Top o’ the morning to you on Thursday, June 12, 2025, and National Red Rose Day. Here are some roses I photographed at the flower market in Bogotá, Colombia in 2020 (the U.S. gets many of its flowers, and nearly all its roses, from Colombia).
It’s also Clean Your Teeth Day, as I have a dentist appointment downtown this morning for my biannual cleaning. Posting may be very light today, even limited to this post. Bear with me; I do my best.
It’s also National Jerky Day, National Peanut Butter Cookie Day, International Cachaça Day (celebrating the spirit distilled from sugarcane used in making the famous Brazilian cocktail caipirinha), International Falafel Day, and Loving Day, celebrating the legal end to the ban of mixed-race marriage that occurred in the case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967(!). Here are Mildred and Richard Loving, plaintiffs in the case, photographed in 1967:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 12 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*A few pieces of nooz about the protests about arresting immigrants. First, the protests are spreading, and we even had some in Chicago on Tuesday.
The streets of Los Angeles were quiet on Wednesday morning after an overnight curfew imposed by the mayor in the city’s downtown. Cities across the country prepared for more demonstrations later in the day.
The curfew in Los Angeles, which lifted at 6 a.m. local time, brought calm to the area, where five days of protests over the federal immigration raids have occasionally turned violent. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California blamed President Trump for unrest that began with federal deportation raids on Friday.
Tensions remained high after the U.S. military announced that 700 Marines would join National Guard troops in the city on Wednesday. A spokeswoman for the U.S. military’s Northern Command said that the Marines, who have arrived in the area, were undergoing preparatory training, would help protect federal property and personnel, including immigration enforcement agents.
On Tuesday, protests that began in Los Angeles grew in size and intensity across the country. Some demonstrators in downtown Chicago threw water bottles at police officers and vandalized at least two vehicles. In New York, officers made dozens of arrests near federal buildings in Lower Manhattan, the police said. In Atlanta, they used chemical agents and physical force to drive a few dozen protesters from their foothold on a highway.
More protests were planned in several cities on Wednesday, including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, San Antonio and Seattle. Some organizers said that local demonstrations this week were a prelude to nationwide ones planned for Saturday against President Trump and an unusual military parade in Washington, D.C.
. . . . Arrests: Since protests began last Friday in response to federal immigration raids in Los Angeles’s garment district, hundreds of people have been arrested in several cities, including more than 330 in Los Angeles, more than 240 in San Francisco and a dozen in Austin, Texas, officials said. The encounters have turned tense at times, but the protests have remained largely confined to small sections of cities.
Many of these arrests may be of protestors, not immigrants. The protestors should of course be allowed to demonstrate all they want, so long as it’s in accordance with the First Amendment. And there should be no violence or vandalism. Protestors who do such things deserve to be arrested, regardless of whether you feel their cause is just. That’s civil disobedience: the willingness to take the punishment for breaking what you see as an unjust law or acting illegally but in a cause you see as just.
*There are already 15 detained “terrorists” in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. a tactic for avoiding American legal jurisdiction. Fifteen prisoners remain, some convicted and some in legal limbo. Now Trump is preparing to send detained immigrants there.
The administration is unlikely to inform the foreigners’ home governments about the impending transfers to the infamous military facility, including close U.S. allies such as Britain, Germany and France, the officials said.
The plans, which are subject to change, come as immigration hard-liners inside President Donald Trump’s Cabinet push for more deportations and arrests of undocumented migrants.
The preparations include medical screening for 9,000 individuals to determine whether they are healthy enough to be sent to Guantánamo, notorious for its history as a prison for suspected terrorists and others captured on battlefields in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some of these details were reported earlier by Politico.
It is far from clear whether the facilities there can accommodate 9,000 new detainees, an influx that would amount to a massive increase from the several hundred migrants moved to and from the base earlier this year.
But Trump administration officials say the plan is necessary to free up capacity at domestic detention facilities, which have become overcrowded amid Trump’s pledge to implement the biggest deportation of undocumented migrants in American history. A document reviewed by The Post said that “GTMO,” the government acronym for the base, “is not at capacity.”
Another bad move. First—and I’m not sure about this—does being at Guantánamo mean that incarcerated foreigners aren’t subject to all the provisions of the U.S. legal system? They do have the right of habeas corpus, according to the Supreme Court, but the Trump administration has been notably unwilling to provide justification for holding undocumented immigrants. Second, if the foreign governments aren’t informed, then they can provide no legal assistance to their citizens, something that should be done. Third, we all know the sordid history of suspected terrorists held in that place, and it isn’t pretty. Now it’s not clear that this will happen, but it’s a bad idea as well as an inhumane one,
*The WSJ reports that California governor Gavin Newsom is using his opposition to Trump’s anti-immigration actions in California as a way to advance his own political career.
Gavin Newsom is, once again, in the eye of a tempest. “It is a profoundly important moment,” the California governor said in an interview Monday evening as protesters massed in the streets and U.S. Marines made their way to the state on the president’s orders.
It is also an important moment for Newsom, widely seen as a top potential Democratic presidential candidate, who has leaned into the conflict to position himself as the leader of the opposition. “Seven hundred brave men and women are being used as pawns in Trump’s war on the Constitution,” he told The Wall Street Journal of the Marine deployment, speaking from the Los Angeles County emergency operations center where he has been holed up helping coordinate the protest response. “Our Founding Fathers didn’t live and die for this.”
Newsom traveled to Los Angeles on Sunday to try to quell sometimes-violent protests there, prompted by the Trump administration’s mass immigration arrests. On Monday, President Trump said Newsom should be arrested, calling him grossly incompetent. Newsom, in turn, accused Trump of “authoritarian overreach” and insisted the rule of law itself was at stake.
It is a moment of both opportunity and political peril for the two-term leader of the nation’s most-populous state, whom Trump has singled out to blame for the violence and rioting he says local officials have failed to control. Newsom’s pugilistic response to Trump’s provocations has gladdened the hearts of Democrats hungry for a crusader. But at a time when Newsom has attempted to moderate his image, playing to the Democratic base runs the risk of cementing his profile as a left-coast progressive and associating him with images of urban unrest.
Asked about his presidential aspirations, Newsom, who will leave office next year, didn’t deny he might seek higher office. “I’m not thinking about running, but it’s a path that I could see unfold,” he told the Journal. The 57-year-old said it was too early to make a decision and he would wait to see if the moment felt right.
I’ll bet he’s gonna run, as the credible competition is very thin. Now people are saying that he’s got no chance since he leads California, seen as a progressive state. In today’s Free Press there is in fact an article called “Why Gavin Newsom will never be president.” I’m not sure about his candidacy, but remember that Americans in general want illegal immigration cut way back. Whether Trump’s way of doing that will redound to his credibility with Republicans remains to be seen, but I have a feeling that the Right won’t care that much about Trump calling in the National Guard or the Marines. I suspect the bottom line in 2028 will be whether people feel they’re better off economically.
*Charlotte Allen joins nearly the whole world in panning the new Disney version of “Snow White” (at Quillette): “It’s no longer 1937. . . “. A few excerpts:
The Disney company’s 2025 live-action version of Snow White is just as terrible as nearly everyone says it is. The film has attained an abysmal score of 1.7 on IMDb from 360k ratings and 2.2k reviews (although the site warns, “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title.”) At Rotten Tomatoes, meanwhile, the film has racked up a more generous audience score of 71 percent and a critics’ score of forty percent (although many of the positive reviews are of the “not quite as terrible as you have heard” variety). The upshot has been an eye-wateringly expensive box-office flop as well as a critical disaster. Disney’s animated 1937 adaptation of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale—the first animated feature film ever made—remains a beloved classic (7.1 on IMDb nearly ninety years after it was released, and no unusual voting activity flagged). So how did Disney manage to take a bankable property and produce something this bad?
The new Snow White is bad because, while its 24-year-old lead, Rachel Zegler, is a decent singer, she can’t act very well and she’s been woefully miscast—probably because she is half-Latina and thus qualified the movie for post-#OscarsSoWhite “representation and inclusion” points. (With a Peruvian mother, I’m half-Latina myself, so why didn’t someone ask me to play Snow White?) In Disney’s animated 1937 version (titled Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), our heroine was a sweet and cheery innocent, but Zegler’s character has been rewritten as a Mary Sue girlboss who shows off what a smartypants she is by reciting all the dwarfs’ names in reverse alphabetical order upon being introduced to them. And instead of cleaning their house in return for their hospitality, she makes them do their own cleanup. It’s “Whistle While You Work” for thee, but not for me. If you found yourself hoping that this obnoxious know-it-all would remain dead after biting into the poisoned apple, you were not alone.
I don’t care at all if she’s a Hispanic cast as a “snow white” character, but I do care about Ziegler’s modification of the film into some kind of woke fantasy, and I especially don’t like the seven dwarves being P.C.’ed into computer-generated characters called “magical creatures” (see below). That took jobs away from real dwarves, who wanted those roles!
The new Snow White is bad because the seven dwarfs are crudely rendered CGI motion-capture creations. They look less like the Doc, Grumpy, and co. we fondly remember than what one critic described as “garden gnomes.” Unlike the 1937 cartoon originals with their seven distinctive comic personalities, the new uncanny-valley dwarfs are difficult to tell apart, except for Dopey, who looks like Alfred E. Neuman in a medieval hat. (The new Snow White, by the way, won’t even let Dopey be Dopey; he has to have a lugubrious back story in which he doesn’t speak because he’s “afraid.”)
And the new Snow White is bad because it gets rid of the handsome prince. Why? At Disney’s D23 Expo in September 2022, Zegler bragged that she and her fellow cast members were bringing a “modern edge” to the story. Asked by Variety to elaborate, Zegler enthused: “I just mean that it’s no longer 1937. … [Snow White] is not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love; she’s going to be dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.” Well, OK—but try telling that to the 99 percent double-X chromosome Hallmark Christmas-movie-binge demographic, for whom “Someday My Prince Will Come” is the whole point. . . .
The girlboss heroine, the anonymous CGI dwarfs, and the substitution of romance with ambition are all bad and depressing things, but they are not the worst thing about the new film. The worst thing is its failure to recreate or even understand the story it is trying to tell or the power that story has exerted over generations of readers and re-tellers. Snow White cost US$270 million, making it one of the most expensive movies Disney has ever produced—a fortune in shoots and re-shoots as the project floundered amid delays, antagonistic media reports, and Zegler’s running social-media commentary about feminism, Trump, the Americans who voted for Trump, and Israel’s Gaza war. Disney selected Marc Webb to helm the project, a top-rated fantasy director who had previously made The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and its sequel.No fewer than seven writers pitched in on the screenplay, but only Erin Cressida Wilson (The Girl on the Train, 2016) received a screen credit. (Greta Gerwig is reported to have been called in on a script-rescue mission mid-shoot, and since she has a track record of turning preadolescent girlhood favourites like Little Women and Barbie dolls into instruments of feminist consciousness-raising, it is possible that she tanked the new Snow White single-handedly.)
The review goes on, and it’s snarky for sure, but I ain’t gonna see this movie, and I doubt that many here have, either. The movie has apparently gone beyond the point of where ideology trumps entertainment, and the public doesn’t like that. Here’s the trailer:
*Harvey Weinstein is serving a 48-year sentence in California for sex crimes, and was convicted in New York, but a New York case, in which he was convicted of rape and sexual assault, was thrown out because of issues with the judge. Now, in the retrial, all hell is breaking loose in the jury room:
Jury deliberations in Harvey Weinstein’ sex crimes retrial teetered Wednesday as the foreperson again requested to speak to the judge about “a situation” he found troubling.
The man — who complained Monday that other jurors were pushing people to change their minds and talking about information beyond the charges — was being questioned in private, at his request.
While the jury was in court to hear the answer to an earlier request to re-hear the text of a rape law, the foreperson signaled to Judge Curtis Farber that he wanted to talk.
“He said words to the effect of ‘I can’t go back in there with the other jurors,’” Farber explained later. The foreperson was sent to wait in a separate room, where he penned a note saying, “I need to talk to you about a situation.”
When briefly brought into court, the foreperson said he wanted to speak in private. He, the judge, prosecutors and Weinstein’s lawyers then went behind closed doors.
The discussion was closed to the press and public, but Farber later said the foreperson had expressed that he didn’t want to change his position — whatever it may be — and was being bullied.
“He did indicate that at least one other juror made comments to the effect of ‘I’ll meet you outside one day,’ and there’s yelling and screaming,” the judge said.
Weinstein lawyer Arthur Aidala characterized the foreperson’s concerns more severely, saying that the man had said he was concerned for his safety after his fellow panelist talked about meeting him outside and added, “you don’t know me.”
“I don’t think the court is protecting this juror. Period,” Aidala said, going on to ask for a mistrial.
Apparently the foreperson is stubborn and said nothing would make him change his mind. That’s not a good thing to say, even if you’re thinking it!
The episode was the latest sign of strain among the jurors. On Friday, one of them asked to be excused because he felt another member of the group was being treated unfairly.
Weinstein’s lawyers asked unsuccessfully for a mistrial then, and again after the foreperson expressed his concerns Monday. The jury kept deliberating and went through Tuesday without sending any more messages about interpersonal tensions.
The seven female and five male jurors started their fifth day of deliberations Wednesday by re-hearing accuser Jessica Mann’s testimony that he raped her in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013. The group wrapped up Tuesday’s deliberations by asking to revisit that testimony.
Well, it doesn’t matter much, does it—even if Weinstein is found not guilty. He’s 73 and serving 48 years in California, so he’ll die in prison no matter what happens.
I’ve never been on a jury; I’ve been in the pool several times, but was never selected. In fact, I’ve never even been questioned; I just sit in the jury pool and they fill the jury with people before they get to me, Now, I guess, I’m too old to fulfill this civic duty, as Illinois has age limits.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are on the beat:
Szaron: Where are you going?Hili: To check what this sunbeam is landing on.
Szaron: Gdzie idziesz?Hili: Sprawdzić na co świeci ten promień.
*******************
From Jay, who gives this a progressive headline:
From The Language Nerds (click to enlarge); what happens in different countries of Europe when you try to speak their language. I think France is wrong, at least in my experience,
From Stacy:
From Masih, another Iranian woman missing an eye. The English translation:
We are the daughters of White Wednesdays and stealthy freedoms, the voice of protest of the #Woman/Life/Freedom generation; Campaigns led by the courage of dear Masih Alinejad against compulsory hijab and in the direction of overthrowing The Islamic Republic was formed. We proudly stand in the front line against compulsory hijab. There is a sea of blood between us, the subversives, and the scoundrel Faezeh Hashemi. Certainly, a prince who defends his father’s crimes and a bloodthirsty government is a cursed person, but we are ordinary people and we gave our lives for it. Reformist, conservative, the whole story is over. No to compulsory hijab. #Woman/Life/Freedom
ما دختران چهارشنبههای سفید و آزادیهای یواشکی، صدای اعتراض نسل #زن_زندگی_آزادی هستیم؛
کمپینهایی که با شجاعت مسیح علینژاد عزیز علیه حجاب اجباری و در راستای براندازی
جمهوری اسلامی شکل گرفتند.
ما با افتخار در صف اول نه به حجاب اجباری ایستادهایم.
بین ما براندازان و فائزه هاشمی… pic.twitter.com/DYGIIvOFj5— Kosar Eftekhari (@kosareftekharii) June 10, 2025
From Luana, a Big Lie in USA Today:
This is a real paragraph published in this @USATODAY piece. Does anyone believe this? pic.twitter.com/Bfdi4a23oI
— Brent Scher (@BrentScher) June 7, 2025
From Malcolm. LOOK AT THIS CAT!
The Norwegian Forest Cat is a breed of domestic cat originating in Northern Europe and it’s one of the oldest, as it’s believed to have been brought to Norway about 1000 CE by the Vikings.
[📹 bhelga9700]pic.twitter.com/6nNDhsFFVw
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 3, 2025
Two from my feed:
Hamas filmed every terrible thing they did to our family. They broadcast it live to Tsachi’s wife’s social media. It was how many of us found out what horrors were happening.
We didn’t get the choice not to see. #GretaThunberg pic.twitter.com/bsP9tYZHYO
— Heidi Bachram 🎗️ (@HeidiBachram) June 11, 2025
A polychaete worm with a weird body:
Fancy footwork from a Swima polychaete #OkeanosExplorer ex1711 dive 11 #MarineLife
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This Polish baker lived but two months in the camp before he perished.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-12T09:54:31.253Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, life can live nearly everywhere on Earth, even boiling hot springs—or on a PVC windowsill:
Weird sigil-like lichen growing on a PVC window-sill
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-06-11T11:34:23.131Z
And if you’re teaching evolution, you may want to read this:
Its here! Finally published. http://www.tes.com/magazine/tea…
— EvoNerdette (@bethmorillo-hall.bsky.social) 2025-05-31T05:04:38.835Z
Loved the language reaction map and I agree with it (even French).
I’ve studied Japanese (and speak it well), Russian (not bad but far from fluent) and Arabic (pretty bad) and some high school French: there are huge differences between one’s reception in different countries. The more remote (Japanese) and rare the language the greater the joy the locals exhibit when you speak it.
It is about asymmetries. Once I was in Bangladesh for a month and guessed that if I learned Bengali as a white guy in a year I’d be on TV and famous there.
D.A.
NYC
I enjoy that there is a Latin Salutatorian student address at Harvard graduation. I do not understand it, but am glad to watch. My 1970 BS (math) diploma from The College of William and Mary is written in Latin and Greek but it came with a smaller piece of paper inserted which was an English translation. I always wondered if the BA’s also got a translation or they did not need it, because they were assumed to be fluent in the classical languages.
At peak law pretentiousness my physical law degree is written entirely in Latin. I can read my name and “Collegium” (of a uni founded in the 1960s)- and that’s it.
Give it a break I say….
🙂
Lawyers learn a few words of Latin – mainly to impress non-lawyers. Silly.
D.A.
NYC
I graduated from Cardiff University so parts of the ceremony were in both English and Welsh. According to my two Welsh-speaking friends, the vice-Chancellor was speaking Welsh so badly that they assumed it was Latin for the first five minutes.
My English brother crossed the channel on a day trip. He walked into a Calais café and ordered a coffee in his best French. The café attendant fixed him with a stare that could kill and said “Speak English, please, Monsieur.”
A u6THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. -Anne Frank, Holocaust diarist (12 Jun 1929-1945)
The federal actions in L.A. seem a very clear violation of the Posse Comitatus act, amended and expanded recently to cover also the U.S. Marine Corps. I’m surprised that isn’t big news (yet?). From Wikipedia: “From and after the passage of this act it shall not be lawful to employ any part of the Army of the United States, as a posse comitatus, or otherwise, for the purpose of executing the laws…” And as amended in 2020, “18 U.S.C. § 1385. Use of Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force as posse comitatus: Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, or the Space Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” But as we’ve seen, I suppose Trump will be immune to prosecution under this law, even after his presidency.
It is my understanding that Posse Comitatus does not prevent the government from using the military on our own citizens. It’s been done many times. PC says that the military cannot be used for law enforcement but that under certain conditions, the US military can be deployed for protecting federal property, or for domestic “emergencies”. This latter condition requires an additional level scrutiny but can be authorized by the president under the Insurrection Act, by an act of Congress, or they can deployed in the case of natural disaster, such as when the Marines were sent to New Orleans after Katrina.
I think Trump is an ass, a childish, belligerent, fascist-wannabe, with a large number of useful idiots rioting and giving him every excuse to act out his authoritarian fantasies…. but he is acting legally here.
“It’s been done many times.”
It’s only happened 7 times in the history of the US. That’s rare in my book. And I’m not talking about natural disasters like Katrina. And Trump didn’t cite the Insurrection Act. I wouldn’t be so sure he is acting legally here. Unfortunately, Trump doesn’t care about legalities.
The EvoScope Project and the author’s ideas on scientific capital are very interesting. Kudos to her! This is STEM as a human, not STEM to prepare for a specific vocation. She, like a significant number of subject matter experts in academe, government research labs (including our military), and industry has apparently put together an educational package to support moving current K-12 teachers’ knowledge beyond what they learned in college to what needs to be known by a teacher today. I worked on providing these types of workshop packages in engineering, math, and science after my retirement from NASA in 2008 and was tremendously pleased with those teachers who sought out such courses outside of school hours and over the summer, disappointed in the many teachers who did not, and fully disgusted with most every state and local board of education that did not make additional education in contemporary developments in a teacher’s content area mandatory and pay for it.
I just heard yesterday, but it seems that it happened the day before, that the Am Medical Assn approved an emergency resolution at their annual meeting to request that the Senate investigate Junior Kennedy over his firing of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (Vaccine Advisory Panel). Attempts to dilute the resolution were not approved.
Bravo to them, and relatedly does anyone have any idea when the AMA last ventured into the political arena so energetically?
Foreigners held in prison receive only consular assistance from their home governments, not legal assistance, essentially just news from home and messages back to their families. The foreign government has no standing whatsoever in the domestic legal process unless there was a violation of diplomatic immunity. Remember citizen-expats of almost all countries don’t pay income taxes to their countries of citizenship. The responsibility of a government to its citizens living abroad is very thin. You’re pretty much on your own when you enter a foreign country, especially if you move there.
But yes, the practice is that the domestic government informs the foreign government of the detention so it can petition for consular access. Of course, unless U.S. law says the government must do this, there is no way to compel it.
Yes Leslie – this is the situation in the unpleasant world of being a citizen pinched in a foreign country.
And…if your obscure country doesn’t have an embassy… you’re out of luck. (Some countries have Big Buddies. Like.. if I lose my Australian passport (when I used it) in, say, Morocco, the Canadians will “help” me).
But in all cases that help is minimal from Big Buddies or one’s own diplomats. They’ll give the unlucky tourist/migrant the phone numbers of local lawyers presumably who aren’t crooks and tell your family back home you’re “effed”.
In heartwarming cases low level diplomats (whose first embassy jobs are this kind of thing) will visit the jail from time to time, put (your family’s) money in your jail account… or in the worst case ship your corpse back home.
My legal advice: avoid being arrested but REALLY avoid being arrested travelling.
D.A.
NYC
It’s National Wed Wose Day?
https://images.app.goo.gl/FLEjrbmpj9QdEDHH9
Re: Gitmo
It may yet be seen that the migrants are treated well, not tortured or beaten, and allowed to contact their country of origin representatives.
But somehow I doubt that the same people who thought their modus operandi was OK after 9-11, are going to suddenly change their minds with the new batch of ehm… internees. Their training will kick in and it will be the same story.
I hope I am wrong.
Greta Longstocking looks defeated. Her 5 day sailing trip in the Meditteranean aboard the selfie yacht looked like a fun and relaxing summer vacation but her mission to signal virtue to stop the “Palestinian genocide” didn’t work out. She looks no worse for wear though after being kidnapped by Israeli forces and is probably still enjoying that sammy they gave her on the boat. “How dare them!”
Time to pivot to the next professional protest because her carbon footprint just ballooned up and her priveleged white girl boat ride to help the Palestinian people was completely unhelpful. Maybe she should team up with Elon on autism awareness or stop the apartheid in South Africa.
Some people think Newsom has no chance of being elected president? I remember how many people laughed at the idea of George W. Bush getting elected. And a lot of people thought Trump was done after losing in 2020.