Welcome to America’s holiday: the Fourth of July, 2025, also known as Independence Day. As Wikipedia notes, the holiday. . .
. . . . commemorates the ratification of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, establishing the United States of America.
The Founding Father delegates of the Second Continental Congress declared that the Thirteen Colonies were no longer subject (and subordinate) to the monarch of Britain, King George III, and were now united, free, and independent states.[1] The Congress voted to approve independence by passing the Lee Resolution on July 2 and adopted the Declaration of Independence two days later, on July 4.
There’s a Google Doodle for the day. Click on it to see where it goes.
And here’s a splendid Four of July drone show from two years ago:
It’s also Alice in Wonderland Day, the day in 1862 when Charles Dodson (“Lewis Carroll”) told Alice Liddell a fantasy story as they rowed down the Thames. That story became Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Further, it’s National Barbecued Spareribs Day (brisket is better), National Barbecue Day, National Caesar Salad Day, and Jackfruit Day (good stuff!).
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 4 Wikipedia page.
Note that tomorrow I am flying to Helsinki on the first leg of my Arctic trip, so posting will be light after today, though I’ll try my best to keep the Hili dialogues going and to post photos and travelogues when I can. Wish me luck! As always, I do my best.
Da Nooz:
*The Big Beautiful Budget Bill was passed by the House yesterday after some backroom dealing by Trump. (Article archived here.)
The House on Thursday narrowly passed a sweeping bill to extend tax cuts and slash social safety net programs, capping Republicans’ chaotic monthslong slog to overcome deep rifts within their party and deliver President Trump’s domestic agenda.
The final vote, 218 to 214, was mostly along party lines and came after Speaker Mike Johnson spent a frenzied day and night toiling to quell resistance in his ranks that threatened until the very end to derail the president’s marquee legislation. With all but two Republicans in favor and Democrats uniformly opposed, the action cleared the bill for Mr. Trump’s signature, meeting the July 4 deadline he had demanded.
The legislation extends tax cuts enacted in 2017 that had been scheduled to expire at the end of the year, while adding new ones Mr. Trump promised during this campaign, on some tips and overtime pay, at a total cost of $4.5 trillion. It also increases funding for defense and border security and cuts nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, with more reductions to food assistance for the poor and other government aid. And it phases out clean-energy tax credits passed under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that Mr. Trump and conservative Republicans have long decried.
Also included is a $5 trillion increase in the debt limit, a measure that Republicans are typically unwilling to support but that was necessary to avert a federal default later this year.
The bill’s final passage was a major victory for congressional Republicans and for Mr. Trump, who celebrated in a Thursday night speech in Des Moines, Iowa, meant to kick off a yearlong celebration of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.
“With this bill,” Mr. Trump said, “every major promise I’ve made to the people of Iowa in 2024 became a promise kept.”
Below is a graphic of the final vote; the GOP holdouts were Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania. Otherwise, it was a strict Republican/Democratic split.. Since no reconciliation is needed with the House bill, this will go to Trump’s desk and become law on the day he specified as a deadline: July 4. CNN has an article about how the new bill will affect you. One thing of interest ot academics is that private colleges with big endowments with get a whopping tax hike:
A primary focus of the bill is tax cuts, but not everyone who pays taxes will pay less. Private universities are generally tax-exempt, although they do pay a 1.4% tax on income from their endowments. This bill would jack up that endowment income tax to a top rate of 8% for colleges whose endowments exceed $2 million per enrolled student. We’re talking about schools like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT and Princeton.
It’s also estimated that the bill with raise the national debt by about $3.3 trillion, almost 10% of the $36 trillion existing debt.
*The Supreme Court has accepted a case involving state bans on transgender athletes in sports leagues. (Archived here.)
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Thursday to consider the constitutionality of state laws banning transgender women and girls from participating on female school sports teams.
The cases arise from challenges brought by transgender student athletes against policies in West Virginia and Idaho blocking individuals whose sex at birth was male from competing in women’s and girls’ track teams. Opponents of the bans argue they violate the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment under federal law and the 1972 Title IX law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education.
In Idaho, a Boise State University transgender student challenged a 2020 law that would have barred her from running on the women’s track team. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2023 upheld an injunction against the ban, finding it was likely unconstitutional.
In West Virginia, a 12-year-old transgender girl challenged a 2021 law barring her from competing on her middle school girls’ track team. The Supreme Court declined West Virginia’s emergency request to enforce the law and keep her off the team while the case continued in the lower courts. Last year, a Virginia appeals court blocked the implementation of the law, finding it violates Title IX.
The appeal presents the latest opportunity for the justices to weigh in on the divisive issue, including whether some constitutional protections against discrimination on the basis of sex apply to transgender people.
Arguments will be heard during the Supreme Court’s next term starting this fall. The high court issued a 6-3 ruling during its latest term that allowed states to restrict medical treatments for transgender youth. The justices rejected the argument that sex-based discrimination protections applied to the transgender minors in the case, opening the door for opponents of transgender rights to make similar arguments in cases involving sports teams, bathrooms and other areas.
Given that last decision, and the constitution of the Supreme Court, it seems likely that they will decide such bans do indeed conform to the dictates of title IX. Note that this ruling will affect state bans that are already in place or will be enacted in the future, and doesn’t affect state laws that allow trans-identified men to compete against women. But those laws are unfair with the exception of those rare sports (equestrian events?) in which men have no inherent athletic advantage over women. Fairness dictates that biological women should compete only against other biological women, not with biological men who identify as women.
*Although Trump promised to first go after undocumented immigrants with a criminal record, the WaPo reports that ICE is increasingly detaining those without any record. (Article archived here.)
DHS’s statistics office has stopped publishing monthly data on arrests and removals. But the Deportation Data Project, a team of lawyers and academics, worked with the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy to file a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against ICE to obtain the new dataset.
The dataset offers one of the most detailed snapshots yet of the people ICE is arresting and removing as it attempts to fulfill President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. The Post’s examination of the data shows a substantial increase in arrests, but one that is still significantly below what Trump and his advisers are attempting to do. That could change as Congress prepares to infuse DHS with a massive amount of cash.
The data does not cover all arrests and removals; U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s numbers were not included.
The data shows that ICE officers have made more than twice as many arrests from Jan. 20 to June 11 compared with the same period last year. And the number of people taken into custody has shot up over the past month in particular. Since May 20, ICE has averaged nearly 1,000 arrests per day, compared with about 600 in the months prior.
That uptick still puts ICE below White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s goal of making a minimum of 3,000 arrests a day.
Here’s a graph of weekly ICE arrests taken from this Washington Post article.
According to a June 17 Vox article, though, the Obama administration saw substantially more arrests than Trump did so far:
President Donald Trump promised his supporters “the largest deportation program in American history” — but he’s nowhere close.
That distinction belongs to an early 20th-century program that likely saw 2 million people deported. When looking at more recent times, it’s President Barack Obama — once dubbed by immigrant advocates “the deporter in chief” — who holds the 21st-century deportation record. His administration kicked out 438,421 people in 2013. No president since has come close to equaling that record, including Trump during his first term.
However, if Miller meets his goal of making 3,000 arrests per say, he would more than double Obama’s 2013 record. But the political climate today differs from that under the Obama administration, and I doubt Miller will meet his goal, though 1,000 arrests per day amounts to more than 350,000 per year, not far from Obama’s peak period of deportation.
*The readers of the NYT have chosen the top 100 movies of the 21st century (remember, we’re only a quarter way into it). You can see their choices at this site (archived here). Here is a screenshot of the top 20:
I have seen eleven out of the twenty movies, including the top four. It’s a decent list, but I don’t agree that movies like “Everything Everywhere All at Once” or “Parasite” rank in the top 20. “Everything” I found contrived and boring, while “Parasite,” a good disquisition on class differences, was an okay but not a fantastic movie (remember, this is my opinion). Likewise with “Mad Max,” which is your pedestrian chase-scene movie tricked out with lots of action and chase scenes. On the other hand, I have no beef with movies like “Spirited Away” (a fantastic animation) and “There Will be Blood” making the list. Feel free to weigh in with your choices of movies not in the top 20, or go look at the top 100.
*A new finding shows how far we have come in our ability to get and sequence ancient DNA. A report by the AP says that a substantial portion of genome from an ancient Egyptian actually came from the Mesopotamian “fertile crescent,” widely seen as the cradle of modern civilization. A summary from the AP:
Ancient DNA has revealed a genetic link between the cultures of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Researchers sequenced whole genomes from the teeth of a remarkably well-preserved skeleton found in a sealed funeral pot in an Egyptian tomb site dating to between 4,495 and 4,880 years ago.
ADFour-fifths of the genome showed links to North Africa and the region around Egypt. But a fifth of the genome showed links to the area in the Middle East between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, known as the Fertile Crescent, where Mesopotamian civilization flourished.
“The finding is highly significant” because it “is the first direct evidence of what has been hinted at” in prior work,” said Daniel Antoine, curator of Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum.
Earlier archeological evidence has shown trade links between Egypt and Mesopotamia, as well as similarities in pottery-making techniques and pictorial writing systems. While resemblances in dental structures suggested possible ancestral links, the new study clarifies the genetic ties.
The Nile River is “likely to have acted as an ancient superhighway, facilitating the movement of not only cultures
This is not an earth-shaking finding—not like DNA analysis of the Denisovans or Neanderthals showing that modern H. sapiens carry some of the genes of these extinct groups—but it does tell us something about human history.
Here’s the Nature paper; click on the title to go to it (a pdf is here).
This is the abstract, which pretty much shows what the AP reported but gives some other information.
Ancient Egyptian society flourished for millennia, reaching its peak during the Dynastic Period (approximately 3150–30 bce). However, owing to poor DNA preservation, questions about regional interconnectivity over time have not been addressed because whole-genome sequencing has not yet been possible. Here we sequenced a 2× coverage whole genome from an adult male Egyptian excavated at Nuwayrat (Nuerat, نويرات). Radiocarbon dated to 2855–2570 cal. bce, he lived a few centuries after Egyptian unification, bridging the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods. The body was interred in a ceramic pot within a rock-cut tomb, potentially contributing to the DNA preservation. Most of his genome is best represented by North African Neolithic ancestry, among available sources at present. Yet approximately 20% of his genetic ancestry can be traced to genomes representing the eastern Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia and surrounding regions. This genetic affinity is similar to the ancestry appearing in Anatolia and the Levant during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Although more genomes are needed to fully understand the genomic diversity of early Egyptians, our results indicate that contacts between Egypt and the eastern Fertile Crescent were not limited to objects and imagery (such as domesticated animals and plants, as well as writing systems) but also encompassed human migration.
Imagine sequencing the entire genome of an Egyptian who lived nearly five thousand years ago!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is worried (and he’s not even Jewish!)
Hili: It has been a calm day.
Me: Don’t count your chickens before evening comes.
In Polish:
Hili: To był spokojny dzień.
Ja: Nie chwal dnia przed wieczorem.
*******************
From Stacy. Go right!
From Jesus of the Day:
From The Dodo Pet:
From Masih, a new fatwa. I was under the impression that Israel deliberately—perhaps under U.S. orders—refrained from attacking Khameni, but of course he was hiding out in a bunker anyway and avoiding any electronic communication.
Iran’s top clerics issued fatwas calling for the assassination of Trump and Netanyahu.
$20M Bounty Announced!Two senior Iranian clerics, Nasser Makarem Shirazi and Hossein Nouri Hamedani, both closely aligned with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei have issued religious fatwas calling… pic.twitter.com/StA8esr34k
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) July 2, 2025
From Luana, a big hypocrite exposed by JKR:
Stephen Ireland, who targeted me with endless abuse on here because I oppose the chemical castration of children and the removal of protected spaces for women and girls, has just been sentenced to 30 years in jail for child rape. pic.twitter.com/0HHctRocB4
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 30, 2025
From Malcolm: d*g and cat friends. This is just wrong—but I can live with it. It’s even sort of heartwarming:
This cat and dog are best friends and cuddle together💕 pic.twitter.com/x04gwcZnN8
— 💕Precious Animals💕 (@CutieOverIoad) July 14, 2017
From cesar: more Jew hatred (you’ve probably heard about this). “Death to the IDF,” of course, is equivalent to saying “Israel must be destroyed.” See Natasha Hausdorff discussing this in the first seven minutes of this video.
— Dan Senor (@dansenor) June 29, 2025
From Simon, who says, “As skywalker says, wait for the fist bump”:
Wait for the….. <fist-bump>.#ChimpChum 🐵
— Mark Hamill (@markhamillofficial.bsky.social) 2025-07-02T20:43:31.697Z
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz. She was twelve years old.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-07-04T09:56:49.035Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. The first one is absolutely true, and hilarious:
Because there’s never a bad time to share Chuck Jones’s rules for the Road Runner, here are Chuck Jones’s rules for the Road Runner
— Lev Parikian (@levparikian.bsky.social) 2025-07-03T10:14:20.885Z
And one of the few places you can scratch it!
Our favorite quillball, Nigel, couldn’t be happier getting those behind-the-ear scritches. 🥰 Happy #WorldPorcupineDay!
— Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium (@ptdefiancezoo.bsky.social) 2025-07-03T06:41:31.572Z
“Wish me luck!”
Oh looking forward to this – bon voyage!
Happy Fourth! to all our American friends.
And you, a tad belatedly, from… yesterday (?). I think it was yesterday…
Forgive me Leslie – you, Jon Kay and David Frum are my only three Canadian authorities! (at least I picked the highest IQ Canadians I could find).
best,
D.A.
NYC
Why thank you, Leslie.
Have a great trip! If you’re feeling very brave in Reykjavik, try the Hakarl (fermented shark) – I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole, myself, but if you’re into weird and wacky foodstuffs, this one might be it. 😳
No. Don’t. I once gave some to my sister-in-law, not knowing. She’s never forgiven me.
Fly safe. Amazing travels for you in retirement. Having covered the planet pretty much east to west, now you are completing a north to south. When you were a kid growing up, would you have thought you would do this?
Well, I traveled as a kid, since my dad was in the Army. When we lived in Greece we didn’t travel that much, but in Germany we tooled all over Europe. I suppose it was our shifting locations every 2-3 years that gave me a love of travel.
Interesting. Never thought about how one is brought up normalizing travel.
Excited about your (our vicariously) next trip. Do keep us posted as I enjoy your wanderings very much. Helsinki particularly – I’ve always wanted to go there: their language is bonkers, just next level Finno-Ugric, and they have some cool heavy, granite Soviet inflected architecture I’m fond of. Lots of pics plz boss!
And Happy July 4th everybody! For immigrants like me it has a special meaning. In Sep 2002 I became a US citizen at a courthouse in downtown Manhattan which was epic, just fantastic. A few months later I was admitted to the NY Bar in another nearby courthouse. A big year for me!
Atheists also prefer secular holidays like July 4. I can see the Hudson fireworks from here and am looking forward to them. (My dog isn’t, but he’s 15 now, as old as Joe Biden, and he’s less troubled by them). 🙂
D.A.
NYC
Thank you for that, David. Becoming a naturalized citizen was surely a source of pride and accomplishment, but being granted a licence to practice in a learned profession in your new country must have been awesome.
Are you familiar with the story of the immigrant who came to New York from the Old Country, who was so overcome on the day he got naturalized that he glued his citizenship papers to the door of the cold water walk-up tenement flat he and his new American family were living in, for all the other residents to see and take example. Well, decades later his sons needed to prove his American citizenship for some bureaucratic purpose, but they couldn’t get the now yellow and crumbling paper unstuck. So they took the door off its hinges and man-handled it downtown on the subway, where the information was duly recorded and approved. The way the story was told, one got the impression that that office, whatever it was, saw a lot of that.
Yes, I’ve read that fireworks rattled him much more when he was President than when he was VP.
HA! I meant my dog but I’m sure Joe Biden takes a lot of things easier these days. (I did vote for him).
You probably know what Biden looks like but have you seen my geriatric puppers? (before he was so old). Here ya go!
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
(Somebody talk to the boss about bringing back “Photos of Readers” at WEIT – they were fun but I imagine a bit of work for him).
D.A.
NYC
Agreed. I had been meaning to send in a picture of me doing something pretty funny.
I’ve only seen five of the movies on that list, two of them being LOTR movies. My movie-viewing has slowed considerably this century. Of those I’ve seen, though, I think Spotlight, The Death of Stalin, and Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy would rank high on any list of best movies.
I am puzzled by some of the entries on the list. Mad Max: Fury Road? Well, I haven’t seen it, and it is 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. The Dark Knight? 94%. I did see that and never thought for a ‘mo that it would be rated as all that good. So maybe I just have poor taste in movies.
I hadn’t heard this, but the New York Post is reporting that the OBBB as passed includes student loans caps:
It seems the new caps are not that different from the old ones. I read in the WSJ that the “new caps will lower federal borrowing to $100,000 for graduate students and $200,000 for professional programs, such as medical school, down from caps of $138,500 for most grad students and $224,000 for certain health programs.”
Surely, one shouldn’t even want to go a quarter mill. $ in debt on the crap shoot of being able to pay it off. But people do. I have a couple part-time lecturer colleagues who are in way over their heads in student loans (I don’t expect by nearly that much), but part-time teaching and night work is all they can get.
Here are some un-solicited details about rising college costs, lifted from here:
https://ssti.org/blog/why-cost-college-rising-so-fast
Average tuition has increased about 84% over the past 20 years. Medium income has NOT kept up.
Factors for rising college costs include:
Growth in administrative positions and salaries at colleges and universities. These positions, often unrelated to teaching or research, have expanded due to increased regulatory compliance, student services, and marketing efforts.
Investments in new buildings, dormitories, and athletic facilities to attract students and enhance campus life.
Investments in technology, including software licenses, hardware upgrades, and IT support.
Rising healthcare costs and other employee benefits.
Inflation.
Demand for higher education has remained strong despite rising costs, allowing universities to increase prices without experiencing a significant decrease in enrollment.
Five movies that in my opinion should be on the top 100 list are: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Juno, The Hunger Games, The Virgin Suicides, and Poor Things. In particular, I’m amazed that Poor Things isn’t even on the lists, when it’s easily one of my top 10 movies for all time.
About the only top 10 movie that I’m in total agreement with is Eternal Sunshine. (Although I have yet to see Spirited Away).
I also wanted to add, belatedly, that I just loved reading Andrzej’s reminisces about Malgorzata yesterday and would love to read even more. The references to Burnham and Weber also made me very curious about A and M’s shared intellectual pursuits.
I agree with you about Poor Things.
Have a wonderful trip Jerry! I’m looking forward to reading about it.
Happy 4th to all!
Have a great trip!
Small schools are winners and big research schools are losers in the new tax bill. Ropes & Gray has good summary of the tax implications for tax-exempt organizations.
https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/07/congress-passes-final-tax-package-key-provisions-for-tax-exempt-organizations
“New Exception for Smaller Schools: Under current law, a school is not subject to the excise tax unless it has at least 500 tuition-paying students. Under the final bill, that threshold increases to at least 3,000 tuition-paying students, resulting in smaller schools not being subject to the excise tax regardless of endowment size.”
About 40% of schools have fewer than 3,000 students, I’m told CalTech is one example.
Major universities did successfully lobby Congress to count international students in enrollment figures, thereby lowering the reported endowment per student
Safe travels, Jerry. I am looking forward to hearing about your trip.
With PCC(E) off on his arctic jaunt I hope I’m not out of line by posting this here but I think it’ll be popular with WEIT readers given our love of wildlife. (Generally I’d send this type of thing to him directly). I rarely look at reddit but randomly I came across this quickie.
Mainly animal (bird) sounds – many quite bizarre. (The lyre bird from Oz I do know imitates sounds around it though I’ve never met or heard one in real life. There’s a spoonbill, featured on WEIT lately which I’d like in my apartment as a pet but it might be frowned on by the building and neighbors 🙁
“Cool sounds some animals make”
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1lrmnud/cool_sounds_some_animals_make/
1-2 minutes, don’t put the sound right up.
best,
D.A.
NYC
Bon Voyage!
My movie list would include Poor Things, Pan’s Labyrith, and Kill Bill (both volumes counting as one film.)
I LOVED Hili’s picture today. The memes were all good ones, too — especially the dog and cat who are best buds. Looking forward to the travelogue. Hope there are no plane or hotel mishaps. Have a safe trip, professor.
Everything Everywhere All at Once was the stupidest movie I have ever seen, beating out even They Saved Hitler’s Brain!
The top 100 movies of the 21st century?
My choice are:
1) – 3) The Lord of the Rings (film series)
4) Bohemian Rhapsody
5) WALL-E
The NYT-list shows that cinema is a dying art form. There are so many films that cannot be taken seriously at all (for instance Mad Max, Lord of the Rings, or the idiotic 21st century films by Quentin Tarantino).
My suggestion would be something like this (in no particular order):
– Richard Linklater: Before Sunset & Before Midnight
– Ridley Scott: The Counselor
– Coen Bros: Burn After Reading, Intolerable Cruelty & No Country For Old Men
– Polanski (The Greatest Living Director!): The Pianist & Carnage
– Michael Haneke: Amour
– Robert Altman: Gosford Park
– Alexander Payne: Sideways
– Kevin Costner: Open Range
– Scott Cooper: Hostiles
– Marc Forster: Monster’s Ball
– Clint Eastwood: Million Dollar Baby
– Mike Leigh: Vera Drake & Turner
– Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck: Das Leben Der Anderen
– Lee Chand-Dong: Secret Sunshine
– Bong Joo Ho: Memories of Murder & Parasite