Month: April 2025

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

April 29, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, April 29, 2025, so tomorrow is the last day of the month. It’s National Zipper Day.  Here’s a good short explanation of how zippers work, and I swear, I didn’t know until I saw this! Modern zippers were patented in the U.S. by Whitcomb L. Judson, a Chicago inventor, in 1892.

It’s also National Shrimp Scampi Day and National Rugelach Day, celebrating one of the few contributions of Jewish culture to world food cuisine. Here are rugelach cut open to show the filling of these crescent-shaped pastries:

Photo courtesy of Stu Spivack, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 29 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Goose Won.  

— Andy Craig (@andycraig.bsky.social) 2025-04-29T03:29:06.050Z

Mark Carney’s Liberal party won the Canadian elections, a consequential result that barely gets space in the NYT.

Prime Minister Mark Carney led his Liberal Party to a narrow victory in Canada’s pivotal election on Monday, securing a fourth term in power for the party and a renewed mandate to lead the fight against President Trump over trade and the nation’s sovereignty.

Mr. Carney, a former central banker who was running for office for the first time, struck a combative tone toward the United States during his acceptance speech in the early hours of Tuesday at a Liberal Party event in Ottawa.

It was unclear whether the Liberals would win a majority of seats in the next House of Commons, which would allow Mr. Carney to govern relatively unimpeded, or if his government would need to rely on smaller parties to support his legislative agenda.

Mr. Carney has not met Mr. Trump in person since becoming Liberal Party leader and prime minister last month. But he made Mr. Trump’s menacing comments about making Canada the 51st state and the tariffs he has imposed on Canadian goods the center of his campaign.

The two men held what was described as a professional call before the election, though Mr. Carney said during the campaign that Mr. Trump had brought up the 51st state threat during that conversation.

Mr. Carney has said that he will maintain Canada’s retaliatory tariffs against the United States. But he has cautioned that expanding them would harm Canadians more than they would pressure Americans.

. . . . . Mr. Carney’s victory was an extraordinary political comeback for the Liberals. Just a few months ago, they trailed the opposition Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre by nearly 30 percentage points according to opinion polls, and it was widely expected that the Liberals faced a near-death experience.

But that was before Mr. Trump began talking about annexing Canada and imposing potentially crippling tariffs on the country.

It was also before Justin Trudeau, who many voters had soured on after nearly a decade in office, stepped down as prime minister.

Early in the campaign, polls started to suggest that the Conservatives’ sizable lead had evaporated and that the Liberals under Mr. Carney might be headed for a decisive win.

The Conservatives were leading by over points a few months ago, but fear of Trump, and greater confidence that Carney would deal with the American President better than would Poilievre.  We are losing our trasitional friendship and alliance with Canada, and it’s Trump’s fault. And it’s sad.

Here are the election results from the NYT:

And a tweet sent in by Matthew Cobb:

It's really hard to overstate how hugely favored conservatives were up until two months ago.Here's the graph of Canadian polling between March 2023 and March 2025. (Reminder: blue is conservative.)Those are months and months of 20+ point leads for Tories.

— Taniel (@taniel.bsky.social) 2025-04-29T02:21:21.222Z

*Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker seems to be stepping onto the road of being the next Democratic candidate for President.  Yesterday he spoke in New Hampshire, and certainly made pre-candidate noises with an excoriating attack on Trump:

In a fiery address to New Hampshire Democrats on Sunday night, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker condemned what he described as President Donald Trump’s “authoritarian power grabs” while also blasting the “do-nothing” Democrats in his party — stating it is “time to fight everywhere, all at once.”

The billionaire Democratic governor repeatedly brought the crowd to its feet with acidic attacks on the morals and ethics of the president, adviser and top donor Elon Musk, as well as members of the president’s Cabinet. He slammed their efforts to dismantle government programs that the most vulnerable Americans rely on and said the Democratic Party must “abandon the culture of incrementalism that has led us to swallow their cruelty.” It is time for his party, he said, to “knock the rust off poll-tested language” that has obscured “our better instincts.”

Pritzker was most searing in his condemnation of what he cast as the Trump administration’s infringement on the rights enshrined in the Constitution, stating that it should be easy for Democrats to say, “It’s wrong to snatch a person off the street and ship them to a foreign gulag with no chance to defend themselves in a court of law.”

“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now,” Pritzker said to a standing ovation accompanied by whistles and cheers from the audience. “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They must understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box and then punish them at the ballot box.”

. . . .Turning to his own party, Pritzker argued that Democrats have spent too long listening to voices who “would tell you that the house is not on fire, even as they feel the flames licking their face,” and called out politicians “whose simpering timidity served as a kindle for the arsonists.”

. . . In a 2028 field that is likely to be dominated by governors, Pritzker has positioned himself as one of the most forceful and consistent critics of Trump’s actions while pointing to his record in Illinois as a template for improving the lives of working-class voters.

Pritzker has been a good governor, and attacked Trump early on. What is lacking in the speech above is a program for Democrats; all he says is that Democrats haven’t been sufficiently aware of Trump’s dangers. But that alone won’t win elections.  It’s too early for Pritzker to start touting his accomplishments in our state, which are substantial and admirable, but up to now I thought he wasn’t interested in the Presidency.  Now I’m not so sure, and I, for one, would be in favor of his candidacy.

*Reader Debra sent me the tweet below, and I was puzzled. It must have been a fake ad, right?

But no! A Spectator piece by Jonathan Sacardoti, “Nike’s ‘never again’ slogan is a disgrace,” reveals that, while it may be unwitting and hamhanded, it’s an “insulting and profoundly distasteful” reference to the Holocaust. (The “never again” slogan is  well known referece to the mass slaughter of Jews during WWII.)

Fifty-six thousand runners completing the London Marathon yesterday may well have gasped the words ‘never again’ as they staggered across the finish line. I have never been a runner, but I imagine that even those who willingly endure the 26.2-mile ordeal must feel not only a profound sense of accomplishment but also, at the very least, a fleeting pang of regret.

Yet when I saw the Nike advertisement – hoisted from a crane like an executed Iranian dissident, swaying precariously in front of that modern-day emblem of our capital city, the London Eye – bearing the slogan “Never again. Until next year,” my mind immediately traveled to darker places. What, I wondered, has a running race to do with the Holocaust?

Only last week, my essay commemorating Yom HaShoah, the Jewish Holocaust memorial day, was published in these pages. It focused entirely on the solemn imperative embodied in the promise of “never again,” especially at a moment when Jews worldwide feel increasingly imperilled by a new, unashamed surge of hatred and discrimination. I argued that “never again” cannot simply be reduced to a catchphrase; that remembering the Holocaust is not itself sufficient to fulfil the pledge; that to honour it fully, we must recognise and confront contemporary manifestations of Jew-hatred.

. . .For a moment, I questioned myself. Perhaps I was overreacting. After all, can any single historical catastrophe – or any one persecuted group – claim exclusive ownership over a phrase? Perhaps Nike’s marketing team didn’t even think of the Shoah. Perhaps the creatives who conceived the idea – seated high in their glass towers – simply did not think along those lines. Never. Again. Just two simple words. What else might a runner exclaim upon crossing the finish line to collect a medal and a time slip? Perhaps their managers, toasting another advertising triumph over boozy lunches, were equally oblivious. Perhaps the technician who programmed the screen, and the team that hoisted it skyward for all to see, were simply unaware of the phrase’s gravest historical weight.

But then I remembered how upset it made people when anyone veered too close to ‘black lives matter’ or other popular slogans of our day. My anger only deepened. How could they? How could a giant like Nike – and all the many people involved between conception and execution – fail to recognise the most solemn and famous usage of those words? Or worse, perhaps they did, and decided it did not matter.

It is difficult to extend them the benefit of the doubt. It would have taken just one set of discerning eyes, one solitary voice, one ‘sensitivity reader’ to raise a gentle objection. Did not a single Jew suggest that it might be inappropriate? Did not a single non-Jew, with a grasp of history or an awareness of today’s climate, flag it? If not, why not? Was this ignorance, carelessness, or a chilling indifference?

Well, I will extend them the benefit of the doubt, simply because I cannot believe that they would appropriate a Holocaust trope to advertise a marathon.  Perhaps Nike will issue a statement.

*Somewhat frustrated in his attempt to deport people, Trump is, according to the WSJ, preparing a list of “sanctuary cities and states” that don’t cooperate with the Administration in deportations. This is done, of course, so he can promulgate more deportations as well as punish those who try to protect undocumented immigrants.

President Trump plans to sign an executive order on Monday escalating his battle against Democratic-led states and cities that don’t fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities, a key barrier to the mass deportations he has promised.

The order, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, directs the attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security to identify within a month cities and states that aren’t complying with federal immigration laws, designating them as “sanctuary jurisdictions.”

The cities and states on the list could face a cutoff in federal funding and possible criminal and civil suits if they refuse to change their laws or practices.

“It’s quite simple: obey the law, respect the law, and don’t obstruct federal immigration officials and law-enforcement officials when they are simply trying to remove public safety threats from our nation’s communities,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday at a briefing alongside Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar.

Trump will also direct the Justice Department to pursue civil-rights cases against cities or states that, in its view, favor immigrants in the country illegally over U.S. citizens. The order cites policies that treat immigrants more leniently in criminal cases or sentencing and state laws that provide immigrants in-state tuition rates at public universities but deny the lower rates to out-of-state U.S. citizens. At least 25 states have adopted such laws in some fashion.

Sanctuary cities and states have become a major obstacle for Trump as he has sought to drive up deportations in line with his campaign pledge. Most immigrants in the country tend to cluster in large cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, and the administration has a tougher time arresting those here illegally if local police refuse to assist.

I wonder if the American people, seeing the kind of deportations that have occurred, will change their stand from the opposition to illegal immigration (a stand that helped Trump win) to an anti-Trumpism reflecting disgust with how he’s carrying out his campaign promises.  There’s no doubt that the man is on a tear, and doesn’t have much to lose (save what reputation he has).  I do agree with many who thought the “border problem” needed fixing during the Biden administration, but I can’t imagine a worse way of doing that fix.

*Here is a passionate 10-minute speech by Natasha Hausdorff on overcoming the international hatred of Israel.  And it looks as if it was extemperaneous, since she’s not using or looking at notes.  I always feel heartened that a person that I am on the side of a person this learned, smart, and eloquent.

The YouTube notes explain a bit: “Natasha Hausdorff, UKLFI Charitable Trust Legal Director, addresses the inaugural International Policy Summit of the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Jerusalem on Sunday, 27 April 2025, on ‘The UN and International Courts: Law, Legitimacy and Bias’.” (There’s a 12-minute interview with her at the same conference here.)

And, click on the screenshot below to see Fareed Zakaria’s take at CNN on how Trump’s assault on science, including discouraging immigrants who want to do science, is damaging America. Reader Pat, who sent me the link, describes it:

For his opening essay (take) on Sunday on CNN, Fareed Zakaria discussed the rise of science in the USA after WWII, the importance of immigrants to those efforts, the current dismantling by the Trump administration and the fact that those actions may have more long-term negative consequences for the country than things garnering all the attention, like tariffs.  The video is 5:41 long.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pensive. Malgorzata explains, “Just that some decisions have unintended consequences and it would be better without them. They were not neededas they made the problem worse instead of better.”

Hili: We have to make a few important decisions.
A; Sometimes important decisions lead to unnecessary changes.
In Polish:
Hili: Musimy podjąć kilka ważnych decyzji.
Ja: Czasami ważne decyzje prowadzą do zbędnych zmian.
And a picture of Baby Kulka.

*******************

From Duck Lovers:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:  Look at that bill!

From Now That’s Wild. This cannot be real!

Masih is still quiet, but here’s JKR responding to a video interview, but actually she pens a long tweet in defense of classical feminism:

From Enrico: identity-based publication in the Harvard Law Review:

A funny one from reader Simon.

— George Conway 👊🇺🇸🔥 (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2025-04-25T18:30:19.432Z

From Malcolm. It’s very sad if true, but I always wonder if cats really express sorrow this way:

From my feed. It’s 100 seconds long but listen to the whole thing—it’s amazing!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that i reposted:

A Dutch Jewish girl, gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was ten.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-29T11:53:37.082Z

Matthew’s getting some feline help with finishing up his biography of Francis Crick:

Pepper helping me with the last stages of proof-reading.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-04-27T11:40:01.876Z

A thread of store names with puns. I like this one:

This is my favourite, the bar is very close to where I live.

— PeteZab (@petezab.bsky.social) 2025-04-27T09:08:59.995Z

Three ecology and evolution societies finally remove their “sex definition statement” from the web

April 28, 2025 • 11:30 am

On February 6 of this year, the Presidents of three evolution/ecology societies (the Society for the Study of Evolution [SSE], the American Society of Naturalists [ASN], and the Society of Systematic Biologists [SSB]) put a letter on the SSE website. It was a reaction to a Trump executive order about the definition of sex, and the “tri-societies” statement asserted that sex is not binary (in ANY species), but was a multidimensional multifactoral “biological construct”.  I archived the letter here because I had a feeling that it would cause trouble.

It did. But first, read it below.  It was written, of course, as a kind of virtue-flaunting exercise to placate those who don’t feel that they are either “male” or “female” (“nonbinary” people). But in so doing, the three Societies promulgated a gross distortion of what many (I won’t say “most”, since I don’t know) biologists conceive of as the definition of sex, which is based on gamete size and is close to being binary as it comes. I’ve bolded bits of it below, bits that conflate sex and gender, throw in “lived experience” to add to the confusion, and claim that the nonbimodality of sex “is a hallmark of biological species,” implying that in all animals and plants the definition of sex is far more than bimodal.

Note that the members of these three societies were not polled about the so-called “scientific consensus” they assert; this is a diktat from the Presidents. Voilà: the original “tri-societies” letter:

President Donald J Trump
Washington, DC
Members of the US Congress Washington, DC
February 5, 2025

RE: Scientific Understanding of Sex and GenderDear President Trump and Members of the US Congress,

As scientists, we write to express our concerns about the Executive Order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government”. That Order states first, that “there are two sexes…[which] are not changeable”. The Order goes on to state that sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce. These statements are contradicted by extensive scientific evidence.

Scientific consensus defines sex in humans as a biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex. Accordingly, sex (and gendered expression) is not a binary trait. While some aspects of sex are bimodal, variation along the continuum of male to female is well documented in humans through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Beyond the incorrect claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genetic composition at conception does not define one’s identity. Rather, sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.

We note that you state that “Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale and trust in the government itself”. We agree with this statement. However, the claim that the definition of sex and the exclusion of gender identity is based on the best available science is false. Our three scientific societies represent over 3500 scientists, many of whom are experts on the variability that is found in sexual expression throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. More information explaining why sex lies along a continuum can be found here. If you wish to speak to one of our scientists, please contact any of the societies listed below.

Carol Boggs, PhD
President
Society for the Study of Evolution
president@evolutionsociety.org

Daniel Bolnick, PhD
President
American Society of Naturalists

Jessica Ware, PhD
President
Society of Systematic Biologists
president@systematicbiologists.org

You can see all my posts about the resulting kerfuffle here.  In short, intiially about twenty of us wrote to the three societies objecting to the letter’s scientific contentions. Eventually 125 people connected with evolution appended their names to the letter and were willing to make their objections public (see here). Richard Dawkins also got into the fray, and both he and I discovered independently that the three Presidents who signed the letter actually act as if sex were binary in their own published research. Further, two former Presidents of the SSE also publicly disagreed with the characterization of biological sex given above.

Finally, our letter signed by 125 people asked for an answer, and although we got one from the societies, we were also told we couldn’t make it public. So be it, but I did characterize the answer here, and the societies largely conceded our points. As I wrote:

. . . . this time we asked for a response and got one, signed by all three Presidents.  I can’t reprint it because we didn’t ask for permission [we later did but were refused], but some of its gist is in the response below from Luana [Maroja]. I will say that they admitted that they think they’re in close agreement with us (I am not so sure!), that their letter wasn’t properly phrased, that some of our differences come from different semantic interpretations of words like “binary” and “continuum”(nope), and that they didn’t send the letter anyway because a federal judge changed the Executive Order on sex (this didn’t affect our criticisms). At any rate, the tri-societies letter is on hold because the organizations are now concerned with more serious threats from the Trump Administration, like science funding.

It’s still on hold, but now they’ve taken it down (see below).

I closed my post this way:

I end by saying that scientific societies need not be “institutionally neutral” when they are dealing with issues that affect the mission of the societies, as the definition of sex surely does. But what’s not okay is for the societies to distort “scientific consensus” in the interest of ideology. I have no idea if the Presidents of these societies really believe what they said (as Dawkins has pointed out, all three Presidents use a binary notion of sex in their own biological work), but something is deeply wrong when you use one notion of sex in your own science and yet deny that notion when you’re telling politicians what scientists “really believe.”

It’s just wrong when three evolution societies give the public a distorted view of how biologists define “sex”, and even more wrong when they do so because they are motivated not by the search for truth but to cater to a certain ideology.

As this sad drama draws to an end, I was just informed that, after several months, the three societies have taken down their misguided diktat.  Go to this SSE website and you’ll see this note:

As they say, “a revised version is in progress and will be posted shortly.”  I look forward to the revised definition of sex!  I also note that, as far as I know, no members of the three Societies have been informed that the letter was removed (they were told that the letter was posted, but only several weeks after it went up).

I’m posting this simply as a public service, to inform members of the Societies, and others following kerfuffles about the definition of sex, that the letter was finally taken down and will be replaced. The silver lining is that although I found the original letter embarrassing to science–and just another reason for people not to trust science–the Societies are rethinking what they say about sex.  However, I doubt that the replacement letter is going to emphasize the bimodality of sex as it is defined by many biologists.  After all, the Societies have to be ideologically correct, don’t they?

h/t: Luana Maroja (who did nearly all the heavy lifting of writing responses, gathering signatures, and so on.

New film series on evolutionary biology

April 28, 2025 • 10:15 am

There’s a new series of short films about evolution, all of them part of a larger project, “The closer you look, the more you see.”  I’m boosting it because it not only involves work at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), where I got my Ph.D., but also stars my friend Andrew Berry, who’s a great presenter. And, of course, it’ll teach you about the evidence for evolution.

Here are the details from the site:

Evolution is the most powerful, revealing, transformative, inevitable truth that humans have ever discovered. Andrew Berry, Lecturer in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, takes you behind the scenes to explore groundbreaking research in evolutionary biology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, a renowned research center not open to the public. Harvard scientists reveal the inner workings of the evolutionary process and ponder challenging questions about who we are and where we came from. The film demonstrates the rewards of patient, rigorous, detailed observation. The closer you look, the more you see. 

The film’s twelve captivating episodes give a clear understanding of how evolution works and why we know it’s true. 

It’s free, and the episodes (on Vimeo) range from 3 to 17 minutes long, most running around 6 minutes. (Click on the screenshot below to go to them.) That means you can pick one or two per day, and get an education in evolution in a week or less. There are some very cool things shown, including butterflies collected by Vladimir Nabokov, who worked at the MCZ.

But start at the beginning with episode 1, “Taxonomy”.

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 28, 2025 • 8:15 am

I need photos! If you have some good ones, please send them along. Thanks!

Today we have a second batch of birds from British Columbia photographed by Paul Handford (part 1 is here). Paul’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Once again, most of these images are from our yard, in the hills south and east of Kamloops town, with a few from nearby nature parks.I could not resist sending three images of the glorious Mountain Bluebird.

Western meadowlark, Sturnella neglecta

Red-winged blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus:

Mountain chickadee, Poecile gambelli:

Yellow-rumped warbler, Setophaga coronate:

Pygmy nuthatch, Sitta pygmaea:

Red-breasted nuthatch, Sitta canadensis:

White-breasted nuthatch, Sitta carolinensis:

Northern house wren, Troglodytes aedon:

 Townsend’s solitaire, Myadestes townsendi:

Varied thrush, Ixoreus naevius:

Say’s phoebe, Sayornis saya:

Western kingbird, Tyrannus verticalis:

Mountain bluebird, Sialia currucoides:

Ditto:

Ditto:

Monday: Hili dialogue

April 28, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the last Monday in April: Monday, the 27th of April, 2025, and National Blueberry Pie Day. As always, I recommend that to get the best blueberry pie in the world, you must visit Helen’s Restaurant in Machias, Main, which uses a mixture of fresh and cooked lowbush blueberries–not the big, bland commercial kind but berries picked by hand, and all topped with a thick layer of whipped cream. Here’s a piece along with a glass of blueberry sangria (skip the sangria):

Photo by David Barker

It’s also Great Poetry Reading Day.  Here’s the Society of Classical Poets’ list of the Ten Greatest Poems Ever Written (note that they all rhyme, confirming my theory) and I’ll put below #1, which surely is at the top of the list of anyone with literary chops. You will recognize the author.  Read it to your boo:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 28 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT says that is now understands what caused January’s collision between an Army helicopter and a local flight that killed 67 people.  It wasn’t one thing, but several.

As they flew south along the Potomac River on the gusty night of Jan. 29, the crew aboard an Army Black Hawk helicopter attempted to execute a common aviation practice. It would play a role in ending their lives.

Shortly after the Black Hawk passed over Washington’s most famous array of cherry trees, an air traffic controller at nearby Ronald Reagan National Airport alerted the crew to a regional passenger jet in its vicinity. The crew acknowledged seeing traffic nearby.

One of the pilots then asked for permission to employ a practice called “visual separation.” That allows a pilot to take control of navigating around other aircraft, rather than relying on the controller for guidance.

“Visual separation approved,” the controller replied.

The request to fly under those rules is granted routinely in airspace overseen by controllers. Most of the time, visual separation is executed without note. But when mishandled, it can also create a deadly risk — one that aviation experts have warned about for years.

On Jan. 29, the Black Hawk crew did not execute visual separation effectively. The pilots either did not detect the specific passenger jet the controller had flagged, or could not pivot to a safer position. Instead, one second before 8:48 p.m., the helicopter slammed into American Airlines Flight 5342, which was carrying 64 people to Washington from Wichita, Kan., killing everyone aboard both aircraft in a fiery explosion that lit the night sky over the river.

One error did not cause the worst domestic crash in the United States in nearly a quarter-century. Modern aviation is designed to have redundancies and safeguards that prevent a misstep, or even several missteps, from being catastrophic. On Jan. 29, that system collapsed.

“Multiple layers of safety precautions failed that night,” said Katie Thomson, the Federal Aviation Administration’s deputy administrator under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Some of the other screw-ups:

The helicopter crew appeared to have made more than one mistake. Not only was the Black Hawk flying too high, but in the final seconds before the crash, its pilot failed to heed a directive from her co-pilot, an Army flight instructor, to change course.

Radio communications, the tried-and-true means of interaction between controllers and pilots, also broke down. Some of the controller’s instructions were “stepped on” — meaning that they cut out when the helicopter crew pressed a microphone to speak — and important information likely went unheard.

Technology on the Black Hawk that would have allowed controllers to better track the helicopter was turned off.

It’s amazing that the NYT was able to figure all this out (given that it’s true) before the FAA did. But of course the FAA is doing a much more detailed investigation. You can bet that a lot of changes will be made, and some have already, in the operation of military helicopters around Reagan.

*In a NYT op-ed, writer David French argues that “Harvard may not be the hero we want, but it’s the hero we need.”  (The article’s archived here.) He starts this way: “Like many of its conservative alumni, I have a complicated relationship with Harvard.”  I’ll give an excerpt:

For the second year in a row, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression (where I served as president a number of years ago) has ranked Harvard last in the country in its annual free speech rankings. The environment, FIRE determined, was “abysmal.”

In 2023 the Supreme Court held that Harvard had engaged in unlawful racial discrimination in admissions. There was overwhelming evidence that Harvard discriminated against Asian American applicants.

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In addition, Harvard also responded horribly to the unrest that swept campus after the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. Last summer, a federal judge appointed by Bill Clinton described the university’s response to antisemitic incidents said to have taken place on campus as “at best, indecisive, vacillating and at times internally contradictory.”

You might think that this record of censorship and discrimination would mean that I’d stand up and cheer at the Trump administration’s decision to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from Harvard unless it made radical changes in policy and governance.

But I’m not pleased at all. The Trump administration has gone too far.

. . .At the core of the complaint [Harvard’s lawsuit] is a simple idea: No matter what you think of Harvard’s conduct, it still enjoys constitutional rights, and the Constitution does not permit the president to unilaterally wield the power of the purse to punish his political enemies.

To understand why even critics of Harvard should support Harvard’s lawsuit, perhaps an analogy is helpful. Imagine that there is strong evidence that a person committed a crime. Perhaps he shoplifted from a liquor store.

Months later, you see a police officer beating that person in the street. When you ask why, the officer responds that the man stole from a store and is getting exactly what he deserves.

Even a nonlawyer could immediately identify two problems. First, why are you punishing this person without a trial? Second, the punishment for shoplifting is a fine or short jail time; it’s not a public beating. Demanding that the officer stop his unilateral punishment doesn’t excuse the man’s theft, but it does restore respect for the law.

If Harvard failed to protect Jewish students from harassment, for example, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act would permit the federal government to take action against Harvard (and in fact, the Biden administration opened a civil rights investigation of Harvard in late 2023), but as Harvard’s complaint notes, Congress “set forth detailed procedures that the government ‘shall’ satisfy before revoking federal funding based on discrimination concerns.”

The Trump administration flouted all those procedures.

In addition, as much as any person might reasonably object to the overwhelming leftward tilt of Harvard’s faculty and student body, Harvard’s ideological composition is a choice for Harvard to make, not the federal government.

. . . . While we can applaud Harvard’s decision to confront Trump, the university still needs reform, given its recent history. Harvard’s stand might not make it the constitutional hero that we want, but it is the constitutional hero we need.

I think French is right.  I hope Harvard wins the lawsuit against the government for precisely the reasons he gives, but I also hope Harvard does enact the needed reforms.

*A BBC reporter has been outed as a pretty horrific antisemite from his social-media posts.  Did the BBC get rid of him? Guess!

BBC Arabic journalist Samer Elzaenen has called for Jews to be burned “as Hitler did,” The Telegraph quoted him as saying in a Saturday report.

Elzaenen, 33, who has been reporting from Gaza, has been posting a series of statements on social media that condemns Jewish people, and has also called for violence against them, the Telegraph added, noting that his social media activity in the past 10 years has endorsed and celebrated more than 30 attacks on Israeli Jewish civilians.

He has appeared on the Arabic-language branch of the UK public broadcaster more than a dozen times since Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023. He called the Hamas terrorists who entered Israel that day “resistance fighters.”

Elzaenen had also made similar statements in May 2011 on Facebook, the report added, quoting him saying: “My message to the Zionist Jews: We are going to take our land back, we love death for Allah’s sake the same way you love life. We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.” 11 years later, he wrote on the social media source, “When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything.”

The Telegraph noted a post the BBC contributor made over two years ago on a car ramming in Jerusalem that claimed the lives of two boys aged eight and six and a 20-year-old man, saying that the victims “will soon go to hell.”

Elzaenen is working as a freelance reporter for the BBC, or so I see, but a reporter sending news from Gaza shouldn’t be hired (actually, should be fired) if he’s compromised his integrity that way. But hey–it’s the BBC, Jake!

*The WSJ reports that, of all people, Republican lawmakers may scupper Trump’s big tax bill, which is coming up for passage.

Republicans pushed President Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax and spending package closer to the finish line with votes earlier this month approving a budget framework. But as lawmakers return to work this week, hard intraparty fights remain in writing and ironing out the multitrillion-dollar package.

Most GOP lawmakers are on board with the broader plan to extend expiring pieces of the 2017 tax law, introduce new tax breaks such as “no tax on tips,” boost border spending and cut other government outlays. Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) wants to get the bill finished by Memorial Day. Still, fights are smoldering over the details, and several small groups of lawmakers have painted certain issues as nonnegotiable.

Republicans are using a process called budget reconciliation that requires a simple majority in both chambers, which allows them to pass the package without Democratic votes. With the Senate split 53-47 and a House divided 220 to 213, any small group of Republican dissidents can block the broader GOP agenda.

These include the following groups (names are given in the article for each one):

A group of so-called budget hawks have hinged their support of the president’s reconciliation bill on the idea that the tax cuts must be paired with significant spending cuts. These Republicans are willing to allow some deficit increases because they assume that economic growth will cover some of the costs. But they’ve indicated that—even though they’ve moved the process along so far—they aren’t automatic yes votes.

. . .  One area likely to be targeted in the pursuit of steep spending cuts is Medicaid, a health insurance program that covers more than 70 million people who are low-income and is a big part of state budgets and the healthcare economy. There is a bloc of Republicans warning that deep reductions in coverage will hurt constituents and make GOP efforts to keep the House majority more difficult in 2026.

. . . A group of Republican lawmakers are vowing that their support for the Trump tax bill depends on raising the cap on state and local tax deductions, which was limited to $10,000 in 2017 as part of Trump’s tax law.

Republicans whose states and districts received billions in funding that went towards clean energy projects through the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act are also warning party leaders against clawing back this funding and limiting tax credits that provide incentives. Such a clawback could be used to help offset the cost of other tax cuts, and Trump has repeatedly vowed to repeal the law.

All it would take to block the tax package would be three Republican senators or four Republican congresspeople defecting. Threats from Trump may not work on Republicans who think that they may not be re-elected unless they stand up for what their constituents want.  I predict the budget will pass, but what do I know?

*I am pretty sure that this kind of arrest and detaining before deportation was NOT what the American people had in mind when they weighed in against an excess of illegal immigration:

The [foreign-born immigrant] wife of an active-duty Coast Guardsman was arrested earlier this week by federal immigration authorities inside the family residential section of the U.S. Naval Air Station at Key West, Florida, after she was flagged in a routine security check, officials said Saturday.

“The spouse is not a member of the Coast Guard and was detained by Homeland Security Investigations pursuant to a lawful removal order,” said Coast Guard spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Steve Roth in a statement confirming Thursday’s on-base arrest. “The Coast Guard works closely with HSI and others to enforce federal laws, including on immigration.”

According to a U.S. official, the woman’s work visa expired around 2017, and she was marked for removal from the United States a few years later. She and the Coast Guardsman were married early this year, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an enforcement incident.

The official said that when the woman and her Coast Guard husband were preparing to move into their on-base housing on Wednesday, they went to the visitor control center to get a pass so she could access the Key West installation. During the routine security screening required for base access, the woman’s name was flagged as a problem.

Base personnel contacted the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which looked into the matter, said the official. NCIS and Coast Guard security personnel got permission from the base commander to enter the installation and then went to the Coast Guardsman’s home on Thursday, the official said. They were joined by personnel from Homeland Security Investigations, a unit within Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

HSI eventually took the spouse into custody, and the official said they believe she is still being detained. Officials did not provide the name of the country she is from.

There needs to be a hearing before trying to deport someone—,always. Even if this case involves a “fake” marriage designed to keep the woman in the U.S. despite being here illegally, there still needs to be a hearing. Instead, the Navy and Homeland Security are keeping the woman in detention, probably without a lawyer.  This refusal to provide lawyers is one of the most offensive thing about these arrests.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is deeply concerned with truth.

Hili: Where is the truth?
A: I have a feeling that it’s under the apple tree but I may be wrong.
In Polish:
Hili: Gdzie jest prawda?
Ja: Mam wrażenie, że pod jabłonką, ale mogę się mylić.
And great a picture of Kulka and Szaron playing:

x

*******************

Here’s a photo I took in the freight elevator yesterday as I went down to do laundry. I think it looks like Abe Lincoln carrying a lantern.  Right?

From Duck Lovers:

From Meow. I have no cat so I’m home free:

 

Masih is still quiet and so we have JKR:

From Luana. While the correlation (0.06) may still be significant with this much data, it’s a lot lower than many of us think. Just throwing money at schools is not a soution:

From Simon, who says, “No comment needed.” Indeed! Bravo for Macron.

Macron shook one hand.

— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) 2025-04-26T13:45:10.390Z

From Malcolm: Inappropriate napping:

From my feed. I trust they extracted the toy!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I reposted:

A French Jewish girl gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz. She was just eight months old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-28T09:48:03.443Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. He gives this one the comment “!!!”  Mine is: “It’s impossible, but if it were it might have feathers.”

Well now we've found the biggest grift yet in the de-extinction sphere

— Henry Thomas 🦤🏳️‍🌈 (@zhejiang0pterus.bsky.social) 2025-04-27T18:08:05.279Z

 

A new take on an old meme:

— Brian Williams (@briw74.bsky.social) 2025-04-27T15:03:47.302Z

Words and phrases I detest

April 27, 2025 • 12:40 pm

Yep, it’s time for this feature again. (I have been lax in accumulating words and phrases). Note that I am not trying to change the English language here—only saying what irritates me, and why. Here are four examples, some of which I may have kvetched about before:

Advancement.  NO! NO! NO!  “Advances” has always been sufficient before, so why this gussying-up of a good word? I think the “-ment” suffix is intended to make the speaker sound more erudite, though perhaps people aren’t aware that “advances” is a perfectly good word.

Dudebro.  This word simply means “males I don’t like”, either referring to all males or a specified group. Either way, it is offensive and wouldn’t be tolerated if there was a similar word for women (there probably are, but I’m not going to suggest any.)

“It is what it is.”  This seems to me, on the surface, a redundancy. Things are what they are. Yes, of course! I suppose it could be construed as meaning, “These things can’t be changed,” but why not use that phrase instead of one that’s either ambiguous or redundant.  It also implies that what is cannot be changed, which stifles progress.

“That is so niche.”  This clearly means “this is too specific” in some sense. But “niche” is a noun, not an adjective.  I’m sure it’s too late to stop this one, just as it’s impossible to stop “genius” being used as an adjective instead of a noun, as in “here are ten genius hacks for your closet”.

Our Mayor dons a keffiyeh

April 27, 2025 • 11:30 am

Ever since the City of Chicago dropped the charges against 26 pro-Palestinian students and two faculty arrested on our campus for trespassing, I’ve wondered whether mayor Brandon Johnson, elected in 2023, has some sympathies for Palestine contrasted with some opprobrium for Israel.  (The city also refused to send Chicago cops to take down our encampment, so it had to be done by University police, who in the end did a great job.)

The Instagram post below was put up by CAIR Chicago (the Council for American-Islamic Relations), showing the mayor donning a keffiyeh to celebrate Arab Heritage Month (this month of April),  Now keffiyehs of various types been used by Arabs for centuries, mostly as headdresses but sometimes as shawls. However, this particular black-and-white garment is Palestinian, and, as CAIR surely knows —and Brandon Johnson should have known—is associated with Palestinian resistance, beginning with Yasser Arafat’s frequent wearing of it, including while appearing in front of the United Nations (see the history of the garment and its symbolism at this Guardian article).  As Wikipedia says:

The black and white keffiyeh’s prominence increased during the 1960s with the beginning of the Palestinian resistance movement and its adoption by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Johnson, who is not a popular mayor (see below) has been accused before of “disrespecting” Chicago’s Jewish community, though I didn’t know about that. But the actions of the City of Chicago with respect to illegal activities of Palestinian protestors, and the city’s refusal to act, combined with the photo above, makes me wonder about Johnson’s feelings about Israel. (One instance: when pro-Pals blocked Lake Shore Drive, our main artery along the Lake, the city did nothing.)

To be fair, I did find this picture of Johnson accepting a yarmulka from Jews before he was elected, but of course the article says that he was “courting the Jewish vote”.  I don’t think he put it on, though!

I don’t think I need worry much longer about a possible anti-Semite being mayor, though, for, as I said, Johnson is not at all well liked by Chicagoans of all stripes. As Wikipedia notes:

Johnson is considered to be a political progressive. His term as mayor has been marked with low approval ratings, with only 6.6% of Chicago voters expressing favorable views of him in a February 2025 poll.

As for CAIR, well, it’s been accused of touting antisemitism many times before; I’ll give just three links: here, here, and here (h/t Malgorzata). A few quotes, one from each source (in order):

. . . . key CAIR leaders often traffic in openly antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric. Some of CAIR’s leaders, such as Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, were previously involved in a now-defunct organization that openly supported Hamas and, according to the U.S. government, functioned as its “propaganda apparatus.”

and

The White House strongly condemned recent comments from the leader of a top American-Islamic group who said he was “happy to see” Gazans invading Israel on October 7.

The comments came from Council on American-Islamic Relations Director Nihad Awad at a conference two weeks ago, when – according to a video posted on X, by DC-based Middle East Media Research Institute – he said, “I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”

“We condemn these shocking, Antisemitic statements in the strongest terms,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement shared with CNN.

Bates echoed President Joe Biden in calling the October 7 attacks “abhorrent” and “unadulterated evil,” noting that October 7 “was the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust.”

and

Two years in the making, this new book is the product of extensive meticulous research into the most dangerous Islamist political group in the U.S. today—CAIR. It is dangerous because it was created as a front group for Hamas in 1993—in a secret meeting of Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas leaders, including CAIR’s current leader Nihad Awad, held in a downtown Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia in 1993, a meeting the FBI wiretapped.

Since its corporate inception in 1994, CAIR has been the number one promoter of incendiary vile antisemitic tropes and conspiracies in the U.S. by any “mainstream” Islamist group. I use the word mainstream in quotations because CAIR has successfully duped virtually the entire media establishment—many of whom have willingly collaborated—into portraying this Hamas front group as a “Muslim civil rights organization.” CAIR is soaked with antisemitism, yet we hear NOT a word about this reality from the gatekeepers.