Welcome to Sunday, February 1, 2026, and we’re into a new month, one likely filled with more snow, slush and freezing temperatures. You can see what’s in store from this illumination of February from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, produced between 1412 and 1416. This page is attributed to Paul Limbourg, or the “Rustic painter”, and the Wikipedia caption is this:
An enclosure surrounds a farm comprising a sheep pen and, on the right, four beehives and a dovecote. Inside the house, a woman and a couple of young man and young woman warm themselves in front of the fire. Outside, a man chops down a tree with an axe, bundles of sticks at his feet, while another gets ready to go inside while blowing on his hands to warm them. Further away, a third drives a donkey, loaded with wood, towards the neighbouring village.
It’s also Car Insurance Day, G.I. Joe Day, National Baked Alaska Day, International Furmint Day (celebrating a grape and wine), National Dark Chocolate Day, and World Leprosy Day (it’s now called Hansen’s Disease). And it’s World Hijab Day as well as World No Hijab Day (I prefer the latter).
The Jesus and Mo artist put up this 2007 flashback struo in honor of No Hijab Day. I love the last panel, which tells you why the covering is worn:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 1 Wikipedia page.
And there’s a Google Doodle today celebrating The Art of Beat Making in Hip Hop. You can see an animated video about it by clicking on the screenshot below, and the occasion is given at the site:
In celebration of Black History Month, today’s #GoogleDoodle music video celebrates the art of hip-hop beat making, highlighting how hip-hop producers have innovated techniques for mixing and looping sound. The Doodle is set to a track composed by guest artist, Illa J.
Da Nooz:
*In the face of political criticism (and possible defunding), ICE has expanded its criteria for arresting people without warrants.
Amid tensions over President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota and beyond, federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.
The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.
The shift comes as the administration has deployed thousands of masked immigration agents into cities nationwide. A week before the memo, it came to light that Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of the agency, had issued guidance in May saying agents could enter homes with only an administrative warrant, not a judicial one. And the day before the memo, Mr. Trump said he would “de-escalate a little bit” in Minneapolis, after agents fatally shot two people in the crackdown there.
The memo, addressed to all ICE personnel and signed on Wednesday by Mr. Lyons, centers on a federal law that empowers agents to make warrantless arrests of people they believe are undocumented immigrants, if they are “likely to escape” before an arrest warrant can be obtained.
ICE has long interpreted that standard to mean situations in which agents believe someone is a “flight risk,” and unlikely to comply with future immigration obligations like appearing for hearings, according to the memo. But Mr. Lyons criticized that construction as “unreasoned” and “incorrect,” changing the agency’s interpretation of it to instead mean situations in which agents believe someone is unlikely to remain at the scene.
“An alien is ‘likely to escape’ if an immigration officer determines he or she is unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained,” Mr. Lyons wrote.
The Times shared a description of the memo’s contents with several former senior ICE officials from the Biden administration. Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior adviser at ICE, called the new definition “an extremely broad interpretation of the term ‘escape.’”
Well, all you need to do now as an ICE agent is have a suspicion that someone should be apprehended and a feeling that the person won’t hang around. The first bit gives you license to detain almost anyone; the second, of course, can apply to nearly everyone save people working at a job (it takes a while to get a warrant). This will only increase the public rancor against ICE, and seems a bad decision.
*The UN claims that it is in danger of financial collapse because several countries, including the U.S., haven’t paid their dues.
The United Nations said on Friday that it was facing imminent financial collapse and would run out of money by July if countries, namely the United States, did not pay their annual dues that amount to billions of dollars.
Senior U.N. officials said that if the cash ran out, the agency would be forced to shut down its landmark headquarters in New York by August. The U.N. Security Council, a 15-member body responsible for maintaining international peace and stability, convenes its meetings at U.N. headquarters.
It would also have to cancel the annual General Assembly gathering of world leaders held in September and shut the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which responds to global emergencies like conflicts and natural disasters, it said.
The U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, sent a letter to the ambassadors of all 196 member states on Thursday warning them of “imminent financial collapse,” saying the organization’s financial straits this time were different from those in any previous periods, according to a copy of the letter seen by The New York Times.
“The crisis is deepening, threatening program delivery and risking financial collapse,” Mr. Guterres wrote. “And the situation will further deteriorate in the near future. I cannot overstate the urgency of the situation we now face.”
. . . The United States is responsible for about 95 percent of the money owed to the United Nations, about $2.2 billion, according to a senior U.N. official who briefed reporters on the agency’s budget crisis. That amount is a combination of the U.S. annual dues for 2025, which has not been paid, and for 2026, the U.N. official said.
I am not a huge fan of the UN since it sided with Hamas and against Israel during the war on Gaza, and has, over the years, issued condemnation after condemnation of Israel. From AI:
Since October 7, 2023, the UN Security Council has adopted multiple resolutions focusing on humanitarian pauses, hostage release, and civilian protection in Gaza. While numerous UN bodies have heavily criticized and passed resolutions condemning Israeli actions, the UN General Assembly has not formally condemned Hamas for the Oct. 7 attack, with efforts to do so failing to meet required thresholds.
And in 2024 the UN condemned Israel 17 times, and the rest of the world only 6 times! The UN runs UNRWA, infested with Hamas terrorists and teaching Palestinian kids to hate Jews. Its secretary general as well as Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories, are palpable antisemites. UN Women was very slow to condemn Hamas’s attack on women and its sexual violence on women, waiting until December to do so. The UN force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, is supposed to prevent Hezbollah from engaging in terrorist activities and keep it from running the country, and has failed miserably. UNIFIL doesn’t do squat except run away when there’s fighting. As a whole, the major bodies of the organization, the Security Council and General Assembly, are not only biased but ineffectual. While the UN does engage in humanitarian activities, I think the whole megillah needs to be restructured, and that the U.S. should not contribute to an organization that itself lauds or fails to stop terrorism. Indeed, members of UNRWA engage in terrorism. This is why we aren’t funding it, and I see no way to make the UN into the world peacekeeping organization it was meant to be.
*Last week the feds raided an elections center in Georgia, and for apparently no reason other than Trump is still peeved at losing the 2020 election there (Georgia is a swing state) and called the state’s Secretary of State to beg for enough votes to win (remember?). They wouldn’t oblige him so now, more than five years later, Trump is still exacting revenge.
From the NYT:
On Wednesday, that obsession translated into action, when a team of F.B.I. agents, armed with a search warrant, descended on the Fulton County, Ga., elections hub outside Atlanta to seize ballots, voter rolls and scanner images — even though previous investigations have found no evidence to support his false claims of widespread fraud.
Curiously, the raid was accompanied by some Administration bigwigs, including erstwhile Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, now Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, who doesn’t work for the FBI. The Dispatch comments:
The only interesting thing about yesterday’s FBI search of an elections hub in Fulton County, Georgia, is that the feds got a warrant before carrying it out.
That should have been the least interesting thing about it, especially in context. The operation stank of irregularities that would have been extremely interesting under any other administration but are day-ending-in-Y normal for this one.
For instance, the federal prosecutor listed on the search warrant isn’t the local U.S. attorney in Atlanta, it’s a U.S. attorney from Missouri. We can only guess why, but the New York Times notes that Missouri prosecutors are tangled up with “Eagle Ed” Martin, a staunch “2020 was rigged” true believer and one of the most sinister henchmen in Donald Trump’s Justice Department.
The search was also curiously star-studded. Andrew Bailey, the highest-ranking official in the FBI apart from Director Kash Patel, was on scene to assist. Strangely, so was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, having reportedly “spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost, according to White House officials.” So that’s what she’s been doing instead of her job.
Three sources inside the Trump administration, two of them at the Justice Department, told Politico they don’t understand why an official tasked with sniffing out foreign threats to the United States is participating in domestic law enforcement. Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, observed that there are only two possibilities:
Either Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus—in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees “fully and currently informed” of relevant national security concerns—or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for the office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.
The 2020 election in Georgia was examined by Trump’s own campaign, members of his first administration, and state officials led by a Republican governor and Republican secretary of state. The closest anyone has come to identifying meaningful wrongdoing in Fulton County was human error that led to some absentee ballots being double-counted but didn’t affect the outcome.
One consultant to the president’s 2020 operation who looked into the possibility of fraud sounded flabbergasted when the Journal asked him about the FBI’s Fulton County raid. “That election is six years in the past,” he said. “There’s no undoing it. I can’t imagine there aren’t more important things to look at.”
Like an elephant, Trump never forgets—and he doesn’t forgive, either. And to think that I was once a supporter of Gabbard when she was a Democrat, and I’ll admit that I was even a bit sweet on her. She seemed savvy, was in the Army, surfed, was a Hindu, and had that cool skunk stripe in her hair. Now she’s proven herself just another flack for the Trump administration. What a letdown.
*I still think the U.S. is going to attack Iran soon, probably in conjunction with Israel, and is playing it cool to delude the regime. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the attack weaponry is in place, but nobody is sure what’s going to happen.
The U.S. military has assembled a formidable force in the Middle East within striking range of Iran. Now, President Trump must decide how to use it.
As warships and planes reach the region in growing numbers, administration officials said they are debating whether the main aim is to go after Iran’s nuclear program, hit its ballistic missile arsenal, bring about the collapse of the government—or some combination of the three.
Trump has asked aides for quick and decisive attack options that don’t risk a long-term war in the Middle East, officials said. The ideal option would be one that hits the regime hard enough that it has no choice but to accede to U.S. nuclear demands and lay off dissidents, they said.
There have been discussions about a punishing bombing campaign that could topple Iran’s government, the officials said. Trump and his team have also weighed leveraging the threat of military force to extract diplomatic concessions from Iran.
What Trump decides will determine the shape of any military action. “The kind of things you’d want to do and the force packages you would need are very different,” said retired Vice Adm. Robert Murrett, a former Navy intelligence officer.
A senior administration official said that while Trump has consistently said Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, he is being purposefully ambiguous to keep his strategic objectives and military thinking secret.
Speaking about the ships converging on the Middle East, Trump told reporters Friday in the Oval Office that “they have to float someplace. They might as well float near Iran.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday that Tehran was open to nuclear discussions but that the U.S. needed to stop issuing military threats.
The last sentence is bullpucky. Iran never has and never will stop trying to make nuclear weapons. The regime knows that all it would take is one or two such missiles to entirely destroy Israel, while Iran is big and could stand some retaliation. The lesson that no administration has learned is this: DO NOT NEGOTIATE WITH IRAN ABOUT STOPPING THE PRODUCTION OF NUKES. I’m still a bit ambivalent about us interfering in another country’s internal affairs, but given the huge carnage of civilians there and especially the fact that Iran is ground zero for empowering terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, I wouldn’t be sad if we attacked. The question is what kind of attack would topple the regime, and that’s coupled with worries about what would the Revolutionary Guard do.
*Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s latest column has a provocative title, “Can the iPhone save our democracy?” It has to do with recording events, and of course he means the events in Minneapolis.
A video leaked this week of Greg Bovino, the former Minneapolis ICE honcho, that did the media rounds in the last 24 hours. He’s giving directions to his troops when he was in Los Angeles. It contained what you might expect:
This is our fucking city! … Arrest as many people who touch you as you want. Those are the general orders, all the way to the very top! It’s all about us now. It ain’t about them.
Then this:
“Professional, legal, ethical, moral.” We’re on camera. But other than that, it’s what we do.
What checks might there be on an ICE empowered “from the very top.” Bovino tells us: “You’re on camera. But other than that…” My italics.
The iPhone seems to be the only serious threat to ICE’s violence. We know they feel emboldened to do virtually anything to anybody and have been granted a rhetorical “absolute immunity.” We also know that the federal government will tell big, beautiful, massive lies to justify any and all ICE abuses — before any investigations.
So Renee Good was a “deranged lunatic,” Karoline Leavitt declared. Good didn’t just try to run over an ICE officer; she did run him over, and it was unclear if he would survive his injuries, said the president. She was engaged in “domestic terrorism,” according to Stephen Miller. Equally, Alex Pretti was another “would-be assassin” who walked up to ICE officers “brandishing” a gun, trying “to murder federal agents” who, fearing a “massacre,” fired solely in self-defense. He was an “insurrectionist” rightly “put down,” in the words of one MAGA congressman. Last night, Trump repeated his description of Pretti as an “insurrectionist” and “agitator.”
But we’re left with a small but real reassurance: the propagandists don’t get away with it. And the only reason — I repeat — the only reason is because citizens’ iPhones recorded the split-second incidents, with footage before and after the killings, and everyone on earth could watch them. In both the Good and the Pretti cases, the iPhone footage simply, methodically refuted the Big Lies.
. . . We’ve become worried — with very good reason — about the damage phones have done to our brains, our attention span, and our democracy. But without them, the Trump lies about Minneapolis might well have prevailed. Yes, the phone brings illiteracy, antisemitism, white supremacism, and woke moral panics. Without the iPhone, after all, we would not have had the summer of Floyd. But it also provides a dose of granular visual reality that can be hard to wish or propagandize away, as the Floyd video did.
. . . .what happened this past week in America was that, even with all those caveats, a big majority of sane Americans emerged out of the woodwork, looked at the videos, rejected tribalism, and said: Nah, ICE is lying. And ICE had to retreat.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,” is how Orwell describes the ultimate totalitarian triumph. Well, this past week, the Party failed. And reality won. More to the point, deeply divided Americans, thanks to the iPhone, can still see it. Which is, to be honest, something of
All I can do is make a comment that I don’t like to see in a comment thread after my posts: “+1”. Sometimes that’s all you can say here.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the editor is taking a snooze:
Andrzej: Siesta’s over, back to work.
Hili: Were you talking to me?
In Polish:
Ja: Koniec sjesty, wracamy do roboty.
Hili: Do mnie mówiłeś?
*******************
From Bad Spelling or Grammar on signs and notices:
From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:
From CinEmma:
This post by Masih is non-embeddable, but click on the screenshot to see the video, and heed the warning: it’s grim and a bit gory. But as she says, “Do not stop talking about Iran.”
From Luana, who says “Sarah Lawrence is a disgrace.” And most of all its President! Here Ezra Klein gets disrupted at the college because he’s a Jew.
As @SamuelAbramsAEI points out, after sitting silently while her students disrupted a Jewish speaker for insufficiently denouncing Israel, the college president simply jokes, “welcome to Sarah Lawrence.” https://t.co/tXUl0663TU pic.twitter.com/5sNla3DnNk
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) January 30, 2026
I wrote the President this email:
Dear President Judd,
I recently watched a video of Ezra Klein trying to speak at your school, with you sitting on stage and doing nothing to stop the attempted deplatforming of him. After the ruckus was over, you simply told him, “Welcome to Sarah Lawrence.”
If such disruptions are allowed to interrupt speakers at your school, it’s nothing to joke about—or be proud of. At the University of Chicago, protestors are summarily removed from the audience and our President would be ashamed of what happened. It is against University policy to interrupt a speaker, as it’s an abrogation of free speech. I presume that your school doesn’t have such a policy, but if it doesn’t, it should.Cordially,Jerry CoyneProfessor Emeritus, Ecology & EvolutionThe University of Chicago
When you lied on your resume but still got the job.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/K3Go8M7vtX
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) January 31, 2026
It’s time to see this video again, as the children saved by Nicholas Winton have grown up and surprised him at a BBC taping. And I always tear up when I see it.
I remember the first time I ever saw this footage. It’s stuck with me ever since as an incredible example of human goodness. https://t.co/56EEJH1YDS
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) January 27, 2026
One from my feed; read the whole thing:
BRIAN MAY QUIETLY WALKED INTO A SMALL RESCUE SHELTER ON THE BRINK OF CLOSING — WITH JUST 48 HOURS LEFT BEFORE EVERY CAT INSIDE WOULD BE PUT DOWN
The bills were overdue. Donations had dried up. The owner had run out of options. In less than 48 hours, 39 cats were scheduled to be… pic.twitter.com/g9v06QJlsV
— The Husky (@Mr_Husky1) January 31, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was 12 years old. https://t.co/fhJ3SgNtEL
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) February 1, 2026
. . . and two from Doctor Cobb. I want to go to the Camel Festival!
I went to a camel festival in the Gobi Desert this morning, a celebration of nomadic life, and it was absolutely amazing
— Jonathan C Slaght (@jonathanslaght.com) 2026-01-31T13:18:17.699Z
Look at the size of this fish!
It's hard to grasp how large this grouper is until you see it in comparison to the ship's toilet on the left.This appears to be an Atlantic goliath grouper or 'itajara' (Epinephelus itajara). They can reach 800 lbs (350 kg) & 8 feet long (2.5 m)Let's talk about these gentle giants.
— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2026-01-30T16:24:55.914Z
A BIRTHDAY THOUGHT:
Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be. … / Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed – / Let it be that great strong land of love / Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme / That any man be crushed by one above. -Langston Hughes, poet and novelist (1 Feb 1902-1967)
Very good letter to President Judd: you point out a problem AND provide an example of a solution from UChicago policy and practices against “heckler’s veto”. Thanks for writing it. I would only suggest that, if you did not do it, the letter should be cc’d to the Chair and Vice-chair of the Board of Trustees…President Judd’s bosses.
According to her cv, President Judd’s academic credentials are in music and music theory including the Renaissance. Perhaps she could also study some Renaissance philosophy.
Most of the smart analysts are saying we’ll do something kinetic in Iran but I REALLY doubt Israel will be involved.
Little sheep dog who lied on his resume is hilarious (as a shepherd owner)
They take time to ease into the shepherding job I’ve found. 🙂
PCC(E) and I have similar taste in wimin! I liked Tulsi’s look but I was never wild about her opinions. Ditto the UN, they’ve been beating up on Israel since 1975 (“Zionism is racism”). I wish they’d just do vaccines and clean water and stay out of the Middle East. UNWRA must be utterly destroyed. It is the vector of Pal “nationalism” and victimhood.
D.A.
NYC
Yes, Trump didn’t forget about election fraud. A lot of us haven’t. Election fraud happens. However, after 2020, when allegations of fraud were made, they were never investigated. People acted as if the entire notion was absurd, if not seditious. If you suggested that there was potentially something wrong, you were subjected to the same tactics as climate deniers, COVID deniers, and people who question trans orthodoxy have been. Did fraud happen? Yes. There have been many revelations about dead voters and unqualified voters (including illegal aliens). Was that enough to sway the election? I don’t know. Should allegations be investigated? Always.
As for the NYT, it’s ridiculous to say that previously investigations found nothing. There were no previous investigates. Fulton County has stonewalled all attempts at investigation for six years (as have places like Maricopa County). As for the search having no basis other than Trump’s mania, here is a story about the report that led to the search warrant. Analysis will take time, but one tidbit has been leaked so far: investigators have yet to find a voting machine tape that indicates the count started at zero.
Trump did not raid the election center in Georgia because he is peeved about the 2020 election. He did it as a test run to affect the upcoming midterm elections. Why are the feds gathering voter rolls from states? Many states have given that information to the feds. Why did Pam Bondi’s letter to Tim Walz state one of the conditions for drawing down the ICE presence was Minnesota handing over its voter registration lists? Remember when Trump said he wished he had called out the National Guard to seize electronic voting machines to “find evidence of fraud”? The Georgia raid is one of many little trial runs the administration has undertaken to stay in power no matter what. Arresting journalists, putting the military on our streets, having states undergo midterm redistricting to provide more GOP seats in Congress–a blind man could connect these dots.