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 🗽
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.
“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.
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.
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..
🤔