Welcome to July: it’s Wednesday, July 1, 2026 and a Hump Day (“Dies Gibbosus” in Latin). To mark the month’s beginning, I’ll put up the illustration for the month from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. This one shows the Palace of Poitiers, much of which is still standing, with reaping and sheep-shearing in the foreground. Click to enlarge.
It’s also Canada Day (cheers to our northern neighbors), International Chicken Wing Day, International Reggae Day, and National Gingersnap Day.
Click on today’s Google Doodle to read about some historic World Cup penalty shootouts:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
Footy news: With Germany and the Netherlands now out of the world cup, France advanced by beating Sweden 3-0. Kylian Mbappé tied Messi for most goals in a World Cup tournament: 6.
Kylian Mbappe helped book France’s place in the World Cup round of 16 by taking his tournament total to six goals in a slick 3-0 victory over Sweden.
France’s procession through the group stages looked ominous for their rivals, with Mbappe starring in a show that contained a support cast just as entertaining. In New Jersey, Michael Olise proved to be the outstanding sidekick.
Such momentum was impossible to contain for a Sweden side that had blown hot and cold before and during this tournament, unable to meet the standard required to cause the favourites any genuine problems. They managed just two efforts on target in a horribly one-sided tie.
With Didier Deschamps back on the touchline following the passing of his mother, Mbappe rose highest to the elevated occasion, scoring either side of the break in a performance dripping with class.
He sliced through Sweden’s deficient defence to beat Jacob Zetterstrom for the opener in the first half, and linked with Olise to score France’s third late on, finishing off the move with a curling far-post finish off the left – reminiscent of the great Thierry Henry.
Here are the highlights, with the goals noted by time on the video: 8:20, 10:32, and 12:40 (the last by Mbappé tying Messi’s record):
*In a “bipartisan” 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court handed Trump a big defeat yesterday, but also gave him—as well as those of us who don’t want to see biological men competing in women’s sports—a victory. We’ll talk about the sports decision in the next post, and below we’ll concentrate on the Court’s decision to allow birthright citizenship (i.e., babies born in America are American citizens), something that Trump opposed. You can see the full Court decision on birthright, including dissents, here.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down President Trump’s attempt to curtail birthright citizenship, a rejection of his most aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration.
The decision rebuffs Trump’s bid to upend the deep-rooted understanding that virtually everyone born on American soil is automatically a U.S. citizen. That understanding, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, was enshrined in the Constitution in 1868.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.”
Six justices—three conservatives and three liberals—ruled against Trump, though only five did so on constitutional grounds. The court’s three most conservative justices dissented.
The case challenged an executive order that Trump issued on the first day of his second term. It declared that future children born in the U.S. wouldn’t be considered citizens if their parents were living in the country illegally or were visiting the country on temporary visas.
The executive order never took effect. It was quickly blocked by multiple lower courts because it appeared to conflict with the 14th Amendment, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The executive order also seemed to contravene an 1898 Supreme Court decision that confirmed that U.S.-born children of immigrant parents are entitled to American citizenship.
. . .The three members of the court’s right flank—Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch—dissented.
“This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court, and in my judgment, the Court has made a serious mistake,” Alito wrote. “As interpreted by the Court today, the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of ‘birth tourists.’”
I predicted this decision a long time ago, for the Constitution is very clear on it. leaving little wiggle room, though Thomas et al. found some. Here’s the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, and bolding is mine:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Now we didn’t have birth tourism then, but even “originalists” would have to stretch to guess that the Founders would deny citizenship to the children of immigrants, even short-term ones. In other words, I agree with this decision.
*An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: “Rubio holds the line on Hezbollah“:
The U.S. has brokered another Middle East deal and, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio taking the lead, this time the deal tries to box Iran out. The U.S.-Israel-Lebanon Trilateral Framework signed Friday focuses on the only real way for Beirut to regain its sovereignty: disarming Hezbollah, Tehran’s Lebanese Shiite proxy.
The framework begins as follows: “Israel and Lebanon affirm the right of each state to exist in peace, and their mutual desire to live in security as neighboring sovereign states.” This should be boilerplate, but it’s a rare Lebanese recognition of Israeli sovereignty. As recently as 2022, a Biden Administration-mediated maritime deal had to be split into two separate documents to let Lebanon pretend it wasn’t reaching an agreement with Israel.
The framework also recognizes the legitimacy of the Israel Defense Forces presence in southern Lebanon until Hezbollah is disarmed, at which point Israel will withdraw fully. This begins with two small “pilot zones” the IDF will hand to the Lebanese Armed Forces, which are charged with disarming “non-state armed groups”—the preferred Lebanese euphemism for Hezbollah—and dismantling terror infrastructure.
Lebanon and its army have been reluctant to confront Hezbollah and continue to speak of “stability,” the usual code for accommodation. The terrorist group maintains its Shiite support base and defies state authority, starting destructive wars and answering only to Iran. Hezbollah refuses disarmament and threatens civil war if Beirut tries.
But after losing two wars with Israel, Hezbollah is also weak. The pilot zones are Lebanon’s best chance to make progress—especially if it can replace its foot-dragging top general.
For Israel the two small zones are a worthwhile bet and a hedge against Iranian demands for an immediate Israeli withdrawal. Now Lebanon’s government has reaffirmed that Hezbollah’s disarmament must come first.
Who can disagree with this agreement, in which Lebanon recognizes Israel’s sovereignty and pushes Hezbollah to disarm, allowing Israel to remain in Southern Lebanon until that disarmament happens? And it separates Hezbollah from the tentative and stupid “Memorandum of Understanding” of the U.S. and Iran, in which Iran demanded that Hezbollah freedom was part of the deal. Allowing that is equivalent to allowing terrorists to continue operating and striking northern Israel.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal ponders the “Board of Peace” in Gaza, and what it’s up to (Segal’s bolding):
More than six months after Donald Trump’s U.S.-led Board of Peace was signed into being at Davos, the body charged with rebuilding Gaza and replacing Hamas is rich in plans and short on the one thing that would let it act: a way in.
Its representatives gathered this week at a resort in Cyprus for what an Arab diplomat and a Palestinian official described to The Times of Israel as a chance to “recalibrate” after a rocky start—though an official insisted the meeting was routine and the process broadly on track. The session followed a previously unreported workshop in the Egyptian coastal town of Ain Sokhna, attended by the full roster of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the dozen-plus Palestinian technocrats meant to govern the Strip. Six months after they were unveiled, they are “managing” it from a hotel in Cairo.
Unsurprisingly, the core barrier to progress is disarmament. The Board’s Gaza envoy, Nickolay Mladenov, blames Hamas’s refusal to give up its weapons. The disarmament plan presented in March lays out an eight-month sequence: the NCAG takes security control, Israel pulls back heavy weapons, an international force deploys, and Israeli troops leave only once Gaza is “verified” free of arms. Hamas has shifted from flat rejection toward offering to surrender its police weapons and remaining heavy arms first—but the tens of thousands of AK-47s held by its military wing remain the sticking point. Translation: they are happy to hand over governance so long as they remain the real power in the Strip.
Mediators told The Times of Israel they could eventually coax a “yes, but” from Hamas; the open question is whether Washington would treat that as enough to lean on Israel.
The vacuum has birthed a “Plan B”: building “temporary communities” in the Israeli-occupied “green zone,” beginning on the ruins of Rafah. It’s a gamble—unclear whether Palestinians will agree to move to the Israeli-held side of the Strip, or whether the NCAG would forfeit its legitimacy by governing under occupation.
Even after six months—and what I’m sure was a lovely retreat in Cyprus—the facts on the ground in Gaza have barely changed. Recent events have certainly not been conducive to progress. Of the $17 billion pledged at a February donor conference, only a sliver has landed. Everyone was distracted by the small matter of the Iran war, and the Gulf states suddenly were faced with higher spending priorities. The war has also shifted the government’s—and, more importantly, Trump’s—attention away from the Strip. Virtually all of the diplomatic progress on the Gaza front has come from Trump’s sheer force of will, and short of Hamas blocking a major shipping route, I wouldn’t forecast a major redirection toward Gaza any time soon.
As I recall, under the initial agreement, Hamas was supposed to disarm and disband by January of this year, but of course nobody with two neurons to rub together believed that Hamas would disarm. I can’t see them willingly surrendering arms—or power—under any circumstances but military coercion, and that has already been tried. The only possibility I can think of would be economic leverage that would make the people of Gaza get rid of Hamas themselves, but that is not going to happen.
*The NYT reports on a new study in Current Biology that clarifies the origin of turtles, which was previously controversial as the morphological evidence contradicted the genetic evidence. The genetic evidence seems to be right now, as researchers have matching morphological and genetic evidence that turtles descended from a common ancestor that also gave rise to dinosaurs as well as modern crocodilians and turtles (article archived here).
Turtles are weird. They move around in their own armored sanctuary, have adapted to living on land and in water and are among the longest-living animals on the planet. Their anatomy is so unusual that it’s difficult to pinpoint where they belong on the tree of life. Where do they come from? Who, scientists would love to know, is their common ancestor?
Many paleontologists have asserted that turtles originated with an ancient reptile, Eunotosaurus africanus, which lived 260 million years ago and had a broad set of ribs that later developed into a shell. Other studies that focused on genetic evidence, however, have suggested that turtles are actually more similar to crocodiles and birds, and may share a common ancestor with them.
“Turtle origins have always been a tough nut to crack,” said Xavier A. Jenkins, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
In a new study in Current Biology, Dr. Jenkins and his colleagues claim to have resolved the longstanding debate. They suggest that turtles are not holdovers from the ancient Eunotosaurus, but are instead members of a group of reptiles called archosauromorphs that also includes ancient birds, crocodiles, pterosaurs and dinosaurs. And this time, the researchers have the anatomical evidence to match the DNA.
. . .In total, Dr. Jenkins and his team examined 226 ancient turtle, archosaur and Eunotosaurus specimens to look for characteristics that would classify them as either turtles or not. The researchers used an X-ray technology to go inside of each fossil and digitally move bones that obstructed their view.
Then, they compared all known specimens of Eunotosaurus with archaic turtle specimens, like Proganochelys, which lived 210 million years ago and was one of the first turtles to have a shell, and Pappochelys, which lived 240 million years ago and had bones on its belly that were fused together but no top shell.
The researchers found that in the earliest turtles and other archosaurs, like crocodiles and birds, the cases that formed the protective barrier around the brain, had a bone called a laterosphenoid, which connects the side of the brain to the top of the skull. Eunotosaurus and early reptiles lacked this bone, as well as a hooked fifth metatarsal, located on the foot.
. , ,Turtles, ancestral birds and crocodiles also have a free-floating stapes, a rodlike bone found in the ear that allows for more complex hearing. Early reptiles like Eunotosaurus had a thicker stapes that was firmly attached and made for a poor sense of hearing.
Taken together, these observations show that the earliest turtles “have lots more similarities to birds and crocodiles than we previously thought,” said Jonah Choiniere, who worked on the study and is a professor of comparative paleobiology at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Their skulls, hearing and feet all point to archosaurs as a common ancestor.
But as comprehensive as the paper might be, it hasn’t yet quieted the origin debate among paleontologists.
Tyler Lyson, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science who was not involved in the study, said he doesn’t agree that Eunotosaurus was not a turtle (he published that it was, in 2016). But he said he still welcomes the research: “Ultimately, I don’t agree with their conclusions, but it’s a good step forward in the debate.”
Here’s a reconstruction of Eunotosaurus from Wikipedia. It was about a foot long, had those broad ribs, forming a plate, that made people assume it was a turtle, but now is thought to be a distraction from turtle ancestry:
Here’s a figure from the paper showing modern turtles (Testudinata) more closely related to modern crocodiles and birds than to Eunotosaurus (with the yellow star), which appears to be part of a lineage that went extinct without producing modern representatives. A more valid transitional form appears (as molecular evidence suggested) to be Pappochelys(“grandfather turtle” in Greek), indicated with B at the top of the diagram and the black star in the phylogeny. The flattened ribs on the top of Eunotosaurus and Pappochlys appear to be a case of independent evolution: “convergent evolution.”
When I first started teaching evolution 44 years ago, I used to tell my students that some groups, like rabbits and turtles, were not known to have any fossil transitional forms—that both groups appeared in the fossil record without clear ancestors. Well, now we have them both for turtles, as shown above, and for rabbits.
*The Bird History Substack site has a great list of “The 100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time“, compiled by Robert Francis (h/t Ginger K.). The list is great, and here are some of my favorite common bird names:
Screaming Cowbird
Happy Wren
Handsome Fruiteater
Zigzag Heron
Charming Hummingbird
Tiny Hawk
Oliaginous Hemispingus
Noisy Friarbird
Flightless Steamer-Duck (I’ve seen them!)
Obscure Berry-Pecker
Monotonous Lark
Predicted Antwren
Horned Screamer
Strange Weaver
Snoring Rail
Firewood Gatherer
Bare-faced Go-away-bird
Invisible Rail
Hoary Puffleg
Diabolical Nightjar
There are many more; go see for yourself. And here are two Flightless Steamer Ducks (also called Fuegian Steamer Ducks) that I photographed in the Falklands in 2019. Look at their tiny wings!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the boys are after rodents:
Szaron: Either it’s just me, or there’s a mouse over there.
Hili: You’re imagining things.
In Polish:
Szaron: Albo mi się zdaje, albo tam jest mysz.
Hili: Przywidziało ci się.
*******************
Another great medieval letter from TherionArms:
From Give Me a Sign:
From Kitty Litterposting:
Masih continues, rightly, to criticize Trump for not helping the people of Iran in his many “deals”. Here are six minutes of Masih railing against Trump and Vance. At least read her text:
I criticized Obama. I criticized Biden for handing billions to the mullahs. And I have no fear to say it now: Trump and JD Vance are doing the same, handing money to a regime they themselves called the greatest sponsor of terrorism on earth.
Call me whatever you want. I am a… pic.twitter.com/ehjQGY3qzV
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) June 30, 2026
From Luana; this commentary in a journal has apparently been fixed:
Always check the article proofs: pic.twitter.com/KkmfqVV7qa
— Neil Renic (@NC_Renic) June 29, 2026
From Larry the Cat via Simon, an unexpected occurrence:
Germany lost a penalty shootout?! pic.twitter.com/ZVZHEd7Wh3
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) June 29, 2026
From Emma; paintings come to life singing a mambo:
The best three minutes you can spend today, possibly this year.
— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) June 29, 2026
One from my feed. This was a tough one to fix, but fix it he did:
Hats off to this man! 💕 pic.twitter.com/OvCroQ17e1
— The Figen (@TheFigen_) June 28, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he got to Auschwitz. He was 12 years old. https://t.co/Oy1C6EDxeH
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) July 1, 2026
And two from Dr. Cobb. I think Breugel just imagined those bats:
Natural history on canvas: Brueghel knew about bird-eating noctule batsJust published in @pnas.org, OA for all eyesLed by the one-and-only @romero-vidal.bsky.social, with the amazing @elena-tena.bsky.social and Sonia Sánchez-Navarro@ebdonana.bsky.social LINK: http://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/…
— Miguel Clavero (@chikichanka.bsky.social) 2026-06-30T05:06:58.174Z
And one Matthew posted himself:
SORCERY
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-06-29T14:54:49.198Z
RE: checking proofs…some years ago, because after writing the paper and reading it many times over, I would see what I wanted to see in journal galley proofs. So I had my 9-10 year old daughter read them to me at the kitchen table after dinner. She did not enjoy this duty, but it was effective as she simply read the words on the page and I could hear if they were wrong versus what I intended.
In the other direction, one of my engineers once purposely inserted a line around the middle of a 30-40 page NASA Technical Paper which said something like “ if you read this line and come see me, I will buy you an ice cream in the cafeteria”. He got two takers I believe.
I do like the highlight feature on Microsoft Word these days so I will more easily see notes to myself in drafts before declaring a final version. My first papers were hand written by me, then typed by our secretary on an IBM Selectric with interchangeable type ball in the 1970’s. Somebody could correct me on this, but I think that I recall before the interchangeable ball, there was a specific key on a typewriter that could be replaced for special symbols and of course there were papers with handwritten equations.
HA! You’re such an old dude, Jim! I always enjoy your stories and I actually remember those IBM ball typewriters from the 70s and 80s. And “secretaries”. My Dad, a professor of Eco History in Australia, had a secretary.
Believe it or not, near me on 17th there is a typewriter STORE. That’s all they sell, and they service them.
Love the ice cream line. I steal. I’m going to put that into one of my longer articles.
best regards,
D.A.
NYC 🗽
My writing improved immensely once I started using a word processor instead of an IBM Selectric. Why? Because it’s so easy to change things in software! Move a paragraph. Remove it completely. Change a word. Change a sentence. Doing all that with a typewriter was such a pain that I often just left things alone rather than change them. With software laziness is no longer an excusable excuse.
Happy about the Birthright Citizenship thingie. Trump’s idea was typically, reflexively stupid.
Build a wall, close our embassies, do wtf you want with the numbers, and please… police our frontiers.
But if a baby’s first sunrise is under our skies, that is a New American by default. It has to be.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
I actually have some sympathy with the notion that birthright citizenry should not be extended to the children of illegal immigrants who are here unlawfully. Their parents have no business being here whatsoever. And I wonder if that idea is what the bewildering 2nd clause of the Amendment is about:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
How would anyone not be subject to the jurisdiction of the US? Would it be because they are still subject to the jurisdiction of the country of origin of their parents, not being officially admitted to the US? Should illegal immigrants have any rights at all? Should their children?
I agree. Parents are in the USA illegally and/or solely for the purpose of getting citizenship for their children? Goes against common sense. Note that birthright citizenship is the exception, not the rule, in the world. It might have made sense when that amendment was written.
Agree. Some countries have removed birthright citizenship, as travel became easier.
I wonder what realistic avenues there are to closing down birth tourism, without changing the constitution.
Could it be made a serious crime for the mother to enter the country with this intent? Might be hard to prove intent… there will be e.g. cases of tourists unaware of a pregnancy. But anyone knowingly facilitating this could surely be charged.
Would it be legal to levy a $1M tax on any citizen turning 18 who has not lived inside the country for 3 years, and whose parents were not citizens when they were born? Big enough to ensure arrest at the border, but waived if you renounce citizenship. I suppose this will catch some who did not know they were citizens.
The reason that that clause – “subject to the jurisdiction of” – is included is in recognition of the fact that there is very narrowly defined class of people who are NOT subject to the jurisdiction of the US law even when they are present on US soil. Those people are foreign diplomats, their families, and their staff.
The reason children of diplomats don’t have the right to citizenship if they are born in US soil, is because they aren’t any more subject to the jurisdiction of the US courts than their parents are. Just as they can’t be prosecuted for breaking US law, when they are in the US, they can’t be given citizenship, if they are born in the US. They are outside both the duties and the benefits of US law.
The exception for diplomats does not in the least call into question whether the children of the US-born children of non-diplomats have the right to citizenship. Unlike diplomats, every other foreign national, without exception, IS unquestionably under the jurisdiction of US courts, for as long as they are inside the US national territory. That applies to children, as well: just as they are as subject to the law, as their parents, they are entitled to the right of citizenship, given by law, if they are born on US soil.
Thanks. 🙂 Makes sense.
Rand Paul has already introduced a Constitutional Amendment to end birthright citizenship. Here are the relevant portions:
This is the right thing to do. If you don’t like the Consitution, convince other people, and amend it. Too many people in both parties rely on the Court to save them. Unfortunately, I don’t see much chance that Democratic States will vote for passage. I’ve also seen proposals for restricting entry to the U.S. from groups that practice birth tourism.
And Rand Paul submitted that long before the ruling. One thing I like about the man is his ability to separate “what is” from his idea of “what should be.” Justice Scalia was fond of saying that if he were king, then flag-burning would be banned. Yet he sided with the Court that recognized flag burning as protected speech. Both the country and Congress would be in a better place if more people could look at cases and say: Correct ruling; we need to change the law.
I’ll withhold judgment on this case until I’ve read it. I’m particularly interested in Thomas’s dissent.
Slight correction: “Kylian Mbappé tied Messi for most goals in THIS World Cup tournament: 6.”
Most goals in a WC was 13 by Just Fontaine, 1958.
Ah, thank you. But this one ain’t over yet!
The “cite that crappy Gabor paper” flub is hilarious.
Reminds me of a correction that kept reappearing in various stages of the proofs in a recent paper of mine: “I have replaced the text … with the text you now see highlighted in green, in which a new footnote (13) is included.”
No matter how many times I told the editors (not native English speakers) to cut it, it kept showing up. But I remained civil!
Maybe you should start a thread asking for everyone’s best calamitous editing stories.
The story goes that in Genesis 22 an editor changed an older version of the story in which Abraham does sacrifice Isaac but forgot to edit verse 19.
(I always wondered what would have happened in the story if Abraham would have told Sara what he was going to do.)
Then there is the so-called “Wicked Bible,” an edition of the King James Bible printed in 1631. It omitted the word “not” from the commandment about adultery. “Well, if the Bible says I gotta, then I gotta . . .”
Wow…”not native English speakers”. Cannot imagine. Circa 1970’s/80’s: While the editing of conference papers and journal articles went through their own processes, in-house NASA technical papers had to pass muster with our lab’s editing branch. Not only were these ladies native English speakers, but they reminded me of my strictest high school English teacher (hair pulled into a bun), and they answered totally to the NASA Style Manual, regardless of whether a notation or abbreviation made sense to an engineer’s or scientist’s own technical community. The Manual prohibited commercial references, so flight test on the NASA Grumman F-14 research aircraft had to be referred to as “a twin engine, variable sweep wing jet aircraft” and only after looking at the mass and geometry data would the reader figure out what it was. We put the tail number in, but in the days before the interweb, that was not of much immediate use. A picture: the editor of my first paper in 1978 had edited my father’s papers in the 1950’s and 60’s. Talk about respecting your elders! I won more arguments with our lawyers and procurement folks than with our editors.
“cdesign propentists” is the exemplar of embarassing results for not reading proofs.
“Of Pandas and People”, a book promoted by creationists for use in schools was quickly edited after a 1987 Supreme Court ruling banned teaching creationism in public schools. In order to appear sciency, and to keep the book available to be used in schools, the editors replaced the word “creationists” with “design proponenents” and said this is now a science book! But a cut-and-paste error showed that new version of Pandas was merely the old version dressed up with new clothes, and was important evidence in Kitzmiller vs Dover. Kitzmiller v. Dover was a federal court case that ruled it is unconstitutional to teach intelligent design (ID) in public school science classrooms because it is a form of creationism and not a scientific theory.
This mistake could not have been made with a golfball typewiter.
O, you’re right, that was hands down the best one ever.
My colleagues and I would review each other’s papers before submitting. We had a running joke where, after reviewing a paper and making corrections, the author would be told “all good except I randomly inserted the word “anus” somewhere in the text”. That always got the author to proofread it one more time!
Things we never heard before Trump entered politics: Birth tourism; election fraud;…they are eating the cats; Quiet, piggy.
While the SC decision was 6-3 on the statutory question, it was only 5-4 on the constitutional issue of birthright citizenship. That opens the door for Congress to take action to nullify or change the 14th Amendment. If the dissenting judges think the 14th Amendment only applied to freed slaves, why doesn’t the 2nd Amendment apply only to single shot muzzle-loading firearms and bladed weapons?
I believe there was a SC case from the 1930’s (?) that asked that exact question. The answer was that the founders meant for citizens to have the same weapons as any contemporary infantryman would carry on his person.
US v Miller (1939) actually took the plain language of the 2nd Amendment “well regulated” seriously and allowed States to regulate firearms. The more recent “Originalists” ignore that part.
Since others are sharing editing horror tales, here is mine: I once inserted entirely the incorrect information into a footnote. I realized my error at the stage of the pre-press proof and sent an email to the editor, asking her to replace the footnote with a new footnote text that I included in the email. I don’t know whether the email got lost, or ignored, but the incorrect footnote appears in print. I cringe every time I think of it. (But I will never blame the editor. It was my stupid mistake and I own it.)
I’ll never forget the harangue we had to listen to as a grad student @ Rutgers after one of our collaborators (@ Mt Sinai, NYC) submitted a joint manuscript without sending the final ms to RU, wherein he had mis-spelled my advisor’s last name (Pietruszko). She went on, on the lab phone, for at least a full half-hour. We all felt very sorry for poor Arthur Cederbaum.
(I couldn’t remember how he mis-spelled it, and couldn’t immediately find it, but on a hunch guessed that he may have dropped the Z, and bingo!)
Loved the mambo-singing paintings and the poor horn-stuck calf.
Um, isn’t Hili a girl? You wrote “the boys”…
And speaking of regime change (We were, weren’t we?), there are reports saying that anti-Hamas protests have been taking place in Gaza, but that they have so far been pushed down by Hamas (https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-strip-stagnates-gazans-plan-first-large-anti-hamas-protest-since-ceasefire/ ). And there are also reports about Kurdish fighters infiltrating western Iran (https://www.jfeed.com/middleeast/irgc-kurdish-fighters-iran-internal-conflict). Maybe regime changes are incipient.
Finally, I love turtles! It’s interesting that their position on the cladogram has been moved so far from where they were before. Now that they are near the birds, will we discover turtles with feathers or turtles that flew? (Don’t think so.)
Norman I must disagree with you here my friend.
I’m sure there are a lot of kerfuffles in Gaza due to the tribal/ family clan politics mainly which is a big and under reported Thing in the dynamic of that enclave of Islamist murder.
I’m sure there are pi–ed off people there, and they’re machine gunning each other as energetically as always.
But the people of Gaza’s defining culture is dead Jews, no more no less. That’s the game, there’s nothing else.
If it is Hamas doing the machine gunning today, it’ll be Pal Islamic Jihad tomorrow. It is how they roll. I’ll give Hamas this: they represent.
And also, I don’t hold any hopes for a Kurdish uprising in Iran – I just don’t feel they have the motivation, let alone the abilities. And if former Kurdish uprisings, in Iraq say, are anything to go by they should ABSOLTELY not take any promises we Americans con them with.
best,
D.A.
NYC
The bit about where turtles belong is cool and all, but the new findings mainly reinforce the broad consensus that turtles are Archosauromorphs, embedded with the lizards, snakes, and crocodilians. There are hold-outs that they are relics of the ancient Anapsid (cheekbone-less) reptiles, but their placement within the Archosaurs is in all the textbooks.
I would teach this stuff in my evolution class as a nice example of how phylogenies are revised based on new data. But like everyone should on this subject, I always started out by saying “turtles are weird”.
Mark, did you mean to group lizards and snakes with Archosauromorphs?
(Not a biologist, just a taxonomy groupie.)
One of my favourite bird names is Melodious Warbler. I saw one in my garden in southern Scotland a couple of summers ago. The northern limit of their range used to be northern France, so either it was lost or the sighting was a smidgeon of evidence for climate warming.
Was it melodious?
I did not hear it sing, unfortunately.
Dr. Coyne there is a typo in your post: “allowing Israel to remain in Southern Israel until that disarmament happens” should read “Southern Lebanon”.
Fixed, thanks.
My lack-of-proper-copyediting story: I was on the high school newspaper staff and a few of us were also on the yearbook staff. A couple of my friends on the yearbook staff inserted a 1969 Playboy Playmate of the Month centerfold naked lady into a montage of various photos of seniors when they were children. It is very small: only 1.5″ tall and .25″ wide. Very few people knew about it, and the adults didn’t catch it before we went to press. I have my copy of that yearbook from my high school graduation in 1969, and I like to point out that picture to visiting friends. We were such rascals!
68 dollars is indeed a low price for a whole Gaylord of corn ears, so I would say I see nothing wrong with that sign!