Save for John Avise’s collection of dragonfly photos for tomorrow, we’re out of readers’ wildlife. This is sad, as the feature has been going since this site started in 2009 (I can’t believe it’s been that long!). If you have wildlife photos and don’t want the feature to disappear, please send ’em in. There will be no photos today.
Welcome to Jewish cat shabbos: CaturSaturday, May 17, 2025, and National Walnut Day. Here’s a short video about how commercial walnuts are harvested: They shake ’em off the trees!
It’s also Armed Force Day, World Whisky Day, National Mushroom Hunting Day, National Cherry Cobbler Day, National Pinot Grigio Day, and they’re running the second race of the Triple Crown today: the Preakness.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 17 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*To become an American citizen, applicants have to answer questions about America’s history and laws, which is okay (I hear that most native Americans can’t answer them). But now, in this Age of Trump, they’re thinking of turning this vetting into, yes, a reality television show. It’s not a done deal yet, but it’s tacky, and of course the pressure of being on t.v. could throw some people:
The Department of Homeland Security is considering taking part in a television program that would have immigrants go through a series of challenges to get American citizenship, officials said on Friday.
The challenges would be based on various American traditions and customs, said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the agency. She said the department was still reviewing the idea, which she spoke about several weeks ago with a producer named Rob Worsoff.
“The pitch generally was a celebration of being an American and what a privilege it is to be able to be a citizen of the United States of America,” she said. “It’s important to revive civic duty.”
She said the agency was happy to review “out-of-the-box pitches,” particularly those that celebrate “what it means to be an American.”
The project was reported earlier by The Daily Mail.
Mr. Worsoff told The Wall Street Journal that the show was not intended to be punitive.
“This isn’t ‘The Hunger Games’ for immigrants,” Mr. Worsoff said, adding, “This is not, ‘Hey, if you lose, we are shipping you out on a boat out of the country.’”
Ms. McLaughlin said the pitch had not yet reached the level of Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary. She said on social media on Thursday that the department “receives hundreds of television show pitches a year,” including for documentaries about border operations and white-collar investigations. “Each proposal undergoes a thorough vetting process prior to denial or approval,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “This pitch has not received approval or denial by staff.”
The department has worked with filmmakers in the past on programming.
In 2017, during the first Trump administration, the agency allowed documentary filmmakers extensive access to operations conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for a program called “Immigration Nation.”
I cannot imagine the American public being intensely interested in such a show. Granted, they would learn some history and law, but people would find it boring. I find it embarrassing and schlocky, and imagine answering those questions on t.v. I am betting they won’t go through with it. “I’ll take Canceled Amendments for $200.”
*Israel previously announced that it would launch a large offensive against Hamas after Trump finished his trip to the Middle East. But the IDF couldn’t wait, and a big offensive has just begun. (h/t Malgorzata)
Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip on Friday killed at least 74 people, Hamas-run authorities said, as US President Donald Trump wrapped up a Middle East visit that skipped Israel and offered little prospect for a ceasefire and hostage deal.
Vowing to take care of Gaza, Trump said “a lot of people are starving in Gaza… There’s a lot of bad things going on.”
Strikes overnight into Friday morning hit the outskirts of Deir al-Balah and the city of Khan Younis, and sent people fleeing from the Jabaliya refugee camp and the town of Beit Lahiya.
The death toll figure, which is not independently verified, does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas, including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
The Saudi Al-Hadath news channel reported that Israeli tanks advanced in the area of Beit Lahiya.
The IDF said Friday afternoon that it had carried out airstrikes on over 150 “terror targets” in the Gaza Strip over the past day.
The targets included anti-tank missile launch posts, cells of operatives, and buildings used by terror groups to carry out attacks on forces, the army said.
The strikes in Gaza on Friday were preparatory actions leading to a larger operation and were meant to send a message to Hamas that the campaign will begin soon if there is not an agreement to release hostages, the Associated Press reported, citing an unnamed Israeli official.
The problem with the food, which I do worry about, it that yes, Gaza has enough food for all its people for some time, but Hamas is guarding it in warehouses. True, no food is coming in, but Israel has offered to distribute food to people so it could ensure that the food goes to civilians, not to Hamas, but the UN won’t let Israel do that for reasons that are completely unclear to me. But, at any rate, it’s not true that Israel refuses to distribute food, and remember that there is no obligation to distribute food to an enemy country (we didn’t in WWII), so Israel is going beyond the call of duty by offering to do so.
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly and snarky news column in the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: The emir of America.”
→ Biden and Kamala continue their bickering: A top adviser to Kamala’s presidential run told authors of a forthcoming book that Biden screwed the campaign over, and that if he had only dropped out earlier, Kamala would have soared. Which makes no sense, because she became slightly less popular as she campaigned. It seems like if Biden would’ve quit just a couple months earlier, Doug Emhoff might have been in the East Wing today switching out the drapes and getting ready for SoulCycle in Georgetown. The new book details Biden’s aging, and the lengths people went to cover it up includes that his team planned for Biden to be in a wheelchair soon after the election. I need everyone involved in this to step away from public life. But they refuse. Last week, Joe and Dr. Jill Biden went on The View. The ladies asked him about the criticisms of his age, and he went on for a few minutes until Dr. Jill, our villain, swooped in to say how very hard he worked.
The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us, and they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day. I mean, he’d get up, he put in a full day, and then at night he would, I’d be in bed, you know, reading my book, and he was still on the phone, reading his briefings, working with staff. I mean, it was nonstop.
He put in a full day like a grown-up, she says, as Joe stares ahead, confused. Why is Joe all dressed up there at The View table anyway? Dr. Jill, just let him rest, good Lord.
→ The new Statue of Liberty: Donald Trump is being gifted a jumbo jet by the Qataris. The administration says it’s being given to the Defense Department and then will go to Trump’s “presidential library foundation,” which I’m sure will be very real and very full of big books. Facing criticism, Trump reposted someone on Truth Social saying the plane is a gift from a foreign government, like the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France. Just like that. But does the Statue of Liberty have a minibar full of Diet Coke?
My favorite exchange on this whole thing was on Fox News, between Brian Kilmeade and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Kilmeade: “Do you worry that if [the Qataris] give us something like this, they want something in return?”
Leavitt: “Absolutely not, because they know President Trump, and they know he only works with the interests of the American public in mind.”
To be clear, I only work with the interests of TGIF in mind. So if someone wants to gift a briefcase of diamonds or a big private plane, TGIF might be interested in promoting your concrete company. Incentives: aligned! You’re welcome, TG readers.
Attesting to the legality of the gift from Qatar was United States attorney general and top blonde Pam Bondi, whose former job was working as a lobbyist for Qatar.
→ UC Berkeley votes against Hindu Heritage Month: The UC Berkeley student senate voted against Hindu Heritage Month, citing “Hindu nationalism,” despite the university’s observing several other heritage months. Hindus are not allowed heritage time! Stop asking for heritage awareness, Hindus. You must sit in shame next to the Irish Pride group and the campus Israel club (it is an awkward combo in there, I gotta warn you). Certain heritages’ self-awareness needs to be suppressed, and UC Berkeley is adding Hindu to that list. The failed resolution had recognized contributions to the Berkeley community by people of Hindu heritage, and called on students to “support their Hindu peers on campus.” No. Stop asking. As your debutante arbiter of who is white, and what to do with edge cases, I’ll be clear: Greeks and Italians are ethnic and may celebrate, though not for a whole month, just a heritage week. Basically a food festival and that’s it. But Hindus are white. I can’t explain why but it’s true.
*A new paper in Science once again shows the value of genetic differences between human populations in reconstructing the history of human migration. Who says population differences are of no biological significance?. Click below to read it, or find the pdf here (h/t Matthew):
The upshot is really summarized in the abstract, and the four lineages giving rise to modern South American populations is shown in the figure below. The size of the circle in each area is an index of the inhabitants’ genetic diversity, which itself is an index of population size (bigger circles = more people in the past).
Here’s the summary:
From our origins in Africa, humans have migrated and settled across the world. Perhaps none of these migrations has been the subject of as much debate as the expansion into and throughout the Americas. Gusareva et al. used 1537 whole-genome sequenced samples from 139 populations in South America and Northeast Eurasia to shed light on the population history of Native Americans. Collected as a part of the GenomeAsia 100K consortium, analysis of these data showed that there are four main ancestral lineages that contributed to modern South Americans. These lineages diverged from each other between 10,000 and 14,000 years ago, and this analysis reveals more details of the population history dynamics in these groups.
Note how, in general, the South American circles are smaller, reflecting the fact that only a limited number of individuals went on each southward foray, reducing the genetic diversity. Note that they used over 1500 whole genome sequences to get these data, and that the lineages diverged over 10,000 years ago. What I always find amazing is that humans crossed the Bering land bridge about 17,000 years ago, and only a few thousand years later they’d already crossed North America, Central America, and made it to South America. That’s some fast traveling, and one wonders why. (I presume competition, but we don’t know.)
They also were unable to find the part of NE Asia where the immigrants originated, but they surely had to pass through Siberia.
Click picture to enlarge:
*The man who tried to stab Salman Rushdie to death has been sentenced, and although it was the maximum sentence under the charges, it seems light to me:
The man convicted of stabbing Salman Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in 2022, leaving the prizewinning author blind in one eye, was sentenced Friday to serve 25 years in prison.
A jury found Hadi Matar, 27, guilty of attempted murder and assault in February.
Rushdie did not return to court to the western New York courtroom for his assailant’s sentencing but submitted a victim impact statement. During the trial, the 77-year-old author was the key witness, describing how he believed he was dying when a masked attacker plunged a knife into his head and body more than a dozen times as he was being introduced at the Chautauqua Institution to speak about writer safety.
Before being sentenced, Matar stood and made a statement about freedom of speech in which he called Rushdie a hypocrite.
“Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people,” said Matar, clad in white-striped jail clothing and wearing handcuffs. “He wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.”
ADMatar received the maximum 25-year sentence for the attempted murder of Rushdie and seven years for wounding a man who was on stage with him. The sentences must run concurrently because both victims were injured in the same event, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said.
Rushdie, stabbed 15 times, lost one of his eyes and the use of one hand, and if you want to read his ruminations about the attack, I highly recommend Rushdie’s account Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, which I’ve mentioned before. Since Rushdie never met the guy who stabbed him, it’s not just his thoughts about the murder, which are quite eloquent, but the gruesome details of his long healing. At the end he confects a dialogue between himself and Matar in an attempt to suss out Matar’s motivations. It’s all because Rusdie wrote a book that offended some Muslims; I bet Matar didn’t even read it.
Here’s an 8.5-minute BBC video giving details of the trial; it includes a short interview with Rushdie:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s looking for books in all the wrong places.
Hili: What are you looking for?Andrzej: A good book.Hili: You are not going to find it here.
Hili: Czego szukasz?Ja: Jakiejś dobrej książki.Hili: Tu nie znajdziesz.
And a picture of Szaron stalking:
*******************
Masih must be feeling better, as she’s reposting old posts. Here’s one about hijabs. There are English subtitles
درست میگفت آن زمان عادی نبود…#چهارشنبه_های_سفید#آزادی_های_یواشکی https://t.co/clLyszlBwF
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) May 16, 2025
From Luana. Seriously, a headline this straight (and indicting Palestinian terrorism) is very rare in the NYT!
I mean this entirely sincerely: kudos to the NYT for a straight headline like this pic.twitter.com/oZ3IY8WbNk
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) May 15, 2025
From Simon:
Unpopular Pete Hegseth Forced To Drink Lunch Alone
From Malcolm. I may have posted this before (I can’t recall), but I love it.
Every 10 steps she takes, she looks back to check her little one pic.twitter.com/RxP770PRsW
— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) April 30, 2025
From my feed; these are pretty amazing and, I’m sure, expensive:
Hyper realistic silicone mask visuals
pic.twitter.com/wrJ1llU7zq— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) May 16, 2025
One from the Auschwitz Memorial that I reposted”
This Czech Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was 13.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-17T09:39:30.280Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb, who’s recovering rapidly. The first one he captions, “More nightmarish visions from the good old US of A. It’s heinous:
The state of Georgia is using the body of a brain-dead woman as an incubator. Because she was 9 weeks pregnant when she died, and their abortion ban is from about 6 weeks, they are sustaining her on life support, without input from her family, until 32 weeks of gestation. A true dystopian nightmare.
— Arghavan Salles, MD, PhD (@arghavansallesmd.medsky.social) 2025-05-15T18:46:36.731Z
Here’s natural (well, really artificial) selection for antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Note that the environment gets more challenging towards the center.
A fabulous video – I used to show this to my first year students as am example of natural selection in action.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-04-13T15:24:22.352Z
Dr Cobb will have the Cup Final at 4.30pm to cheer or depress him…
This article on inset tool using may interest!
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2422597122
Tool use aids prey-fishing in a specialist predator of stingless beesso humans, apes, lots of others all use tools!
Insect! No way to correct on this browser, (Firefox in Mint) sorry…
That is interesting! And yes, it does seem to be a case of tool use in an insect.
Glad you are rapidly on the mend, Matthew. Thanks for the terrific bacteria video from Harvard. And despite these evolutionary capabilities of your invading germs, you still beat them back in the end. Good work!
“The state of Georgia is using the body of a brain-dead woman as an incubator.”
Woke Right radical activism.
Same energy as Woke Leftism, opposite direction.
… of course, unless there is no other information to go on, and eXtwitter is rather light too.
It’s “only” the hospital’s worry, informed by their lawyers’ opinion presumably, that it can’t turn off “life” support for this dead woman in case its officers (and the treating doctor separately) could be charged with a criminal offence such as murder or manslaughter of the not-yet-viable fetus. We would find out only if the hospital decided to take a chance and allow support to be stopped, then see what the police decided to do, and what a jury would do if the police laid a charge. The hospital, as with anyone else contemplating an action that might break the law, can’t rely on any prior advice even from an attorney-general, say, that the conduct would not be prosecuted. (Warning that he would prosecute can be relied on!) So the risk-averse choice is to not permit the doctors to stop support.
Oh well. Georgia voted for this. Let them change the law if it bothers them.
Matar says Salman Rushdie is “a bully, he wants to bully other people.” Um, yeah, he wrote a novel. What a bully! I guess Matar believes that novels are worse than knives?
The pen is mightier than the sword, perhaps.
Matar was radicalized perfectly. His story is telling. He grew up (single mother I think) poor-ish in suburban NJ where he was born but his parents were Lebanese.
He seems very low IQ and it was on a teen trip to his ancestral home in Sth Lebanon (Sidon) he drunk the cool aid. He fell in with the Hezb crowd in what is an Iranian colony basically.
I didn’t venture south of the airport in Beirut as an American when I was there a long time ago during the Israel-Hezb war (but even in peace I wouldn’t go south. Nor would you if you are sane).
The roads are festooned with the portraits of young martyrs, dead stares ahead. It is poor, tribal, stony and not as pretty as the rest of that beautiful but accursed land.
Sth Lebanon is terrifying, Hezb-land. Its recent demise is a welcome gift to peace.
And knowing Matar will be locked away for 25 is good though since his conviction is state he might get out sooner. Hope he gets a beeper as a release present.
D.A.
NYC
The American citizen TV game show will be boring because there aren’t that many questions to ask. It isn’t Jeopardy! They’ll need to figure out some way to spice it up. Maybe play the game in the nude.
And, of course there are genetic differences among the world’s populations. This is one of the main ways to sequence* which groups went where and when.
*Pun inadvertent but recognized during proofreading.
(Two things Japanese are obsessed with over there: trains and cats! No kidding.) I love it there and never regret learning Japanese. 🙂
On another issue – can anybody posit why (Western) state TV broadcasters are so hard left in their outlook? I routinely watch PBS, A.(ustralian)B.C., DeutscheWelle (almost Stalinist) and the Frenchie one (socialist with pretentiousness) etc.
All completely crazy green, trans-genderwang and “River to Sea” pro-terrorism.
Here, there was an engram going around following the frequency of words like racism and white supremacy in 4 big US newspapers over the past two decades – with a predictable ski jump increase – so it is private media also.
Elections in all these places have rejected the above notions which have little resemblance to what people like PPC(E) and I would call maybe soft 1990s leftism.
Data tells us in the last decade women have led the charge to the left but there must be more to it than that.
D.A.
NYC
David, to answer your question “why (Western) state TV broadcasters are so hard left in their outlook,” I would recommend reading:
Musa al-Gharbi: We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Princeton UP, October 2024
How a new “woke” elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status – without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged.
Musa al-Gharbi: You Ask, I Answer: We Have Never Been Woke FAQ. March 2, 2025 [free substack post]
My responses to reader and audience questions about the book and its themes
Batya Ungar-Sargon: Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy. Encounter Books, 2021
Batya Ungar-Sargon: How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class. The Free Press, Nov 1, 2021
What explains the media’s obsession with race and power? It has very little to do with social justice and everything to do with class.
Robert Maranto: Class Struggle: How the Media Became the Ivory Tower. Academic Questions, Spring 2023
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/1/class-struggle-how-the-media-became-the-ivory-tower
Review of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, by Batya Ungar-Sargon, Encounter Books, 2021
Greg Lukianoff & Rikki Schlott: The canceling of the American mind. Simon & Schuster, 2023
Case Study: Journalism pp.93-103
Jonathan Kay: Investigating the Academy. Quillette, April 19, 2024
In a recent speech to University of Toronto scholars, a Quillette editor explained why many of his fellow journalists are reluctant to report on administrative scandals at Canadian universities.
Matt Taibbi: Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. OR Books, 2021, 320 p.
Michael Schudson: Journalism: Why It Matters. Polity Press, 2020, 120 p.
Herbert P. Kitschelt & Philipp Rehm: Secular Partisan Realignment in the United States: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of White Partisan Support since the New Deal Era. Politics & Society, Sept. 2019, 47(3)
Herbert P. Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm: Polarity Reversal: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of Partisan Support in Knowledge Societies. Politics & Society, December 2023, 51(4)
One thing that’s special with respect to state-funded media is that the market test is attenuated. Taxpayer are forced to fund them, as long as right-wing parties don’t get elected into government and decide to partially or completely defund them. And this is going to happen at some point if state-funded media keep pursuing the political interest of their employees (that is, shaping their news coverage such that it is consistent with their own political preferences) as opposed to doing their job.
How did it get that way? My hunch is that it is first self-selection of particular employees into state-funded media and then (later) political discrimination in hiring and promotion (so if you are a conservative or centrist you get frozen out because leftists are doing the hiring or have veto power in hiring and promotion). I think that’s also what happened in academia.
Here are some numbers that are not specific to state-funded media in Germany, but pertain to all German journalists (2023-2024). A survey by researchers from the Technical University Dortmund asked German journalists about their party preferences. Here are the results:
23% had not party preference
41% supported the Green Party
6% The Leftist Party (Die Linke)
16% Social Democratic Party (the strongest center-left party)
8% the Christian Democratic Party (the main center-right party)
The most interesting thing here is that about half (47%) of the surveyed journalists supported the Greens and The Leftists Party. These two parties are the woke ones in Germany. In the most recent federal parliamentary election the combined vote share of these two parties was 20.4%. (This is the combined share of the second votes. German voter cast 2 ballots: one for a candidate in their local district, and the second one for a party.)
Somewhat related:
Neil Gross: Why is Hollywood so Liberal? New York Times, Jan 27, 2018
https://archive.ph/zdNVg
Peter, it makes perfect sense for PBS and NPR to have followed the same path as academia with respect to their extreme left leaning politics– aren’t the majority of these stations housed on university campuses? Are there any that aren’t? They’re in lockstep with one another. (I can’t speak to the situation in Germany) Lots of great links here, by the way. Thank you.
There is certainly a feedback loop dynamic to it – in hiring and universities/media mainly. Bad actors get weeded out of for profit only corporations faster I think. (I’ve never worked at a uni nor a media “office” or large media company. The companies I worked for were all profit not “mission” driven.)
On another note I’m surprised at how left Germany seems to be. Der Linke is pretty much East German isn’t it? Man. Popular with the kids – who never experienced the DDR.
D.A.
NYC
I blame Postmodernism. It took over the humanities and “soft sciences” and spread out from there.*
I hope it’s now on the decline, and it can’t happen soon enough, but I’m an optimist.
And somehow it has managed to infect a lot of self-identified “skeptics.”
Helen Joyce answering a question from Peter Boghossian:
Question (@34:00 mins): Why is it that so many people in the skeptical movement and in the atheist movement have become true believers?
Answer: Don’t you think that they were never skeptics? They were in it as a movement, as a group. It was their tribe. They were tribal, and this was their tribe. And that’s a very upsetting realization, and it’s one that I’ve had too. The groups that I thought I was in because – like to the extent that I was in a group, I’ve never formally been in a group – but like let’s say fellow-traveller-type people, I thought that we were motivated by the same sorts of things. And it turned out that no we were just coincidental briefly.
Reality vs. Trans Ideology | Peter Boghossian interviews Helen Joyce, July 3, 2023 (on YouTube)
Short answer:
Because Rudi Dutschke’s Long March Through the Institutions was carried out and has succeeded almost completely. The rest is just details of the implementation.
Re “This is not, ‘Hey, if you lose, we are shipping you out on a boat out of the country.’”
“I’ll take ‘habeas corpus‘ for $500.”
“No, you won’t….”
The show needs a name. Too bad Jeopardy is already taken. Maybe You Bet Your Life is out of copyright.
Q. “What is the foundational law for the rights of sovereign citizens?”
A. “It was enshrined in the MAGA CARTA”.
** tickertape rains down**
Women are incubators. Host bodies. Birthing people.
Thank you, SCOTUS.