Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, September 27, 2025: shabbos for good Jewish cats as well as International Rabbit Day. Now I know that this painting (“Young Hare” by Albrecht Dürer, 1502) is a hare, not a rabbit, so don’t come after me. It’s close enough, and it’s beautiful:
The news may be truncated a bit today as I drank and ate too much last night at an Argentinian steakhouse, and hence arose, after a restive night, quite late. As always, I do my best.
Da Nooz:
*The WaPo’s article on Trump’s new tariffs, “Trump’s fresh tariffs could inflate consumer prices for months to come” is wrong in one word: “could” should be “will.” OF COURSE consumer prices will go up. How could they not, as American companies have to pass on inflated costs of goods from other places to the consumer? This is on top of the inflation we already have, and the only good news is that it may drive Republicans away from Trump in the next election.
President Donald Trump’s sector-specific tariffs threaten to add fresh fuel to inflation that has remained stubbornly elevated for four years, potentially driving up costs for households at least in the short term.
The new tariffs range from 25 percent to 100 percent and target pharmaceuticals, heavy trucks, kitchens cabinets, bathroom vanities and upholstered furniture. They will take effect Oct. 1.
It’s already a challenging period for consumers. Fresh data from the Commerce Department on Friday showed core inflation — the Federal Reserve’s preferred gauge of underlying price pressures — grew at a 2.9 percent annual rate in August. That was in line with expectations but up from a 2.5 percent rate in April.
“At a time when it’s looking increasingly like the U.S. is experiencing an acceleration in underlying inflation, the new tariffs announced by President Trump will only exacerbate the challenges facing households and will only make it harder for the Fed to continue cutting interest rates, as the president wishes,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
And remember—that’s from a “right-leaning” institute. If you haven’t noticed that virtually all prices are up, you haven’t bought anything. Since Americans always pay close attention to their economic well being at election time, I’m crossing my fingers—not so much for the midterms, since regardless of what happens Trump will have a veto, but surely for the 2028 election.
*My conversations here with people from Harvard are consistent, with faculty saying that they think President Garber is doing a good job fighting against their multi-billion-dollar levy from the Trump administration. But of course Garber is also bargaining on the side for a settlement that may make Harvard’s lawsuit against the Administration moot. The decision on whether to fight or bargain with Trump is plaguing American colleges, as they decide whether to “give in or fight back.”
The Trump administration has attacked the University of California system’s research funding, launched a swarm of investigations and demanded that it pay more than $1 billion.
But people across the 10-campus system are at odds over how to fight back, stirring a war within about countering President Trump’s tactics. In many ways, the conflicts reflect academia at large, which has not mustered a consensus about how to fend off the White House’s campaign to remake American campuses.
California administrators have tried to negotiate with the same government that professors have sued. The university system’s regents have huddled behind closed doors while one, Gov. Gavin Newsom, has publicly called for defiance. And system leaders have clashed with campus-level officials over giving the Trump administration the names of scores of students and employees connected to complaints about antisemitism.
“This has nothing to do with antisemitism, and everything to do with capitulating,” Peyrin Kao, a Berkeley lecturer who was included in the files that went to the federal government, told regents last week.
. . . The tensions stem from the question of what universities should prioritize. Should battling incursions into academic freedom take precedence? Or protecting students and cherished values like diversity? Or should retaining federal research funds come first?
Well, in my own view the present structure of DEI at universities should go, as it forsters neither diversity of opinion, promotes equity at the expense of merit, and is not inclusionary, forcing a critical-race ideology on everyone, with dissenters not welcome. But I digress:
. . . The University of California system, which has about 560,000 students and employees, receives more than $17 billion in federal funding each year.
Most of the federal money for the university system, which includes six academic health centers, is related to patient care covered by Medicare and Medicaid. But more than $7 billion is tied to research and student financial aid. If federal funding were to largely vanish, officials predict that the academic, economic and social repercussions would reshape California, where the university system is among the largest employers.
The Trump administration has had the system on edge for months.
Of course both actions make sense, and either could be construed as creating the best for the university. Either keep the research going or maintain your principles. My Harvard colleagues have lost tons of grant money and have had to get rid of some of their lab workers. This is an impasse, and I’m just glad I don’t run a university. My preference would be to defend the principle of academic freedom, but is that worth having valuable and sometimes life-saving research shut down?
*This week’s news-and-snark column by Nellie Bowles in the Free Press is particularly good, and I wish I could reproduce it all. But you’ll have to subscribe to see it: “TGIF: Pass the Tylenol.” As always, I’ll steal a few items from the inimitable Bowles.
→ Quick check-in on free speech: Outside the Turkish consulate in London, a knife-wielding man, Moussa Kadri, attacked a protester who was burning a copy of the Quran. Kadri shouted “I’m going to kill you!” as he slashed at the protester, chased him, and kicked him while he was on the ground, before spitting on him. It’s all on video. But Kadri was spared jail time by a judge, who said:
I note however that you are now 59 years old and someone of hitherto exemplary character. . . . You are a loved husband and father. A hard worker and someone who those who have written on your behalf cannot praise highly enough. You are relied upon as a carer and much respected in your work with charity.
The Quran burner who Kadri attacked with a knife? He was found guilty in June of a “religiously aggravated public order offense” and ordered to pay a fine. Fascinating. Is he a father?
Has there ever been a more peaceful transition of power than this one? So gentle. Ushered in with empathy and love. Goodbye, gentle Europe! If someone stabs you for complaining, they won’t go to jail anymore, you sweet soft shell crabs. Take comfort in the fact that the man wielding the knife is of otherwise exemplary character.
→ Oh my god:
The Dems are in very big trouble. Only 35 percent of respondents in this poll said they approved of Trump’s management of the economy—a similar number to those who approved of the economy under Biden last year. Even still, respondents said the Republican Party is better at managing the economy than Democrats. Dems, this poll is a five-alarm fire. One option: Moderate and embrace the abundance agenda, which is just Becoming Bill Clinton Again. It’s Free Markets plus, I guess, a solar panel somewhere. Abundance is Allbirds with a vape. It’s an agenda that says, Hey, kids, what if the subway was funded and also safe, just don’t ask questions. Embrace abundance and elevate my kings, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias. Recognize their superiority. The Clinton family was great, guys. Stop trying to do anything better—it can’t be done.
→ I love Kamala on her book tour: Kamala Harris’s book tour began in earnest this week—with the former vice president set to crisscross the country to market 107 Days, where each chapter details one day in her compressed presidential campaign. The book is filled with surprising tidbits of truth, such as Harris being unable to choose Pete Buttigieg as her running mate because he’s gay and she’s married to a Jewish guy, and Americans like Broadway, fine, but let’s keep it in the theater, huh? The revelations have made for an interesting media tour:
Rachel Maddow: It’s hard to hear. . . . You’re the first woman elected vice president, you’re a black woman and a South Asian woman elected to that high office, very nearly elected president, to say that he couldn’t be on the ticket effectively because he was gay, it’s hard to hear.
Kamala Harris: No, no, no, that’s not what I said. . . . My point, as I write in the book, is that I was clear that in 107 days—in one of the most hotly contested elections for president of the United States against someone like Donald Trump, who knows no floor—to be a black woman running for president of the United States, and as a vice-presidential running mate, a gay man, with the stakes being so high, it made me very sad, but I also realized it would be a real risk.
So, in other words, Maddow is exactly right and Kamala didn’t think she could win with a gay guy? It’s okay! I couldn’t win a game of Taboo with a gay guy—but mostly because I don’t get their references.
It’s amazing to watch Kamala Harris on tour now, given that throughout her entire presidential campaign, Harris didn’t hold a single formal press conference. Not a single one. Trump chases after every camera he sees. When you take a selfie in Washington, D.C., Trump materializes next to your face to ramble about tariffs. At every wedding at Mar-a-Lago, Trump emerges to take questions and weigh in on the dresses. He’d hold a presser on a Little League game—no event is above commentary from him. There’s a lesson in that.
*In The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan proffers a bit of a rant, but a justified one: “Our post-literate, post-liberal era.” Sullivan claims that when the Internet arrived, the pictures and videos of the Internet would displace reading: “win any contest for eyeballs.” And, he says, he was right: America has been dumbed down, and this dumbing down has led to the rise of strongman Trump.” A longish excerpt:
I’m not touting myself as some kind of Cassandra, and my memory is probably flattering me. But, as I tried to imagine practically how a literary and political magazine [he was editor of the New Republic] could adjust to the web, I just didn’t see how it could — except as a peripheral, minor preserve of a few. (Hence my gravitating toward blogging a few years later.) What I failed to consider was how this would have a huge cultural and thereby political effect that would shake the reasoning and deliberating foundations of liberal democracy. It meant we would think and read less, and see and feel more. It meant our attention span would attenuate to make long-form reading rarer and rarer. And that, in the end, would matter.
I detest the notes accompanying articles in many venues that say things like, “Reading time: 4 minutes.” As if you could judge whether yo wanted to read a piece by its length, not by its content. But now I’m ranting, too. Back to Sullivan:
A brilliant little Substack essay last week reminded me of all this in a flash. James Marriott helps you see how a post-liberal politics is deeply related to a post-literate culture. Deep reading is in free-fall everywhere in the developing world, as the smartphone has hijacked our brains. Professors at even elite colleges are finding their students have lost the ability to read at length and in depth; talking has replaced reading; images have replaced ideas; engagement has supplanted reflection; and the various cognitive skills that reading once conferred to the masses since the printing press are fast atrophying.
Which cognitive skills? Neil Postman explains in Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist-all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.
No wonder global IQ levels are now falling for the first time. No wonder the reading scores of American high-school students are the worst since 1992, according to a new report. No wonder the next generation communicates in memes, not words, let alone sentences. AI is surely compounding this even further, allowing you to have an increasingly sophisticated bot read something for you. College itself, as a period when you devote yourself to long and deep solitary reading, is becoming obsolete:
[L]arge language models have created an existential crisis for teachers trying to evaluate their students’ ability to actually write, as opposed to their ability to prompt an LLM to do all their homework. “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” one student said. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” a professor echoed.
No wonder that Gen Z and younger — having been denied the solace of knowing actual history, experiencing serious religious faith, and being transported by big, complex novels into other distant minds and places — feel adrift, searching for meaning and perspective, lost in phones, prey to cults. Trans-furries and budding neo-Hitlers: an emotive, irrational, grievance-obsessed generation of lonely souls — increasingly prone to violence.
One reason Trump is president now is because all this made his ascendance possible. A post-literate president rose through the irrational, emotive Twitter revolution, with social media simultaneously making it hard to gain any perspective, overcome any emotional trigger, or concentrate for more than a couple of minutes. I noticed this as the Dish progressed toward its 2009+ era: the perfect pace to maximize traffic was a single brief post every 20 minutes. We had no serious analytics; but you could feel the collective attention span wither and die after a few seconds as surely as that pace and frenzy turned my own brain and body into a twitchy, dopamine-addled fog.
You want a perfect example of a post-literate moment? Ponder the UN speech by President Trump this week. Even written down, it was “the weave” — a series of unconnected rants and digressions, baseless assertions and unseemly insults, a stream of addled and angry consciousness with no real relationship to coherence, or reason, or persuasion.
Imagine the head of a small country standing up at the UN and saying:
I’m really good at predicting things, you know?… I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.
All I can say is that although this sounds curmudgeonly, it also sounds correct.
*Finally, Ghost, the Giant Pacific octopus starving herself to death as she tends a batch of unfertilized eggs at the Aquarium of the Pacific, is still alive. There’s a bit of news about what will happen to her after she dies:
. . . . the Aquarium of the Pacific is sharing what will happen to Ghost’s remains after she passes away. In an update on Ghost’s condition, Nate Jaros, the aquarium’s vice president of animal care, tells PEOPLE exclusively that Ghost, who “continues to rest comfortably behind the scenes,” will be cremated.
“After she passes, our veterinary team will do a necropsy examination similar to a human autopsy to learn as much as we can about her health to ensure we are providing optimal care and nutrition; and her remains will be cremated,” Jaros tells PEOPLE.
Ghost arrived at the aquarium in May 2024 after a scientific collector brought her into the facility. As Jaros explains, “Our giant Pacific octopuses are sustainably and humanely collected from the wild by permitted specialists that conduct scientific collections.”
“Sustainably collected”? What does that mean. They collected her so the aquarium could make money. Had they left her in the ocean, she’d still die tending her eggs, but those eggs would be fertilized. As it is, her genetic lineage is doomed (they breed only once).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej and Hili are down again:
Hili: We need to wake up from this bad dream.
Me: Unfortunately, that’s not possible.
In Polish:
Hili: Musimy się obudzić ze złego snu.
Ja: Niestety, to nie jest możliwe.
*******************
From Divy, who said she would have to skip this “captcha”. They’re ALL loaves!
From Masih: Iran won’t let men look at women’s legs showing underneath dresses:
So the Islamic Republic hides the legs of European ministers… That’s not a government, that’s a fetish club with nukes. and here is my question to both of you @elinavaltonen@mariastenergard and your people in Sweden, and Finland: You want to talk ‘peace talks’ with these guys… pic.twitter.com/WLNHnmBRoE
From Luana, the first of 15 tweets. I haven’t read the paper yet:
🧵 1/15 – “THERE ARE ONLY TWO SEXES AND THERE CAN NEVER BE MORE” – my publication in Archives of Sexual Behavior.
Thread with link and very brief summaries of the main points I cover in the paper… pic.twitter.com/0wmrUFcDaM
Steve Pinker and Tyler Cowen discuss the advantages and disadvantages of anonymity on the Internet . In general I think people should take responsibility for their words: no anonymity.
In the clip below, Tyler Cowen (@tylercowen) and I discuss common knowledge in relation to anonymous accounts on social media, shaming mobs, and noble lies.
27 September 1937 | A French Jewish girl, Myriam Bloch, was born in Metz.She arrived at #Auschwitz on 20 December 1943 in a transport of 850 Jews deported from Drancy. She was among 505 of them murdered in gas chambers after the selection. –Children at Auschwitz: https://youtu.be/aYKx_zpLSqA
South Texas game cam catches a raccoon riding a javelina (Dicotyles tajacu).The deer feeder corn attracts a lot of other species, but maybe we should worry about them all teaming up against us?(📷: Jeff Davis, TAMU-Kingsville alumni forum)
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Life is short. Be swift to love! Make haste to be kind! -Henri Frederic Amiel, philosopher and writer (27 Sep 1821-1881)
“may drive Republicans away from Trump in the next election”
I thought that US president could not have a third term but, when I googled, I found that Trump thinks he has found a loophole.
Are people in the USA thinking that Trump really will try and change the constitution or use the loophole of running as vice president for a president who will then immediately resign?
That BBC story is from March, old news. As a rule of thumb, when a headline is cast as a question the answer is always, “No.” This is because the media need to catastrophize things.
The cool thing about the vice-presidential gambit is that if the electorate was up for it, it would work over and over again, not just once. A person can serve a lifetime of terms as President so long as he gets elected to the Presidency only twice. If he ascends to the office through the vice-presidency, or by any route outlined in the line of succession, his name can be on the next ticket (as VP nominee) as many times as his party wants to nominate him. This would require that the nominee for President would agree always (but not legally enforceably) to step aside in favour of his running mate, the “real” candidate, after the election. The first time, as with breaking any taboo, this would seem like a bitter pill for an ambitious politician to swallow. But as the process become normalized with regular use, candidates for President would come to understand that they were intended to be no more than buckets of warm spit, stalking horses for the real candidate, the sitting President. All attention and campaigning would turn to the running mate who, unlike traditional VP candidates, would be able to run on his record in office as President and promise four more years of steady stewardship and stable geniusity.
Trump has probably been thinking about that. It probably won’t fly. It certainly won’t work via being Vice-President, as all Vice-Presidents have to be eligible to be elected President. What about both POTUS and VPOTUS dropping out somewhere then the next person coming up? The consensus seems to be that the intent of the law is clear and that more than two terms, no matter how, would not stand up in court.
Trump might try something else, namely get a relative to run but he would be the “real” POTUS. IIRC a governor of Texas did that once.
“Vice-Presidents have to be eligible to be elected President”
I didn’t come across that information when I was looking at the options. Thank you, I find that reassuring.
I think you read it right the first time, Joolz.
. . . the Constitution’s 12th Amendment says “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the United States”. [from the BBC story]
Contra Philip Helbig, the 12th doesn’t say anything about the VP being constitutionally eligible to be elected President, only that he be constitutionally eligible to be President. Meaning, that he has to be over 35, a natural-born U.S. citizen, meet the residency requirements, and, I guess, not have participated in insurrection against the United States. As you, the BBC, and I postulate, he could serve any number of terms by succession, just not by election. The protests by opponents of a Trump Third Term sound like wishful thinking to me. The best defence against it is that he will be just too damn old.
By “old news” I meant only that if Donald Trump hasn’t mentioned something in a week or two, it’s probably no longer on his mind as he moves on to something else. So I apologize to you for dismissing your report. Old is good. I’m betting that my 2000 Civic will outlast Jerry’s even though it has more miles on it. I suppose it depends if Chicago road salt is worse than southern Ontario salt.
Conclusion: no sensible person would debate the intent of the 22nd amendment. However, not all people are sensible.
I know it was an old piece, it doesn’t mean that the info in it was out of date as the constitution can be changed and Trump’s ego may make him try. I just wanted to know what people over there thought.
I agree it’s not likely, but in US politics all bets are off.
I wonder how much more recent the piece would have had to have been that it was not considered “old.” No more than 24 hours? A week? A month? By that logic it seems that no one should mention having read any history.
Listening to a recent James Lindsay’s podcast this morning (within the last two weeks, hopefully not too “old”), he informed listeners that 2017 was “a very long time ago.”
I contemplate a 16 year-old in 2025 saying apologetically, “I may be showing my age [or, “I may be ‘dating’ myself”], but I remember way back in 2017 . . . .”)
I bought my current car in late 2016. I intend to keep it at least as long as PCC(E) has kept his. Or should I sell it out of fear that it will be viewed as “old” or “dated”? (No doubt I myself personally am inescapably “dated,” from Lindsay’s definition having resided on this mortal coil for a very, very, very much longer time than “a very long time” of eight years.)
Excellent Filippo. I think about this stuff a lot – how time telescopes. And how, I at 55 feel like an older man but I remember …say.. 1980. and I meet more and more people for whom “1980” seems like 1960 to me… the dark ages before my time and civilization (which we all know started in… 1980!).
I think.. just an idea.. we think about property the same way. Like your and PCC(E)’s vintage cars, of 10 or 15 years ago. Might as well be Model T Fords!
hheehe
Good point.
D.A.
NYC
As I say in real life, it’s not the age that matters, it’s the quality 😄
I remember as a kid working out how old I would be at the millennium and I was horrified. I just knew I would be too old to celebrate it. Here we are, a quarter of a century after the millennium and I still don’t feel old.
A friend did feel old though when her child asked her how she managed when she was a little girl and they lived in caves 😂😂
The mention of the Quran burning and stabbing incident reminded me of a thought I had the other day.
I had read an article about an incident in which someone had thrown a bag of pork into a Jewish fraternity building, which the authorities were treating as a hate crime as they searched for the culprit.
And though there are some differences, it occured to me that burning the Quran and throwing a bag of pork at a Jewish building are in some ways comparable. (One difference I see is the throwing INTO the building, which is different than doing something in a public space or on one’s own private property.)
Depending on whether one wishes to make more of the differences or of the similarities, I suppose one would either have to treat both as hate crimes or treat both as issues of free expression.
Thoughts?
Burning your own book is protected political speech.
The other involves two people charged with crimes (burglary and criminal mischief) that also have an aspect of racial hatred. One of them made entry into the building and splattered raw pork all over the place.
No idea why they charged him with burglary, not breaking and entering, but maybe that’s how they define burglary there (entering without permission?).
Well, I tried to bracket out the breaking and entering issue in my parenthetical comment.
Let me rephrase: should burning one’s own Quran outside a Muslim institution and throwing one’s own bag of pork outside a Jewish institution be treated the same? As a hate crime or as acceptable free expression?
Should burning one’s own cross on one’s own property, which happens to be across the street from a church popular with black folks be acceptable expression?
The circumstances aren’t as important as the intent.
Yes, I thought about adding just such an instance to my question, but assumed it wasn’t necessary, as it would be quite parallel and could be multiplied ad nauseam with similar acts and further religious and/or ethnic communities.
And could you elaborate on the intent comment? Do you mean that with a certain given intent it should be a punishable hate crime, and with some other intent it should be seen as permissible free expression? And how would such be adjudicated?
Oops. After I wrote that I went down stairs to make some coffee. As I was grinding up the beans, my brain said;”wait a minute!”.
I said that backwards. Circumstances are more important that intent, of course. People can burn crosses all they want, so long as they keep it to themselves. Same with Koran burning. If you do it in front of a mosque; you’re doing to incite. If you thow pork at your mother-in-law, she probably dreserved it, but if you throw it into a synagogue you are trying to incite.
You do any of that, and you lose all nice guy privleges.
I have to add….even the SMELL of coffee clears my head. There are many addictions in the world, few are any good. But coffee…..
But isn’t the whole idea of freedom of expression in fact the freedom to express oneself to others in public? “Keeping it to myself” isn’t really freedom of expression at all, is it?
Responding to you, GB, just because your respondents are max. indented. Amplifying you, really.
Burning one’s own copy of the Koran outside a mosque would be incitement in the U.S. only if you said to your mob of kerosene-can-toting followers gathered outside the mosque, “I have lit the spark, now pour your kerosene on the timbers of this here mosque (not the one across town) and I’ll set it ablaze!” That would be incitement to violence no matter what you were burning as the tinder. If you are there by yourself unarmed, with no followers toting incendiaries, you don’t have the means to violence, so no incitement to same. If by burning the Koran you are merely taunting, hoping only that the congregants in the mosque will fly off the handle and riot, I don’t think that is incitement. That’s just standing up to the heckler’s veto. What if they ignore you, as most of us resign ourselves to doing when they burn our flags? Does that change the legality? We can’t thump an aboriginal protestor just because he burns a Canadian flag, and he commits no offence doing so.
It’s true that if there was an anti-Israel protest going on and someone from our side set to burning the Koran in view of the Muslim demonstrators, the police might well escort him away to prevent a breach of the peace, knowing how volatile those Muslims are. But he couldn’t be charged with a crime unless he did something else like obstructing the police doing their lawful duty in crowd control and de-escalation.
Ah, cross burnings. Who says it’s illegal — where? — to burn a cross you bought yourself on your own private property, across the street from a black church? (Assume you’re not violating any by-laws against outdoor burning during fire season etc. And if there was a fire ban, make a realistic hologram of a burning cross. Hang some nooses from the cross-arms even.) Again, unless the burning cross is explicitly meant to incite a mob that has the means to spread the fire to the church, it’s protected speech, surely, no matter what the circumstances and intent of the cross-burner were. Hate speech in Canada is explicitly defined in our Criminal Code and none of the actions described herein would be prosecuted as hate speech. The first example with kerosene would be “incitement to riot”, I think. But not hate speech.
As for hate enhancements to actions that are crimes even before hate figures in, I find those dangerous virtue signalling exercises by prosecutors. But there has to be a crime, first. No amount of hate by itself turns a lawful act into a crime.
Re speech, if you like (or at least tolerate) South Park, the latest ep has a subtle (for them) jab on the topic: James Comey suffers a very serious accident (involving a huge pile of cat excrement) and lies immobilised in hospital. The doctor says he is regaining his freedom of mobility, but the toxoplasmosis brain parasites makes it doubtful he will regain his freedom of speech. FWIW, this ep is highly rated on IMDB.
The Hesiod quote is from “Works and Days” written around 700BCE. Not exposing your genitals, in whatever condition, near a fireplace, seems like a reasonable precaution. Although he also says, “Don’t piss standing up while facing the sun” which strikes me as less useful.
Yes, not facing the wind would make more sense.
Obviously an indication that Hesiod understood the concept of solar wind.
😂
I wonder if Hesiod had in mind Aesop’s fable, “The Sun and the Wind.”
Better analysis, there, Mr. Stubbs. Thanks for the context.
My original thought was “Burning pubes a big problem back in dawn of civilization days?”
D.A.
NYC
From Luana. The first of fifteen tweets. I haven’t read the paper yet.”
It’s Bunny Day! Our yard is home to four bunnies—Eastern Cottontails. One is Fluffy (small ears, sits puffed up like a puffball). Another is Stripey (with a white stripe on her side, she’s three years old and nearing the end of her life). The other two don’t have names, but they look a lot like Stripey, so may be her offspring. They grow up fast. They are a big pain in the spring when they eat all our young garden plants. But the plants get ahead of them by late spring and the bunnies move on to the grass and clover, which is fine. By summer, we’re no longer annoyed and we enjoy them—little creatures living rich lives right in our yard.
It’s even worse! If the inflation rate grew from 2.5% to 2.9% year-over-year as the WaPo says, inflation grew by 16%! (Of course there is quite a bit of monthly variation.)
And yes, while universities are navigating the financial crisis in their own ways, they can dramatically improve things by dismantling DEI completely—and not just by changing the name. I want my airplane pilot, my surgeon, my financial planner, my city manager, my … to be meritorious. We should demand nothing less.
Collecting Pacific Giant Octopuses “sustainably?” Maybe it means “without contributing additional CO2 to the atmosphere.” 🙂
I think in hunting, sustainable harvests means that the population will not decline to where it cannot easily recover.
I forgot where I read this, but the author’s point was that the real historical anomaly was the Republican party as it used to be, whereas the Republican party now is similar to right wing parties everywhere.
We can debate the causes, but the U.S. is regressing to the mean.
Though I share Masih’s revulsion at the Iranian regime and appreciate her principled and energetic stand against it, I’m afraid she has once again shown herself to be a rather unreliable messenger with her “fetish club with nukes” comment. Iran does not have nukes. One could probably defend the claim that it aspires to nukes, even if others would dispute it. But simply saying it has nukes is misleading; whether intentionally so or not is hard to judge.
Jared – When it comes to nukes, and Iran, and Israel’s size… I think even anything CLOSE to nukes is not a non-zero risk, it is a five alarm fire.
They have a countdown clock to Israel’s annihilation in their town square in Tehran.
This kind of thing challenges normal risk equations made for civilized countries.
Iran …. is different. Sadly. For now.
D.A.
NYC
A countdown clock?! Is there a video of it counting down? When is it scheduled to hit zero?
…….ballroom. I don’t think he has the power to build it.
It is apparently under construction at this moment.
It reminds me of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera. iDJT’s won’t last as long, even as a ruin.
The news may be truncated a bit today as I drank and ate too much last night at an Argentinian steakhouse …
I lived for a time next door to “Henri’s”, an Argentinian restaurant, in Melbourne, Australia. A hand-written sign at the entrance to the restaurant said “If you don’t like garlic don’t come in.”
Contrary to Andrew Sullivan, Trump did not get elected because people have become dumbed down by the internet. Trump got elected because the majority did not approve of open borders, men in women’s sports, and DEI race-based discrimination in university admissions and hiring – the three pillars of today’s Dem party. As former Dem advisor Ruy Teixeira has warned, unless they abandon those pillars they will be out of office for a long, long time.
PS Netanyahu’s UN speech was brilliant – says it all really.
“We’ll have their votes for 200 years,” LBJ gloated, after he signed the civil rights legislation into law in 1964. He was likely correct. But can the Democratic Party govern if those are the only votes it can count on for the remaining 139 years?
A bloc that votes 95% for you, albeit with middling turnout, can’t just be thrown under the bus. But if each black non-voter you pander to drives away three non-black voters who vote, in a country where blacks aren’t the only minority anymore but are the only one not thriving, some hard choices might have to be made. Yet if your policies drive away all those black voters and cause them to stay home on Election Day, that’s not good either. This looks a lot like the coffin corner in aviation, a jam that can be impossible to escape from. Whatever the pilot does is wrong.
So annoying that restive means restless when it should mean restful!
Really? My dictionary says differently:
restive | ˈrɛstɪv |
adjective
(of a person) unable to remain still, silent, or submissive, especially because of boredom or dissatisfaction: the crowd had been waiting for hours and many were becoming restive | he reiterated his determination to hold the restive republics together.
• (of a horse) stubbornly standing still or moving backwards or sideways; refusing to advance: both their horses became restive at once.
ORIGIN
late Middle English (as restif): from Old French restif, –ive, from Latin restare ‘remain’. The original sense, ‘inclined to remain still’, has undergone a reversal; the association with the stubborn behaviour of a horse gave rise to the current sense ‘restless’.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Life is short. Be swift to love! Make haste to be kind! -Henri Frederic Amiel, philosopher and writer (27 Sep 1821-1881)
“may drive Republicans away from Trump in the next election”
I thought that US president could not have a third term but, when I googled, I found that Trump thinks he has found a loophole.
Are people in the USA thinking that Trump really will try and change the constitution or use the loophole of running as vice president for a president who will then immediately resign?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx20lwedn23o
That BBC story is from March, old news. As a rule of thumb, when a headline is cast as a question the answer is always, “No.” This is because the media need to catastrophize things.
The cool thing about the vice-presidential gambit is that if the electorate was up for it, it would work over and over again, not just once. A person can serve a lifetime of terms as President so long as he gets elected to the Presidency only twice. If he ascends to the office through the vice-presidency, or by any route outlined in the line of succession, his name can be on the next ticket (as VP nominee) as many times as his party wants to nominate him. This would require that the nominee for President would agree always (but not legally enforceably) to step aside in favour of his running mate, the “real” candidate, after the election. The first time, as with breaking any taboo, this would seem like a bitter pill for an ambitious politician to swallow. But as the process become normalized with regular use, candidates for President would come to understand that they were intended to be no more than buckets of warm spit, stalking horses for the real candidate, the sitting President. All attention and campaigning would turn to the running mate who, unlike traditional VP candidates, would be able to run on his record in office as President and promise four more years of steady stewardship and stable geniusity.
Trump has probably been thinking about that. It probably won’t fly. It certainly won’t work via being Vice-President, as all Vice-Presidents have to be eligible to be elected President. What about both POTUS and VPOTUS dropping out somewhere then the next person coming up? The consensus seems to be that the intent of the law is clear and that more than two terms, no matter how, would not stand up in court.
Trump might try something else, namely get a relative to run but he would be the “real” POTUS. IIRC a governor of Texas did that once.
“Vice-Presidents have to be eligible to be elected President”
I didn’t come across that information when I was looking at the options. Thank you, I find that reassuring.
I think you read it right the first time, Joolz.
Contra Philip Helbig, the 12th doesn’t say anything about the VP being constitutionally eligible to be elected President, only that he be constitutionally eligible to be President. Meaning, that he has to be over 35, a natural-born U.S. citizen, meet the residency requirements, and, I guess, not have participated in insurrection against the United States. As you, the BBC, and I postulate, he could serve any number of terms by succession, just not by election. The protests by opponents of a Trump Third Term sound like wishful thinking to me. The best defence against it is that he will be just too damn old.
By “old news” I meant only that if Donald Trump hasn’t mentioned something in a week or two, it’s probably no longer on his mind as he moves on to something else. So I apologize to you for dismissing your report. Old is good. I’m betting that my 2000 Civic will outlast Jerry’s even though it has more miles on it. I suppose it depends if Chicago road salt is worse than southern Ontario salt.
https://www.factcheck.org/2025/04/legal-scholars-dispute-constitutional-loophole-for-a-third-trump-term/
Conclusion: no sensible person would debate the intent of the 22nd amendment. However, not all people are sensible.
I know it was an old piece, it doesn’t mean that the info in it was out of date as the constitution can be changed and Trump’s ego may make him try. I just wanted to know what people over there thought.
I agree it’s not likely, but in US politics all bets are off.
I wonder how much more recent the piece would have had to have been that it was not considered “old.” No more than 24 hours? A week? A month? By that logic it seems that no one should mention having read any history.
Listening to a recent James Lindsay’s podcast this morning (within the last two weeks, hopefully not too “old”), he informed listeners that 2017 was “a very long time ago.”
I contemplate a 16 year-old in 2025 saying apologetically, “I may be showing my age [or, “I may be ‘dating’ myself”], but I remember way back in 2017 . . . .”)
I bought my current car in late 2016. I intend to keep it at least as long as PCC(E) has kept his. Or should I sell it out of fear that it will be viewed as “old” or “dated”? (No doubt I myself personally am inescapably “dated,” from Lindsay’s definition having resided on this mortal coil for a very, very, very much longer time than “a very long time” of eight years.)
Excellent Filippo. I think about this stuff a lot – how time telescopes. And how, I at 55 feel like an older man but I remember …say.. 1980. and I meet more and more people for whom “1980” seems like 1960 to me… the dark ages before my time and civilization (which we all know started in… 1980!).
I think.. just an idea.. we think about property the same way. Like your and PCC(E)’s vintage cars, of 10 or 15 years ago. Might as well be Model T Fords!
hheehe
Good point.
D.A.
NYC
As I say in real life, it’s not the age that matters, it’s the quality 😄
I remember as a kid working out how old I would be at the millennium and I was horrified. I just knew I would be too old to celebrate it. Here we are, a quarter of a century after the millennium and I still don’t feel old.
A friend did feel old though when her child asked her how she managed when she was a little girl and they lived in caves 😂😂
The mention of the Quran burning and stabbing incident reminded me of a thought I had the other day.
I had read an article about an incident in which someone had thrown a bag of pork into a Jewish fraternity building, which the authorities were treating as a hate crime as they searched for the culprit.
And though there are some differences, it occured to me that burning the Quran and throwing a bag of pork at a Jewish building are in some ways comparable. (One difference I see is the throwing INTO the building, which is different than doing something in a public space or on one’s own private property.)
Depending on whether one wishes to make more of the differences or of the similarities, I suppose one would either have to treat both as hate crimes or treat both as issues of free expression.
Thoughts?
Burning your own book is protected political speech.
The other involves two people charged with crimes (burglary and criminal mischief) that also have an aspect of racial hatred. One of them made entry into the building and splattered raw pork all over the place.
No idea why they charged him with burglary, not breaking and entering, but maybe that’s how they define burglary there (entering without permission?).
Well, I tried to bracket out the breaking and entering issue in my parenthetical comment.
Let me rephrase: should burning one’s own Quran outside a Muslim institution and throwing one’s own bag of pork outside a Jewish institution be treated the same? As a hate crime or as acceptable free expression?
Should burning one’s own cross on one’s own property, which happens to be across the street from a church popular with black folks be acceptable expression?
The circumstances aren’t as important as the intent.
Yes, I thought about adding just such an instance to my question, but assumed it wasn’t necessary, as it would be quite parallel and could be multiplied ad nauseam with similar acts and further religious and/or ethnic communities.
And could you elaborate on the intent comment? Do you mean that with a certain given intent it should be a punishable hate crime, and with some other intent it should be seen as permissible free expression? And how would such be adjudicated?
Oops. After I wrote that I went down stairs to make some coffee. As I was grinding up the beans, my brain said;”wait a minute!”.
I said that backwards. Circumstances are more important that intent, of course. People can burn crosses all they want, so long as they keep it to themselves. Same with Koran burning. If you do it in front of a mosque; you’re doing to incite. If you thow pork at your mother-in-law, she probably dreserved it, but if you throw it into a synagogue you are trying to incite.
You do any of that, and you lose all nice guy privleges.
I have to add….even the SMELL of coffee clears my head. There are many addictions in the world, few are any good. But coffee…..
But isn’t the whole idea of freedom of expression in fact the freedom to express oneself to others in public? “Keeping it to myself” isn’t really freedom of expression at all, is it?
Responding to you, GB, just because your respondents are max. indented. Amplifying you, really.
Burning one’s own copy of the Koran outside a mosque would be incitement in the U.S. only if you said to your mob of kerosene-can-toting followers gathered outside the mosque, “I have lit the spark, now pour your kerosene on the timbers of this here mosque (not the one across town) and I’ll set it ablaze!” That would be incitement to violence no matter what you were burning as the tinder. If you are there by yourself unarmed, with no followers toting incendiaries, you don’t have the means to violence, so no incitement to same. If by burning the Koran you are merely taunting, hoping only that the congregants in the mosque will fly off the handle and riot, I don’t think that is incitement. That’s just standing up to the heckler’s veto. What if they ignore you, as most of us resign ourselves to doing when they burn our flags? Does that change the legality? We can’t thump an aboriginal protestor just because he burns a Canadian flag, and he commits no offence doing so.
It’s true that if there was an anti-Israel protest going on and someone from our side set to burning the Koran in view of the Muslim demonstrators, the police might well escort him away to prevent a breach of the peace, knowing how volatile those Muslims are. But he couldn’t be charged with a crime unless he did something else like obstructing the police doing their lawful duty in crowd control and de-escalation.
Ah, cross burnings. Who says it’s illegal — where? — to burn a cross you bought yourself on your own private property, across the street from a black church? (Assume you’re not violating any by-laws against outdoor burning during fire season etc. And if there was a fire ban, make a realistic hologram of a burning cross. Hang some nooses from the cross-arms even.) Again, unless the burning cross is explicitly meant to incite a mob that has the means to spread the fire to the church, it’s protected speech, surely, no matter what the circumstances and intent of the cross-burner were. Hate speech in Canada is explicitly defined in our Criminal Code and none of the actions described herein would be prosecuted as hate speech. The first example with kerosene would be “incitement to riot”, I think. But not hate speech.
As for hate enhancements to actions that are crimes even before hate figures in, I find those dangerous virtue signalling exercises by prosecutors. But there has to be a crime, first. No amount of hate by itself turns a lawful act into a crime.
Re speech, if you like (or at least tolerate) South Park, the latest ep has a subtle (for them) jab on the topic: James Comey suffers a very serious accident (involving a huge pile of cat excrement) and lies immobilised in hospital. The doctor says he is regaining his freedom of mobility, but the toxoplasmosis brain parasites makes it doubtful he will regain his freedom of speech. FWIW, this ep is highly rated on IMDB.
The Hesiod quote is from “Works and Days” written around 700BCE. Not exposing your genitals, in whatever condition, near a fireplace, seems like a reasonable precaution. Although he also says, “Don’t piss standing up while facing the sun” which strikes me as less useful.
Yes, not facing the wind would make more sense.
Obviously an indication that Hesiod understood the concept of solar wind.
😂
I wonder if Hesiod had in mind Aesop’s fable, “The Sun and the Wind.”
Better analysis, there, Mr. Stubbs. Thanks for the context.
My original thought was “Burning pubes a big problem back in dawn of civilization days?”
D.A.
NYC
From Luana. The first of fifteen tweets. I haven’t read the paper yet.”
It got Emma Hilton’s approval: https://x.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1970841640106680500
It’s Bunny Day! Our yard is home to four bunnies—Eastern Cottontails. One is Fluffy (small ears, sits puffed up like a puffball). Another is Stripey (with a white stripe on her side, she’s three years old and nearing the end of her life). The other two don’t have names, but they look a lot like Stripey, so may be her offspring. They grow up fast. They are a big pain in the spring when they eat all our young garden plants. But the plants get ahead of them by late spring and the bunnies move on to the grass and clover, which is fine. By summer, we’re no longer annoyed and we enjoy them—little creatures living rich lives right in our yard.
It’s even worse! If the inflation rate grew from 2.5% to 2.9% year-over-year as the WaPo says, inflation grew by 16%! (Of course there is quite a bit of monthly variation.)
And yes, while universities are navigating the financial crisis in their own ways, they can dramatically improve things by dismantling DEI completely—and not just by changing the name. I want my airplane pilot, my surgeon, my financial planner, my city manager, my … to be meritorious. We should demand nothing less.
Collecting Pacific Giant Octopuses “sustainably?” Maybe it means “without contributing additional CO2 to the atmosphere.” 🙂
I think in hunting, sustainable harvests means that the population will not decline to where it cannot easily recover.
I forgot where I read this, but the author’s point was that the real historical anomaly was the Republican party as it used to be, whereas the Republican party now is similar to right wing parties everywhere.
We can debate the causes, but the U.S. is regressing to the mean.
Though I share Masih’s revulsion at the Iranian regime and appreciate her principled and energetic stand against it, I’m afraid she has once again shown herself to be a rather unreliable messenger with her “fetish club with nukes” comment. Iran does not have nukes. One could probably defend the claim that it aspires to nukes, even if others would dispute it. But simply saying it has nukes is misleading; whether intentionally so or not is hard to judge.
Jared – When it comes to nukes, and Iran, and Israel’s size… I think even anything CLOSE to nukes is not a non-zero risk, it is a five alarm fire.
They have a countdown clock to Israel’s annihilation in their town square in Tehran.
This kind of thing challenges normal risk equations made for civilized countries.
Iran …. is different. Sadly. For now.
D.A.
NYC
A countdown clock?! Is there a video of it counting down? When is it scheduled to hit zero?
…….ballroom. I don’t think he has the power to build it.
It is apparently under construction at this moment.
It reminds me of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera. iDJT’s won’t last as long, even as a ruin.
I lived for a time next door to “Henri’s”, an Argentinian restaurant, in Melbourne, Australia. A hand-written sign at the entrance to the restaurant said “If you don’t like garlic don’t come in.”
Contrary to Andrew Sullivan, Trump did not get elected because people have become dumbed down by the internet. Trump got elected because the majority did not approve of open borders, men in women’s sports, and DEI race-based discrimination in university admissions and hiring – the three pillars of today’s Dem party. As former Dem advisor Ruy Teixeira has warned, unless they abandon those pillars they will be out of office for a long, long time.
PS Netanyahu’s UN speech was brilliant – says it all really.
“We’ll have their votes for 200 years,” LBJ gloated, after he signed the civil rights legislation into law in 1964. He was likely correct. But can the Democratic Party govern if those are the only votes it can count on for the remaining 139 years?
A bloc that votes 95% for you, albeit with middling turnout, can’t just be thrown under the bus. But if each black non-voter you pander to drives away three non-black voters who vote, in a country where blacks aren’t the only minority anymore but are the only one not thriving, some hard choices might have to be made. Yet if your policies drive away all those black voters and cause them to stay home on Election Day, that’s not good either. This looks a lot like the coffin corner in aviation, a jam that can be impossible to escape from. Whatever the pilot does is wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_corner_(aerodynamics)
Exactly right! Thanks for your comment.
So annoying that restive means restless when it should mean restful!
Really? My dictionary says differently: