wondered how does that fit with Elon Musk and Tesla?
Uncomfortable, given the ‘ideology’ motivating the production of electric cars? of which some parts are also manufactured/assembled in China.
Drill baby drill into Musk’s fortune… 🤔
While I’m at it. Rutherford and a bunch of English physicist split the atom and pavlova is an NZ dessert. What! I hear you say, ok he didn’t mention pavlova.
The factories that make electric cars and smelt the ores of cobalt and nickel and steel and lithium and the machines that dig the ore out of the ground and the ships that move it around the world all run on fossil fuels. Building more cars of all descriptions and more everything as the world gets wealthier assures a steady future for oil and gas, even if a larger proportion of those cars is electric than currently.
Nor did he mention that the acknowledged conquerer of Everest was a NZer. But note that the origin of the pavlova desert is strongly contested between NZ and Australia; I have no idea which has the better case.
Re the guy apparently trying to kill the mouse, I had a similar experience with a rat. No, I did not climb up onto a chair and start screaming; I dealt with it in a manner that did impress upon me the aptness of the saying “looking like a drowned rat”. ISTM setting lethal mouse or rat traps shows just as much contempt for those critters as does dealing with them in a more immediate up-close-and-personal manner.