Welcome to a Hump Day (“le milieu de la semaine” in French): Wednesday, July 24, 2026 and it’s Museum Come to Life Day. Here’s Sue, the famous T. rex owned by and on display at Chicago’s Field Museum (the original head is displayed elsewhere, but the head here is an exact replica). Look at those tiny arms! It’s estimated that 90% of the skeleton was recovered.
It’s also National Parchment Day (once made from animals, it’s now made from plant cellulose), and National Pralines Day.
I have a big writing assignment to do, so posting may be light for the next week, or even ten days. Bear with me: I do my best.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
Footy news: Playing for Portugal in the World Cup, 41-year-old Christiano Ronaldo scored two goals in a 5-0 drubbing of Uzbekistan, setting a record: the first man to score a goal in six World Cups.
Call it ego, call it drive or determination, that’s what has made him who is, what has pushed him to places on a football field very few have come close to even seeing.
So, of course, he was going to strut out for matchday two against Uzbekistan, head held high, that jaw pointedly jutting out, and score inside six minutes. He’s been doing this for two decades now, why is anyone remotely surprised?
The goal itself was a throwback to just what makes him the most prolific goalscorer of our times: the movement, the timing, the finish.
If you rewatch the goal, keep an eye on Ronaldo in the box. When João Cancelo raced down the right wing, everyone in Portugal red moved forward with him – except Ronaldo, who moved horizontally, moving closer to the spot he knew the cross was going to come through. As everyone (Portuguese and Uzbek) stood still waiting for the ball to get to them, Ronaldo was on the move.
He went forward with everyone else first, before stopping. Pushing past Bruno Fernandes, blindsiding the defenders, he zipped forward to the near post where once again he jinked back to keep the defenders on their heels, before darting out in front. There, he met the low, bouncing cross perfectly on the half volley, leaning back and absolutely hammering it into the bottom corner. The sharpness of the movement had allowed him the time and space to execute that finishing technique perfectly. It was goalscoring 101, a lesson in how to do it from the master himself.
The play in which Ronaldo scored his first goal starts at 1:56 in the video below. His second goal run starts at 7:56, and later there’s an own goal by Uzbekistan.
Here are the highlights:
*Three anti-Israel Democratic Socialist representatives, all endorsed by NYC Mayor and antisemite Zohran Mamdani, have won their primary races in New York.
Three Democrats who made criticism of Israel central to their political identities swept to victory in House primary races in New York City on Tuesday, signaling a new era of skepticism in their party toward the Jewish state and its actions.
The striking results reflected a fast-moving shift in liberal politics. Democratic voters are now more likely to be critical of Israel and its government than they are to be supportive, according to several recent polls, a monumental change in American sentiment.
And while many Democratic officials remain supportive of Israel, next year’s class of congressional Democrats is on track to be more wary about America’s relationship with Israel than at any other moment since the Jewish state was established after World War II.
The Democratic Party is rapidly becoming populated with Jew haters, and I do not say that lightly. Right now Jews and sympathizers with Israel are losing their political home.
*The latest hangup with the U.S./Iran ceasefire talks is a report that both sides give conflicting accounts of what’s been agreed on.
President Trump and Iran offered conflicting accounts on Tuesday over whether Tehran had agreed to open some of its most sensitive nuclear sites to U.N. inspectors, as top officials from both countries sought to secure support for a lasting peace agreement.
After the latest marathon round of U.S.-Iran negotiations, dueling narratives have also emerged over two other key issues: the safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz and frozen Iranian assets. The disputes reflect not just the high stakes of the talks, but also the morass of details still to be resolved.
Mr. Trump insisted in a social media post that Iran had “fully and completely agreed to the highest level Nuclear inspections,” hours after two Iranian officials said that the nuclear program had not been discussed in detail in talks over the weekend in Switzerland.
The president accused Iranian officials of making false statements and said: “If they did not agree to this, there would be no further negotiations!”
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, said earlier on Tuesday that Tehran had no plans to invite inspectors from the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency to nuclear sites that were hit by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes in June 2025.
“It is too early to discuss these things,” Ali Bahreini, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, said in a separate news conference. Both Iranian officials asserted that the nuclear issue would be addressed in later rounds of negotiations.
But the I.A.E.A.’s director general, Rafael Grossi, said in an interview with Japanese broadcaster NHK-World published on Tuesday that inspections would commence, adding that the agency believed “the sooner the better.” He said the I.A.E.A. would seek to inspect Iran’s stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, although it was not clear how it could get access to facilities that were attacked and partially destroyed.
If Iran is allowed to continue enriching uranium, there must be not only strict and frequent inspections by the IAEA, but also unannounced inspections. Iran will not be stopped in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, just as North Korea could not be stopped. To these countries it is essential—self defense is the issue for the DPRK, the destruction of Israel for Iran.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal argues that J. D. Vance is in a toxic relationship with Iran.
It’s Tuesday, June 23, and I’m no professional, but I think I can spot the signs of a toxic relationship. Threats of violence. Desperately defending the partner’s behavior. Cutting you off from your friends. Draining your resources. Gaslighting. By most of these measures, Vice President JD Vance is in a toxic relationship with the Islamic Republic.
Coming out of the talks in Switzerland yesterday, Vance hailed a “good foundation” for ending the regional war. He claimed Iran had agreed to let the International Atomic Energy Agency back into the country—only for Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei to state flatly that Tehran had not negotiated on its nuclear program and had accepted no new commitments.
Then there’s the intimidation. Even as it talked peace, Iran kept a hand on the region’s throat, threatening to shut the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israel’s actions. Trump answered threat with threat, warning Tehran it “won’t even make it back” to its own country if it closed the strait. And when Iran turned the same pressure on the talks themselves—threatening to storm out of the summit over insults from Trump—Vance ran interference, waving it off as mere “social media threats” and insisting all was fine because, after all, they’d kept talking late into the night.
Next comes the lopsided exchange. Yesterday, the US Treasury issued a general license letting Iran freely sell crude oil and petrochemicals through the 60-day negotiation period, while talks continued on releasing frozen assets—a potential economic windfall worth billions. And what did Washington get in return on the nuclear file? According to the Iranians, nothing. Vance even tried to pass off appeasement as boundary-setting, reportedly insisting the freed-up money could only go toward American wheat and soybeans. Iran didn’t bother to counter. Its officials simply made clear they’ll spend their money however they please.
Then there’s the isolation. Iran has maneuvered the US into a Lebanon “deconfliction” mechanism built around Washington, Qatar, Pakistan and Tehran—but not Israel, the country actually being shot at. On its face, that’s a loss for Israel. But Tehran may have overplayed its hand. Unlike Hezbollah, and contrary to Iran’s assumptions, Israel is not a U.S. puppet—and a seat at this table would have been more trap than prize. Inside the mechanism, Israel would face constant, hard-to-refuse pressure to stand down; outside it, those calls are far easier to ignore. An invitation would have forced Israel into an awkward bind: either sign on to a framework stacked against it, or openly reject Trump’s solution. By shutting Israel out, Iran inadvertently spared it that choice.
. . .As Netanyahu surely understands, when a friend is trapped in a toxic relationship, lecturing them about how awful their partner is rarely works; it only breeds resentment. The best you can do is hope they see it for themselves. And given how brazenly Iran is behaving, I’m growing optimistic that they will.
So all that’s left to say is: JD Vance, I hope you get help.
I think they should have used the term “abusive relatinship” rather than “toxic relationship” as it’s clear that Vance is being abused by Iran and saying that everything is fine. I still worry that Trump is going to hold Israel responsible if the talks fail.
*At the Free Press, Niall Ferguson tells us Why Britons really regret Brexit.
Tuesday marks the 10th anniversary of Brexit, the referendum on British membership of the European Union. It is also the day after the admission by yet another party leader, Keir Starmer, that the game is up, and someone else must ascend what the Victorian Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli memorably called “the greasy pole” to occupy the post of prime minister.
As Cowling might have said, this is not the first time in British history that the stability of party politics has been disrupted by a big and divisive issue. Not only electoral reform but also free trade and Irish home rule had comparable impacts in the 19th century; appeasement of Germany and the Suez Crisis in the 20th. To Cowling, who despised liberalism and grudgingly respected Marxism, European unification was just the latest disastrous utopian enterprise of the insufferably high-minded liberal elite who ran nearly all the Cambridge colleges (though not his own, reactionary Peterhouse). And, as in previous political crises, stable majorities in the House of Commons have become infernally hard to command—hence the high turnover at the top.
The difference is that Britain’s battle over Europe appears to have shattered completely the old two-party system, so that the opinion polls today have Reform UK—a lineal descendant of previous pro-Brexit parties—ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives, who are only a few percentage points ahead of the Greens and Liberals. By an irony Cowling would have relished, British party politics has never looked more like Continental European politics than it has since Brexit.
So what exactly happened?
. . . The simple answer is that British voters opted to “Leave” by 52 percent to 48 percent for many of the same reasons that the U.S. electorate opted to gamble on Donald Trump later that same year. It was a populist backlash against an elite project that prioritized globalization, mass migration, and multiculturalism over the economic and cultural preferences of the white working-class.
Ten years on, however, Brexit has fallen short of its twin promises to revitalize the British economy and curb immigration—in marked contrast to President Trump’s two administrations. Result: mass disillusionment with “broken Britain,” manifested as a tendency to rotate through prime ministers as rapidly as Italy in the 1970s.
There is no doubting the public disillusionment. The most recent polls have 57 percent of voters saying Brexit was the wrong decision, against just 30 percent who think it was the right one. More than two-thirds of voters say Britain is worse off as a result. Yet this narrative fails to explain why Brexit failed to deliver.
Ferguson argues that Brits voted against Brexit because they didn’t want to join an elitism “United States of Europe,” losing autonomy, and worried about increased immigration if they joined the EU. They also thought it would drag down the economy. Well, the economy tanked anyway, and immigration increased—just not from the EU.
Can Britain come crawling back to the EU now with another referendum, crying for admission? As Ferguson notes, “a majority of Britons (55 percent) say they would support undoing Brexit altogether and rejoining the Brussels fold, a shift in sentiment which has as its counterpart a decline in public support for the ‘special relationship’ with the United States.” But he says that structural problems in the UK are more pressing than rejoining the EU, which wouldn’t solve them (Ferguson means economic problems, but he fails to specify the problems he’s talking about). As I said, though, it’s clear that British politics have never been the same since Brexit.
*Trump’s claim that there’s been extensive vandalism at Washington D.C.’s Reflecting Pool is still unsubstantiated, but he’s increased the presence of law enforcement in the area.
The Trump administration stepped up the law-enforcement presence Monday at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, as the White House made new claims that vandalism was the chief cause of problems at the renovated site.
President Trump said he had photographic proof of someone cutting a 350-foot gash into the pool’s bottom coating, but he and others in the administration have provided few details to support the claims and no gash that large was visible earlier in the day.
“I saw it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “They cut it very violently.”
The president and other officials began making vandalism claims over the weekend, after problems at the reflecting pool appeared to be getting worse, with visible tears in the pool’s new flooring and algae blooming despite cleanup efforts.
Five individuals have been arrested for vandalism, and five more were issued federal citations, an Interior Department spokesman said midday on Monday. No public records were immediately available.
A White House spokeswoman declined to provide The Wall Street Journal with copies of the police reports, citing ongoing investigations. A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro in Washington said her office had received a handful of citations and was reviewing them.
This should all be on the public record now, but it’s a mystery. Where are the police reports and names of individuals charged? Beyond this mystery is another: why is this debacle one of the main news items in both print and television? Is it because people are both amused and incensed by a needless waste of money, or are they seeing this as yet another sign of Trump’s ineptitude? I too have been drawn into this controversy, but largely because of its effect on waterfowl:
. . . . the Washington Post reports that a duck carcass was found in the pool and two other dead ducks nearby (h/t Wayne).
It’s not immediately clear how those two [nearby] ducks — one was a juvenile and the other was an adult — died. But animal experts said ducks, which know no boundaries, typically go back and forth between the two water spots of the Reflecting Pool and Constitution Gardens.
They expressed concern that the construction activity is placing additional stress and “drama” on the ducks and their habitat. They also worry that algae blooms containing toxins called cyanobacteria, or chemicals from the paint in the Reflecting Pool, could harm wildlife. Certain types of algae are part of a duck’s natural diet, but if the birds consume blue-green algae, it can be toxic.
“They walk and fly back and forth,” said City Wildlife President April Linton. “They could have had exposure to the Reflecting Pool. It could be something related to peeling paint or algae.”
That’s it—the last straw for Trump. He’s a duck-killer!
A relevant meme from Gregory:
*In The Atlantic, Ed Yong reports a discovery that the conventional wisdom about lichens—that they involve a mutualism between one species of algae and one species of fungus—is wrong. Biologists have missed all along that another, third species of fungus is essential (h/t Marion).
Lichens have an important place in biology. In the 1860s, scientists thought that they were plants. But in 1868, a Swiss botanist named Simon Schwendener revealed that they’re composite organisms, consisting of fungi that live in partnership with microscopic algae. This “dual hypothesis” was met with indignation: It went against the impetus to put living things in clear and discrete buckets. The backlash only collapsed when Schwendener and others, with good microscopes and careful hands, managed to tease the two partners apart.
Schwendener wrongly thought that the fungus had “enslaved” the alga, but others showed that the two cooperate. The alga uses sunlight to make nutrients for the fungus, while the fungus provides minerals, water, and shelter. This kind of mutually beneficial relationship was unheard-of, and required a new word. Two Germans, Albert Frank and Anton de Bary, provided the perfect one—symbiosis, from the Greek for “together” and “living.”
. . .In the 150 years since Schwendener, biologists have tried in vain to grow lichens in laboratories. Whenever they artificially united the fungus and the alga, the two partners would never fully recreate their natural structures. It was as if something was missing—and Spribille might have discovered it.
[Toby Spribillie] has shown that the largest and most species-rich group of lichens are not alliances between two organisms, as every scientist since Schwendener has claimed. Instead, they’re alliances among three. All this time, a second type of fungus has been hiding in plain view.
“There’s been over 140 years of microscopy,” says Spribille. “The idea that there’s something so fundamental that people have been missing is stunning.”
The fungus thought responsible for the mutualism was an ascomycete in the kingdom Fungi. But the third partner, also in the kingdom Fungi, is a basidiomycete—in this case a yeast. There’s a yeast in the cortex [tough outer layer] of all lichens, and it appears integral to the structure. The authors have not yet combined all three individual components to see if they can get lichens; that may be impossible if the components cannot all be cultured separately.
Here’s the Science paper; click to read. A summary is below the screenshot:
Lichens assemble in three parts
Lichen growth forms cannot be recapitulated in the laboratory by culturing the plant and fungal partners together. Spribille et al. have discovered that the classical binary view of lichens is too simple. Instead, North American beard-like lichens are constituted of not two but three symbiotic partners: an ascomycetous fungus, a photosynthetic alga, and, unexpectedly, a basidiomycetous yeast. The yeast cells form the characteristic cortex of the lichen thallus and may be important for its shape. The yeasts are ubiquitous and essential partners for most lichens and not the result of lichens being colonized or parasitized by other organisms.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are curious.
Hili: What are you studying?
Me: A very old book.
In Polish:
Hili: Co wy studiujecie?
Ja: Bardzo starą książkę.
(Photo D.M)
*******************
From Funny and Strange Signs; more humor from the London Underground:
From Kitty Litterposting:
And another great medieval letter from TherionArms:
Masih, who can sing, has an article in the Free Press about what happens to women in Iran who do sing. (Guess!)
The ink on the Iran deal wasn’t even dry before the Islamic Republic showed its true face, writes Masih Alinejad. Its first move? Sentencing singer Parastoo Ahmadi to 74 lashes for singing without a hijab. https://t.co/ETqrx9McL6
— The Free Press (@TheFP) June 23, 2026
From Luana. A survey of Pakistani genomes reports that nearly one-third of all human genes in the population are homozygous in some individuals for knockout mutations; that is, they produce no proteins. Yet the Pakistanis are doing fine. This high frequency may be due to inbreeding; see here for more information.
Was an honor to serve as a reviewer on this amazing paper in @nature reporting gene knockouts in ONE THIRD of all human protein coding genes. Yes you read that right… https://t.co/EypCpoZSLO
— Vagheesh Narasimhan (@vagheesh) June 18, 2026
The Number Ten Cat will soon be serving under another Prime Minister—his seventh, I believe:
Another one bites the dust. pic.twitter.com/qjVMNYcjdg
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) June 22, 2026
From JKR, but the law is the law:
The Scottish government has finally been dragged, kicking and screaming, into compliance with the law. https://t.co/twCs3jmUTB
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 23, 2026
One from my feed. and I wonder if it’s true:
Bear in Russia was seen waiting at a bus stop… waiting for someone to get off the bus.
At 8 in the morning, a woman was walking toward the bus stop when she saw a bear standing there like it was another passenger waiting for the next ride. At first, she froze.
The woman kept… pic.twitter.com/o6B8JIp3m3
— Mr PitBull Stories (@MrPitbull07) June 22, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial, a survivor:
This woman is photographed with her hair, but her head was shaved later when she escaped and was recaptured. She survived the war, living three years in camps. https://t.co/3VnYTzESW4
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) June 24, 2026
And two from Dr. Cobb. First, a video of two young herons watching a whirly bird:
Young great blue herons watching a helicopter. Filmed June 20, 2026, at Oak Woods Cemetery.
— Robert Loerzel (@robertloerzel.bsky.social) 2026-06-22T22:22:09.368Z
And an interspecific adoption. I hope the duck survives!
At Clennon Valley Lakes, Paignton, Devon the Tufted Duck Aythya fuligula is still being raised by a pair of Coots Fulica atra and is growing fast. Interesting how it has adopted the behaviour of a baby Coot and goes to the adults for food, it does dive on its own as well.
— John Walters (@johnwalterswildife.bsky.social) 2026-06-23T03:36:00.646Z
Symbiosis is an apt word when describing Islamic extremists and woke, progressive western politicians. the Islamists benefit from support by people embedded in the politics of their enemies, and the politicians seem to benefit from votes from their progressive constituents.
Look at the results of the primaries in NYC. In these cases, the politicians running all had the same platforms: affordability, housing, transportation, anti-ICE, etc. What variable differentiated between them? The degree to which they condemned a little country 6000 miles away and its supporters—which has nothing to do with housing, affordability, ICE or anything else. The most extremist among them got the nomination to run for on behalf of the Democratic Party, which is usually a shoo-in for the position in NYC.
Mamdani’s approved candidates, Avila Chevalier and Valdez, share the antisemitic behavior of the mayor: support for terrorists, support for rapists and murderers (as long as their victims are Jews) and Anti-Western values in general.
Does anyone wonder why Jews are concerned about progressive antisemitism? In my opinion, anyone concerned about Western, Liberal, enlightenment values should share our concern.
Writing from NYC now.. what a disaster, Starwolf. To be fair to our hijabis and campus swastika keffiya wearing terrorist loving communist friends, Gaza is actually located a few miles north of Long Island, so….
Starwolf I -think- you live in Israel, apologies if I’m wrong: imagine if Israeli politics were defined by issues in Brooklyn!
I doubt even most New Yorkers have ever met an Israeli citizen, nor a “Palestinian”. But like most of the Islamosphere that doesn’t stop ’em from hating!
I watched our election with horror, in part b/c now this makes Mandami a “kingmaker” of sorts. (sigh). I wrote about him – linked earlier here – some months ago to warn my people:
https://democracychronicles.org/forgetabaht-it/
I WAS a lifelong voting Democrat, though not a party member so I couldn’t vote in the primaries. I’m no longer a Dem.
best regards,
D.A.
NYC 🗽
People hate Jews even where there are no Jews.
People hate Jews even when the Jews haven’t arrived yet. This example is small but telling.
https://www.thejc.com/opinion/our-holiday-landlord-realised-we-were-jewish-what-happened-next-was-deeply-troubling-i9zjiz1p
I shook my head, held my nose and voted for Kamala over the absolutely unacceptable trump. But what’s next in the idiot versus ideologue sweepstakes? I have always believed and preached that one can always discern a choice even if by a thin margin…but I have become depressed that I may have been wrong…right only in theory, but wrong in real-world application.
Jim, thank you for saying this. And please know I am not in the least being facetious. I tend to favor idiots over ideologues on the assumption the former usually do less damage. It’s a pity we are so often offered both in a single package.
Harry Enten, the CNN analyst, recently reported that Democratic Socialists of America have a +17% net favorability among Democrats (vs. just +4% for Dems in Congress). Moreover, 53% of Democrats now say that AIPAC backing makes them less likely to support a candidate (up from 34% two years ago). Sympathy for Israelis has plunged from 34% to 16% since 2023; sympathy for Palestinians soared from 31% to 60%. I think ignorance of history and ideological commitment to multiculturalism and “diversity” explain much of this, but antisemitism is sprinkled in.
Separating Israel from the mix, a huge divergence has emerged regarding the Fourth of July. In 2001, Democrats and Republicans were equally proud to be Americans and about equally likely to display a flag. No longer. While Republicans have shifted barely at all, today only 27% of Dems say they will display a flag (down from 65%), and only 29% are extremely or very proud to be an American (down from 85%). Barely a quarter now see July 4th as a day to celebrate America. I’ve never cared whether someone displays a flag: it is the shift here that concerns me.
The underlying split also shows up in Gallup poll reports focused on the upcoming 250th anniversary. “Republicans are more likely to focus on the freedoms and opportunities Americans have, with Democrats more likely to focus on the diversity of the American people as a key source of pride.” One can wonder whether the “diversity” part has become more important than the “American.”
The antipathy among an emerging majority of Democrats is no longer just against Israel; it is against what JFK-to-Clinton-era Democrats believed essential and praiseworthy about America. I’m sure many in the UK and elsewhere can relate to the political shift translated into their vernacular. I suspect you won’t be the only one feeling the dilemma, Jim.
Thanks for those scary numbers, Doug. Yeah, I don’t know what to do. I guess I grew up thinking the principles of the Constitution and the Nation were constant, lofty goals to be held high and achieved. The espoused Western Enlightenment values supporting john Rawls’ Theory of Justice were core to my behaviors or at least the aim of my behaviors. I have tried to resist the dark analysis of Douglas Murray’s “War on the West”.
As a Jew growing up in the US South of the 50’s and 60’s, post-holocaust with some still-tatooed camp survivors living in our town and a number of men in our neighborhood who had fought in the European theater, there was generally sympathy for Jews from the large majority gentile population. I experienced maybe 5-6 acts of antisemitism over my life up until just a few years ago. What happened after Oct 7, especially on college campuses and the benign acceptance by their administrations floored me. I saw a similar shocking behavior from our local woke dems and churches. You mention history. I thought about that too and have spent the past 2+ years reading (i am unable to read/write/productively work more than about three hours/day these years) all I could to understand the history. I am finished reading now and in the midst of writing and for the life of me cannot understand the (antisemitic) reactions I see.
I just think that I no longer fit this world…my woke wife told me that ten years ago when she discouraged me from advising our grandchildren in academic and career choices … she said that my successes had come in a different world which is irrelevant to theirs…she could well be right. Even Rawls had to write a follow-on to “Theory” to account for an unfair populace. To make light of it a bit, perhaps it goes to the old borscht belt joke that the world is a tuxedo and I am a brown pair of shoes. But I shall continue reading, including the good people on WEIT, until the end.
(My apologies for the length..my last comment today)
David, ISTM that a significant part of Israeli politics has been defined by issues in Brooklyn, since the US has almost always been on Israel’s side in its international conflicts (the Suez Crisis being the one exception I’m aware of) and no-one else has, so maintaining that special relationship has been very important; even to the extent that the current PM, who clearly does not suffer fools gladly, has held his nose and sucked up to the First Fool when necessary.
Zav Kochav, I expect that the FF’s betrayals have been particularly painful for Israelis, more so than the Europeans and others who had also considered the US to be a steadfast ally.
Jim, I too grew up thinking the principles of the Constitution and the Nation were constant, lofty goals to be held high and achieved; and that those principles had at various times been severely tested but had prevailed. It was a secular faith that they always would. For me FF’s casual and largely unhindered betrayal of those principles hit me very hard, so much so that my partner suggested I see a counsellor. It really was a crisis of faith and of personal identity. Being a long-time expat I had enough emotional distance from the outrages that, with a lot of help, I got thru those crises ok. I genuinely fear that a large number of my former compatriots will not. Be well.
[c 250 words]
One of the winning candidates, Bruce Lander, is Jewish himself. I don’t know anything else about him.
But it is unmistakable that there’s a strong anti-Israel sentiment in the DSA (and increasingly in the Democratic Party) that often is outright antisemitic.
Here’s a recent critique of the DSA by a Jewish liberal.
https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/the-dsa-is-pushing-the-biggest-lie
As for JD Vance, I’ve disliked him strongly ever since he attacked Zelensky in the White House.
True, but Brexit is a symptom, not the cause. The cause is mass immigration. British children are now a minority in primary schools in London, and in Manchester, and in Birmingham, England’s three biggest cities. Brexit was primarily a protest vote against mass immigration.
And, again, this is confusing symptom with cause. The reason why it is Reform, rather than the Conservatives, benefitting from Labour’s unpopularity is because the Conservatives welcomed and expanded mass immigration, just as Labour have.
Recently played the boardgame Hegemony, which in a 2-player game pits the Capitalists against the Working Class.
I was the Capitalists, and the first thing I did was increase immigration.
I agree, Coel. I’d just add that the leftward/progressive lurch of Labour politics and society in general, including trans nonsense, the blatant bias of the police and the BBC, have also played a big part in stoking people’s rage.
Why didn’t leaving Brexit fix it? How can all these politicians be so stupid?
Almost all British politicians of all parties plus the civil servants live in the “BBC bubble”, which has over recent decades become woke, in the sense of uncritically accepting the mantras that humans are fully fungible, that migrants will quickly assimilate and be a boon, that all cultures are equally “valid”, that religions are good things, and hence that Islam must be a religion of peace, that diversity is “our greatest strength”, and — above all — that the very worst thing one can do is be “racist” or think that Western attitudes and culture are in any better than anyone else’s. They really do, including the Conservatives, think that all of these things are true.
That’s it in a nutshell. They probably aren’t all stupid, many can be intelligent at times, but the woke virus seems to remove all capacity for logical thought. They become clones. A few decades ago I could recognise every politician in the government cabinet and the shadow cabinet, and many ordinary MPs too. Nowadays, I probably could only name half a dozen from a photo I don’t think it’s my age, I just think politicians aren’t individuals anymore.
Not to forget they are signatories to the European Convention of Human Rights. This effectively ties their hands and prevents them from deporting any convicted criminals. Remember the case of the chap who could not be deported because his son didn’t like foreign fried chicken.
The system is absurd and open to flagrant abuse by tricky lawyers thus setting up ridiculous precedents.
I believe Reform have stated they will leave the ECHR in attempt to regain sovereignty.
Same thing happening here in the land of Oz. Currently the most popular party here is the anti-Islam One Nation party, led by Pauline Hanson who is now leading in the polls as preferred PM. The two major parties, Labor and Liberal, are both guilty of allowing mass immigration including from Islamic countries, but Labor has deliberately imported large numbers of Muslims as a voting bloc to depend on. This situation has led to Islamic attacks on synagogues, Jewish businesses and Jews themselves, culminating in the Bondi massacre. But to cater to his Islamic voter base, when the current Labor PM Albanese was under pressure to create a commission to investigate antisemitism, he said he would not do so until he had also created a commission on “Islamophobia”! His government also worked hard behind the scenes with Islamic groups to bring “ISIS brides” back to Australia – providing them with new passports to do so; even the UK did not do that! Most Aussies are finally getting fed up with all this nonsense.
1 Join the EU in an attmpt to energise the economy.
2 Economy moribund AND high immigration – leave the EU
3 Economy moribund AND high immigration – vote Reform or rejoin EU.
Lots of problems of cause and effect and may confounding variables.
“North American beard-like lichens are constituted of not two but three symbiotic partners: an ascomycetous fungus, a photosynthetic alga, and, unexpectedly, a basidiomycetous yeast.”
Wow!!!
A detail about this is that the algae component can be either a eukaryote algae (as in cells with nuclei), or it can be photosynthetic cyanobacteria — bacteria that do photosynthesis. So there are very different kinds of photosynthetic partners.
Very interesting. Biologists have long known how strange lichens are. Now they are stranger still!
As my parents used to like to say, “There’s a fungus among-gus”
The Reflecting Pool farce is in the public eye because it encapsulates the entire Trump regime. Create a problem, ignore expert advice, lowball the cost, give your rich donor pal a lucrative no-bid contract at many times the original cost estimate, watch a slapdash job get done, see things fall apart, refuse to admit your errors, blame someone else, and then throw in the police and military.
This could be the pool, the ballroom, the cage fight, the war with Iran, voter fraud, etc.
I note that some weeks ago Trump was on the news stating the lining of the pool was so tough no one could cut it. Now it is vandals (or ducks!) with boxcutters doing the damage and the damage miraculously grows from 250 feet to 350 feet in the same interview.
If the pond was the worst thing Trump had ever done, he’d be a good president by default. But even though it’s trivial next to all our other problems, I like construction and I find it interesting from a forensic point of view.
My guess is that those long straight splits in the coating on the pond occurred at joints in the concrete, where the coating was even more weakly bonded than elsewhere. Or perhaps at places where workers stopped for the day, since wet coating doesn’t always bond well to coating that has already dried.
But with respect to the possibility of vandalism, even if vandals had been capable of making such extremely straight cuts through the coating, that’s all they could have done – make cuts. If the coating job had been properly done, it would have been as impossible for them to peel sheets of coating off the concrete between the cuts as it is for a person to peel sheets of paint off the walls in their home.
I also note a caravan of federal vehicles, which included Trump, drove over the bottom of the pool before it was filled. Heavy vehicles with armor driving on the lining. What could go wrong?
Hey I just thought of this :
You know this Disclosure Day hype?
Imagine if a lichen invented an alien invasion story – like, there’s a lichen that made all the lichens.
I’ll have to think this over.. it’d be a good satire of alien life – or creators which are the same thing as the created creatures, but the creatures invent it for themselves… e.g. a lichen God..
🤔
Once can only hope that J.D. Vance will eventually sour on the Iranians. How much humiliation is he willing to endure?
The NYT had a piece on the negotiations at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/us/politics/jd-vance-iran-negotiations.html?searchResultPosition=1 which quoted Trump:
“If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Mr. Trump said of the peace deal last week. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.”
Vance is very likely on a hiding to nothing…
How much ‽
He’s Trump’s most bestest toady¹, that’s how much.
…………
¹ My dictionary gives the origin as “early 19th century: said to be a contraction of toad-eater, a charlatan’s assistant who ate toads; toads were regarded as poisonous, and the assistant’s survival was thought to be due to the efficacy of the charlatan’s remedy.”
Eerily relevant, IMO.
I looked up the Eurasian coot on Wikipedia because I wanted to get a closer look at its intriguing bill, and I found a close up of its feet while I was at it. Wow. They have ugly-cute chicks, too.
Thanks for the lichen bit. After moss, lichen is one of my favorite life forms. I read that it grows astonishingly slowly (Bill Bryson’s Science/History book, I think) and that a quarter sized clump takes many years to grow. Which only makes it cooler.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
“British voters opted to “Leave” by 52 percent to 48 percent”.
British overall, yes, but Scotland and N Ireland didn’t vote to leave the EU. We voted ‘remain’, but we were overruled by the other nations in the UK.
It’s ironic because many people fell for the UK government propaganda that said they had to reject Scottish Independence in 2014 or they would be kicked out of the EU, but rejecting independence is what actually dragged us out of the EU.
The EU is willing to fast track Scotland back in as we already meet most of the criteria for entry, and I know a lot of people personally who now wish that they had voted for independence, but the UK government is refusing another indy referendum, even though the circumstances have changed dramatically.
It is particularly galling that NI has a special deal with the EU as they have a land border with it, but Scotland hasn’t been given any concessions.
“worried about increased immigration”
Scots don’t have many issues with EU immigration, we actually need more incomers who want to work for Scotland. We have big Polish and Italian communities who help make our country successful and who even campaigned for Scottish independence with us. We do, however, want to control our own immigration, but we aren’t allowed to.
Westminster has declared that it will force us to take Gazan refugees, while deporting several families who have been welcomed here who are providing valuable services to Scots. For example:
1 Westminster forced out a Canadian family despite them running a much needed shop in a remote community.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-39791228
2 Westminster overruled the Scottish government who wanted to let an Australian family, with a Gaelic speaking son, stay here
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-36377458
3 an American friend who is a filmmaker could not get her visa extended despite her total love for Scotland and her ability to work here.
I think Westminster is blind to the problems that immigration is causing. Personally I don’t care which country people are from, but anyone who wants to migrate to another country should at least be willing to comply with local standards, but some cultures, generally that oppress women, seem to have a huge problem with that.
In other words, “multiculturalism” tends to work out OK until Islam shows up.
I’m reluctant to say it directly, but it seems to be a particular section of that community that has great difficulty integrating socially. I have no issue with people in their own religion socialising together, but when you step out into the world in general, it’s important to respect others, if you want them to respect you.
Germany includes the perpetrator’s nationality in their crime stats for rape and sexual assault, and when it collated the statistics per capita, in this link, it is interesting to note the religion of the top dozen or so nations on their list.
https://x.com/joolzzt/status/1841972653508153617
It’s not just in the crime stats, it’s in everyday life. My sister works for an organisation that deals with the British Citizenship test and she has found that men from certain countries think they can pass the test without following her instructions, or insist that they want to sit and supervise their female family members as they take their test. It’s frustrating for her when they won’t take instruction.
I will never vote for Farage, but I think he is picking up voters because the government doesn’t seem to be listening to people who are worried.
I can understand your reluctance but I think it is important to point out the elephant in the room.
Agree. It’s certainly getting worse. I was intimidated by a private taxi driver recently who walked all around my car filming it and me. I suspect it’s because he was angry to find a woman who wouldn’t back up for him, even though he was in the wrong. When I told her what happened, my sister guessed, correctly, that he was from another culture.
The problem with speaking up. is that a lot of people conflate being anti Islam with being racist, when they are actually very different things. But I must speak up more.
It’s not a matter of difficulty integrating socially. It’s a matter of the will to do so, as opposed to the idea that the host nation conform to their particular practices. There are Muslims who have succeeded in integrating socially in Britain and the US. The mechanisms exist.
In America, we used to have the “melting pot” concept. Immigrants would integrate, all the while keeping their own customs and traditions at home. It took awhile, usually a generation or two, but it happened. Nowadays, immigrants demand that the larger population bend over backwards to accommodate them. that is not the basis I for a cohesive society.
And you know what the biggest issue is? Women. some cultures are not used to the idea that women walk around without “modest” dress, which can mean anything from objecting to shorts to objecting to anything other than full covering. And women who do not dress according to these concepts are regarded as sexually available and/orlacking all sexual morals. The concept of women as human beings with the right and ability to dress as they wish, work as they wish, behave as they wish, is foreign to many societies, especially those based on religion. And when people having been educated in those societies immigrate into Western societies, it is liable to cause great harm, as we saw with the grooming gangs in Britain.
But again, it is important to point out the elephant in the room here: Islam.
The biggest issue is not women. Women are free to dress as they want, and anyone who objects or makes irrational assumptions about them is the problem, not the women.
It’s the patriarchal societies that these people come from that is the cause of the problem. Sadly, some of those women have been brainwashed into being subservient to the patriarchy and they can be the ones who force FGM onto their daughters, but the men who refused to allow them to be free or to have an education are the root cause.
As Mike says, it tends to be those who follow Islam who have this backward mentality. Not all followers of course, but the immigrants causing most discord tend to be from Islamic countries.
I wonder if the problem would be solved if England was given a referendum on independence from the other three nations in the Union?
I wish they would, but Scottish exports earn a lot of money for the UK and we send them water and power. Plus there is still oil in the North Sea. Westminster would have to return the oil rigs that they annexed as they are in, what would be, Scottish territory if we were independent. We contribute a lot to the UK. Norway discovered out at the same time as us and the Norwegian government handled it wisely. Westminster didn’t.
If we really were a drain on the UK then, the Tories wouldn’t have fought so hard and lied to keep us.
“Right now Jews and sympathizers with Israel are losing their political home.”
But as long as enough people who always voted Democrat continue to do so, then the woke Democrats can do what they want without getting voted out. At what point are they no longer the lesser evil? I would have thought that openly supporting Hamas and the castration of children would have been enough, keeping in mind that Trump hasn’t actually invaded Greenland yet.