Welcome to the end of the “work” week: Friday, November 14, 2025, and National Pickle Day. What would a world without pickles be? A corned beef or pastrami sandwich would be worthless. Here’s one serving from Katz’s Deli in NYT:
It’s also International Girl’s Day, National American Teddy Bear Day, and National Spicy Guacamole Day.
My bear, You should all know his name by now:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 14 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Well, Trump signed a House-passed bill that will lead to the government’s reopening, but only for a few months.
The GOP-led House passed a spending package reopening the government and President Trump signed it into law late Wednesday, drawing to a close a record-long 43-day shutdown driven by Democrats’ demands to extend expiring healthcare subsides.
The House approved the measure 222 to 209, largely along party lines, two days after the bill cleared the Senate.
The package extends funding for the federal government through Jan. 30 and includes full-year funding for the Agriculture Department, military construction and the legislative branch. The bill also includes language guaranteeing the reversal of federal layoffs initiated by the Trump administration during the shutdown in a move to pressure Democrats, as well as a moratorium on future cuts.
The resolution of the standoff ensures paychecks for federal employees, including air-traffic controllers, and sends hundreds of thousands of furloughed government workers back to the job. But it postponed until later this year the central political fight: how to address the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to be cut off for millions of households.
In Wednesday’s vote, several more Democrats voted with Republicans to fund the government than in the previous House vote nearly two months ago, when Rep. Jared Golden of Maine was the only supporter. This time, six Democrats backed the bill, including Golden as well as Henry Cuellar of Texas, Adam Gray of California, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Tom Suozzi of New York and Don Davis of North Carolina.
On the GOP side, Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Greg Steube of Florida bucked their party and voted no.
The breakthrough to end the shutdown came in recent days. A band of senators who caucus with the Democrats broke with the party to advance the package Sunday night, in the midst of deepening worries about the impact of the shutdown on low-income Americans and air travel and little evidence Trump or Senate Republicans would blink first.
Final Senate passage came on a 60-40 vote Monday night. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), who had kept the House out since mid-September to keep up pressure on Democrats, then ordered House lawmakers back to Washington.
In comments after the House vote, Johnson called the shutdown “utterly pointless and foolish” and blamed Democrats for the hardship it caused. “Voters are going to remember which political party played games with their lives,” he said.
Democrats had insisted for more than a month that any deal to reopen the government include an extension of ACA subsidies, saying the GOP was making healthcare unaffordable.
Some Republicans were sympathetic to the demands because more than 20 million Americans get the tax credits to lower the cost of their health plans and are set to see their premiums rise sharply next year. But Trump and GOP leaders said that they would only negotiate after the government reopened. Senate Republican leaders ultimately promised to hold a vote on ACA subsidies by mid-December.
The data show that more Americans blame the Republicans than the Democrats for the government shutdown, which of course is why Trump was trying so hard to get Congress back in session. But given that both sides are intractable, I foresee another shutdown happening early next year. And that will hurt the Republicans even more. If that was the only effect, I would approve, but the fact is that Americans need a resolution of food-stamp and healthcare issues.
*On Wednesday a House committee released a ton of emails related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, and while there are hints of Trumpian malfeasance, there’s no smoking gun.
President Trump’s long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein came to an apparent end in the mid-2000s. But Mr. Epstein remained intently focused on Mr. Trump for years afterward, seeking to exploit the remnants of their relationship up until his arrest on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019.
In more than 20,000 pages of Mr. Epstein’s typo-strewn emails and other messages released by a congressional committee on Wednesday, Mr. Epstein insulted Mr. Trump and hinted that he had damaging information on him.
By turns gossipy, scathing and scheming, the messages show influential people pressing Mr. Epstein for insight into Mr. Trump, and Mr. Epstein casting himself as the ultimate Trump translator, someone who knew him intimately and was “the one able to take him down.”
The release of the messages instantly pushed the two men’s much-scrutinized relationship back into the public eye, re-energizing Democratic attacks on Mr. Trump and his Justice Department for failing to publicly disclose more information from the investigation of Mr. Epstein.
The messages hint that Mr. Epstein or his advisers believed they had inside — and potentially damaging — knowledge of Mr. Trump’s far-flung properties and business dealings. Some suggest that Mr. Epstein thought Mr. Trump knew more about his personal conduct than the president has publicly acknowledged.
. . . . The emails, the latest batch of Epstein-related documents, were obtained from the Epstein estate in response to a subpoena from a congressional committee. They offer a clear window into his day-to-day communications with friends and associates.
Here’s pretty much all they have so far that inculpates Trump, and it ain’t much:
In April 2011, Mr. Epstein wrote to his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was later convicted of helping orchestrate Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation, that Mr. Trump was the “dog that hasn’t barked.” One of Mr. Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, had recently gone public about her experiences with Mr. Epstein — telling a British tabloid that he had abused her and trafficked her to other men, and providing the outlet with a now famous photo of herself, Prince Andrew and Ms. Maxwell.
Mr. Epstein’s email said that Ms. Giuffre had “spent hours at my house with him” — Mr. Trump — yet Mr. Trump “has never once been mentioned.” Ms. Giuffre said in a 2016 deposition that Mr. Trump never had sex with her or even flirted with her.
In 2012, Mr. Epstein emailed one of his lawyers, Reid Weingarten, and suggested that he get someone to dig into Mr. Trump’s finances, including the mortgage on Mar-a-Lago and a $30 million loan Mr. Epstein said that Mr. Trump had received. Reached on Wednesday, Mr. Weingarten declined to comment, saying he was limited by attorney-client privilege.
Epstein also said he had photos of Trump with “girls in bikinis”, but so far no such photos have surfaced. Trump will weather this (i.e., won’t be impeached), but he’s beginning to suffer the death of a thousand cuts. See the next item:
*The title of the WaPo article says it all, “Epstein is the one issue that persistently splits Trump from his base.”
. . . . The specifics of what Epstein is alleged to have done also reinforced a larger narrative that fueled Trump’s rise and the construction of his political movement, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) said in a recent interview.
“Many people in MAGA feel that the government has been corrupted, and is not looking out for ordinary Americans,” Khanna said. “One of the reasons they supported Trump, even though he was imperfect, [was that] he said, ‘I’m going to expose it all. I’m going to tear it all down. I’m going to go after this corrupt elite that has shafted you and that has really killed the American Dream.’”
In that sense, releasing the Epstein files “was core to Trump’s promise,” Khanna said. “It was not some incidental issue or tangential issue. It was his central theme that the American corrupt elite had betrayed forgotten Americans.”
Khanna and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) have led the effort in the House for a discharge petition that would force a vote on the full release of the files. With Wednesday’s belated swearing-in of Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Arizona), who won a Sept. 23 special election to take the seat vacated by the death of her father, they have gathered the necessary 218 signatures to do so.
Yes, the files should be released. Is there any reason not to, save to buttress the crumbling reputation of Trump? Unfortunately, the Justice Department cannot release everything it has on Epstein without the Senate concurring and the bill being signed by Trump. And that has a snowball’s chance in Hell.
*Recently Randy Wayne, a professor in plant sciences at Cornell, wrote a piece on the Heterodox STEM site called “Does God belong on a science class?” Amazingly, his answer was “yes,” and here’s an example of his reasoning:
I conclude that bringing God into a science class helps the scientific enterprise. To illustrate, here are some examples where I bring God into a science class
When discussing the Origin of the Universe, I present two laws of physics that can be used to explain the origin of matter. One is the first law of thermodynamics; the other is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The first law of thermodynamics, according to James Joule, states that energy cannot be created or destroyed except by the Creator’s fiat (James Joule July 1843, R. Wayne Light and Life lecture notes p. 517), and according to Julius Robert Mayer (1869; On Necessary Consequences and Inconsistencies of the Mechanics of Heat, In: K. L. Caneva. 1993. Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy p. 43), “God spoke: Let it be, and it was!” Consequently, there was “a creation where nothing happens by chance, but everything is ordered with divine purpose.” (Mayer, 1848; Contributions to the Dynamics of the Heavens in Popular Representation, In: K. L. Caneva. 1993. Robert Mayer and the Conservation of Energy p. 9).
He gives other examples, but the gist is that when we don’t understand something scientifically, like the ability of humans to play the piano, we can always invoke the alternative supernatural explanation of God. It’s a big, fat God-of-the-gaps argument, and it’s heterodox but also misguided. Fortunately, reader Coel Heller, also on the Heterodox STEM site, went after Wayne’s goddiness in another piece called “God does not belong in a science class.” An excerpt:
One central part of Wayne’s argument is that:
“A foundational assumption such as reality is composed of matter and energy and nothing else, is an assumption—what Euclid calls a postulate. Foundational assumptions are untested, otherwise they would be called facts. Evidence gathering, logic, reason, and analysis are built on the assumptions, and science cannot proceed without faith in the assumptions …”
This view, that science rests on metaphysical assumptions that must be taken on faith, is commonly supposed, but is (I submit) profoundly wrong. At root, science comes from observing the world around us and developing a set of ideas that help us understand, predict and manipulate the world. Observing regularities in the natural world would have helped humans hunt or herd animals or grow crops more successfully. Over time, observing the night sky and the cycles of days, months and seasons led to an understanding of planetary orbits, and from there to Newton’s account of gravity and thence to Einstein’s account. We know that these accounts are true (in the sense of being good models of the world) because they make good predictions.
. . . Wayne argues that leaving God and the supernatural out of science is an arbitrary and unwarranted choice. But the history of science shows this not to be so. Early scientists were fully content to invoke God if they needed him to patch up their models. James Clerk Maxwell wrote: “I have looked into most philosophical systems, and I have seen that none will work without a God”.
Newton applied his theory of gravity to the solar system and concluded that the whole edifice would be unstable over the long term, and so needed God’s intervention to make it work. “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being” he wrote in Principia, and later: “A continual miracle is needed to prevent the sun and the fixed stars from rushing together through gravity”. Similarly, leading astronomer John Herschel wrote that the laws of nature had been established by the “Divine Author of the universe” and were being maintained by “the constant exercise of His direct power in maintaining the system of nature” while all material causes emanated “from his immediate will, acting in conformity with his own laws”.
But, as decades passed and understanding improved, scientists developed better models that worked fine without divine intervention. Hence Pierre-Simon Laplace’s (possibly apocryphal) remark to Napoleon that he “had no need of that hypothesis”. And in 1859, defending Darwinism, Thomas Henry Huxley wrote: “But what is the history of astronomy … but a narration of the steps by which the human mind has been compelled, often sorely against its will, to recognise the operation of secondary causes in events where ignorance beheld an immediate intervention of a higher power?”.
. . .Invoking God doesn’t explain anything that the idea was not designed to explain. And that is the hallmark of an ad-hoc hypothesis, constructed to arrive at a desired conclusion. It also exhibits parochial thinking (God being envisaged in the image of an idealised tribal leader, and then abstracted and made apophatic from there) along with a large dollop of wishful thinking (What does a human most want? To be loved and live forever. What does a god provide? Being loved and living forever).
(5) The idea of God makes no predictions and so is unfalsifiable. Consider a child dying of brain cancer. If we gave the mother the ability to cure her child then she would do so without hesitation. God loves the child even more than the mother, and has the power to cure him as easily as lifting a little finger, so he cures the child, right? Well, … maybe not.
When Wayne adduces some evidence that there’s a supernatural being that actually interacts with the world, then we can start considering gods in scientific explanations. Since we don’t have that evidence, we can say, as Laplace supposedly did, “We don’t need that hypothesis,” It’s curious that although Wayne’s style of argument was debunked several centuries ago, the Heterodox STEM site considers it worth publishing again in gussied-up form.
*New natural-history news about whales and remoras:
There are easier ways to cross an ocean, but few are as slick or stylish as the remora’s whale-surfing joyride.
Scientists tracking humpbacks off the coast of Australia have captured rare footage that shows clutches of the freeloading fish peeling away from their host in what looks like a high-speed game of chicken, just moments before the whale breaches.
As the humpback plunges back below the surface the remoras, also known as sucker fish, return to the whale, sticking their landings with the timing and precision of Olympic gymnasts. It’s elegant work for a hitchhiking fish that lives upside-down and survives on dead skin flakes.
Remora australis spend their lives aboard whales or other large marine mammals, which they ride like giant cruise ships, breeding and feeding their way across stretches of ocean. The species has an adhesive plate on its head that helps to create a kind of vacuum seal, allowing the fish to grab a whale and hang on for the ride.
The marine scientist who recorded the accidental close-ups of the remoras’ high-speed whale surfing had placed suction-cup cameras on humpbacks during their annual migration from Antarctica to the waters off Australia’s Queensland state. Olaf Meynecke planned to study whale behavior, but his video feeds regularly filled with dozens of photobombing remoras, which rode in groups of up to 50 as they clung to the same spots where his cameras were attached.
“Whenever the whale was breaching and doing in particular fast movements it appears that the sucker fish were responding very quickly to the movements,” said Meynecke, from the Whales and Climate Research Program at Griffith University. “They knew exactly when to let go of the body of the whale before it was breaching the surface of the water and then returned to the same spot only seconds later.”
This appears to be a true mutualism, with remoras avoid predators, get dead skin and sea lice to eat, cop a free ride, saving energy, while the whale gets cleaned. On the other hand, the article suggests that whales breach to get rid of their remoras. It can’t be both unless there’s an intermediate optimum number of remoras. Want to know what it looks like? Here’s a great video showing that the remoras sense that the whale is about to breach and get off, only to stick back on when the breach is done:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,
Hili: Is the story about the sesame a fairy tale?
Me: Yes, a five-star one.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy opowieść o sezamie to bajka?
Ja: Tak, pięciogwiazdkowa.
***********************
From The Language Nerds:
From Stacy:
From Things with Faces; perplexed shallots:
Posted by Masih; more oppression of women by the Iranian theocracy. (More information at The Daily Fail.)
Iranian taekwondo athlete Hanieh Shariati was arrested for posting videos training without hijab.
Her Instagram shut down and no one knows where she’s being held.
In the Islamic Republic, a woman’s hair and body are treated as threats to national security. pic.twitter.com/KWmVEUlVBY— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) November 12, 2025
From Luana. A new study shows that by looking at GWAS scored from millions of individuals, the “missing heritability” that was the lower GWAS heritability than the “macro” heritability based on inheritance of phenotypes was almost surely due to the inability to identify regions of the genome with very small effects on the phenotype:
We are pleased to announce that our new study explaining the missing heritability of many phenotypes using WGS data from ~347,000 UK Biobank participants has just been published in @Nature. Please check out our manuscript here: https://t.co/PK2DIpshOQ.
— Loïc Yengo (@LoicYengo) November 12, 2025
From Simon, who joins Larry the Cat in his opprobrium towards Trump:
Today is Remembrance Day, when we pause to remember the horrific sacrifices of war made on our behalf by the generations that came before. Donald the draft dodger has demanded that we do not use that name. As with so much else, he should be ignored. pic.twitter.com/dbugUIIW4n
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) November 11, 2025
From Malcolm, a double kitten adoption. Sound up to hear the mewing:
A man went to adopt a cat,but it wouldn’t leave its brother, and he ended up having to take both pic.twitter.com/eCVDxi51Du
— We don’t deserve cats 😺 (@catsareblessing) October 30, 2025
One from my feed; a persistent osprey:
One of the most common questions I get asked. Why is the Osprey your favorite bird to photograph/video? This video is the perfect example of why.
Ospreys never give up. Ever. pic.twitter.com/sdz67NHPrZ
— Mark Smith Photography (@marktakesphoto) November 13, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial
This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed immediately after arriving at Auschwitz. He was two months old. Be sure to watch the movie (link in the tweet). https://t.co/SUBzb7aD9k
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 14, 2025
And two from Dr. Cobb. Look at this door, nearly a millennium old:
The remarkable 12th century south doorway of the Church of St. Mary and St. David at Kilpeck in Herefordshire. 📸 My own. #AdoorableThursday #Kilpeck #Herefordshire
— Kevin Wilbraham (@kpw1453.bsky.social) 2025-11-13T06:57:53.956Z
. . . and a thread of Christians not acting like Christians:
. . .
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power. -P.J. O’Rourke, writer (b. 14 Nov 1947)
Another of the fundamental ills of society: we should test “them.”
Well put.
We do! What we can’t do is STOP testing others for these maladies 🙂 People accuse each other all the time of being stupid, ignorant, greedy, any two, or all three. Presumably because they flunked the test. Love for power is not as readily bandied. I’ve never been accused of loving power, even though I do 🙂
The woman seeking formula for a crying baby must be operating in some strange big city? I’m pretty sure any small town church in the midwest or the south would say “Honey, where do you live?” and “We’ll get some over there as soon as I can get someone to bring it.” And, “Do you have diapers?”
A friend who is a Methodist minister has led both a small town/rural church and a large urban church told me this exact thing. While at the large urban church he got 20-50 calls a day from people asking for money. A frequency that could have bankrupted the church had the hand outs been given.
With the small/rural churches, people were diligent about repaying any charity, or providing help in kind.
The rural folk also tend to know—or can quickly find out—who is in need and who is scamming.
The urban churches generally lack that visibility. And as you suggest, they would be poor stewards of their resources and soon unable to help cases of verified need were they to bankrupt themselves giving money to every scammer that stepped in the door. We all know this—and dare I say behave the same way with our own money.
Perhaps what the urban churches need is the ability to confiscate and give away other people’s money whenever someone tugs at their heartstrings with stories fabricated or real.
My guess would be that the churches in larger urban areas don’t have the resources to test the validity of the claim (scam in this case). Whereas in a small community, it is easier to pop round to someone’s house. Having said that, this does not explain the non-Christian responses.
In my experience, at least some churches in urban/ suburban areas team up with non-profits or government orgs to fill in gaps in services. Since the non-profits or government have done the work of verifying that the people are truly in need, this obviates the risk for churches that their charity will be exploited by people who don’t really need it.
E.g., since women in DV/homeless shelters often need day care so they can work or job search, the methodist church near me has for years now teamed up with a local shelter to provide its current occupants with free day care, diapers, and formula. But when I did volunteer work there, I was told that if anyone who wasn’t a current client came to the door asking for diapers or formula, I should refuse to give them any. At first blush, it sounded rather uncharitable, but the reason was that if they got a reputation for handing out free baby supplies with no proof of need required, they’d be inundated by people who just wanted something for free.
My wife volunteers with our local food bank. I asked her what their policy is. Generally if the person is not known to the foodbank, the general procedure is not to say yes or no, but to get the person’s particulars and tell them the food bank will get back to them. Formula, diapers etc are not always in stock, and they do not have cash on hand.
Plus, we live in a rural area, so it’s easy to check on the reliability of the person calling.
My first question to the caller would be, “Why do you need formula? Especially if you are poor, why aren’t you breast-feeding?” Then, “What else did you spend your money on this month?”
But whatever, it seems most of the Churches she called knew she was scamming. So that’s good.
It’s well known that the drug gangs do a lot of community outreach with barbecues, charity, bail-bonding, and other “fixing”, to root themselves in the community, Viet Cong-style, and cast social ostracism on snitches so as not to rely entirely on beatings. Gangs are immensely profitable for those at the top and it’s good for business to “help”, with formula stolen by the bagful from Wal-Mart. My question though is how did these other anonymous “couple of people” call up a gang? Are they on Facebook? Do you call your local drug dealer and ask for help instead, or is there a dedicated customer-service line? I smell bull-shit.
Mr. Toasty!
I don’t know if Donald Trump dodged the draft. But are there other prominent politicians accused of shirking combat? I am wondering if the good Donald is being picked on unfairly.
Dick Cheney
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/11/12
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/11/13
Great door, Matthew. I have to wonder how thick the timbers that make it up are. Hopefully the parish would never sell it at any price to some rich cat who wanted it for his McCastle.
Oh, and thank you, Coel. Nonsense such as Wayne’s must be confronted.
Thanks Jim, and thanks to Jerry for linking to my piece. 😊
I’m wondering why a professor of plant science is teaching about the origins of the universe.
It looks like the pickle plate comprised both half-dill and whole-dill pickles. Very sophisticated.
And Toasty is still looking good—but a bit like he survived a government shutdown.
Both my senators and my congresswoman voted to keep the government closed and to extend the pain being meted out against their own constituents. I’m done with all three of them.
Of course Randy Wayne’s argument is foolish. (Thank you Coel Hellier!) Lack of knowledge about something isn’t evidence for God. Prior to Watson and Crick, a lack of understanding of how genes work didn’t mean that it could have been God’s work. Over time, knowledge has squeezed the potential for God’s agency into such a narrow window that, to my satisfaction, that window has closed. YMMV.
Cool piece on the remoras! They are so interesting in a yucky sort of way. The opportunism of natural selection at work.
I thought Wayne’s framing was strange …. does God belong? And then is it legal?
My to and fro with Wayne did not lead anywhere.
Heather Cox Richardson this morning re. O’Julius’ declining fortunes within his base:
“MAGA has been at least partly demoralized by the information coming out of the Epstein documents, with right-wing influencer Dinesh D’Souza, for example, defending Trump by saying: “Right now, we don’t have anyone else.” Trump media ally Stephen Bannon told supporters: “Trump’s…an imperfect instrument, but one infused by divine providence. Without him, we’d have nothing.” “
I’m off to read her next!
Regarding celebrations for November 14: Today is also Ruby Bridges Walk to School Day. I wouldn’t have known but for one local elementary school holding a celebration. It was reported by local news. The day celebrates Ruby Bridges and reminds us that there was a time when it was not possible or safe for black children to be in schools with white children. So utterly absurd. With all the hoohah about PC, woke, DEI, critical race theory etc. etc, I think it is good for all of us to reflect on our past. I am so very grateful my grandson can learn in a school room open to all. Please consider adding this celebration to your site for November 14, 2026.
Thank you Leigh. I was not aware of this event. I am a former school board chairman who grew up in a segregated school division in the South in the 50’s and 60’s…regardless of Brown vs Board of Ed in 1954. Just as the Holocaust is too far back in the rearview mirror for today’s students to understand, so is de jure segregated schools. This might be a good educational activity for our elementary schools next year.
I knew about Miss Bridges. Norman Rockwell painted her: “The Problem We All Live With.”
I wouldn’t call de jure segregation absurd. The white majority just decided it didn’t want to share its limited resources equally with the black minority, leaving a bigger share for its own members. The most efficient way to do that was to segregate the budgets by segregating the school systems. There is nothing absurd about preventing a black child from attending a white school and consuming resources the majority wanted to earmark for its own white children. People usually can be trusted to do things for reasons that serve their interests. We don’t live in some theatre of the absurd where people responsible for budgets do truly mad chaotically self-destructive things with the money. The Southern states didn’t just snap out of absurdity. The Supreme Court told them to.
When white and Asian students, and diligent black students, compelled by socioeconomic class to attend majority black non-segregated city schools today, I’ll bet when they learn about Ruby Bridges they might think just maybe the Southern segregationists were onto something.
“A woman doing an experiment on TikTok” – and no one questions this entire story was made up?