Welcome to Tuesday, the Cruelest Day of the Week. It’s June 18, 2024, and it’s International Sushi Day. For sure it’s cultural appropriation, but of the good kind (nearly all kinds are good).  Here’s the best sushi movie ever made: “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” it’s 80 minutes long, but mesmerizing.  This is, to many, the best sushi restaurant in the world. (If this movie, which is great, doesn’t play in your browser, just go to it on the YouTube site.)

It’s also Autistic Pride Day, Go Fishing Day, National Cheesemakers Day (blessed be them!), National Cherry Tart Day, International Picnic Day, and Waterloo Day in the United Kingdom (the date of the battle in 1815).

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

Da Nooz:

*The Jerusalem Post gave the results of a new poll taken by a Palestinian pollster in both the West Bank and Gaza (h/t Robert). and it puts the lie to those who claim that Palestinians who aren’t in Hamas don’t really support it much.

Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki released a survey of Palestinian attitudes on Wednesday – the third since October 7 – showing that fully 61% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would prefer to see Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip and that support for the terrorist organization far outstrips that of Fatah.

Nevertheless, the headline of a New York Times front page article on Sunday read, “Gazans voice their distress under Hamas.” The online headline to the story was, “As war drags on, Gazans more willing to speak out against Hamas.”

Three days after a prominent Palestinian pollster referred to as such by a senior New York Times writer in November, released a poll indicating one trend among Palestinians, the Times published a front-page article that seemed to contradict those poll findings.

While the poll showed strong support for Hamas among Palestinians, the Times article, based on “interviews with nearly a dozen Gaza in recent months,” portrayed a different narrative of dissatisfaction with Hamas rule in Gaza.The article acknowledged that while gauging public opinion in Gaza is more difficult now even than it was in the past and, in some instances, renders contradictory results, “some recent surveys reflect the weak or mixed support in Gaza for Hamas and its leaders.”

That NYT article is here, and nobody would take this for even a quasi-scientific poll.  From the NYT:

In interviews with nearly a dozen Gaza residents in recent months, a number of them said they held Hamas responsible for starting the war and helping to bring death and destruction upon them, even as they blame Israel first and foremost.

. . . Some of the Gazans who spoke to The New York Times said that Hamas knew it would be starting a devastating war with Israel that would cause heavy civilian casualties, but that it did not provide any food, water or shelter to help people survive it. Hamas leaders have said they wanted to ignite a permanent state of war with Israel on all fronts as a way to revive the Palestinian cause and knew that the Israeli response would be big.

“Nearly a dozen” people? Of course, I can’t find how many people were interviewed by the Palestinian Pollster, either. Here’s another poll:

A poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Gaza and published this past week showed that support in Gaza for Hamas leaders is slightly higher and that the share who are satisfied with Hamas leadership in the territory has risen since December.”

Shikaki’s poll, unlike the one from March cited by the Times, found that the percentage of satisfaction with Hamas and Sinwar remains very high. Some 65% of all Palestinians said they were satisfied with Sinwar’s performance during this war (76% in the West Bank and 50% in Gaza.)

How do we figure out if the Palestinians, speaking out of fear, are just telling the pollsters what they want to hear? Hamas, after all, doesn’t much like its Palestinian opponents, as we saw in 2006 and 2007, when they killed a lot of Fatah members in Gaza.  We’ll only find out for sure if Hamas is overthrown and then Gazans get to choose their own leadership.

*Every day when I look at the Washington Post it seems lamer and lamer, and that’s probably true, as the paper is bleeding money like a stuck pig. It’s hard to find anything covered there now that isn’t better covered elsewhere. However, here’s one article that caught my eye, “The most common job in America is an incredible three-way tie.” So guess what those jobs are before reading below. The tie is pretty amazing. The piece was written in response to someone who asked what was the most common job in the U.S.—and also the least common job.

If you guessed home health and personal care aide was American’s most common job in 2023, you were correct! And honestly, if you guessed retail clerk or fast-food counter worker, we ought to give it to you anyway. With about 3.7 million workers each,the three jobs cluster together so closely atop the list that the winner falls within the minuscule margin of error produced by the BLS’s critically acclaimed, clunkily named Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program.\

Here’s the Post’s graph; the top three jobs differ by only about 13,000 workers.

Twice a year, BLS contacts more than 180,000 businesses to find out what sort of workers they employ in 800-plus occupations and what they pay them. Each year’s final release is informed by the most recent three years of surveys, so when all is said and done, this survey tries to get data from more than half of American jobs.

The least common job?

And it turns out that only 260 of America’s jobs go to wood patternmakers — making it the least common job tracked by the federal government. Brad Moore, director of engineering at Badger Alloys, employs two of them.

On the western edge of Milwaukee, where Badger has sprawled across several city blocks since its founding in 1966, the pattern perfectionists take the engineer’s plan for a valve or pump and craft a master. Often it’s wood, but sometimes they use other materials, such as urethane or aluminum. A colleague puts each side of the master into a mold box, a fancy industrial sandbox full of easy-to-shape industrial sand, to create a mold. They fill the mold with molten steel or alloys. Once it hardens, Team Badger busts the metal out of the sand to reveal single-piece parts that can weigh as little as a few pounds or as much as a late-model Chevy Suburban.

“It is unquestionable that those who can build, maintain and understand traditional wooden pattern equipment are artists,” Moore told us. “We aren’t making more, and they are slowly retiring and leaving the industry” now that so much American manufacturing has moved overseas.

But Moore doubts the art will die off entirely. American factories, ships and power plants, especially those critical to the nation’s security, will always need locally made steel bits that can’t easily be fabricated with other techniques. A few of the 10,000-odd wooden masters in Badger’s dry and secure storage facility have been around for a century, and Moore sees no reason we won’t need them for a century longer.

But of course there are unique jobs and jobs less common than wood patternmakers. For example, I’d guess lion tamers. This applies only to jobs tracked by the federal government. We are a white-collar country, but there are quite a few manual laborers: twice as many as software developers, which I found surprising.

*The IDF claims that it has destroyed two of the four brigades of Hamas fighters in Rafah,

The Israel Defense Forces said Monday it has dismantled about half of Hamas’s fighting force in Rafah, killing at least 550 gunmen in the area, as the operation against the terror group in the Gaza Strip’s southernmost city continued.

The IDF’s 162nd Division has been fighting in Rafah for more than 40 days, first taking control of the city’s eastern outskirts and the border crossing with Egypt in early May. In the second stage of the operation, about a week and a half later, the division captured the Brazil neighborhood.

The third stage of the Rafah offensive saw the IDF take control of the entire Egypt-Gaza border, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, and push into the city’s northwestern Tel Sultan neighborhood.

The IDF said it has killed at least 550 gunmen in the Rafah operation — that is, those it was able to physically identify following battles. Many more terror operatives were killed in strikes against buildings and tunnels, it has assessed. Additionally, an unknown number of terror operatives fled the Rafah area as the military began its offensive there.

Of the four battalions in Hamas’s Rafah Brigade, two — Yabna (South) and East Rafah — are considered to be almost completely dismantled, while the capabilities of the other two — Shaboura (North) and Tel Sultan (West) — are somewhat degraded due to IDF operations.

Along the Philadelphi Corridor, the IDF said it located hundreds of rockets, including dozens of long-range projectiles aimed at central Israel. Also in the border area, more than 200 tunnel shafts have been located, leading to many underground routes.

But of course many questions remain. How many Hamas fighters are in tunnels and can pop up in places other than Rafah, as they’ve been doing? When the IDF claims to have destroyed both remaining brigades form Hamas in Rafah, will that somehow end the war? Where is Sinwar? Where are the rest of the hostages? (My guess is that they’ve been farmed out to civilians.)  And, most of all, after Israel “destroys” Hamas, what will happen to Gaza?

*President Biden, while tightening immigration rules on one hand, is loosening them with the other. But the loosening seems fair, so long as the immigrants married to Americans aren’t doing so just to get their green cards:

President Biden is expected to announce a new immigration program Tuesday that would provide a path to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the country illegally who are married to U.S. citizens, according to lawmakers and others familiar with the matter.

Biden plans to make the announcement at the White House alongside members of Congress, immigration advocates and U.S. citizens who, because of arcane immigration rules, haven’t been able to sponsor their spouses for green cards.

The program has the potential to benefit immigrants who have been living in the country at least a decade, offering them work permits, deportation protections—and a route for them to apply for green cards, which is the pathway to citizenship. The program’s size would make it one of the largest immigration initiatives started in recent decades, rivaled only by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that former President Barack Obama created to benefit Dreamers in 2012. The White House is also planning to mark the 12-year anniversary of that program, known as DACA, at the event Tuesday.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that Biden was weighing the spouses program.

. . . With the new policy, his team homed in on the idea of providing immigration relief to spouses because a much smaller version of the program already haw existed for a decade for military families, according to people familiar with the discussions. His advisers also pointed to internal Democratic polling that found that most Americans support legalizing spouses of U.S. citizens, even if they entered the country illegally.

But this does seem fair, and of course there are ways to ensure that people really are married beyond having that marriage license. Suspected violators are separated and asked questions like “what side of the bed do you sleep on?”, and of course much more probing questions.  But if a couple has been married for a decade, and is living together, it seems cruel not to allow the immigrant spouses to embark on getting citizenship.

*The Biden Administration has a new Title IX law, one that protects LGBTQ+ students (fine with me, but not with Republicans), but also dismantles the salubrious changes made by Betsy DeVos in adjudicating sexual discrimination cases in colleges (DeVos’s changes were for the better, Biden’s changes for the worse), and, apparently, says nothing about what’s going to happen to transgender athletes.  However, the law is being challenged by several states, and apparently for the LGBTQ+ stuff. Ergo, it’s on hold. If it’s still on hold and Trump is elected, all bets are off:

The Biden administration’s effort to expand protections for LGBTQ+ students hit another roadblock Monday, when a federal judge in Kentucky temporarily blocked the new Title IX rule in six additional states.

U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves referred to the regulation as “arbitrary in the truest sense of the word” in granting a preliminary injunction blocking it in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. His ruling comes days after a different federal judge temporarily blocked the new rule from taking effect in Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi and Montana.

Attorneys general in more than 20 Republican-led states have filed at least seven legal challenges to President Joe Biden’s new policy. Republicans argue the policy is a ruse to allow transgender girls to play on girls athletic teams. The Biden administration said the rule does not apply to athletics.

Still under consideration is a request for a preliminary injunction filed by the Republican attorneys general of Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. The Education Department has asked a judge to deny the request.

Set to take hold in August, the rule expands Title IX civil rights protections to LGBTQ+ students, expands the definition of sexual harassment at schools and colleges, and adds safeguards for victims. Title IX, passed in 1972, is a law that bars sex discrimination in education.

Here’s the part that’s worrisome:

The ruling Monday in Kentucky was applauded by the state’s Republican attorney general, Russell Coleman, who said the regulation would undermine equal opportunities for women.

“The judge’s order makes clear that the U.S. Department of Education’s attempt to redefine ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity’ is unlawful and beyond the agency’s regulatory authority,” Coleman said in a statement.

If “sex” is redefined to include “gender identity,” then yes, student athletics will have to allow transgender women to compete against biological women in school athletics.  I’d have to look up the law, and I’m too lazy to do that now (plus it’s 93°F outside).  But the dismantling of DeVos’s protections for sexual harassment/assault cases in college, which simply gave the accused the same rights he’d get in court, is dire, and for that they should hold the law up. But I don’t have any beef about laws that expand civil rights protections to LGBTQ+ people. Is there any downside to this?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili remains bellicose:

Hili: I’m afraid that the aphids have returned.

A: So we have to declare war against them.

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

From Cat Memes:

From The Absurd Sign Project, Uncensored 2.  The caption, “Suddenly, McDonald’s looks less appetizing since they put rodents on their menu.”

From reader Barry:

From Masih; the Taliban are sending their own kids to the West for education, while permitting only boys to get education in Afghanistan.

Did you know that the same Taliban that banned girls and women from attending school in Afghanistan are sending their own children to the West for education?
It’s a shame that Gender Apartheid is happening in 21st-century.
Will you join us?#UnitedAgainstGenderApartheid pic.twitter.com/WD0zgj99vs

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) June 14, 2024

Colin Wright is disappointed, as he should be, but it’s not his fault! Either ideology or ignorance of biology (or both) can explain this sad result:

Only 64.2% of you got the right answer: gametes

The type of gamete an individual has the function to produce is what universally defines an individual’s sex, with males having the function to produce sperm, and females, ova.

Chromosomes do not define a person’s sex. Rather, the… https://t.co/xJzLsZY3FK

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) June 15, 2024

From Malgorzata; People need to know that this kind of Jew hatred is taught as a regular thing in Palestine. This is from MEMRI, so it’s absolutely reliable. Notice that in Palestine they don’t use euphemisms like “Zionist”; they simply say, as they do in this cartoon, “Jew”.

Yes, a Palestinian state that teaches hatred is dangerous to the Middle East. No one wants another Nazi-like regime. On TV cartoons, they teach hate, racism, and anti-Semitism against Jews. Notably, they avoid using terms like #Israel or Zionist, reserving those for Western… pic.twitter.com/TK8XhMshLx

— Amjad Taha أمجد طه (@amjadt25) June 15, 2024

From Malcolm, a man helps a cat play:

Man gives cat a ride on the merry go round..🐈🐾☺️ pic.twitter.com/CgK7NIdTah

— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) June 1, 2024

Freddy Mercury warming up, with the audience helping, before his famous performance at Live Aid.  I’d never seen this!  He’s singing the opening of the famous Harry Belafonte song.

🧵 Thread of some of the most epic moments in Rock History 👇🏻

1- Freddie Mercury doing a vocal warmup at Live Aid with 70k people in his hands. pic.twitter.com/Gx7PCVXYq4

— 🎸 Rock History 🎸 (@historyrock_) June 16, 2024

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

A ten year old girl, gassed upon arrival. https://t.co/Np92WTdpzI

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) June 18, 2024

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, the self-correcting nature of science (found while Matthew was researching his biography of Crick):

In the late 1970s several researchers attempted to show that DNA is not a double helix. One of the most determined was Bill Pohl. Jim Wang, who collaborated with Crick, was eventually able to prove Pohl wrong, as he explains in this letter. pic.twitter.com/bKuJFA8zaM

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) June 17, 2024

I love this video. Look how politely the raccoon takes its donut.  I’ve watched this maybe twenty times, and I don’t get tired of it.

This Raccoon has better manners than most humans pic.twitter.com/wADBaeum67

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) June 16, 2024

Welcome to Thursday, June 13, 2024, and National Cupcake Lovers Day.  Here are some very fancy s’mores cupcakes with marshmallow frosting and the requisite graham crackers and two squares of a Hershey Bar™.  This would be a great breakfast treat!

It’s also Sewing Machine Day (Thomas Saint of England took out a patent on an early sewing machine on this day in 1790), Weed Your Garden Day, World Softball Day, and International Albinism Awareness Day. Let’s not forget albinos other than humans; here’s an albino wallaby and its joey; mom must have mated with either another albino or a carrier for this recessive gene:

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

Da Nooz:

*A war between Israel and Hezbollah seems imminent since Hezbollah keeps upping the number of sophisticated rockets fired at Israel daily. As I write this at 1 pm yesterday, Hezbollah has fired over 215 rockets at Israel. Note that the Iron Dome takes down most of these rockets, plus many Israelis in danger areas are sequestered in bomb shelters.  Note too that Israel responds only to rocket fire from Lebanon and only responds to attacks, never initiating. Finally, note that the UN has a binding resolution (#1701) on Hezbollah not to do that. Hezbollah is committing an arrant war crime, targeting civilians, but nobody cares since their targets are Jews.

Hezbollah launched some 215 rockets and several more missiles and drones at northern Israel on Wednesday, in what it said was a response to the killing of a senior commander in the terror group by an Israeli airstrike a night earlier.

The barrages marked the largest attack carried out by Hezbollah during ongoing fighting on the Lebanon border amid the war in the Gaza Strip.

And the terror group vowed to ramp up its attacks in retaliation for Israel’s elimination of top commander Taleb Abdullah. At a funeral procession in Beirut, senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said the group would increase the intensity, force and quantity of its operations against Israel.

Hezbollah launched some 215 rockets and several more missiles and drones at northern Israel on Wednesday, in what it said was a response to the killing of a senior commander in the terror group by an Israeli airstrike a night earlier.

The barrages marked the largest attack carried out by Hezbollah during ongoing fighting on the Lebanon border amid the war in the Gaza Strip.

And the terror group vowed to ramp up its attacks in retaliation for Israel’s elimination of top commander Taleb Abdullah. At a funeral procession in Beirut, senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said the group would increase the intensity, force and quantity of its operations against Israel.

“If the enemy is screaming and moaning about what happened to it in northern Palestine, let him prepare himself to cry and wail,” Safieddine said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a security assessment Wednesday evening “in light of the developments in the north,” his office said.

The successive Hezbollah attacks began on Wednesday morning with a barrage of at least 90 rockets fired at several areas in northern Israel, including Tiberias — for the first time amid the war — Safed and Rosh Pina, sending tens of thousands of people to shelters, as Jewish Israelis celebrated the Shavuot holiday.

The Israel Defense Forces said another 70 rockets were then launched at the Mount Meron area, home to a sensitive air traffic control base. Ten more rockets were fired at Kibbutz Zar’it, and an anti-tank guided missile struck a factory of the Plasan armored vehicle manufacturer in Kibbutz Sasa, causing damage.

Fortunately, only a handful of Israelis have been killed or wounded by these rockets, but Hezbollah sure looks as if it’s spoiling for a fight, and it may get one. Israel is already prepared for a war with Hezbollah, and the U.S. has warned them, indirectly, not to take advantage of the Gaza war by themselves attacking Israel. But that’s exactly what they’re doing, though I expect the U.S. won’t help Israel in a war with Hezbollah.  The UN has many soldiers stationed in Lebanon, but they dare not interfere with the terrorists.  Oh, and 60,000 Israelis have become refugees in their country, having fled south from their northern border to avoid the rockets.

*There’s not a lot of news today, but there is useful practical news. Here’s some for people who want to renew their passports, and now can do so ONLINE:

Travelers who want to renew their passports online can do so starting Wednesday.

Eligible travelers can process their applications without sending everything in the mail and can expect to receive their passport back in six to eight weeks. The State Department tested online passport renewals in 2022, but took the program offline in 2023.

*The NYT reports that a Missouri restaurant has banned anyone under 30. Yep, not just kids, but even young adults. They think it gives older customers a better vibe, but legal issues loom. . . .

When Tina and Marvin Pate travel to Cancún or the Dominican Republic, they enjoy the bliss created by the good music, delicious food and the absence of children.

So in May, when they opened Bliss Caribbean Restaurant in St. Louis County, Mo., the couple decided to give their customers the same joy — by requiring that all female customers be at least 30 years old, and all men 35.

“We decided to come up with a whole restaurant where adults could pretty much go on vacation for a fraction of the cost,” Mr. Pate said.

This rule has drawn widespread attention to Bliss through social media, resulting in packed dance parties and what the restaurant calls a “grown and sexy” vibe.

But the requirement has also raised some legal questions, as experts point out that the restaurant is treating men and women differently.

“My knee-jerk reaction is that it is technically illegal,” Sarah Jane Hunt, the owner and managing partner of the St. Louis-based law firm Kennedy Hunt, P.C., said in an interview. Ms. Hunt specializes in discrimination lawsuits.

Since Bliss Caribbean Restaurant opened in May, news media have covered the restaurant and its rule, and residents have turned to social media, mostly to praise the policy.

“It stops all of the riffraff that goes on in St. Louis,” said Sean McLemore, a 50-year-old St. Louis resident who has dined at Bliss Caribbean Restaurant. “The atmosphere is real chill. It’s a great environment.”

What laws might it be breaking? Here’s one answer:

But legal experts say that despite the owner’s best intentions, the restaurant’s age rules may not be legal. Travis Crum, an associate law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said that even though federal law does not generally prohibit age restrictions in public spaces, the restaurant may be violating the Missouri Human Rights Act.

The act “prohibits discrimination by public accommodations on the basis of sex” in addition to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, ancestry, or disability, Mr. Crum explained.

But Crum doesn’t say anything about age. If they can’t ban those under 30, they can’t ban children, either, and yet don’t some restaurants ban kids? I am neutral on this restaurant’s policy, but I do think that banning children in some places is salubrious because sometimes you want a quiet meal without worries of children screaming or running about.

*One of my friends asked me why I thought Republicans had a worse policy on the environment than do Democrats, something that would seem to me bloody obvious.  But the WaPo reports some new Republican perfidy on this issue, and how scientists are trying to prevent it:

When the union representing nearly half of Environmental Protection Agency employees approved a new contract with the federal government this month, it included an unusual provisionthat had nothing to do with pay, benefits or workplace flexibility: protections from political meddling into their work.

The protections, which ensure workers can report any meddling without fear of “retribution, reprisal, or retaliation,” are“a way for us to get in front of a second Trump administration and protect our workers,” said Marie Owens Powell, an EPA gas station storage tank inspector and president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Council 238.

The agreement signals the extent to which career employees and Biden administration officials are racing to foil any efforts to interfere with climate science or weaken environmental agencies should former president Donald Trump win a second term. Trump and his allies, in contrast, argue that bloated federal agencies have hurt economic development nationwide and that the Biden administration has prioritized climate science at the expense of other priorities.

“One of the things that is so bad for us is the environmental agencies. They make it impossible to do anything,” the former president said in an interview with “Fox & Friends” that aired June 2, claiming that “they’ve stopped you from doing business in this country.”

The Trump administration sidelined, muted or forced out hundreds of scientists and misrepresented research on the coronavirus, reproduction and hurricane forecasting, environmentaladvocates said. Now as an example of what’s to come, they point to a blueprint called “Project 2025,” a plan for the next conservative administration drafted by right-wing think tanks in Washington.

The plan calls for a sweeping reorganization of the executive branch, one that would concentrate more power in Trump’s hands. At the EPA, it recommends eliminating the office of environmental justice, which was created in 2022 to address the pollution that disproportionately harms poor and minority communities.

I’ve never heard of this office, so I have no opinion about its elimination, but I know how anti-science Trump and his running dogs are.  A bit more:

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where a 2020 investigation found that agency leaders violated its scientific integrity policy after Trump showed a doctored hurricane forecast map, stricter standards took effect in March. A similar policy will soon be extended to the Commerce Department, including to the political appointees whose violations were detailed in the 2020 probe.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is showing off:

Hili: I admire everything possible.

A: And what do you admire just now?

Hili: The vastness of my ignorance.

Hili: Podziwiam co się da.

Ja: A w tej chwili co podziwiasz?

Hili: Bezmiar własnej ignorancji.

And Kulka has finally made friends with the new baby upstairs:

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

From Cat Memes:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih; another Iranian woman injured for not covering her hair.  When is this madness going to stop?

This image shows the bruised legs of a woman who resisted being forced into a van for not covering her hair. The photo is shared on social media as a reminder that participating in elections means voting for criminals. The same police who killed Mahsa Amini and many other… pic.twitter.com/4PJB8L7p8X

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) June 12, 2024

From Emma Hilton, responding to a tautology-infected gender activist. She’s getting as snarky and funny as J. K. Rowling:

Nathan.

This is hilarious nonsense.

It’s not like asking whether a tabby cat is a cat *at all*.

It’s like asking whether a tabby dog is a cat, but because someone has told you that some dogs are to be called cats, and you agree because you’re under extreme social pressure… https://t.co/jHJg9JtOD9

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) June 9, 2024

From Qanta Ahmed, a Muslim physician who happens to not hate Israel and Jews.

I completely agree, however I am so disturbed as a Muslim and as a Muslim, who has lived in Saudi Arabia, where I had a wonderful home for two years, to have to confront the reality that entire Palestinian communities and families are deeply invested in keeping hostages captive.… https://t.co/gVlVkSEQOs

— Qanta Ahmed (@MissDiagnosis) June 9, 2024

A tweet and a followup answering Larry the Cat’s question:

From Malcolm. I haven’t seen this movie, but I love the animations from Studio Ghibli (my favorites are “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away.”

In case you’re a fan of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli and saw Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, you still may not know her glider, the Mehve, has been recreated in real life by artist Kazuhiko Hachiya.

It’s called M-02J and has a 963 cm wingspan.pic.twitter.com/5RT8J4t20g

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 13, 2024

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a Dutch girl gassed upon arrival. She was 11.

13 July 1933 | Dutch Jewish girl, Duifje Gans, was born in Amsterdam.

In September 1944 she was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber. pic.twitter.com/YRVX95PmH0

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) June 13, 2024

Two tweets from Doctor Cobb; the first showing a fun-loving DUCK:

“Ready, set, weeee” 😂 pic.twitter.com/QefchHMWlZ

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) June 12, 2024

We haven’t seen my beloved Philomena lately. Here she is dilating on Christianity:

pic.twitter.com/6bvpcTAtiC

— John W. Farrell (@JohnWFarrell) June 12, 2024

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, June 11, 2024, and National Corn on the Cob Day.  I used to have a picture of Matthew Cobb with a can of corn on his lap, which I called “Corn on the Cobb”, but I can’t find it.  This photo of elote, the tasty Mexican version, will have to do:

It’s also Call Your Doctor Day, National German Chocolate Cake Day (not cultural appropriation!), Pizza Margherita Day, World Pet Memorial Day, and, in Hawaii, King Kamehameha Day,

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

Da Nooz:

*On Sunday French President Emmanuel Macron experienced a humiliating defeat when, after the elections for the EU parliament, his own Renaissance party’s representatives were roundly defeated (31.4% to 14.6%) by Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally Party (it seems that all of Europe is moving sharply rightward). In respond, Macron made a gamble: he summarily dissolved one of the two houses of the French Parliament and called for new elections. From the NYT:

*NBC News reports that the U.S. is contemplating cutting a side deal with Hamas (without the presence of Israeli representatives) to free the American hostages. (h/t: Bill)

Biden administration officials have discussed potentially negotiating a unilateral deal with Hamas to secure the release of five Americans being held hostage in Gaza if current cease-fire talks involving Israel fail, according to two current senior U.S. officials and two former senior U.S. officials.

Such negotiations would not include Israel and would be conducted through Qatari interlocutors, as current talks have been, said the officials, all of whom have been briefed on the discussions.

White House officials declined to comment.

The Biden administration has said it believes Hamas is holding five American hostages who were abducted during the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. U.S. officials are also hoping to recover the remains of three additional U.S. citizens who are believed to have been killed on that day by Hamas, which then took their bodies into Gaza.

The officials did not know what the United States might give Hamas in exchange for the release of American hostages. But, the officials said, Hamas could have an incentive to cut a unilateral deal with Washington because doing so would likely further strain relations between the U.S. and Israel and put additional domestic political pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

One of the former officials said the internal discussions have also taken place in the context of whether the possibility of the U.S. cutting a unilateral deal with Hamas might pressure Netanyahu to agree to a version of the current cease-fire proposal.

I haven’t thought at length about this, but it sounds to me like a bad idea. We are allies with Israel and should be solving this problem together, nor should the U.S. be helping Hamas (note: this isn’t Palestine they’re bargaining with) in any way. What could the U.S. give Hamas that wouldn’t help them?  On the other hand, I can see that it’s a way to give five human beings their freedom, and Biden’s real brief is to help Americans if he can.  On the other hand, it seems like an election-year stunt, and ideally the U.S. would be working with Israel to get ALL the hostages freed. (But we’re not in agreement on the negotiations.) On the third hand, Thailand did cut a side deal to get its hostages back by releasing Palestinian prisoners. (I am not sure how many Hamas members are in U.S. prisons, and whether Hamas would want them back badly enough.) This is a diplomatic and moral dilemma, and I can see both sides.  I just don’t think Biden should be helping Hamas, though if they’ll let Americans go in return for a handful of Arab terrorists being released from prison, perhaps it’s worth considering. Readers should weigh in.

*In light of the recuse of four Israeli hostages by the IDF, Hamas has now issued orders to any of its “operatives” to kill any hostages if the IDF shows up.

Hamas terrorist leaders have given standing orders to operatives who are holding hostages saying “that if they think Israeli forces are coming, the first thing they should do is shoot the captives,” according to Israeli officials quoted by The New York Times on Monday.

Two days after the Israel Defense Forces’ rescue of four hostages from Nuseirat in central Gaza, the newspaper reported that if other hostages were killed on Saturday, as Hamas has claimed, “it might have been at the hand of the [terrorists], not because of an Israeli airstrike.”

The IDF has directly rejected a Hamas claim that three hostages were killed by Israeli airstrikes, the report noted.

The two buildings where the four hostages were kept were about 200 meters apart, and a decision by security forces to go for both simultaneously on Saturday was due to the concern that Hamas may murder the hostages after identifying the rescue operation at the other location.

The Times also reported on Washington’s contributions to hostage-rescue efforts since almost immediately after Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel, quoting US officials as saying that “the sheer numbers of American aircraft” gathering intelligence over Gaza have been able to surface information that Israeli drones missed.

“At least six MQ-9 Reapers controlled by Special Operations forces have been involved in flying missions to monitor for signs of life,” the officials were quoted as saying.

Well, I’m delighted that the U.S. is sticking with Israel and helping it gather intelligence. My question is what Hamas has to gain by shooting hostages if the IDF shows up.  It loses bargaining chips, for one thing.  Their response might be that there’s no surviving an encounter with the IDF, and why give up hostages that Israel wants if you’re going to die. Another thought I had was, “Just surrender if the IDF shows up. You may have to give up your hostages, but you don’t die.” Then I remembered that true Muslims want to die, as you get eternal benefits in heaven from martyrdom.   I asked Malgozata earlier, and she, like me, didn’t have a cut-and-dried answer. A half hour later she sent me this:

The answer to your question of why Hamas they kill hostages when the IDF shows up came to me after we finished talking. They keep hostages alive only as long as they need them to extract some benefits from Israel. Otherwise, why let those infidels live? Killing infidels is pleasing to Allah. Then we went for a walk and I told Andrzej about your question. He reminded me about the Nazis in the last weeks of the war. They needed men and fuel for fighting but they still used a substantial portion of both to kill Jews. Their aim was to kill all Jews on Earth and they tried to kill as many as possible even when they could see Russian tanks on the horizon. And this was pure, earthly ideology, no heavenly rewards were promised. So pure hate can achieve such an outcome.

Readers are of course invited to weigh in on this issue.

*The Washington Post has an op-ed called “A scientific controversy at the Supreme Court“, which of course got my antennae waving. It turns out that while nearly all studies show that the abortion drug mifepristone is safe, a couple of studied highlighted problems. Recently those papers showing problems were retracted by the publisher.  Remember, the whole basis for banning the drug in Texas came from those who say the FDA ignored problems with the drug!

In March, the Supreme Court heard a case about access to mifepristone, one of two pills used for a medication abortion. Just weeks before that, though, a scientific controversy roiled the debate: Some of the scientific studies underlying the legal challenge to the abortion pill were retracted by Sage, the academic publishing company, over methodological and ethical concerns. The Supreme Court is expected to rule in a matter of days or weeks.

This is a big deal. Removing a published article from a scientific journal doesn’t happen because of some small error. It’s unusual for a paper to be retracted (about 1 in 500), but the rate is increasing — and misconduct accounts for the majority of such instances. A retraction can be decided by the authors (after realizing a huge error) or by the publisher (over fraud, plagiarism, ethics, etc.).

The legal challenge was set off by a group of antiabortion doctors who argued that the Food and Drug Administration ignored safety concerns when it eased restrictions on mifepristone’s availability. They relied on scientific studies claiming the medication is dangerous, citing the number of emergency room visits after mifepristone use. After publication, though, other scientists voiced major concerns about the statistical methods and thus questioned the conclusions.

The experts identified major ethical issues and scientific errors, including: A peer reviewer knew at least one of the authors of all three studies, and several are members of the same pro-life advocacy organizations, despite declaring no conflicts of interest in the study. The Sage review also concluded there were “unjustified or incorrect factual assumptions,” “material errors” and “misleading presentations” of data that “demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor and invalidate the authors’ conclusions in whole or in part.”

Then there’s this:

Clinical guidance and policy are (ideally) built on decades of research and consideration of the totality of evidence. In the case of mifepristone, more than 100 studies show it’s safe — in fact, safer than Tylenol — with only a few discordant studies. However, big mistakes can make it past the peer-review process, and, in some rare cases, “mistakes” are intentional and egregious. Even if studies are retracted, they can do a lot of harm. (Just look at the Wakefield study on autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.)

If that’s the case, then the Supremes should say the drug is safe. We don’t want judges deciding what sound science is; we want them to defer to the scientific consensus, as they do when ruling against creationism as a subject in public schools.  If the Supreme Court starts judging the safety of drugs, we’re in trouble.

*Finally, Hunter Biden’s case has gone to the jury:

Jurors in Hunter Biden’s gun trial began deliberating Monday to decide whether the president’s son is guilty of federal firearms charges over a revolver he bought when prosecutors say he was addicted to crack cocaine.

He is charged with three felonies in the case that has laid bare some of the darkest moments of his drug-fueled past. Prosecutors have used testimony from former romantic partners, personal text messages and photos of Hunter Biden with drug paraphernalia or partially clothed to make the case that he broke the law.

“No one is above the law,” prosecutor Leo Wise told jurors in his closing argument as first lady Jill Biden watched from the front row of the Wilmington, Delaware, courtroom.

Jurors deliberated for less than an hour before leaving the courthouse for the day. Deliberations were to resume Tuesday morning.

. . .Before the case went to the jury, the prosecutor urged jurors to focus on the “overwhelming” evidence against Hunter Biden and pay no mind to members of the president’s family sitting in the courtroom.

“All of this is not evidence,” Wise said, extending his hand and directing the jury to look at the gallery. “People sitting in the gallery are not evidence.”

I’m guessing that the verdict will be “guilty”.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the bad news has put Andrzej in a bad mood:

Hili: You have been reading the news again.

A: Is it visible?

Hili: Yes, You look as if you wanted to say something unpleasant to somebody.

Hili: Znowu czytałeś wiadomości.

Ja: A to widać?

Hili: Tak, wyglądasz jakbyś chciał komuś powiedzieć coś przykrego.

And a photo of Baby Kulka cavorting outdoors:

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

From Unique Birds and Animals and Instagram:

From Science Humor:

A good question from a reader:

From Masih, kudos from another famous dissident:

The amazing @AlinejadMasih ! https://t.co/WHaJxYQtLh

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) June 9, 2024

Some hypocrisy sent by Malgorzata:

Contrasting the U.S. targeting campaign against ISIS with Israel’s against Hamas.

This was celebrated as a legitimate strike against an ISIS convoy in Fallujah.

It was supposed to be a humanitarian corridor for civilians to exit Fallujah ahead of an offensive – yes, ISIS took… pic.twitter.com/PvwR0nZDBv

— Michael P Pregent (@MPPregent) June 4, 2024

Albanese is an odious person. Look at the language she uses:

.@FranceskAlbs This is to serve notice that your statement below constitutes a material breach of the United Nations Code of Conduct for Special Procedures Mandate-Holders of the Human Rights Council, specificially for violating your duties under Article 3 to act through a… https://t.co/eIfvTsGvGq

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) June 9, 2024

Is this really a great commercial? It’s certainly an unusual one!

Quite possibly the greatest commercial I’ve ever seen. #commercials pic.twitter.com/7Vm85R01qe

— Lloyd Legalist (@LloydLegalist) May 31, 2024

GUESS!

Mother bear and her cubs climbing a snow wall
pic.twitter.com/A37d7tcSbi

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) June 10, 2024

From Malcolm: two angles on a volcano, both photographed from space:

https://www.facebook.com/reel/817401286906592

From the Auschwitz Memorial; one that I reposted:

Gassed upon arrival at the camp. She was two years old. https://t.co/mda0RcSja9

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) June 11, 2024

Two tweets from Dr. Cornonthe Cobb. How do people SKI like this!

Unbelievable!

pic.twitter.com/tZb3z48xuj

— Figen (@TheFigen_) May 16, 2024

Matthew simply says “Outrageous!” in response to this product. I agree with him!

🥴🥴🥴🥴 pic.twitter.com/jyFjn3F2jN

— FunnyStuff & Sarcasm 🙃 (@Funny_Stuff32) June 9, 2024

I’m back after a day off and some rest (I actually got a decent night’s sleep), so welcome to Sunday (Sabbath for goyische cats), June 9, 2029.  There will be a shortened Hili dialogue today as I was too wiped out to prepare them. (Most of the preparation is done the night before.) Tomorrow we’ll resume as usual.

It’s National Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Day, which becomes edible only when you omit the rhubarb. As I say endlessly, vegetables (especially gritty and sour ones) don’t belong in pies.

It’s also Donald Duck Day, for it was on this day in 1934 that the pantsless drake first appeared in the short animated Disney film “The Wise Lttle Hen”. Here it is; Donald shows up at 2:04, dancing the hornpipe:

And it’s Race Unity Day, La Rioja Day, celebrating a great wine, Coral Triangle Day, promoting ocean conservation, and Don Young Day, celebrating the Republican congressman from Alaska who served for 49 years—the longest-serving representative in history.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 9 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

The big news is the rescue of four Israeli hostages by the IDF in the Gazan refugee camp of Nuseirat. (The details of the operation are here.) All four hostages were held by civilian families (three men in one place and the woman in another), and the rescue involved firefights in both the homes and the surrounding villages; Hamas gunmen were involved in both place. Hamas opened fire on the IDF from a market as the IDF tried to put the hostages into a vehicle to remove them from Gaza. The death toll is uncertain, ranging from 55 (in the Palestinian hospital) to 210 (Hamas’s figure). (Israel estimates 100.) We don’t know what proportion of the dead were terrorists (were the family holding the hostages along with Hamas gunmen “civilians”, for example?).

This is what I can gather from a cursory look at the news, and what’s absolutely predictable is the world’s reaction, which is that the hostage rescue produced a “massacre” (see this article about the reaction of EU representative Josep Borrell):

European Union High Representative Josep Borrell called the hostage rescue operation carried out by Israeli security forces on Saturday morning “appalling” in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

The operation, carried out jointly by the IDF, Shin Bet and Border Police’s National Counterterrorism unit Yamam, successfully rescued four hostages: Noa Argamani, Shlomi Ziv, Almog Meir Jan, and Andrey Kozlov. According to Palestinian officials, over 200 Palestinians were killed during the IDF operation.

Borrell referred to the operation as “another massacre of civilians,” noting that the EU “condemns this in the strongest terms.”

Borrell called the fight to rescue the hostages a “bloodbath,” but, curiously, also said this:

Earlier on Saturday, Borrell also sent remarks congratulating the four hostages on their release, writing on X that they are “are free and safe today.

“We share the relief of their families and call for the release of all the remaining hostages.”

It almost seems as if the reaction of the world is that Israel should not have tried to rescue the four hostages, or at least rescued them without there being so many deaths in the firefight. My reaction is that the deaths of civilians were an unfortunate byproduct of Hamas trying to kill IDF soldiers trying to rescue the hostages. Hamas could just let them go, you know.

Here’s a tweet showing the woman hostage, Noa Argamani, being escorted to a helcopter for evacuation:

The moment Noa Argamani was accompanied by Yamam officers to a helicopter after the rescue operation https://t.co/BOziRRkBkx pic.twitter.com/H8wD1EjwH9

— Documenting Israel (@DocumentIsrael) June 8, 2024

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is narcissistic, as always:

A: What are you doing?

Hili: I beautify the world with myself.

Ja: Co robisz?

Hili: Upiększam sobą świat.

. . . and a photo of Baby Kulka looking out the window:

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

From The Dodo Pet:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy: (I suppose Jesus is also his seatbelt):

Masih and Yasmine Mohammed appeared on Sam Harris’s show talking about Gender Apartheid.

I had the absolute pleasure and honor of co-hosting @MakingSenseHQ with Sam Harris 🤍And the cherry on top of that phenomenal cake was that we were interviewing my dear friend, @AlinejadMasih 🌸

Gender Apartheid and the Future of Iran: https://t.co/SoZuBzcmec pic.twitter.com/NrZAFAXshR

— Yasmine Mohammed 🦋 ياسمين محمد (@YasMohammedxx) June 7, 2024

Here’s the episode:

From Luana: Another school adopts standardized tests:

Another elite university has brought back testing. pic.twitter.com/HD0ol95oAr

— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) June 8, 2024

A protest in Washington D.C. calling for the killing of more IDF soldiers as well as “Zionists” in general:

If this mob was screaming “Ku Klux Klan, Ku Klux Klan, kill another black man now”, imagine the response. pic.twitter.com/wKOmmXWW74

— Jake Wallis Simons (@JakeWSimons) June 8, 2024

I don’t understand this, and neither does the cat.

Cat in shock! I’m sure he said WTF! 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/JDkMENTUdo

— Figen (@TheFigen_) June 8, 2024

From Malgorzata; Golda Meir speaking 54 years ago, and still sounding contemporary:

A must-watch Golda Meir interview, answering in 1970 …to the 2024’s questions.

🎥 @TheMossadIL – the one and only . pic.twitter.com/VecsZqp4G0

— miha schwartzenberg (@mihaschw) June 4, 2024

From the Auschwitz Memorial: an 18-year-old man gassed to death upon arrival:

9 June 1926 | A Czech Jew, Jindřich Prossnitz, was born in Prague.

He was deported to #Auschwitz from #Theresienstadt ghetto on 27 October 1944. After selection he was murdered in a gas chamber. pic.twitter.com/YSubNpb9SI

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) June 9, 2024

From Matthew: amazing glassblowing skill:

Wait for it! It’s so totally fucking worth it! pic.twitter.com/L7awPTWkMO

— Much Ado about Abby Normal🧠🤯 (@muchado33) June 7, 2024

Note: I’ve been struck down by severe insomnia again, and now have gone two nights without sleep. Posting will be light today as I try to rest and recover, and may also be very light tomorrow.

Welcome to CatSaturday, June 8, 2024, shabbos for Jewish cats and National Jelly Doughnut Day. I prefer the Polish variant, Pączki, shown below. Don’t they look good? They are fat, yeasty, and filled with good jam. 

It’s also International Young Eagles Day (why the ageism?), National Rosé Day (the wine), World Gin Day, Best Friends Day, Thomas Paine Day (he died on this day in 1809), International Drink Chenin Blanc Day (it can be good!), Bounty Day on Norfolk Island, “the day that the descendants of the mutineers arrived on the respective islands” in 1856, World Brain Tumor Day and World Oceans Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 8 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Good nooz first. According to the Times of Israel, the IDF rescued four hostages, ALIVE, in Gaza.

Four Israeli hostages were rescued alive by troops from Hamas captivity in a daring operation in the central Gaza Strip earlier today, the military announces.

The rescued hostages are named as Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv. All four had been abducted by Hamas terrorists on October 7 from the Supernova music festival near the southern community of Re’im.

Special forces had simultaneously raided two Hamas sites in central Gaza’s Nuseirat. At one location, Argamani was rescued, while Meir Jan, Kozlov, and Ziv were at the second location.

The rescued hostages are all in good condition, according to initial medical assessments. They were taken to Tel Hashomer Hospital for further evaluation.

Their photos from the ToI:

Argamani was known because videos of her being abducted by Hamas on the back of a motorcycle were widely circulated. Here’s a still photo of the abduction (h/t: Tom Gross):

*Clarence Thomas finally came clean about the ritzy trips he got from rich friends, revising his financial forms. Isn’t falsification of those forms a crime?

Justice Clarence Thomas revised his financial disclosure forms Friday to include two trips he took in 2019 that were paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow.

The first trip, in July 2019, was to the Indonesian island of Bali. The other was in the same month in Monte Rio, Calif. Crow, who is a real-estate developer and Republican Party donor, paid for food and lodging on both trips, according to the forms.

Thomas’s pattern of accepting luxury travel paid for by Crow was the subject of a ProPublica investigation in 2023.

At the time, Thomas defended his decision not to disclose the vacations, saying the personal trips weren’t the type that federal judges in the past had been required to report.

The ProPublica story renewed scrutiny of the court on Capitol Hill, where some lawmakers have long pushed for the justices to revisit their ethics policies. Last year, the court adopted its first formal code of ethics, saying at the time that the move “largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.”

Thomas said in Friday’s forms that he had “sought and received guidance from his accountant and ethics counsel” as part of a “review of prior filings that began last year.” The gifts from Crow were “inadvertently omitted at the time of filing,” Thomas said on the form.

Other stuff that was reported by other justices, who are more honest (Alito got a delay submitting his form).

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reported being paid almost $900,000 by Penguin Random House, which is publishing her memoir later this year.

Jackson also disclosed that the singer Beyoncé personally gifted her tickets to a concert, which were valued at around $3,700.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh similarly reported $340,000 in book royalty income. Axios reported on Thursday that the justice is working on a memoir.

And I don’t believe Thomas’s claims that he “inadvertently omitted the trips”.

*It doesn’t look as if Hunter Biden is doing very well vis-à-vis his gun trial. His daughter testified today and it didn’t help him:

Hunter Biden’s daughter Naomi testified on Friday that her father was sober and “hopeful” in mid-2018, right before he claimed to be drug-free on a gun application — but that claim was quickly undercut by her own anguished texts saying he had driven her to the breaking point.

Ms. Biden, 30, a lawyer in Washington, took the stand hoping to bolster Mr. Biden’s contention that he was working hard to kick his addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol. She said he was “the clearest” she had seen him in years when visiting him in Los Angeles in August 2018.

But under an intense cross-examination, her claim seemed to crumble. Prosecutors read aloud her texts from mid-October, when Mr. Biden visited New York City, where Ms. Biden was living with her boyfriend and entering her second year of law school.

The exchanges painted a starkly different picture of his behavior. Mr. Biden ignored Ms. Biden’s desperate texts for hours and made a bizarre request when he did resurface, at one point asking her boyfriend to drop off keys to a borrowed truck at 2 a.m. in Midtown Manhattan before disappearing again.

“I’m sorry daddy, I can’t take this, I don’t know what to say,” she wrote to him on Oct. 18 — at a moment when he was buying crack and partying with a girlfriend, according to previous evidence introduced by the government.

His lawyers have offered a spirited, if narrow, defense centered on questioning whether Mr. Biden was actually using drugs at the moment he filled out the form. It remains to be seen whether Ms. Biden’s emotional testimony, intended to help her father’s case, had a positive impact on the jury.

. . . .Mr. Biden is charged with three felonies: lying to a federally licensed gun dealer, making a false claim on the federal firearms application and possessing an illegally obtained gun. If convicted, he could face up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines. But nonviolent first-time offenders who have not been accused of using the weapon in another crime rarely receive serious prison time for the charges.

The defense has indicated it will seek to show that Mr. Biden was not using drugs at the time he applied to buy a gun, emphasizing the lack of evidence in witness accounts, text exchanges and Mr. Biden’s memoir. Already in some of his cross-examinations, one of Mr. Biden’s lawyers, Abbe Lowell, has tried to punch holes in the prosecution’s stated timeline of Mr. Biden’s pattern of drug use in the months before and after the gun purchase.

The defense argues that the question is worded in the present tense, and that the government cannot prove that Mr. Biden was using crack cocaine on the day he acquired the gun, Oct. 12, 2018.

Seriously? On the day he acquired the gun? I don’t think that’s what the question was meant to ascertain. Below is the relevant question from ATF form 4473, the one Biden checked “no” to. Note that the question says “are you an unlawful user of. . “. It implies, at least to me “during the period you got the gun”, not “on the very day you got the gun”. (And he was probably on crack then anyway, but it can’t be proven.)  His ex-wife and girlfriend testified that, at the time he bought the gun, Biden was using crack, as evidenced from crack-smoking paraprenalia found in his car and direct observation (he was using crack “every 20 minutes or so“).

*As aways, I submit for your consideration three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at the Free Press, this week called “TGIF: Mystical old man era.”  The first point is something that I think we really have to worry about:

→ Good days and bad days: Brave whistleblowers are coming out recently to say, “Guys. . . Biden. . . he’s so old, have you noticed?” And Democrats have no good response, even though there is a whole bench of nice, normal-aged options to swap in. This week there’s a mega Wall Street Journal investigation, including this detail from a major war funding meeting about Ukraine: “He read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods, and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.” He sounds like me trying to break up with someone. He sounds like me as a stoned teenager running into my mom. You get it. “The White House and top aides said he remains a sharp and vigorous leader.” But over and over the investigation emphasizes: there are good days, and there are bad days. Like when you’re recovering from hip surgery. But just watch him at this wreath-laying ceremony with 46-year-old Emmanuel Macron: the look of confusion on Biden’s face; the moment he sort of starts to sit down but pauses; how Jill Biden leads him offstage as Macron springs around agile, alive, shaking hands, using his brain to tell his body where to go. At this point my theory is that Biden and his team know he cannot govern anymore and cannot even be an effective figurehead for staff machinations. So the theory: if Biden wins, he resigns, citing new health information, and Kamala Harris becomes president. In fact, I’d bet money on that. Please bet among yourselves in the comments. Other publications may have cooking apps. I have no problem becoming a betting app.

→ Briahna Joy Gray is letting it all hang out: Bernie Sanders’ former press secretary gives us a window every day into the mind of the American left. She’s been employed by The Hill, an otherwise normal, sane publication, where she gives her take from the progressive side of things. Her latest take: Hamas wants to build a beautiful multifaith, multiethnic country of freedom, just like the United States.

“When Hamas is talking about eliminating Israel, it’s talking about not killing all of the Jews. It’s about eliminating the idea,” she said onstage this week. (One of the panelists, Free Press columnist Eli Lake, erupts in laughter.) “Sir, can I just finish this sentence? It’s about eliminating the idea of a Jewish state, ending a Jewish state, ending an ethno-national state, and having a state more like what we have in the United States.” The Bernie brigade genuinely believes that Hamas wants to make a country just like the United States. I think they genuinely think this is what will happen. I think they’ve been foie gras–ducked with so much Iranian propaganda, they think this is what Tehran is too. Freedom has gotten so normal to this group they have no concept of what life under fundamentalist Islam even would look like.

And when the sister of a Hamas hostage implored Briahna to think about the suffering of the female hostages, Briahna literally rolled her eyes and ended the call. I’m grateful to Briahna Joy Gray for making the leftist stance here so clear. Which is why it’s a bummer that it looks like The Hill ended her contract on Thursday.

→ Oh, I love the NYT union: The very well-paid leaders of the New York Times’ union are doing what they do best: posting their hatred of Jews and Israelis, insulting reporters, saying the paper is trash and they hate it.

Here’s a beloved New York Times union leader, Nastaran Mohit, referring to “Zionists”—“All these Zionist butchers know how to kill. Children. Families. The next generation. Depraved monsters who will meet their fate one day.” Interesting read there. Reminder that if you believe in a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, then you are a Zionist to Ms. Mohit and the rest of the movement. She called the newspaper a “decrepit institution” and said it was “utterly reprehensible” that the paper received an award for its coverage of the war. Go to her with all your HR issues, y’all. I’m sure she’ll be great at reviewing a Jewish NYT employee’s harassment allegation. Good luck!

*And we can’t miss Sully. Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s main column is “How elites have empowered the far right,” with the subtitle “The US, UK, EU and Canada went far left on immigration—and are paying the price.”

Not so long ago, as many of us reeled from the political earthquakes of Brexit and Trump, it seemed sensible for responsible mainstream political parties to adopt tighter immigration control to keep the populist right at bay. Mass migration in Europe had led to a far-right resurgence; in the US and UK, Trump and the Johnson-era Tories seemed to grasp this and moved to co-opt the anti-immigrant fervor. Democracy was working to accommodate a shift in the public mood.

Or so it seemed. Nearly a decade later, something else has happened: an immigration explosion. In response to a volatile public mood, Western elites actually intensified their policy of importing millions of people from the developing world to replace their insufficiently diverse and declining domestic populations.

The same thing is happening in the UK and Canada.

The recent figures from the US, UK and Canada are mind-blowing. The graphs all look like a hockey stick, with a massive spike in the last three years alone. Under Trump, the average number of illegal crossings a year was around 500,000; under Biden, that has quadrupled to two million a year — from a much more diverse group, from Africa, China and India. To add insult to injury, Biden has also all but shut down immigration enforcement in the interior; and abused his parole power to usher in nearly 1.3 million illegal migrants in 2023 alone. The number of undetained illegal migrants living in the US has thereby ballooned under Biden: from 3.7 million in 2021 to 6.2 million in 2023, according to ICE. If a fraction of those millions turns up for asylum hearings, I’ll be gob-smacked.

. .  If you want to understand why Biden keeps trailing in the swing states, why the Tories are about to be wiped out in a historic collapse, and why Trudeau is at all-time low in approval at 28 percent, this seems to me to be key. As the public tried to express a desire to slow down the pace of demographic change, elites in London, Ottawa, and Washington chose to massively accelerate it. It’s as if they saw the rise in the popularity of the far right and said to themselves: well now, how can we really get it to take off?

. . . Even under Biden’s “crackdown”, he is still prepared to admit at least 1.75 million illegal immigrants a year! Last week, Chuck Schumer declared that the ultimate goal was to legalize every single illegal immigrant — because Americans are not having enough children. Without open borders, of course, our economy wouldn’t look so good: in the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, foreign-born workers gained 600,000 new jobs, while native-born Americans lost 300,000. But don’t you dare mention the “Great Replacement Theory”!

I’ll skip the UK/EU stuff and just give the conclusions about the U.S.  First, Sullivan avers that hes not against immigration per se, but wants  ”legal, orderly, and controlled immigration”, which jibes with the wishes of most Americans, and explains why (read it). And the results:

One person was responsible for Trump’s first term: Hillary Clinton. And one will be responsible for his second: Joe Biden.

. . .All that means, it seems to me, is that if you care about the issue at all, as more and more Americans do, then Trump is the obvious choice this fall. Which is one reason I fear the election result will not be as close as most people think. Our elites have had almost a decade to respond to the public mood and a new global reality. And they still don’t get it.

This was, of course, supposed to be the job of Kamala Harris, but she didn’t do squat: one reason I wouldn’t trust her as President. Biden didn’t do squat, either, and don’t really understand why. It’s not exactly that he would lose by following the wishes of most Americans. Could he have bent to the whim of the open-border Democratic progressives? Whatever the cause, he failed to address until the last minute what the American people have been calling for loudly. I am no longer a big fan of Biden, and will vote for him only very reluctantly. I also think hell be close to non-sentient at the end of his second term.

*Finally, since it’s the weekend, here’s a story from the AP’s “oddities” section about a small kid getting nommed (well, picked up) by a giraffe:

A Texas family got a brief scare when a nibble from a giraffe turned a 2-year-old’s safari visit into an airborne adventure.

Paisley Toten was in the bed of a pickup truck on June 1 when her family drove through the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center, where visitors can see exotic animals such as zebras, giraffes and sable antelope, and feed some of them from their car.

The family had stopped to feed a giraffe when it grabbed Paisley’s shirt with its mouth and lifted her several feet. Paisley’s mother was in the pickup bed with her and shouted, prompting the giraffe to drop the toddler into her arms unhurt. Video of the encounter taken from the car behind went viral. The girl’s family also shot their own video.

“Paisley was holding the bag and the giraffe went to go get the bag, not get her, but ended up getting her shirt too and picking her up,” Jason Toten, the girl’s father, told television station KWTX.

“My heart stopped, my stomach dropped … it scared me,” Toten said.

The family then took the girl to the shop and bought her a toy giraffe.

Park rules when the family visited allowed riding in an open truck bed as long as an adult was riding with any children. The park on Thursday changed its safety rules to require everyone to stay inside their vehicles with doors closed.

Yeah, but you’re allowed to feed the giraffes by hand? That doesn’t sound too good to me. I’m informed that giraffes can bite people very hard, and also kill them with a hard kick. People should stay in the cars with the windows rolled up, and the giraffes should be fed only by the wildlife center.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej and Hili have some badinage:

A: Here you are!
Hili: Only because I’m not somewhere else.

Ja: Tu jesteś!

Hili: Tylko dlatego, że nie ma mnie gdzie indziej.

Baby Kulka is enjoying the fine weather:

And the flowers are blooming in Hili’s (and the staff’s) yard:

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

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Alison; father and daughter, killed October 7, 2023:

From The Dodo Pet:

Retweeted by Masih; two dissidents hated by Russia (see about Bill Browder here):

Bill and I sat next to each other at the opening dinner in Oslo. With so many glasses at the crowded table, I asked him, “Bill, is this water yours or mine?” “Garry,” he said, “It doesn’t matter. They’d both be poisoned!” https://t.co/Xx4fAX9iZa

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) June 5, 2024

From the news: the draft Security Council resolution about Israel. Looks like Hamas pretty much wins. And since the U.S. proposes this, it will pass the Council.

🚨🚨Updated U.S. draft security council resolution calling Hamas to accept the proposal for a hostage deal and stressing Israel has accepted it. Full version here:

The Security Council,

PP1 — Reaffirming the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations,

PP2 —…

— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) June 6, 2024

I love this one, and the cat found a loving home (read the full second tweet; h/t Keith):

The mountaineer was surprised to find a cat at such a high altitude, but he quickly realized that the cat must have been a stray or lost. The cat seemed to be in good health, but was clearly hungry and in need of help.

The mountaineer decided to bring the cat down the mountain…

— BOT SKNDOM (@Bot1Dr) June 5, 2024

From Bryan; a rescued duckling! It reminds me of the good old days for me!

Lucky the ducky is still in the wildlife rescue center, getting fattened up so he can be released back into the wild.

This little baby slept on my chest under a blanket the whole night. I am his mother. https://t.co/AWRMdXjZhw pic.twitter.com/DrxfzygYKi

— Billboard Chris 🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@BillboardChris) June 7, 2024

Here I am with Sammi the duckling, who also slept on my chest, but under my hand (I got no sleep). He/she also slept in my armpit:

From Barry. Get a load of those peepers!

The eyes of a conch

pic.twitter.com/hqOhKeXFDc

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) May 11, 2024

From the Auschwitz Memorial; one I reposted:

Gassed to death upon arrival; age five https://t.co/VLdkFRnqJH

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) June 8, 2024

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a duck on a cricket field. Matthew adds, “Also: a duck is the word for getting out for zero in cricket. A golden duck is getting out first ball.”

Anuj Dal was worried, but this duck played it nice and cool pic.twitter.com/Wpmovy9IFh

— Vitality County Championship (@CountyChamp) June 6, 2024

. . . . and American sports. A fantastic throw from right field, getting the runner out at home plate:

Japanese baseball player Chusei Mannami went viral a couple weeks ago for this ABSURD throw.

I ended up going down a rabbit hole and folks… this guy might have the most electric arm in baseball history.

🧵 Threadpic.twitter.com/xS1obWWGxY

— Kendall Baker (@kendallbaker) June 5, 2024

It’s Monday, May 27, 2024 and Memorial Day, the unofficial start of Summer (curiously, there’s no Google Doodle today). And although real Summer doesn’t start for another 3.5 weeks, it’s sure acting like summer in Chicago, what with temperatures in the mid 70s and even the 80s.

And it’s National Grape Day, so spare a thought for Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) who, when I was younger, started organizing farm workers beginning with the 5-year Delano Grape Strike that made many of us (including me) refuse to buy non-union grapes. The strike ended in 1970 when Big Grape signed with the newly-created United Farm Workers. Here’s a photo of Chavez and management ending the strike. (Note that Chavez loved big band music, especially from Duke Ellington).

It’s also Cellophane Tape Day (the patent was published on this day in 1930), National Grape Popsicle Day, and, in Australia, the beginning of National Reconciliation Week.

Posting may be light until Tuesday as I have a piece to write for another venue. Bear with me; I do my best.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Over at his website, Reality’s Last Stand, Colin Wright reports that an upcoming NIH-organized symposium and sex and gender has ONLY gender activists as its participants. I even recognize some of them. Here’s the notice that they sent to Jey McCreight:

As Colin notes:

Registration for the symposium, titled “Exploring the many dimensions of sex and gender in the genomics era,” opened on May 19, and the “tentative agenda” was revealed.

However, despite the event’s stated purpose of bringing “experts from the biological and social sciences to clarify and contextualize – but not resolve – the complexities around sex, gender, and genomics by considering them in their scientific, ethical, and historical contexts,” the list of presenters is ideologically homogeneous, consisting entirely of activist scientists and radical gender ideologues.

Colin goes through the whole list, and the two I recognize are Beans Velocci, whose Cell paper I criticized here, and Anne Fausto-Sterling, famous for saying that there were five sexes, then grossly overestimating the number of “intersexes”, and then saying that she was only writing “tongue in cheek.”  These people are not serious scholars.  Here’s what I said about Beans’s abysmal paper:

Here are the main problems with Velocci’s paper:

1. It conflates sex differentiation, sex determination, and the definition of sex
2. It argues, wrongly, that no progress has been made in understanding the nature and definition of biological sex
3. Its argument is ideological rather than scientific, yet is given the trappings of science
4. It argues that the binary nature of sex, which the author rejects, somehow erases transgender and nonbinary people
5. And, as usual, its supposed examples that make sex nonbinary, like the long clitoris of the hyena, are wrong.  But where are the clownfish? Send in the clownfish!

Colin runs through the list, and it will make your jaw drop open. Most of them appear to believe that sex is a spectrum, not binary, but there are other weirdos in the group. Here are just two:

Os Keys is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington, and describes himself as a “genderfucky nightmare goth.” An LGBTQ+ activist, Keys has blocked me on X, although we have never interacted.

Cassius Adair, who is moderating a session, has a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. According to his website, he provides “queer and trans storytelling consulting for popular podcasts and public radio programs” and serves as a “transgender sensitivity reader.”

Kellan Baker, a health services researcher at the Whitman-Walker Institute, identifies as a trans man and LGBTQ+ activist. Baker claims to “have been every letter in the LGBTQ acronym.” Baker’s research focuses on “data equity,” and Baker has argued against binary sex classification forms.

With maybe one or two exceptions, they’re all like this.

Colin notes:

One thing is clear: this is not a serious symposium concerned with truth and deepening our understanding of sex and gender in genomics—it’s a gender activism strategy session. It is completely inexcusable that there are no representatives who acknowledge biological sex as binary and immutable at this symposium. It is imperative that the NHGRI extend an invitation to individuals like Carole Hooven, Emma Hilton, Heather Heying, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, or myself, who can offer a different, and scientifically accurate, perspective.

I appreciate the shout-out, but I’m not a sex expert. Hooven, Hilton, and Wright are, and there are others who have a sensible view of sex as well. None of them are invited. Colin calls on the NHGRI to “rectify their error”, but I don’t see that happening!  This whole mess is what I mean by the ideological erosion of science.

*The Jerusalem Post documents the changing coverage in the NYT of the sides in the Israel/Hamas war. The piece is by Lilac Sigan, and is called “From Oct. 7 to today: How Hamas criticism has vanished in the New York Times.”

Alongside winning the Pulitzer for seven articles that covered the war, the New York Times was heavily criticized for its biased and problematic reporting. The harsh allegations did not only come from Jews and Israelis but surprisingly also from pro-Palestinians, who actually claimed that the Times was pro-Israeli.

So what is the truth behind the contradicting claims and accusations? The answer can only come from monitoring and quantifying the mass of the coverage. And it was definitely massive.

During the first seven months of the war, from October 7 to May 7, the number of articles published in the Times on the subject reached 3,848.

Just for comparison – during all of 2022, the number of articles covering Israel in The Times reached only 361. Less than one-tenth in double the time period.

Here are some plots that speak for themselves: coverage over time. 1,398 articles were analyzed

We coded the articles by two criteria: empathy and criticism. Each headline was examined according to whether it expressed empathy towards a particular person or group, and then according to whether it also expressed criticism towards an entity or group.

Another plot:

The glaring disproportional criticism is particularly jarring when observing only the Top News category of Today’s Headlines – meaning the three most important headlines that are featured at the top of the newsletter every day.

Reports about the war appeared daily in at least one of the three headlines in the Top News of the newsletter and sometimes even in all three.

One more bit:

Out of 276 Top News headlines during the seven months of the war, 151 expressed empathy exclusively towards Palestinians (55% of the headlines).

Only 16 headlines expressed empathy towards Israelis (5.8%), and half of them specifically towards the hostages. In addition, 130 out of 150 headlines that expressed empathy towards Palestinians criticized Israel, meaning more than 86%.

The conclusion:

The inevitable conclusion is that the Times’ editorial line clearly diverted attention away from Hamas, which started the war and refused prisoner exchange deals, and aimed it toward Israel.

. . . . This is an explicit American interest, which the Times de facto worked against. Just to be clear – the Israeli government and its extremists deserve a great deal of criticism for their conduct before October 7 and also throughout the war. But where did the criticism of Hamas disappear to? One does not necessarily have to negate the other.

. . .The Times still defines itself as liberal, but its emphases and scope of coverage during the war point to a clearly progressive editorial line.

This matches the claims raised in December 2023 by two of its former senior staff members, James Bennett and Judith Miller, who said that the Times has long ceased to be a liberal newspaper and has become illiberal, tribal, and intolerant.

Despite this, some blinkered miscreants accuse the NYT of being pro-Israel. I guess there’s not enough criticism of the Jewish state.

*Parents take heed: the Wall Street Journal has a piece called “The colleges where you’re most likely to have a positive return on your investment.” This is all about finances, asking where it’s worth it to go to college so you get a financial benefit from attending:

Young professionals graduating from public universities charging in-state tuition often receive a degree that is worth the money—with one caveat.

New graduates need to earn at least $50,000 a year, on average, in their first decade off campus for the degree to pay off, according to new research from Strada Education Foundation, a nonprofit that analyzed federal education and earnings data. If they can land that salary, or make $500,000 before taxes over 10 years, state school graduates across sectors will find the investment worth it and should be able to pay off their loans, Strada says.

At a time when many Americans are questioning the value of a college degree—and some teens and 20-somethings are forgoing higher education for trade work like plumbing, welding and construction—four-year state universities are a bargain compared with their private counterparts and still often provide a path to financial security.

“As long as you’re above that $50,000, even in the most expensive states, you’ll still have that positive return on investment,” said Nichole Torpey-Saboe, Strada’s vice president of research.

Public university alumni are more likely to secure good-paying jobs if they had access to college internship opportunities, career coaching and strong job markets, Torpey-Saboe said.

Median in-state public college tuition and fees in the U.S. are $8,000 a year, with room and board running another $11,000, according to Strada. At private nonprofit universities, where costs have soared, Strada found the median tuition and fees are about 58% more at $30,000.

Half of more than 5,200 people polled by Pew Research Center said it was less important to have a four-year degree today than it was 20 years ago. About a third of four-year college graduates think going to university is worth the cost, Pew said. The median salary last year for bachelor’s degree holders between the ages of 22 and 27 was $60,000, compared with $36,000 for people in that age range with just a high-school diploma, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The lesson if you want $$ out of your education and don’t have a lot of dosh to pay tuition: go to a public university, and be a business major if it’s a big school.  You can shoot me now.

*People seem to have forgotten that Hamas is still firing rockets from Gaza into Israel, and the targets are not military ones, but they’re either fired willy-nilly or aimed at civilians, like the barrage fired at Tel Aviv and civilian communities in Israel. That is, of course, a war crime; Israel does not deliberately target only civilians, but it’s okay for Hamas to do that.

Hamas fired a barrage of rockets from Gaza that set off air raid sirens as far away as Tel Aviv for the first time in months on Sunday in a show of resilience more than seven months into Israel’s massive air, sea and ground offensive.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage in what appeared to be the first long-range rocket attack from Gaza since January. Hamas’ military wing claimed the attack. Palestinian militants have sporadically fired rockets and mortar rounds at communities along the Gaza border, and the military arm of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group later Sunday said it fired rockets at nearby communities.

The Israeli military said eight projectiles crossed into Israel after being launched from the area of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where Israeli forces recently launched an incursion. It said “a number” of the projectiles were intercepted.

Thank Ceiling Cat for the Iron Dome. But of course that also leads the world to criticize Israel more, since the Dome leads to an “inequity” of civilian casualties between Israel and Gaza. On the other hand, people always forget how low the ratio of civilian casualties/Hamas casualties is; it’s stunningly low for urban warfare, and that’s because Israel doesn’t want to kill civilians.

*Here’s the world’s fastest pit stop: 1.8 seconds.  In that time they refuel the car and change all four tires. A stunning display of teamwork, endlessly practiced.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili once again sees a windblown tuft of grass as the Devil:

Hili: The grass attacked me.

A: Be careful so it doesn’t harm you.

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

From Now That’s Wild:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Science Humor:

Reposted by Masih; I presume this “helicopter song” is a celebration of the death of the President and seven others in a helicopter crash not long ago.

Google translation: Helicopter song in the rally #لندن in front of the Embassy of the Islamic Republic This rally is being held to condemn the arrogance and brutality of the supporters of the regime

آهنگ هلی‌کوپتر در تجمع #لندن مقابل سفارت جمهوری اسلامی

این تجمع در محکومیت گستاخی و توحش حامیان رژیم هم اینک در حال برگزاری است#رئیسی pic.twitter.com/3LWMqgAr5q

— Sima Sabet | سیما ثابت (@Sima_Sabet) May 25, 2024

From Barry, who says, “That looks like a nice massage.”

Whoa! Next thing she will try to sleep with it. 😄 pic.twitter.com/mcSZJIX90Y

— Figen (@TheFigen_) May 25, 2024

From my feed. Lucky cat!

Lil bro got saved by the windshield pic.twitter.com/Iw4W9Ht0vL

— Interesting Things (@interesting_aIl) May 24, 2024

From Malgorzata; why are terrorists shooting in an UNRWA compound in Gaza?  Seriously, it’s time to get rid of that organization.

Hamas ❤️@UN
UN ❤️Hamas https://t.co/rtEW0nWYaf

— Elder of Ziyon 🇮🇱 (@elderofziyon) May 14, 2024

From Malcolm: a philosopher cat.

The neighbor's cat after playing with Nietzsche's book. pic.twitter.com/iD5peMYNu7

— Cursive (@Pergament_F) April 26, 2024

From the Auschwitz Memorial; Dolly’s parents, sister, and brother were also murdered in the camp.

27 May 1927 | A Greek Jewish girl, Dolly Florentin, was born in Thessaloniki.

In 1943 she was deported to #Auschwitz. She did not survive. pic.twitter.com/5AywWNgXM5

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) May 27, 2024

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb, stuck in Manchester. First, lucky ducks (actually, they look like geese to me) watch a meteorite fall.

A group of ducks witnessed the meteor that fell in Portugal pic.twitter.com/SA3FfW85j5

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) May 23, 2024

Cat versus chickens (cat wins!):

pic.twitter.com/raUXQb955I

— Cats did what they shouldn’t (@whatcatsdid) May 23, 2024

Welcome to Thursday, May 23, 2024, and National Taffy Day, the best way to extract your dental work.  Here’s a video about how commercial taffy is made:

It’s also The Declaration of the Báb, International Chardonnay Day, and World Turtle Day. 

Reader Divy, who with her husband owns several hundred individuals in dozens of species, sent us a turtle for today with this caption:

This is Francis, a Malaysian giant turtle (Orlitia borneensis). We adopted him from a rescue group about 4 years ago. He is very personable and outgoing, and his favorite pastime is eating. His carapace is a little misshapen, as it should be a bit more domed, but we love him anyway. He’s on the market for a girlfriend, so we’re on the lookout for one😸:

Finally, there’s a Google Doodle today celebrating the estimable Mexican dish of chilaquiles (click below to see where the photo goes).  The lowdown on the Doodle (and the dish) is here, including this:

We have the exclusive first look at the new Google Doodle, illustrated by Oakland-based artist Chava Oropesa, which features the beloved Mexican breakfast dish chilaquiles, which means “chilis and greens” in the Aztec language Nahuatl.

Chilaquiles, a dish with a rich cultural history, was born out of resourcefulness. Instead of discarding stale corn tortillas, people began cutting them into strips, frying them up, and sautéing them in salsa. Today, this beloved Mexican dish can be found on menus in Mexican restaurants across Mexico and the southwest of the U.S. It is usually garnished with a combination of cream, queso fresco, onions, and avocados.

I like it with a fried egg or two—one variant of the dish.

My variant:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 23 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*An independent state of Palestine has just been recognized by three European countries, though why they’d reward Hamas’s attack with a state defies me. It seems meant more to punish Israel than anything else, for neither Palestine nor Israel actually wants two independent states.

Three European nations said they would recognize an independent Palestinian state, reflecting deepening international frustration with Israel’s war in Gaza, where the Israeli military was moving deeper into Rafah to shore up its control of the besieged enclave’s border with Egypt.

Norway, Spain and Ireland said Wednesday that they were taking the necessary steps to bring into effect their recognition of a Palestinian state and expected other countries to follow in the coming weeks. The move runs counter to Washington’s long-held position that a future state comprising the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem should come about through a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

President Biden “believes a Palestinian state should be realized through direct negotiations between the parties, not through unilateral recognition,” a White House National Security Council spokesperson said in response to Wednesday’s decisions. Serious talks on a two-state solution have been moribund for years.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said plans by European countries to recognize a Palestinian state were “a reward for terrorism,” and that such a reward “will not bring peace—and it will not stop us from defeating Hamas either.” The war began in response to a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, according to Israel.

Actually, many other places have recognized an independent Palestinian state, like all the light green countries in the map below:

Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, welcomed the move as “an important step on the path to establishing our right to our land and establishing our independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”

The United Nations granted nonmember observer status to Palestine in 2012. About 140 countries have recognized a Palestinian state, but Europe has long been split on the issue. In 2014, Sweden recognized a Palestinian state, and Slovenia said it may follow soon. Britain and Germany, meanwhile, continue to say they will only do so through a formal peace process involving Israel.

And a really dumb statement:

“In the midst of a war, with tens of thousands killed and injured, we must keep alive the only alternative that offers a political solution for Israelis and Palestinians alike: Two states, living side by side, in peace and security,” Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said Wednesday.

In fact, this recognition won’t do squat about the issue. Where will the state be? Will they kick all the Jews out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem? How would they connect Gaza with the West Bank? None of these problems can be solved without the participation of Israel and Palestine, and not under their present leaders. See the Elder of Ziyon’s sardonic column on this, along with this sardonic cartoon showing the leaders of Ireland, Norway, and Spain:

*From the NYT we read that Biden is forgiving another $7.7 billion in student loans.  As a friend noted, “Forgiving the most privileged people in history – using taxpayer money, 167 billion dollars of it.  Surreal.  What an idiot.” My friend voted for Biden before, but won’t this time, but, like me, he/she despises Trump. This puts my friend (and maybe me come November) in a quandary.  I’d surely vote for Biden if Illinois weren’t going for him anyway, but I’m keeping my eye on him.  But to the news:

President Biden announced another round of student loan forgiveness on Wednesday, canceling $7.7 billion in debt for 160,000 people in what has become a centerpiece of his campaign for re-election.

The announcement builds on Mr. Biden’s strategy of chipping away at college debt by refining existing programs, even as his administration pursues an even larger plan over the opposition of Republicans.

Many borrowers in this round of forgiveness, who qualified through public service loan forgiveness, the president’s SAVE plan or another income-driven repayment plan, have already begun receiving emails notifying them of their approvals, the Education Department said in a statement.

The Biden administration has now canceled about $167 billion in loans for 4.75 million borrowers, or roughly one in 10 federal loan holders. The president has set forward a much bigger goal: forgiving debt for nearly 30 million borrowers as soon as this fall. But the broader program is still being finalized and could fall victim to legal challenges, as Mr. Biden’s first, far more ambitious attempt at mass debt cancellation did.

Forgiving student loan debt is a key part of Mr. Biden’s outreach to the younger voters who overwhelmingly supported him in 2020 but have shown signs of drifting away.

*Some fascinating new science is reported in a Nature News piece that summarizes a preprint in bioRχiv (h/t Matthew):

Genetic information usually travels down a one-way street: genes written in DNA serve as the template for making RNA molecules, which are then translated into proteins. That tidy textbook story got a bit complicated in 1970 when scientists discovered that some viruses have enzymes called reverse transcriptases, which scribe RNA into DNA — the reverse of the usual traffic flow.

Now, scientists have discovered an even weirder twist. A bacterial version of reverse transcriptase reads RNA as a template to make completely new genes written in DNA. These genes are then transcribed back into RNA, which is translated into protective proteins when a bacterium is infected by a virus. By contrast, viral reverse transcriptases don’t make new genes; they merely transfer information from RNA to DNA.

“This is crazy molecular biology,” says Aude Bernheim, a bioinformatician at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who was not involved in the research. “I would have never guessed this type of mechanism existed.”

The bacteria has reverse transcriptase but also a mysterious sequence of RNA whose function was unknown. It turns out that this RNA folds itself up in a three-dimensional structure and the bacteria’s reverse transcriptase went around that RNA over and over again, writing a new DNA sequence that wasn’t encoded by any linear code. This new DNA sequence then represents a gene that gets translated into a protein. This whole process is triggered when a virus infects the bacterium, triggering the production of that protein (called “Neo”) that prevents virus-infected bacteria from dividing.

They don’t know how the virus triggers the sequence that winds up with the bacterium producing “Neo,” nor do we know how Neo works. But it’s clearly an adaptation to keep bacteria from being destroyed by viruses, which is also why CRISPR evolved. But this system works in a completely bizarre and unpredictable way:

The discovery that reverse transcriptase — which has previously been known only for copying genetic material — can create completely new genes has left other researchers gobsmacked. “This looks like biology from alien organisms,” Israel Fernandez, a computational chemist at Complutense University of Madrid, wrote on X.

“Their findings were astonishing,” says Nicolás Toro García, a molecular biologist at Zaidín Experimental Research Station in Grenada, Spain, and should help researchers to develop biotechnology applications for the system.

The discovery has even left Sternberg in awe [Samuel Sternberg is the senior author of the bioRχiv paper] : “It should change the way we look at the genome.”

*Finally, Nikki Haley announced that she’ll be supporting Trump in November.

Nikki Haley said Wednesday that she will be voting for Donald Trump in the general election, encouraging the presumptive GOP nominee to work hard to win support from those who backed her in the primary.

“I will be voting for Trump,” Haley, Trump’s former U.N. ambassador, said during an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington.

But Haley also made it clear that she feels Trump has work to do to win over voters who supported her during the course of the primary campaign, and continue to cast votes for her in ongoing primary contests.

No surprise there! I presume she wants a plum position in the Trump Administration (oy, do I hate those two words!) should The Donald win in November.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, birds are eating MY cherries! But I bet Hili likes the influx of starlings!

Hili: These starlings love cherries.

A: Unfortunately.

Hili: Te szpaki uwielbiają czereśnie.

Ja: Niestety.

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

From reader Pliny the In Between’s Far Corner Cafe, the reappearance of Angry Cat Man (me!):

From Strange, Silly, or Stupid Signs:

From Science Humor:

From Masih, who notes that everyone dancing in this video was killed by the Iranian regime, and for trivial reasons:

Honoring Killers: When Western Diplomacy Betrays Justice!
Every person you see dancing in this video was brutally killed by the Islamic Republic for simply showing their hair or peacefully pretending. They are not mere numbers or statistics; each one had dreams and a future. Yet,… pic.twitter.com/ErSLmahAfi

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) May 22, 2024

J. K. Rowling is jousting again. She always wins.

.@SophieMolly_SG I’m seriously impressed that you’ve been able to read and review an unpublished book of which there are currently only two copies in existence, neither of which have been lent to you. pic.twitter.com/NLJ64W1pGX

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 19, 2024

A long description of Israel at the present time. The video at the end is of pro-Palestinian students going rogue at the University of Amsterdam:

“To all our haters marching against us, calling for our end, and demanding us painful fate…

What do you know? I ask this with the most sincere seriousness. What do you really know? And I’m not even just talking about Israel or Gaza or the history of the conflicts.

What do you… pic.twitter.com/utm4d92ati

— Imtiaz Mahmood (@ImtiazMadmood) May 14, 2024

From Simon, who says, “This drink has no coffee. . . . or if it does, that cat will be bouncing off the ceiling.”

Chill bro is all yours pic.twitter.com/y435RCBs9Y

— Tweets of Cats (@PostsOfCats) May 15, 2024

From Malcolm; a friend found again (second tweet).  I’m not sure what the object is in the first tweet; perhaps a manta ray.

This dog had been missing for two weeks and this was the house cat's reaction when he was finally found. ❤️🥺🤗
pic.twitter.com/XMIbCE4ZGP

— Shugar Bread🇬🇭 (@shugarbreaddd_) April 20, 2024

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a family of four murdered upon arrival at Auschwitz:

23 May 1895 | A Dutch Jewish woman, Betje Olivier-van Thijn, was born in Amsterdam.

In September 1942 she was deported to #Auschwitz with her husband Mozes and their two daughters, Anna and Jeannette. They were all murdered in a gas chamber. pic.twitter.com/8s00XcPv9o

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) May 23, 2024

From Matthew, who says this is from a German television talent show. Only in Germany!

Nobody:

Germans: pic.twitter.com/KBPtqfElqM

— Kristi Yamaguccimane (@TheWapplehouse) May 20, 2024

And another from Dr. Cobb. Live and learn!

Cats’ eyes dilate when they hiccup pic.twitter.com/6Ttb69dmn9

— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) May 22, 2024