Welcome to the tail end o’ the week: Friday, May 23, 2025: World Turtle Day. Here are some turtles from Botany Pond in July, 2018; I believe they are red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans) sunning on a duckling ramp. I doubt whether we will have turtles in the pond this year.
It’s also the Declaration of the Báb (part of the Bahái faith), and National Taffy Day. Here’s how one place makes saltwater taffy, which has salt and water but is not appreciably different from other taffy. It is not a “salty treat”, as the video avers; it’s just sold near the beach, along boardwarks.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 23 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Obituaries: Norm died, and I loved him in “Cheers”:
George Wendt, an actor with an Everyman charm who played the affable, beer-loving barfly Norm on the hit 1980s TV comedy “Cheers” and later crafted a stage career that took him to Broadway in “Art,” “Hairspray” and “Elf,” has died. He was 76.
Wendt’s family said he died early Tuesday morning, peacefully in his sleep while at home, according to the publicity firm The Agency Group.
“George was a doting family man, a well-loved friend and confidant to all of those lucky enough to have known him,” the family said in a statement. “He will be missed forever.” The family has requested privacy during this time.
Despite a long career of roles onstage and on TV, it was as gentle and henpecked Norm Peterson on “Cheers” that he was most associated, earning six straight Emmy Award nominations for best supporting actor in a comedy series from 1984-89.
Six straight Emmy nominations! I guess he didn’t win any, but he was great. Here’s a montage and a memoriam (the show ran for eleven years and was one of my favorites, especially the fractious relationship between Sam and Diane):
*The House of Representatives passed the bill that would fund Trump’s domestic agenda, but it was a squeaker, passing by a single vote. And it still needs to be passed by the Senate, which has a 53-47 Republican majority.
The Republican-led House passed President Trump’s sprawling tax-and-spending bill early Thursday, after party leaders made a series of last-minute changes that united their warring wings.
The vote was 215 to 214, with one lawmaker voting present. The measure now goes to the Senate, where a similar tug of war could play out.
The passage of Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” marked a major win for Trump and for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), who again found the formula that steered a course between hard-liners, who wanted deeper spending cuts, and moderates, who worried that the bill would hurt their districts’ hospitals and clean-energy projects.
Thursday morning’s vote was a significant step toward extending Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts and cementing other conservative priorities while trimming spending on Medicaid and food aid. It again showed the president’s power to unite fractious House Republicans, whose narrow majority meant that any handful of dissidents could have sunk the bill.
“This bill is our opportunity to deliver on the promises we made,” said Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R., Texas). “At its core, the one big, beautiful bill is about more than dollars and cents. It’s about liberty and empowering the American people.”
Reps. Warren Davidson of Ohio and Thomas Massie of Kentucky were the only two Republicans to vote against the measure, arguing that it didn’t do enough to rein in deficit spending. All Democrats were opposed.
Rep. Andy Harris (R., Md.) voted present, saying he wanted to move the legislation along but had concerns about deficits and Medicaid. Reps. Andrew Garbarino (R., N.Y.) and David Schweikert (R., Ariz.) missed the vote. Schweikert said that the vote concluded as he reached the House floor and that he supports the bill. A Garbarino spokesperson said he inadvertently missed the vote and supports the bill.
The bill tightens the work requirements for Medicare, which will cause roughly 14 million people to lose their health benefits, cuts taxes (mostly for higher earners, but also for seniors), doubles the maximum child tax credit, reduces the amount of student loans subsidized by the government, and, among other things, exempts qualified tipping income from taxation—up to $160,000 (does anybody earn that much in tips?) PBS adds this:
A fresh analysis from the Congressional Budget Office said the tax provisions would increase the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion over the decade, while the changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other services would tally $1 trillion in reduced spending. The lowest-income households in the U.S. would see their resources drop, while the highest ones would see a boost, the CBO said.
Here’s the Washington Post‘s bar graph about how the present bill would affect the national debt. Red bars increase it, green ones decrease it:
There are likely to be substantive changes as the bill moves to the Senate, but don’t ask me what’s likely. What’s clear is that Trump has won this one.
*Some good news from the Supreme Court: in a 4-4 tie, they let stand an Oklahoma ruling forbidding the use of public money to fund religious charter schools (article archived here). This does not, however, mean that this practice is banned throughout America, which would be peachy:
A divided Supreme Court rejected a plan on Thursday to allow Oklahoma to use government money to run the nation’s first religious charter school, which would teach a curriculum infused by Catholic doctrine.
The court split 4 to 4 over the Oklahoma plan, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing herself from the case, and the decision provided no reasoning.
That deadlock means that an earlier ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court will be allowed to stand. The state court blocked a proposal for the Oklahoma school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which was to be operated by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, and aimed to incorporate Catholic teachings into every aspect of its activities.
Because there was no majority in the case, the court’s decision sets no nationwide precedent on the larger question of whether the First Amendment permits states to sponsor and finance religious charter schools, which are public schools with substantial autonomy.
The brief ruling in one of the most anticipated cases of the term came as a surprise, after oral arguments took place only a few weeks ago in April. At the argument, a majority of the justices had appeared open to allowing Oklahoma to use government money to run the nation’s first religious charter school.
The decision did not include a tally of how each justice voted. It stated only that the lower court ruling was “affirmed by an equally divided court.” It is also unclear why Justice Barrett, the junior member of the court’s conservative supermajority, recused herself, which meant that she did not participate in oral argument or deliberations.
Why did Barrett, who is religious, recuse herself? The article adds “it may be because she is close friends with Nicole Stelle Garnett, a professor at Notre Dame Law School who was an early adviser for St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, the school involved in the dispute.” Whatever; it seems to me that the government paying for a religious education is a violation of the First Amendment, even if all religions get this benefit. And the issue now has to be litigated state by state. If Barrett had voted for the bill, it would have passed and we’d have religious charter schools everywhere.
*The Free Press reports that Harvard delayed for months the investigation of a videotaped harassment of a Jewish student: “Attacking Jews at Harvard doesn’t just go unpunished. It gets rewarded.”
In the year and a half since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, there have been so many alarming incidents on college campuses aimed at Jews. Many stick out for their grotesque imagery, for their outrageous slanders, and for their Soviet-style tactics. But the incident that I remember most vividly is the one that took place at Harvard University less than two weeks after Hamas invaded Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 more.
No one was physically injured that day. But the fact remained that the incident was wildly beyond the pale: a group of Harvard students surrounding another student, an Israeli named Yoav Segev, repeatedly screaming “Shame!” in his face, blocking his path, and forcing him to leave a part of campus that he was entitled to be in just as much as they were.
Video of the confrontation quickly went viral. You can watch it here.
Check the video. This is exactly what happened to me when I was photographing a singer in the encampment last year. I wasn’t causing trouble, I was just recording video because I liked his voice. But I was, as I called it, “keffiyehed”, surrounding by people holding up keffiyehs and who wouldn’t let me out of the fabric circle (they’d move every time I tried to get out and accuse me of bumping them. It was scary, but I couldn’t report it because I couldn’t identify the protestors and of course Chicago does all it can to avoid punishing them. I finally got out, but was badly shaken. The Jewish student at Harvard, however, could identify the assaulters, but Harvard didn’t do much to discipline them.
The incident might have just disappeared from the news, like so many other videos of post-October 7 antisemitism on campus, if not for another shocking fact. The two aggressors who were the easiest to identify, because they were not wearing masks or hoodies and did not have keffiyehs around their faces, were not just Harvard students. They were also Harvard employees.
Ibrahim Bharmal was a Harvard Law School student and an editor at the Harvard Law Review. He was also a law-school teaching fellow in a civil procedure class. Elom Tettey-Tamaklo was a student at Harvard Divinity School. He was also a residential Harvard proctor, someone who advised first-year Harvard College students and lived in their dorm.
The Free Press concludes this:
An investigation by The Free Press into the October 18 confrontation caught on video and the resulting criminal case reveals that Harvard and its police department played a very significant role in delaying the case and thereby influencing its course and outcome. In doing so, Harvard and its police department, whose chief resigned this month in the wake of a nearly unanimous no-confidence vote against him, worked at cross-purposes with the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, district attorney’s office—and with the pursuit of justice itself.
None of this might even have been an issue if Harvard had dealt with the incident immediately and decisively.
The outcome? The assaulters got a slap on the wrist:
Last month, a day before Harvard released its antisemitism report and about 18 months after the video went viral, the case ended with a whimper, not a bang. A judge ordered Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo, charged with misdemeanor assault and battery, to perform 80 hours of community service and to complete an in-person anger-management class as part of a pretrial diversion program. They will also take a negotiation class at—where else?—Harvard.
Now, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo are set to graduate next week, at which point Harvard’s ability to take disciplinary action against them will no longer just be controversial. It will be moot. Segev’s lawyers told The Free Press that Garber and other Harvard officials haven’t responded to their questions about whether Harvard has finished a disciplinary process for Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo.
So it goes. . .
*I really do dislike AI, at least for replacing academia, though it is useful for other stuff. Here’s a headline I love: “Fictional fiction: a newspaper’s summer book list recommends nonexistent books. Blame AI.”
The recommended reading list contained some works of fiction. It also contained some works that were, in fact, actually fictional.
The content distributor King Features says it has fired a writer who used artificial intelligence to produce a story on summer reading suggestions that contained books that didn’t exist.
The list appeared in “Heat Index: Your Guide to the Best of Summer,” a special section distributed in Sunday’s Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer last week.
More than half of the books listed were fake, according to the piece’s author, Marco Buscaglia, who admitted to using AI for help in his research but didn’t double-check what it produced. “A really stupid error on my part,” Buscaglia wrote on his Facebook page.
Among the summer reading suggestions was “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir, described as “a science-driven thriller following a programmer who discovers an AI system has developed consciousness” and been secretly influencing world events. “Nightshade Market,” by Min Jin Lee, was said to be a “riveting tale set in Seoul’s underground economy.”
ADBoth authors are real, but the books aren’t. “I have not written and will not be writing a novel called ‘Nightshade Market,’” Lee posted on X.
Cue the Schadenfreude.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili glories in the local flowers:
Hili: It’s the end of the lilac.A: But the roses are just beginning.
Hili: Bez się już kończy.Ja: Za to róże zaczynają.
*******************
From Stephen; how scientific publishing works:
From Now That’s Wild:
From Divy:
Masih is back posting again! Read the whole thing and watch. Look at those scary morality cops!
Hey Western feminists! watch this.
Imagine you’re driving your car or sitting on the subway, and suddenly you’re surrounded by police officers because your hair is not covered.The regime says sending videos to me — Masih Alinejad — could lead to 10 years in prison.
So why do… pic.twitter.com/goup4t2OZC
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) May 22, 2025
From Reese on Facebook:
From Malcolm: A wonderful guy rescuing a bobcat in a steel-jaw trap. Those traps are hideous and should be outlawed!
Nerves of stainless steelpic.twitter.com/uIXpHKyv80
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 7, 2025
From Luana; read the article:
In every line you sense the writer’s gritted teeth as they strain to avoid using a single pronoun for cross-dressing paedophile and convicted sex offender, ‘Katie Birtles’.https://t.co/efDzh8O4CK
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 22, 2025
One from my feed. I don’t think this would work very well:
spoon of shame 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/FFvO3vX1pm
— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) May 21, 2025
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish lad was gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz. He was only two. Had he lived, he'd be 84 today.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-23T10:18:43.685Z
Two posts from Matthew: I was right!!!! (see here and an upcoming post.
Scientist admits sky is indeed bluewww.newscientist.com/article/2481…
— Casey terHorst (@ecoevolab.bsky.social) 2025-05-22T17:13:15.661Z
And this is unbelievable. I don’t believe the courts will let it stand:
The Trump administration on Thursday halted Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the college to fall in line with President Trump’s demands. nyti.ms/4k8w2qB
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2025-05-22T18:19:41.882Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body. -Margaret Fuller, author, critic, and women’s rights advocate (23 May 1810-1850)
And a fridge for ice cream and the cogitative equivalent thereof! 😁
And a gaming PC!
It is my considered opinion that a domicile becomes a home when you have a cat. A child will do, but a cat is better. Cheaper, fluffier, and quieter.
Supreme Court halts tax support for religious schools. Right wingers will be angry. If we give tax money to support Catholic schools, soon the Baptist will want that sweet tax money for their schools. Then the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, the Methodists. Then the Muslims to support their sharia redolent madrasses. Then the Hindus. The the Moonies and the Scientologists. Every mega church will be forming their own schools to grab that tax money for themselves. Wheeeeeee!
Yes, Jerry. Your experience with the mob last year has absolutely no business in society and especially not on a college campus. These thugs should have been removed from campus with dispatch by college authorities providing both a safer environment for university residents AND demonstrating what is not acceptable behavior as time, place, and manner. I am sorry that you had to endure it and that there seems to be no guarantee that you would not be subject to such behavior today.
I was referred by one of the WEIT commenters (sorry that I cannot recall who to give you credit) the other day to a very disturbing piece by a fellow at Harvard, Omar Sultan Haque, written in January of 2024. Dr. Haque is broadly and deeply educated though I cannot find any original research papers by him, nor an h-index and apparently has been knocking around Harvard for over twenty years. His claim is that Harvard is totally and irreparably broken, having abandoned its founding telos of veritas for a DEI form of Social Justice. He sees this as a full and deep cultural characteristic from the Corp’s Penny Pritzker through the earlier President Gay if I understand his longish paper correctly. It is at url https://www.omarveritas.com/p/veritas-betrayed-wake-up-stand-up
I would appreciate comments on him and his very disturbing viewpoint from any knowledgeable Harvard-adjacent readers on this site.
I saw this piece as well. More recently, he was featured in City Journal (https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-left-bias-trump-omar-sultan-haque ). The whole situation is disturbing on so many levels. Trump’s sledgehammer approach isn’t very edifying and just adds to the chaos, but what’s happened at these universities is truly shocking. (One small personal anecdote: a friend & his wife scrimped & saved to send their daughter to Harvard. Dad had a great relationship with her. While she was home on Christmas break, during her first year, they got into some debate over something, and practically spat at him “well, you would think that, you’re just a white cisgender male!” She’d never spoken like that. It just got worse throughout her whole time there.)
I don’t know how many other people have taken a good look at the Harvard antisemitism report, but it confirms what Haque says about the pervasiveness of social justice activism and the total rejection of dissenting beliefs and dissenters themselves at Harvard. What is going on at Harvard Medical School is a case in point. It’s not just that it’s a monoculture, it’s that the students are acting on their beliefs by doing all they can to physically exclude ‘evil’ Zionists from the school (with the tacit approval of administrators):
Sorry the quote is so long, but it all seemed important
I read the report and it’s chilling. Pervasive antisemitism and intimidation of Jews on campus.
The Budget Bill passed by the House of Representatives contains an item which restricts the power of Federal Courts to enforce injunctions. This would greatly limit what Federal Courts could do in response to acts by administration officials. One place to read about it is the Cato institute, under the heading, A Move To Strip Courts of Contempt Powers.
With the murder of two Israeli embassy staff in Washington, we have to ask did the rhetoric of PZ Myers, Hemant Mehta, Nick Fish of American Atheists, and the American Humanist Association, play a deadly role?
[PS – Satire – see the above and their insinuations after the Christchurch massacre, in case you had forgotten]
The thing about the A.I. making up books is no news to me. On two occasions, once with ChatGPT and once with Grok, I asked the A.I. for a list of books on a topic. In both cases the response included books that did not exist. After determining that, and then asking the A.I. about it, the A.I. was apologetic. In one case it said it conflated several of the author’s writings to come up with the entry it cited. Remember, kids: A.I., Often wrong, but never in doubt.
Same thing happened to a colleague and me. We were writing a paper that’s in final draft and we thought, lets see what our internal GPT would do with it. It was actually quite good, well written, though a bit didactic. But it was oddly wrong in weird ways, too difficult to describe here. Anyway, when we looked at the references more than 75% were fake. No such papers existed.
They hallucinate.
Harvard has already sued the Trump Administration over foreign students.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.285083/gov.uscourts.mad.285083.1.0_1.pdf
Of course Colossal did not de-extinguish the Dire Wolf. That was a ridiculous claim from the start. Cool that they were able to get a few Dire Wolf characteristics to appear, but making colossal claims about small achievements does not advance the cause of science. It makes science look like just another hustle.
I met George Wendt at the Midway Airport in Chicago in the 1990s, when I was a pilot there. He was sitting in the crowd at one of the gates, when he saw that I had recognized him. He got up, and walked over to where I was standing and I said: “You’re George Wendt, right?” I pronounced his last name as “vent.” He said: “Yeah, that’s right.” I asked him if I pronounced his name correctly – with the German pronunciation. He said that I did, but most people say “went” and it’s too much trouble to correct them. I said I get all kinds of pronunciations for my name, Blase – like fire only with an “s” not a “z.” We chatted a bit about him living in California, but having a lot of family in Chicago, that he was there to pick up his niece, and how long would it take for her flight to arrive. I told him I’d go to our operations office and check for him, since those flight display monitors were very inaccurate. I did that, and told him his niece’s flight was still taxiing for take-off on the ground, and probably wouldn’t arrive for another hour and a half. He thanked me, and then we chatted about airline scheduling and the traffic around the airport, and then he asked me if I wanted to go down to that little pub in the terminal and have a couple of beers with him. I told him that if I was seen in a pub in my airline uniform I would be fired. He said some thing like: “Oh, yeah. I can understand that. People would wonder if the beer-drinking pilot was going to be flying their flight.” So, we chatted a while longer, then he said he enjoyed our chat and went back to his seat in the gate area. Later, I thought that I should have just left my coat and hat in the Ops office, changed shirts, and had a couple of beers with George Wendt. I think he liked it that I had not once mentioned his job as an actor or anything about Hollywood. Thirty years later I wrote a book about my airline “adventures,” and included this little anecdote in the chapter about my celebrity encounters. My meeting with George Wendt was probably my most memorable one. He was a very nice man, a good actor, and I bet we would have had an enjoyable conversation over a couple of beers.
And, of course, let’s not forget that Norm was the inspiration for the alien Morn who was a regular in Quark’s bar in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Re the woman rescuing the bobcat:
It would be interesting to witness the confrontation between her and the (probably) aboriginal man who owned the trapline and was exercising his Treaty rights to a modest livelihood on his band’s traditional territory.
My bet is that she would end up in jail. (If the trap was instead a poacher’s trap, she might be dead.)
Yes it would be better to assimilate the aboriginals into the regular wage economy and then ban trapping once we have been successful. That would be a win-win.
I am glad to see that the bobcat (and the woman!) were able to walk away from the ordeal. Whether the cat will be able to run fast enough on its injured leg to catch its dinner is another question. Did she condemn it to slow starvation instead of a quick dispatch if the trapper found it still alive in the trap?
Traditional or indigenous ways of dispatching animals is often horrifying. Like Halal (and possibly kosher? I don’t know) slaughtering.
For us to indulge such nonsense to the misery of animals is morally broken.
D.A.
NYC
Special thanks to “Peter” here at WEIT who referred me/us to
https://archive.ph/D0sV5
An Economist article on Hezb’s satisfyingly sad position in Lebanon these days.
With so much of the media beclowned in the last decade the Economist is still top quality.
D.A.
NYC
You are very welcome, David. (I did read at least 2 of your pieces, and I found them interesting and well-written. I might read more.)