Welcome to a hump day (“dita e gungës” in Albanian ): Wednesday, April 16, 2025, and National Banana Day. Here is how organic, fair-trade bananas are grown and harvested in the Dominican Republic:
And I can’t resist putting up this terrific live version of Harry Belafonte singing about a worker who loads bananas on boats. Have a listen!
A beautiful bunch of ripe banana
Hide the deadly black tarantula!
It’s also Day of the Mushroom, Save the Elephant Day (and don’t make them gestate embryos with some mammoth genes!), National Orchid Day, and National Eggs Benedict Day (Anthony Bourdain says to stay away from this brunch staple). Here’s a wild elephant I photographed in South Africa last year:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 16 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Here’s an article to put spring in your step, and it’s by the NYT’s conservative op-ed columnist Ross Douthat: “Trump is on a path to failure.”
. . . when [Trump] returned to office, I vowed to avoid premature declarations of catastrophe. I would criticize, but I wouldn’t act as though everything was irrecoverable for at least the first year.
That’s a very bad place to be for a president who has always depended on good economic vibes, and it’s happening against a backdrop of other wrong turns and disappointments. I wrote in December about the need for a fruitful balance between Trumpism’s populist and techno-libertarian factions, between the spirit of JD Vance and the spirit of Elon Musk. I was imagining, say, pro-family tax policy jointed to abundance-oriented deregulation — but instead, the balance so far consists of reckless trade war on the populist side and Musk’s crusade to reduce government head count without apparent regard to government capacity. It’s a synthesis of sorts, but not a happy one.
Meanwhile everything the administration does, it does with a dose of tough-guy excess, as though determined to alienate any part of its coalition that isn’t fully committed to the MAGA cause. It’s not enough to pursue deportations; we need to deport people to a prison in El Salvador without convicting them of any crime. It’s not enough to ask our NATO allies to bear more burdens; the ask has to come with a snarl, a trade war and a fixation on Greenland. It’s not enough to purge D.E.I. programs; we have to hack away at scientific research and humanitarian aid as well.
This all makes for a very bad trajectory, and the fact that Trump survived bad trajectories before doesn’t mean that this one is destined to reverse. Maybe this time he’s too cocooned and unrestrained, too surrounded by flatterers, too confident in his place among history’s decisive figures (someone should tell him about their often unhappy endgames) to steer toward stability and popularity.
Douthat thinks that a course correction is still possible, and maybe he’s right, but I’m hoping he’s not.
He can have tariffs; he just can’t have the tariffs of “Liberation Day,” with their scale and cackhanded design. He can have deportations; he just has to accept the limits imposed by moral decency and the Supreme Court. He can have a version of the Department of Government Efficiency, just refocused on deregulation, where it should have been focused from the start. He can have yes-men and flatterers; he just needs some people in his cabinet to say, “Sir, maybe not.”
He can even pine for Greenland and woo its denizens. He just can’t threaten to go seize it.
Throughout his time as the dominant force in our politics, Trump has showed a capacity for what you might call temporary discipline, linked to a crude survival instinct and a sense of the prevailing winds.
If those instincts are still with him, this is the time to listen to them — and to remember that while fortune has her favorites, nemesis always waits.
I’m rooting for NEMESIS!
*The US and Iran are still doing a dance around Iran’s nuclear program, though I think it’s a stupid dance that won’t achieve the US aims. As the Times of Israel reports US Envoy to the Mideast Steve Witkoff (he’s incompetent) announces that the US is trying to slow down rather than dismantle Iran’s desire to create nuclear weapons.
US special envoy to the Mideast Steve Witkoff appeared to use a key component of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal signed during the Obama administration as a reference point for the ongoing talks with Tehran, in comments that seemed to indicate the US is looking to limit rather than dismantle Tehran’s nuclear program.
The deal, which US President Donald Trump abandoned in 2018 and has long criticized, barred Iran from enriching its uranium beyond 3.67 percent as part of a framework intended to prevent the Islamic Republic from obtaining a weapon.
But then they add this:
“The president means what he says, which is: Iran cannot have a bomb,” Witkoff told Fox News in a Monday interview, elaborating that the ongoing “conversation” with Iran would be about enrichment and weaponization, with the imperative to verify any agreed commitments.
“Iran “do[es] not need to enrich past 3.67%. In some circumstances, they’re at 60%, in other circumstances 20%. That cannot be,” he said. “You do not need to run — as they claim — a civil nuclear program where you’re enriching past 3.67%.”
Enriching uranium from 60% to the 90% needed for a weapon is a relatively short technical step.
The comments indicated that the US is looking to limit Iran’s uranium enrichment rather than dismantle its nuclear program altogether, as demanded by Israel, which sees a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat.
Israel is right here, and Iran has evaded every limitation ever put on it. Witkoff seems to me just about as oblivious as Blinken when it comes to the Middle East.
*But the Free Press points out America’s obliviousness:
Right after Trump expressed his frustration that the mullahs may be stringing out the talks, he said: “Iran has to get rid of the concept of a nuclear weapon. They cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
This may sound counterintuitive upon first read. Isn’t the whole point of Witkoff’s diplomacy to guarantee Iran will not build a nuclear weapon?
But a weapon is only the final phase of Iran’s vast nuclear-industrial complex. Specifically, weaponization refers to the construction of a deliverable warhead. In this respect, the fact that Trump did not say that Iran cannot have a nuclear program, which is what he insisted on when he scuttled Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, is a red flag.
On Monday evening Witkoff told Fox News that the aim of his negations was “to do something about enrichment.” He said: “They do not need to enrich past 3.67 percent.” Witkoff also said ultimately he wanted to reach a deal on verification that Iran’s enrichment was not for a nuclear weapon. “That includes missiles, the type of missiles they have stockpiled there, and it includes the trigger for a bomb.”
Yikes. Leaving aside the imprudence of announcing your real red lines at the start of negotiations, this appears to be a recipe for accepting a nuclear deal that is at best as weak as Obama’s in 2015. At least, that is the opinion of several hawks in Washington and inside the Trump administration. The problem is that in Trump’s second term so far, the “restrainer” wing has been ascendant. So while some administration officials, such as National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have called for the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program, it’s Witkoff and his team who are actually negotiating with the Iranians.
. . . . Why offer Iran an opportunity to keep its centrifuges and ballistic missiles? Far better to press the advantage now and make Iran a Godfather offer. The mullahs can dismantle their nuclear program now in exchange for concessions—or America and Israel can do it for them.
We need to make Iran an offer it can’t refuse. If you think they are amenable to dismantling their nuclear program, you’re wrong, and that’s why the proper deal won’t be made.
*This is relevant to what the Administration is doing to Harvard. Here, from 2019, is a quote from our late President Bob Zimmer about who enforces free expression on campus:
The question of whether this problem should be addressed through additional Federal legislation or executive action has been raised in multiple situations in recent years. In 2017, I testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, chaired by Senator Lamar Alexander. Senator Alexander asked me at that time whether I thought Congress should address free expression on campus through federal legislation. I replied unequivocally that I was opposed to any such federal legislation. The question of federal intervention in this arena arises again today, not with Congress, but with the Executive Branch. As was my position with respect to Congress, I believe that any action by the Executive Branch that interferes with the ability of higher education institutions to address this problem themselves is misguided and in fact sets a very problematic precedent.
There are two related features of potential Federal engagement on this issue that would threaten the mission of institutions of higher education. They would do so by creating the specter of less rather than more free expression, and by deeply chilling the environment for discourse and intellectual challenge. The first feature is the precedent of the Federal government establishing its own standing to interfere in the issue of speech on campuses. This opens the door to any number of troubling policies over time that the Federal government, whatever the political party involved, might adopt on such matters. It makes the government, with all its power and authority, a party to defining the very nature of discussion on campus. The second feature is the inevitable establishment of a bureaucracy to enforce any governmental position. A committee in Washington passing judgment on the speech policies and activities of educational institutions, judgments that may change according to who is in power and what policies they wish to promulgate, would be a profound threat to open discourse on campus. In fact, it would reproduce in Washington exactly the type of on-campus “speech committee” that would be a natural and dangerous consequence of the position taken by many advocating for the limitation of discourse on campuses.
Therefore, rather than improving the situation, further legislative or executive Federal action has the potential to reinforce and expand the difficulties regarding education and free expression that we are confronting now. It would be a grave error for the short and the long run.
QED. I sure miss Zimmer (so do the ducks!), and it’s a crying shame that he died. I’m sure he’d be saying the same thing now, except more forcefully!
*I can’t resist posting this snarky article because I thought the “Katy Perry Space Shot” was a ludicrous bit of hype and not “historic,” as the news described it. The piece is called “Lauren Sánchez’s Cosmic Bachelorette Party.” (Article is archived here.)
If you don’t know what a bachelorette party is like, let me tell you: It’s like being vacuum sealed in a tin can with a bunch of girls you don’t know that well but with whom you have to pretend to have a life-changing experience, for the sake of the bride, who invited everyone and who has a vision.
In other words, it’s exactly what happened on this morning’s historic American spaceflight.
Just after 9:00 a.m., in West Texas, an all-female space crew lifted off and flew to the Kármán line, which is considered the beginning of outer space, thanks to Jeff Bezos’s private spacefaring company Blue Origin. Ten minutes and 21 seconds after they left the ground, and after a brief hang in zero gravity, the capsule carrying the six women landed back on Earth.
The newly minted astronauts include Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez, pop star Katy Perry, CBS journalist Gayle King, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, former rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, and film producer Kerianne Flynn. (While Perry was invited to take part in the experience gratis, according to Blue Origin at least some of the seats on the flight were paid for.) The tagline of the trip was “Taking Up Space” (their crew name was The Six Taking Up Space), and the whole thing smelled of a hen party down to the custom flight patch and matching outfits. The women all wore figure-hugging, blue bell-bottomed flight suits, custom-made by the brand Monse, and delivering on Perry’s promise that the six-lady crew would put the “ass” in astronaut.
A few days ago, Perry told the AP that she was doing this to “inspire” the next generation—but watching all the coverage (I couldn’t wait for this trip), it seems like this flight was more like the most publicized, and most expensive, bachelorette party ever rather than a generational watershed.’
It sounds like a big hype-fest as well as a bachelorette party, with a lot of self-promotion:
When the group got up to space and started floating—everyone’s perfectly coiffed hair flying everywhere—the group huddled to chant “take up space” and then, like when you pregame too hard before hitting a bar, they all split up to do their own thing. Katy Perry held a daisy (her daughter is named Daisy) up for the camera and teared up. She also revealed the setlist for her upcoming Lifetimes tour on a cardboard butterfly before letting it float away. Elsewhere in the pod, Lauren Sánchez held up a plushie of “Flynn”—the dyslexic fly character from her children’s book The Fly Who Flew to Space—and, like a drunk person, kissed it and said, “Proud of you, Flynn.”
A video:
Katy Perry used a misplaced apostrophe in her obligatory Instagram post below, which shows the “crew” in their designer space suits. The entire mission from launch to touchdown took eleven minutes.
Weiss’s piece is good, but I’d like to see what Nellie writes about this on Friday.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is enigmatic, but Malgorzata explains: “So many humans go around with broken moral compasses. Why should ladybirds be spared from this epidemic?”
A: What do you see there?Hili: A ladybird with a broken moral compass.
Ja: Co tam widzisz?Hili: Biedronkę z uszkodzoną busolą moralną.
*******************
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:
From Things with Faces, happy telescopes:
From Now That’s Wild:
Masih is still quiet, so I’ll have to give a tweet from someone equally demonized:
Man continues to insist that women must redefine their own sex class to include his fellow men, and sincerely believes this makes him a progressive hero. pic.twitter.com/5dd7eypIB1
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 13, 2025
A picture from Divy:
From Malcolm, who says, “Too big to handle.” I found a response tweet, too.
Rat: Let me go!
Cat: No way, you’re my pet now.
Rat: That’s not good for either of our reputations. Bye— Avroneel Biswas (Your Nemesis) (@Avroneelbiswas) April 7, 2025
Two from my feed. First, a happy ending:
What’s going on here? pic.twitter.com/rX9QFqTwJH
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) April 14, 2025
Another happy ending. It reminds me of a book I just finished: Cold Crematorium, one of the best (and most distressing) books about the Holocaust I’ve ever read.
Holocaust survivor Susan Pollack OBE still vividly remembers her moment of liberation, when 80 years ago at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, a British soldier found her and picked her up. pic.twitter.com/257PtJLDO3
— H.E.T. (@HolocaustUK) April 14, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted.
A French Jewish girl gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz–on her 12th birthday.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-16T10:24:24.793Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb: First, space tuna!
NGC 1514 is a nebula, the gas and dust ejected from a dying star. But hoo boy, is it *weird*. When you observe it with JWST, it looks like, well…… a transparent tuna fish can with bright glowing rims. Why?Good question. We don't know.badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/incredible…🔭🧪
— Phil Plait (@philplait.bsky.social) 2025-04-15T16:41:38.122Z
If any post is viral, this one is. Matthew’s take is “Insert metaphor here.”:
WATCH: Elephants at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park react to Monday's 5.2 magnitude earthquake that shook San Diego County. The elephants formed an "alert circle" meant to protect the young and the entire herd from any threats, according to the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
— ABC 10News (@abc10news.bsky.social) 2025-04-14T22:46:06.713Z
ICYMI – and especially for cult religion geeks :
Katy “Asstronaut” Perry – interviewed immediately after landing – cited the New Age cult religious Hoffman Process – developed by Bob Hoffman – as part of her “whole” impression of the Asstronaut experience.
Bonus : “whole” refers of course to the standard mystical “holistic” gnosis which Katy Perry perceives and everyone else needs Katy Perry to tell them what it is. Bob Hoffman’s theory is also, big surprise, interested in the “whole self”, which he knows and we don’t.
I leave it to readers to find but note to exercise discernment of Bob Hoffman from other Hoffmans.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Hoffman_Quadrinity_Process
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. -Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (16 Apr 1844-1924)
One of my favorite quotes!
Best quote ever.
In news from the UK, the Supreme Court has just pronounced on the legal definition of “woman” (as applicable to the 2010 Equality Act etc), ruling unanimously that “woman” means biological woman (not including self-IDing males) and that “sex” means biological sex (not gender).
Cue much crying and gnashing of teeth from the misogynist bigots over at Pharyngula and Hemant’s substack!
Excellent news, thanks for the heads up. That it had to go this far to state the obvious is mind-boggling.
Post coming up very soon on this. Half an hour.
Well, great news.
West Coast here — glad to see others are onto this earlier. I’m on an email list from Sex Matters (UK) and was happy to see the news & looking forward to further commentary.
Unanimous! May we do the same thing here!
I too look forward to Nellie’s take on the girls go fly, but this (little sister Suzy’s I think) was a good’un. While I think that these flights are dangerous and would not seek its thrill myself (I am am pretty much a chicken as I also will not even get in a helicopter unless I know it to be well-maintained such as by NASA or US Army), these commercial stunts are what lead to a democratization of space flight. They did fly at Mach 3 on the way to zero-g…now that’s exciting to me! Of course there is a BIG difference between this ballistic flight and one to orbit, but as one of the girls pointed out, this was what Alan Shepard did on America’s first Project Mercury human-crewed spaceflight …. She was not quite correct in that Shepard reached a 100-mile altitude versus their just over 60 miles which gave rise to the argument over whether 100 miles or 100km (the 60+ mile Karman line) qualifies one for astronaut wings. But, regardless, these girls did a brave (whether they knew it or not) or stupid thing that makes such travel seem more approachable by regular folks. I was a bit relieved to know that New Shepherd does have an escape rocket system for the capsule in the event of booster anomaly, but that is a rough ride and still relies on landing parachutes deploying correctly. Put the ass in astronaut – cute!
I know that people are laughing at the space flight the other day, and it’s easy to think of it as trivial. Well, it may be trivial in the grand scheme of things, but it was a major event for the participants. I like it!*
*Fortunately, the astronauts took off and landed safely.
The right stuff used to be a 32 year old white male test pilot; then it became any test pilot or someone with an advanced STEM degree; now girls at a bachelorette party….”the right stuff inflation over 60 years”
Btw don pettit is scheduled to fly back to earth from the ISS in a soyuz spacecraft this weekend on his 70th birthday!
I too find it very cool that space flight is being democratized. But by Bastet, I wish they’d chosen a more serious bunch of women for this–a group less interested in their brands and makeup and designer suits and more interested in the technology and the sheer existential thrill of reaching space and seeing Earth from that perspective!
Really enjoyed Harry singing. Probably his most famous song, but he had a beautiful voice and a rummage trough the archive will be my evening work.
I always thought it was “highly deadly, black tarantula” but genius.com agrees with “hide the deadly black tarantula.” But why do you want to hide it?
My mom loved Belafonte, and so I remember songs of his such as “Man Smart, Woman Smarter” and “I Do Adore Her” fondly. On his compilation of American music, Tom Waits chose Belafonte’s “Sylvie,” a stirring song showing both Belafonte’s chops and his commitment to human rights.
Have fun revisiting his songs!
I think the octopus had a notion that it could make a meal out of the shark (maybe a nurse shark?), but then realized this was not going to be a safe bet.
The Holocaust rescue narrative followed by the birthday tribute to Micheline Caen brought tears to my eyes and the elephants made me smile. (Tough to be in a zoo, but safe from poachers — oh, what a world.)
“I was imagining, say, pro-family tax policy jointed to abundance-oriented deregulation”
So that’s why Elon Musk is receiving such a huge ta cut. Not because he is a billionaire, but because he has so many children.
None of the women astronauts were trans women? Oh, the horrors.
Israel was on such a roll after the exploding cell phones (that still sort of give me the creeps), taking out Nasrallah and Sinwar… I really thought — and hoped — they would go after Iran’s nukes. Whether or not they needed US assistance to do it I’m not sure. I also don’t know if the Biden Administration held them back. I agree with our host, though, “Witkoff seems…just about as oblivious as Blinken…”
They had a shot at it, Debi.
After Iran sent 300 separate missiles and drones to destroy or terrify Israel, the Israeli response managed to bomb most of Iran’s early warning radar systems (made in Russia) AND..more importantly, their only factory producing the kinds of explosives used inside nukes to set them off. A pretty big win.
Israel needs better bombers and better airborne refueling planes to do a proper number on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program facilities. Trump would provide these.
The pager operation was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen. As well as the human and mental damage it sewed deep mistrust throughout the whole Hezb system. Also sewed mistrust of the Iranians who helped Hezb get the pagers.
D.A.
NYC
Oh, that’s right, it was pagers. I forgot. And you are right about it messing with Hezbollah. My ex has a sister in Beirut (NOT connected to Hezbollah in any way, though she was certainly negatively affected by the wrath their bs drew from Israel) and EVERYBODY was freaked out by that. At any rate, I do hope Trump helps Israel finish the job in Iran.
Re the iDJiT being “too surrounded by flatterers”, I initially misread that as flatearthers. Oops not oops.
Re Nemesis (the goddess), Wikipedia tells us:
Prophetic?
“It’s not enough to pursue deportations; we need to deport people to a prison in El Salvador without convicting them of any crime.”
This argument would have more force if the administration had not already stated that the deportation of Abrego-Garcia to El Salvador was an administrative error. As for the deportation of MS-13 and Tren de Aragua. So America has a few less gangsters. It is worth noting that the people complaining the loudest, don’t live in gang controlled neighborhoods.