Welcome to CaturSaturday, October 11, 2025. It’s shabbos for Jewish cats and also International African Penguin Awareness Day.  Here are three photos I took last August of African Penguins  (Spheniscus demersus) at Boulders Beach) near Capetown, South Africa. (h/t Martim and Rita):

It’s also Universal Music Day, International Pinotage Day, National Chess Day, National Sausage Pizza Day, Southern Food Heritage Day, World Biryani Day, and World Dulce de Leche Day. All in all, a good food day.  Here’s a great Southern Breakfast from the Loveless Motel and Cafe outside Nashville (there were biscuits, too).  Country ham, fried eggs, grits, and red-eye gravy.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 11 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The cease-fire in Gaza seems to have really begun: the IDF is moving about and the hostage swap seems to be in the offing.

Thousands of people began the long walk from the south to the north of the Gaza Strip on Friday after the Israeli military announced a cease-fire that mediators hoped would lead to the end of the two-year war.

Men carried bags, women carried young children, and older children held hands as they made their way up the dusty seaside road toward the ruins of Gaza City, which they were ordered to flee weeks ago. Some said they were heading north for the first time since the war began.

Though the surroundings were bleak, the mood was jubilant.

“The crowds are unbelievable,” said Shamekh al-Dibs, who fled south with his family last month. “People are so happy, even if what they’re going back to is destruction.”

Israel agreed early Friday morning to a cease-fire deal with Hamas, which the military said came into effect at noon. As part of the agreement, Hamas would release the remaining hostages held in Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, while Israeli troops would partially withdraw.

The deal was based on a proposal presented by President Trump last week. On Friday, a spokesman for Israel’s Parliament said Mr. Trump was expected to visit the chamber in Jerusalem on Monday.

Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Mideast envoy, said the U.S. military had verified that Israeli troops had withdrawn to the agreed-upon line inside Gaza. That, he said on social media, opened a 72-hour window in which Hamas must hand over the remaining hostages.

The bit below was in the NYT morning newsletter (h/t Luana). Bolding is mine:

This is where each side stands:

Hamas is taking a risk. The group would give up much of its leverage over Israel by releasing the remaining hostages. There is no certainty that by doing so, it will achieve its main goals: the complete withdrawal of Israeli military forces from Gaza and a permanent end to the war.

Netanyahu is thinking ahead. He had promised “total victory” in Gaza and is pulling back before Hamas has disarmed. But welcoming home Israeli hostages is a major political boost, and he will soon be up for re-election.

Trump claims victory. He craves the Nobel Prize Prize. He did not win today, but this agreement boosts his chances in the future.

Nope, the words in bold are not the main goal of Hamas, which is really a Palestinian state from the river to the sea, and a Judenrein Middle East. The goals given above are interim goals.

*Trump has now started to fire federal workers as the government shutdown drags on. The thing is, he’s doing it to try to force the hand of Democrats, but the people who really get hurt are the people who are fired.

The Trump administration moved to begin laying off federal workers Friday while the government was shuttered, fulfilling threats from President Donald Trump to take advantage of the closure to shave off still more parts of the federal workforce he dislikes.

“The RIFs have begun,” White House budget director Russell Vought posted on X Friday afternoon, using an acronym for reductions-in-force.

A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans, confirmed that the RIFs were starting, and said “they will be substantial.” The White House did not provide specifics on how many employees were affected, or at which departments.

The shutdown layoffs are the culmination of years of groundwork laid by Vought, an architect of the Project 2025 playbook for Trump’s second term, which outlined a drastically reduced federal bureaucracy. Vought’s office had threatened mass dismissals during the shutdown, perhaps even stretching into the hundreds of thousands, and told agencies they should “retain the minimal number of employees necessary.” Trump told reporters before the shutdown that he might fire “a lot” of people, and once the shutdown began, Vice President JD Vance and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt indicated that cuts were coming, as well.

The Washington Post previously reported that the dismissals were likely to total fewer than 16,000.

The layoffs run counter to recent internal warnings from senior government officials that such dismissals are legally questionable. In the first days of the shutdown, officials privately counseled agencies against conducting reductions in force, or RIFs, while the government lacks funding, because it would likely violate the law, The Post reported this month.

. . .The officials cautioned that the Antideficiency Act forbids the government from obligating or expending any money not appropriated by Congress, which means the government cannot incur new expenses during a shutdown, when funding has lapsed. The RIF process, which is extensive and involves promising severance payments, would probably be prohibited under the act, the officials concluded.

That theory will now almost certainly be put to the test. Even before the layoffs began, they drew a legal challenge from several federal unions. Their lawsuit, brought against OMB and the Office of Personnel Management on Sept. 30 over threats of dismissals, argued that the administration has no authority or ability to conduct RIFs amid a shutdown, in part citing the Antideficiency Act.

Another lawsuit! I’ve lost count of how many suits are pending against the federal government based on Trump’s actions. It must be at least several dozen.

*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column in the Free Press. This week’s is indeed done by Nellie, and is called “TGIF: Shutdown blues.” There’s one about the University of Chicago:

→ Campus field trip: A University of Chicago professor was arrested and charged with violent felonies during riots at an ICE facility in the Chicago suburbs. Eman Abdelhadi, of the university’s Department of Comparative Human Development (which honestly sounds like a pretty racist field), is accused of aggravated battery against a government employee and resisting/obstructing peace. This is the same professor who in July said: “Fuck the University of Chicago, it’s evil. Like, you know? It’s a colonial landlord.” Fascinating. When did the University of Chicago get in on the radical professor game? I thought UChicago was one of the buttoned-up ones, but then again, I guess this counts as conservative thinking on campus lately.

More importantly, what in the heck is the Department of Comparative Human Development? Is it, like, hot or not? I actually think I’d be great there if so. I have some theories I’d like to share. Bar says with her new job I’m not allowed to talk about it, though.

→ Closed borders: According to new internal federal statistics obtained by CBS News—which, by law, I now have to say is a very great news service or I won’t get to eat dinner—unlawful U.S.-Mexico border crossings have fallen to the lowest annual rate since 1970.

In fiscal year 2025, U.S. Border Patrol agents recorded nearly 238,000 apprehensions of migrants crossing the southern border illegally—down from the 2.2 million made in 2022.

While you might think this comes from a nationwide effort, really the feds are on their own. On October 4 in Chicago, Border Patrol and ICE agents faced backlash from protesters. Police were allegedly ordered not to respond to the agents’ calls for help (the head of Chicago police denies this). Boys, I love a Chicago beef, but let’s remember you’re all on the same team here. It is interesting every once in a while, in our relatively functional society, to see a little flicker of what total breakdown would look like. Chicago PD versus Border Patrol would be quite a scene in our civil war, if that’s something you like to imagine (I just like to imagine the little burrows I would hide in).

→ Beautiful, if odd: Nicholas Roske, the transgender woman who now goes by Sophie and who traveled from California to Maryland to try to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, was sentenced to just eight years in prison. In the ruling, the Biden-appointed judge said: “I am heartened that this terrible infraction has helped the Roske family. . . accept their daughter for who she is.” Wait, guys, are we doing heartwarming family reunions or are we putting a would-be assassin in jail? Like what’s going on here?

*Anna Krylov, one of my partners in crime, has written a thoughtful analysis of Trump’s “compact” offered to U.S. universities. If they agree, they get perks like grants (MIT has just rejected this compact). By and large, she thinks the compact is good, though she objects to a few of its stipulations. (You can see the compact, which has ten stipulations, here). Some excerpts from Anna;

Based on this initial input, I expected the Compact to be a gross infringement on university autonomy. I expected to find an outrageous set of demands, on the level of rounding up all faculty who criticized President Trump on social media and putting them on unpaid leave, instituting a mandatory prayer at the beginning of each class, setting up ICE checkpoints, demanding affirmative action for conservatives, and requesting all prospective hires to sign an anti-Woke pledge. But after reading the actual document, I realized that it is nothing of the sort.

The document, which is only nine pages long, reads more like an aspirational manifesto than concrete policy. It calls on universities to show their willingness to comply with existing non-discrimination laws, such as banning the use of race or sex in admissions and hiring and protecting women sports and spaces (Titles VI, VII, and IX). It also calls on universities to adopt the principle of institutional neutrality and to cultivate open discourse on campus. In addition, it calls for the restoration of academic excellence by strengthening merit-based admissions, using standardized tests, and curbing grade inflation. I found myself in agreement with a good 75% of the Compact, and I cannot wrap my head around why it generated such fierce opposition.

True, not everything in the Compact is acceptable — I find rigid caps on foreign enrollment, political litmus tests for foreign students, and a few other details objectionable. Also, I think the government should made it clear that all universities are invited to sign it, not just the initially selected nine schools. Such objections should be communicated to the government in response to their invitation to provide feedback. If these objections can be negotiated out, universities — including USC —should sign. This will signal to the public their good-faith willingness to reform and right their course. Below I discuss specific sections of the Compact and explain why I think signing it is the right thing to do.

Anna goes through the stipulations one by one, and, in the end, concludes that her school, USC, should negotiated the problematic bits but then sign it:

The key question, then, is whether the Compact is the right way forward. Aside from the concerns about specific points in the Compact I have already discussed, I have three general concerns.

First, I do not like the idea of only select universities being given the offer to sign—the invitation should be extended to everyone. Second, I would like to see organizations such as FIRE, the AFA, the Heterodox Academy, and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters be involved in shaping the Compact, and universities play a greater role. Ideally, I would like to see a consensus on the principles articulated in the Compact emerge among university leadership and the broader academic community, but this might be unrealistic, given the problems of ideological capture described above.

Third, incentivizing signatories with “increased overhead payments where feasible, substantial and meaningful federal grants, and other federal partnerships” is wrong—research funding should not be used as either a carrot or a stick. While essentially the same thing was done by using DEI mandates as a prerequisite for federal funding by the Biden administration, and by the decades-old practice of holding universities hostage to Title VI and Title IX (see here for a brief account), past misdeeds are not an excuse for new misdeeds.

To sum up, the essential ideas articulated in the Compact are excellent. The Compact is an opportunity for universities to signal good will, to reform, and to right their course, and to recommit to their mission of research and education. It is an opportunity to win back public trust. However, the process should be improved—by making clear that the offer is open to all universities, by allotting more time for finalizing the content of such a historic document, and by inviting the broader community of universities and organizations championing academic freedom to participate in this process.

We discussed this yesterday, and I more or less agree with her assessments of each “demand”, though I don’t at all like the idea of the government trying to control the behavior of universities. Further, some stipulations, like limiting foreign students to 15% of the student body, are maladaptive. But remember Biden and Obama also tried to control universities; it’s just that Trump’s reforms are from Trump, even though most of them are sensible. And because they’re from Trump, and universities are nearly all on the left, the stipulations must be rejected. We’ll see if schools like MIT start curbing grade inflation, adopt institutional neutrality, and get rid of its DEI structures. A WSJ op-ed, surprisingly applauds MIT’s rejection of the compact:

In a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, MIT President Sally Kornbluth wrote that the school can’t support the compact because it is “inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.”

*Andrew Sullivan’s column yesterday is called “Why Bari Weiss matters“, with a subtitle, “Big media and higher education desperately need reform. For democracy’s sake.” Sullivan begins by showing how much trust both the media and Ivy League colleges have lost with the public, and then asks whether the media has gone completely down the tubes, becoming polarized and anti-Trump. This is where Weiss comes in:

And the truth is that the media is eminently fixable, and our job as journos is to fix it. If we already had, none of this would be happening. That’s why Bari Weiss matters at CBS, and why I am praying she pulls it off. It’s also why Bezos is right to rebrand the WaPo and bring in more intellectually diverse columnists; and why getting NPR off federal funding is important — so it no longer propagandizes on our dime. In my view, these are positive developments — even if they are rooted in Trump’s re-election.

If Bari et al. can return to mainstream media and make it less polarized and more empirical, it will be a mitzvah for the republic. We need these institutions. I’ve never believed that the old blogosphere, or YouTube, or the new Substack, could replace them. They matter. And as long as Bari understands that while both sides deserve scrutiny, only one is in power right now, and that is therefore where the main focus must be, she’ll succeed. It is vital she shows her anti-Trump mettle as well as her opposition to wokeness. If we are to regain liberal democracy, it will not be by continuing to one-side everything. It will be by guiding these institutions back to public respect.

He then mentions Trump’s “compact” with universities (see above), which he approves of:

The same applies to elite universities. I was prepared to be horrified by Trump’s memo of conditions for future federal funding, sent to nine institutions. But I wasn’t. The demands make sense: ending race discrimination in admissions and hiring (already illegal); ensuring intellectual and ideological diversity; mandatory SATs and grade transparency — anonymized, of course; tuition fees held steady for five years; an end to the gender madness; and foreigners capped at 15 percent of the student body.

In fact, very little of this piece is about Weiss; she appears to be a symbol of reform for both colleges and media, someone who is not supposed to “propagandize on our dime.” Whether she does is a matter for the future. I am not writing off Weiss simply because she lacks experience in television or is too you. My approach with her is simply wait and see.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili expresses her disdain for poor Kulka

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I finally have a tropical storm named after me (h/t Nicole):

From Animal Antics:

From Cats that Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

From CinEmma:

Maish gives us a link to her 48-minute conversation with María Corina Machado, the latest Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, who has been living in hiding.

My sister, @MariaCorinaYA , has become the nightmare of Venezuela’s dictator.
Across oceans and borders, women who dare to speak truth to power often pay the heaviest price. She called millions into the streets, and she paid dearly for it. Listen to our conversation, it is… pic.twitter.com/9KB9mHkdAF

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) August 22, 2025

From Luana. AOC gives her theory of “spiritual height.” Ladies and gentlemen, friends and comrades, this may one day be President of the United States:

After facing backlash over her body-shaming of Stephen Miller for his height, AOC proclaims her love and support for the Short King Community. She then explains her theory of height:pic.twitter.com/o9cl5vc9cl

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 7, 2025

Jordan Peterson’s daughter announces that he’s pretty sick:

Hey, as you know @jordanbpeterson has been really sick. A lot of people have been asking for updates so here’s one. He’s recovering slowly day by day but I won’t lie, it’s slow and scary. He won’t be back for another few months at least, probably longer. We’re not entirely sure… pic.twitter.com/wmS5Wy2tg8

— Mikhaila Peterson (@MikhailaFuller) October 4, 2025

From Malcolm; how camera lenses can film in the rain without getting drops of water on them:

Why rain never sticks to these lenses

[📹 vt.physics]pic.twitter.com/FFBpQDP4AS

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 13, 2025

One from my feed. Antlers win! (Listen until the call at the end):

When a bison meets a bull elk

📹nczoo

pic.twitter.com/LLjkQixGgr

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) October 10, 2025

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. He was only 8 months old, and would have been 84 today had he lived. His mother was gassed with him, and his father died in the camp less than a year later.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-10-11T10:11:47.330Z

From Matthew; a beautiful moray eel:

Snowflake moray eel – Echidna nebulosa#gili #giliislands #lombok #diving #scuba #trawangan #diveandstay #giliair #pets #ocean #sealife #marinelife #padi #fish #

— Terumbu (@terumbudivers.com) 2025-09-13T10:22:22.000Z

Matthew also sent a video. The caption:

This video, collected at ~500 meters depth during Dive 16 of the Windows to the Deep 2018 expedition on June 30, 2018, highlights a benthic fish (Atlantic Midshipman, Porichthys plectrodon) dwelling in a burrow, snatching a large midwater fish (barracudina in the family Paralepididae) with quill worms as onlookers. The snail was an innocent (and unfortunate) bystander to the whole thing as well.

Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats (remember that the Sabbath was made for cats, not cats for the Sabbath). It’s Sunday, May 18, 2025, and Mother Whistler Day, celebrating something to do with James McNeil’s Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother, painted in 1871.  I’ve seen it at Paris’s  Musée d’Orsay, a not-to-be-missed stop on a visit to that city. Its formal name is “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1”.

Here’s a photo of Mrs. Whistler, also in the public domain:

From Wikipedia:

The sensibilities of a Victorian era viewing audience would not accept what was a portrait exhibited as an “arrangement”, hence the addition of the explanatory title Portrait of the Painter’s mother. From this, the work acquired its enduring nickname of simply Whistler’s Mother. After Thomas Carlyle viewed the painting, he agreed to sit for a similar composition, this one titled Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2. Thus the previous painting became, by default, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1.

Here’s Carlye’s portrait, also in the public domain:

It’s also National Cheese Souffflé Day and World AIDS Vaccine Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The horse Journalism, which finished second in the Kentucky Derby, won the Preakness, sadly having blown a chance to win the Triple Crown.

Once trailing by as many as five lengths, Journalism was still far behind Gosger at the top of the homestretch as it squeezed between Clever Again and Goal Oriented — the horses so close they and their jockeys rubbed together — before finally finding open ground. From there, with jockey Umberto Rispoli urging him on, Journalism ran down Gosger at the post, needing all of the course’s 1 3/16th miles to author a stunning comeback victory at the 150th Preakness at Baltimore’s Pimlico Race Course.

Here’s the race:

*I keep saying that if anything can curb the spate of unlawful Executive Orders spewing from Trump, it would be the Supreme Court, as Chief Justice Roberts want the court to keep some gravitas rather than being a rubber stamp for a loony President. And now it may be happening with the Alien Enemies Act, an old law that Trump’s using to deport people accused of being members of Venezuelan gangs. The court sent it back to the appeals court, which

*NBC News reports that Trump is working on a plan to move a million Gazans to Libya. That is half the population of Gaza, and, surprisingly, the Libyans appear ready to approve of it, for they gain the release of money previously frozen by the U.S. But these are early days:

The Trump administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya, five people with knowledge of the effort told NBC News.

The plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libya’s leadership, two people with direct knowledge of the plans and a former U.S. official said.

In exchange for the resettling of Palestinians, the administration would potentially release to Libya billions of dollars of funds that the U.S. froze more than a decade ago, those three people said.

No final agreement has been reached, and Israel has been kept informed of the administration’s discussions, the same three sources said.

The State Department and the National Security Council did not respond to multiple requests for comment before this article was published. After publication, a spokesperson told NBC News, “these reports are untrue.”

“The situation on the ground is untenable for such a plan. Such a plan was not discussed and makes no sense,” the spokesperson said.

Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, said that Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that has run Gaza, was not aware of any discussions about moving Palestinians to Libya.

“Palestinians are very rooted in their homeland, very strongly committed to the homeland and they are ready to fight up to the end and to sacrifice anything to defend their land, their homeland, their families, and the future of their children,” Naim said in response to questions from NBC News. “[Palestinians] are exclusively the only party who have the right to decide for the Palestinians, including Gaza and Gazans, what to do and what not to do.”

The last paragraph, however, may not be true, for a recent poll shows that nearly half of surveyed Gazans would, with help, be willing to move to another country. So far, though no countries have been willing to take them (in fact, no countries), but Libya might. That still leaves 1.3 million Gazans, and presumably most of the remaining Hamas members, still living in the territory, but I don’t blame the citizens of that ruined strip of land wanting to start life anew—and not ruled by terrorist thugs.

*Speaking of that, the Wall Street Journal reports that many Gazans are getting sick of Hamas and are even, at the risk of their lives, demonstrating against them.

. . . .few expected Hamas to be wrestling with the most visible internal challenge to its authority since it seized control of the Gaza strip in 2007: the people it professes to represent.

Hamas has ruled harshly, often jailing and killing its critics or threatening them into silence. Yet a simmering, continuing resistance has added to the pressure on Hamas, especially in northern Gaza, where the town of Beit Lahiya is the epicenter of anti-Hamas protests that began in March.

After the demonstrations erupted in the town, they quickly spread to other parts of the Gaza Strip. Chanting “Hamas out,” large crowds, often at great risk, have demanded an end to the war and Hamas to cede control of the enclave. Since then, smaller but boisterous protests have taken place, where fear of Hamas has seemingly evaporated.

On social media, influencers—many of them Palestinians based in Egypt, Turkey, Europe and the U.S.—are urging Gazans to rise against Hamas and amplifying the protests globally. They are filling a void created by militant threats against journalists in Gaza, forcing many reporters to self censor their coverage of opposition to Hamas, said the Committee to Protect Journalists on Thursday.

“I consider myself the voice of the protests,” said Hamza al-Masri, a Turkey-based influencer, who has more than 1.2 million followers across several platforms. “Hamas has terrorized people in Gaza.”

What is unfolding in Beit Lahiya and on social media opens a window into how Hamas misinterpreted the shift in sentiments of many Gazans. It also represents an unprecedented collective defiance against the militants.

“The general feeling among Palestinians all over Gaza, not just Beit Lahiya, is that Hamas doesn’t care about their lives or suffering,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of political science at Al-Azhar University—Gaza who now lives in Cairo. “The general feeling is that Hamas cares more about its own survival.”

Well, it took them nearly twenty years to realize that!  When they dig tunnels at the expense of the populace, set up terror centers in schools, hospitals, and even humanitarian zones, you’d think the locals would cotton on faster, especially when they see all the money Hamas spends on its crusade to destroy Israel. But better late than never, and I hope the disaffection spreads. And I hope even more that they overthrow the ruling thugs and that, after it’s done, they would realize that to leave in peace, they need a government dedicated to improving the lives of its own people, not to ending the lives of people to the north.

*At the Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan compares Pope Leo XIV to Trump, and guess who wins? Read “The Pope, the President, and America.”

. . . . . And it’s Leo’s American identity that distinguishes him in the global imagination, and in the history of the last two millennia. Which means, as David French has noted, that two Americans now bestride the entire globe in universal recognition and influence: this Pope and this President. And it’s the contrast between their personalities and values — not their politics — that makes the pairing so poignant at this moment in history. They represent two Americas — both genuine, but very different.

Leo is a classic American immigrant mix: Creole/French/Italian. His father was part of the Normandy invasion, Leo grew up on the South Side of Chicago, he went to Villanova when Rollie Massimino was basketball coach, and his two brothers made fun of him at home for being such a goody two-shoes. The brothers are classic: one, John, a mild-mannered, well-spoken former school principal, the other a ridiculously familiar Florida Man called Lou. How much more American can you get?

Leo himself seems so profoundly Midwestern to me, in all the best ways. Quiet in affect, careful in speech — and not that exciting. I’ve now listened to a few of his public interviews and speeches and I have to say they are terribly dull, full of words drained of freshness. I’m not saying his intellect is pedestrian; it obviously isn’t. But he is constantly avoiding the making of waves; he’d rather re-tweet than tweet; his description of selecting a bishop — a process he was in charge of — is all about a bishop’s ability to listen, to be humbly in dialogue, and to be fully engaged in the messy world as a still, small — but potent — voice of calm. He seems to know who he is, with no particular need to impress.

Trump, of course, is a near-mirror American image: from Queens, not Chicago, all inflammation all the time, a deeply insecure human with no discernible equanimity at all. Where Leo has been saturated in the tenets of Catholicism, Trump’s core moral values are entirely pagan. Power over others, for Trump, is a good to be sought at all times and costs. Great wealth is the clearest sign of an admirable person. Greed is healthy. The weak and the poor and the homeless are pathetic. It’s better to be a liar than a sucker. Revenge is the real point of life, and forgiveness dependent on the total submission and humiliation of the other.

If he were just this, of course, Trump wouldn’t be president. He also represents a gloriously American vulgarity — a brash, restless, money-grubbing carnival barker. He loves fast food, Coke Zero, and WWE. He swindles and charms. His energy is prodigious, his worldliness fathomless. And he can be terribly funny. Who wouldn’t laugh at the following brag in his Riyadh speech this week: “We renamed the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America. That was very popular … other than perhaps with Mexico.” This shameless hucksterism has never ascended to the presidency in quite this way before — but it is deeply, authentically American nonetheless. I can’t help but be fond of it, even as Trump’s core character still appalls.

. . . And it is what America has always represented at its best. It may feel dark right now, but we need to remember the American values that Pope Leo reflects have not disappeared, even though they are now in the shadows. I see good, quiet people all around me, modest people like Bob Prevost, who do good every day. We Americans are not just about money and power and fame, and never have been. We are also about faith and dignity, modesty and hard work, common sense and mercy. The very person of this mild-mannered Chicagoan will remind the world that this too is true. And that at some point, the current depravity will end.

I almost didn’t post this because it always irritates me to see a man as rational as Sullivan devoting a large portion of his life to superstition, but I do agree with the last paragraph: “the current depravity will end.” It doesn’t feel that way, right now; and if I wanted to depress myself I could say that the problem is far more than Trump alone: it’s half of America who voted for him. Leo (even if he’s the avatar of superstition) is in the better half, and I hope the better half triumphs.

*Chicago and Da Pope. Yep, our city is adopting Leo XIV, who of course hails from here, as one of the city’s icons, as Chicago-ish as hot dogs and Da Bearsh.

In the breathless day since Pope Leo XIV’s election as the first American pontiff, the memes, doctored images and tongue-in-cheek references have piled up deeper than Chicago’s pizza and more loaded than its hot dog, seemingly irresistible to comics and commoners alike.

Stained-glass windows depicting a dunking Michael Jordan? A change in canon law to make ketchup-topped frankfurters a sin? Cameos in “The Bear”? All of it apparently as tempting as the forbidden fruit.

“You just saw a billion jokes,” says Chad Nackers, who was raised Catholic and now presides as editor-in-chief of The Onion, the satirical site that heralded Robert Prevost’s elevation with an image of the smiling pontiff encased in a poppyseed-dotted bun.

“Conclave Selects First Chicago-Style Pope,” read the headline.

“It’s just kind of ripe for humor,” Nackers says.

“DA POPE!” blared the front of the Chicago Sun-Times on Friday, one of countless spins on the city’s unique accent, immortalized in “Saturday Night Live” sketches. No matter how Pope Leo XIV actually appears, in this realm of humor, he’s a mustachioed everyman who swaps his Ts for Ds and his zucchetto for a Bears cap.

With the Second City in the spotlight, more Chicago tropes were trotted out than even the famed namesake improv troupe could dream up. The popemobile traded for the Dodge Monaco made famous in “The Blues Brothers”? Check. Twists on city-set shows and movies like “Chicago Hope,” er, “Chicago Pope”? Yup. Dreams of Portillo’s Italian beef sandwiches and the Chicago liqueur Malört taking the place of the bread and wine of communion? Yes, chef. Over and over again.

AD

In sports-loving Chicago, city teams were spun in a swell of papal humor. Initial belief that the pope’s baseball loyalties were with the Cubs led content creator Caitlin Hendricks to muse that Leo ironically hates the Cardinals. As it turns out, though, it appears the man in white roots for the White Sox.

Yep, but this is the best one—a real cover:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,

Hili: My shadow is bigger than your tree.

A: THat’s not true but I understand your ambition.

Hili: Ja daję więcej cienia niż to twoje drzewo.

Ja: To nie jest prawda, ale rozumiem twoje ambicje.

*******************

From Stacy, another weird medieval scene:

From Jesus of the Day, and it may be real!

From My Cat is An Asshole:

Masih must be recovering, as she’s back posting again, and showing that she’s winning:

Remember the men who mocked #MyStealthyFreedom and #WhiteWednesdays the campaigns that I’ve launched against forced hijab in Iran!

10 years later, they’ve lost control.

First they ignore you. Then laugh. Then fight. Then you win.pic.twitter.com/Uz6a8EphBk

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) May 16, 2025

Simon sent a great screenshot of a post:

From Malcolm; kindness:

This man saw a cat, stayed to play with it, & cat fell asleep. The man didn’t move for not disturbing the sleeping cat. There’s no small kindness, & the world goes round for the sake of many a kind man. pic.twitter.com/35NZomOpcy

— Hakan Kapucu (@1hakankapucu) May 2, 2025

J. K. Rowling mocks the UN:

‘Women’ with penises. https://t.co/xBu6Vxxiz4

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 5, 2025

I found this one while doomscrolling:

What a fun game human! pic.twitter.com/91mZglLqe2

— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) May 3, 2025

A lovely aurora from the ISS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrosome

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A French Jewish girl was gassed upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was four. Had she lived, she'd be 87 today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-18T09:46:33.461Z

One tweet only from Dr. Cobb. Tetragonurus is a squaretail fish (the small one), and a pyrosome is a colonial tunicate.

Tetragonurus with its emotional support pyrosome from @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 455 #designingthefuture2 #MarineLife

— Lisa (@tuexplorer1.bsky.social) 2025-05-09T12:57:15.380Z

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, May 13, 2025 and National Apple Pie Day, celebrating the culinary equivalent of America! But they’re not limited to America: here’s a “Dutch apple pie with a lattice top layer (appeltaart)” (Credit: No machine-readable author provided. Pv assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons):

It’s also Tulip Day, Frog Jumping Day (celebrating Mark Twain’s 1865 story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County), National Fruit Cocktail Day,World Cocktail Day, and International Hummus Day. Here’s a lovely hummus meal I had in Jerusalem two years ago, complete with pita, falafal, and tomatoes with raw onion (not visible).  This place put whole chickpeas on top of the hummus paste.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 13 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage held by Hamas (actually he’s a dual citizen of Israel and the US), has been freed after direct US/Hamas negotiations (article archived here):

Hamas released Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage it held in Gaza, on Monday evening, after mediators brokered a deal between the group and the United States that largely circumvented the Israeli government. Hamas and the Israeli military confirmed the handover.

Mr. Alexander’s release came on the eve of a visit by President Trump to the Middle East, and was portrayed by Hamas officials as an attempt to secure U.S. support for a wider deal to end the war.

Mr. Alexander, 21, was among roughly 250 people seized and taken to Gaza during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that ignited the war in Gaza. A dual Israeli American national serving in the Israeli Army, he was captured from a military post that morning. He grew up in New Jersey and moved to Israel after high school to join the military.

Unlike most other hostages, Mr. Alexander was released without a formally announced cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, highlighting the failure of efforts to secure a broader truce between the two sides. Hamas still holds at least 20 living hostages — along with some 40 dead bodies, including those of several Americans — but it is reluctant to release more of them unless Israel agrees to hold negotiations to end the war. Israel wants the right to continue the war after any future truce, leading to an impasse in the talks.]

. . .Still, Mr. Cohen [“Yehuda Cohen, whose son Nimrod is still held in Gaza”] saw hope in how Mr. Trump was willing to work around Mr. Netanyahu. “He’s losing patience,” Mr. Cohen said of Mr. Trump. “We hope that it’s a new start of a new hostage deal, forcing Netanyahu to end the war, get all the hostages.”

Mr. Trump helped to fuel such hopes by announcing on social media on Sunday that Mr. Alexander’s release could be “the first of those final steps necessary to end this brutal conflict.”

The only way that Hamas will release all the hostages is if it’s allowed to retain power in Gaza, which would be intolerable to many Israelis. But on the other hand, Israelis naturally want the hostages released. Such is the dilemma of the Jewish state. Netanyahu has said that after Trump leaves the Middle East, the assault on Hamas will begin again, more serious this time.  And then what? Nobody knows.

Here’s a news report that shows part of the family reunion:

*This is weird: the romantic partner of Theranos grifter Elizabeth Holmes (she’s serving about a decade in prison for wire fraud) has raised millions of dollars for an AI-related biotech testing startup (h/t Killian).  From NPR:

The partner of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has raised millions of dollars for an artificial intelligence startup hoping to introduce a product that can be used in medical testing and other settings, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the endeavor who could not speak publicly because the company has not yet officially launched. The company is called Haemanthus, which is Greek for “blood flower.”

Holmes, a former Silicon Valley star, is serving an 11-year sentence in federal prison for misleading investors about her blood-testing startup Theranos, once heralded as a breakthrough in laboratory science before its core technology proved faulty.

Since being imprisoned at a federal facility in Bryan, Texas, Holmes has been providing advice to her partner, Billy Evans, on the startup, according to the sources. The precise nature of Holmes’ supporting Evans on the venture is unclear.

About a dozen people are part of the startup. Some of those working on the company formerly worked with Evans at Luminar Technologies, which develops sensors for autonomous vehicles, according to the company’s patent and Delaware incorporation paperwork. Evans has raised money mostly among friends, family and other supporters so far, according to one of the sources.

Evans is called her “partner” as it’s not sure whether they are legally married, though one would expect that the public records would answer that. More:

. . . . Holmes’ support for her partner’s foray into biotech is striking, given she is serving a federal prison sentence for fraud in that same field.

Over the course of her nearly four-month criminal trial, Holmes insisted she did not commit any crimes, despite evidence presented by the government and witness testimony suggesting she purposely deceived investors and tried to cover it up, not long after she was plastered on the covers of magazines and drew comparisons to Steve Jobs.

From prison, Holmes continues to fight. On Thursday, a federal appeals court upheld her conviction.

Holmes, the mother of two, named one of her children Invicta, Latin for “invincible.”

In addition to Holmes’ fraud conviction, a separate investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission led to her being banned from serving as an officer or director of any public company for a decade as part of a March 2018 settlement. The prohibition does not affect her ability to help run a private company, but a source familiar with Haemanthus said she is not planning to take a formal role helping Evans run the company.

Still, she is plotting a post-prison return to the healthcare industry.

Would you invest any money in this new company? Apparently a lot of people have, and it’s bloody weird. Almost as weird as Holmes “plotting a post-prison return to the healthcare industry.” She’ll be about 48 when she gets out, as she’s not entitled to much time off for good behavior.

*The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) reports that a professor at the University of Washington who was punished for putting the “wrong” land acknowledgment on his syllabus is suing his University. From FIRE’s media report: (I’ve bolded his “land acknowledgement”:

A federal appeals court in San Francisco is set to hear oral arguments later this week in the case of a Washington professor who refused to adhere to his university’s requirement that he include specific “land acknowledgment” language in a course syllabus.

On Thursday, May 15, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear oral arguments in the lawsuit brought by Professor Stuart Reges against the University of Washington. University administrators punished Reges after he included a land acknowledgement statement on his syllabus that differed from the university’s approved language. His statement? “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.”

The university told him to remove the statement and launched a year-long investigation with the threat of termination, claiming that Reges disrupted the learning environment. While Reges faced a setback when the district court initially ruled in favor of the university, he appealed in May 2024 and the fight goes on.

Josh Bleisch, one of the attorneys representing Reges, is available to discuss the upcoming arguments and the case. Reges is represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a national free speech group.

“We’re going to bat for Reges to send a simple message: faculty aren’t mouthpieces for their administrations,” said Bleisch. “The value of land acknowledgements may be up for debate, but faculty rights are not. We look forward to defending Reges’ rights in court.”

A longer FIRE report from 2022 (this has been going on for a while) is here, and I’ll give two more bits:

Colleges increasingly promote land acknowledgment statements that recognize indigenous ties to the land on which a college sits. On a list of syllabus “best practices,” UW’s computer science department encourages professors to include such a statement and suggests using language developed by the university’s diversity office “to acknowledge that our campus sits on occupied land.” The fact that the statement could be adapted seemed clear — until Reges wrote one that administrators did not like.

“University administrators turned me into a pariah on campus because I included a land acknowledgment that wasn’t sufficiently progressive for them,” said Reges. “Land acknowledgments are performative acts of conformity that should be resisted, even if it lands you in court. I am pleased that FIRE joined with me to fight back against University of Washington’s illegal viewpoint discrimination.”

. . . As a public institution bound by the First Amendment, UW must uphold its professors’ right to free speech and cannot discriminate against them based on viewpoint. UW is free to encourage its faculty to include land acknowledgment statements in their syllabi, and even to suggest examples, but it may not mandate that they either use only approved statements or remain silent on the issue under threat of discipline.

I think FIRE is right; this is a free-speech issue as well as an academic freedom one. If you are encouraged to put land acknowledgments on your syllabus, they cannot specify what you must say. And although I don’t know from the “labor theory of property,” Reges may well be right.  I don’t think he’s allowed to lie on his syllabus, but it doesn’t look as if he did.  I really dislike land acknowledgments because they’re purely performative. They are there to make the issuer look progressive and moral, but they accomplish exactly nothing. And that is what “woke” means.

*Those crazy tariffs between the U.S. and China, tariffs that threatened to promote an American recession, appear to have disappeared as quickly as they came. They’ve been slashed deeply, and the markets have responded favorably.

The U.S. and China agreed to slash punishingly high tariffs on each other’s goods, a major thaw in trade relations that resets the tone between the world’s two largest economies from outright conflict to constructive engagement.

After two days of weekend talks in Geneva:

President Trump’s “reciprocal” tariff on China will fall to 10% from 125%.

A separate 20% tariff the president imposed over what he described as China’s role in the fentanyl trade will remain.

Beijing will cut its retaliatory levies on U.S. goods to 10% from 125%.

The U.S. said reductions will last 90 days while talks continue.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said meetings over a fuller deal would likely start in the next few weeks, but it would be implausible for reciprocal tariffs on China to fall below 10%.

President Trump said the trade talks achieved a “total reset” with China, calling it a very good deal, and said he might speak to Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the end of the week.

The agreement lowered tariff levels far more than Wall Street expected, with one analyst, Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, calling the deal a “best-case scenario” for investors.

U.S. stocks surged, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite climbing more than 4%. The Dow industrials jumped above where it closed on April 2, before Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs sent markets into a tailspin.

From 125% to 10%: that’s a steep cut on both sides.  Now the best tariff is no tariff, but 10% on each side is at least acceptable, and won’t raise the price of consumer goods all that much.  I’m not sure whether this is Trump’s decision or that of his advisors, but it’s a relief. The only dark cloud for me is that I hoped that those who voted for Trump would become more centrist when they see how he tanked the economy for no good reason.

*Finally, Trump has signed an EO that will order a change–a lowering–of drug prices, and that can only be good. Americans pay way too much for drugs compared to residents of comparable countries, and it simply gouges the consumer while enriching drug companies.

President Donald Trump on Monday signed a sweeping executive order setting a 30-day deadline for drugmakers to electively lower the cost of prescription drugs in the U.S. or face new limits down the road over what the government will pay.

The order calls on the health department, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to broker new price tags for drugs over the next month. If deals are not reached, Kennedy will be tasked with developing a new rule that ties the price the U.S. pays for medications to lower prices paid by other countries.

“We’re going to equalize,” Trump said during a Monday morning press conference. “We’re all going to pay the same. We’re going to pay what Europe pays.”

It’s unclear what — if any — impact the Republican president’s executive order will have on millions of Americans who have private health insurance. The federal government has the most power to shape the price it pays for drugs covered by Medicare and Medicaid.

Trump’s promised new — but uncertain — savings on drug prices, just hours after the Republican-led House released its new plan to trim $880 billion from Medicaid.

Taxpayers spend hundreds of billions of dollars on prescription drugs, injectables, transfusions and other medications every year through Medicare, which covers nearly 70 million older Americans. Medicaid, which provides nearly-free health care for almost 80 million poor and disabled people in the U.S. also spends tens of billions of dollars each year for drugs.

The nation’s pharmaceutical lobby, which represents the top U.S. drugmakers, immediately pushed back against Trump’s order, calling it a “bad deal” for American patients. Drugmakers have long argued that any threats to their profits could impact the research they do to develop new drugs.

“Importing foreign prices from socialist countries would be a bad deal for American patients and workers,” Stephen J. Ubl, the president and CEO of PhRMA, said in a statement. “It would mean less treatments and cures and would jeopardize the hundreds of billions our member companies are planning to invest in America.”

This is from a US government report issued in 2020.

Insulin prices have increased dramatically over the past decade in the United States. This report presents results from international price comparisons of insulins using a price index approach. The average gross manufacturer price for a standard unit of insulin in 2018 was more than ten times the price in a sample of 32 foreign countries:$98.70 in the U.S., compared with $8.81 in the 32 non-U.S. OECD countries for which we have prescription drug data. The U.S. prices for the mix of insulin used in the U.S. were 8.1 times prices paid in all non-U.S. OECD countries combined.

Nearly 146 million people in America have either Medicare or Medicaid, and those are the oldest and poorest people.  That is more than half of American adults (people over 18). Many of the drugs that are overpriced, like insulin do not need further research and development—at least not big bucks’ worth. I’m pretty sure, though I don’t know with certainty, that a lot of the overpriced drugs are not new ones that needed a lot of money to develop. But of course Big Pharma could say, “Well, we need to overcharge because it gives us a constant stream of money to develop new drugs.”  I don’t believe that.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains the latest dialogue: “Hili says that everything is OK, she feels well and comfortable, but maybe somewhere else it would be better still and she is thinking about where there is a place she would feel even better.”

Hili: What now?

A: I don’t understand.

Hili: I have it good here and I wonder where to go to have it even better.

Hili: Co dalej?

Ja: Nie rozumiem.

Hili: Tu jest mi dobrze i zastanawiam się gdzie pójść, żeby mi było jeszcze lepiej.

*******************

From Cats, Coffee, and Chaos:

From David:

From Things With Faces: an evil chicken thigh:

Masih has been ill! We wish her a quick recovery; Iran needs her!

I recently underwent surgery for a women’s health issue, and unfortunately, post-operative complications have made the recovery far from easy. Although I had already shared the news on Instagram, many of you continued to reach out with concern and I’m deeply touched.

Thank you… pic.twitter.com/xnZCdtYoql

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) May 12, 2025

Have a look at her future studies:

BREAKING: George Washington University has announced their award winners for “outstanding leadership.”

Among the award winners is Vidya, who they praised for heading to law school to defend “anti-Zionists.” Universities don’t just tolerate Jew-haters, they reward them. pic.twitter.com/CIYuGE0eoJ

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) May 9, 2025

From Malcolm. LOOK AT THIS TREE!

Stunning 820 years old linden tree in the Czech Republicpic.twitter.com/2JsZ6mm7bo

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 23, 2025

From Barry, who notes, “There are purrs, meows, and chirps. . . but what in tarnation is this?

Cats have a wide spectrum of vocalizations, from the ‘standard’ meow, to purrs, to chirps and trills.

Yet, they always know how to surprise you with unexpected sounds.pic.twitter.com/2SbnLGrpLE

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 10, 2025

From Luana; this is just plain WEIRD!:

“It’s the grapes guy” 🍇
pic.twitter.com/EsYVoJjKYV

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) April 29, 2025

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted

Two posts from Dr. Cobb, who’s still abed and ailing but improving slowly. First, this is the first post of a thread. Read the whole thing; you won’t be sorry:

OK, this is wild.In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them.It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*. What the HELL?1/

— Mike Sowden (@mikeachim.bsky.social) 2025-05-12T15:20:06.024Z

To see the land slip, look to the right at 11 seconds in:

This is mind-blowing! I have never seen footage of the slip that occurs during an earthquake! Here you see the slip that occurred during the Myanmar earthquake. 🤯www.youtube.com/watch?v=77ub…

— Douwe van Hinsbergen (@vanhinsbergen.bsky.social) 2025-05-12T09:37:07.202Z

Welcome to the top o’ the week: Monday, May 12, 2025, and National Nutty Fudge Day. I prefer mine without nuts. Here’s some fruity fudge, which looks pretty good:

It’s also International Nurses Day, National Odometer Day, and Limerick Day.  Here’s one I wrote as a postdoc to answer a professor in molecular genetics who asserted that natural selection was unimportant and that development explained the appearance of animals:

“The giraffe,” said John Kiger last fall,
“Causes me no amazement at all;
“Why, the gene for the neck
“Is repeated, by heck
“And that’s why the damn thing’s so tall!”

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 12 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT goes after Colossal Bioscience’s wonky “de-extinction program” (as I did) in a piece called “There’s no ‘undo’ button for extinct species.” (Article archived here. h/t Enrico) A lot of the criticisms were given in my earlier Boston Globe piece.  I bolded one sentence.

De-extinction is a distinctly modern fantasy: the extremely appealing idea that we can, with just some pipettes and computers, undo the destruction we continue to cause the natural world. So it’s fitting that the first animal whose creation Colossal announced was a dire wolf — an animal that exists, in the public imagination, primarily as a fantasy. Colossal’s advisers include the “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin and two stars of the HBO adaptation, and a press photo showed the animals sitting on the show’s Iron Throne. Many commenters were shocked not by the advancing science of genetic engineering but rather by the revelation that dire wolves were once real animals.

. . . Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi began life as gray-wolf cells that were edited, grown into embryos and implanted in the wombs of surrogate dog mothers. The edits, which consisted of 20 modifications on 14 genes — a small fraction of the 19,000 genes that make up a gray-wolf genome — were based on comparisons between gray-wolf genomes and those reconstructed from dire-wolf DNA found in ancient tooth and bone fragments. (Gray wolves and dire wolves share superficially similar skeletons, which once led scientists to conclude they were closely related, but they’re actually quite distinct, with evolutionary lineages that diverged millions of years ago.) The resulting animals were larger and fluffier and lighter in color than other gray wolves. The company’s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, says this is enough to make them dire wolves, if you subscribe to the “morphological species concept,” which defines a species by its appearance. “Species concepts are human classification systems,” she told New Scientist, “and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right.”

A lot of people disagreed. Calling the pups dire wolves, wrote the evolutionary biologist Rich Grenyer, is “like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short Frenchman to wear his hat.” The scientists who specialize in canids for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a group that monitors biodiversity and maintains lists of threatened and endangered species, responded to Colossal’s announcement with a news release of its own, declaring that “the three animals produced by Colossal are not dire wolves.” For one thing, they said, there is no way to know if these wolves are good physical proxies for animals no one has seen for 12,000 years. For another, pure physicality ignores the ecology and behavior and culture of the original dire wolf — the very things that made it one.

I LOVE Grenyer’s comment; I wish I was that clever. At any rate, the tenor of the piece is that “de-extinction” is a false promise.

Even if Colossal had managed to reproduce the dire-wolf genome, that would be very different from reproducing a world in which a vanished creature might thrive. It’s also different from reproducing all the ways in which those creatures once affected their environment. Shapiro has referred to Colossal’s work as “functional de-extinction” — a concept borrowed from the rewilding movement — which argues for bringing back the animal activities that maintained an ecosystem, if not the exact animals that once performed them. It’s also a play on the ecological term “functional extinction,” which designates species that are still, technically, present in the world but in such starkly diminished numbers they no longer eat or pollinate or otherwise have a meaningful impact on their ecosystems. It’s a term that’s getting more and more play, given that the average size of global wildlife populations declined by 73 percent from 1970 to 2020.

. . . .Extinction is not a phenomenon of the mythic past. It’s an active and ongoing crisis, one that’s making our world less resilient and more impoverished. The potential victims, as the scientists at the International Union for Conservation of Nature noted, include many canids, the real-life extended family of dire wolves, now facing a raft of threats: “habitat loss and degradation, human-wildlife conflict, invasive species, disease and the overall disruption of natural processes.” By providing the appearance of an escape clause, so-called de-extinction could undermine not just the few protections that endangered species have but also the idea that we need to make any changes at all.

The day Colossal released its promo video, Doug Burgum, the Trump administration’s secretary of the interior, wrote a long post on X celebrating the news as the first step in ending protections for endangered species. In the future, populations would never really be at risk of disappearance, no matter how diminished their presence. And if they did vanish? Well, we would just bring a few of them back, Burgum told Department of Interior employees during a town hall: “Pick your favorite species,” he said, “and call up Colossal.”

I found that last quote, too.  Watch for the appearance of those woolly mammoths in three years!!!

*And another NYT article from Enrico is about who should set the rules for protests at Columbia University (archived here).

In the spring of 2024, pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia University found a formidable ally in the university senate, a body that was given authority over campus protest policy in the aftermath of violent police interventions decades earlier.

Now, the powerful senate finds itself under a microscope. University administrators and trustees, eager to reclaim authority and answer criticism from the Trump administration, have ordered a review of the senate, a move that could fundamentally alter Columbia and redefine control of student protests and disciplinary action.

Some trustees and administrators have blamed the senate for delaying and obstructing discipline of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who broke university rules, and some appear to have accused the 111-member elected body of antisemitism. Senators hotly rebut those charges and say that the senate is standing up for Columbia’s rules and proud tradition of protest against outside pressure.

. . .While a Trump administration task force has demanded that Columbia make a series of changes to get the $400 million back, the decision to review, and perhaps overhaul, the senate goes beyond those demands. It highlights the broad ideological divide between the left-leaning faculty members who dominate the senate and want to protect it and the trustees, who are mostly wealthy businesspeople and lawyers with a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that the university functions.

If the Senate punished Columbia students for encamping, or invading a building, I don’t know about it. A bit more:

I hate to say this, but I don’t think they wouldn’t have done that without the threat of Trump. And for sure the invasion of the library, which involved pushing security guard and vandalism, was against university regulations.

The school’s response to the protest contrasted with its approach last year, when chaotic and sometimes violent pro-Palestinian protests and encampments led the school to move classes online and cancel its main graduation ceremony. Now, for the first time in more than 50 years, the school employs campus police with expanded authority to arrest students.

I’d prefer that the school did this on its own rather than have its hand forced by our “President.” But seriously, breaking into a library and pushing guards, and then vandalizing the library during finals, no, that is not free speech.  I just hope that the school doesn’t drop the charges.

Here’s a Global News video of the assault, demonstration vandalism, and arrests. Note most of the protestors have covered their faces in the usual cowardice. Remember, these are the students who want to turn America into Palestine:

*Pizza Assault! Judges in cases adjudicating Trump’s recent policies have been intimidated by, yes, unordered pizzas. And I can imagine that that would be unsettling:

Federal judges say unsolicited pizza deliveries to jurists’ homes that began in February may number in the hundreds across at least seven states, prompting increased security concerns and a demand from a Senate leader for a Justice Department investigation.

Many of the deliveries have gone to judges presiding over lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s policies. The U.S. Marshals Service has been tracking the deliveries, and judges have been sharing details about their experiences in hopes of finding out more about what they call an ongoing attempt at intimidating the judiciary.

Some of the pizza deliveries have gone to judges’ relatives. In recent weeks, orders have been placed in the name of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’s son, Daniel Anderl, who was fatally shot at the family home in New Jersey in 2020 by an attorney who posed as a delivery person.

In an interview with The Washington Post, U.S. Circuit Judge J. Michelle Childs, who serves in Washington, said she has received seven anonymous pizza deliveries at her home in the past few months — one shortly after she took part in a ruling against the Trump administration in a lawsuit over the firing of an independent government watchdog.

“It’s unsettling because I’d like to go to work every day, even with the hardest case, just feeling like there’s no sense of intimidation,” said Childs, president of the Federal Judges Association.

“It’s really an unnecessary and an unfortunate threat to our security when we’re trying to be judicial officers in a very neutral position with respect to our cases,” she said. “You need a strong judiciary for the system to work. This is infringing on democracy generally.”

Childs and Salas said that they and other judges have discussed the deliveries with the marshals, relaying information to them each time a pizza arrives at the door. Childs serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Salas serves on the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.

I never order food to be delivered, but don’t you have to leave a credit card number when you order? What numbskull thought up this stunt?  And what law is being violated here? I’m sure there is one, probably falling under the rubric of “intimidation.” Perhaps “intimidation through pizza.”

*This can’t be legal: Trump may accept a jet from the corrupt country of Qatar to use as Air Force One!

President Donald Trump reportedly is set to accept a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet as a gift from the ruling family of Qatar during his trip to the Middle East this coming week, and U.S. officials say it could be converted into a potential presidential aircraft.

ABC News reported that Trump will use the plane as a new version of Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office in January 2029, when ownership will be transferred to the foundation overseeing his yet-to-be-built presidential library.

The gift is expected to be announced when Trump visits Qatar as part of a trip that also includes stops in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the first extended foreign travel of his second term. The Qatari government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Administration officials, anticipating questions about the president accepting such a large gift from a foreign government, have prepared an analysis arguing that doing so would be legal, according to ABC. The Constitution’s Emoluments Clause bars anyone holding government office from accepting any present, emolument, office or title from any “King, Prince, or foreign State,” without congressional consent.

. . . . One expert on government ethics, Kathleen Clark of the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, accused Trump of being “committed to exploiting the federal government’s power, not on behalf of policy goals, but for amassing personal wealth.”

Air Force One is a modified Boeing 747. Two exist and the president flies on both, which are more than 30 years old. Boeing Inc. has the contract to produce updated versions, but delivery has been delayed while the company has lost billions of dollars on the project. Delivery has been pushed to some time in 2027 for the first plane and in 2028 — Trump’s final full year in office — for the second.

Qatar, as you know, is the home of most immensely wealthy Hamas officials, and supplies plenty of dosh to the terrorist organization. For us to accept a gift from such a state is an arrant travesty, and, I hope, illegal. What does Trump flying around in a Qatari jet symbolize?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is exercising self help:

A: What are you thinking about?

Hili: Where to look for happiness.

Ja: Nad czym myślisz?

Hili: Gdzie szukać szczęścia.

*******************

From reader Wayne:

From reader David Jorling, and this must be Lamarckian evolution!

From reader Stacy, the new Chicago pope:

This is a story you should know about. The BBC gives the full story.

(1) MAJOR BREAKING STORY ON THE DARLINGTON NURSES

This is why it is untenable for men to have access to female changing rooms in the NHS.

Karen Danson, a Darlington nurse, anonymous until now, has gone public on her chilling story on how, after saying that she has experienced… pic.twitter.com/FqkOaBemRH

— Christian Concern (@CConcern) May 11, 2025

From Luana: a thread by Lee Jussim about some replies to Nate Silver’s dissing of the Bluesky site. The thread is worth reading, as is one reply:

My own contribution https://t.co/i5bcw7kKRH

— HeterodorxPodcast🍂🧑‍🦳 (@heterodorx) May 11, 2025

From Simon, who says, “As imaginary as the true value of cryptocurrency.”

Brilliant!

— Peggy Stuart (@peggystuart.bsky.social) 2025-05-09T20:42:12.618Z

From Malcolm; a parrot and AI talk on the phone. It’s hilarious.

pic.twitter.com/a87ZhQWubS

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973c) March 12, 2025

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

12 May 1928 | A Dutch Jewish boy, Max van den Berg, was born in Rotterdam.In August 1942 he was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber.

— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-05-12T02:00:40.816Z

Two tweets from Matthew. First, some ducklings:

I went to the park to film some water textures with a fancy ultra slomo camera, but got distracted by ducks, so here is some very wholesome content of ducklings having a great time chasing lil bugs in extreme 900fps slow motion:

— Rob Sheridan (@rob-sheridan.com) 2025-05-08T02:02:43.757Z

Colossal’s patent is for the final, gene-edited animal, so I don’t think that’s a violation of research ethics, but I doubt anybody is going to infringe on their patent anyway. The toys are clearly AI generated bya a prankster.

Colossal Biosciences is trying to win patents on the "Woolly mammoth" and the "dire wolf."www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/16/1…

— Antonio Regalado (@antonioregalado.bsky.social) 2025-04-16T12:46:46.386Z