Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to the first Monday in July: July 6, 2016, and National Fried Chicken Day. Here’s a plate of this quintessentially American dish (and a lovely salad) in Honlulu, of all places. I scarfed these down on June 23, 2019:
And I note (h/t Matthew) that it was on this day in 1957, when I was seven years old, that McCartney and Lennon first met, sparking the best rock music in history (and the best that will ever be!). Thank Ceiling Cat that I came of age when the Beatles had their brief period of musical hegemony.
69 years ago, on the 6th of July 1957, John Lennon met Paul McCartney for the first time. Lennon's skiffle group, the Quarrymen, were performing at the St Peter's Church garden fête in Woolton. McCartney met Lennon in between their two sets. #otd #history 🗃️
Clicking on the Google Doodle will show you the latest footy scores and upcoming games:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Footy news. There was a big upset yesterday as Norway beat Brazil 2-1, sending the Cariocas home in despair. As expected, England beat Mexico, but only by one point: 3-2. Today’s games include two good matchups: Portugal against Spain and the USA against Belgium. Let’s look at the Brazil/Norway game:
Erling Haaland scored two late goals to send Norway to the World Cup quarterfinals for the first time with a 2-1 victory that condemned Brazil to their earliest exit in the competition since 1990.
Haaland broke the deadlock in the 79th minute at Met Life Stadium off a left-wing cross from Andreas Schjelderup and then added a decisive second with a powerful low shot into the corner of the net in the final minute of the 90.
The Manchester City striker now moves level with Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé at the front of the race for the Golden Boot, with all three on seven goals. His scoring streak for his country has now reached 14 games, with Haaland scoring 27 goals in that span.
“Maybe this will write history in Norway,” Haaland said. “Everyone just need to enjoy themselves. This is just an insane day. It’s one of the most insane days in Norwegian history. Just enjoy it, embrace it and enjoy the moment.”
Bruno Guimarães missed a penalty in the first half, with a chance to give Brazil the lead, after a video review of a tackle from Kristoffer Ajer on Matheus Cunha. Brazil had another chance from the penalty spot after a foul on Casemiro deep into second-half stoppage time, which Neymar converted, but it came too late to rescue Carlo Ancelotti’s side.
Norway, who had lost on their two previous visits to the World Cup last 16 — in 1938 and 1998 — will meet either Mexico or England for a place in the semifinals.
“I think that all Norwegian citizens are experiencing the night of a lifetime,” coach Ståle Solbakken said. “Some people say that we have changed Norway forever. Probably, they will party for a week or so.”
Here are the highlights, with the goal-scoring plays given at times from the video: 10:48, 13:40 (Norway, both by Haaland), and 17:01 (Brazil, penalty kick).
*The AP reports that Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral (minus his son, who may be dead) occasioned a lot of hatred of America, which doesn’t portend well for a ceasefire.
Iran’s top officials and brothers of the new supreme leader emerged into public view Sunday to attend funeral prayers for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Their appearance signaled confidence in their safety as Iran pushes back on U.S. demands in negotiations to permanently end the war.
Crowds of hundreds of thousands chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” as they called for revenge over the Feb. 28 attack that killed the 86-year-old supreme leader and other top officials, triggering the war. Some hard-liners called for the assassination of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has yet to make an appearance in the funeral ceremonies, which are unfolding over several days. He is believed to be in hiding after reportedly being wounded in the airstrike that killed his father.
The U.S. is meanwhile pressing ahead with negotiations with Iran aimed at fully reopening the Strait of Hormuz and rolling back its disputed nuclear program.
Ziba Naderi, a 42-year-old nurse attending the funeral Sunday, said Iran needed to heed Mojtaba Khamenei’s commands. “I heard the call for revenge, but our leader should say what we need to do,” she said. “And we must listen to him.”
The leader ain’t saying nothing. More:
Posters and graffiti at the Grand Mosalla called for the killing of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Why is the biggest bastard in the world still alive?” Mohammad Rasouli, a poet who emceed the event before the prayers, said to the crowd over loudspeakers, referring to Trump. “The world is no longer a good place” for Trump, he added as the crowd cheered.
“I came here to shout and seek revenge,” said Gholamreza Sabooni, a 29-year-old man who works in a grocery. “They killed our imam, we should kill their leader, Trump.”
They would if they could, but they can’t. More:
Talks over reaching a permanent end to the war appear to be on hold until the end of the funeral.
The funeral was in part a show of unity and defiance as Iran demands a measure of control over the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for global energy that it shut down during the war. The U.S. has rejected those demands, and the sides are divided on other key issues, including the conflict between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran’s nuclear program.
The U.S. assisted 70 transits of the Strait of Hormuz over the past 72 hours, including 18 on Saturday, a multinational maritime body overseen by the U.S. Navy said Sunday. It called traffic steady along routes near Oman and Iran but still below prewar levels. The threat level remained “substantial” and mine clearance and surveying work continued.
There’s no way this war is going to be over in a month and a half, as Iran will simply not agree to any stipulation that would prevent it from ever having nuclear weapons, much less to giving power to the people or opening the Strait of Hormuz restoring its pre-war state. Isn’t it nice to live in interesting times?
It’s been about 10 years since Hollywood stopped casting the turbaned Islamist as the villain in movies like these—but at this point, Iran’s just casting themselves in the role.
Call this the end of the brief U.S.-Iran honeymoon—the stretch where Iran kept acting against American interests but hid it behind a thin veneer of ambivalence and relatively polite rejectionism toward U.S. demands. Now the mask is coming off, and underneath is the exact same face.
In the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is still using threats to compel commercial vessels through its shipping lanes. The calculation is simple: keep threatening and attacking, and countries and international bodies will think twice before facilitating alternative transit routes. Meanwhile, Tehran is floating the idea that it could weaponize both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb as leverage if the U.S. violates their memorandum of understanding.
But things seem to be moving. Benjamin Netanyahu has been invited for his seventh trip to the White House during Trump’s second term. If Bibi’s been keeping a punch card, I’d guess the next visit’s free. What the meeting’s actually about remains to be seen—though if my knowledge of 1980s action movies is any guide, it may be something explosive.
US President Donald Trump on Saturday said he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “get along very good” and that the Israeli premier “knows who the boss is,” in a brief phone interview with Axios.
Trump also confirmed that he would soon meet with the Israeli leader, saying that Netanyahu had asked him for a meeting at the White House, and that it could take place as early as next week after the NATO summit in Turkey.
The Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement on Friday that the two leaders spoke on the phone and “agreed to meet soon in the US.”
An Israeli official told Axios that the meeting “might take place the week after [next]” due to scheduling difficulties.
“During their conversation, the prime minister said that the United States is a guarantor of global freedom, and that Israel greatly values the close relationship between the two nations,” Netanyahu’s office said Friday.
Don’t ask me what these dudes are going to discuss, or if it involves a resumption of hostilities. I doubt that Trump is up for that given the proximity of the midterms, and besides, he’s The Boss.
About the funeral of the late Ayatollah:
Trump also told Axios that he is following the ongoing funeral ceremonies for the late Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in US-Israel strikes on February 28.
Claiming that the Iranians are “begging to make a deal,” Trump said the two sides put negotiations on pause to allow for the days-long funeral to take place, during which the American president claims neither party will attack the other.
Huge crowds of mourners gather for the start of the funeral of Iran’s late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran on July 4, 2026. (Screen grab/Iranian state media)
“They are all there. One shot [and we can take them all out], but we are not going to do that because then we would have nobody to negotiate with,” Trump reportedly said.
Adding that he was surprised to see Iranians crying at the funeral, Trump mused, “Maybe it’s fake tears.”
*Michael Shermer wrote a column for the Fourth in the Boston Globe, “The science of the Declaration of Independence.” Here are some quotes from the version reprinted in Skeptic magazine, which is slightly different but not paywalled. Shermer sees the Declaration as a quasi-scientific experiment designed to produce a better society, though I disagree with him one one point.
Many of the Founding Fathers were, in fact, natural philosophers — scientists in today’s language (the word wasn’t coined until 1834) — who deliberately adapted the method of data gathering, hypothesis testing, and theory formation to their nation building. Their understanding of the provisional nature of findings led them to develop a social system in which doubt and dispute were the centerpieces of a functional polity. Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Madison, and the others thought of social governance as problems to be solved rather than as power to be grabbed. They thought of democracy in the same way they thought of science — as a method, not an ideology. They argued, in essence, that no one knows how to govern a nation, so they had to set up a system that allows for experimentation. Try this. Try that. Check the results. Repeat. As Jefferson wrote in 1804:
“No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth.”
Even the fundamental principles underlying the Declaration of Independence, which is usually thought of as a statement of political philosophy, were in fact grounded in the type of scientific reasoning that Jefferson and Franklin employed elsewhere. Consider the foundational line “We hold these truths to be self-evident …” Jefferson’s original phrase was “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.” Why was it changed?
According to author Walter Isaacson, on June 21, 1776, in reviewing the Declaration Franklin “crossed out, using heavy backslashes that he often employed, the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase, ‘We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable’ and changed them to the words now enshrined in history.” Isaacson explains why in his book “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written”:
“The idea of ‘self-evident’ truths was one that drew less on John Locke, who was Jefferson’s favored philosopher, than on the scientific determinism espoused by Isaac Newton and on the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume.”
Hume, the great Enlightenment philosopher whose writings were well known to the Founding Fathers, famously made a distinction between analytic truths that are self-evident by definition (cardiologists are doctors) and synthetic truths for which one needs to check the evidence to see if they are true (cardiologists are rich). By using the word “sacred,” Isaacson continues, “Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not, that the principle in question — the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights — was an assertion of religion. Franklin’s edit turned it instead into an assertion of rationality.”
My disagreement with Michael (and the Founders, I guess) is that the Declaration was prompted by moral realism, a view I see as bogus but which Shermer defines this way:
The concept underpinning the Declaration of Independence is known as moral realism, which is central to how we think as a nation and to our way of life. Moral realism says that right and wrong, just and unjust, moral and immoral, are not the whimsical products of power or culture but are discoverable through reason and science. In the same way that Galileo and Newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that really are out there, so too did the founders purport to discover moral laws and principles about human nature and society that really do exist.
It’s true that if you specify what kind of society you want, it’s possible in principle to do social experiments to see if your “moral” dicta yield that kind of society you desire. But dfifferent people will prefer different kinds of societies, and this means that there are no “objective truths” about morality. And this means in turn that societies like America were really set up on consequentialist principles, with morality judged by the results of actions. “Morality” like that underlying America’s founding is relative to what consequences people desire, and thus cannot be objective “universal truths.” Now it’s likely that the Founders all envisioned a similar kind of optimal society, but the “moral laws” they envisioned may not hold for others, as we can see by how different societies embrace other principles that we consider immoral (viz., Soviet society).
*In the NYT, ten writers offer their choice of “The definitive movie about America” (archived here). Here are some (I’ve put asterisks next to the ones I’ve seen), and there is more at the site for each movie. The rules:
I asked 10 writers what films they would pick to define America and why. Their choices ranged from blockbusters to indies, homegrown comedies to enigmatic Italian drama, a recent best-picture Oscar nominee to a little-known debut — in short, movies as varied as the country itself.
And the choices:
Killer of Sheep (1978). Charles Burnett’s masterpiece takes place in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, in the mid-1970s, a decade after civil unrest there. Shot in black-and-white, the film is at once an expressionistic portrait of a poor Black family and of the country they live in, its idealism and bitter truths. There is soaring beauty as well as rueful comedy in Burnett’s vision, and pain that cuts to the bone. Here, every scarred wall and empty lot speaks to promises broken, as does the hollowed-out face of the father, a slaughterhouse worker (Henry G. Sanders).
*There Will Be Blood (2007). A ruthless, self-made mogul with a string of shady dealings in his past. An opportunistic preacher more interested in power than holiness. A country where fabulous wealth is available, if you’re willing to stomp your boot on your neighbor’s back. Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 epic, “There Will Be Blood,” which gave Daniel Day-Lewis one of his greatest roles, rips into the American dream, borrowing the cinematic language of Hollywood’s great westerns but inverting their themes.\
Dazed and Confused (1993). Not long into “Dazed and Confused,” as Texas high schoolers pour out of classrooms for summer break in 1976, the cool teacher hollers about the impending Bicentennial: “Don’t forget what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.”
The national milestone lingers in the teenagers’ minds — “This country was founded by people who were into aliens, man,” the head stoner insists — but it’s mostly a backdrop for a rowdy night. As social cliques bleed together, conflicts arise: between old mores and new cultural groundswells, between patriotism and rebellion, between boundless freedom and nowhere to go. It’s in this friction that the Americanness of Richard Linklater’s 1993 dramedy is undeniable.
*Scarface (1932). Talk about American types: The epitome of slapstick mayhem and the censor-consternating sensation of 1932, “Scarface” was bankrolled by a legendary Texas-born tycoon (Howard Hughes) and directed by a big-time Hollywood auteur (Howard Hawks) from a script mainly by a celebrated Chicago newshound (Ben Hecht) as a vehicle for a former idol of New York’s Yiddish theater (Paul Muni), who plays a fictionalized portrait of the most notorious man in the country then (Al Capone). “Scarface” wasn’t the studios’ first gangster film, just the most violent and noisiest.
The Florida Project (2017). Is there a more American city than Orlando, Fla.? Its attractions promise big dreams, big fun, total escape. But it often masks the tremendous working-class struggle required to keep those dreams alive. The director Sean Baker interprets the complications of Orlando, and America itself, in film form with this sun-soaked drama that unspools on the other side of the Disney world. Discount motels with names like Futureland Inn and Magic Castle are the homes and de facto playgrounds of children who spend their days engaging in games and a little mischief, amid these tarnished environs.
*Nashville (1975). There are few filmmakers whose work encompasses America, in all its complexities and contradictions, as fully as Robert Altman’s. In his best movies, he took on sacred cows, hidebound institutions, frontier mythology and conventional notions of heroism, and did so with a knowing wink and quiet cackle. There’s something inherently American about his 1975 masterpiece, “Nashville”— how he’s reaching for something big and all-encompassing and audacious in interweaving 24 characters from a variety of backgrounds and social strata over a few days in the capital of country music.
*Dirty Dancing (1987). A study of class divides, labor, identity, women’s rights, health care and more hiding in a frothy coming-of-age romance, “Dirty Dancing” has all the right moves for understanding postwar America — anda killer soundtrack.
*Zabriskie Point (1970). Set in summer 1968 in the Mojave Desert, Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” is a hypnotic meditation on American ideals told through strangers turned lovers: a college dropout on the lam and a secretary driving through on a work trip. They spend one fever dream of an afternoon wandering the landscape, discussing societal tensions and stumbling into an extremely dusty orgy. (It’s Antonioni and the ’60s, after all.)
Nothing but a Man (1964). Starring an unforgettable Ivan Dixon (as Duff), with an outstanding supporting cast (Abbey Lincoln, Yaphet Kotto, Gloria Foster), “Nothing but a Man” tells a political story in a personal register. Its characters — informed by research trips that Roemer took across the South with his co-screenwriter, cinematographer and fellow Jew, Robert Young — are never anything other than human, for better and worse.
Disclosure Day (2026). The world, as a villainous Colin Firth puts it, is on the brink. Quasi-government operatives work in the shadows. Paranoia and distrust, sometimes with good reason, fill the air. The fight to reveal the truth is as furious as the fight to suppress it. Yes, “Disclosure Day” is an aliens-are-here epic, but tonally, when the cardinals, crop circles and car chases give way to regular people struggling through a chaotic nation, it conveys the anxiety and uncertainty suffusing modern-day, non-sci-fi American life.
This is a dog’s breakfast of selections, and who on earth would think that “Zabriskie Point” (a good movie) or “Dirty Dancing” (an awful movie) would define America. If I had to pick one of the above, it would be “Nashville,” but I bet you can guess what my own choice would be. Yes, it’s “The Last Picture Show,” of course. But remember: nobody puts Baby in a corner!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili turns up her nose at Andrzej’s dinner:
Hili: Are you going to eat that? Andrzej: Yes. Why are you asking?
Hili: You know perfectly well that a vegetarian diet doesn’t suit me.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy ty to będziesz jadł?
Ja: Tak, dlaczego pytasz?
Hili: Wiesz dobrze, że wegetariańska dieta mi nie odpowiada.
From Masih; are these real tears or crocodile tears?
Khamenei’s sons are weeping.
His victims’ families wept for decades. Nobody arrested them for crying. Unlike what your father did to ours.
Cry harder. It still won’t be enough.
However Mojtaba Khamenei who was appointed behind closed doors, is still invisible to the Public. pic.twitter.com/gZo0uBQQow
I’m posting a screenshot of Israel-hater Ana Kasparian’s tweet (reposted) in case she takes it down. The video is said to be AI generated, and it doesn’t ring true anyway. The two Community Notes call it out for being AI, the first saying this:
From Steve Stewart-Williams, who’s just written a new book on sex differences. I’ve read it and recommend it highly. And I think the explanation below is at least partly right:
“Because a mate’s status and wealth are more important to women than men, men may have evolved a stronger desire to achieve status and wealth… This immediately suggests an explanation for the fact that, on average, men earn more than women.”https://t.co/Lydw4XYa60pic.twitter.com/o3LOP2x4v2
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) July 4, 2026
From Luana; more antiscientific mishigas in New Zealand. I may write about this later:
Here’s an easy-read scientific submission on the bill to define women and men in NZ legislation. This group is not taking a position on the bill, but merely correcting all the unscientific nonsense flying around about the sexes.
This French Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was three years old, and would be 87 today had she lived. https://t.co/XhXRuv2KVQ
And one from Dr. Cobb. Look at the helmet on this mantis! What is it for? Is it sexually dimorphic?
A portrait of an adult female Stenophylla lobivertex, Dragon mantis, showing off the insane head crests. Horns on the eyes touch the horn on top giving the illusion that she has holes in her head. Probably the most unusually shaped mantis out there.#macro #nature #wildlife #mantis #insect #bugsky
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:
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.
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:
. . . on the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, President Donald Trump returned to Mount Rushmore after nine years of flirting with the idea of having one more face jointhe four presidents: his own.
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 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.
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 by Mairav Zonszein (born in Tel Aviv). 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.
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
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.
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!
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
Welcome to Saturday, July 4, 2026, and Independence Day in America: our country turns 250 years old today. I wonder how many Americans know exactly what event the day is celebrating. In case you meet such a miscreant, tell them this (my bold):
Independence Day, known colloquially as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday in the United States which commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, establishing the United States of America.
By doing this, the delegates to the Second Continental Congress declared that the Thirteen Colonies were no longer subject (and subordinate) to the monarch of Britain, King George III, and were now united, free, and independent states. The Congress voted to approve independence by passing the Lee Resolution on July 2 and adopted the Declaration of Independence two days later, on July 4.
But it might have been signed after it was adopted, so it’s not celebrating the signing of the document:
Historians have long disputed whether members of Congress signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, even though Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin all later wrote that they had signed it on that day. Most historians have concluded that the Declaration was signed nearly a month after its adoption, on August 2, 1776, and not on July 4 as is commonly believed.
Below is “John Trumbull‘s painting, Declaration of Independence, depicting the five-man drafting committee of the Declaration of Independence presenting their work to the Congress. The painting can be found on the back of the U.S. $2 bill. The original hangs in the US Capitol rotunda. It does not represent a real ceremony; the characters portrayed were never in the same room at the same time.”
There’s a Google Doodle today celebrating the Fourth of July; click to see the animated page where it goes:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
Footy news: Yesterday Argentina beat Cape Verde 3-2 in extra time, Colombia beat Ghana 1-0, and Australia tied Egypt 1-1 in full time, but won 4-2 on penalties, so the Socceroos are out of the World Cup. Let’s look at the first game, as Argentina is my favorite team. Messi scored again for Argentina, but the plucky team from the underpopulated islands almost knocked them out of the tournament.
Argentina survived an almighty scare to book their place in the World Cup round of 16 with a dramatic 3-2 win over Cape Verde after extra time Friday.
Tottenham defender Cristian Romero headed in the game winner via a deflection off Diney Borges from Lionel Messi‘s corner in the 111th minute, but only after Cape Verde had threatened to cause perhaps the greatest shock in World Cup history.
The African debutants twice found equalizers — one in extra time — to push the reigning world champions to the brink of an unthinkable upset.
Messi got his seventh of the tournament with a wonderfully taken goal in the first half only for Deroy Duarte to cancel it out in the second half and stun the thousands of Argentina fans inside Miami Stadium into silence.
With the score 1-1 after 90 minutes, Manchester United defender Lisandro Martínez appeared to end Cape Verde’s resistance early in extra time to make it 2-1.
But that was before fullback Sidny Cabral produced a moment of magic and possibly the goal of the World Cup so far when he cut in off the left and curled his effort into the top corner.
Argentina went ahead again when Borges inadvertently deflected Romero’s header into his own net. But there was still time for one more dramatic twist when Emiliano Martínez produced a stunning save to stop Cabral’s free kick and send Argentina through.
Here are the highlights of that game. On the video below, Argentina’s plays that yielded goals are at 2:20 (Messi), 14:19 and 19:24 (an assist from Messi’s corner kick);Cape Verdea’s at 5:15 and 16:03. The game was tied 1-1 at regulation time, but three more goals were scored in overtime.
*I’m a sucker for all articles giving advice about how Democrats should fix the party to win future elections. Michelle Cottle at the NYT joins the queue with an op-ed called “This pathetic groveling is no way to rebuild a party” (archived here). First, where does the groveling come from?
Not infrequently, I open my email to find a fund-raising request from the Democratic Party with a subject line that reads as though it was sent by a contrite boyfriend.
“Can I explain?”
“You deserve an explanation”
“Sorry to reach out on a Sunday”
“Let me try to convince you”
“Please”
“Can I level-set with you, Michelle?”
OK, that last one sounds more like a dippy business consultant trying to wow me with vapid jargon. But my point is that, right up front, these messages telegraph insecurity, pleading, chagrin. Hardly the vibe of a confident political team fighting the good fight. My overriding impulse is not to give the party campaign cash but to offer to pay for group therapy.
The Trump years have been hard on Democrats’ psyches. Every time the party’s leaders see the president nodding off on the job or read one of his late-night Truth bombs, they must agonize anew: How the heck did we get thrown over for that guy?
. . . The blue team needs to claw back some self-respect and reassure voters that they aren’t being asked to back a bunch of losers.
Cottle then goes off on a tangent, arguing that Republicans have a greater sense of community than do Democrats, though the GOP’s community is built on hate. (And what is the Democratic “community” built on? In the center, hatred of Trump, on the far Left, hatred of America, too.) But what advice does Cottle have for us Democrats?
But making people feel part of something larger than themselves is always a good bet. Remember the hopey-changey energy of Barack Obama’s first presidential run? For all its retrospective corniness, that campaign made people feel great about themselves and the leader they were supporting. The Democrats should be focused on making voters proud to support their team again.
Yes, yes, we know that, but how do we do it? And her whole column comes down to this one insipid paragraph:
Focusing on building relationships and a sense of shared values takes more work than creating quick hits optimized to elicit drunk donations. But considering the larger public’s tragically low opinion of and trust in the Democratic Party — the entire political system, really — Democrats need to shake things up. Maybe start by promoting an emotion other than exhaustion and a more inspiring message than: You have no other options.
And that’s it. We need to “shake things up” and tender “an inspiring message.” Yes, yes, we know that, too. But what message? Fix the economy, stupid? Maybe. But how about opening the borders, getting rid of ICE, distancing ourselves from Israel, and providing free gender-affirming care to all who want it? That’s not the message that will sway voters. Once again I’m disappointed with the lame advice of these columnists. Perhaps we should get a good candidate first. Here’s a possibility:
What if politics is all MAGA vs DSA; what if ’28 is AOC vs Kristi Noem? I often say “a centrist will emerge and win”, but when people say “who?”, I don’t know. Not joking: We may need to draft someone like McConaughey. Which is a bad idea! He’s an actor! But it might come to that https://t.co/gN6xZIctAD
The assault could see Poland’s vital infrastructure targeted by missiles or drones, or even Russian soldiers crossing the border into Natoterritory, Washington has said.
Sources close to Polish president Karol Nawrocki told Polish outlet Onetthatthe aim of Moscow’s possible assault, which could be launched in a matter of months, would be to provoke tensions and pressure Ukraine’s Western allies to suspend their military and financial aid.
The US “systematically informs Poland about ever-new Russian plans for a conventional attack on Nato’s eastern flank, from which Poland is by no means excluded”, a source close to the Polish president said.
Warsaw’s security services have admitted that a conventional attack, such as a small ground incursion, which Moscow may allege is an accident, is possible.
Other possibilities are a drone attack on infrastructure such as power stations or simulated air strikes forcing Poland to activate its air defence systems.
A Polish intelligence source said that a “hybrid attack in the border region” could take place, in the most extreme scenario.
An armed incursion involving Russian or Belarusian troops could be presented as a mistake, such as straying into Polish territory because of a GPS failure, or a fake rescue mission to retrieve a helicopter suffering from a malfunction, sources said.
Moscow could hope that Poland would be forced by the US to negotiate rather than responding forcefully and opening fire on Russian or Belarusian soldiers, sources told Onet.
Vladimir Putin would see a scenario in which Russians withdraw as a result of negotiations as a win from Moscow’s perspective, the sources said, with an end to Western support for Ukraine a possible condition it could demand in return for withdrawal from Poland.
You can also see this story at The Jerusalem Post. This plan reminds me of how the Germans attacked Poland from the other side on September 1, 1939. And now that the cat’s out of the bag, it won’t look like an accident any more. Ukraine is one thing, but an attack on a NATO ally is another, and I doubt that Putin would try to pull this off, desperate as he is to defeat Ukraine. I sent this link to Andrzej, who responded: “Objection—hearsay.” And the source appears to be only a Polish ambassador, so yes, it seems to be hearsay.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal, in a piece called “America and Israel at 250,” first reflects on the history of U.S.-Israeli relations, and then gives his take on how Israelis see Americans:
Israelis hold a deep admiration for America—not just as the source of their Amazon packages, but as a font of aspiration and support. One cannot ignore the powerful influence of the thriving American Jewish community. Even those Jews who went east instead of west, choosing Israeli hardship over American prosperity, could see in the cultural imports and the wealthy philanthropists that America truly was the “Golden Medina.” In the 1990s, and to some degree still today, “Made in America” has been shorthand for quality and luxury because, in the collective imagination, America remains a land of wealth and possibility.
Israeli rock legends Rami Fortis and Berry Sakharof describe the Israeli image of the U.S. quite well in their song “America”:
An open Chevrolet drives toward the great freedom
Disneyland strikes the world, everyone wants it all
There is no fear and no sadness, everything here is so perfect
America sells everyone’s dream
Is there a limit?
There is no limit.
How many songs can be written about America?
Perhaps the clearest symbol of this attachment is the man who has drawn so much American wrath in recent years: Benjamin Netanyahu. He is Israel’s answer to the American coastal elite—American-educated, fluent in English, and the man who imported American-style campaign tactics to Israeli politics. Far from hurting his career, that fluency with America—the accent, the degree, the media instincts—made him seem more qualified to lead, not less.
But the connection runs deeper than material culture. In the Israeli imagination, America still occupies the place it always has—the promised land’s own promised land, a place defined by unlimited possibility. It’s the country, as Marco Rubio recently described, “where anyone, from anywhere, can achieve anything.” For a state built by refugees and exiles, that idea lands differently than it does for most. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—written by the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus and inscribed on the Statue of Liberty—could just as easily describe the mission Israel set for itself decades later.
Writing from the original shining city on the hill to an audience that, in large part, lives on the new one, I’ll close with this: On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it’s worth saying plainly that Israel would not exist, or thrive, the way it does without the United States—not only because of the direct support, but because of the world that was created the day that ship landed at Plymouth Rock, the day that shot was fired at Concord, and the day a declaration opened with the words that all men are created equal. That world is the one in which the Jews could return to their ancestral homeland and flourish in the 21st century.
Of course support in the other direction is waning, which is ineffably sad. Even if the waning support is blamed on Netanyahu, you can bet that America is not going to rush into Israel’s arms when there’s a new Prime Minister. The opprobrium against Israel is based on both antisemitism and oppressor/oppressed narratives. Segal’s words are stirring, but what’s happening to Jews now is that Israel is becoming the promised land’s promised land.
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column from the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: We’ve got the gayest Parliament.”
→ Happy pride!: The outgoing prime minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer, was celebrating the end of Pride Month and, looking out at the crowd, said what I’m awarding Quote of the Week: “I’m really proud that we’ve got the gayest parliament, I don’t think just of all time—anywhere in the world. I don’t think there’s any parliament that is gayer than this one.”
Considering this is a country where everyone in the government wears wigs and dresses to do their jobs, I suppose being the gayest parliament is somewhat of an accomplishment.
I’ll add that there is likely no media company gayer than this one, not even close. Except maybe Out magazine. But a lot of good that does me! In a just world I would have been the grand marshal of the parade, but it seems that all Pride Month marches have been entirely rebranded as political, and they are not wavin’ my banner. There are barely even vestigial references to the original concept. Here’s the new Dyke March motto: “We’re here! We’re queer! Free Palestine is our demand!” It doesn’t even rhyme, folx.
Nellie is gay, of course, but she’s sure not pro-Palestine. And yes, the Dyke March motto is accurate (click on the link).
→ And how are the Jews this week?: Oh, well. Scott Wiener, the far-left state senator and congressional candidate from San Francisco, was chased away from the city’s annual trans march by activists yelling things like: “You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel, you piece of shit.” Scott doesn’t really even support Israel. He announced that it’s doing a genocide, that he won’t take AIPAC money, etc. But Scott is, yep, Jewish, and he took too long to say the magic genocide words. There are now two of these videos where he’s cornered by activists. In each, he is calm and silent, though you can see there’s fear in his eyes. Here’s how the local press covered it: “We did the unthinkable and asked an actual trans person who organized the first Trans March to weigh in on Wiener’s little snit fit.” The silent man being berated is framed as the hysterical one. His little snit fit.
. . . Here’s Ana Kasparian, a major progressive influencer and co-host of The Young Turks podcast, giving us a fresh Hezbollah take:
And on The View, the ladies listened as radio personality Charlamagne Tha God explained that “Trump is Netanyahu’s puppet.” And on CNN, we have someone commenting on Jon Ossoff’s relative strengths versus Josh Shapiro: “He might be the Democrat that can thread the needle because even though he’s Jewish, he’s very critical of the Israeli government, very critical of Benjamin Netanyahu.” And: “Jon Ossoff may not read as Jewish as Josh Shapiro does, for whatever’s that worth.” So that’s where it’s at right now. There’s a far-right website called The Unz Review that I like to keep tabs on so I know what’s going on (I also read Jacobin, don’t worry), and at first Unz really shocked me every time I’d open it, but lately the weird thing is that a lot of the articles on it seem like they could run anywhere. Maybe they’ll start being syndicated in local San Francisco blogs.
Kasparian is getting worse and worse with her love of terrorists. Note that Hezbollah has been designated a terrorist organization by a lot of countries, including Canada, Australia, the U.S., the UK, Germany, Thailand, Argentina, Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait, UK, Azerbaijan, UAE, Bulgaria, and India.
→ Congratulations to the Empire State Building climbers: Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, known for starring in the Netflix documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story, climbed to the top of the Empire State Building this week. They went without permission or harnesses (doing this for attention on social media is their whole deal), though it did rhyme with Phillipe Petit’s stunt, where he walked across the Twin Towers on tightrope in the ’70s. At the very top of the building’s spire, they unfurled a banner that said, “When the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace.” Okay. And then, right before they got arrested, the guy proposed!
Look at this engagement ring photo. She climbed that entire tower with this manicure. Thus begins July, straight female pride month.
*Two days ago I took a poll about people’s views on wishing for death and suffering of their political/ideological opponents. Here are the results as of this morning. 63% of voters would not wish for the death of an opponent, and that merciful sentiment rises to over 86% of those who don’t wish for suffering or an agonizing death of their opponents. I should have been more explicit and said “Is it okay to expressed wishes.” But I’m glad to see the commentariat is not a bunch of angry pit bulls. Good on you!
*Below is a livestream of a corpse flower at Virginia’s Norfolk Botanical Garden that should bloom between today and July 8 (h/t Peter). The caption and a link:
Watch as a rare corpse flower (Amorphophallus titanum) blooms at Norfolk Botanical Garden. The massive flower, nicknamed “Lady MacDeath,” may not bloom again for another 10 years.
The flower is from Sumatra, and gets its name from the odor of rotting meat it emits when blooming. That suggests that the pollinators are carrion eaters. And, according to Wikipedia, they are. The adaptations of this plant are stunning:
As the spathe gradually opens, the spadix heats up to 37 °C (99 °F), and rhythmically releases a powerful smell to attract carrion insects which feed on or lay their eggs in rotting meat. The potency of the smell gradually increases from late evening until the middle of the night, when carrion beetles and flesh flies are active as pollinators, then tapers off towards morning. Analyses of chemicals released by the spadix show the stench includes dimethyl trisulfide (like limburger cheese), dimethyl disulfide (garlic), trimethylamine (rotting fish), isovaleric acid (sweaty socks), benzyl alcohol (sweet floral scent), phenol (like Chloraseptic), and indole (like faeces). The smell is detectable up to 800 m (0.50 mi) away. The inflorescence’s deep red colour and texture contribute to the illusion that the spathe is a piece of meat. During bloom, the tip of the spadix is roughly human body temperature, which helps the perfume volatilize. The heated spadix creates a micro-convection in the cool ambient air, enhancing the transport of the scent. The heat helps to convince carrion-feeding insects that a dead body is present, attracting them to the inflorescence.
Keep checking in: it won’t bloom for long!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej are both in the doldrums:
. . and another great medieval letter from TherionArms:
From Masih: Crocodile tears for the late Ayatollah. It’s a good thing Israel didn’t know where this was happening. (Or maybe they did but didn’t want the optics of attacking the funeral.)
This video went viral on Iranian social media;
Ghalibaf and Araghchi, regime’s top negotiators with America standing over the coffin of their Supreme Leader, killed by America.
The negotiation table just got a lot more awkward.
He acted with incredible gentleness, making sure not to frighten the owl, and ultimately managed to rescue it successfully 💓 pic.twitter.com/2fnJ7NYAg2
— Beauty of music and nature 🌺🌺 (@Axaxia88) July 2, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was 1.5 years old and would be 84 today had she lived. https://t.co/AVZMxTLXah
Ramisyllis multicaudata has one head and up to a thousand rear ends. It lives inside a sponge, and every time its body branches into a new channel, all the organs branch too. One worm, shaped like a tree, threaded through its host. #WormWednesday Image from onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/…
Welcome to Friday, July 3, 2024, and for most Americans the start of the three-day Fourth of July weekend. It’s American Redneck Day, although I don’t know why we’re celebrating a group (conventionally, poor Southern whites) whose members are stereotyped as ignorant and bigoted. The site celebrates them this way:
. . . . the 1970s brought “Redneck chic.” This saw it as fashionable to be viewed as a redneck, and the connotations of race or class were not a part of it. Instead, it involved many people pretending to be rednecks, in areas such as their dress—by wearing western clothes—and in the music they listened to—by listening to country music, such as the Outlaw sounds of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. In the 1980s, there began to be more “upscale rednecks,” mirroring films such as Urban Cowboy, while at the same time there were still actual poor “rednecks.”
In the 1990s, the country music boom and the rise of blue collar-comedians such as Jeff Foxworthy brought the redneck aesthetic to an even wider audience, and like the “Redneck chic” of the 1970s and the upscale Urban Cowboys of the 1980s, it to had an underlying level of sophistication to it. For example, many of the country music stars and comedians of the time, and up to the present day, were college-educated and wealthy, while marketing their material to a working-class and non-college-educated audience.
As is apparent, there are many views of what “redneck” means and who is a redneck. Some embrace the term and see it as a symbol of pride, while some reject it. Regardless of your views on rednecks or redneck culture, today is a day to remember the impact it has had on America.
To me, cowboys and lovers of country music are not rednecks, and the term is not the same as “blue collar workers,” but so it goes. Here’s Jeff Foxworthy, who’s made a comedy career by joking about rednecks. Here Foxworthy expatiates on the defining traits of the species:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 3 Wikipedia page.
There will be lighter posting tomorrow because it’s a HOLIDAY. Bear with me; I do my best.
Da Nooz:
*Footy News:In yesterday’s World Cup games, Switzerland beat Algeria 2-0, Portugal beat Croatia 2-1, and Spain beat Austria 3-0. Let’s see the last game, which sees Spain going into the knockout round of 16:
Mikel Oyarzabal scored twice as Spain cruised into the World Cup round of 16 with a 3-0 win over Austria at SoFi Stadium on Thursday to extend their unbeaten streak to 34 games.
After an underwhelming group stage, which included a surprise draw with Cape Verde, Spain now head with fresh momentum toward a last-16 meeting with either Portugal or Croatia on Monday in Arlington, Texas.
“The great teams step up when it’s needed,” Spain coach Luis de la Fuente said. “We played a great match. We came close to perfection, but we must keep improving. There is always room for improvement, because every upcoming match will be very difficult.”
It also marked a significant hurdle overcome for one of the pretournament favorites, with Thursday’s result their first knockout win at the World Cup since they beat Netherlands in the 2010 final.
After Spain’s group stage exit in 2014 and failures at the first knockout hurdle in the past two tournaments, Oyarzabal became the first Spanish player to score a World Cup knockout goal since Andres Iniesta’s extra-time winner in the final in South Africa.
The Real Sociedad striker first found the net with a first-time finish in the 34th minute after fine buildup play involving Pedri and Marc Cucurella. And he put the cap on Spain’s dominant win after another cross from Cucurella and another cool finish past the Austria goalkeeper.
Here are the highlights, with Apain’s three goals (on the video) at 5:06, 8:34, and 12:15 (one Spanish goal was called back for interference with the goalkeeper).
A large chunk of the $2 billion haul President Trump took in last year came as hundreds of thousands of his fans and other investors bet on a speculative cryptocurrency called $TRUMP, hoping its value would soar with his return to the White House.
But while Mr. Trump amassed an eye-popping $636 million from the cryptocurrency, known as a memecoin, many of his followers who heeded his call to purchase the coin came out losers.
That outcome, documented by an independent analysis of trades and fees paid out from $TRUMP token sales, is drawing renewed attention this week, as Mr. Trump for the first time has detailed the extraordinary $1.4 billion in revenue he secured just from the cryptocurrency industry since he returned to the White House.
The president’s 927-page financial disclosure showed how Mr. Trump and his family reaped huge financial rewards in 2025 through his money-losing Trump Media venture and a separate cryptocurrency firm called World Liberty Financial, even as routine investors suffered vast losses.
He also amassed hundreds of millions through deals that involved foreign governments or corporations with agenda items pending before the Trump administration.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump dismissed questions about how much money he had made after returning to the White House, suggesting that he left personal financial decisions related to his investments to others.
“I don’t know if I had a better career in politics or business,” Mr. Trump said as he was about to board his new Air Force One jet donated by the government of Qatar with his two oldest sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., looking on. “But I had a great career in business. And you saw the cash.”
The memecoin, which features an image of Mr. Trump pumping his fist the way he did after a 2024 assassination attempt, has no intrinsic value itself. Instead, it was a bet on the aura around Mr. Trump and the idea that the coin’s fortunes would rise with his presidency.
In a way, Mr. Trump’s cryptocurrency windfall is a reflection of the speculative nature of the nascent industry, in which executives behind these often highly volatile ventures are at times able to generate huge profits at the expense of smaller investors, who often lose vast sums on experimental coins.
Former federal financial regulators said Mr. Trump has taken that to a new extreme, structuring his crypto ventures so he always made money on the front end, according to disclosures from the companies, no matter what happened to the business in the long run.
“It is hard to wrap your head around that the president of the United States would engage in this level of self-enrichment at the expense of so many of his supporters,” said Lee Reiners, a former Federal Reserve Bank examiner who now studies cryptocurrency issues at Duke University. “This is a president of the United States who has made more money off crypto since he took office than he made in any prior year in his entire business career.”
I’m not sure how they structured deal to ensure that Trump always profited, good times or bad, but it seems unethical, even if he doesn’t oversee what’s happening. As for other investments, well, I’d be surprised that the people who oversee them don’t know Trump’s preference sand what he’s likely to do. All in all, it doesn’t seem like his portfolio is “neutral,” and so he makes a billion bucks per year.
*Remember Gaza? Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal summarizes his feelings after “1000 Days since October 7.”
My first visit to Gaza after October 7 showed a relatively intact city, hidden amidst plumes of smoke and sounds of battle. A year later, in November 2024, Jabalia was a massive pile of rubble, stretching from horizon to horizon, with packs of dogs roaming among the ruins and garbage. On the thousandth day of the war, nothing remained in the area. The once densely populated city looked desolate and quiet, like the surface of the moon. Engineering drills searched for tunnels below ground, with D9 bulldozers operating above. In the vast majority of Gaza, nothing remained, neither above ground nor below it.
This is the situation in all the territory controlled by Israel, which now makes up about two-thirds of the Strip’s territory. Rafah was wiped off the face of the earth, as were most of Khan Yunis and huge swaths of Gaza City. Ninety-two percent of the tunnels have been completely destroyed; the rest will soon follow.
Inside Hamas-controlled Gaza, there have been increasing reports of a resurgence, tunnel rehabilitation, training exercises, and an inevitable IDF operation. These reports should be viewed with intense skepticism. Hamas is failing to genuinely rearm after its smuggling routes in the air, on land, at sea, and underground were choked off. Three hundred sixty-two smuggling tunnels from Egypt were destroyed in Rafah. Training is conducted in hiding, reconstruction materials are not arriving, and the newly dug tunnels in the sand are barely shored up with whatever is available: sheet metal, wood scraps. Iran bends over backward to protect Hezbollah; for Hamas, it does not even pick up the phone. That is the consequence for a proxy that starts a war without permission and becomes a lost cause.
Perhaps this is why Hamas recently agreed to terms that include handing over all heavy weaponry, tunnel maps, production sites, and weapons caches. Its leaders agreed that the weapons would be surrendered to a committee, not to Israel. The multinational force that will subsequently deploy will serve as a buffer between Hamas and Israel, and will be responsible for the collection. Israel will withdraw only after Hamas is disarmed, the militias’ weapons are also collected, all government positions are handed over to a technocratic committee, and police officers who fail a security clearance are forced to retire. The agreements make no mention of small arms, which flood Gaza by the tens of thousands. How many are there? The divisions operating in Gaza used to transport rifles to the Israeli border, where bulldozers would run them over and crush them. At a certain point, they asked to stop collecting weapons because it had become their primary activity.
. . . looking back today, I can say this much—through victories and defeats, across a thousand days of heroism and sacrifice, Israel and her people have clawed their way back from the brink of despair.
There is a verse in Ezekiel that has taken on new meaning for me: “And when I passed by and saw you flailing in your blood, I said to you, though you were in your blood, Live! I said to you, though you were in your blood, Live!” Ezekiel is recounting God’s adoption of the Jewish people—his command to live is his first order to his new nation.
It is not a promise that the blood is wiped away, or that the wound stops being a wound. It is a command spoken over a body that has not yet answered—twice, because once was not enough to be believed. Israel, on the morning of October 7, was exactly that: flailing, exposed, drenched in its own blood, with no guarantee it would rise. What the thousand days since have shown is not that the wound healed, but that the command was heeded. Every hostage returned, every enemy brought low, every reservist who answered the call—all of it is the same word, spoken back, day after day: live.
If you’re not Israeli, it’s hard to keep up with what’s going on in Gaza, but what’s above is better than I expected. No more tunnels, no large arms, and no weapons caches. But Hamas “agreed to terms” before and didn’t abide by them. And I’m worried about why they don’t deal with small arms, as Hamas should have no arms. Yes, Hamas certainly lost the conflict, but nevertheless it persists. When it no longer persists, then the serious rebuilding of Gaza can begin.
*I didn’t used to watch soccer until about 20 years ago, and then fell in love with “the beautiful game,” which is now my favorite sport (I still don’t watch any sport much). If you’re a novice, the NYT tells us “How to World Cup,” a title that irks me a bit (the article is archived here). There are tips about what to wear, who to root for, what to say, and so on. I find that a bit ridiculous, but here are a few:
WHAT TO WEAR
The World Cup is not the time to be subtle. If you want to dress like your favorite Epcot pavilion, THIS IS YOUR TIME. When you go to an indie concert, you never want to wear the T-shirt of the band you’re seeing. This tournament is the opposite of that. Wear the colors of the nation you support in shameless fashion. Be full-on Timothée-Chalamet-courtside-at-a-Knicks-game brazen. The only other option is to dress like a large swath of traveling England fans and go shirt-off. If that is the case, be different from all those England fans and make sure you are wearing S.P.F. 60 sunscreen.
WHOM TO ROOT FOR [JAC: yes, they say “whom”!]
The United States, naturally, if you’re reading this in the United States. Our boys have thus far played swaggy, buccaneering soccer and coaxed from audiences the greatest of fan emotions: delusional hope. But the true joy of the World Cup is the chance for fans around the world to reconnect to their roots.
Nope, I’m rooting for Argentina as I want Messi to go out on a World Cup win.
WHAT TO TALK ABOUT [one example]
The smaller teams have roared.Cape Verde, population of around 525,000, an archipelagic nation consisting of 10 volcanic islands scattered across the central Atlantic Ocean, has charmed, becoming the smallest nation ever to reach the knockout rounds. The 40-year-old goalkeeper, known chummily as Vozinha (full name: Josimar José Évora Dias), saved seven shots to hold tournament favorite Spain to a goal-less tie. He now has over 17 million Instagram followers, more than Patrick Mahomes, Jalen Brunson and Victor Wembanyama combined.
WHAT NEVER TO SAY
“Nothing can go wrong now” — never let these words escape your lips. Don’t tempt fate and call a game over. On Sunday, Canada made history by reaching the round of 16 for the first time, shocking South Africa with an exclamation-point 92nd-minute strike from Stephen Eustáquio, who instantly wove himself into his nation’s history alongside true greats like Alanis Morissette, Margaret Atwood and Barenaked Ladies. Japan’s dream of a first-ever knockout-stage win was dashed by Brazil roaring back from a goal down, stealing victory in the 96th minute.
Even the United States has not been immune. Our boys won back-to-back World Cup games for the first time in 96 years. We were on our way to being undefeated until the 98th minute of the game against Turkey, when Arda Guler nutmegged our hero Pulisic, a soccer humiliation akin to whipping off his shorts in public, helping his countryman Kaan Ayhan to net the winner with the last kick of the ball. This is soccer. A game in which, within the blink of an eye, both teams can soar and then feel their wax wings melting.
And a good story:
Perhaps my favorite World Cup story occurred in Lawrence, Kan., where the Algerian team set up camp at a local DoubleTree hotel. The town’s citizens quickly fell truly, madly, deeply for North African soccer and culture. When the Fennec Foxes clinched their place in the knockout rounds last weekend, the Lawrencians stood side by side with Algerian fans to welcome the team back in the early hours of the morning. Together they illuminated the Kansas night sky with a spectacular display of firework-fueled passion worthy of Algiers. This was the stuff of World Cup lore, the creation of stories that will be told and retold for generations to come, destined to become only bigger and more wild-eyed with each retelling.
Still, it’s a bit condescending to tell us what to do/say/wear, and so on. But what else do you expect from a paper that turns “World Cup” into a verb?
*The Free Press reports on a letter sent by 170 faculty members (Jewish and non-Jewish) to Harvard students avowing solidarity but saying that antisemitism is not under control at Harvard. The article is written by a Harvard professor and a Harvard alumna.
From the editors:
According to officials at Harvard University, its antisemitism problem is under control. Reports of antisemitic incidents on campus are down after the numbers exploded in the wake of October 7, 2023. Today, 170 Jewish and non-Jewish Harvard faculty members will publish a letter stating that there is more to the story, and that while there’s less overt antisemitism at the university this past year, a more insidious form of Jew-hate has emerged. Jewish students are hiding their Star of David necklaces and scrubbing their CVs of references to Israel to self-protect. Two signatories to the letter explain what’s still not working—and what the school should do about it. —The Editors
The entire letter (the Presidential Task Force report they mention is here:
Earlier this spring, a group of Harvard faculty and staff published an open letter condemning theTitle VI lawsuit filed against Harvard by the Department of Justice in March. The DOJ claims that Harvard failed to enforce its rules to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassmentand discrimination, thereby denying them equal educational access. Their letter does notacknowledge any antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias on campus. Instead, it accuses the DOJ of“weaponizing antisemitism.”
We understand why colleagues question the merits and motives of the Title VI lawsuit. But ones hould not turn a blind eye to the fact that many Jewish and Israeli students have suffered harassment and discrimination over the last few years, degrading their Harvard experience. Ignoring students’ accounts is misleading and hurtful. There are many examples documented in the 300-page Presidential Task Force on Combatting Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias report and elsewhere, and these problems have been acknowledged by President Alan Garber.
Among the incidents reported to faculty, including members of the Task Force:
(1) Gay Jewish students were excluded from LGBTQ groups in the College and at HLS because they refused to renounce Zionism.
(2) An Israeli undergraduate student was told to leave a classroom by an instructor because her being Israeli made other students uncomfortable.
(3) A Jewish undergraduate student was harassed because of her identity, including in a social media post saying she “looks just as dumb as her nose is crooked.” We believe that the situation has improved to some extent recently, but challenges remain. Over the past year, Jews and Israelis at Harvard have reported hiding their identity including by wearing a baseball cap over their kippot, tucking in their Star of David, and scrubbing Jewish-sounding names or activities from their resumes.
We write in solidarity with all Jewish and Israeli students, especially those who have personally encountered bias. We see you. We hear you. We will continue to stand with you and stand up for you.
Then there are the signatures. The FP article adds this:
Two notable observations about signatories to the faculty letter. First, many are not Jewish—support from allies is crucial. Second, a large proportion come from Harvard Medical School. Physicians are tasked with identifying and treating root causes and attending to both acute and chronic problems. We know that hate and discrimination of any form has absolutely no place in the delivery of healthcare. Moreover, the vast majority of medical students at Harvard will be directly involved in caring for patients who seek their skills and healing capacity; by definition in medicine, this involves providing impartial, empathic, evidence-based care to all, including Jewish and Israeli patients and their families.
There is more work to be done at Harvard. The 170 Jewish and non-Jewish faculty signatories to the letter stand with Jewish and Israeli students on campus, and with the aim that they are free to bring their full selves and identities everywhere on campus without fear of bias, harassment, bullying, or ostracization.
I asked a liberal but non-Jewish colleague at Harvard why he/she didn’t sign the letter, and was told that it might constitute evidence to Trump that Harvard is deeply antisemitic, resulting in the government withholding more grant money from the school. And that, said my colleague, would hurt Jewish students more than the small degree of antisemitism that remains. Don’t ask me, as I’m not there.
The U.S. and Oman are looking for ways to break Iran’s insistence on charging tolls for ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Their chief lever in indirect talks was a promise to unfreeze some of the $100 billion in Iranian funds held overseas.
So far, Tehran isn’t taking the bait. Its military leaders are responding with a fresh round of threats against ships passing through one of the world’s most trafficked waterways.
U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner traveled to Doha this week to talk with Qatari mediators about how to break the impasse and settle the implementation of last month’s initial agreement to open the strait. Both the U.S. and Iranian teams discussed recent fighting in Lebanon with Qatari mediators, a conflict that has added another wrinkle to the process, people familiar with the discussions said.
The U.S. diplomats offered a trade-off to Iran, the people said: Relinquish its claim to control the strait and renounce toll payments in exchange for billions of dollars of unfrozen funds.
Under last month’s pact with the U.S., Iran was set to get access to part of the $100 billion of its funds frozen abroad. Iran’s economy is badly in need of a fresh injection of foreign currency amid rampant inflation driven by years of sanctions.
Talks had initially been progressing toward the release of $6 billion held in Qatar but Iran’s decision to block the strait has set back the release, the people said.
On Thursday, Iran signaled the reward wasn’t enough to change its position. Upon returning from Doha, Iran’s negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi, insisted Hormuz is “under Iran’s command,” not the U.S.’s.
Tehran’s military doubled down later in the day, warning that any ship not passing through an Iran-approved route would face an “immediate and powerful” response.
I have a three-word response to this: bomb Kharg Island. It’s a good thing I’m not President, eh?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili objects to everything—but nothing in particular. She’s just objectionable.
Hili: I firmly object. Andrzej: To what?
Hili: That calls for further investigation.
In Polish:
Hili: Stanowczo protestuję.
Ja: Przeciwko czemu?
Hili: To wymaga dalszego badania.
From Luana; Hakeem Jeffries congratulates a Democratic Socialist loon on her primary victory. Such is the coopting of the Democratic Party:
A smart, strategic Republican Party would run a slate of bland, pin-striped party cogs who think capitalism and America are good and easily retain the Senate and probably the House, but we don’t live in that universe. https://t.co/N1FxfTuPxV
A video described in the Jerusalem Post, released by survivors of Oct. 7 on the 1000th day after the massacre. English translation:
For 1000 days, our family preferred to keep this recording to ourselves. This is the horrifying moment when my little brother confirms to us that Dad and Mom were murdered. Today, we decided to release it, to demand truth, justice, and accountability. Accountability must begin with taking responsibility – everyone who had a hand on the wheel must go home and take responsibility, suits and uniforms alike.
במשך 1000 ימים המשפחה שלנו העדיפה להשאיר את ההקלטה הזאת לעצמנו.
זה הרגע המחריד שבו אחי הקטן מאמת לנו שאבא ואמא נרצחו.
היום, החלטנו לפרסם אותה, כדי לדרוש אמת, צדק, ותיקון.
תיקון חייב להתחיל מלקיחת אחריות – כל מי שהיה עם יד על ההגה חייב ללכת הביתה ולקחת אחריות, חליפות ומדים כאחד pic.twitter.com/VxrXuGIYvX
— שיר מתיאס הבת של שחר ושלומי (@MathiasShir) July 2, 2026
This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was not quite two years old, and would have been 84 today had she lived. https://t.co/nGaZNdCIRT
Welcome to Thursday, July 2, 2026, and it’s National Freedom from Fear of Speaking Day. Many people have a phobia about speaking in public, but the gentleman in the painting below overcame it to have his say in a town meeting. This is of course Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” painting (the original), one of his famous 1943 series of “Four Freedoms“, all on display at the Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, MA. I photographed this along with another fearless speaker in 2012 meeting, “Moving Naturalism Forward,” organized by physicist Sean Carroll in Stockbridge.
This is what Wikipedia says about the painting:
Freedom of Speech depicts a scene of a 1942 Arlington town meeting in which Jim Edgerton, the lone dissenter to the town selectmen’s announced plans to build a new school, as the old one had burned down, was accorded the floor as a matter of protocol. Edgerton supported the rebuilding process but was concerned about the tax burden of the proposal, as his family farm had been ravaged by disease. A memory of this scene struck Rockwell as an excellent fit for illustrating “freedom of speech”, and inspired him to use his Vermont neighbors as models for the entire Four Freedoms series.
The blue-collar speaker wears a plaid shirt and suede jacket, with dirty hands and a darker complexion than others in attendance. The other attendees are wearing white shirts, ties and jackets. One of the men in the painting is holding a document that reveals a subject of the meeting as “a discussion of the town’s annual report”. Edgerton’s youth and workmanlike hands are fashioned with a worn and stained jacket, while the other attendees appear to be older and more neatly and formally dressed. According to Bruce Cole of The Wall Street Journal, Edgerton is shown “standing tall, his mouth open, his shining eyes transfixed, he speaks his mind, untrammeled and unafraid”, and his face resembles Abraham Lincoln. According to Robert Scholes, the work shows audience members in rapt attention with admiration of the speaker, who resembles a Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart character in a Frank Capra film. According to John Updike, the work is painted without any painterly brushwork.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 2 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
Footy news: The U.S. beat Bosnia and Herzogovina 2-0, securing its first win in the knockout round since 2002. But there’s some bad news about red cards:
First, the good news: The United States men’s national team beat Bosnia-Herzegovina 2-0 in the World Cup round of 32 Wednesday night.
Now, the problematic: If the Americans are going to continue advancing, they will have to do it without their top goal scorer.
Folarin Balogun scored what proved to be the decisive goal for the U.S. just before halftime — his third of the tournament — but was then sent off just after the hour mark in a controversial decision that will see him suspended for the round-of-16 match against Belgium.
“It wasn’t a perfect day by any means,” defender Chris Richard said. “But it was our day.”
The red card came after Balogun collided with Bosnian defender Tarik Muharemovic just inside the U.S. attacking third. Both players were on the ground initially, but then the referee, Raphael Claus of Brazil, was called to the monitor by the video assistant referee.
After watching the slow-motion footage, Claus determined that Balogun had raked his cleats down Muharemovic’s leg and onto his foot and ankle, sending him off for serious foul play. Balogun looked shocked; he trudged to the sideline and was consoled by Christian Pulisic and Timothy Weah.
“We had to dig deep for that one,” Pulisic said. “It didn’t go exactly to plan with the red card, but that just shows what a good team we are. We said in the hydration break, you know, this is what it takes to be a really strong team. And, we were able to do it.”
Balogun is the fifth American to receive a red card at a World Cup and is the first player from any country to score and receive a red card in the same knockout game since France’s Zinedine Zidane in the 2006 final.
Ah, I remember Zidane kicked out for headbutting an Italian player after they exchanged “words.” Here are 15 minutes of highlights from the game above: the two plays leading to U.S. goals are at 4:50 and 10:51 (penalty kick); the red-card play at 6:56. (The U.S. scored two goals that were erased by offside calls.) The U.S. won despite losing a top scorer for the last 30 minutes of the game, and we’ll now advance to the round of 16.
Republicans are hampered by the unpopularity of President Trump and his diminished standing on the economy, while most of the Democratic candidates are so far running ahead of their party’s own struggling brand, the polls show.
Winning the Senate remains a stiff challenge for Democrats. Republicans hold 53 seats, meaning that Democrats would need to flip at least four seats while defending all of their own vulnerable ones.
The Times/Siena polls looked at the six states that are considered to be the Democratic Party’s best shots at flipping Republican-held seats: Alaska, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. The surveys found that while all six states are close enough to be competitive, if the election were held today Republicans would be favored in enough states to keep control of the Senate.
But the new polls suggest that Democrats have a path.
Mr. Trump carried five of the states in 2024, and if all six states were considered together he won them by an average of eight percentage points. In the polls, the average of the Senate races in those six states was a tie, with 47 percent for both Republicans and Democrats. The shift shows how far the political environment has tilted in the Democrats’ direction ahead of the midterm elections.
The Times/Siena polls show Democrats with a slim edge in Maine and a more substantial lead in North Carolina. Republican candidates lead narrowly in three states: Alaska, Iowa and Ohio. Texas is tied.
Voters across all six battlegrounds were thoroughly frustrated by rising prices — and many blamed Mr. Trump. Only 36 percent of voters approved of his handling of cost-of-living issues, including an abysmal 24 percent among independent voters.
What would it mean if Democrats took the Senate? Well, it would prevent passage of bills that are initiated by Trump. (This assumes that parties would vote as a bloc.) And if the House becomes Democratic as well, then bills that Democrats like and passed in both houses would go to the President’s desk, where he’d veto them; and a veto could not be overriden. We’d thus have a divided government, but if you dislike Trump, his initiatives and appointments would have a smaller chance of passing. I am making no predictions about any changes in Congress as I’m no pundit.
It’s Wednesday, July 1, and the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, famously defined a conservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” An Iran hawk is made the same way. According to The Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump reviewed military options for a full-scale war against Iran to “finish the job,” but has decided, for now, not to move forward.
The Wall Street Journal article is here, and is archived here.
The report says Trump is concerned that renewed military conflict could hurt the chances of a diplomatic resolution and of dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, and that he’s shown willingness to let indirect talks in Qatar run past the August 18 deadline. He is said to be fine with continuing limited strikes on Iranian targets if Tehran violates the current temporary deal—as it already has, repeatedly.
How are those negotiations going?
Not well. It seems JD Vance’s “historic” face-to-face achievement was a one-off. Washington has been quietly downgraded from talking to the Great Satan to negotiating with the Little Satan instead—a senior Qatari official confirmed that U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Qatari officials in Doha, but there are currently no high-level U.S.-Iran meetings scheduled.
How are those negotiations going?
Not well. It seems JD Vance’s “historic” face-to-face achievement was a one-off. Washington has been quietly downgraded from talking to the Great Satan to negotiating with the Little Satan instead—a senior Qatari official confirmed that U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Qatari officials in Doha, but there are currently no high-level U.S.-Iran meetings scheduled.
Faced with Iran publicly denying that peace talks even exist, Vance is denying reality right back, insisting it’s merely a “Persian negotiating tactic.” He’s not wrong that rejectionism is a tactic—he’s just wrong about what it’s negotiating for. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, confirmed the delegation will skip U.S. officials entirely, meeting only the Qataris in Doha to talk about unfreezing Iran’s own assets. The tactic isn’t stalling for a better peace. It’s stalling for a better payment: extract the MoU concessions first, discuss the nuclear file never.
Iranian officials have shown no willingness to meet U.S. nuclear demands, focusing instead on asserting control over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran says it will impose its “sovereignty and new policy” there regardless of whether it reaches an agreement with Oman, calling the strait a purely internal matter. Reports differ on the nature of the proposed transit fees—Iran calls them mandatory, a regional diplomat calls them voluntary, and Oman’s foreign minister rejects fees outright but leaves room for “maritime service” mechanisms such as safety and pollution measures. Regardless of that distinction, Iran seems set on asserting authority over the waterway: it has already indicated that ships paying “security fees” and following IRGC protocols would get priority transit, while others face delays.
Iran will not make a deal the U.S. can accept. That’s the reality. The only question left is how many more “historic” handshakes, Doha detours, and denied peace talks it takes before that reality mugs Vance the way it mugged every liberal Kristol had in mind.
What Segal is saying is that Iran won’t even make a deal that gives Trump ammunition for saying he achieve his goal that “Iran will never have nuclear weapons”—much less anything else he could brag about. If Trump is unwilling to admit defeat or pretend that a total defeat is a total victory, he’d have to go back to war.
Democratic dissatisfaction with the status quo percolated through Colorado’s primaries Tuesday as a socialist defeated a longtime congresswoman and Sen. Michael Bennet lost his gubernatorial bid to the state’s combative attorney general.
Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old Democratic socialist, toppled Rep. Diana DeGette, 68, for a Denver congressional seat, according to the Associated Press. Her win is the latest advance for a socialist groundswell that is forcing a reckoning for Democrats. Bennet lost to Phil Weiser, who assailed Bennet’s votes to confirm some of President Trump’s nominees and increase funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and criticized his support from wealthy donors.
“The incumbents that are there right now are too complacent,” Kiros said in an interview Tuesday ahead of the election. “I think what we’re seeing is a reckoning and a referendum, frankly, on the leadership of the party to actually fight for the policies that the voters care about.”
Colorado is the latest flashpoint in a Democratic civil war. A slate of left-wing candidates toppled Democratic House incumbents or won crowded races in New York last week, riding endorsements from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. In Maine, Graham Platner won the Democratic primary in June, putting a progressive with a working-class message—and a complicated past—on the ballot for Democrats in one of the most competitive Senate seats in the November midterm elections.
The victories in New York set off alarm bells for centrists, and the elections in Colorado served as a barometer for whether progressive candidates appeal to voters outside coastal metropolitan areas. Kiros topped DeGette 51% to 42% with 93% of the vote counted, the AP reported. Weiser led Bennet 56% to 44%.
Centrists scored at least one win Tuesday as Sen. John Hickenlooper fought off a primary challenge from the left. Hickenlooper’s easy victory came in a race that was seen as closer than expected in the final stretch.
Them’s big leads for the progressives, too! I’m not sure why the Democratic party is moving leftwards, which I don’t think is a good way to win Presidential elections, at least. Perhaps the Party is so frustrated with having lost both the Presidency and all of Congress that its members are taking any new direction, especially one that smells like “greater change.” And of course we know now that it’s no impediment to winning if you hate Israel: here’s what Grok tells me about Kiros’s stand on the Jewish nation:
She advocates ending all U.S. military aid to Israel (including defensive systems like Iron Dome), accuses Israel of apartheid, occupation, colonialism, and genocide in Gaza, and calls for an arms embargo. Her positions have been a central part of her campaign, which is backed by groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Justice Democrats. She frames U.S. support for Israel as complicity in what she describes as genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Dansky was once senior counsel for the ACLU Center of Justice. In this case she was on the other side of the ACLU, whose attorneys (including co-director of LGBTQ and HIV rights, Chase Strangio) argued against the state bans. The ACLU has also split with former feminist allies by arguing for the housing of biological men in women’s prisons, including those with records of violent sex offenses. These efforts in trying to force society to reimagine biology are clearly failing, but the outraged reaction yesterday shows the fight isn’t over. NBC described the decision as a “major blow to LGBTQ rights,” and former VP contender Tim Walz claimed the “Supreme Court says schools can be cruelto my trans kids”: [note that the NBC link does not go to NBC]
Cruel is an extraordinary word to describe the act of allowing states to object to a radical social program that was implemented virtually everywhere ahead of both scientific and (especially) political consensus. The numbers aren’t close. A New York Times/Ipsos poll last year found 79% of Americans, including 67% of Democrats, are opposed to “athletes who were male at birth” participating in women’s sports. The same poll found 71% of all Americans, including 54% of Democrats, believe no one under 18 should have access to puberty blockers. This was after exposure to years of movement messaging.
Strangio and the ACLU don’t see that they’re asking for something people can’t give them, even if they wanted to, namely the honest belief that people who’ve transitioned have literally changed sexes. The gambit failed for the same reason Spanish speakers rejected “Latinx.”
As with Latinx, activists tried to lobby “sex assigned at birth” into reality, only to have the population spit it back out as “biological sex.” The court just recognized another thing that was uncontroversial until ten minutes ago. Yes, a small percentage of human beings have intersex characterstics, but most of the world’s population can’t be forced to unlearn what it intrinsically knows. Knowing which gametes your body cranks out is another form of “lived experience,” one is irrelevant to activists, apparently, because it’s “normative.” People know they weren’t “assigned” a sex by hospital clerks. Some people tried to think that way. It just didn’t take.
Activists could have started with a proposition: given that sex is binary, what can society do to accomodate people who experience dysphoria and wish to live under a new identity? The same Americans who accepted gay marriage fairly quickly after Obergefell v. Hodges11 years ago likely would have extended as far as they could without jumping into a factual or scientific abyss, on issues ranging from expanded insurance to easier routes to housing or identification. Instead, activists treated access for biological males to women’s locker rooms, sports rosters, even prisons as settled rights matters, against which only right-wing Christian patriarchal bigots could possibly object. Unless 80% of Americans are bigots, a lot of apologies are owed.
With regard to the climate by activists like the ACLU’s Chase Strangio, Taibbi concludes:
This has been a constant theme, that criticism is murder, disagreement bigotry. Everything that wasn’t an instant salute was deemed evidence of lurking genocidal hatred. Even a lifelong trans advocate like Canada’s Dr. Kenneth Zucker had his career ruined for the crime of believing some dysphoria cases dissipate with time. This couldn’t be tolerated because it clashed with the linguistic imperative of “gender-affirming care.” It isn’t rational to insist no troubled boys or girls might eventually become happy ones, just as it isn’t rational to keep denying hormones make hitting the fastball easier.
Having produced a textbook history lesson in how not to persuade, the movement won’t reconsider its aims. Instead, bet on activists searching for ways to bypass the problem of persuasion altogether. A Vox headline yesterday suggested the loss was a “cautionary tale for all left-leaning lawyers.” For a moment it seemed a mainstream pundit was going to suggest not using courts to force into being policies that majorities in both parties reject. Instead, Ian Millheiser’s point was that the left shouldn’t bring cases to this Supreme Court. Why ask permission, when you’re sure you’re right?
The Supreme Court’s ruling Tuesday upholding state bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports is prompting questions about whether trans rights litigators have made strategic missteps, saddling the ascendant legal movement with sweeping precedents that could hurt their cause for years to come.
Critics, including some trans rights advocates, say the movement has rushed to tee up causes that the court’s 6-3 conservative majority is not ready to embrace — particularly expanded rights for trans athletes, which polls show most Americans oppose. Given the high court’s solidly conservative record on LGBTQ+ issues, some supporters of trans rights are delivering a sobering message: Keep cases away from the Supreme Court.
“The question right now is not whether transgender advocates should fight or not fight — it’s whether going to hostile courts is the most prudent move,” said Duncan Hosie, a fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center and a supporter of legal protections for trans people.
Given the Supreme Court’s opinions last year upholding bans on transition care for minors and this week’s ruling on trans athletes, Hosie said, it’s clear that “courts are not the most prudent move.”
Tuesday’s decision found that states can separate teams based on “biological sex” without offending the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and Title IX, a landmark 1972 antidiscrimination law involving education.
The court’s six conservatives led the opinion, but even the court’s liberal justices agreed that such bans do not violate Title IX. They disagreed with the majority’s finding that the bans withstood scrutiny under the equal protection clause.
The ruling capped a year of setbacks for the LGBTQ+ movement, which included a ruling against state bans on “conversion therapy” for gay and trans minors, as well as an order temporarily halting California policies that discouraged notification of parents when their children were socially transitioning at school.
Litigators filing lawsuits on behalf of transgender plaintiffs say they face a frustrating dilemma. On one hand, the Trump administration and Republican-led states have implemented policies sharply restricting the rights of transgender people, and activists say those edicts must be fought.
On the other hand, lawsuits challenging these policies are routinely reaching the Supreme Court and resulting in precedents that are detrimental to trans rights, covering the entire country and potentially lasting for decades.
Chase Strangio, co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT & HIV Project, said he recognizes the movement needs to “adapt.” But there are no easy answers, Strangio said, when “you have every branch of [the federal] government stacked against you.“
I’m not sure that going to the courts is the big problem; rather, it’s the uber-activism of the gender movement, so that it pushes things that aren’t widely accepted, like the participation of biological men in women’s sports and the “right” to affirmative care. And that’s on top of some activists’ assertions that are misleading and irrelevant, like “all this legislation is trying to erase trans people” or “there aren’t that many trans athletes, anyway.” It’s the promotion of laws and practices that Americans don’t buy that is what brings these things to court. Of course there are some bigots fighting the activists, but arguing that Americans in general are anti-trans and want trans people contravenes what we see with our own eyes. Listen to the rhetoric of Chase Strangio, a trans lawyer for the ACLU, commenting on the Supreme Court case:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is, as always, cynical:
Hili: The radio said it was going to rain.
Andrzej: People say a lot of things.
In Polish
Hili: Mówili w radiu, że będzie padał deszcz.
Ja: Ludzie różne rzeczy mówią.
From Luana: the newly-elected Democratic candidate for Representative in New York. This is what our party has come to:
“There is no money for schools, or childhood poverty”
These people live in a made up world. NYC spends 44k per year, per child on public school that leaves them illiterate. https://t.co/1jTfSekuoO
This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was 2 years old, and would be 84 today had she lived. https://t.co/AVLPSetKRP
An addition to the "Awesomely Peculiar Hall of Fame" — extremely rare sighting of a barreleye fish, & first footage of this species, Winteria telescopa, alive in situ. Filmed during the #Doldrums expedition at 710 m. Read more about tubular eyes & a light organ here:youtube.com/shorts/1bhh3…
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.
Limbourg brothers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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.
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.
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 archosauromorphsthat 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 Eunotosaurushad 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.”
(From paper): Figure 4 Simplified cladogram of early reptiles showing the placement of E. africanus and stem turtles (A–C) Red occurrence lines indicate taxa previously proposed as stem turtles; blue lines denote unambiguous stem turtles. The placement of Sauropterygia within Archosauromorpha follows our parsimony analysis, although they are found as lepidosauromorphs in the Bayesian analysis. Posterior probabilities > 0.50 are labeled below nodes (also see Figure S3). Skeletal reconstructions of (A) Protorosaurus speneri, (B) Pappochelys rosinae, and (C) Proganochelys quenstedti depict the hypothesized evolutionary transition from a protorosaur-like ancestor to early turtles. Skeletal reconstruction of P. speneri and P. rosinae by LiterallyMiguel, and P. quenstedti derived from Gaffney.46 Silhouettes are available from Phylopic (www.phylopic.org) under CC BY 3.0 licenses or within public domain.
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:
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.
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.
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/…
Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, June 30, 2026, and my sister Susan’s birthday. Happy birthday, Sis! (It’s also my half-birthday as I was born on December 30). Here’s my sibling:
Click on the Google Doodle below to see the footy scores and upcoming games:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 30 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
Footy news: In the knockout round of 32 yesterday, Brazil beat Japan 2-1, so the South American team goes into the round of 16. This was expected, but Japan came very close. . .
Gabriel Martinelli scored five minutes into stoppage time to seal a 2-1 win for Brazil against Japan in Houston after the five-time FIFA World Cup winners fought back from potential humiliation following Kaishu Sano‘s first-half opening goal.
Sano’s 29th minute goal stunned Carlo Ancelotti’s team and raised the prospect of Brazil losing a competitive game against Asian opposition for the first time and leading to one of the World Cup’s biggest-ever shocks. But a Casemiro header on 56 minutes hauled Brazil level and set up a second-half onslaught as the Seleção chased a winning goal.
Japan held firm, though, with goalkeeper Zion Suzuki making a series of crucial saves to keep his team on level terms. But Brazil snatched victory and a place in the round of 16 in the final seconds when Arsenal forward Martinelli scored from close range after being released by Bruno Guimarães.
Brazil will now face the winners of Tuesday’s tie between Norway and Ivory Coast in New Jersey on Sunday.
Here are the highlights. Japan’s first scoring play is at 3:38 on the tape, and Brazil’s two goals are in plays starting at 8:30 (a header) and 14:00.
President Donald Trump said Monday that Iran had requested a meeting with U.S. counterparts, though one of Iran’s top negotiators said no further talks had been scheduled after attacks across the Persian Gulf over the weekend challenged negotiations to end the war.
The U.S. president has tried to preserve a fragile interim deal, but hostilities mounted in recent days in the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil had been shipped before war began. After four days of trading strikes, both sides appeared to pause their attacks Monday.
Trump said on social media that a meeting with Iran would happen Tuesday in Doha, Qatar. Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, are flying to Qatar for the meeting, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”
But Kazem Gharibabadi, a senior negotiator for Iran, denied any talks had been scheduled.
The U.S. and Iran agreed to an interim deal earlier this month that calls for Tehran to dilute its stockpile of enriched uranium. It also waives U.S.-backed sanctions on the country while opening the Strait of Hormuz and giving each side 60 days to hammer out broader agreements.
. . . .Pezeshkian offered praise for the interim deal in comments published Monday by the state-run IRNA news agency, calling it “a great victory for the Iranian people.”
“Based on the plans made, $6 billion out of the total $12 billion of Iranian resources in Qatar will be released and returned to the country, and necessary follow-ups are being carried out,” he said. He did not elaborate.
Pezeshkian, a reformist within Iran’s theocracy, is the highest-ranking official within Iran to reference the release of the funds held by Qatar, a key mediator along with Pakistan in the negotiations.
So far, U.S. officials say no frozen Iranian assets have been released. Qatar as well as has not acknowledged any such transfer.
Conflicting word on the negotiations, conflicting word on the release of Iranian assets: who can we believe—Trump or Iran? That’s like asking whether you believe Satan or the Devil?
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Trump’s bid to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook with little legal scrutiny.
In a second decision, the court gave Trump free rein to fire officials at other independent agencies for any reason. The pair of rulings effectively delivers a split verdict on Trump’s second-term effort to exert maximal control over the executive branch.
By a vote of 5-4, the court in the Cook case dealt a stinging blow to Trump’s mission to remake the Fed, which he has repeatedly criticized for not lowering interest rates more aggressively. In a separate case involving the Federal Trade Commission, the court in a 6-3 ruling gave the president broad latitude to oust leaders of regulatory agencies that Congress sought to insulate from political pressure.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote both decisions.
The court had repeatedly made clear in recent months that it was poised to expand presidential sway over the agencies that regulate areas like consumer protection, collective bargaining and nuclear reactors. At the same time, some justices had signaled that they believed the Fed was entitled to special protections from political interference.
“Under our precedents, Cook was entitled to notice and some opportunity to respond prior to her termination,” Roberts wrote.
Accepting Trump’s position “would allow the president to remove a member of the Federal Reserve at any time, for any reason, without any notice before, and without any judicial check after,” the chief justice said. “That would turn for-cause protection into little more than at-will employment.”
Roberts was explicit that something larger than Cook’s job was at stake. Allowing a president to fire governors at will would threaten the central bank’s ability to set policy free from political pressure, the core reason Congress made the Fed independent in the first place, he wrote.
Here we see the separation of powers at work in that the judiciary ruled what the executive branch can do. My only question—and I have not read the decisions, is whether appointing heads of agencies must have Congressional approval. I suspect it does not, for in that case the Supreme court would not have given Trump the power to unilaterally name them.
Senator Susan Collins and Graham Platner are locked in a neck-and-neck Senate contest in Maine, according to a New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll, as voters weigh a desire for Democratic control of the Senate against Ms. Collins’s record and controversy around Mr. Platner’s past conduct.
Mr. Platner leads the race by two percentage points among likely voters, capturing the support of 49 percent, compared to 47 percent for Ms. Collins. It is a slight advantage, but one that is considered too small for polls to measure reliably, and which could easily grow or shrink as campaigning ramps up.
An oysterman who has never held elected office, Mr. Platner, 41, rode a populist message to the Democratic nomination despite reports about offensive online posts, a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol and his treatment of women. But the poll found that he is failing to attract some voters who otherwise want to see Democrats take power in Washington.
Fifty-four percent of voters said they would like to see Democrats control the Senate next year, a notably higher percentage than the percent of respondents who said they supported Mr. Platner. In fact, Ms. Collins, the Republican, is winning 10 percent of voters who prefer Democratic control.
I doubt that I’d vote for Platner; I’d probably write in another Democrat, but fortunately I’m not a Mainer and don’t have to vote. However, for those who say that Collins talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk (i.e., doesn’t vote with Democrates in the Senate), well, Grok said this when I asked it if Collins ever votes with the Democrats in the Senate:
Yes, frequently on certain issues—more so than nearly any other current Republican senator. Her moderate profile and low party unity scores mean she regularly supports positions favored by Democrats or bipartisan coalitions, especially on appropriations, some social/moderate issues, and procedural or targeted matters. However, she still votes with Republicans on the large majority of high-stakes party-line votes (nominations, core fiscal/tax priorities, etc.).Notable examples of alignment with Democrats or against GOP majorities:
Healthcare/ACA: Voted against the “skinny repeal” of the Affordable Care Act in 2017 (one of only three Republicans to do so). She has supported elements of stabilization and opposed some aggressive repeal efforts, though she backed the 2017 tax bill that repealed the individual mandate.
Guns: Supported the 2013 Manchin-Toomey amendment to expand background checks (bipartisan but failed).
Student loans/education: Backed some Democratic-backed refinancing proposals.
Impeachment and Trump opposition: Voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment (Jan. 6-related). She has opposed certain Trump administration spending priorities and some judicial or policy moves in both terms.
Other cross-aisle work: Frequent collaboration on appropriations bills, disaster relief, and targeted legislation (e.g., HAVANA Act, electoral count reform). She has cosponsored or supported bills with Democrats on health, education, and infrastructure-related matters.
Recent examples: Occasional breaks on spending, foreign policy (e.g., Iran-related), and specific nominations or amendments where she sided with Democrats.
On many close or party-line votes, especially judicial confirmations and major conservative priorities, she aligns with Republicans. Critics on the left argue her breaks are often symbolic or on votes where her side already has the numbers; critics on the right say she is insufficiently conservative.
If you think that’s wrong or misleading, weigh in below.
A Michigan couple have been charged with murder, child abuse and torture in connection with the death last year of their 7-year-old son, who at the time weighed 255 pounds, according to court filings.
The boy, Casper O’Brien, died on Nov. 4, 2025, after the authorities responded to a 911 call earlier that day that he was not breathing at the Flint Township home he shared with his parents, Damien and Jessica O’Brien, according to the authorities.
An autopsy report from the Genesee County medical examiner concluded that Casper had died of dilated cardiomyopathy — an enlarged and weakened heart — brought on by morbid obesity.
Casper was bedridden at the time of his death, and subsisted on little more than snack foods, the Genesee County prosecutor, David S. Leyton, said in an interview on Saturday.
The child was not enrolled in school and received little to no medical care despite having a history of nonverbal autism, according to prosecutors and the autopsy report from the medical examiner, John Bechinski.
“This was a sad and horrific case involving the wanton and willful neglect by two parents for the care, welfare and medical needs of their son,” Mr. Leyton said in an emailed statement. “Their neglect led to their child suffering severe bed sores, various rashes and other physical health disorders.”
Prosecutors charged the parents with second-degree murder and three counts of second-degree child abuse. They were also charged with torture.
If convicted of the murder and torture charges, they face the possibility of life in prison.
In a statement, Mr. O’Brien’s lawyer, Elias Fanous, said that it would be “premature to comment on the allegations and charges that Mr. O’Brien is facing.”
“As in all criminal matters, Mr. O’Brien is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law,” Mr. Fanous said.
Yes, the “presumed innocent” trope, which is true, is what defense attorneys always say when they don’t have a good case. In fact, how did a 7-year-old get to weigh 255 pounds and get no medical care unless his parents neglected him? I’d like to see what tactics the defense uses if the parents plead “not guilty”. It’s this kind of thing that further erodes my faith in humanity; how could somebody act like that, especially knowing that they’d get caught?
*From Williams; a short video about European young folk’s ignorance of the Holocaust. It’s appalling.
Astronomers have uncovered a pair of giant planets that are lighter than cotton candy — super-puffs the size of Jupiter.
The featherweight pair — orbiting a star 1,110 light-years away — are the biggest exoplanets found to have less density than cotton candy.
That makes them the lightest known planets of their size, said the University of Oxford’s George Dransfield.
“These two planets have densities comparable to a nice blob of shaving foam, fresh from the can,” Dransfield said in an email. She and her team reported their findings Wednesday in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Dransfield suspects these fluffy, wispy worlds are probably white or blue, depending on whether the skies there are cloudy — no shades of cotton-candy pink. The planets are probably mostly hydrogen and helium, although it will take follow-up observations by NASA’s Webb Space Telescope to confirm their chemical makeup.
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Detected by NASA’s Tess satellite over the past decade, these two especially puffy-puffs orbit a star in the southern constellation Volans, known as the flying fish. The researchers studied the planets’ orbits using telescopes on Earth to determine their density, from 1,110 light-years away. A light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers).
Grok looked up the density of cotton candy for me and then calculated how much Jupiter would weigh if it were made of cotton candy, compared to what astronomers think it weighs now:
Real Jupiter: ~1.898 × 10²⁷ kg (~318 Earth masses)
Cotton-candy Jupiter: ~7.155 × 10²⁵ kg (~12 Earth masses)
The real Jupiter is about 26.5 times more massive than the cotton-candy version.
The cotton-candy version would have only about 3.8% of Jupiter’s actual mass.
That’s more than I thought such a planet would weigh!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the editor is not doing her job:
Hili: You were supposed to go shopping, but instead you’re back at the computer again.
Andrzej: I just have to check something real quick.
In Polish:
Hili: Miałeś pojechać na zakupy, a tymczasem znowu siadasz do komputera.
Ja: Muszę szybko coś sprawdzić.
From Luana, who think that Mamdani’s proposed rent controls in NYC will be counterproductive, leaving rent-controlled apartments purchased by rich people largely vacant:
I haven’t studied it in detail, but from what I have seen, the natural experiment that Buenos Aires ran over the past six years seems like yet more clear evidence that rent control limits supply and (ironically) raises rents. pic.twitter.com/CAWAdUFY85
This is funny, but Rowling should know that jumping spiders are totally harmless. They should be coddled and appreciated.
What kind of maniac lists ‘often watches before it jumps’ as a mitigating circumstance? You think I find it cute that it might be peering at me from a dark hole, calculating the best moment to make its big entrance? pic.twitter.com/Bi8lbfG0hG
One from my feed, a lovely rescue story (my favorite type). Be sure to read the whole tweet.
A baby elephant named Ellie was discovered alone in the wild in South Africa, having been rejected by his herd due to a severe umbilical abscess and hernia.
Ellie remained lethargic and deeply depressed, showing no will to live. Recognizing that elephants are intensely social… pic.twitter.com/druq8eWDel
A mosaic and a fish in the submerged part of the ancient Roman town of Baiae:
For #MosaicMonday this fantastic photo of a mosaic (and a lovely fish 🐟) that was discovered in the submerged ruins of #Roman Baiae.📷 Parco Archeologico Campi Flegrei
