Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, November 18, 2025, and Mickey Mouse Day, celebrating the rodent’s first appearance in a Disney cartoon. It was in Steamboat Willie, released on this day in 1928. Here’s the cartoon, and they don’t make them like this any more! (Mickey appears 30 seconds in). Don’t miss the musical duck (cruelty to animals).
I have to go to the sleep doctor today, so posting will be light.
It’s also Apple Cider Day and National Vichyssoise Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 18 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*After long opposing the release of the “Epstein files”—the Justice Depoartment’s dossier on the late Jeffrey Epstein—President Trump, under Congressional pressure, has changed course and urged the House to vote for releasing the files.
Trump, who has resisted backing such a measure for weeks, said on social media that he believes Republican lawmakers “should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide.”
“Nobody cared about Jeffrey Epstein when he was alive and, if the Democrats had anything, they would have released it” before the 2024 election, Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social, urging Republican lawmakers to focus on the economy instead.
The measure, which would compel officials at the Justice Department to release all unclassified records, documents, communications and investigative materials relating to the investigation and prosecution of Epstein in its possession, could face hurdles in the Senate. It is not clear whether Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) would bring the measure up for a vote, and Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) was noncommittal in an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
If the measure passes both chambers, Trump would have to sign it before it took effect. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether the president would do so, and Trump was silent on whether he wants to see a Senate vote as well as a House vote.
. . .On Friday, at Trump’s request, the Justice Department launched an investigation to examine the relationships between Epstein and several prominent Democrats and donors. Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly tapped federal prosecutors in Manhattan to take on the job.
Legal experts raised concerns over the weekend that Trump’s demand for a new investigation could give Justice Department officials an excuse not to release all the documents.
*Seattle has a new mayor who says she’s a socialist: 43-year old Katie Wilson. She’s also the daughter of a biologist that some of you will recognize: David Sloan Wilson, an advocate of group selection and the “extended evolutionary synthesis” (hje also thinks that human altruism evolved by group selection; perhaps that influenced his daughter). At any rate, the WaPo has an editorial-board op-ed that’s quite critical of Wilson, ” Seattle’s coming socialist experiment,” with the subtitle, “The mayor-elect has little experience but plenty of bad ideas.”
Who is Wilson? She does not own a car. She lives in a rented 600-square-foot apartment with her husband and two-year-old daughter. By her own account, she depends on checks from her parents back east to cover expenses. To let them off the hook, she seeks to force residents of Seattle to pay for “free” child care and other goodies.
Sound familiar? She’s the West Coast Mamdani, seeking to govern a city with a high cost of living by broaching unworkable programs:
. . . Seattle’s office vacancy rate is now above 33 percent. Major employers like Amazon, which was founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos, have relocated thousands of workers from Seattle to Bellevue, right across Lake Washington, because it’s safer and friendlier.
The mayor-elect’s plans will simultaneously accelerate the exodus of businesses while making the city more of a magnet for vagrants and criminals. For example, Wilson criticized Harrell’s sweeps of homeless encampments. She backed off previous support for defunding the police, but many officers remain nervous.
Like the mayor-elect in New York, Wilson wants to open government-run grocery stores, despite their record of failure. She suggested during a September event that she won’t allow private supermarkets to close locations that aren’t profitable. Instead, she wants to require them to give more notice and pay generous severance packages to their employees. “Access to affordable, healthy food is a basic right,” Wilson said.
. . . Wilson may be less constrained than Mamdani. Fellow progressives also toppled the incumbent president of the Seattle City Council and the city attorney while picking up two other seats. Only two of the seven council members have served more than one term. There are not many silver linings here, except that the country may be able to more quickly see the failures of their policies — which could prevent voters in other cities from falling for socialism.
“I will appoint a cabinet of exceptional leaders,” the mayor-elect promises on her website, “whose lived experiences reflect the diversity of Seattle’s Black, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latinx/Hispanic, and People of Color communities as well as that of women, immigrants and refugees, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, people with disabilities, people of all faith traditions, and residents from every socioeconomic background.”
Well, the Post has gotten more conservative since Jeff Bezos took it over, but even so this report is dire: the voters of Seattle appear to be committing suicide. One can hope that Wilson can fix the place, but given her lack of experience, I doubt it. I have the same doubts about Mamdani.
*SCIENCE! The NYT notes that we can now track individual Monarch Butterflies as they make their journeys from north to south and back again (article archived here).
For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America, actively monitoring individual insects on journeys from as far away as Ontario all the way to their overwintering colonies in central Mexico.
This long-sought achievement could provide crucial insights into the poorly understood life cycles of hundreds of species of butterflies, bees and other flying insects at a time when many are in steep decline.
The breakthrough is the result of a tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200. Researchers have tagged more than 400 monarchs this year and are now following their journeys on a cellphone app created by the New Jersey-based company that makes the tags, Cellular Tracking Technologies.
Most monarchs weigh 500 to 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrator making the transcontinental journey is, by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice.
Here are the journeys of two tagged and released monarchs who flew all the way from Ontario to Mexico, where they spend the winter. Figure from the NYT. I didn’t think that individual monarchs actually flew that whole distance, but I was wrong. Some of them go down the East Coast to the Florida Keys:
“There’s nothing that’s not amazing about this,” said Cheryl Schultz, a butterfly scientist at Washington State University and the senior author of a recent study documenting a 22 percent drop in butterfly abundance in North America over a recent 20-year period. The movements of monarchs and other flying insects are cloaked in mystery, and “now we will have answers that could help us turn the tide for these bugs.”
Tracking the world’s most famous insect migration may also have a big social impact, with monarch lovers able to follow the progress of individual butterflies on the free app, called Project Monarch Science. Many of the butterflies are flying over cities and suburbs where pollinator gardens are increasingly popular. Some tracks could even lead to the discovery of new winter hideaways.
. . . . Monarchs have evolved two highly sophisticated navigational systems. Most of the time, they rely on a system that orients them in relation to the sun, keeping them pointed south throughout the day by compensating for the sun’s movements across the sky. When clouds get in the way, monarchs switch to a backup compass that relies on ultraviolet light to detect the angle of the Earth’s magnetic field.
Their twin compasses usually keep migrating monarchs headed in the correct general direction. But how the butterflies manage to locate the same isolated colonies their great-great grandparents occupied the year before is a longstanding mystery.
No more than one in four is likely to survive the journey, with the rest succumbing to unfavorable winds, hungry birds, vehicle traffic or sheer exhaustion, among other perils.
The migrators who manage to reach the colonies join a spectacle in which huge flocks circle overhead in kaleidoscopic whirls and roost so thickly on fir trees that even the sturdiest branches bend under their collective weight.
To me the most amazing part of this navigation system is that it’s evolved. That is, there are specific genes passed on by the migrants that, in their offspring tell them how to head back to where their parents came from (the ones that make it to Mexico do not return to the U.S.: their offspring do). The study, with lots of cool photos and videos, shows that the previous “common knowledge” that individual monarchs never fly all the way from the U.S. to Mexico, but do it in several generational hops, which each generation going further towards the Mexican reserves. We now know, from the tracking above and others given in the article, that his is not true. The southern journey is made by single individuals, while the return trip made by several generations.
And this is the sad part:
In the 1990s, the winter population at the Mexican colonies was regularly estimated in the hundreds of millions, but it now rarely tops 60 million. Last winter, the estimate was roughly 38 million. The much smaller West Coast monarch population is even more vulnerable. Last winter, fewer than 10,000 were seen huddling in their usual spots along the California coast.
Experts cite a host of reasons for the decline, all related to human influence.
Here’s a video showing the amazing congregation of overwintering Monarchs in Mexico:
*The BBC has described what seems to be a horrible war crime committed by U.S. Marines in Iraq 20 years ago, with 24 civilians killed, including women and infants:.
Bullet holes pepper the front door to the house in the Iraqi town of Haditha, where she grew up. Inside the back bedroom, a colourful bedspread covers the bed where her family was shot.
This is where she hid with her five siblings, mum and aunt when US marines stormed into their home and opened fire, killing everyone apart from Safa, on 19 November 2005. Her dad was also shot dead when he opened the front door.
Now, 20 years on, a BBC Eye investigation has uncovered evidence that implicates two marines, who were never brought to trial, in the killing of Safa’s family, according to a forensic expert.
The evidence – mainly statements and testimony given in the aftermath of the killings – raises doubts about the American investigation into what happened that day, and poses significant questions over how US armed forces are held to account.
The killing of Safa’s family was part of what became known as the Haditha massacre, when US marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians, including four women and six children. They entered three homes killing nearly everyone inside, as well as a driver and four students in a car, who were on their way to college.
The incident triggered the longest US war crimes investigation of the Iraq war, but no-one was convicted of the killings.
This reminds me of the My Lai massacre of 1968, involving around 100 U.S. soldiers wantonly murdering hundreds of Vietnamese civilians. Only one person was convicted, Lt. William Calley, who served only 3 years of house arrest for his crime.
In the Iraq incident, Marine, Frank Wuterich pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty (unrelated to the massacre), and, in a plea deal, was broken down to private and then given a general discharge. Here’s a one-hour documentary video of the incident, which is available for viewing only outside the UK.
*There’s not much interesting news going on (Epstein, Venezuela, etc.) but I wanted to put up this heartwarmer from the AP showing a sea otter pup, separated from its mom, who finally gets reunited with her. It’s fairly easy to find places to watch sea otters in California, and you should avail yourself of the chance if you’re around Monterrey. I love the way they use recordings to lure the mom. Ms. Zink and her colleagues deserve kudos!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron recall the bad old days in Poland.
Szaron: Waiting in lines is so boring.
Hili: You’ll see real lines when the Marxists come back to power.
In Polish:
Szaron: Nudne to czekanie w kolejkach.
Hili: Prawdziwe kolejki zobaczysz jak marksiści znowu dojdą do władzy.
*******************
From Clean, Funny, & Cute Animal Memes:
From Things with Faces; lotus root:
From The Dodo Pet:
NOTE: CLOUDFLARE, TWITTER, AND MANY OTHER SITES ARE DOWN THIS MORNING, SO THE TWEETS MAY BE MISSING PICTURES OR VIDEOS. COME BACK IN A WHILE AND THE PROBLEM SHOULD BE FIXED.
From Emma Hilton. Psychiatrist Jack Turban is an ideologue, and I think his gung-go “affirmative care” views are harmful to adolescents.
Turban presents this list of “dimensions of sex” as if they are unrelated features, rather than physically and mechanistically interlinked parts of a whole system.
A whole system that has two discrete forms attached to two discrete functions separated across two classes of… https://t.co/44L0AxHoiH
— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) November 17, 2025
From Luana: an attempt to explain away grade inflation:
People constantly say this sort of thing but not one Harvard professor actually believes their students are better at coursework today than a decade ago (and As are more common than ever) pic.twitter.com/VFhNZuc9YY
— alex bronzini-vender (@alexbronzini) November 17, 2025
From Simon; some miscreants are dissing Larry the Cat. How dare they?!
These toxic briefings from Downing Street just got personal… https://t.co/rqhxVRnhJ8
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) November 14, 2025
From Malcolm; a white blood cell doing its job:
White blood cell wandering between red blood cells and checking for harmful organisms.pic.twitter.com/eFdPUO5lCS
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 5, 2025
One from my feed. Yes, this is a Japanese squirrel: the Ezo flying squirrel (Pteromys volans orii), native to Hokkaido and one of the cutest of all mammals. Does it beat out the giant panda?
This is a Japanese squirrel. pic.twitter.com/UkicTe9cX1
— The Best (@Thebestfigen) November 16, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial.
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was four years old. She would be 87 today had she lived. https://t.co/4fZG03vgBF
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 18, 2025
Two from Dr. Cobb. A double pun first:
Brush your teeth after eating these or else you'll get calculus.
— Phil Plait (@philplait.bsky.social) 2025-11-16T20:41:08.818Z
. . . and the chemistry of skunk spray and how to remove it:
The latest edition of #PeriodicGraphics by @compoundchem.com explores the smelly chemicals in skunk spray and how to get rid of the stink. cen.acs.org/biological-c… #chemsky 🧪
— C&EN (Chemical & Engineering News) (@cenmag.bsky.social) 2025-11-14T20:15:52.228Z
Re: monarch tracking–when I was a HS student, one of my teachers (can’t remember her name, but she kept a pair of swans!) got me interested in monarchs. I got paper tags from her, raised monarchs from eggs, and attached the paper tags to wings. I do remember having a terrarium for milkweed to raise the bugs, and I felt good about doing junior science. This was clearly a tracking mechanism, but I don’t remember the outcome.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who’ll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it’s the latter, so I sign up. -Margaret Atwood, novelist and poet (b. 18 Nov 1939)
Japanese squirrel helps explain Anime.
Ha!
Shouldn’t that be “Japanese squirrel help explain Anime”? Hái! 🙂
That butterfly story is great – glad to hear PCC(E) is getting sleep info – I’d be interested to know how it goes!
I actually think Summer Tan’s argument is deserving of consideration.
Rose Horowitch: The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A. The Atlantic, Aug 28, 2025
In the era of grade inflation, students at top colleges are more stressed than ever.
https://archive.ph/2u7At
Excerpt:
Last year, the university set out to study the state of academics at Harvard. The Classroom Social Compact Committee released its report in January. Students’ grades are up, but they’re doing less academic work. They skip class at a rate that surprises even the most hardened professors. Many care more about extracurriculars than coursework. “A majority of students and faculty we heard from agree that Harvard College students do not prioritize their academic experience,” the committee wrote.
And yet, these students report being more stressed about school than ever. Without meaningful grades, the most ambitious students have no straightforward way to stand out. And when straight A’s are the norm, the prospect of getting even a single B can become terrifying. As a result, students are anxious, distracted, and hyper-focused on using extracurriculars to distinguish themselves in the eyes of future employers.
The whole article is worth reading. Jerry posted about it shortly after it was published.
From a Harvard student:
Aden Barton: AWOL from Academics. Harvard Magazine, March-April 2024
available online
Extracts (I recommend the whole article):
I spend far, far less time on my classes than on my extracurricular activities—working as a research assistant, editing columns for the Crimson, or writing for Harvard Magazine. It turns out that I’m not alone in my meager coursework. Although the average college student spent around 25 hours a week studying in 1960, the average was closer to 15 hours in 2015.
for many students, instead of being the core part of college, class is simply another item on their to-do list, no different from their consulting club presentation or their student newspaper article. Harvard has increasingly become a place in Cambridge for bright students to gather—that happens to offer lectures on the side.
data from the Crimson’s senior survey indicates that students devote nearly as much time collectively to extracurriculars, athletics, and employment as to their classes.
HALF OF THE BLAME can be assigned to grade inflation, which has fundamentally changed students’ incentives during the past several decades. Rising grades permit mediocre work to be scored highly, and students have reacted by scaling back academic effort. I can’t count the number of times I’ve guiltily turned in work far below my best, betting that the assignment will nonetheless receive high marks.
(For people not familiar with North-American English: AWOL = absent without leave [that is, leave = permission to leave; the origin of the abbreviation is the military].)
A mixture of very cool stuff and emotionally difficult stuff, as usual. This website has become a daily habit for me. As per Bryan, above, the monarch story is great. I remember when they were common, decades ago in Wisconsin. The Enzo flying squirrel is precious. Those NYC & Seattle mayors — worrisome, and we’ll see what happens.
My Lai massacre: let’s not forget the action of Hugh Thompson Jr. and crew who intervened.
Never was a big fan of David Sloan Wilson. Isn’t group selection the way he puts it just WRONG?
Now the Wilson damage continues with his batty daughter. We New Yorkers did about the stupidest thing we could do with out pants on by electing Comrade Hamas Mandami and Seattle said: Hold my beer.
Yikes. Glad I don’t live in those pl…. ooohh no.
D.A.
NYC
David, did you see this?
Yes. Thank you, I answered at the bottom (b/c the thread expired) rer Cass Sunstein reference.
I’m a big fan of Eric Kaufman – read and watch a lot of him.
Interesting about the German context, I’d often wondered whether German state DW TV was actually taken over by the GDR high command after 1989 given its wildly leftist obsessions and bias (the only German media I consume).
And it makes a lot of sense that academics (ahem, present company excepted, and my Dad!)… imbue their students – who will become journalists – with their ideas.
I’ve noticed this VERY much with Middle East politics as I am a veteran of that. Lefty 60s and 70s ideas about Israel (and big time – the Shah of Iran) were handed down – like sacred native dances – from hippy boomer professors to Xers like me and on down to the kiddies of today. Even if they’re wildly wrong! Many students then go on to the media (ahem, my column) to pass those ugly dances on. Intergeneration meme transmission.
best and thanks Peter,
D.A.
NYC
I live outside the city of Seattle, so I did not have an opportunity to vote against Ms. Wilson. Her election may trigger a giant sucking sound of businesses and residents moving to the Eastside (of Lake Washington): Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond, Woodinville, and Issaquah. It would be very expensive for the big companies to move though—there might not be enough office space on the Eastside—so the biggies will probably stay put and wait things out. It’s a bit better now, but a couple of years ago I could look outside my doctor’s office window from a beautiful new building in downtown Seattle and see dozens of homeless people living in squalor under an Interstate-5 overpass. Every overpass had its own homeless community. We’ll see how Ms. Wilson does as mayor.
It’s amazing that one can track individual Monarchs during migration. How such delicate creatures can survive such journeys is hard to fathom. Maybe they aren’t so delicate after all. When I was in grad school, we were just starting to learn how insects use UV and polarized light. It’s interesting that Monarch’s use UV to guide them on their way. It is truly sad to read that Monarch populations continue to decline. I remember the excitement he expressed when my old friend Bob Silberglied (zz’l) told his class that he had just returned from visiting one of the Monarch’s overwintering colonies. He wouldn’t reveal exactly where it was, to protect the colonies from tourists. I visited an overwintering colony in Pismo Beach, California a few years ago. It was amazing. I tried not to disturb the butterflies. The leaves on the trees had fallen but the butterflies covered the trees as if they were leaves.
Re Seattle, long ago fresh out of grad school I got a cold-call job offer from Boeing. One of the several reasons I declined was that the strongest memory from my one visit to Seattle as a tourist was not the Space Needle but rather the historic Pioneer Square, with derelicts¹ sleeping on the benches. This was decades before this became commonplace in every city.
Re the monarch migration, that citizen-science tracking project is amazing and heartwarming. It fits well with the video narrator’s effusive joy.
Unlike the video, WaPo got the science mixed up: “When clouds get in the way, monarchs switch to a backup compass that relies on ultraviolet light to detect the angle of the Earth’s magnetic field”. I wish that was a typo but strongly suspect it’s too-typical journalistic ignorance and/or not caring much about “the facts”.
. . . . .
¹ Yes, younglings, that was then the most polite term for today’s “unhoused”.
Well, I do live in Seattle and did vote in the election, and NOT for Wilson. Unfortunately this result will get (or is getting) played up as Seattle losing its collective mind and veering off a leftward bound cliff, but that would be overplaying the situation. There were two main factors leading to this fiasco (both of which may also apply to NYC, though I don’t know enough about that to properly opine):
First, Seattle is a “blue” city, and as such many here are keen to rebuke, or rebel against, Trump in any way possible. The leftward turn in this local election was in my opinion a very heavy reaction against the Trump administration and what it is perceived as standing for. Many don’t seem to realize, or care, that this is ultimately self-destructive. It feels good now, the bill will come due later.
Second, the incumbent Bruce Harrell, though a long time politician, was essentially incompetent as mayor, with repeated gaffes throughout his term. I’m not sure anyone in town still believes that he is the right person for the job. Unfortunately his buffoonery left the door open for someone like Wilson to slip in. Unlike Harrell, she’s not a longtime politician and her “outsider” stance appealed to many of the disaffected. Once again, the dearth of competent and properly qualified candidates is going to haunt us.
Finally, despite proclaiming her “mandate” (a la Trump), it is important to note that she won by an extremely low margin and was trailing the race for several days post-election before overtaking Harrell and squeaking past him at the end of the ballot count. This was the result of an unfortunate convergence of circumstances, and if a decent opponent can emerge I seriously doubt she’ll get a second term. We toss incumbent mayors out all the time around here.
The ancient curse of “may you live in interesting times” has never seemed more apropos.
And oh yes, there is a homeless problem here, like in virtually every large city, but the “derelicts” don’t sleep on the benches in Pioneer Square anymore, they go elsewhere. And no, the square is not named for pioneering homelessness. It’s not a Seattle invention.
The Auschwitz photos are so sad every day, but this morning’s is especially so for me because Flore looks just like my grand daughter at four, with the bow in her hair, bright eyes, and a beautiful, happy smile.
With my close contact with my grandchildren let alone my own adult children these photos are a daily tragedy. I can barely look some days.
What crushes me is the knowledge that all these beautiful and deeply loved children were shortly to be caught up in a cyclone of unfathomable evil.
And the fact that so many of those children would still be alive today – and therefore could be people we ourselves know – somehow makes their loss personal as well as historical.
I agree with all of you about the surprisingly deep emotional impact of these Auschwitz photos – they create an awareness of the horror in a way that statistics cannot begin to approach. Day after day we see beautiful babies and children and families smiling into the camera, and we are left to imagine their frantic, terrible endings.
I remember when visiting Seattle 25 years ago they had free bus services within the central urban area, so that bit isn’t new. Remember that public transport is one of those rare cases where a good service helps the people who don’t use it as well as the people who do use it (less traffic).
I also remember a truly huge number of scruffy, bearded men hanging around in a park area overlooking the sea. I assumed it was a pure mathematics conference (I was attending a statistics conference) until I realised it was all homeless guys.
I know exactly the location you’re talking about—right by the Pike Place Market. It always smelled strangely like perfume at that park because the city sprayed perfume there to mask the smell.
“…a pure mathematics conference”…Ha!…you applied guys…+1
My limited experience with professional pure mathematicians cautioned me that if one spends too much time thinking outside the box then you tend to forget where the box is, or maybe even that there ever was a box. Sort of like mysticism.
Glad that the massacre in Haditha is being exposed. I’m watching it but need a break. Very disturbing.
Thank you for that post.
I’m glad this horrific event is being exposed.
Exposed, yes. Prosecuted, why bother? Just more Trump pardons.
I’ve seen Monarchs overwintering in Santa Cruz, California. There’s a sanctuary there, at Natural Bridges State Beach. The butterflies hang from eucalyptus trees* in big clusters that look like dead leaves at first glance. They take turns huddling in the warm center of the cluster.
Years ago, I met a woman who told me that her parents had a house on the Monarchs’ California migration route, and their backyard would be covered with butterflies during migrations. One evening her mother was in the yard enjoying the sight when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit, and all the butterflies flew into the air at once. A magical moment.
*Eucalyptus are naturalized in California.
tbh, TO BE HONEST! Jack Turban MD.
Sex is a kaleidoscope of pretty colours, multiple rotating patterns by reflection produced by mirrors… tbh.
Sea otter pup reunited with mom is adorable. So is the Japanese squirrel!
The problem with the Leibniz brand Choco Minis is that they are just so damn small.
Infinitisimal, one might say.
On the principle of math-geek solidarity, I forbear mentioning any grammar or spelling misteaks. 🙂. (Not quite Epimenides of Crete or Alfred Tarski, but in the same general neighbourhood.)