Welcome to the last day of June: Monday, June 30, 2025, which is my sister’s birthday (happy birthday, Sis!) and my half-birthday, since I was born on December 30. Here’s Mom, Susan, and I in our passport picture taken before we moved to Greece (kids had to be pictured with a parent). This would be about 1954 or 1955. I just noticed how big my ears were in proportion to my head. I think I’ve grown into them now.
It’s also International Asteroid Day, National Meteor Day, and National Organization for Women Day NOW was founded on this day in 1966 by a group of women, and Wikipedia lists them:
The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 by 28 women at the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women in June (the successor to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women), and another 21 women and men who became founders at the October 1966 NOW Organizing Conference, for a total of 49 founders. Both conferences were held in Washington, D.C.[18] The 28 women who became founders in June were: Ada Allness, Mary Evelyn Benbow, Gene Boyer, Shirley Chisholm, Analoyce Clapp, Kathryn F. Clarenbach, Catherine Conroy, Caroline Davis, Mary Eastwood, Edith Finlayson, Betty Friedan, Dorothy Haener, Anna Roosevelt Halstead, Lorene Harrington, Aileen Hernandez, Mary Lou Hill, Esther Johnson, Nancy Knaak, Min Matheson, Helen Moreland, Pauli Murray, Ruth Murray, Inka O’Hanrahan, Pauline A. Parish, Eve Purvis, Edna Schwartz, Mary-Jane Ryan Snyder, Gretchen Squires, Betty Talkington and Caroline Ware.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 30 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Stymied by their inability to stop Trump’s Big Beautiful Budget Bill, Senate Democrate did the only thing they could to stall its progress: demand that the 940-page bill be read out aloud in the Senate chamber.
. . .Unable to stop the march toward passage of the 940-page bill, the Democrats as the minority party in Congress is using the tools at its disposal to delay and drag out the process.
Democrats forced a full reading of the text, which took some 16 hours. Then senators took over the debate, filling the chamber with speeches, while Republicans largely stood aside.
. . . Using a congressional process called budget reconciliation, the Republicans can rely on a simple majority vote in the Senate, rather than the typical 60-vote threshold needed to overcome objections.
Without the filibuster, Democrats have latched on to other tools to mount their objections.
One is the full reading of the bill text, which has been done in past situations. Democrats also intended to use their full 10 hours of available debate time, which was underway.
And then Democrats are prepared to propose dozens of amendments to the package, a process called vote-a-rama. But Republicans late Sunday postponed that expected overnight session to early Monday.
“Reckless and irresponsible,” said Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan. “A gift to the billionaire class,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Debate has been underway in the Senate late into [Friday] night, with Republicans wrestling President Donald Trump’s big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts over mounting Democratic opposition — and even some brake-pumping over the budget slashing by the president himself.
The outcome from the weekend of work in the Senate remains uncertain and highly volatile, and overnight voting has been pushed off until Monday. GOP leaders are rushing to meet Trump’s Fourth of July deadline to pass the package, but they barely secured enough support to muscle it past a procedural Saturday night hurdle in a tense scene. A handful of Republican holdouts revolted, and it took phone calls from Trump and a visit from Vice President JD Vance to keep it on track.
. . . All told, the Senate bill includes some $4 trillion in tax cuts, making permanent Trump’s 2017 rates, which would expire at the end of the year if Congress fails to act, while adding the new ones he campaigned on, including no taxes on tips.
The Senate package would roll back billions in green energy tax credits that Democrats warn will wipe out wind and solar investments nationwide, and impose $1.2 trillion in cuts, largely to Medicaid and food stamps, by imposing work requirements and making sign-up eligibility more stringent.
The Republicans spent all night with the vote-a-rama tactic, but according to the NYT, debate is still going on. Trump has given Congress until July 4 to pass the bill . . and then what? And a GOP Senator, pressured by Trump, said he wasn’t going to run for re-election:
In a stark display of the political peril for Republicans around the bill, Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, one of the party’s most vulnerable incumbents, suddenly announced Sunday that he would not run for re-election next year after voting against bringing the bill to the floor. His opposition had drawn a harsh rebuke from Mr. Trump, who threatened to recruit a primary opponent to challenge him.
Later, in a scathing speech on the Senate floor, Mr. Tillis assailed the bill and Mr. Trump, saying the measure was a betrayal of the president’s promise to protect Medicaid and warning that his party was “about to make a mistake.”
Trump’s bullying has come to threatening to “primary” one of his own party’s Senator if that Senator doesn’t vote the Trump Way. That’s a good way to impose your will on the country, but a bad way to foster democracy.
*We have another Trump-induced capitulation, and this is a big one in academia. The President of the University of Virginia resigned after Trump asked him to step down over a Federal civil rights investigation. President James E. Ryan, accused of heading a university that was too deep into DEI, voluntarily resigned, though he says he was going to leave next year anyway. (Article is archived here.)
The Trump administration on Friday secured perhaps the most significant victory in its pressure campaign on higher education, forcing the resignation of the University of Virginia’s president, James E. Ryan, over the college’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
The extraordinary wielding of federal power to oust the 58-year-old college president showed the unusual lengths the administration would go to pursue President Trump’s political agenda and shift the ideological tilt of academia, which he views as hostile to conservatives.
Mr. Ryan’s resignation also presents new challenges for other colleges negotiating with the government, including Harvard, whose officials have been repeatedly attacked by Mr. Trump and his allies. While the administration has stripped billions of dollars from universities in pursuit of Mr. Trump’s policy goals, Mr. Ryan’s departure marks the first time a university has been coerced into removing its leader.
The reaction to Mr. Ryan’s resignation was immediate and emotional on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville. Faculty leadership held an emergency meeting to adopt a resolution opposing the change, and hundreds of students and faculty members gathered for an impromptu march to Carr’s Hill, the college president’s residence.
The DEI angle:
The New York Times reported on Thursday evening that the Justice Department had demanded Mr. Ryan’s resignation as a condition to settle a civil rights investigation into the school’s diversity practices.
In a letter sent on Thursday to the head of the board overseeing the university, Mr. Ryan said that he had planned to step down at the end of the next academic year. But “given the circumstances and today’s conversations,” he wrote, he had decided “with deep sadness” to tender his resignation now, according to one of the people familiar with the matter who was briefed on the letter’s contents.
. . . The Justice Department had targeted the University of Virginia for at least the past month. But 10 days ago, government lawyers tasked with enforcing federal laws issued a stern warning to the board overseeing the University of Virginia that the school needed to act quickly. The department informed the college of multiple complaints of race-based treatment on campus, and of the government’s conclusion that the use of race in admissions and other student benefits were “widespread practices throughout every component and facet of the institution.”
“Time is running short, and the department’s patience is wearing thin,” the letter, dated June 17, said.
More despotism. The administrations files a complaint against a university, and then tells the school that if its President doesn’t resign, all hell will break loose (i.e., Trump will pull a Harvard on U. Va., stripping it of funding). No wonder Ryan didn’t want to fight any more!
*According to David French at the NYT, Trump has made his worst nomination yet for a federal judge: Emil Bove. French calls the nomination “reckless.” (Article is archived here.)
On Wednesday, when the eyes of the nation were still fixed on the Middle East, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Trump’s nomination of Emil Bove to serve as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which covers cases from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Virgin Islands.
Emil Bove, however, would be a problem for a very long time. At 44 years old, he’s been nominated for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. That means he’d long outlast Trump in the halls of American power, and if past performance is any measure of future results, we should prepare for a judge who would do what he deems necessary to accomplish his political objectives — law and morality be damned.
. . . At the start of his second term, Trump named Bove the acting deputy attorney general, and Bove immediately made himself an instrument of Trump’s vengeance. He ordered F.B.I. officials to compile lists of agents who participated in investigations related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He fired Justice Department prosecutors who were hired to work on Jan. 6 cases without any evidence of wrongdoing.
He ordered prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to drop criminal charges against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, seemingly on the ground that prosecuting Adams could interfere with Trump’s immigration agenda, an action which triggered a revolt in the Southern District.
Danielle Sassoon, a former law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia who was then the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District, resigned, declaring that she did not see “any good faith basis” for Bove’s legal position. Another attorney with impeccable conservative credentials, Hagan Scotten, wrote perhaps the most scathing resignation letter I’ve ever read.
“No system of ordered liberty,” he wrote, “can allow the government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.”
*On his website, lawyer Jonathan Turley beefs about the proliferation of “hate speech” prosecutions in Germany and the attendant legal crackdown on what Americans would consider free speech. The result is no apparent decrease in hate speech but chilling of political speech in general (h/t Bill).
We have discussed how Germany is extending its criminalization of speech to the Internet. Germany imposed a legal regime that would allow fining social networks such as Facebook up to 500,000 euros ($522,000) for each day the platform leaves a “fake news” story up without deleting it. The country fined YouTube to force the company to remove views that the government considers disinformation on COVID-19.
Germany has also targeted Elon Musk with threatened prosecution if he does not reestablish censorship systems at X.
None of this, mind you, has put a dent in the ranks of actual fascists and haters. Neo-Nazis are holding massive rallies by adopting new symbols and coded words, while Germany arrested a man on a train because he had a Hitler ringtone on his phone.
Last year, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser was upset that civil libertarians were calling her anti-free speech, so she tried to shut down a publication for a satirical meme.
That “new world order” is based on an aggressive anti-free speech platform that has been enforced for years by the European Union. It is vividly evident in the latest crackdown in Germany.
According to the BKA, there were 10,732 crimes related to online hate speech committed last year—a record number and four times the crimes from 2021. It is an example of the insatiable appetite created by censorship as people seek to silence their critics or those with opposing views.
Stefan Niehoff, a 64-year-old former Bundeswehr sergeant was convicted for posting satirical images involving Nazi imagery. While the criminal case was eventually dropped, he was fined because the judge failed to find his actions sufficiently satirical.
Not sufficiently satirical! And yes, it’s chilled the speech of Germans:
According to a poll of German citizens. Only 18% of Germans feel free to express their opinions in public. 59% of Germans did not even feel free to express themselves in private among friends. And just 17% felt free to express themselves online.
When nearly one in five Germans is too cowed to express their opinions in public, and nearly 60% won’t even do it in private, we have a problem, Bonn. But this suppression of hate speech is going on all over Europe (viz., the UK), not just Germany. It’s a worrying trend, as are the many punitive actions against Europeans for criticizing their government. These are democracies?
*Finally, from the AP’s reliable “oddities” page, we learn that a veterinary dentist (I didn’t know there were such people) saved the canine tooth of an Alaskan brown bear (aka grizzly) by making a giant titanium crown for it. This is after the dentist previously did a root canal on the tooth, but had to do more work after the tooth was re-injured.
An Alaska brown bear at the Lake Superior Zoo in northeastern Minnesota has a gleaming new silver-colored canine tooth in a first-of-its-kind procedure for a bear.
The 800-pound (360-kilogram) Tundra was put under sedation Monday and fitted with a new crown — the largest dental crown ever created, according to the zoo.
“He’s got a little glint in his smile now,” zoo marketing manager Caroline Routley said Wednesday.
The hour-long procedure was done by Dr. Grace Brown, a board-certified veterinary dentist who helped perform a root canal on the same tooth two years ago. When Tundra reinjured the tooth, the decision was made to give him a new, stronger crown. The titanium alloy crown, made by Creature Crowns of Post Falls, Idaho, was created for Tundra from a wax caste of the tooth.
Brown plans to publish a paper on the procedure in the Journal of Veterinary Dentistry later this year.
“This is the largest crown ever created in the world,” she said. “It has to be published.
Tundra is now 6 years old and, at his full height on his hind legs, stands about 8 feet (2.4 meters) tall. The sheer size of the bear required a member of the zoo’s trained armed response team to be present in the room — a gun within arm’s reach — in case the animal awoke during the procedure, Routley said. But the procedure went without a hitch, and Tundra is now back in his habitat, behaving and eating normally.
Below is a video showing the shiny new tooth. Tundra has a grill!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is finally being helpful:
Andrzej: Do you know where my glasses are?
Hili: In the kitchen, next to the kettle.
In Polish:
Ja: Czy wiesz gdzie sa moje okulary.
Hili: W kuchni, koło czajnika.
*******************
From CinEmma:
From David:
From Now That’s Wild:
Masih is quiet today, but here’s JKR responding to a critic in her inimitable way:
When you tell a woman she must pretend a man is a woman, you’re asserting the right to control her speech and perception of reality, while also trivialising and devaluing her female-specific experience. You’re asking her to agree that ‘woman’ is a concept men can embody at will. https://t.co/G2xVwYPTJc
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 29, 2025
From Luana. If I ever get cancer, I’m going to have my chemotherapy early in the morning. We need to find out the reason for this disparity:
Super interesting – and now supported by evidence from a randomized trial
Blue: each day’s chemo-immunotherapy was started and completed before 3 pm
Red: each day’s therapy was started and completed after 3 pm
Those who received treatment early in the day had better survival https://t.co/oyaoDaC17j pic.twitter.com/TJ9IC6RxpV
— Samuel Hume (@DrSamuelBHume) June 28, 2025
Andrzej posted this on his public Facebook page. Here’s the English translation with my notes in brackets. Malgorzata’s “collapse” was a heart attack she had on the London Underground; fortunately, Andrzej carried her out and got her to the hospital, where they restarted her heart. She survived until her death on June 13 of this year.
The day before Malgorzata’s death, we sat as usual (plus minus) every hour and smoked a cigarette. Yes, a cigarette, because since her heart attack in 1995, we’ve always smoked one cigarette per episode, (friends laughed that we treat them like “weed”). [JAC: as in Poland, they’d go outside and share a single cigarette.] After her collapse, I couldn’t stop and ran from the apartment to the emergency stairs in our London apartment. After half a year she started following me, sitting next to me and saying “let me be pulled” [JAC: i.e., “let me have a puff”] and it stayed like that. After my three strokes and throat cancer, the story kept repeating itself in the same way.So, the Monday before Tuesday, we were sitting on our porch steps, smoking a cigarette and Malgorzata said, “do you see the first lily?” ” . At the end of the garden, by the gate to the garden the first lily actually bloomed. There are a few more now.
From Malcolm: one minute of moggy cuddles:
We don’t deserve cats…🥹 pic.twitter.com/m16Df8ToUQ
— The Internet of Cats 🐈🐈⬛ (@KittiesInternet) June 19, 2025
From my feed: I’d like to know the trick as well:
Someone explain how this is done pic.twitter.com/kjCijZPs7v
— Dudes Posting Their W’s (@DudespostingWs) June 29, 2025
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
A Belgian Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was thirteen.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-30T12:15:41.303Z
Two form Dr. Cobb. First, he’s correcting the drafts of his Crick biography again. The text is 485 pages long, the rest is other stuff (photos, index, and so on):
Tfw you finish going through 575 pages of proofs for the fifth time and you think “finally nailed it, picked up all the misteaks”. Just like you thought the previous four times.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-06-29T16:00:42.462Z
. . . . and a gorgeous flatworm:
A Turbellarian flatworm! Loving the colour that just had to be seen in darkfield. 🦑 #plankton
— Elizabeth Beston (@elizabethbeston.bsky.social) 2025-06-28T18:24:17.683Z
UVA is a state university overseen by a board of visitors appointed by the governor, who right now is a big trumpster, glenn youngkin. My understanding is that the board hires and annually evaluates the university president. So where the hell is the board of visitors in all of this?
More on the University of Virginia:
Timothy J. Heaphy: What the University of Virginia Should Have Done. New York Times, June 30, 2025
https://archive.ph/0RmB2
Timothy J. Heaphy is the former university counsel for the University of Virginia.
Thank you for the link, Peter. Excellent article by Tim Heaphy (whom many people may remember as a counsel on the House Jan6 hearings) who is absolutely there and knowledgeable regarding UVA and Virginia politics. He points out the the board of visitors, a youngkin appointed majority, did not defend the university or the president, but indeed carried out what was likely a youngkin wish and pushed popular president jim ryan out. This is just utter bullshit
Jim Ryan was a notorious advocate of DEI. He won’t be missed.
Happy birthday to sis!
I propose the Idiocracy shunt – we have tunneled through the scenario of Idiocracy in 2505 already, and returned just in time for Soylent Green
The attack on the University of Virginia is inseparable from the history of the University. Although it is a public university, it fought the admission of women to the College of Arts and Sciences until 1970. Alumni and senior administrators associated with the Farmington Country Club took the University to be theirs, and factions on the Board of Visitors have, over the years, battled over such things as how tours of the Grounds should present the connection of the University and Mr Jefferson (that’s how he’s known) with slavery. Two alumni associated with the battles over these issues are in the present Department of Justice.
So what is your point in the context of 2025?
@matthew: Don’t forget to proof the cover. A professor of mine opened a box of new books and discovered that his book discussed the period from Elizabeth II to Charles II. (Should have been Elizabeth I.)
That’s a pretty horrifying mistake!
Also, Matthew shouldn’t forget to proof the running heads. If there is a mistake in one, there’s usually a mistake in all. I learned that as a copyeditor, when I failed to spot a misspelling in the running head of a chapter for a textbook. The author was an extremely punctilious German professor, and he gave me a deserved tongue-lashing when he discovered the mistake himself.
I have a book about the midget submarines used by the British in WWII — the title of which is “Above Us the Waves”, but appears as “Above the Waves” on the spine. D’oh!
Decades ago, I saw a book on basic car mechanics whose cover boasted “Second edition. All previous misprings corrected”…
Re lung cancer survival and timing of chemo-immunotherapy:
Possibly related to the 8am surge of cortisol, either making the chemo better tolerated and thus patients less likely to delay a dose or fail to complete the course, or having some direct interaction with the therapy.
Maybe also explains another health inequity: city patients do better than rural. When I had chemo I was always given later appointments as they knew I lived 2.5 hours away.
Dr. Moss,
” related to the 8am surge of cortisol”
I was unaware of this surge, hobbyist endocrinologist that I am. Is it related to the same blood sugar surge or are they both just co-incident to “waking up and starting the machine”?
I’m interested in this cortisol surge.
Keep commenting please, I always like your messages.
D.A.
NYC
A quick search shows lots of results like this:
https://labme.ai/blogs/health/how-why-cortisol-fluctuates-during-the-day
Thank you v. much doctor – I’ll read it tonight and forgive the terrible “DEI art” that comes with the article. hehhe
I dropped out of medical school decades ago in Melbourne but keep up a solid, armchair interest.
all the best,
D.A.
NYC
The tweet pair is misleading. The study cited by Luu himself, lower panel, is not a randomized trial and he acknowledges this limitation in the reference below. It is a retrospective analysis of chemotherapy as given. The re-tweet by Hume refers to a “randomized trial”. He gives no citation so we can’t verify that the subjects were randomized as to dose timing. To clarify, a typical RCT of a new chemo or immunotherapy drug would be randomized against standard treatment. Then in a post-hoc analysis, the researchers could look at timing of treatment to explore a possible circadian effect, just as they could look at race, self-identified gender, or astrological sign to explore for any effect signal there. This would still be a “randomized trial”, just not randomized on dose timing. In this case you’d want to know if subjects in the control arm also did better from early treatment, and was there a difference in differences? (Did the new drug do even better if given early?)
Patients who get treated early, sharp at 0800, are the ones who have no trouble staying “on time”: everything is going according to plan, all values within acceptable limits (“nominal” as the NASA people used to say.) The ones treated later in the day include patients who arrive in the morning as scheduled but something always seem to delay them. Blood tests aren’t quite acceptable that the clinic nurse can OK them, new symptoms have to be evaluated with physician examinations and imaging tests before going ahead, i.v. access is difficult, performance status isn’t quite as good as it had to be for the clinical trials that demonstrated effectiveness, so some medical judgement has to be applied. (“How many hours a day would you say you spent on the couch since your last treatment?”) They may be just older, poorer, and more socially isolated, with less ability to get to the cancer centre and into a chair by 0800 on the dot, all of which predict lower survival. This delayed group will have disproportionately more patients who do get treated but with dose reductions. Even without dose reductions, it’s plausible that these patients who struggle to stay on schedule, with frequent delays, aren’t doing all that well and will probably suffer early relapse. And then there are the poorly “adherent” patients who arrive late for every treatment. Rather than canceling them, the cancer clinic accommodates them by staying late to finish their treatment. Non-adherence predicts poor outcomes in any disease. Clinical trials make vigorous efforts to include only engaged and committed subjects. Clinical practice can’t be so choosy with patients.
If anyone can find the citation for the “randomized trial” Hume refers to, please do post it. He doesn’t even tell us what disease was being treated, or with what!
https://oncodaily.com/science/circadian-biology-321235
There is a literature on circadian effects of cancer treatment which I won’t cite so as not to upset the mods with more links.
Also, this study contradicts numerous reports re several cancers that afternoon chemotherapy is far superior to morning therapy, with regards to both response and remission.
Jonathan Turley may be well versed in US freedom of speech law. However, he should first study the German Basic law before criticizing it.
Article 5 [Freedom of expression, arts and sciences]
(1) Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed. There shall be no censorship.
(2) These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons and in the right to personal honour.
(3) Arts and sciences, research and teaching shall be free. The freedom of teaching shall not release any person from allegiance to the constitution.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.html
Citation: Lawyer Joachim Steinhöfel makes it even clearer: “In the USA, there is in fact an almost ‘absolute freedom of speech’ under the First Amendment. The state may only intervene to restrict it in extremely exceptional cases.”
Freedom of speech in Germany is protected by Article 5 of the Basic Law. “But with legal limits, for example in the case of incitement to hatred, insult, defamation or slander,” explains Steinhöfel.
In Germany, however, social media users enjoy better protection against unlawful interference with freedom of expression by social media, “because the user can invoke fundamental rights”, says Steinhöfel. “In the USA, this only applies to actions by the state itself.”
The narrower limits on freedom of expression in Germany are not least due to the experiences of National Socialism.
https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/ausland/meinungsfreiheit-usa-deutschland-vergleich-100.html
While I think the incitement of hate needs to be bounded more strictly, we are still far off from the UK situation.
Ironically, I think the policing of speech was imported from the US – we just codified them in good old German fashion.
If you want to know more about Article 5 basic Law. The Federal Government has published an explanation. However, it is in German.
Freedom of the press and freedom of opinion are fundamental rights – and are enshrined in Article 5 (1) of the Basic Law. They are essential features of the free and democratic basic order. But what exactly do these rights mean and where are the limits?
https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/service/archiv-bundesregierung/75-jahre-grundgesetz/meinungs-und-pressefreiheit-2274858
There is no issue criticizing the government here in Germany. There will be problems if you do something that can be construed to glorify the Nazis – which results from our unique perspective on Nazis.
Since the US has exported wokeness to Europe, you now also get problems when verbally attacking groups that are protected under the intersectional identity system. I would have no problems openly badmouthing the government and/or their officials as long as I don’t cross the red line that is incitement.
Maybe of interest:
Die Welt: Mehrheit der Deutschen äußert sich in der Öffentlichkeit nur vorsichtig. Mai 2025
https://archive.ph/44yla
Nur rund jeder fünfte Deutsche fühlt sich in der Öffentlichkeit frei, seine Meinung zu äußern. Zu diesem Ergebnis kommt eine repräsentative Umfrage des Instituts für Demoskopie Allensbach.
For those who are interested but can’t read German, use the Translate feature of your browser. Click on the three vertically aligned dots in the upper-right corner of your screen, and then click on Translate.
Have you read the first two sentences of the WELT article? The Germans don’t fear prosecution, but rejection by fellow Germans. Especially sensitive topics are immigration and Islam. I’d say this was discussed on this very site many times in the excesses of wokeness.
How does this impact my claim, that there is no prosecution for criticizing the German government?
I wasn’t trying to call into doubt your claim that “there is no prosecution for criticizing the German government.”
Wasn’t there a man who was arrested for making an online image of a German politician holding a sign saying “I oppose free speech!” I recall reading that he was arrested for ridiculing this politician who opposes free speech – and his arrest proved his point!
PS Here is the relevant news item:
“A German journalist has been hit with a suspended sentence after poking fun at the country’s Interior Minister on social media.
David Bendels, the editor-in-chief of Deutschland-Kurier, had shared an image online in February of Nancy Faeser holding a digitally manipulated sign reading: “I hate freedom of speech.”
Right. First, it’s not like the USA has free speech and no other country does. There is a continuum of what is allowed. There are also differences as to what is considered speech (resulting in things like porn being legal in the USA since it is “speech”, i.e. people being paid to have sex with each other and let it be filmed, but one person paying another, both consenting, in private, is illegal in most of the USA). Second, it is not censorship. Censorship is when the government must approve something before it is published. What is involved here is mostly stuff like Russian propaganda, deep-fake videos, etc. with the clear intent to spread wrong information (not a matter of opinion) to influence elections etc. As noted, criticizing the government is not what is at issue, but rather things like anti-semitism. Sadly, there is a woke angle to this, but that should become better under the new government. (The majority party would repeal much woke stuff if they could; in a coalition, they can’t get everything they want, but things are already less woke than under the previous government. The SPD has dropped in popularity mainly due to wokeness.). Also, there has been a recent initiative aimed at cutting back on frivolous law suits.
Thank you for that explication. People like me who live in other countries that fall short of U.S. 1A absolutism, which I confess to be a fan of, will find food for thought.
The procedure for replacing the Brown Bear canine was unnecessary, and the whole thing seems exploitative, imo, in order to get a publication and some media attention. A simple extraction would likely suffice as this animal will spend the rest of its days in a zoo and it would have no difficulty at all missing a canine.
We adapted a retired greyhound who had very bad teeth, and they all had to be removed saved for the front teeth. Would ‘Wiggins’ be able to eat? There was no problem, and he lived a full life.
A dear friend adopted an abused “breeder” dog from the Amish – who aren’t as quaint and kind as one would think, especially with dogs. The 2 year old pup has no teeth so it is complicated to feed her but they manage. Amish pull the teeth out of human children (that show about them a decade ago, “Breaking Amish”)… and dogs.
How the dog has adjusted to a (ahem, non-religious) loving home warms my otherwise stony heart.
D.A.
NYC
I’m a cognitive psychologist and magician. The “torn and restored newspaper” is about as old as newspapers. It’s one of the first tricks I learned. It’s not hard. I could tell you how to do it, but then I’ve have to shoot you.
I found a video showing how it’s done.
What a beautiful and sweet picture of little Jerry with Mom and sister.
Yes and a very happy birthday to little sis Susan.
I agree!
Jerry, I was curious why your family was going to Greece, so I just did a search of your site and learned that it was because your dad was posted there by the Army.
However, I was mighty disappointed to discover that all the links to the photos from your time in Greece were broken, since the descriptions sounded charming (e.g., the cursed cherry cake!). Can these broken links be fixed? In my experience with websites, the problem is usually fairly simple.
Jerry posted a comment about catching trouble (warning?… I’m not sure) about having photos from certain sources (sorry my memory of the details so vague) and so he went back and pulled ALL the old photos — even the ones he had explicit approval to post. It’s a shame. I tried to look up photos from Dobrzyn last year and found them all missing. Hope he sees your question and reminds us what the issue was.
The original novel The Running Man by Richard Bachman (Stephen King), first published in 1982, was set in our present year.
The cover of the first edition read: “Welcome to America in 2025 when the best men don’t run for president. They run for their lives.”
Prescient?
So sad about Malgorzata, friend of WEIT/Jerry and my excellent Polish translator.
I didn’t know she smoked. I did for 30 years but my – and millions – of lives have been saved by vaping. It isn’t perfect but the evidence they have against it is slim indeed. Particularly if the personal equation is “Cigs or vape”.. Which it is rather than “Nicotine or nothing” the question many who don’t understand or enjoy or are addicted to nicotine don’t understand. (badly written but I’m in a hurry. sorry)
Vaping saves lives (for more qualified opinions see Dr. Sally Satel, friend of Pinker).
D.A.
NYC
In years gone by, I have purchased Nicorette gum for other folks (who were addicted to Nicotine). The gum was actually devised for Swedish submarine crews (so they could get their Nicotine fix without smoking).
Happy birthday and Happy half-birthday!
Re. risky habits, an old college pal was a dedicated vegetarian, and even had a sub named after him at the deli in Williamsburg – Allen’s Garden Special. About a decade ago, he had a serious stroke of a sort that carried about a 10% survival rate, but he survived without any apparent after-effects. The only reason I knew about it was that he told me. So I replied, “I guess you’re taking statins now?” Nope! No (prescription) drugs! When I last talked to him, the same topic came up and it was still the same. He was proud of not taking any medications.
A few months ago he and his wife were in the grocery store one morning and all was normal. In the afternoon he started to experience heart rhythm issues but didn’t want to go to the hospital. He was gone within the hour.
When I talked to his wife afterward, the topic of prescriptions came up and she said that he hadn’t changed, “but he loved his mushrooms.” He had had a thing for psychedelic mushrooms, and on a hunch did a quick search to find that there is anecdotal suspicion that those things trigger heart problems.
Very anecdotal my friend Mr. H., and probably wrong.
Here is why: I’ve heard and entertained a lot of the “heart problems” etc of psilocybin over the years and (while I am no expert) I’m personally unconvinced. Evidence for that is very lacking.
Sort of like how “new marijuana causes INSAAANITY!”
When the reality is that pre-existing conditions, be it dementia, schizophrenia, heart conditions are so delicate – and many patients so fragile – that MANY exogenous interruptions can cause disaster.
There’s a huge bias to “blame the druuuugs” – particularly with recreative drugs.
That said, in all my articles condoning psychedelics I say: “If you are… or might be.. schizophrenic.. take a pass” – which is advice I’d give a lot of people for a lot of life altering, mind expanding experiences. (roller coasters, divorce, space travel, bunji jumping, etc.) Let’s not start pointing the loaded gun of “causation” about willy nilly.
An aside, I think (after testosterone and boy stunts) a lot of the difference in life expectancy between men and women is partly explained simply by us dudes not going to the doctor when we should. This is an argument for marriage if there ever was one.
(though your milage may vary, depending on wife).
Good to read you here again Mr. Hempenstein,
D.A.
NYC
Heart attacks can be triggered by caffeine too. Anything that raises blood pressure and increases heart rate puts stress on the heart. Exercise too!
Regarding the chemo in the morning result, the first thing that comes to mind is human error which is more and more likely as the day goes on. This is a small leap from the Israeli parole study (S Danziger, J Levav, L Avnaim-Pesso, Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108, 6889–6892 (2011).). To be fair, there are issues with the original study such as non random ordering of the cases (something to look for here too btw). Nonetheless I would put my money on human decision making before I went for a chemicals-have-different-effects-at-different-parts-of-the-circadian-cycle explanation….
Your comment illustrates the pitfalls of inferring causality from physiological principles. The danger is that a potent causal mediator, such as human error, could be entirely overlooked because no one thought of it.
Note that even with randomized assignment to late vs. early treatment, one can say only that late is worse than early (if this is so.) One can’t conclude what the mechanism of the effect is without further study, which is why a full development of hypotheses is so important.