Welcome to a Hump Day (“水曜日” in Japanese), the last day of 2025, New Year’s Eve, and, appropriately, National Champagne Day. Here’s a short video about how it’s made, which helps you understand why the good stuff is not cheap. (Note: the name “champagne” is reserved for the stuff made in the right area of France; there’s no such thing, for example, as American champagne.)
There’s a moving Google Doodle to celebrate the onset of 2026; click on it to see where it goes:
Here is Jango in Florida, getting ready for New Year’s Eve by sniffing cava held one of his staff, reader Divy:
It’s also Hogmanay (the Scottish New Year celebration), World Peace Meditation Day, and No Interruptions Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The U.S. has finally mounted an attack on a land-based site in Venezuela, bombing a loading dock with drones.
Trump has been raising pressure on Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, by building up naval forces in the region, seizing oil tankers and destroying boats that the U.S. has alleged were carrying drugs. U.S. Southern Command said late Monday that it had conducted another boat strike in the Eastern Pacific, killing two. Those strikes have destroyed 30 alleged drug vessels and killed at least 107 people since September. The shoreline attack would be the first on land, a move Trump has been previewing for months.
Trump declined to say whether the military or the CIA carried out the strike. He previously authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for more information. The Pentagon declined to address questions about the U.S. military’s involvement in the attack. The CIA declined to comment.
The president has declared a “non-international armed conflict” on drug cartels, with officials likening traffickers to al-Qaeda or Islamic State terrorists. Judges and lawmakers from both parties have questioned the administration’s legal authority for the strikes and for fast-tracked deportation of alleged gang members.
Trump first referenced the shoreline attack Friday in a radio interview with Republican donor John Catsimatidis, saying the strike occurred two nights earlier.
“We just knocked out — I don’t know if you read or you saw — they have a big plant or big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from,” Trump said in the interview. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard.
The fact that we’re still blowing boats out of the water without giving them a chance to surrender still bothers me, as does the President getting to order military action (“non-international armed conflicts, which of course in this case IS international) unilaterally, without Congress’s approval. The law says that we can’t go to war unless Congress approves, but of course Trump ignores that.
Here’s some good “de-extincting” news that doesn’t involve Clssl Bscnc*s (h/t Loretta). They’ve cloned the highly endangered black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes). It was once declared extinct, but they found a wild population in Montana, and now there are about 500 individuals in the wild.
Black-footed ferrets, once widespread across western North America, were thought to be extinct in the 20th century. But after a ranch dog’s chance find in the 1980s and advances in modern science, 12 baby ferrets were born this summer, descended from clones made from cells frozen nearly four decades ago.
Their births — 11 kits from three litters at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, and one at a conservation facility in Colorado — represent a milestone in a decades-long effort to revive one of North America’s most endangered mammals.
Experts said the current wild ferret population comes from just seven individuals, which is such a limited gene pool that it could hinder the species’s survival. Now scientists have successfully cloned ferrets, and those clones have produced offspring, which could help boost the population.
“What’s exciting is that with these births, we’re getting new, unique genetic diversity in this population,” said Justin Chuven, deputy coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center in Carr, Colorado. “If you have a more genetically diverse population, it’s more likely they’ll be able to overcome challenges of disease and drought and have the ability to survive in the wild.”
In the late 1800s, there may have been about a million black-footed ferrets, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. But their numbers plummeted in the 20th century. They lost their habitat to farms. A plague decimated them. And the poisoning of prairie dogs, their main source offood, pushed them toward extinction.
In the late 1800s, there may have been about a million black-footed ferrets, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. But their numbers plummeted in the 20th century. They lost their habitat to farms. A plague decimated them. And the poisoning of prairie dogs, their main source offood, pushed them toward extinction.
By the 1970s, no one could find black-footed ferrets in the wild, and there were none in captivity, according to Chuven.
The dog on a cattle ranch in Meeteetse, Wyoming, brought a dead black-footed ferret to his owner’s porch in 1981. Recognizing it, Shep’s humans called local wildlife officials. They realized Shep had found what was probably the last population of the species living in the wild.
Saved by a d*g! I have to admit that cats never saved a species from extinction. . .
Experts monitored the population of about 130 ferrets linked to the one Shep had found, but when the animals continued to decline from disease, they captured 18 of those ferrets and took them into captivity so biologists could start breeding them. But it was a small gene pool to work with.
One of the ferrets taken from the wild, Willa, died in 1988 — before she reproduced. But scientists collected her cells for storage at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo, a repository of living cell lines of more than 1,000 species.
“They preserved her tissue in hopes they’d someday have the technology,” Chuven said.
In 2020, more than 30 years after Willa died, the first clone from her stored tissue samples was born — Elizabeth Ann. But she was not bred because of problems with her uterus that led to her having a hysterectomy. Two years ago, two more cloned ferrets were born — Noreen and Antonia — made by implanting Willa’s cells into an egg from a domesticated ferret.
This summer, six females and six males were born, including the 11 at the Smithsonian’s Front Royal facility and one born to Noreen at the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center. Officials said Noreen and Elizabeth Ann died in June.
However, they don’t plan to release them into the wild because of Willa’s “highly valuable genetics,” though with a founder population in the wild that small, they do need more genetic variability. I think 500 is pretty good, though; I don’t deem the species to go extinct because of inbreeding, which I think is an overrated danger for a population that big. Remember, one inseminated female carries half the heritable variation of the population, though not, of course, all the rare alleles that might be useful. Here’s a video that shows species restoration when it involved captive breeding. They are adorable, aren’t they?
*The Guardian asks, “Why is the Democratic Party hiding its 2024 autopsy report?“, an op-ed by Norman Soloman (h/t David). The answer, which makes my hair stand on end, is because they think that Kamala would be a great candidate for President in the next election.
The Democratic National Committee’s decision to block the release of its own autopsy report on the 2024 election is stunning but not surprising. Averse to unpleasant candor, the Democrats’ governing body functions more like a PR firm than a political organization devoted to grassroots capacities for winning elections. The party’s leaders pose as immune from critique, even if they have led the party to disaster.
Unwilling to depart from the party establishment’s culture of conformity, the DNC has remained under the Biden-Harris shadow throughout 2025. Release of an official autopsy might have shown that party leaders actually want to encourage public discourse about the missteps that enabled Donald Trump to become president again. But the DNC is proceeding as if there’s nothing to be learned from the tragic debacle of 2024 that its leaders don’t already know – and they don’t need to share their purported wisdom with anyone else.
In early December, the DNC featured Kamala Harris as the keynote speaker at the semi-annual meeting of its 450 members. Predictably, her formulaic speech received a standing ovation. No matter that in recent months, on the long book tour promoting her campaign memoir, Harris was notably incapable of responding with any coherence to questions about why as vice-president she claimed that Biden was fit to run for president in 2024 or, for that matter, to be president for another four years.
The DNC’s refusal to release its autopsy is in keeping with a pattern of evading hard truths that led virtually every elected Democrat in Washington to go along with President Biden’s insistence on running for re-election until his awful debate performance in late June 2024. Meanwhile, big majorities of Democratic voters were continually telling pollsters that they didn’t want Biden to run again.
An autopsy report with any value would not dodge such matters. Nor would it elide sensible questions about how much money went to insider consultants and advertising contractors as the Harris campaign managed to spend $1.5bn during the hallowed 107 days of her presidential campaign last year. An autopsy might also probe the moral and political consequences of nominee Harris continuing to toe the Biden line for huge arms shipments to Israel while its military continued to slaughter Palestinian civilians in Gaza; during the campaign and afterward, polling showed that she would have gained a substantial boost of votes by calling for an arms embargo.
Well, I will ignore that last paragraph, which is biased and misleading, buying into the ludicrous “genocide” scenario. (Well, it’s the Guardian.)
Months ago, news accounts surfaced that release of the DNC’s autopsy would be postponed until after the November election. The draft autopsy reportedly avoided casting blame on Biden or Harris or other Democratic leaders. But as it turned out, even such a tepid autopsy would be too hot for the DNC leadership to handle
We all know what we have to do to get a Democrat elected: find a smart, articulate candidate who is closer to the center than the incoherent Harris AND DO NOT TOUT HER AS A CANDIDATE. In fact, do not give her any air. The Republicans will in all likelihood run Vance, so we have to think who can stand up against him. It’s early days yet, so I won’t broach names, but if you have any good ones, put them below. It is hard to find a good centrist Democrat these days, isn’t it?
*Several sources, including NBC News, reports that FBI Director Kash Patel was already beefing up investigations of childcare and healthcare scams before that video by Nick Shirley went viral. Note that the alleged mastermind of the earlier nutrition scheme associated with the pandemic is not Somali but white, but we have no information on who, if anybody is “masterminding” the healthcare and childcare schemes.
The FBI went into overdrive to investigate suspected fraud at nearly a dozen Minnesota social services after a YouTube video purporting to show day care facilities that aren’t operational but receiving state and federal funding went viral over the weekend.
FBI Director Kash Patel posted on X that he was aware of the video, created by right-wing influencer Nick Shirley, but insisted the FBI had already “surged” investigative resources and personnel to Minnesota as part of its ongoing fraud investigation that has largely targeted Somali immigrants.
“The FBI believes this is just the tip of a very large iceberg,” Patel posted Sunday on X.
Meanwhile, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s office defended its ongoing efforts to crack down on fraud when it was asked about the video.
“The governor has worked for years to crack down on fraud and ask the state legislature for more authority to take aggressive action,” a spokesperson for the governor’s office said in an email. “He has strengthened oversight — including launching investigations into these specific facilities, one of which was already closed.”
The Justice Department has been running a sprawling fraud investigation involving some members of Minnesota’s Somali community for years.
In 2022, during the Biden administration, federal prosecutors announced initial indictments in what they called a $250 million scheme to defraud a federally funded child nutrition program. As of last month, prosecutors had charged 77 people. They described Aimee Bock, who is white, as the mastermind of the operation. A jury convicted her in March.
Shirley, 23, who describes himself as an independent journalist, put the subject of Minnesota fraud in the spotlight of conservative media in recent days. His report out of Minneapolis was quickly championed by Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk and various right-wing outlets. His video has been viewed millions of times on X and YouTube.
And another NYT article from Dec. 18 (before the Shirley video) notes how the scandal has suddenly broadened:
An investigation into fraud in Minnesota’s social services programs has broadened significantly, federal prosecutors said on Thursday.
The prosecutors told reporters that they were investigating suspicious billing practices in 14 Medicaid-funded programs. Until now, the investigation had focused on only three safety net programs run by state agencies.
“What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes,” Joseph H. Thompson, the federal prosecutor overseeing the investigation said at a news conference. “It is staggering industrial-scale fraud.”
A preliminary assessment suggests that more than half of the $18 billion in taxpayer funds spent on the 14 programs and intended to help low-income, vulnerable people since 2018 was most likely stolen, the federal prosecutors said.
In light of Shirley’s video (which has been criticized by some), the NYT reported yesterday that the Health and Human Services Department has paused all childcare aid to Minnesota. However, Governor Walz is still pushing back, as you can see in the last line below, which I’ve put in bold:
The decision blocks a funding stream that provides $185 million in annual aid to Minnesota day care centers, according to the health department.
More than a dozen schemes have come to light in Minnesota in recent years, many of them involving people of Somali origin. Prosecutors say the schemes have cost taxpayers billions of dollars. The scandal has rattled Minnesota politics and drawn the ire of the White House.
On Friday, a conservative active on social media, Nick Shirley, posted a video purporting to uncover rampant fraud in day care centers run by people of Somali origin. While day care centers in Minnesota have been prosecuted for overbilling in the past, none of the centers featured in the video have been accused of fraud by the authorities. Nevertheless, the video drew accolades from several senior White House officials.
Jim O’Neill, the deputy health secretary, said in a video statement on Tuesday that the department was pausing the funding in response to “credible allegations” of “extensive fraud” in Minnesota’s child care programs. Mr. O’Neill said he had sent a letter to the state’s governor, Tim Walz, a Democrat, demanding a thorough audit of the state’s day care centers.
In a statement, Mr. Walz’s office said the governor had been combating fraud “for years.”
“Fraud is a serious issue,” said the statement. “But this is a transparent attempt to politicize the issue to hurt Minnesotans and defund government programs that help people.”
Prosecutors described the expansion of their investigation as they announced charges against six new people, accusing them of defrauding safety net programs. That brought to 92 the number of people charged in a yearslong fraud investigation that has roiled state politics in Minnesota and has drawn the attention of the White House. So far, at least 60 people have been convicted. Others are awaiting trial or have fled the country.
Note, though, the claims that none of the childcare centers in Shirley’s video have been accused of fraud. We will just have to see how this shakes out. But it looks to me that Walz’s political career will be set back by not only the ongoing fraud, but his repeated attempts to say that the investigations of it are politically motivated.
*In “Things Worth Remembering,” the Free Press gets a preacher to tell us about the meaning of one of Gerard Manley Hopkins‘s great poems: “Pied Beauty.” I am quite fond of this poem, as I am of several other Hopkins poems (e.g. “Spring and Fall” or “God’s Grandeur” (read them to yourself and savor the beauty), and in fact I once lost a fellowship because I touted him as a great poet when the people judging me thought he was jejune. Here is “Pied Beauty”:
Glory be to God for dappled things –For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.All things counter, original, spare, strange;Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:Praise him.
I tell you, Hopkins, a Jesuit priest who died at 45 of typhoid, and could have been bipolar, knew how to write poetry. (Note that there are rhymes here, almost a necessity for great poetry.) His poems are unmistakable; nobody else wrote like that. And yes, he’s extolling God, though the author, Father A. Sirico, has to goddy-up the poem, ruining its musical beauty (the last line is a great touch). Father Sirico has to beleaguer us this way:
The poem’s final injunction reads, “Praise him.” Hopkins offers no tidy explanation, no philosophical treatise to the imperfections of life. He simply marvels at the God who fathers both the spotted cow and the child of Bethlehem. The same God who delights in rose-moles on trout flesh delights to be born as a small, homeless, Middle Eastern infant. The same God who lavishes creation with abundant variety enters that variety himself to heal it.
Christmas is the moment the immutable God embraces the mutable world, dignifies it, and begins the long work of restoring it.
Sorry, Father, but there is no God. The poem is still wonderful, even if it doesn’t give us any truth.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej announcer that Listy will be moved as of tomorrow:
Hili: Happy New Year.
Me: Starting tomorrow, new posts will be on Substack only.
Hili: And on Facebook, of course, and me on WEIT.
Hili: Do siego roku.
Ja: Od jutra nowe teksty tylko na Substacku.
Hili: I na Facebooku i oczywiście, i ja u Jerrego.
*******************
From Jesus of the Day (the devil’s in the details):
From Meow Incorporated:
From Things With Faces, an overbaked but still happy cheesecake:
From Masih. As the Iranian currency plummets, the people rise up, and they aren’t cowed by security forces. I find this video amazing but heartening:
Watch How Unarmed People Force Security Forces to Run Away
These moments will be remembered as powerful scenes from the Iranian people’s uprising against a corrupt and incompetent regime.
Security forces thought they were clearing the main street near the bazaar (Se Rah-e… pic.twitter.com/v8F4SJBkE4
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 30, 2025
From Luana, who says that she didn’t think Greta would get any dumber (but she did). No, the world did NOT ignore what was happening in Gaza, but note how Greta characterizes the West. Her movement really does seem to be authoritarian.
RACISM https://t.co/eoWkur34wY
— Climate Warrior🐬 #ClimateJustice🇵🇸🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 (@ClimateWarrior7) December 30, 2025
And Luana notes that they fixed the misspelled sign:
Quality ‘Learing’ Center day care finally fixes its misspelled sign after national outrage https://t.co/H8o5gbjfov pic.twitter.com/tn9l6NYhR5
— New York Post (@nypost) December 30, 2025
“Dreams” covered well. Sent by Malcolm. She is, however, trying very hard to imitate Stevie Nicks:
An impressive cover of “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, Lanie Gardner
[📹 laniegardner]pic.twitter.com/0EfpS1RieE
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 20, 2025
One from my feed; Mel Blanc doing many voices:
Mel Blanc created the voices of the main Looney Tunes characters.
In this video, he performs all of them at once.
pic.twitter.com/dT5eePFtjk— cinesthetic. (@TheCinesthetic) December 30, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
31 December 1918 | A Norwegian Jewish woman, Mirjam Oster, was born in Oslo.
In November 1942 she was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber after selection.
—🎧 Listen about the development of the mass murder infrastructure at Auschwitz:… pic.twitter.com/PODXa8J8zO
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) December 31, 2025
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, he asks the same question I did the other day: how did a European get an animal found only in the New World? INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW!
Serious question. How did Linnaeus get his raccoon? If it was a gift from the King of Sweden, where did the King get it from? There was a Swedish colony of New Sweden in New Jersey, but that ended in 1655, long before Linnaeus's day. So what's the answer? Bsky do your stuff! Pls rt. h/t Doug R.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-12-30T17:04:48.274Z
Matthew says of the next one: “I may have sent this one before. . . . but it can watched many times. Such writing and acting.” I can’t embed it, but click on the screenshot to hear it at BlueHair:
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it. -George Marshall, US Army Chief, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Nobel laureate (31 Dec 1880-1959)
“…we can’t go to war unless Congress approves, but of course Trump ignores that”….As does Congress I might add.
An excellent video from Natasha Haussdorff in which she talks about west bank/Judea and Samaria and at around 18:00 details four accepted international criteria for a state and how Israel since declaring independence in 1948 at the day of the end of British Mandate satisfies these. I found that having read Herzl’s “The Jewish State” was helpful in understanding some of these points. Url should be
Also, latest Dan Senor video on settler violence explains definitions of settlers from various perspectives and addresses some of these points in right wing of Bibi’s coalition. A good 60 minutes.
Finally the literate Texan always brings a smile to my face…cannot see him often enough.
Theodor Herzl’s “The Jewish State” is out of copyright and can be read for free online. It’s an amazing piece.
On a closely related note, I’m now reading an excellent, artfully done 2025 book by Rachel Cockerell called “Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land,” about one-third of which is devoted to Herzl and the first several Zionist Congresses, held at the turn of the 20th century, mostly in Basel, Switzerland. The rest of the book is devoted to the largely unknown effort to bring Jews coming to the U.S. to Galveston, Texas, rather than to New York. The worry was that squeezing so many Jews into the Lower East Side would eventually cause America’s welcoming of Eastern European Jews to sour. (It did.) The Galveston initiative was largely unsuccessful, and is barely remembered as a blip in the history of Jews in America. Cockerell’s book brings to life the desperation of Russian Jews to escape persecution and find a place where they could live in peace.
Off the top of my head: George Bush the Elder invaded Panama, eventually arresting the president of that country and throwing him in jail somewhere; Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia for weeks on end and later did the same sort of bombing campaign against rump Serbia in support of Kosovo’s secession (as an aside, the Russians closely observed “defensive” NATO’s involvement); Clinton also bombed Iraq several times as well as Afghanistan and an aspirin factory in Sudan; Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Obama wiped out Libya and Khaddafy, leading to the hell-hole not only in Libya but also in Mali and other sub-Sahel African countries; all (gasp) without Congressional approval, which is the Law. So that horse has left the barn.
If I understand the daycare in Minnesota situation correctly, here are the options:
Daycare has children: this is suspicious because most Somali immigrants are on welfare, so why would their kids be in daycare?
Daycare has no children: this is suspicious because what is a daycare doing without children?
So what would be a non-suspicious daycare in Minnesota? In my opinion the above framing is classic conspiracy thinking. There has been fraud and I’m sure there is more to uncover, but there needs to be more evidence than that.
I think you need to think this through again, Mike. Your conspiracy is a non sequitor as it is based on “options” which are not themselves exclusive. The day cares are frauds if they have children only when investigators are present, which appears to be the case.
You’re backing the wrong horse here, mike.
Here’s my take on the DNC’s 2024 post-mortem: They don’t want to release it because it’s bad. Not that it makes the DNC bad, but that the report and the inquiry were done so badly that it would be embarrassing to release it.
According to AI: “The “Long March through the Institutions” is a concept rooted in the ideas of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), who proposed a “war of position” as a strategy for achieving revolutionary change in advanced capitalist societies, contrasting it with a sudden “war of movement” like the Russian Revolution of 1917″
Perhaps the institution of the Democrats has been ‘marched through’ and an autopsy of failures would expose this takeover?
The Democratic elite are paying the price for making DEI their lode star. They’ve lumbered themselves with a mediocre candidate, picked because she ticked the identity boxes “black” and “woman”, and now cannot say out loud that their DEI hire is anything less than top notch.
(Ditto Claudine Gay, ditto Ketanji Jackson, ditto Lisa Cook, ditto Nikole Hanna-Jones, ditto many other hires from the era when identity trumped merit.)
Wait! Coel, by the phrasing in your last sentence, you seem to suggest that we’re past the time when “identity trumped merit”. I sure hope that’s true, but I gotta say, I’m not seeing it.
Reading “Pied Beauty” always makes me think about the wonderful calico and tortie cats who have kept me company!
A day late but Happy Birthday for yesterday.
RE potential Dem candidates:
Newsome – the obvious front runner. (A bit too smooth and west coast for many)
I like (IL gov) JB Pritzker – but the country might not feel like it needs a short fat jewish billionaire. However like Newsome he has done a great job trolling trump and also a good job as gov.
I also like (CO gov) Jared Polis – who noted himself that if the focus groups say they need a gay, balding middle aged jewish guy he might be their man. He is a sensible centrist, as far as I can tell.
I’ve always liked Pete Buttigieg – again is the country ready for a gay president? (Perhaps more than it’s ready for a female president – who knows) He comes across as very smart and detail oriented. As well as a decent human being. Also did a decent job in the Biden admin, although the administration itself might get hung around his neck as a candidate.
Mark Kelly might be another possibility – interesting life story, although he is a military veteran (as is mayor Pete) and the history, over my lifetime, of presidential elections is that a vet running against a non-vet always loses (see Reagan, Clinton, Bush Jr, Obama). I guess it’s not a fatal flaw and more likely an accident of history.
Whitmer would probably be my favored female candidate.
Happy New Year everyone
I think Pete Buttigieg would make an excellent president. At this point it doesn’t seem likely, mostly because he isn’t in the public eye as a possible candidate but also because he is gay. But, who knows. There is still time for him to become a likely candidate and maybe being gay wouldn’t be the liability I think it probably still is.
Hi Darrell. Again with the Pete B. Thing here. PCC(E) talks about this also as do most of my Manhattan friends. They are wrong. I love the guy and even gave him Money once (very rare for me with politicians, only him and Hillary).
Let me make my case: While in our own liberal climes being gay is nothing special (I live in the “gayest” neighborhood in the universe), for a lot of the electorate (black people, Christians, Muslims etc) the gay thing is a total deal breaker. And moreso for MANY foreign countries, the concept of a PotUS “First Husband” is not going to fly. At all.
Let’s not DEI the presidential run and alienate pretty much everybody but ourselves. He’s probably the best man for the job but he needs to get it first.
best regards,
D.A.
NYC
Agree, David. Pete Buttigeg doesn’t have to worry about the right-wing Christians because they’re not going to vote for a Democrat anyway, even a straight one. But the black and Muslim Democrats will stay home in droves, handing Georgia, Michigan, and Minnesota to the Republicans. Given how the Dem coalition works, you could see a (presumably white) male homosexual candidate taking only California, Washington, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts. That’s just 124 votes out of 538. Not a defeat on the scale of McGovern or Carter ’80, but a drubbing still.
Unfortunately, as the Democratic Party turns away from straight, white people and even straight, white men like Joe Biden celebrate their eventual “replacement”, it eliminates its largest pool of electoral sympathy for the many homosexuals it attracts. It becomes an exclusive club, not a political party. (Canadians have been saying this about our socialist New Democratic Party for several decades. It has never formed a national government but has too many passionate supporters who don’t seem to care about power to allow it to dry up and blow away.)
Abroad, many foreign leaders you have to make deals with wouldn’t want to be seen in the same room with him, for fear they’d be deposed or assassinated. At best, same-sex couples on the world stage are “cute”. A homosexual in Treasury, or Speaker of the House, sure. But not in the Oval Office.
It might well be that the U.S. electorate “deserves” to elect someone of the quality of Pete Buttigeg. But that’s not how politics works.
Ive got to chime in. Newsome is a born politician, like Clinton. And just like Clinton, even if I agree with him, I feel like I’ve got to take a shower after I hear him speak. He’s a liar and can’t be trusted. I’ve lived in CA for 10 years now. It works, sort of, but man it’s ugly.
I like Mark Kelly. I’ve been told he’s not slick enough. He’s a twin, as am I, and, better, and identical twin (I am not). I have not done a deep dive into his policy positions though I understand he’s a centrist. Don’t know how bad he is on gender-woo, hoping for the better. I have donated to his Senate re-election fund and, of course, there’s that notorious Hegseth investigation.
Here”s what Google AI told me:
” Mark Kelly is a renowned American astronaut, naval aviator, and retired U.S. Navy Captain who flew four Space Shuttle missions, commanded Space Shuttle Endeavour, and logged over 50 days in space before becoming a U.S. Senator for Arizona, continuing his public service legacy alongside his identical twin brother, Scott Kelly, also a famous astronaut. ”
He was interviewed by the Harris campaign for the VP slot and dodged that one when they chose Walz. I like him also because I’m an admirer of Gabby Giffords.
I like Seth Moulton (D-MA), too, who called out Biden early in 2024 and for some inexplicable reason doesn’t want his daughter run over by a boy on the soccer. field. And there’s Dean Philips (D-MN) what actually had the guts to call out Biden’s weakness and enter against him in the early primaries — also described as centrist. I realize he’s not a national figure, but hey, he stood up and did something.
So cool that they’ve cloned the Black-footed Ferret! Amazing that technology allowed the cloning of cells from an animal that has been dead for 30 years.
Jejune? If your judges thought that poem was jejune, it’s just as well you were rejected, since you didn’t want that fellowship anyway.
But I have questions. If that was a biology fellowship you were applying for, why the heck did your judges care about your analysis of a poem? Unless the poem was about fruit flies, of course.
After I wrote the above, I wondered; are there any poems written about fruit flies? And lo and behold, there are. Have you ever read “Lullaby to a Fruit Fly”? The first stanza goes:
Best of all, it was clearly written by a poet-biologist.
“Saved by a d*g! I have to admit that cats never saved a species from extinction. . .”—Thank you for making me laugh so hard my morning coffee was sprayed everywhere.
In the photos I’ve seen of Andrzej he always looks like a very serious chap. The kind of guy when you meet in person you think: “THIS is a respectable guy.”
Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku Andrzej!
Off to Times Square tonight as usual, got my diapers and hip flask. 🙂 HAHHA No. I’m not insane….. but as a stupid young man 30 years ago, new to NYC, I did go. It was hell, just… horrible. When your TV shows you this tonight in Times Square, all those people you see are drunk, not NYers, frozen and miserable. Happy New Year!
D.A.
NYC
D.A.
NYC
” . . . the video, created by right-wing influencer Nick Shirley . . . .”
The other evening PBS News Hour also made sure to include the descriptor “right-wing.”
What not a few are looking for is a “left-wing” type making such a video and whether and how NBC, PBS, and their ilk would report it.
Comment by Greg Mayer
The instructions on how to draw a reindeer are lacking in so many ways. The final drawing is a fair representation of a red deer (called wapiti or elk in North America), not a reindeer.
GCM
I enjoy literary criticism that explores a poet’s artistic development, that situates a poem within not only the poet’s corpus but also within the broader stream of influences and contemporaries. Technical analysis can also intrigue me—particularly as to how technique creates certain effects and might close off others. Even a discussion of reception history can be fascinating as one sees the twists and turns of critical judgment and fashion. But I can recall very few times when I enjoyed being told in prose what a poem supposedly “means.” There is a reason why poets generally don’t explain their works!
“To repeat, most of our difficulties in criticism are rooted in the heresy of paraphrase. If we allow ourselves to be misled by it, we distort the relation of the poem to its ‘truth,’ . . . we bring the statement to be conveyed into an unreal competition with science or philosophy or theology. . . . If we allow ourselves to be misled by the heresy of paraphrase, we run the risk of doing even more violence to the internal order of the poem itself. By taking the paraphrase as our point of stance, we misconceive the function of metaphor and meter. We demand logical coherences where they are sometimes irrelevant, and we fail frequently to see imaginative coherences on levels where they are highly relevant.”
– Cleanth Brooks, “The Well Wrought Urn”
There has been no formal declaration of war (by the U.S) since 1942
A declaration of war serves notice to the world that its trade with the belligerent nations between which a state of war exists is subject to molestation by either belligerent. In declaring war, Congress would also be endorsing the shift of the economy onto a war footing, a task, (like the prosecution of the war itself) it would delegate to the Executive. As holder of the taxing power, it would also have to vote the necessary appropriations to fund the war. If the President doesn’t need the delegation of those war powers to carry out military operations overseas, he doesn’t need to ask Congress for a declaration of war.
Wikipedia says this:
and goes on:
Much of the political story on the war in Vietnam, which dominated the news during my late childhood and early adult life, was the degree to which Congress could control the foreign policy ambition of the Executive when it required the application of military force absent a declaration of war. Not much, it turned out.