A new week has begun: welcome to Monday, February 10, 2025, and Oatmeal Monday. Here’s a lovely bowl of oatmeal I had at the inn where I was staying for the Kent Presents meetings in August of 2018: Look at all the nuts, fresh and dried fruits, maple syrup, and a pitcher of cream.
Superb Owl News: (h/t Barry). First, Google “Superbowl” and see what you get.
It was indeed a rout: The Philadelphia Eagles stopped the Kansas City Chiefs cold in the Superbowl, crushing the Chiefs 40-22:
A more fragile team would have folded. It wouldn’t have made it back here, because it wouldn’t have been able to weather the series of storms this Philadelphia Eagles franchise faced along the way.
And it wouldn’t have halted history on the sport’s biggest stage.
Certainly not like that.
But these Eagles were different — defiant, even. And on Sunday night in Super Bowl LIX, they were utterly dominant. Their reward is the franchise’s second Super Bowl win, a stunning 40-22 rout of the two-time defending champion Kansas City Chiefs at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, a resounding victory that avenges a gutting, last-second Super Bowl loss two years ago to these same Chiefs and returns the city of Brotherly Love to the top of the football world.
This time, the Philly Special wasn’t needed.
This time, the Eagles’ defense was so devastating that Patrick Mahomes — already a three-time Super Bowl MVP before the age of 30 — staggered through one of the worst games of his seven-year NFL career.
This time, Jalen Hurts left no doubt.
Mahomes, under heavy duress throughout, was sacked six times and hit 11 times. He finished 21-for-32 for 257 yards, three touchdowns, two interceptions and a lost fumble, though most of Mahomes’ production came well after the game had been decided. The Eagles led 34-0 before the Chiefs even crossed midfield.
You can see the game highlights (turn off ad blockers) here; Philadelphia did some great passing and field-goal kicking. Taylor Swift will be sad and may write a song about the debacle.
From Cats Without Gods:
It’s also National “Have a Brownie” Day (why the scare quotes? are we supposed to only pretend we had a brownie?), National Cream Cheese Brownie Day, National Poop Day (the day you excrete the remains of the food you ate during yesterday’s Superbowl), National Flannel Day, International Cribbage Day, and Teddy Day, the day you give your beloved a teddy bear (it’s part of Valentine’s Day Week). My parents gave me my Teddy, who is named Toasty and still resides in my office. Here he shows his age and his severe depilation:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 10 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*It looks like Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr., both of whose nominations were endangered (for Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Health and Human Services, respectively), now look as if they’ll squeak through Congress. That depends on Republicans voting as a bloc, of course:
Republican skepticism in the Senate of President Donald Trump’sCabinet nominees has been worn down, putting his unconventional choices for some of the most powerful positions in the federal government on the verge of confirmation.
Floor votes are expected this week on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in line to be the nation’s health secretary, and Tulsi Gabbard, the choice for director of national intelligence. Both are from outside traditional Republican circles and espoused views in the confirmation process that alarmed GOP senators at times. Still, their nominations have advanced to the full Senate after crucial committee votes.
One by one, Republicans have acquiesced to Trump’s picks, even those whose personal history, lack of experience and unorthodox views would have once made them hardly imaginable for a Cabinet.
It’s a striking demonstration of how GOP lawmakers are standing by as Trump, in a show of force, disrupts the federal government and installs loyalists to lead key departments. Republican leaders in the Senate, eager to show Trump their worth, have chalked up confirmations at a rapid clip.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, just a month into the role, has lined up a vote on Gabbard as the first order of business, followed by Kennedy later in the week. Already on the job is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who faced allegations over drinking and aggressive behavior toward women. And Republicans appear ready to soon install Kash Patel as FBI director.
. . . . The collapse of resistance has set a new tone in the Republican-controlled government and shown how even the most independent-minded lawmaker would rather work with Trump than risk crossing him. Trump himself has refrained from the threats to GOP skeptics that defined his first term and relied on Vance, a former Ohio senator, to quietly walk some of his former colleagues through their concerns.
“You can’t think of this just as a normal president coming into office for the first time,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., who was involved in the effort to get Trump’s nominees across the finish line. “Everybody I was dealing with was truly undecided trying to get to yes, and so it was just a process.”
Ceiling Cat help us, everyone! RFK Jr. scares me the most because of his potential to actually kill people through stupidity.
*This WSJ article may explain why black and Hispanic voters, who went more for Republicans than expected in the last election,
Some of President Trump’s Black and Latino supporters say they are pleased with his immediate efforts to dismantle federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs, according to interviews conducted by The Wall Street Journal, though they were uneasy about the way he talked about race and some worried he might spark a rise in discrimination.
Ending so-called DEI programs—which include efforts to foster a more diverse workforce—was a frequent promise by Trump during the campaign, during which he broadly picked up a higher share of support from nonwhite voters than in his 2020 and 2016 bids.
Since taking office, Trump has made slashing DEI programs a priority, signing executive orders to eliminate programs within the federal government and ordering up lists of federal employees involved in those efforts. He also revoked a six-decade-old executive order that requires government contractors to proactively root out discrimination on the basis of race and sex.
While Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won nonwhite voters in both the 2020 and 2024 elections, Trump in 2024 saw an 8 percentage point increase with Black and Latino voters, as well as a 5 percentage point jump in support from Asian voters, according to the election survey AP VoteCast.
Nonwhite voters made up nearly a quarter of the national electorate during last year’s election, according to AP VoteCast, and more in some battleground states.
While Trump cannot run for re-election in 2028, Republicans are eager to keep these voters to hold their majorities in the House and Senate during the 2026 midterm elections and the White House two years later.
Here’s a graph from the AP showing the increase in minority voters who supported Trump in the last two elections (he lost in 2020, of course). And it shows how wokeness helps the Democrats lose elections.
*The NYT “Trilobites” column, this time by Sara Novak, reports on a remarkable fossil finding: fossilized bones and soft tissue of plesiosaurs (large marine reptiles), all described in an article in Current Biology.
With serpentine necks, flippers and a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, plesiosaurs have captured imaginations since paleontologists uncovered the first specimen more than two centuries ago. Their skeletal anatomy is well documented, but their external appearance has largely remained a mystery.
Now researchers have conducted the first detailed analysis of plesiosaur soft tissue, offering a more complete look at what these real-life sea monsters might have looked like when they lived from 215 million to 66 million years ago.
Published Thursday in Current Biology, the findings suggest that some plesiosaurs had humanlike skin on their tail regions and fishy scales on their flippers, similar to the features of some living sea turtle species. The research highlights an evolutionary detour that runs counter to other ancient marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs, which evolved away from scales in favor of skin, or much smaller scales, to allow them to move more efficiently through their marine habitats.
“These are iconic animals, and the way we reconstruct them hasn’t changed for nearly 200 years, so this is a big update,” said Miguel Marx, a doctoral student at Lund University in Sweden and lead author of the paper. “It changes our perspective on their evolutionary history and how they adapted to life in the ocean.”
Mr. Marx and colleagues analyzed three soft-tissue skin samples, each about the size of a fingernail, from a flipper and the tail of a 183 million-year-old long-necked plesiosaur specimen. The species is to be named in a future peer-reviewed paper. But the samples came from the Posidonia Shale in Germany, where the ocean chemistry preserved soft tissues. That left it frozen in time. Some of the tissue remains were so flawlessly fossilized that researchers could see skin cell nuclei under the microscope.
. . .While it’s difficult to know for sure how extinct animals would have maneuvered through their environments, Mr. Marx said that the scales observed on the plesiosaur had probably stiffened the trailing edge of the flipper, allowing for enhanced propulsion through the water, another feature shared with today’s sea turtles.
Plesiosaurs may also have used scales on their flippers for traction and protection as they sifted through sand and vegetation on the ocean floor for food. Previous research suggests that preserved marine trackways found near Ancona, Italy, came from plesiosaurs, another indication that they might have spent time feeding at the bottom of the ocean.
Here are some fossilized scales from a flipper (caption from paper):
*We have the first pro-Palestinian encampment of the season, this time at Bowdoin College, a prestigious private liberal-arts school in Brunswick, Maine.
Student protestors with Bowdoin Students For Justice in Palestine have set up an encampment inside the college’s student union building and are now facing disciplinary action from the school.
The organization announced the protest Thursday as the college’s board of trustees was meeting. According to the release, the event was planned as a response to the administration’s lack of action on the Bowdoin Solidarity Referendum, a student initiative that passed with broad support in May that called on Bowdoin to, among other things, disclose investments in arms manufacturing and commit to not investing in defense industry funds in the future.
“Today, we launch this encampment, demanding that Bowdoin immediately commit to fully realizing all four demands of our referendum,” the announcement read.
“Trump has vowed his unequivocal support for Israel’s genocide, most recently calling for the United States to ethnically cleanse and ‘take over’ Gaza,” the Bowdin SJP announcement read. “Today, we act for our peers in Gaza and the West Bank, heeding the calls of Birzeit University professors and staff: “Gaza is not for sale. Palestine is not a real estate project.’”
Around midnight, Senior Associate Dean for Student Affairs Katie Toro-Ferrari told students they had to leave the encampment before 1 a.m. or face consequences.
“I want to make sure students understand that this could put them on the path where they are jeopardizing their ability to remain as Bowdoin students,” she told the Orient.
The paper reported that around 1 a.m., college security staff began collecting student IDs, but at least 50 protestors remained. On Friday morning, college security officers blocked access to the building wadsfjkith protestors still inside. Vice President of Student Affairs Jim Hoppe addressed the encampment in an 8 a.m. email to students.
Students began receiving notices about disciplinary hearings, according to posts on the Bowdoin Students For Justice in Palestine Instagram account. At around noon on Friday, the Orient reported that about 20 additional students broke past a line of security officers to enter the building.
In a Friday afternoon statement to the Press Herald, organizers of Bowdoin SJP said they would stay encamped for “as long as it takes” to convince the college to divest from weapons industries.
What do you think will happen to the students? Do you think any will suffer disciplinary sanctions? I’m guessing a big NO here, but stay tuned. Wait! There’s an update from the Bowdoin Orient:
Late on Sunday evening, a crowd gathered in front of the south entrance of Smith Union after receiving notice from protesters inside that the College would potentially act to remove the encampment. Protesters expected this removal after reportedly rejecting an ultimatum from the administration to clear out of Smith Union by 10 p.m. or face harsher consequences.
Around 11:15 p.m., students in the SJP encampment addressed the crowd from the second-floor window of Smith, saying that they received word from the administration that they will face immediate suspension if they do not leave the building by 8:30 a.m. on Monday, February 10. According to the same announcement, administrators also informed students that they must leave Smith by 5 p.m. the same day, with SJP organizers noting the potential for forcible removal or arrests. Many students remain in the encampment for a fourth consecutive night.
They could be suspended in less than two hours!
*Below is an ad that you saw yesterday if you watch the Superbowl. And people are objecting to it, rightly.
The first thing the ad shows is a scale. Over the soundtrack of Childish Gambino’s anthem “This is America,” a narrator laments the nation’s obesity crisis and “the system” that is “built to keep us sick and stuck.” It notes the “$160 billion weight-loss industry that feeds on our failure” as images of junk cereal, pie and a cheeseburger flash across the screen.
“Something’s broken, and it’s not our bodies,” the narrator says, adding: “There are medications that work, but they’re priced for profits, not patients.”
The minute-long ad, which will run during the Super Bowl, pitches a “life-changing” solution to all this: weight-loss drugs, as offered by the telehealth startup Hims & Hers. Viewers see a fridge stocked with Hims & Hers-branded vials of medications. These are compounded drugs, meaning they haven’t gone through the traditional approval process designed to safeguard against risks to consumers — a point the ad largely glosses over.
On Friday, Senators Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Roger Marshall, Republican of Kansas, sent a letter to the acting head of the Food and Drug Administration saying the ad “risks misleading patients.”
“Nowhere in this promotion is there any side-effect disclosure, risk or safety information as would be typically required in a pharmaceutical advertisement,” they wrote.
The ad has also drawn the ire of some doctors who prescribe obesity drugs, as well as the Partnership for Safe Medicines, a coalition of nonprofit organizations including some that are affiliated with the drug industry. The group sent a letter to the F.D.A. on Thursday calling the ad “dangerous” and warning it only discloses that the medications are compounded briefly and in a small font. The organization called on the Fox Corporation to withdraw the ad.
“Americans don’t understand the safety profile of compounded medications. So when you make a drug ad and don’t disclose it, there’s a safety problem,” said Shabbir Imber Safdar, the executive director of the Partnership for Safe Medicines.
. . .Hims & Hers and its rivals have used savvy marketing and convenient virtual prescribing platforms to bring compounded weight-loss drugs to the masses. The company and other telehealth platforms like it have capitalized on a stipulation that allows compounding pharmacies to dispense their own versions when brand-name drugs like Ozempic are in short supply.
By some estimates, millions of people are now taking compounded versions of these drugs. Hims & Hers has said around 100,000 consumers have signed up for its weight-loss program, which includes compounded medications. The company’s revenue jumped by over 50 percent from the previous year in the months after it started offering access to compounded weight-loss medications.
These compounded medications cost a fraction of the list price for brand-name drugs. As the ad frames it, that’s giving consumers access to the same kind of powerful medications, free of the bureaucracy of “the system.”
Some experts disagree. “The idea that this for-profit company is not exploiting you financially because it’s making it a little bit cheaper to get knockoff Ozempic — that is a wild claim,” said Kate Manne, the author of the book “Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia.”
To Mr. Safdar, the ad is “like running an ad for a Cadillac and not telling anybody that the car you’re selling is made by a Yugo.” It shows injector pens that look similar to Ozempic and Wegovy, but with brand names blurred out.
Here’s the ad:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili resembles a hungry bird:
A: You look like an owl.Hili: I look like somebody who is waiting too long to be served at the table.
Ja: Wyglądasz jak sowa.Hili: Wyglądam jak ktoś, kto zbyt długo czeka na podanie do stołu.
*******************
From Stacy:
From: 2025 Darwin Awards!!/Epic Fails!!
From: Meow, a demonstration of cat genetics:
Masih retweeted a personal experience from Gad Saad that he recounts here for the first time:
I’ve never shared this story publicly but let me do so now. When my parents were kidnapped by Fatah, they separated my parents. When they were mistreating them and forcing them to confess to insane things, my mother said to her torturers: “Go ask my husband if you don’t… https://t.co/WX5PTc0EXf
— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) February 9, 2025
From Malgorzata. It never ends. . .
The only Jewish school in New Zealand has been graffitied with “Genocide High School” and “God Hates You”. pic.twitter.com/IkeEjvu7PO
— Jane (@DrJaneNorton) February 6, 2025
Another from Malgorzata. If you thought Hamas was evil, well, this will buttress that view:
Hamas forced Eli Sharabi to announce that he was excited to be reunited with his wife and daughters this morning, fully aware that they had murdered his family on October 7th.
The Jewish people will never forget or forgive Hamas’ utter depravity and crimes. pic.twitter.com/OFS5obtvJA
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) February 8, 2025
This is from a Republican member of the New York City Council who resigned from the Women’s Caucus:
🚨 On Friday I OFFICIALLY left @WomensCaucusNYC because I can’t reasonably stay part of a body that purports to stand up for women, but refuses to condemn the RAPE, MURDER, and CAPTIVITY of Jewish women by jihadi terrorists without adding “context”.
This makes them as useless… pic.twitter.com/Jf4CeFPOs0
— Councilwoman Inna Vernikov (@InnaVernikov) February 9, 2025
From Malcolm; beautifully athletic cats:
Gotcha!
📹First cat of volcano pic.twitter.com/0ARcXuWKBL— Mulan Chun-Li (@chunlimulan) January 23, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
A 12-year-old German Jewish girl gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-10T11:12:29.970Z
Two posts from Doctor Cobb. First, Jack Lemmon’s amusing gravestone:
How did this gator get the hat, and how did it put it on its head?
In a sentence never before uttered by humans, I am delighted to share that an alligator stole my conservation instructor’s hat by jauntily walking into the water while wearing it 🐊
— Samantha Maich (@samanthamaich.bsky.social) 2025-02-08T00:20:36.536Z
Superb plesiosaur!
Superb Hili!
😆
“Many students remain in the encampment for a fourth consecutive night” says it all.
Perhaps they have watched PZ Meyers’ recent “political resistance” YouTube chat (yes, really!!!) with three other “resistance” warriors. One of them wears a face mask over Zoom, presumably because they fear their powerful ‘resistance’ of sitting around and moaning will alert authorities, with PZ and his comrades going down in some sort of Ruby Ridge incident.
It is over an hour long, and it is total cringe.
I can’t find it. Do you have a link?
I searched PZ Myers videos on “political resistance.”
An encampment in February? In Maine?
Oh wait, it’s indoors.
Wimps.
….and still haven’t gotten laid yet!
How about that.
D.A.
NYC
My name for the haircut: forestache.
+1
I watched Flow yesterday, rather than the Super Bowl, and it was completely charming and superbly executed! Thank you for recommending it Dr. Coyne et al!
From births-on-this-date list:
1927 – Leontyne Price, American operatic soprano
So this is her 98th birthday!
I guess it is a sign of aging to enjoy hearing on this sort of almanac listings an actual birthday of some treasured figure instead of “the Nth anniversary of the birth” .
Leontyne Price in Verdi’s “Libera Me”
https://youtu.be/_d86QHlsHwI?si=mfKvTHakXTClb17M
As an atheist I sometimes feel conflicted over adoring some musical pieces which are religious expressions. But for something like this, it helps if (1) we note the frequent observation that the composer was himself probably at least agnostic, and (2) try to enter into sympathetic imagination of the “wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?” sort, or “I can see how people could form an urgent wish for the world to be like this” .
One of the greatest American’s (in my opinion) of all-time was a professor at Bowdin. That would be Joshua Chamberlin. He is a legend for defending Little Big Top at Gettysburg by charging Confederate forces with bayonets (his forces were out of bullets). The Confederates were not out of bullets, but were astounded by the bravery of Joshua Chamberlin and his forces.
Regarding the plesiosaur skin discovery, go to this web site (below) to see a picture of the entire fossil, with the author of the study for scale. The picture is incredible! I wish I could post it here.
https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/soft-tissue-183-million-year-old-jurassic-plesiosaur-analysed
Trump nixing the penny is a great idea – one that previous presidents have wanted to do. It is made by one supplier in MD who grossly overcharges us for a useless product.
Problem is coinage is in the preview of Congress as per the Constitution from what I remember. So it might be illegal for the executive to just stop it.
We’re seeing a bit of this – good ideas but hard to imagine they’ll pass the courts and the system. And the system is the most important thing of all.
D.A.
NYC
Yes, only Congress can stop minting pennies- they’ve tried a few times, but it has never passed. We mint billions of pennies a year, so it would save some dosh as it costs over 2cents to mint a penny.
Though MD has nothing to do with pennies. They’re minted in Philadelphia and Denver at the moment. West Point and San Francisco also mint pennies, but they are proofs for collectors, not meant for circulation.
And let’s get rid of daylight savings while we’re at it.
Even if it costs 2 cents to mint a penny (i.e. more than a penny is worth), that in itself is not an argument against minting them. I think that Snopes covered that years ago.
The reason to keep the penny is because everything in America costs $X.99¢.
If we lose the penny, everything will automatically now cost $1 more. (Perception is everything.) Unless you think things will then cost $X.95¢….
Merchants would still post and ring in the sticker price as $ X.99. The rounding would be done on the total sale of items plus sales taxes and would apply only to cash sales. Credit and debit card sales would continue be charged to the penny. At least that’s how we do it, having got rid of the penny some years ago. Mind you, a Canadian one-cent piece (as we called them), was worth only two-thirds of a U.S. cent so it eclipsed faster.
Good Grief! Had no idea that could be done!
When was the last time you filled up your car?
As I understand it, the Secretary of the Treasury has discretion with respect to how many of each coin to mint. Arguably, he or she could therefore mint zero pennies. However, if that interpretation is too strained for you, then he or she could simply mint one penny.
Can’t resist sharing this:
BREAKING 🔴
UN Chief António Guterres: “I have instructed the UN to stop all programs and funding to the Houthis in Saada.”
This comes after the Houthis kidnap 28 UN employees.
Interesting, stop the aid for the kidnappers you say?
from https://x.com/Osint613/status/1889039899224899747
would be funny if it wasn’t so absurd and evil.
D.A.
NYC
I greatly applaud Inna Vernikov’s declaration.
(However, and not to single her out particularly, but why the portentous, melodramatic, distracting and irritating music in the background? Does it somehow make her statement more credible? Media of all kinds are eaten up with this fatuous sonic piffle. Give me Walter Cronkite with only the faint transient sound of the teletypewriter in the background. I guess Fortune has smiled and I have reached the Age of the Curmudgeon.)
I’m with you on the music thing. I detest it. Hold the soundtrack, please. It insults me, somehow.
When it comes to the Super Bowl, I’m with the cat…
Don’t like the sketchy Hims and Hers ad & product? There’l plenty more of that stuff around due to gutting of federal protective agencies & the general political/cultural atmosphere. I would not expect any action from Fox Corporation, either. (Yes, yes, I’m once again stating the obvious.)