Welcome to Sunday, July 9, 2023, and National Sugar Cookie Day. They’re best when made with cinnamon and brown sugar, and this subspecies is called “snickerdoodles”.

It’s also Fashion Day, National No Bra Day (when I was in college in the Sixties, this was every day), and Nunavut Day, celebrated in that Canadian territory.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the July 9 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The AP reports that one of the “Manson Girls”, Leslie Van Houten, might be freed very soon. If you have a good memory, you’ll remember that there were four: Van Houten, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Susan Atkins (I can still remember them). Squeaky was released on parole after 34 years in jail for pointing a gun at President Gerald Ford. Krenwinkel, who participated in several murders, has been in prison since 1971: the longest-incarcerated woman in America. She has a parole hearing this November. Susan Atkins, also convicted of murder, died of brain cancer in prison in 2009 after 38 years in jail. As for Van Houten, also convicted for murder, she may be set free:
California’s governor announced Friday that he won’t ask the state Supreme Court to block parole for Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten, paving the way for her release after serving 53 years in prison for two infamous murders.
In a brief statement, the governor’s office said it was unlikely that the state’s high court would consider an appeal of a lower court ruling that Van Houten should be released.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is disappointed, the statement said.
Newsom had previously overturned a parole board’s recommendation for release in 2021, but apparently the California Supreme Court can overrule the Governor’s decision
Van Houten, now in her 70s, is serving a life sentence for helping Manson and other followers in the 1969 killings of Leno LaBianca, a grocer in Los Angeles, and his wife, Rosemary.
Van Houten could be freed in about two weeks after the parole board reviews her record and processes paperwork for her release from the California Institution for Women in Corona, her attorney Nancy Tetreault said.
She was recommended for parole five times since 2016 but Newsom and former Gov. Jerry Brown rejected all those recommendations.
However, a state appeals court ruled in May that Van Houten should be released, noting what it called her “extraordinary rehabilitative efforts, insight, remorse, realistic parole plans, support from family and friends” and favorable behavior reports while in prison.
“She’s thrilled and she’s overwhelmed,” Tetreault said.
“She’s just grateful that people are recognizing that she’s not the same person that she was when she committed the murders,” she said.
After she’s released, Van Houten will spend about a year in a halfway house, learning basic life skills such as how to go to the grocery and get a debit card, Tetreault said.
“She’s been in prison for 53 years. … She just needs to learn how to use an ATM machine, let alone a cell phone, let alone a computer,” her attorney said.
Van Houten and other Manson followers killed the LaBiancas in their home in August 1969, smearing their blood on the walls after. Van Houten later described holding Rosemary LaBianca down with a pillowcase over her head as others stabbed her, before herself stabbing the woman more than a dozen times.
Smiling at the trial. The AP caption is “From left: Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, walk to court to appear for their roles in the 1969 cult killings of seven people, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate, in Los Angeles, Calif.”
*It’s a slow news day, but perhaps you’ll be interested in the NYT’s report (and the paper) on the first beetle ever discovered missing its elytra (the hard wing covers of a beetle that makes them tough. You can find the paper free by clicking on the screenshot of its title:
The insect in the small specimen collection of Lund University in Sweden looked out of place.
“OK, this is a prank,” Vinicius Ferreira, an insect taxonomist and evolutionary biologist, said to himself. “It’s a joke.”
The beetle — only one-tenth of an inch and found in 1991 in Oaxaca, Mexico, among leaf litter of a pine and oak forest floor at an elevation of more than 9,500 feet by the naturalist Richard Baranowski — was most definitely a male. But it was missing one of the animal’s defining characteristics: the tough forewing casing known to scientists as the elytra.
After careful analysis, Dr. Ferreira described the insect this month in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society as a previously unknown but “extraordinary” elytra-less species of beetle: Xenomorphon baranowskii.
“Boom. We found this really weird animal. The ‘alien’ beetle,” Dr. Ferreira said, selecting a name that honored Dr. Baranwoski and also called to mind the “Alien” of his favorite sci-fi movie franchise.
Wing loss has been seen in several beetle species, as well as loss of the elytra in females. But this male (only one specimen has been described) is the first to lack both wings and elytra. A photo is below: the scale shows how small it is.

Xenomorphon is the first anelytrous adult male beetle to be discovered. At first thought to be a damaged specimen, a thorough examination of its morphology indicated that it was, indeed, an individual that naturally did not have either wings or elytra, which is evidenced by the lack of a scutellar shield and other commonly found features present in the alinotum (Fig. 2A); in fact, the alinotum of the specimen fully resembles that of the larvae of other elateroid beetles (see Costa et al. 1988; Ferreira and Ivie 2022). The new genus displays a similar condition to that found in some ‘larviform females’, having a remarkable morphological similarity to females of Lampyris noctiluca Linnaeus, 1758 (Lampyridae) (Novak 2017, Keller 2022), the common glow-worm of Europe, for example.
This male shows a paedomorphic condition, in which the junvenile morphology of the individual persists into adult life. The authors note that there may be advantages of losing wings and elytra at high altitudes, like being less likely to be blown away by the wind. But the males also sacrifice their ability to find females. All in all, we don’t know why these males have lost their wings and elytras, but first we need to find more than one male to be sure this is a general condition. And, as the authors say, “Further studies are needed for a definitive answer to explain the loss of elytra of Xenomorphon.”
*Here’s a headline from Newsweek, courtesy of Luana. Click to read; I’ll quote a bit below. It’s funny because Ben & Jerry’s are always proclaiming that they occupy the moral high ground. Not this time!
An Indigenous tribe descended from the Native American nation that originally controlled the land in Vermont the Ben & Jerry’s headquarters is located on would be interested in taking it back, its chief has said, after the company publicly called for “stolen” lands to be returned.
Don Stevens, chief of the Nulhegan Band of The Coosuk Abenaki Nation—one of four descended from the Abenaki that are recognized in Vermont—told Newsweek it was “always interested in reclaiming the stewardship of our lands,” but that the company had yet to approach them.
It comes after the ice cream company was questioned as to when it would give up its Burlington, Vermont, headquarters—which sits on a vast swathe of U.S. territory that was under the auspices of the Abenaki people before colonization.
“The U.S. was founded on stolen Indigenous land,” the company said in a statement ahead of Independence Day. “This year, let’s commit to returning it.”
If they did, I think this would be a real first for American companies and universities, and others would be pressured to follow.
Maps show that the Abenaki—a confederacy of several tribes who united against encroachment from a rival tribal confederacy—controlled an area that stretched from the northern border of Massachusetts in the south to New Brunswick, Canada, in the north, and from the St. Lawrence River in the west to the East Coast.
This would put Ben & Jerry’s headquarters, located in a business park in southern Burlington, within the western portion of this historic territory—though it does not sit in any modern-day tribal lands.
“We are always interested in reclaiming the stewardship of our lands throughout our traditional territories and providing opportunities to uplift our communities,” Stevens said when asked about whether the Nulhegan Abenaki Tribe would want to see the property handed over to Indigenous people.
While the chief said that the tribe “has not been approached in regards to any land back opportunities from Ben & Jerry’s,” he added: “If and when we are approached, many conversations and discussions will need to take place to determine the best path forward for all involved.”
Unfortunately, Ben & Jerry’s have no comment about the situation. Let’s see if they put their factory where their mouth is.
*We’re told that this week had some of the hottest days on record, or even in many thousands of years, but since records have been kept for only about two centuries or so, you might have asked yourself, “How can they make such a statement”? The Washington Post gives us some clues.
Tracing climatic fluctuations back centuries and millennia is less simple and precise than checking records from satellites or thermometers. It involves poring through everything from ancient diaries to lake bed sediments to tree trunk rings.
But the observations are enough to make paleoclimatologists, who study the Earth’s climate history, confident that the current decade of warming is exceptional relative to any period since before the last ice age, about 125,000 years ago.
Our understanding of conditions so long ago is far less detailed than modern climate data, meaning it’s impossible to prove how hot it might have gotten on any given day so many thousands of years ago. Still, the Earth history gleaned from fossils and ice cores shows the recent heat would have been all but impossible over most of those millennia.
“There’s no way to drop one hot day into the middle of the ice age,” Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University, said.
. . .If any a single day in the past 100,000 or 125,000 years could have been as hot as the Earth this week, scientists said it could only have occurred about 6,000 years ago. At that time, the planet had warmed with the end of the last ice age, and a period of global cooling began that would continue until the Industrial Revolution.
Scientists are confident that, apart from the global warming of recent decades, it was Earth’s warmest period in the past 100,000 years. They estimate that temperatures averaged somewhere between 0.2 degrees Celsius and 1 degree Celsius (0.36 to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than they were from 1850-1900.
. . .That assessment states with “medium confidence” that temperatures from 2011-2020 exceed those of any multi-century period of warmth over the past 125,000 years.
Further, there is no evidence anywhere in scientists’ understanding of Earth’s history of warming that occurred nearly as rapidly as the ongoing spike in temperatures, caused by the burning of fossil fuels and emissions of greenhouse gases.
If a hotter day happened on Earth anytime in the past, Alley said, it was the result of natural processes.
“The current rise is not natural, but caused by us,” he said.
*From Greg:
The New York Times‘ fondness for woo continues to grow: a big homepage article today declares that Uri Geller has “emerged the victor“. The evidence for this: Geller is rich and has opened a museum about himself; an Australian has written a coffee table book about him; and he has outlived his critic James Randi (who was 18 years older than Geller, and died in 2020 at the age of 92). And besides, what harm can there be in cultivating the habits of mind that allow people to believe in telekinesis? The Times used to be a little less credulous about such things, and the harm they can cause.The article is in the “Business” section, so I guess how much money you have is the right way to judge who ‘wins’. But there’s nary a mention of the size of Randi’s estate– how can we be sure who really won?
It’s a fortune he might have never earned, he said, without a group of highly agitated critics. Mr. Geller was long shadowed by a handful of professional magicians appalled that someone was fobbing off what they said were expertly finessed magic tricks as acts of telekinesis. Like well-matched heavyweights, they pummeled one another in the ’70s and ’80s in televised contests that elevated them all.
Mr. Geller ultimately emerged the victor in this war, and proof of his triumph is now on display in the museum: a coffee-table book titled “Bend It Like Geller,” which was written by the Australian magician Ben Harris and published in May.
The victor? The VICTOR? The NYT then admits that Geller wasn’t really banding spoons or was psychic; it was all trickery:
And the point is that Mr. Geller is an entertainer, one who’d figured out that challenging our relationship to the truth, and daring us to doubt our eyes, can inspire a kind of wonder, if performed convincingly enough. Mr. Geller’s bent spoons are, in a sense, the analog precursors of digital deep fakes — images, videos and sounds, reconfigured through software, so that anyone can be made to say or do anything.
And get a load of this:
If Mr. Geller can’t actually bend metal with his brain — and civility and fairness demands this “if” — he is the author of a benign charade, which is a pretty good definition of a magic trick. Small wonder that the anti-Geller brigade has laid down its arms and led a rapprochement with the working professionals of magic. He is a reminder that people thrill at the sense that they are either watching a miracle or getting bamboozled. And now that fakery is routinely weaponized online, Mr. Geller’s claims to superpowers seem almost innocent.
No civility and fairness don’t demand the “if”—the possibility that he really was bending spoons with his brain. His followers now more or less admit it, and magicians like Randi could do it regularly. By saying that Geller “won”, and putting in that “if”, the NYT is once again pandering to woo. And if it wasn’t woo, but just magic, then Geller lost and Randi won. Oh, and the NYT also lost.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cats are discussing demeanor and philosophy:
Szaron: Nothing induces me to be optimistic.Hili: You can always choose a stoic calm.
Szaron: Nic mnie nie skłania do optymizmu.Hili: Zawsze można wybrać stoicki spokój.
And a nine-year-old dialogue with Hili and her late friend Cyrus the d*g:
Hili: And a cat will lead you.
Cyrus: If you keep talking so much, I will bite your tail.
in Polish:
Hili: I kot będzie cię prowadzić…Cyrus: Jak będziesz tyle gadać to ugryzę cię w ogon.
********************
From Thomas, a Speedbump cartoon by Dave Coverly.
From Merilee, a Bizarro strip by Wayne and Piraro.
From the Absurd Sign Project 2.0:
From Masih, a brave Iranian woman, of which there are many:
For women, singing is forbidden in Iran. This woman is bravely singing in one of Esfahan’s most historical mosques. When the security agent tried to stop her, she resisted and continued. Brave Iranian women like her will some day bring down this most anti-woman regime. pic.twitter.com/NvSgQqIFND
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) July 6, 2023
I found this one. Lovely cloud, and very colorful! (Read more about pileus clouds here.)
Pileus clouds steal the show anytime they grace the sky pic.twitter.com/TBdShRU3xI
— Vids that will make you love earth (@VidsOfHeaven) July 7, 2023
From Luana, who was born in Brazil. Look at all this torment!
Aliko Dangote, the richest man in Africa, has been tormented by a Brazilian man named Osvaldo for the last several years.
You just gotta admire the sheer dedication here tbf 😭😭😭 pic.twitter.com/XQ8rnq3iJf
— Conrad Barwa (@ConradkBarwa) July 6, 2023
From Barry, whose caption is: “No, no! You got me all wrong. I wasn’t going to jump you. I just wanted to see if I could stand on two legs.”
Sound up:
— chocolate chip😁🖖🏼🏳️🌈🟧🥂🟦 (@cannoli1000) July 6, 2023
From Malcolm. How many cats would do this?
Daily workout.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/YT9PYZmkX5
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) July 3, 2023
From the Auschwitz Memorial, a girl gassed upon arrival. She was five.
9 July 1937 | A French Jewish girl, Rosette Garbaz, was born in Paris.
In August 1942 she was deported to #Auschwitz and after the selection murdered in a gas chamber. pic.twitter.com/QuPzmwfuGe
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) July 9, 2023
From Dr. Cobb. First, a NYT article about the Nazi destruction of a synagogue:
Pieces of Munich Synagogue, Destroyed on Hitler’s Orders, Found in River https://t.co/j3zjLdjuOC extraordinary and haunting – one of the fragments has the Hebrew 10 commandments that synagogues often display.
— Simon Schama (@simon_schama) July 8, 2023
Here’s a piece of the rubble that may have the Ten Commandments (I don’t read Hebrew). Photo from the NYT:
I wonder if it ordered “milk, neat”, and then knocked the glass off the table:
there was a cat at the bar last night pic.twitter.com/Jr8yCUANHe
— marshall country mart (@marshallvore) July 6, 2023
A sad note: Michael Ashburner, a great Drosophila geneticist, just died. I knew him slightly: a terrific guy. But he smoked like a chimney, and that did him in.
I am incredibly sad to say that Michael Ashburner passed away last night after a long illness. A giant of fly genetics and biology he was also very influential in the development of bioinformatics. I will be eternally grateful for the kindness and support he showed me. RIP
— Steven Russell @SteveRuss@mstdn.social (@sr120) July 7, 2023