Welcome to the very last day of the month: Thursday, July 31, 2025. For some reason I dread the coming of August! At any rate, today is National Chili Dog Day, and I could use one (along with fries), comme ça:
It’s also National Avocado Day, Shredded Wheat Day, National Cotton Candy Day, National Raspberry Cake Day, and yes, National Spam Day. I like spam!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*A NYT op-ed with a title I couldn’t resist: “This is the moment that Democrats have been talking about for years.” The moment? Trump’s signing into law the Big Beautiful Budget Bill. The piece, written by Antonio Delgado, the Democratic lieutenant governor of New York State, says that if Dems took advantage of what he sees as a bad bill, our party could make big gains:
After months of hand-wringing and finger-pointing, Democrats are still learning how to navigate a political landscape dominated by Donald Trump’s Republican Party. With Democrats locked out of power in Washington, the burden has shifted to the state and local levels to prove that we can govern.
Republicans have given us an opportunity to do just that. This month, Republicans in Washington — including every Republican representative from New York — voted for a morally bankrupt piece of legislation that slashes social safety net programs, cuts taxes for the ultrawealthy and provides $75 billion in new funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. President Trump pushed these policies simultaneously for a reason: so that he can scapegoat immigrants for the economic pain his agenda will bring to everyone. The problem isn’t scarcity — it’s greed.
This is the moment Democrats have been talking about for years: a chance to prove we’re more than a party of outrage and opposition. If we can’t deliver now, when the stakes are highest, we don’t deserve the trust of the people we claim to represent. It’s time to offer Americans more than sternly worded social media posts and podcast interviews.
So far, we’re failing that test. Our leaders are falling into the same trap Democrats have routinely found themselves in since 2016. These crises need to be taken on in a way that is bold and unafraid and that delivers for the working and middle classes without fear of reprisal from concentrated wealth or corporate power.
The solution? Find leaders like—wait for it—Zohran Mamdani:
What makes this situation all the more frustrating is that we just saw what it looks like to connect with voters on the most important issue of the day: affordability. In June, Zohran Mamdani pulled off one of the biggest upsets in New York’s modern political history. Establishment Democrats have been talking about affordability for years and have very little to show for it. Mr. Mamdani got through to New Yorkers on the very same set of issues. Instead of lecturing them, he took the time to actually listen to what voters were feeling. He had the courage to directly engage with people, and then brought a laser focus on the issues that they care about. As a result, he shattered turnout records and brought out young voters in droves. It should have been a major signal to the establishment.
Instead of embracing Mr. Mamdani’s success, as I have, many top Democrats have kept their distance.
To date, party leaders seem more interested in clinging to power than delivering for the people. Better to maintain an unsustainable economic status quo than be mislabeled a Communist, the thinking goes. Better to avoid being called soft on “illegals” than to do the hard work needed to truly protect hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers living in fear under Mr. Trump’s dragnet.
Well, Mamdani is gonna run NYC, and whether or not he succeeds will affect the chances of other Democrats. But America is not NYC, and the American public is not likely to be wild about Mamdani’s program. As for “being soft on illegals,” if you listen to what the American people want, they want the opposite of what Delgado thinks: they want fewer people entering American illegally.
I swear, if I hear one more op-ed saying that Democrats should listen to what Americans want, and that this is the way we should win, I’ll hurl. The principle is of course right, but what Americans want is not what progressive Democrats say they want.
*Big headline from The Free Press: “Why Sydney Sweeny’s body is causing a total meltdown.” I barely know who Sydney Sweeney is, but she’s apparently very good looking and with the kind of pulchritude that’s seen as driving men wild. She’s an actress, and the brohaha is that she just did a commercial for American Eagle Jeans that has a double entendre: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” (read as “genes”). The original ad has been pulled, but here’s a version:
This has not only angered people who are saying she’s bringing back eugenics with the “genes” entendre (oy!), but also people who argue that, just when America was relaxing what were seen as overly restrictive standards of beauty, she’s erased all that by being classically beautiful. And so the brouhaha:
“This is literal Nazi propaganda,” announced one viral post. “Did they mean to include a bunch of Nazi dog whistles in this?” asked another. Yet another referenced a notorious white supremacist slogan in their tweet: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children is a crazy tagline for selling denim.” The ad’s been called “regressive,” “racist,” and “tone-deaf.”
And it’s not just anonymous people online. MSNBC warned that the Sweeney campaign is a sign of an “unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness,” while the (also quite hot) rapper Doja Cat joined the pile-on with a TikTok parody in which she mocked the actor—who’s starred in Euphoria and The White Lotus—mimicking her lines in a drawling, redneck accent. The video was widely praised as a “razor-sharp response” that, according to certain outlets, had elevated a cringey marketing misstep into a national conversation about “representation, corporate responsibility, and the power of celebrity voices in modern discourse.”
The right, meanwhile, did what it so often does when the left says something innocuous is very racist: They made her a cause. “Woke advertising is dead. Sydney Sweeney killed it,” read one tweet. Ted Cruz (as in, the senator) declared on X: “Wow. Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women. I’m sure that will poll well.” The literal White House communications director, Steven Cheung, added: “Cancel culture run amok. This warped, moronic, and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024. They’re tired of this bullshit.”
And, last but not least, Donald Trump Jr. shared an AI-generated picture of the president, in double denim, taking the same pose as Sydney, and posted it on Instagram, in what I assume is an expression of support for her. “Um, Donald is so hot right now!!!” read the caption.
Besides being a Nazi, Sweeney is seen as wrecking the “body positivitity movement,” in which everyone is seen as beautiful in their own way.
Sydney Sweeney is hot, but the 27-year-old is also more than that. She is incredibly, incredibly powerful. The woman can move markets. American Eagle’s stock shot up nearly 20 percent after the campaign dropped. She didn’t just sell jeans—the profits of which, by the way, are going to a domestic violence charity—she added hundreds of millions in value to a publicly traded company practically overnight. Once, we would have accepted this and moved on. There was a time in the not very distant past when a beautiful woman selling jeans was just great advertising.
But lately the American public has grown used to a very different kind of ad, which tried to convince us beauty is whatever they say it is this week. You know the ones: the sagging swimsuit campaigns, the big-and-proud lingerie shoots, the breathless press releases declaring that representation is the new hotness. For roughly a decade, brands insisted on telling us what we should find sexy—stretch marks, back rolls, visible panic disorders—whether we liked it or not.
The body positivity movement told us, loudly and constantly, that everyone is beautiful, that all bodies are worthy of the spotlight, that a triple chin was not only normal, but empowering. Obesity wasn’t a health crisis, it was an identity. That era wasn’t really about celebrating women. It was about neutralizing beauty. Sanding down the sharp edges of desirability until no one felt left out, and no one stood out.
“This is literal Nazi propaganda,” announced one viral post. “Did they mean to include a bunch of Nazi dog whistles in this?” asked another.
And now here comes Sweeney, basking in her exceptional, remarkable, jaw-dropping body. Selling sex and looking like an unreformed Victoria’s Secret Angel, draped across a convertible in low-rise denim. Saying: Yeah, I’m lucky, I got really, really good genes. The contrast is almost comical. Whether she meant to be or not, she’s a kind of walking middle finger to the movement that tried to blow up all of our old-fashioned ideas about beauty. She’s not the future of advertising. She’s the past, revived, and making more money than ever.
I find this all hilarious, as I have no dog in this fight. It just shows how almost anything can be blown up into a huge controversy. All I can say as an evolutionist is that I think some standards of beauty come from evolution, as they’re connected with reproductive ability, so not all of them are “socially constructed.” Beyond that I will not go. Oh, and John McWhorter also thinks (as do I) that the eugenics thing is simply performative outrage.
*George Will has followed my lead and, in a WaPo column, lists “The top five words that today are gratingly misapplied or worn out.” And here they are (I’ve put them in bold):
The fifth-most misused word in what remains of the tattered language is “massive.” It is an adjective applied to anything big, even if the thing has no mass. There cannot be a massive increase in consumer confidence. Similarly, it would be wrong to say there is massive illiteracy in many uses of “massive.”
The fourth-most shopworn word is “unique.” It is applied to any development that has happened since the person misusing “unique” was in high school. As in, “There is unique polarization in America today,” a judgment that cannot survive even a cursory reading about the 1850s. Often the misuse is compounded by tacking “very” onto it. Saying that something is “very unique” is saying that something merely unique is less so than something “very unique,” with uniqueness varying by degrees.
The third-most gratingly misapplied word is “only,” but only in the phrase “one of the only.” As in, Mickey Mantle is one of the only switch hitters in the Hall of Fame. One of the only is a wordy way of avoiding “few.”
I’ll add here that “only” is one of the most misplaced words in sentences. Here’s one example of such a misplacement: “I only ate one hot dog.” You should know why that’s wrong.
The second-most worn-out word in contemporary discourse is “iconic.” This adjective is, it seems, applicable to anything or anyone well-known in a way different from the way anything or anyone else has become well-known. New Jersey urges tourists to come and enjoy its “iconic boardwalks.” Hulk Hogan, a professional wrestler, was, a story on his death said, iconic. Meaning he was somewhat famous and somewhat distinguishable from other professional wrestlers, every one of whom strains to be very unique.
Today’s most promiscuously used word is “vibe.” It probably is used so often by so many because trying to decipher its meaning is like trying to nail applesauce to smoke. Having no fixed meaning, “vibe” cannot be used incorrectly. So, it resembles the phrase “social justice,” a noun and a modifier that does not intelligibly modify the noun.
Well, I agree with “unique”, but my own list wouldn’t have the other four—not that they aren’t still grating. But I would substitute “amazing” for “massive”, and use “only” for placement, as I don’t object to its usage the way Will puts it. Yes, “iconic” is way overused, and I detest “vibe”. But good for Will for being such a curmudgeon!
*From the AP: a new paper in Nature shows life thriving all the way at the bottom of the deepest ocean trenches, fueled by elements and compounds falling down from above:
An underwater voyage has revealed a network of creatures thriving at the bottom of deep-sea ocean trenches.
In these extreme environments, the crushing pressure, scant food and lack of sunlight can make it hard to survive. Scientists know that tiny microbes prosper there, but less is known about evidence of larger marine life.
Researchers traveling along the Kuril–Kamchatka and Aleutian trenches in the northwest Pacific Ocean used a submersible to find tubeworms and mollusks flourishing at over 31,000 feet (9.5 kilometers) deep. The deepest part of the ocean goes down to about 36,000 feet (11 kilometers).
Scientists had surveyed this area before and had hints that larger creatures might live at such depths. The new discovery confirms those suspicions and shows just how extensive the communities are, said Julie Huber, a deep sea microbiologist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
“Look how many there are, look how deep they are,” said Huber, who was not involved with the research. “They don’t all look the same and they’re in a place that we haven’t had good access to before.”
The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
In the absence of light to make their own food, many trench-dwellers big and small survive on key elements like carbon that trickle down from higher in the ocean.
For crying out loud, why don’t these articles ever link to the research they’re talking about? The Nature paper is here, and a precis “news and views” is here.
*Colin Wright reports in the Wall Street Journal that he is suing Cornell University because he applied for a job there as an evolutionary biologist and secret documents have since come to light showing that Cornell was looking for such a biologist, but it had to be a member of a minority (Colin is white). Race-based hiring is of course illegal, and Cornell knew it.
I’m filing a complaint against Cornell University for racial discrimination.
This isn’t a political stunt or publicity grab. It’s a last resort in response to a gross injustice that destroyed the career I spent more than a decade building. It’s about holding accountable a powerful institution that violated the law, abandoned its principles, and discriminated against me because of my race.
. . . . Last month, the America First Policy Institute released internal Cornell emails showing the university conducted an effort to recruit what the search committee referred to as a “diversity hire.” One committee member described the process bluntly: “What we should be doing is inviting one person whom we have identified as being somebody that we would like to join our department and not have that person in competition with others.” That “somebody,” who is black, was selected not because of research excellence, but because of race. I was denied the chance to compete—so were other academics who might have been qualified.
This discriminatory practice, conducted in coordination with Cornell’s Office of the Provost—led at the time by current Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff—violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race. That’s why, with representation from the America First Policy Institute, I’m taking legal action against Cornell.
What makes this worse is the university’s continued dishonesty. This year, Mr. Kotlikoff wrote: “We do not exclude anyone at Cornell for reasons irrelevant to merit, neither do we admit or evaluate students, hire or promote employees, award chairs or tenure, or make any other merit-driven decisions at Cornell based on race, ethnicity, or other attributes not relevant to merit.” The leaked documents show otherwise.
In addition to orchestrating the discriminatory hiring scheme, Cornell created other racially filtered hiring pipelines, including a $16 million National Institutes of Health-funded initiative called the Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program. or First. This program, the stated purpose of which is “enhancing compositional diversity,” required hiring committees to revise applicant lists repeatedly until they were diverse enough. If the applicant pool wasn’t diverse enough, the process was paused for “additional robust outreach.”
Imagine if the races were reversed. Suppose a whistleblower uncovered internal emails showing that a university had run a secret search to ensure that qualified black applicants were excluded from consideration. Suppose the school selected only white candidates to produce a racially predetermined outcome. There would—rightfully—be national outrage. It would be a landmark civil-rights case. That’s exactly what Cornell did—except I’m white.
This kind of race-based hiring is not only illegal, but is against the stated policies of my own university. I hope Cornell gets a sharp blow to the tuchas for this kind of duplicity. It’s one thing to make it public, but of course they couldn’t do that. So they are doing what many other schools are: hiring based on ethnicity but disguising it in various ways.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Hili dialogue is very long today (she’s reporting on the life of Andrzej: “The Administrator”), and so I have put Hili’s words below the fold. But here is her photo:
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From CinEmma:
From Things With Faces. Caption: “Luke, I am your coffee.”:
From Jesus of the Day:
Masih has a podcast: 71 minutes linked to this tweet. The topic: “What the West gets wrong about Iran.”
The Islamic Republic hasn’t come to terms with losing the 12-day war with Israel. There’s a lot that the West gets wrong about the Islamic Republic. @AlinejadMasih unpacks it all.https://t.co/Flekd0sibf
— Kambiz Foroohar (@kambizf) July 21, 2025
From Simon. I wonder if Larry the Cat still like Macron. . . :
Macron: "He's a very clever cat" Merci monsieur le président x
— Larry the Cat (@number10cat.bsky.social) 2025-07-10T19:36:17.529Z
From Luana: an alphabet divorce:
It’s time the LGB divorce the TQ+.
We are not the same. pic.twitter.com/bnRuzKc9wn— RigoStaRR (@RigoIrizarry) July 5, 2025
From Malcolm: an adoption gone wrong (but good for the d*g):
This little pup adopted by a mama cat
pic.twitter.com/OQ8irf2tcL— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) July 6, 2025
One from my feed: a double moggy adoption:
A guy wanted to adopt a cat, but he wouldn’t leave his brother’s side, so he had to take both of them.pic.twitter.com/Z4YqwB12OI
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 28, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
A Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed to death immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was about seven. https://t.co/OJru1ivepF
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) July 31, 2025
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. You can read the linked PNAS paper and decide for yourself:
Why do treehoppers look so weird?! Our latest paper, out this week in @pnas.org, suggests a perhaps unexpected reason – static electricity ⚡ We show that treehoppers can detect the electrostatic cues of predators and that their crazy shapes may boost their electrosensitivity! doi.org/10.1073/pnas…
— Sam England (@samjakeengland.bsky.social) 2025-07-24T11:41:50.171Z
This is an amazing feat of natural selection. Can you guess why building this fake spider (a complex behavior) has evolved?
“Deep in the Peruvian Amazon, a spider is at work building an elaborate, fake decoy of itself. In its web, it busily goes to working crafting its doppelgänger out of leaves, debris and dead prey insects…”#scicomm#sensoryecology#falsesignalwww.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/s…🧪 🕷️
— Sensory Ecology Lab (@sensoryecology.bsky.social) 2025-07-27T03:14:29.847Z
BELOW THE FOLD: Today’s Hili dialogue. Click “read more” to see the English version
For two days, writer Danuta Szulczyńska-Miłosz was our guest. She’ll be assisting with work on The Diary Found in an Old Head. The Administrator has gone mad – he’s buying a new laptop and plans to stay in constant contact with her. Danka instantly became part of our world. She met the Granddaughter, Paulina, and Gosia – the Teacher, who rushed in from Gdynia just to check whether the Administrator was still alive and well. She talked with Stefan, who helps in the garden, as if they’d known each other for a hundred years. She explored the history of Dobrzyń with fire in her eyes, examining everything that no longer exists – the place where the synagogue once stood, Żydowska Street, now called Słowackiego, Zduńska Street where Jewish craftsmen used to live, and the port, where for centuries barges floating down the Vistula to Gdańsk would collect grain – the forced labor of peasants sold by the nobility.
The hill with the iron cross, once much larger, was where a palisaded fort once stood, its garrison guarding the border, beyond which lay the lands of pagan Prussians and Yotvingians. The former lived in the western parts of Pomerania, the latter in the east. They were fond of raiding Dobrzyń, which guarded the Slavic lands of Mazovia.
The Administrator loves to spin this tale, sitting on a bench in the neat little marina. He conjures images of fishing boats, barges moored at the quay, horse-drawn carts or ox-drawn wagons carefully descending the steep road to the port. Porters unloading grain, barrels of tar, crates of oak bark.
The Administrator fell hopelessly in love with Danka, because she listened so beautifully to his chaotic story – about Viking boats sailing up the Vistula, about islands flooded by the dam built at the 675th kilometer of the river during the final years of Władysław Gomułka’s rule, which altered the timeless landscape, and about that unassuming hill with the iron cross that holds such an important place in Polish history. It was here that the story of the Teutonic Order began. The Teutonic Knights – known for their white cloaks with black crosses. In truth: The Order of the Hospital of St. Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem, founded in 1190 in Acre during the Third Crusade. Initially, a hospital brotherhood caring for wounded and ill Germans, it somehow evolved into a military order with ambitions of founding its own state – somewhere on the pagan fringes of Europe.
The Duke of Płock wanted to reinforce the border with the Prussians and Yotvingians, and German knights from Acre offered their services. The duke was warned that it was a trap. Foolish Duke paid no heed. He brought the hospital knights to this hill in 1226. But when they declared that Dobrzyń belonged to them, Konrad of Mazovia grew a little irritated and in 1228 gave them Chełmno Land as a fief, kicking them out of Dobrzyń. The hospitaliers from Acre were content with Chełmno Land, but regretted losing Dobrzyń. They tried many times to reclaim it. In 1409, they burned the town along with the fort, and beheaded the garrison commander in the market square. A year later came the Battle of Grunwald.
Writer Danka listened to the sociologist so beautifully that he wanted to tell her everything right there in that port. He hurried into modern times – to the Jewish cemetery that lay just beyond the hill with the iron cross, whose gravestones were stolen for paving stones, sharpening tools, and construction material. What little remains of it now lies underwater, and no one knows what it looks like down there.
They came back breathless with excitement over all that’s already gone. Truly, I don’t know where this will lead.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Trust is the first step to love. -Premchand, novelist and poet (31 Jul 1880-1936)
Yes, the Dems’ plan has succeeded. They gave Trump and the GOP enough rope to hang themselves, and now they have him where they want him!
I’m sure they’ll ignore or make feeble excuses for the recent polling showing that even voters who detest the Republicans’ unashamed toadying detest the Democrats’ headless-chicken fecklessness even more.¹
Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.
. . . . .
¹ The ranting language and interpretation are of course mine, not the pollsters’.
Ah, you remind me of an old Ani DeFranco song with your “Tweedledum and tweedledumber” … I don’t remember which one. It was on Little Plastic Castle CD. There were some good songs on that one.
A search of https://genius.com says the song is Fuel and the lyric is
Haven’t listened to it yet, but I will.
Yes! That’s it. The studio version. Hope you like it
A heads up for readers still following the U.S. (international) human spaceflight program: it is time for another crew changeout on the ISS. JUST AFTER NOON TODAY, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to blast off from Cape Kennedy with the four-person astronaut Crew 11 onboard. As a U.S. flight, it will chase Station for a couple of days before rendezvous and docking this weekend. I always go to Space.com for live coverage or direction to live coverage.
While theoretically, these commercial flights, contracted out to SpaceX in this case, should be independent of the budget and personnel turmoil at NASA itself, I do not see how that is possible and believe that additional risk is being added to the already risky business of launch to low Earth orbit…
And in other news, I continue to welcome and follow the daily long versions of Hili’s world.
Ah – refreshing to know!
NASA is becoming irrelevant as it is being overshadowed my SpaceX and Musk’s ultimately futile drive to colonize mars. This according to a short program on NPR as a report about an opinion piece from The Atlantic. Thoughts?
Years ago I caught sight of a space shuttle catching up to the ISS as they flew overhead. That was awesome.
Mark: just watched scrub for today due to a really dark cloud that had formed over launchsite with less than five minutes to launch.
Regarding future of NASA and its mission as a federal agency, with the current president and congress, I have absolutely no idea. To get a feel for what NASA was created for in 1958, as a national response to Russian advances in space including Sputnik, you should look at the establishing legislation, known as the Space Act of 1958 (url https://www.nasa.gov/history/national-aeronautics-and-space-act-of-1958-unamended/ ) in the first couple of pages you see the 8 or 9 main elements of the purpose of the new Space Agency. This formulation plays off the creation of the NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) created by Congress in 1915 as a response to the US being behind Europe in aeonautical capability at the start of WW1 even though the airplane was invented in the US. All of the existing NACA field labs were folded into the new NASA along with several DoD facilities.
While equally emphasizing aeronautics and space in the 1958 legislation, the mission as defined by budget quickly moved to a space priority eventually having two main space components: human spaceflight and science. Human spaceflight started as man in orbit culminating with man on moon, then constant presence in space on station and of course all the engineering design, development, and operation, of creating these unique and extremely complex vehicles. Science expanded to become understanding the planets, the sun, and outer space science properties in general through creating and launching instruments to measure these basic science data. Aeronautics research other than that required for launching and re-entry through earth’s atmosphere slowly but steadily eroded from the Agency’s funded mission.
Around the mid-80’s, I think I recall as a Reagon administration initiative, there was a push to hand over NASA launch vehicle design and operations to the commercial sector…fought over for years of turf battles…until Musk succeeded by doing. His contracts are still drawn up and monitored by NASA, but as contracts he has federal-hands-off responsibility to get the job done.
Meanwhile, as with other basic science research at NSF, NIH, and some of dept of energy, the NASA science budget has been halved from around $8B to $4B in rump’s proposed budget and NASa civil servant workforce significantly reduced.
So W(ho)Tf knows? Sorry but I cannot predict through unmodelable chaos.
Many thanks for your observations and synoptic history.
Whoever finds NASA “irrelevant,” it’s not me. I’ll never forget where I was when listening on a transistor radio to the live broadcast of Aldrin’s and Armstrong’s descent and, “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” And CAPCOM Charles Duke responding, “You’ve got a bunch of guys here about to turn blue!” (like me).
Thank you Filippo. I still get chills at the back of my neck when reading your quotes from that landing so many years ago.
Here is Sydney Sweeney with her old pals and an appropriately titled song for this fake (and ridiculous) outrage.
A belated “Happy Birthday” to Mick Jagger, who turned 82 this week. He still knows what sells! Convertibles!
In the matter of Sydney Sweeney, I suspect jealousy plays a large part in the backlash. I doubt if the “fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist” types that Orwell complained of have genes as nice as hers.
Envy more than jealousy, I think. When women say, “I hate you for looking so good,” it’s not a light-hearted compliment. They really mean it, literally. Do they ever.
I know a certain incredibly irksome female – obviously beyond reproach and scrutiny herself – who has repeatedly referred to a male whom she dislikes as “pretty boy.” I have often thought that, were he not a “pretty boy,” she would criticize him for that, also.
What is interesting is how this has split among the left and right.
During the last presidential election, I was flipping between the PBS and FOX coverage. Couldn’t help but notice that the FOX crowd, especially the women, were a lot easier on the eye than the PBS crew. It’s as if PBS had a “5 and below” policy, and FOX had the opposite.
It seems to me the chaotic story mentioned by Hili will be a fascinating book some day. I look forward to reading it.
As I’ve mentioned in several places, Andrzej is indeed writing an autobiography.
Pretty Blonde Girl Models Clothes To Help Sell Them Shock Horror Probe.
Cf. Brooke Shields.
(Also tangentially relates to the current Epstein scandal.)
SS .. I mean .. the Sydney Sweeney ad campaign .. is a Leftist psyop.
BlackRock (i.e. Larry Fink ) and Vanguard are American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) top two shareholders at 15% and 12% (as of 31 July 2025 easy to verify with a search ).
They deliberately push the mass line “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans”. They know exactly the import of this.
Normal people : word-play/beauty/sexual instinct/sales/jeans/nudging/marketing/etc.
Radicals :
->Woke Left : “Nazis / Fascists like this”
->Woke Right : “Gee, I’m a Nazi / fascist.”
… or :
https://x.com/putzisbackbaby/status/1950299353752670660?s=46
Also, and evolution-related, look at this Brooke Shields ad from way before Woke :
https://youtu.be/AXzR5b6HoIA?si=90gkPvyzz3zfDunp
Same word-play, etc. … all I have to say is :
LOL they are playing people (including me!) like a … mp3?…
Will ya just look at that butt! She almost doesn’t have one. (Brook Shields, I mean) My mom used to call that “crackerass” having no idea that it was a derogatory term. It’s funny because that’s what I couldn’t stop noticing about this Sydney Sweeney ad — she has the flattest ass I’ve seen in a commercial for years! Bryan? You’re ruining everything for me. 😏 But, seriously, advertising campaigns have been playing us forever. That’s what they’re all about. What will happen to all the young women who’ve had butt lifts now? They’ll have to go have them undone!
Ahem
Debi
I viewed the Brooke Shields ad for the same reason I read WEIT :
The evolution!
😁
Debi, if there’s a market for it than detransgluteal surgery will be readily and unapologetically available.
And Bryan, I agree that the cultural evolution of female attractiveness has been an active area of academic study, cf. Rubenesque and Twiggy-esque.
Well, perhaps we can join hands and pray to Divine Providence for a miracle to deliver her from what allegedly ails her. (Is it her maternal genes’ or her paternal genes’ fault? Or some combination? Or maybe Brook should just simply do something about it, like John Stuart Mill of His Own Free Will. I gather that, as long as she does not post here, Da Roolz don’t apply.)
As Richard Dawkins said in another context quoting I forget whom, “Every dog has its fleas.” (For some reason I’m also reminded of Christopher Hitchens’s rejoinder to Laura Ingraham, “You should have me on more often so that you can give your opinion.”)
The spider decoy is astonishing – the article says it is the most accurate decoy observed to date – but notes that spider-built decoys are known, but usually not so accurate – gotta wait ’til January for permits for a trip to collect specimens.
Was new to me!
“One of the only” is wrong, as George Will says. It starts by suggesting (with “only”) that Mr. Mantle is the only switch-hitter in the Hall of Fame but then pulls its punches and concedes there might be some unspecified number in there with him. It suggests the speaker may have thought off the top of his head that Mantle was the only one, then had second thoughts but couldn’t be bothered to check. He’s really saying, “the only…, er, OK maybe not the only, but one of the only”. Better to say, “Mantle is one of twenty switch-hitters to be inducted into the HoF.” Then the reader can decide to interpret that as Mantle being merely one of twenty, or one of only twenty.
“In the shipwreck, the cat was one of the only survivors.” Great news about the cat, but did anyone else survive or not? How many?
Grammatically, “the only” sounds as if it refers back to Mantle himself but on careful reading it refers to that subset of switch hitters — twenty — inducted to the HoF. A bait-and-switch. By contrast, Brian Hextall is the only NHL goaltender to score a goal while his team was shorthanded, and Martin Brodeur is the only one to score a game-winning goal. Brodeur is also the only goalie to score a goal while the opposing goalie was on the ice. (All from Wikipedia). Those are unambiguously unique achievements and merit “the only.”
Regarding “massive,” I’m reminded that 10-15 years ago NY Times reporters were on a tear using the adjective “monumental.” I reasonably gather that editors put an end to that. (Or was it that editors insisted on inserting the word? Perhaps one shouldn’t automatically blame reporters for every linguistic jot and tittle in a story.)
I was prepared to be very skeptical about the tree hopper/electrical field hypothesis, but reading it has changed my mind. it might actually be true!
Starting on the treehopper paper — electroreception. Very cool & thanks.
I also like (pan-fried) spam. And the Sydney Sweeney ad controversy is absurd. What exactly are people claiming? That’s it’s “eugenics” to claim that her good looks came from her DNA? That’s just common sense. And I like the return of old fashioned beauty standards.
Indeed the left are mightily annoyed that they cannot control desirability in people. They have tried to say the person with 3 chins is just oozing sex appeal. Everyone silently said No and politely carried on with their life.
They tried this same bullying tactics with if you men don’t date a trans woman then you are a sexual racist. Much to no one’s surprise it backfired.
As PCCE says its is hardwired into us and no slogan is ever going to change that. After all we all can admire a rose but will hardly be struck with awe at the beauty of a compost heap.
I think the hysterical overreaction is hilarious and quite telling.
“To date, party leaders seem more interested in clinging to power than delivering for the people. Better to maintain an unsustainable economic status quo than be mislabeled a Communist, the thinking goes. Better to avoid being called soft on “illegals” than to do the hard work needed to truly protect hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers living in fear under Mr. Trump’s dragnet.”
Ahhh, why do we have such stupid people in the Democratic Party? I have yet to see a cogent defense of the frankly unrealistic policies of young Mr. Mamdani, many of which (like draconian rent control, government-owned grocery stores, and free public transportation) have already been tried elsewhere and have failed many times. And…many of these initiatives aren’t even within the power of the mayor to actualize. So there is a huge element of fantasy involved in this wave of support for Mamdani.
Further, NYC does have a problem with an influx of illegal immigrants who are making the city less safe and are draining resources. Half-witted “sanctuary cities” policies are almost as bad as indiscriminate rounding up of illegals.
For fools like Antonio Delgado, being a good Democrat today is primarily an exercise in hating Trump and being very vocal about it. If you are not doing that, you must be for Trump….this is the “if not for us, against us” logic of the type of simpleton that seems pervasive in the Party today. It is good for winning primaries, but little else. Doing the hard work of coming up with realistic solutions to complex problems is well beyond these folks.
We really do need a return to the more pragmatic politicians of the Clinton era.
Politics as performance art. Amusing Ourselves to Death. The feckless Dems are not the only purveyors.
The Polish version of Hili Dialogue is nowhere to be found.
That’s because I didn’t put it up. If you want it, email me and I’ll send it to you. Putting it up would have made the post extremely LONG.
Yet ANOTHER middle aged FEMALE (always!) British accent keening and crying over “Poor Pawestinian “refugee camps”” and the (self inflicted) misery therein.
Note – Not refugees by any definition and most definitely not “camps”. Try: “genocidal jihadis trained since birth on one mission: Kill the Jews.” Not the “Zionists” – the Jews, al yahood.
Don’t British reporters have some rape gangs to report on back home? HHhhmmm?
What morally bankrupt contemptable useful idiots they are. Though… over here PBS’s Andrea Navas has nearly perfected her pronunciation of “GHaazah”, with the Arabic “G” and all. Next lesson “Falesteeen” Andrea. You did so good on your summer abroad in BaaTHEloona!
D.A.
DavidAnderson_JD_NYC
@DavidandersonJd
I’m still waiting for Israel to recognise the Catalonian state, which at least has defined borders….
Thank you George! I am so tired of every damn thing being Iconic! Time was when such things were instead Classic, which was quite tiresome and tedious, but not nearly as irritating.
The guy in the tweet is absolutely correct. LGB have wanted to divorce TQ+ for many years!
LGB: We were born this way.
TQ+: We were NOT born this way! You are anything you say you are.
See the organizations LGB Alliance (USA and UK), LGB Courage Coalition, Gays Against Groomers, and probably some others I’m forgetting.
Diarrhea is hereditary: it runs in the jeans.
Remember Gary Hart who had to withdraw from the presidential race because of an affair on a yacht (which just happened to be named Monkey Business)? Remembering Chappaquiddick, he tried to avoid damage by making no excuses. Didn’t work. The woman involved later was in an ad for “No Excuses” jeans, saying in a sultry voice “I don’t make them; I just wear them”.
Asked about this by a journalist, in one of his rare moments of humour, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl quipped that in Germany no-one would care about such activities and in France they might be a requirement to get elected.
Diarrhea is hereditary: it runs in the jeans.
Remember Gary Hart who had to withdraw from the presidential race because of an affair on a yacht (which just happened to be named Monkey Business)? Remembering Chappaquiddick, he tried to avoid damage by making no excuses. Didn’t work. The woman involved later was in an ad for “No Excuses” jeans, saying in a sultry voice “I don’t make them; I just wear them”.
Asked about this by a journalist, in one of his rare moments of humour, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl quipped that in Germany no-one would care about such activities and in France they might be a requirement to get elected.