Today’s posts may be truncated due to circumstances beyond my control (see below).
Welcome to Sunday, July 5, 2026, the Sabbath made for goyische cats and National Hawaii Day. Here’s Mauna Kea on the Big Island, Hawaii’s highest point at 13,803 feet (4,207.3 meters). (It’s also the second highest mountain on any island, behind Puncat Jaya on New Guinea (4,884 meters or 16,024 feet). Astronomical observatories sit on the mountaintop. I took the photo on June 30, 2019:
It’s also Bikini Day, National Apple Turnover Day, and National Graham Cracker Day, celebrating a food design to eliminate lust and carnal desires.
And it was the worst Fourth of July ever. On July 3, Chicago had the heaviest rain I’ve experienced in my forty years living in this city. It was like a bucket of water being dumped everywhere constantly, and it lasted a long time, accompanied by stiff winds. Even walking across the street to my car was sufficient to drench me. Some places in Chicago lost electrical power and, unfortunately, my flat was one of the few unlucky buildings (the wires were down). It was also hot, and since all electricity was off, we lost not only power, but water (there’s apparently a pump that gets it up to my crib). That meant that although it was hot, my source of cooling (a reliable fan that blows on my bed) was kaput. As was the water tap. No drinks or shower for me! It was a miserable night, but I hoped the power would soon be restored.
It was not. When I woke up on the morning of the Fourth, there was still no electricity. Further, the emergency lights in my building were also off. Since the elevators were down, I had to walk down ten flights of stairs in total darkness, feeling my way along. Fortunately, the University of Chicago had power, so I was able to do a bit of work on my writing project. What I was unable to do was make myself a planned celebratory dinner featuring a large t-bone steak and a good bottle of red wine. When your power’s off and your freezer is full, you have about 24 hours before the food starts thawing, and you cannot open the freezer door if you hope to save the food. Ergo my steak languished in darkness.
About 2 pm, roughly 24 hours after Friday’s power outage, I went home to recover the frozen food. (I had already moved my dairy products, which were few, to my lab’s food refrigerator.) I quickly opened the freezer door and shoveled all the frozen food into a doubled-up heavy garbage bag. There must have been fifty pounds of the stuff (including many steaks as well as sundry other meats and frozen vegetables), and, like Santa, I lugged my sack down ten floors to my car and drove it to the lab. Fortunately, the frozen food was still frozen save for a gooey carton of Breyer’s strawberry ice cream, which got tossed. My sack of frozen food fit into the lab’s food freezer, where it now reposes in anticipation of power restoration at home. We’re told the power will be on today, but I don’t believe it.
Since it was hot again, and I had no fan, I decided to spend the night in my air-conditioned office. I tried to think of it as “camping.” Spreading cushions and a sleeping bag on the floor, I essayed sleep. Unfortunately, hauling that heavy sack o’ food injured my right arm, which was already injured from tossing duck food too far. (Getting old is hard!) Ergo I got almost no sleep because of the pain, for I don’t have Tylenol or Advil in the lab). So here I sit, exhausted and typing with an aching arm steakless in Chicago. It was the worst Fourth of July in my life, mitigated only by the reappearance of heavy rain last night that cancelled the pyrotechnics and their attendant racket. But I saved my frozen food!
I hope American readers had a better Fourth. Tell is in the comments what you did.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 5 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Footy news: There were two World Cup games yesterday. Morocco beat Canada 3-1, knocking our northern neighbors out of the tournament, and France beat Paraguay 1-0. In the latter game Kylian Mbappé saved the day for France, tying Messi for two scoring records:
It wasn’t pretty and it took some time, but a 70th minute penalty from Kylian Mbappé broke the deadlock as France advanced to the round of 16 with a 1-0 win over Paraguay on Saturday.
It took some time for the game to really evolve in the sweltering summer heat, and both sides exchanged fouls and angry words throughout a first half with just five shots and a combined xG of 0.20 (Paraguay 0.05, France 0.15). In the end, France earned a penalty when Paraguay’s Diego Gomez felled sub Désiré Doué inside the area, and after a lengthy delay for VAR review, referee Ilgiz Tantashev pointed to the spot.
Up stepped Mbappe, sending goalkeeper Orlando Gill the wrong way and producing the winning margin. The goal, Mbappe’s seventh of the World Cup, ties Argentina’s Lionel Messi in the Golden Boot race. It also makes him just the second player (alongside Messi) to score seven or more times at two different World Cups, with both doing it in 2022 and 2026.
Up next for France is a date with Morocco in Boston on Thursday, while La Albirroja head home with heads held high.
The highlights. Mbappé’s goal on a penalty kick is at 10:15 the video, and there’s a big of a scuffle at 3:00 as Mbappé got fouled and the two teams threatened each other. There was another scrum at the game’s end; as the announced said, “Paraguay wanted to fight,” and were clearly targeting Mbappe.
Today Brazil plays Norway and Morocco plays England.
*Trump visited Mount Rushmore on Friday and gave a speech calling his opponents “communists,” both “godless” and “evil”. Meanwhile, spokespeople for the White House said that his face belongs up there with Washington, Roosevelt, Jefferson and Lincoln, echoing statements he’s made before.
Four months before tough midterm elections, President Trump used the backdrop of Mount Rushmore one night before the nation’s 250th birthday to characterize his political opponents as “godless,” “evil” communists.
“We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish stupid and unwise,” he said on Friday, demanding that Congress pass his so-called SAVE America Act, which would impose stricter voter ID rules that would make it harder to vote. He called for terminating the filibuster.
The larger purpose of the speech was hard to miss. He was sharpening a line of attack that the White House has started to use to head off a newly insurgent progressive wing of the Democratic Party that appears to be resonating with liberal voters.
Mr. Trump read from an apocalyptic script as the stony faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln looked on. He said the word “communism” so many times, you might’ve thought the Cold War was still on.
He was not subtle. Communism, he said, “is the enemy of July 4, 1776.” He called it a bigger threat than Pearl Harbor and even 9/11. He name-checked Karl Marx.
. . . and from the second link:
Ahead of his visit to the national memorial on Friday, his White House said that adding Trump’s face would be a welcome development — even though officials at Mount Rushmore have long said the monument cannot be carved further.
“There would be no better addition to the iconic Mount Rushmore than the 45th and 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, in a statement to The Washington Post.
. . . As recently as five weeks ago, the president — twice in one evening — posted to Truth Social digital mock-ups of his face next to the mountainside carvings of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
In fact, there’s no room to carve another face on the mountain, but here’s what Trump once posted on Truth Social:
I’m glad there’s no more room at the inn, because if there were Trump would do everything he could to get in there. But I don’t think even he could wheedle his way into a National Memorial.
*The Democratic Socialists of America have been on a roll, electing a number of their members, some deranged, in Democratic primaries. At the Free Press, Olivia Reingold describes the views of one of these victors, Melat Kiros, whom we’ve met before. She defeated Colorado incumbent Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who’s been elected five times,. Kiros, one of the loons and a rabid anti-Semite, will probably be elected come November.
Appearing onscreen next to far-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, Darializa Avila Chevalier [JAC: another loon], who just clinched the Democratic nomination for a New York House seat, encouraged viewers to canvass for a 29-year-old democratic socialist with no prior political experience.
Melat Kiros, Avila Chevalier told them, is “just an incredible human being.”
Well, that depends on your construal of “incredible”; some of them are accurate. More:
Kiros is poised to be one of their most hard-line members yet.
. . . She studied law at Notre Dame before taking a job as a securities regulatory and enforcement associate in the New York office of Sidley Austin, helping defend major corporations against government regulators.
But she was fired from her plum law gig after publishing a letter on Medium addressed to U.S. law firms after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack against Israel. She said it was unfair for legal institutions to label “calls for the elimination of the Israeli state” as antisemitic. How else could students call for a solution that would force “Israel to reckon with its colonial role in Palestine,” she wrote.
. . .After being ousted, Kiros pivoted to pursue a PhD at the University of Colorado, where she is researching the “efficacy of reparations” and universal basic income.
For a political newcomer, Kiros has already accumulated a long list of scandals—or truth bombs, depending on the voter. In May, she justified October 7 as the “inevitable consequence of apartheid, of occupation, decades of occupation” while appearing on Piker’s livestream. Last week, a local TV news reporter asked Kiros if that same logic applied to the United States on 9/11.
She replied that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were “inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East.”
In interviews, Kiros has made it clear that if elected, she and the rest of the DSA delegation don’t intend to play nicely with the Democratic establishment. Earlier this month, when asked by a local TV news reporter if she and her DSA colleagues would hold their party hostage to extract concessions in Congress, she replied point-blank: “That’s the goal.”
Kiros added that her progressive platform represented the “ideals and the values” of most Democratic voters.
“We’re seeing this chasm between the policies that voters actually want to see and the legislation that our leadership is actually progressing,” she said.
I can’t believe that these DSA wackos will help the Democrats win, either the Congress or the Presidency. But a hatred of Israel appears to be a requirement for joining the DSA.
*The Trump administration is abandoning and weakening gun regulations. That is not a good thing unless you’re one of those misguided souls who think that
The Trump administration is scrapping more than three dozen firearms regulations, abandoning a crackdown on illegal sales, restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness and loosening oversight of private weapons transactions.
The drastic retrenchment at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws, was not entirely unexpected: President Trump campaigned as a champion of gun rights.
In the view of critics and even some A.T.F. veterans, the agency, in closely mirroring the demands made by gun owners and manufacturers to lighten their regulatory burden, is enacting changes at the expense of public safety. The moves, they worry, come as the bureau has already been weakened, with hundreds of its officials diverted to immigration enforcement.
Proponents of the changes point out that some of the reversals would return regulations to what they were only a few years ago, before President Joseph R. Biden took office. After a series of deadly mass shootings, Mr. Biden signed into law gun control measures, ending nearly three decades of gridlock over whether and how to regulate firearms
. . . Already, the administration has done away with major policies, including a zero-tolerance approach toward gun dealers who repeatedly broke the law. The more than three dozen rules that it has moved to eliminate would raise the legal threshold for revoking a dealer’s license; extend gun rights to buyers who had faced restrictions because of mental illness or inability to manage their own finances; and end extra scrutiny of stabilizing braces, gun accessories that have been used in mass shootings to lethal effect.
The administration is now targeting gun regulations that Democrats have passed at the state and local levels. It has challenged bans on semiautomatic rifles in Colorado, the District of Columbia and Virginia. On Wednesday, it sued California for its restrictions on the sale of Glock and Glock-style handguns, and Virginia for limits on the sale of semiautomatic rifles, hours after both laws went into effect.
. . . A White House official said the administration’s policies reflected Mr. Trump’s commitment to ensuring that Americans could exercise their Second Amendment rights, accusing the Biden administration of bypassing Congress and using the regulatory process to restrict gun rights.
Let’s look at that Second Amendment again:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
How many of these changes are going to increase the chance of having a “well regulated Militia?” i urge you to read Garry Wills’s essay in the 1995 New York Review of Books, “To keep and bear arms.”
*Idiotic statement of the day: From a NYT op-ed b called “Israel is not invincible.” Her thesis is that Israel has to stop fighting so much. One para:
Israel is not only not invincible; it must seriously consider changing its strategy. There is not a military solution to every problem. The zero-sum understanding of what it means to be pro-Israel has gone so far that it is now alienating Israel’s staunchest supporters. Israel’s embrace of total war and permanent military force, without an achievable endgame, is backfiring, undermining its very effectiveness and utility.
The endgame is peace and only peace. Israel goes to war only when it is attacked or an attack is inevitable (as with Iran). What Zonszein apparently wants is for Israel to negotiate with Hamas, Iran, and Lebanon, making concessions to terrorists to gain a peace that can only be temporary. How like the NYT to find an Israel-dissing Jew!
*The National Review gives us a list of “Twenty-five movies to celebrate America at 250” (article archived here). Here’s the list, with the descriptions truncated. I’ve put asterisks next to the ones I’ve seen, and I’ve liked every one of them (two asterisks for especially good ones).
Drums Along the Mohawk (dir. John Ford, 1939) — Ford’s Revolution happens at the edge of the map, where a young couple builds a farm the war keeps burning down.
Glory(dir. Edward Zwick, 1989) — The 54th Massachusetts drills, argues, and finally charges Fort Wagner into the guns, knowing the odds.
**Lincoln (dir. Steven Spielberg, 2012) — Not the marble but the operator, twisting arms, trading patronage jobs for votes, telling a bawdy story while the 13th Amendment hangs by a thread. Daniel Day-Lewis plays him as a tired country lawyer who happens to carry the moral weight of a nation. . .
Once Upon a Time in the West (dir. Sergio Leone, 1968) — Sometimes it takes a foreigner to show us ourselves, and Leone’s outsider’s opera sees the American frontier more clearly than we tend to. It is not always pretty, the greed, the killing, the settling paid for in blood.
Rio Bravo (dir. Howard Hawks, 1959) — Hawks made it in open contempt of High Noon, whose sheriff spends the picture begging a cowardly town for help. John Wayne’s John T. Chance refuses to beg, and a drunk, a cripple, and a green kid sign on to hold the jail anyway
The Long Gray Line(dir. John Ford, 1955) — An Irish immigrant fumbles his way into West Point as a mess-hall waiter and stays 50 years, training the officers who will lead the country’s armies and burying more of them than any man should.
**Yankee Doodle Dandy(dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942) — James Cagney plays George M. Cohan as a strutting force of nature, born on the Fourth of July and writing the songs a nation marched off to war humming.
*A River Runs Through It (dir. Robert Redford, 1992) — Adapted from Norman Maclean’s luminous novella, the film follows two brothers coming of age in 1910s Montana under a Presbyterian minister who draws no line between religion and fly-fishing.
*Sergeant York (dir. Howard Hawks, 1941) — A Tennessee marksman who reads Scripture wrestles his conscience over killing, then single-handedly captures 132 Germans in the Argonne.
*Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (dir. Frank Capra, 1939) — Capra sends a bumpkin idealist to the Senate and lets the machine nearly grind him to paste.
A League of Their Own (dir. Penny Marshall, 1992) — With the men overseas and the major leagues fearing they might have to go dark, the owners hedged by filling the ballparks with women, and discovered they could play.
**Saving Private Ryan (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1998) — The Omaha Beach landing opens the film with 20 minutes of unsparing slaughter, the camera as concussed as the men wading into the guns.
**The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946) — Three veterans come home to a country that moved on without them, and Harold Russell, a real disabled vet playing a sailor with hooks for hands,
*The Right Stuff (dir. Philip Kaufman, 1983) — Sam Shepard’s Chuck Yeager rides a horse out to the X-1 he will fly through the sound barrier, laconic to the point of insolence, and the film never quite stops preferring him to the celebrities who follow
The Iron Giant(dir. Brad Bird, 1999) — A boy and a fallen war machine meet in Cold War Maine, and the giant, built to kill and terrified of its own nature, refuses the purpose it was made for
*Lilies of the Field (dir. Ralph Nelson, 1963) — A black handyman driving through the Arizona desert stops for water at a farm of German refugee nuns and finds himself, half against his will, agreeing to build them a chapel.
*Selma (dir. Ava DuVernay, 2014) — The film opens with four girls descending a church staircase in their Sunday best, and then the blast at Birmingham tears them away. What follows is a claim upon America rather than a revolt against it.
*Ford v Ferrari(dir. James Mangold, 2019) — A Texan carmaker and a hot-tempered Englishman set out to build the machine that can finally beat Ferrari at Le Mans, while executives fret about marketing and image.
*Nashville(dir. Robert Altman, 1975) — Released on the eve of the Bicentennial, Altman’s great American panorama gathers politicians, dreamers, musicians, grifters, homemakers, and has-beens into one sprawling chorus, each convinced the microphone belongs to them.
Superman (dir. Richard Donner, 1978) — The story arrives from the stars but grows up in a Kansas wheat field, where the Kents raise a foundling from another world into a decent Midwestern boy before he ever learns to fly.
Miracle (dir. Gavin O’Connor, 2004) — Kurt Russell’s Herb Brooks skates his college kids half to death until they can match the Soviet machine, then turns them loose at Lake Placid in 1980.
Barcelona (dir. Whit Stillman, 1994) — Any American who has lived abroad will know the predicament: two cousins defend their homeland in a Spain where anti-Americanism passes for sophistication.
Minari (dir. Lee Isaac Chung, 2020) — A Korean family stakes everything on a patch of Arkansas dirt, the father convinced he can grow produce for a market that hasn’t yet realized it needs it.
*The Straight Story(dir. David Lynch, 1999) — An old man rides a lawnmower across the Midwest to reconcile with his estranged, dying brother, and Lynch, of all directors, films it with total earnestness.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is catting:
Andrzej: What are you staring at?
Hili: My empty bowl.
In Polish:
Ja: Czemu się tak przyglądasz?
Hili: Mojej pustej miseczce.
*******************
Another great medieval letter from TherionArms:
From Terrible Maps:
From Give Me a Sign:
From Masih, Guess the answer to her question before you watch the video:
Someone in New York just sent their condolences to the Islamic Republic for the supreme killer Ali Khamenei’s funeral.
Guess who?
Drop your guess below before you watch. 👇 pic.twitter.com/ust5AH63iz— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) July 4, 2026
Emma calls out a spectum-ist:
This dude has spent weeks trying to tell women that “women” is what anyone makes of it, and it turns out his preferred use of “woman” is the use that captures him.
And his navel. https://t.co/OacHA6pnQa
— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) July 4, 2026
The Number Ten Cat sends the UK Fourth-of-July sentiments:
Today the UK celebrates 250 years of independence from the tyranny of the United States of America. Imagine living in a society where the leader can repeatedly break the law and nobody stops them!
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) July 4, 2026
From Luana. I think the original tweeter is right: I can’t think of a Democrat who has bucked the party line:
This actually is completely nuts. https://t.co/cNDUoOYaKy
— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) July 3, 2026
One from my feed; another heartwarming rescue:
This is what humanity is all about…..
🎦 Credit: Daily Mail. pic.twitter.com/p0AbeDcyJg
— PROTECT ALL WILDLIFE (@Protect_Wldlife) July 4, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was about three years old. https://t.co/sWz1v1N7My
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) July 5, 2026
And two from Dr. Cobb. First, giant earwigs!
Giant (or Tawny) Earwigs Labidura riparia on the wild dunes at La Coubre, France
— John Walters (@johnwalterswildife.bsky.social) 2026-06-14T08:20:58.259Z
Look at the eyes on this amphipod!
This deep sea creature is as sharp & clear as broken class, & can grow as long as your hand. This giant amphipod, (Cystisoma) only has two colored body parts: the dense orange stomach/egg pouch, & two MASSIVE eyes, which are a glittering holographic orange layer completely covering its head.📽️ MBARI
— Rebecca R Helm (@rebeccarhelm.bsky.social) 2026-04-10T13:54:53.771Z
Sorry about your misery. At least you have safe haven of your first-world lab. I spent yesterday in a/c hiding from heat (100F at 3pm…still mid-90’s at 6:00…low at 80 overnight). Luckily power held steady! Was reading Pluckrose’s Cynical Theories again trying to digest her chapter on post-modernism. I think that attending our city’s outdoor activities in the heat would have been less frustrating. Hope water and power are back at your crib today.