Welcome to Sunday, the sabbath for goyische cats, and we’re now into June. It’s June 1, 2025. Here is the June illustration from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (ca. 1412-1416). It’s time to reap!
It’s also National Hazelnut Cake Day, Wear a Dress Day (I address this to Luana, who refuses to wear dresses), World Milk Day, Dinosaur Day, Heimlich Maneuver Day, National Frozen Yogurt Day, and National Olive Day.
Refresh yourself with this video about the Heimlich Maneuver, and don’t forget the back pounding:
There’s a Google Doodle today, celebrating “hyperpop” music, which, says the site, is “a genre/anti-genre of electronic music pioneered by LGBTQ+ artists.” Click below if you want to see where it goes (it’s Pride Month):
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*More tariffs in store: Trump is planning to double the tariff on foreign steel and aluminum. Just another stupid move in the endless tariff wars. The news last night (sans Lester Holt, my fave, who left) announced the European countries already pay less for these metals than we do. We’re only going to fall farther behind.
President Trump said on Friday that he would double the tariffs he had levied on foreign steel and aluminum to 50 percent, a move that he claimed would further protect the industry.
The announcement came as Mr. Trump traveled to a U.S. Steel factory outside Pittsburgh to hail a “planned partnership” that he helped broker between U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel, a corporate merger that he opposed last year as a presidential candidate. Although the details of the U.S. Steel deal are still murky — and Mr. Trump later admitted he had not yet seen or signed off on it — the president used the moment to cast himself as a champion of the embattled industry.
Speaking to a crowd of steel workers, Mr. Trump claimed that foreign countries had been able to circumvent the 25 percent tariff he put in place this year. The higher tariffs would “even further secure the steel industry in the United States,” Mr. Trump said.
It is not clear how much doubling the tariff rate would actually bolster the domestic steel sector, but the move gave Mr. Trump the opportunity to wield tariffs at a time when his other import taxes have proved vulnerable to legal challenges.
In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said that the tariffs would take effect on June 4 and that they would provide a “big jolt” to American steel and aluminum workers.
A big, big, BIGLY jolt. In fact, the highest jolt in the history of the WORLD! But while it may boost American metal production, we all know that it will also boost the prices of goods made with steel and aluminum, and the net effect on the American economy would be negative. I could have written about many other maladaptive things our “President” is doing, including issuing pardons to bad people (see below), trying to block or rescind visas for foreign students, cutting grants, and so on. But I don’t want to turn this site into a Trump-bashing venue, for there are many other places you can go to see that.
*The Times of Israel, quoting a reliable international organization, says what anybody with brains already knows: Iran has been sneakily trying to build a bomb while hiding its activities from the rest of the world:
Iran carried out secret nuclear activities with material not declared to the UN nuclear watchdog at three locations that have long been under investigation, the watchdog said in a wide-ranging, confidential report to member states seen by Reuters.
The findings in the “comprehensive” International Atomic Energy Agency report requested by the agency’s 35-nation Board of Governors in November pave the way for a push by the United States, Britain, France and Germany for the board to declare Iran in violation of its non-proliferation obligations.
A resolution would infuriate Iran and could further complicate nuclear talks between Tehran and Washington.
VIENNA — Iran carried out secret nuclear activities with material not declared to the UN nuclear watchdog at three locations that have long been under investigation, the watchdog said in a wide-ranging, confidential report to member states seen by Reuters.
The findings in the “comprehensive” International Atomic Energy Agency report requested by the agency’s 35-nation Board of Governors in November pave the way for a push by the United States, Britain, France and Germany for the board to declare Iran in violation of its non-proliferation obligations.
A resolution would infuriate Iran and could further complicate nuclear talks between Tehran and Washington.
While many of the findings relate to activities dating back decades and have been made before, the IAEA report’s conclusions were more definitive. It summarized developments in recent years and pointed more clearly towards coordinated, secret activities, some of which were relevant to producing nuclear weapons.
It also spelled out that Iran’s cooperation with IAEA continues to be “less than satisfactory” in “a number of respects.” The IAEA is still seeking explanations for uranium traces found years ago at two of four sites it has been investigating. Three hosted secret experiments, it found.
The IAEA has concluded that “these three locations, and other possible related locations, were part of an undeclared structured nuclear program carried out by Iran until the early 2000s” and that “some activities used undeclared nuclear material,” the report said.
Whatever made U.S. and world leaders think the Iran was enriching uranium for “peaceful” purposes? Blindness, stupidity, or both, I guess. This should be a wake-up call to Trump to stop trying to strike a “stop-the-nukes” deal with Iran in return for loosening sanctions. Iran is lying, it’s always lied about this, and Trump should just go ahead and let Israel try to take out the bomb-making facilities-. In fact, the U.S. and Israel should do that jointly,
*At the Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan asks us to “Pardon the Death of Liberal Democracy“, and it’s about Trump’s numerous and unjustifiable pardons:
I suppose you can say that at least Trump is not a hypocrite. Fathomlessly corrupt himself, he has been particularly assiduous in pardoning his fellow white-collar criminals.
Just in the past month, he gave a pardon to a former Connecticut governor who pled guilty to honest services fraud, mail fraud, and tax fraud; to a nursing home exec who pled guilty to tax crimes; to reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, for bank fraud, wire fraud, and tax dodging; to a former Staten Island congressman, for tax fraud; to a former Detroit mayor, for fraud and racketeering; to a labor union leader who took gifts up to $315,000 and didn’t report them; to a federal judge in Missouri, for Medicaid fraud; to a former member of the Cincinnati City Council, for bribery; and to a Nevada pol who embezzled the money raised for a statue honoring a murdered police officer and spent it on plastic surgery. Then there’s the infamous former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, who tried to sell a Senate seat.
. . . . Trump can empathize, of course. His own company was convicted of tax fraud, and he tried to steal an election. There is nothing in the presidency he wouldn’t monetize — as his latest $1 million-a-plate crypto dinner and the Qatari 747 prove beyond any doubt. He and his family are now, and always have been, emphatically for sale; and he regards any other approach to life as stupid. But it’s also striking how the huge majority of his pardons have been for Trump-supporting Republicans. Even Blagojevich calls himself a Trumpocrat. Fraud is fine and pardonable — if you like and support Trump. It’s the only criterion that matters.
The foulest by far was his pardon of all the participants who tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power by mob violence. This mega-pardon of more than 1,500 people, at the very beginning of his second term, was not a validation of fraud, but an actual presidential endorsement of political violence. The pardon process used to be painstaking, methodical, and careful. Trump made the J6 decision with the words: “Fuck it: Release ’em all!” His open mulling over whether to pardon the conspirators to assassinate governor Gretchen Whitmer adds a touch of specific menace.
The concept of a pardon, of course, is extremely hard for Trump to understand. Traditionally, a pardon is due to someone who has completed (or nearly completed) their sentence, expressed remorse, and turned their life around — and thereby been the recipient of mercy. But remorse is a concept unknown to a pathological narcissist. Mercy is even stranger. After all, who wins and who loses in an act of mercy? It’s one of those acts defined by grace — another literally meaningless concept for Trump. For him, all human conduct is built on a zero-sum, winner-vs-loser foundation. So a pardon is always instrumental — a way to reward allies, win credits, and enlarge his power by announcing to the world that he alone is the ultimate rule of law, and can intervene at any point to ensure his version of justice is the dispositive one. A monarch, in other words.
. . . .So of course, he is using the pardon power all the time, rather than waiting till the end of his term. It replaces the rule of law with monarchical discretion. That’s why he could not tolerate Jeff Sessions all those years ago. Because Sessions, for all his passionate partisanship, still understood the system he was operating in and still believed that the appearance of impartial justice was integral to liberal democracy’s survival. Sessions was an American.
The core reason Trump is an existential threat to liberal democracy is because he literally cannot understand this. I don’t even think he is that cynical about it. He honestly believes that people on his side can only be prosecuted out of political malice, and that people on the other side are always guilty. A judge who rules in his favor is wise; a judge who rules against him is ipso facto corrupt. And his wily capacity to wriggle free of the many impeachable offenses he committed in office, and legal accountability thereafter, has only deepened this belief.
Yes, we all know now that Trump behaves like a petulant child, lashing out at perceived enemies and rewarding his toadies. I thought it was bad to live through the Nixon era, but Trump beats all. And if the Democrats don’t get their act together, we’ll have President Vance in 2028—and eight more years or Republican rule.
*At Richard Dawkins’s Substack, he reproduces his new foreword to George Williams’s classic book on evolution, Adaptation and Natural Selection. Richard’s intro is called “Foxes in the snow.”
On opening it I have the feeling of being ushered into the presence of a penetrating and outstanding mind, the same feeling I get, indeed, from reading The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, although Williams, unlike Fisher, was no mathematician. In George Williams we have an author of immense learning and incisive critical intelligence, who thought deeply about every aspect of evolution and ecology. Williams not only enlarged the synthesis, he exposed with great clarity where many of its followers had gone astray, even in some cases the original authors themselves. ‘is is a book that every serious student of biology must read, a book that irrevocably changes the way we look at life. Throughout my career as an Oxford tutor, I obviously recommended many books to my students. But I think this was the only one I insisted that all should read. Here’s a list of major mistakes a student is likely to make before reading this book, but will not make afterwards.
You can read the mistakes for yourself, but it really is a great book, and must be one of the first books that a beginning student in evolutionary biology reads. Here’s a bit about “spandels”: things that look like direct adaptations but are adaptive byproducts of other features installed by natural selection (“spandrels” comes from Gould and Lewontin’s 1978 paper, a mixed effort):
A ‘spandrel’ is a non-adaptive by-product. The name comes from the gaps between gothic arches which are a necessary but non-functional by-product of the functionally important arches themselves. Long before the word was introduced into biology, Williams, a leading advocate of adaptation as a proper subject for scientific study, gave an incisive critique of what would later be called spandrels. His vivid example, which regularly grabbed the attention of my Oxford students, was a fox repeatedly running along its own tracks in the snow. Its paws increasingly flattened the snow, which made each successive journey easier and faster. But it would be wrong to say the fox’s paws were adapted to flattened snow. They can’t help flattening snow. This particular beneficial effect is a by-product. Williams summed up the message pithily: adaptation is an ‘onerous concept’.
If I might paraphrase the Anglican marriage service in a way that Williams might not, any attribution of adaptation should not be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly and in the fear of Occam’s Razor. You must first assure yourself that you could, if called upon to do so, translate your adaptation theory back into the rigorous terms of neo-Darwinism. The ‘adaptation’ you postulate must not just be ‘beneficial’ in some vague, panglossian sense. You must clearly set out, and be prepared to defend, a strictly Darwinian pathway to the evolution of the alleged adaptation. The ‘benefit’ must accrue at the proper level in the hierarchy of life, which is the unit of Darwinian natural selection. And the proper level, for Williams as for me, is that of the individual genes responsible for the putative adaptation.
. . .Return for a moment to Williams’ picturesque example of the fox in the snow. I think he’d have accepted the following reservation to his ‘spandrel’ or by-product lesson. Natural selection actually could favour an adaptive broadening of fox paws for the function of flattening snow.
But only if the resulting path benefited the fox itself (and its family) alone, rather than foxes in general. It might, for example, be connected to the individual fox’s own territory. This brings me to the central core of the book, which is Williams’ critique of ‘group selection’. This is as needed today as it was in 1966, for group selectionism won’t lie down. With its magnetic allure, perhaps politically or even aesthetically motivated, group selectionism keeps coming back for more, in ways that, I can’t resist confessing, remind me of Monty Python’s Black Knight.* Williams admits that natural selection could theoretically choose among groups.
For another prescient attack on group selection, which indeed won’t lie down, see Steve Pinker’s 2012 essay at Edge. But all beginning grad students in evolutionary biology should read Williams’ book. Seriously.
*I’m an Everest fan (I’ve trekked to the mountain, without climbing it, twice), and so was fascinated by this Wall Street Journal article about four Brits who set a record: flying from London and summiting Everest within five days. It usually takes weeks, but they ameliorated the climb by pre-adapting by inhaling xenon gas:
. . . the four British army veterans prepared for the world’s highest peak using a new pre-acclimatization regime involving inhaling xenon gas—once used as an anesthetic but now more commonly found in rocket propellant.
Their ascent is rocking the mountaineering community and Nepali authorities, with their use of a substance banned from competitive sport by the World Anti-Doping Agency provoking the criticism this amounts to cheating.
Nepal’s mountaineering authorities are studying the climb and its implications.
On May 29, when the country marks the first recognized summit of the mountain in 1953 as Everest Day, Nepal’s prime minister lamented the use of xenon.
“Dishonesty even with Mount Everest?” he said. “If it did happen, it should be stopped.”
Well, is it more dishonest than using supplemental oxygen? A bit more:
After hearing [Austrian mountaineer Lukas] Furtenbach speak on the radio in 2018 about his efforts to help climbers pre-acclimatize, Fries said he contacted him to propose his idea: breathe in xenon gas before a challenging climb. The gas, said Fries, appears to have neuroprotective properties and prompts the production of a hormone that triggers red blood cell production, improving the blood’s ability to carry oxygen.
Furtenbach had the four British climbers prepare for weeks at their homes in the U.K. by sleeping for a total of over 500 hours each in tents that simulate the low-oxygen conditions on Everest. That has long been part of Furtenbach’s expeditions offering a “flash” ascent of Everest in about three weeks. The men also worked out using masks that simulated thin mountain air.
Their regime included a new feature—a roughly 20-minute, one-time hit of a mix of xenon and oxygen some weeks before the men began their climb in Nepal. The formulation was developed and administered to the men in Germany by Dr. Michael Fries, head of anesthesia and intensive-care medicine at St. Vincenz Hospital in the German town of Limburg an der Lahn.
. . . . The International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation said in January that scientific literature didn’t support the idea that breathing in xenon improves performance in the mountains.
Given how swiftly it can work—putting people to sleep in a minute—highly experienced medical supervision is vital, said Fries.
If I had a bucket-list dream that I know won’t be fulfilled, it would be to stand atop Everest. I’m too old now to perch on the Earth’s highest spot, but I have been at the lowest. It’s not the same, though. . .
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Editor-in-Chief claims her rights:
Hili: Don’t even think about it.Andrzej: About what?Hili: About sitting in my chair.
Hili: Nawet o tym nie myśl.Ja: O czym?Hili: O siadaniu na moim fotelu.*******************
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:
From Jesus of the Day:
From Now That’s Wild:
World Boxing has instituted mandatory sex testing for women boxers, banning Olympic gold medalist Imane Khelif, almost surely a man raised as a woman, from boxing until s(he) takes the test. From Luana:
Finally men won’t be allowed to smash women in the face live on TV and win medals for it. Well done, World Boxing
Shame on the IOC (who allowed it in Paris) & male sports writers who cared more about a man’s feelings than the safety of women & their right to fair sport 🥊 pic.twitter.com/vAOFetaSP0
— Janice Turner (@VictoriaPeckham) May 30, 2025
Rowling’s comment:
You really need to be more careful with those Freudian slips. Khelif isn’t trans, but by casually equating him to a trans women you admit that you know the latter, too, are men. According to the rules of your favourite game, you’ve just been extremely transphobic. pic.twitter.com/d9wtBqnbnT
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 31, 2025
From Pinkah via reader Bryan: the advice is “Kill your darlings.” He’s right, too:
Steven Pinker: The simplest way to improve your writing pic.twitter.com/36JFVW4W1x
— David Perell (@david_perell) May 29, 2025
A screenshot from FB. and I have to say that the headline is dumb:
From Malcolm. I’m not sure exactly how this is helping:
Helping. pic.twitter.com/9LH5MbcfXt
— cats with jobs 🛠 (@CatWorkers) May 17, 2025
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
A Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was twelve.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-01T09:44:14.455Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. The first compares the cuts in American science funding with two other political alterations of the direction of science, although they aren’t precise parallels:
There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd.It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.
— Peter Gleick (@petergleick.bsky.social) 2025-05-31T04:43:12.825Z
A new paper on the origin of teeth (have a look) from the lab of Chicago colleague Neil Shubin:
New paper from the lab: Our teeth arose as sensory organs on the outside of the body of ancient jawless fish.!! Congrats to Yara Haridy and the team!Background and video: phys.org/news/2025-05…Open Access Paper: http://www.nature.com/articles/s41…News and Views: http://www.nature.com/articles/d41…
— Neil Shubin (@neilshubin.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T15:27:13.160Z
I wish I could edit Richard Dawkins! I say this because it’s peculiar that he writes “George Williams’ Adaptation and Natural Selection” when it should be “George Williams’s Adaptation and Natural Selection.”
How and when did anyone see it as an “option” to drop the apostrophe s for the singular possessive case for names that end with an s? We have a punctuation rule for all 26 letters in the alphabet, and so it makes no sense to exempt a letter from that rule simply because of how the letter looks or sounds. So: Kamala Harris’s campaign, Ron DeSantis’s human trafficking, Jesus’s sermons, Sophocles’s plays, Bruce Willis’s best movie, Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, and so on.
Sorry for being a pedant and a noodge, but when I’m right, I’m right.
I’m no linguist, but I’m going to guess that in this case the ‘s is dropped because it really does sound silly.
I was always taught (in the UK) that words that end in s don’t take an extra s in the possessive. Plurals, obviously (as you say), but also singular words:
Socrates’ plays
Saint Saens’ music
Ulysses’ companions
Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene
ladies’ shoes
We don’t add an extra s when speaking, so we don’t write it either.
I was taught the same in the US, both in grammar school and when attending a college near Boston
From what I’ve read over the years, it seems to be a matter of house style (e.g., The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Penthouse); one should not begin with adding the apostrophe/s then later drop same. The former grammar-checker at the NYT, whose name I don’t remember, apparently set the house style for adding the extra “s” but made an exception for words that have two “s” sounds back-to-back like Texas or Kansas. Personally, I like the apostrophe/s, even if the pronunciation is awkward. I cast my vote also for the serial comma. And no, I don’t read Penthouse, regardless of the unconventional places in which you might find its apostrophes.
It depends on your lived experience 😉
Dawkins : “Here’s a list of major mistakes a student is likely to make before reading this book, but will not make afterwards.”
This is the most brilliant way to empower individuals with knowledge I have heard for I don’t know how long – so simple, and clever, yet deeply compelling. This specific example is completely missing in my experience.
Error and mistake is one of the hardest parts of learning – this is simply brilliant literal pedagogy – lead the student through material that makes the head spin. Errors and mistake are inevitable – empowering educators are not – and confidence that it will make you better!
Compared to the old image of whoomp! [ dust cloud / mildew ] read all of this by Friday! [ crackling leather cover and yellowed page 1 of 10,000 ] … which of course is good exercise, though 😁!
The problem with Gleick’s comparison of science under Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, and Trump is that the first two did not allow private research (or at least did not allow it on topics not approved by the government).
Also, his charts do not start at zero, so are misleading. Though the NSF cut does look draconian.
Not sure how it’s helping!? What could possibly be more helpful than turning a mundane, everyday task into a heartwarming and entertaining interaction with another sentient creature!
Our cat would love to ‘help’ when it was time to change the sheets on the bed. She would turn a chore that I disliked into a good time for all.
Exactly! Many times I have taken pictures of my cats “helping” with the change of linens.
Thanks a great interpretation, Jared!
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. -Henry Beston, naturalist and author (1 Jun 1888-1968)
Apropos the hilarious Walmart cake (poor Ashley!), there is an entire genre of humour around this kind of thing, and cakewrecks.com is its Mecca.
Xenon is a noble gas. Presumably it doesn’t interact with anything. Am I wrong?
It doesn’t (easily) react with other elements and like the other noble gasses is found in Nature in elemental monatomic form. But it’s a large molecule that interacts sterically with proteins in the brain to produce rapid profound anesthesia and loss of pain sensation. (Mixed with adequate oxygen of course), it’s a good, safe, anesthetic except for being very expensive* and having a lot of nausea and vomiting afterward, but not the nightmares children can get with ketamine. (Who knew?) The purpose the climbers were using it for sounds like placebo, but reasonable to scrutinize it as a doping agent. (I have zero tolerance. Ban first, permit later with waivers.)
Xenon is used in thermionic thrusting (“nudging”, really) for attitude control in deep space vehicles partly because it is chemically inert, not “rocket fuel” in the conventional understanding.
(* One normal tidal breath requires $3 worth of xenon if used as the sole anesthetic.)
Thanks for the info. I knew it was chemically inert but not that it could still have an affect on the body.
FWIW, I do so like that the Brit term for the US “vacuum tube” is “thermionic valve”.¹
. . . . . .
¹ In the not too dim past, “tubes” / “valves” were the essential components for anything electronic. They still have niche applications today (e.g. very low noise analogue audio).
Also important for guitar amplifiers. What one thinks of as the typical electric-guitar sound is to a large extent the sound of a slightly overdriven and thus slightly distorted valve amplifier. Valves distort differently that transistors.
In the old days, one had to play loud to get that sound. There were also amplifiers with two inputs, intended to amplify two instruments. Each had its own volume control in the pre-amp, and the power amp had a master volume control. At some point, someone realized that one could overdrive the pre-amp but use the master volume to get the volume down to a reasonable level. Something like a spandrel—that’s not what it was intended for. This use of master volume became so common that these days there are amplifiers with just ONE channel where the power-amp volume is called the master volume. (There are also amps with more than one channel, but normally they aren’t intended for more than one instrument at once; rather, one switches between them.). A proper valve amplifier: https://hughes-and-kettner.com/product/triamp-mark-3/
I read there are clinics in Russia that treat depression with Xenon, and which offer it for recreational purposes as well. The effects are said to be similar to nitrous oxide (“laughing gas”). Both xenon and nitrous are classed as dissociative anesthetics along with some other drugs including ketamine and PCP. The primary brain action of dissociatives is to block NMDA glutamate receptors.
Xenon is not a molecule. It is an atom. Hydrogen, Nitrogen, and Oxygen (and many others) form diatomic molecules. Helium and Xenon (and a few others) do not.
Xenon is mostly inert. However, it does form fluorides. Xenon also forms oxides. However, they are unstable and are strong oxidizing agents. Indeed, Xenon oxide is valued as an oxidizing agent that leaves no residue.
I knew about the fluorides but not the oxides.
The Pinker interview was interesting. In gradual school, I was told by an advisor that after the first draft of any paper I should remove every 3rd word before sending it to her for review. The funny thing is, for the reason of getting old and running out of time, just now I’m reading Sterne’s “Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman”, a classic tome from the 18th century equivalent of Monty Python whose central joke is that he is unable to finish a sentence, let alone a story.
Anyway. Shorter is usually better. “Brevity is the soul of lingerie”, as you know.
Another great piece of advice I got from an advisor was the following: Once you’re finished with your paper, take your last paragraph and place it at the beginning.
Make that “how good [no ‘of’] a line that is,” and Bob’s your uncle.
I read George Williams’s Adaptation and Natural Selection back in graduate school. It’s an incredibly clear and well-written book. It’s also fairly short, which gets extra credit.
Iran? Enriching to build a bomb? Who’d a thunk it? I’m glad that many news outlets—not just the Times of Israel—are running this story. If it were just the Israeli press, no one would believe it.
Re “Wear a Dress Day”: Yea, Luana! I have not owned, much less worn, a dress in over 40 years! Even as a kid, I hated the things–pants were always warmer in the winter and more practical all year. When I was in school (K-12), girls were not allowed to wear pants to school, regardless of the temperature (on the theory that knee socks were a fitting substitute for slacks, which was obviously a rule made up by a man). Since I was sick so often, my mother appealed to the elementary school principal, who would only go so far as to allow me to wear slacks under a dress. Moreover, I had to remove the slacks when I got to school, but never had time to put them on again for the bus ride home, which still left me half a mile to walk. No wonder I have always hated dresses.
In the early 70’s a high school classmate once wore culottes. I and other classmates witnessed the occasionally overbearing and matronly Latin teacher directing her to leave class until she came back wearing a dress or skirt. (Anticipating this likely result, the classmate had come prepared with a skirt.) When she was standing I could hardly tell that it was not a skirt. The only hypothesis my adolescent mind could come up with for this matron’s opposition is that somehow wearing culottes would encourage a young lady to be more lax in her deportment and posture when sitting. (I gather that the Latin teacher did not attend girl basketball games.)
I once heard a woman of a previous generation opine that women lawyers should wear dresses or skirts in the courtroom and not pants suits or slacks. No reason was given. (I speculate that wearing the latter would cheat men – and sniping clucking women? – out of an opportunity to evaluate the female attorneys’ legs.)
Ukraine scuttles about 1/3 of all of Russia’s strategic bombers by close-range drone attacks launched from cabins of some sort on trucks. Losses estimated at $2-7Bn.