Category: Stupsi

Saturday: Hili dialogue

March 15, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a CaturSaturday: it’s  March 15, 2025: the Ides of March. But for Jewish cats it’s the Idle of March, as they relax and read scripture on shabbos. And it’s National Egg Cream Day, celebrating a drink associated with Jewish areas of New York. This drink contains neither egg nor cream, but consists of seltzer, milk, and chocolate syrup, traditionally Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Syrup. Here’s a finished one. I don’t know how this got invented, but it’s good, though now hard to get in New York City. Here’s Gem Spa, THE place to get the iconic egg cream, and I’ve had one there. If you’re in NYC, you have to get one!

It’s also National Corndog Day, Maple Syrup Saturday (be sure to buy the darkest one you can find), Natonal Peanut Lovers Day, Play the Recorder Day (see below) and National Pears Hélène Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 15 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I’m surprised, but Columbia University has disciplined more of its students who engaged in illegal protests last year. (h/t Jez)

Columbia University has expelled or suspended some students who took over a campus building during pro-Palestinian protests last spring and temporarily revoked the diplomas of others who have since graduated, officials said Thursday.

The university said in a campus-wide email that a judicial board brought a range of sanctions against students who occupied Hamilton Hall last spring to protest the war in Gaza.

Columbia did not provide a breakdown of how many students were expelled, were suspended or had their degrees revoked, but it said the outcomes were based on an “evaluation of the severity of behaviors.”

The culmination of the monthslong investigative process comes as the university is reeling from the arrest of a well-known Palestinian campus activist, Mahmoud Khalil, by federal immigration authorities last Saturday. President Donald Trump has said the arrest would be the “first of many” such detentions.

At the same time, the Trump administration has stripped the university of more than $400 million in federal funds over what it calls a failure to combat campus antisemitism. Congressional Republicans have pointed specifically to a failure to discipline students involved in the Hamilton Hall seizure as proof of inaction by the university.

Now we’ll leave aside what the meaning of “temporarily revoked diplomas” is, but it’s clear Columbia is doing it to get back the $400 million in federal dosh withheld by the administration (see the demands that the government levied on Columbia in the tweet below). It shouldn’t be necessary for it to reduce the anti-Semitic atmosphere without that pressure, though.

*As usual, I’m stealing a few items from Nellie Bowles’s snarky news/humor column in The Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: Everything’s computer“:

→ MAHA™: RFK Jr. went to a Steak ’n Shake with Fox News this week and proceeded to do an infomercial. This is the infomercial presidency, and every news hit comes with a promo code. In this country, it’s always 3 a.m. on the Home Shopping Network.

RFK: Steak ’n Shake just switched out and people are raving about these french fries, you taste them.
Sean Hannity: They’re amazing, they really are.

RFK, a little later: You taste these, it’s a completely different experience. The customers are raving about it. Steak ’n Shake has been great. We’re very grateful for them, for RFK’ing the french fries. They turned me into a verb.
Hannity: By the way, a plastic straw, thank god.

And it looks like someone ghostwrote RFK Jr.’s suspiciously pro-measles vaccine op-ed last week (you can rest easy knowing it absolutely was not me). Because here he is now: “It used to be, when you and I were kids, everybody got measles. And measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn’t do that. . . it used to be very young kids. . . they were protected by breast milk, and by maternal immunity. Women who get vaccinated do not provide that level of maternal immunity.” This administration is all about two steps forward, three steps back.

He says these things and then won’t own it, so it’s very hard to honestly debate or even properly make fun. Call him anti–measles vax, and there would be uproar from his community that he’s not anti-vax, no, no, just aware, alert, poly-vax-ual. It’s always: “I’m pro–measles vaccine, but also measles is a lie and the vaccine destroys the mother-child bond.” He speaks in riddles wrapped in conundrums. He is MAHA but also Steak ’n Shake and plastic. It’s crystals, but AI. I can’t live like this.

→ Cops are here to check on your religious status: Two uniformed police officers in Toronto, sitting before a Toronto Police logo, talked about how beautiful it is that so many people are “reverting” to Islam post–October 7 (Muslims believe we are all by default Muslim, so conversion is called reversion). Something about these guys in their official cop uniforms is extra alarming. It all feels a little Sharia-esque. And for good measure, in Cincinnati, the rabbi who runs a progressive Reform synagogue was disinvited from an anti-Nazi rally. See, he’s not anti-Zionist. Because it’s really, really hard to be Jewish and also think Jews don’t have a deep connection to Israel, since there’s so much about it in the Torah (the Old Testament, to my WASP friends out there). Tricky. Jerusalem is genuinely in so many prayers. Zion is too. Oh, Zion this. Oh, Zion that. Maybe in our davening it could be replaced with Park Slope or South Beach, but it’s not quite as evocative. Or, as the officers at my door suggest, you could simply revert.

→ I guess we all need to watch Snow White: Disney reportedly canceled the London premiere of its live-action remake of Snow White after fears of provoking an anti-woke backlash. The star, Rachel Zegler, has called the original Snow White plot “dated” and “weird,” which honestly, I’m sure it is. The big, beautiful moment is when the prince kisses our princess while she is in a coma. Where is the affirmative consent, sir? And how come all those dwarfs are giving advice? Do they have MSWs? The new Snow White is about “women being in roles of power,” which sounds weirdly like Meghan’s podcast.

What’s happening is this: We’re in an awkward transitional moment between two cultures right now, and movies take a while to make. So the old woke culture will still sputter out a few of these moralistic tales for the next year or two, movies where no jokes can be made, movies where the character whose whole thing was jumping is replaced by a character in a wheelchair and there’s no explanation. Captain America starring a man who says the character shouldn’t represent America, a bad place. That sort of thing. Soon, we will arrive into the new culture. Soon, we will enter the right-wing movie era, where diversity is that the female costar has a brunette best friend, who, at 135 pounds, is cast as hilariously fat. In the new movies it’s just a slow scroll of lines of code and the guys who get it get it, you know? Movies in 2026 will have mandatory quotas but it’s just for Chads of different heights. Soon, the women in roles of power will also be in comas.

*Because of funding cuts, the University of Massachusetts has rescinded every offer to its incoming biomedical class for the fall. (h/t Phil)

With federal research funding imperiled by brutal cuts under the Trump administration, biomedical graduate programs nationwide are making tough decisions that will scale back the next generation of scientists.

On Wednesday, news broke that UMass Chan Medical School—a public school in the University of Massachusetts system—has rescinded all offers of admission to biomedical graduate students for the 2025–2026 school year. That means an entire class of future scientists has been wiped out. Those who were initially accepted to the program can try to join again in a future cycle under a priority consideration that won’t require them to reapply, according to a letter sent to a previously admitted student that was shared on social media.

In a statement provided to NBC10 Boston, a spokesperson for the school confirmed that several dozen applicants had their acceptance offers rescinded. “With uncertainties related to the funding of biomedical research in this country, this difficult decision was made to ensure that our current students’ progress is not disrupted by the funding cuts and that we avoid matriculating students who may not have robust opportunities for dissertation research,” the statement reads.

Rachael Sirianni, a biomedical engineer in the Department of Neurological Surgery at UMass Chan Medical School who works on treatments for pediatric brain tumors, called the situation “heartbreaking.” Writing on Bluesky, Sirianni called it “a terrible loss for students. But it’s also a loss for all of science. Science *runs* on grad student labor.” But, she added: “Public medical schools have no other choice; there is no other source of funding, and everyone in academia is at extreme risk right now.”

. . . . UMass is the latest biomedical graduate program to make news for cutbacks amid the Trump administration’s new policies. The administration has halted new grant funding and is trying to radically cut support for so-called “indirect” research costs, which cover maintaining laboratory space and administrative functions, among other things. The cut has been temporarily put on hold amid a legal battle.

The article goes on to describe funding cuts at Duke, Vanderbilt, Penn, and other schools. It’s not a good time to be doing science, and I feel sorry for the new generation of STEM students coming up.  But I’m getting a bit more optimistic that Vance will not succeed Trump, so perhaps these policies might end in a few years.

*A Canadian nurse was found guilty of professional misconduct because she supposedly harmed transgender people by saying things like people cannot change their sex, or that she doesn’t believe people “are born in the wrong bodies.” The report, while not penalizing the nurse for saying there are only two sexes in humans, does deny that in its report (see below; h/t Enrico, note that the link goes to the law center that defended her):

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is disappointed that the Disciplinary Panel of the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives, in a decision released today, has found nurse Amy Hamm guilty of professional misconduct for statements made about sexuality and gender in various articles. This decision will negatively impact the freedom of expression of regulated professionals in British Columbia and across Canada.

The panel found professional misconduct in relation to four items where Ms. Hamm expressly identified herself as a nurse while making “discriminatory and derogatory” comments. The Panel found that describing herself as a nurse in the biography attached to three articles she had written, and in one podcast, was enough to create a connection to her profession which brought her under the purview of the regulator.

In September 2020, Amy Hamm, a Vancouver-area nurse, co-sponsored a billboard that read, “I ♥ JK Rowling,” referring to the British author’s public defence of women’s right to female-only spaces, such as prisons and crisis centres, restrooms and changerooms, and sporting events.

A Vancouver city councillor publicly condemned the billboard on social media, prompting the advertising company, Pattison Billboards, to quickly remove it. The sign was up for just 30 hours, but it had already been defaced with paint balls by the time it was taken down.

A self-proclaimed “social justice activist” complained to the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives (BCCNM) that Ms. Hamm was transphobic and, therefore, unfit to be a nurse. The complaint called for Ms. Hamm to be barred from her current and all future nursing positions. A second, anonymous complaint against Ms. Hamm accused her of “promoting and stoking hate speech towards trans and gender-diverse communities.”

Thus began Ms. Hamm’s more than four-year ordeal with the BCCNM. The matter was referred to the College’s Inquiry Committee for further investigation, which resulted in a 332-page report on Ms. Hamm’s tweets, articles, and other online activities. The report led to a citation (or charge) against Ms. Hamm that her allegedly “discriminatory and derogatory statements” constituted professional misconduct. There followed more than 20 days of disciplinary hearings starting in September 2022 and ending in March 2024.

(The BCCNM’s closing arguments can be read here. Amy Hamm’s closing arguments can be read here. The BCCNM’s reply can be read here.)

Here’s something from the ruling itself: a denial of the fact that there are two sexes.
The Panel understands that the statement that there are only two sexes – female and male – is an oversimplification that does not align with current medical or biological understanding. However, the Panel is also cognizant of the fact that most people, who do not have Dr. Bauer’s expertise, would consider there to be only two se xes. Stating there are only two sexes is not, in itself, discriminatory or derogatory to transgender people as it does not preclude the possibility of a transgender person transitioning to the opposite sex; rather, it is those statements which foreclose the possibility that a person assigned male at birth can transition to the female sex, or vice versa, that constitute discriminatory exclusion and erasure. The Panel therefore finds that the statement that there are only two sexes, without more, does not meet the threshold for discrimination.

I am not going to judge whether Ms. Hamm really did violate professional standards of conduct, but I do claim that the College of Midwives and Nurses doesn’t know much about biological sex, and that it’s wrong in saying that people can actually transition to their non-natal sex.

*A few days ago it looked as if the government would shut down because there weren’t enough votes in the Senate (and by that I mean Democratic votes) to allow a temporary budget bill to pass). Now it looks like it will, but that has exposed a generational divide among Democrats.  UPDATE: the bill passed narrowly yesterday: 54-46. The Dems who voted for the bill:

Democrats joining Mr. Schumer in voting to move it forward included several members of his leadership team — Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois, Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada — and two who have announced their plans to retire: Senators Gary Peters of Michigan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. Democratic Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire also voted yes, as did Senator Angus King, the Maine independent who caucuses with their party.

From the original story:

Senator Chuck Schumer’s sudden decision on Thursday to support a Republican-written bill to avert a government shutdown so enraged his fellow Democrats that some were already talking about primary challenges to the 74-year-old Democratic leader from New York.

The eruption of anger about Mr. Schumer’s seeming surrender thrust into public view a generational divide that has emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s deepest and most consequential rifts.

Younger Democrats are chafing at and increasingly complaining about what they see as the feebleness of the old guard’s efforts to push back against President Trump. They are second-guessing how the party’s leaders — like Mr. Schumer, who brandishes his flip phone as a point of pride — are communicating their message in the TikTok era, as Republicans dominate the digital town square.

And they are demanding that the party develop a bolder policy agenda that can answer the desperation of tens of millions of people who are struggling financially at a time when belief in the American dream is dimming.

In other words, the younger generation is done with deference.

Some who argue for more militancy in opposing Mr. Trump say the party’s elders tend to be less comfortable with the type of unbending political warfare that is called for.

“Our party needs more of a fighting spirit,” said Representative Chris Deluzio, a 40-year-old from outside Pittsburgh. “This is not a normal administration, and they’re willing to do dangerous things.”

You know, I am angry enough at the misigash that Trump has pulled that I can sort of see the point of ”resistance,” but I still think that the further Left the party moves, the less likely they are to win. After all Kamala Harris was more on the progressive side than centrist Democrats that might have beaten Trump, but Harris lost handily.  Seriously, do we want someone like AOC running for President (she won’t be doing that, but I am talking about someone sharing her views)? Would they stand a chance of winning? Would Bernie Sanders? I doubt it. Ask James Carville.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,  Hili and Andrzej are practicing entomology:

Hili: Something is walking on the ceiling.
Andrzej: I see, but I don’t know the name of this insect either.
In Polish:
Hili: Coś chodzi po suficie.
Ja: Widzę, ale też nie wiem jak się ten owad nazywa.

In honor of Play the Recorder Day, Stupsi reminds us from Berlin.

“Das ist ein schöner Stock. Er riecht gut. Hast du ihn auch so gern?” (Translation: “That is a nice stick. It smells good. Do you like it, too?”

Stupsi’s staff Natalie playing the recorder instead of the usual harpsichord (listen for the cat interpolations). All she can remember is that it’s a Bach minuet.

Lagniappe: Natalie’s best friend Susanna Borsch, who lives in the Netherlands.  As Natalie says, “We used to play a trio for almost a decade when we were young. She does a lot of playing; one of my favorites of her is her duo she has with her husband Adrian Brown, the finest recorder maker and the maker of the recorder I play in the little clip above. He also made the concertinas that he plays here.

Here are Susanna and Adrian playing “All in a Garden Green.”

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From Cat Memes: a beautiful kitty with a broken heart.

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From The Language Nerds (I love those Irish women’s names like “Siobhan” and “Aoife”):

From Masih: somebody invite her to dinner! She really can dance and sing, and she has been through a lot.  The video is half an hour long and it is definitely worth watching. It includes Masihs favorite dish, gormeh sabzi, which brings her to tears. (I have had it, too, and it is great!)

From Luana: What the government demands from Columbia if the school is to get the $400 million withheld for anti-Semitism returned.

From Simon, two tweets. They are not eating the dogs, but the dogs are not eating!

Next lawsuit:Dogs vs DOGE

— George Conway (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2025-03-14T17:05:14.400Z

Part II. I am not a big fan of d*gs, but I would never starve them.

Better than eating them?

— George Conway (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2025-03-14T17:11:16.201Z

Two from my feed:

This is so sweet, even though the man is ashes.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted.

Gassed on arrival at Auschwitz. Crime: being Jewish. Age: 5

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T09:35:56.917Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a sweet fishy:

We have a porcupine pufferfish friend that truly loves the Cam and we truly love him/her right back 🥰🐡 #porcupinepuffer #pufferfish #cutiepie #smile #coral #coralhead #coralcitycamera #miami #portmiami #miamibeach #biscaynebay #coralcity #civicpridethroughbiodiversity

— Coral City Camera (@coralcitycamera.bsky.social) 2025-03-14T14:15:08.584Z

Stupendous: the lunar eclipse as seen from the Moon! Earth blocks out the Sun. (Blue Ghost is a private lunar lander.)

Oh this is beautiful and wondrous!A total lunar eclipse (seen from Earth) is a total solar eclipse seen from the moon.Here is the “diamond ring” of last night’s eclipse seen by Blue Ghost on the Moon! 🧪www.flickr.com/photos/firef…

— David Grinspoon (@drfunkyspoon.bsky.social) 2025-03-14T14:21:25.004Z

 

 

 

Saturday: Hili dialogue

March 8, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to cat shabbos; it’s CaturSaturday, March 8, 2025. All good moggies are reading the Talmud or Torah, and it’s National Peanut Cluster Day, a treat that can be kosher.

It’s also Genealogy Day, National Peanut Cluster Day, and International Women’s Day. Here’s one woman I admire: Iranian-American Masih Alinejad.  She’s had numerous death threats and two planned attempts on her life by Iran, but she keeps on keeping on, fighting the good fight against theocracy and the oppression of women by Islamism.

And Google has a Doodle for International Women’s Day, highlighting women in STEM. Click below to see where it goes:

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

Da Nooz:  The Nooz may a bit thin today because yesterday (when most of this is written) I was not feeling well. We shall see.

*Trump may be busy osculating Putin’s rump to try to become the Great Ukraine/Russia peacemaker, but now our mercurial and unstable President is threatening Russia, of all things!

President Trump said he is “strongly considering” imposing far-reaching sanctions and tariffs on Russia until a peace agreement is reached in the war in Ukraine.

“Based on the fact that Russia is absolutely ‘pounding’ Ukraine on the battlefield right now, I am strongly considering large scale Banking Sanctions, Sanctions, and Tariffs on Russia until a Cease Fire and FINAL SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT ON PEACE IS REACHED,” Trump wrote on social media on Friday.

He added that both Russia and Ukraine needed to get to the negotiating table “before it is too late.” The Kremlin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Russia launched its latest aerial bombardment of Ukrainian cities early Friday with 67 missiles and 194 attack drones, according to the Ukrainian Air Force. The majority were intercepted, the air force said, but officials reported damage to power and gas facilities. Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s electricity grid, often forcing blackouts in cities across the country.

Earlier this week, the Trump administration said it had ordered a pause to intelligence sharing with Ukraine, a move that deprives Kyiv of a key tool in fighting Russian forces. The U.S. has also suspended weapons shipments to Ukraine.

Asked if he thought Russian President Vladimir Putin was striking Ukraine in an effort to take advantage of the intelligence-sharing pause, Trump said: “I actually think he’s doing what anybody else would do. I think he wants to get it stopped and settled.”

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump added of Putin: “I think he’s hitting them harder than he’s been hitting them. And I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now.”

Trump said he believed Putin wanted to end the war. “I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine, and they don’t have the cards.”

I wish he’d shut his pie-hole about Ukraine not having the cards. Yes, they’re in a bad spot, and yes, they’re gonna lose territory, but at least Trump can treat people with a modicum of dignity, and by “people” I mean Zelensky.  Trump is hell-bent on leaving behind a legacy as “The Great Peacemaker,” but I somehow think he’s not going about it the right way.  At the very least, he’s alienated America from many of its most valuable allies (that includes Canada if you take tariffs into account).

*Although I don’t in general favor drastic Trumpian cuts to universities , I can’t say that I’m weeping crocodile tears after hearing that Columbia University, the epicenter of academic anti-Semitism and a school that has done almost nothing about the Jew-hating atmosphere, has just lost $400 million in federal grants and contracts:

The Trump administration announced on Friday that it had canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University because of what it described as the school’s failure to protect Jewish students from harassment.

On Monday, Linda McMahon, the secretary of education, had warned that Columbia would face the loss of federal funding if it did not take additional action to combat antisemitism on campus.

A statement issued by four federal agencies on Friday announcing the funding cuts referred to ongoing protests and antisemitic harassment on campus, though to what extent pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus can be considered antisemitic remains in dispute.

The Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services and Education, along with the General Services Administration, issued the statement. It was not immediately clear what contracts or grants would be cut.

The statement said that the cancellations represented the first round of action and additional cancellations were expected to follow. Columbia University currently holds more than $5 billion in federal grant commitments, the statement said.

“Universities must comply with all federal antidiscrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding,” Ms. McMahon said. “For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus. Today, we demonstrate to Columbia and other universities that we will not tolerate their appalling inaction any longer.”

That should make them sit up and take notice. While I am an advocate of free speech, things at Columbia had reached the point of a constant Title VI violation, and, as they say on television, “Money talks.”

*The WaPo reports a catastrophic drop in butterfly populations in North America.

Butterflies are rapidly fluttering out of existence from coast to coast, according to a new assessment published Thursday, at a rate that scientists worry could upend ecosystems and undercut pollination that sustains America’s crops

The total number of butterflies in the contiguous United States has declined 22 percent over a 20-year period, according to a study in the journal Science, as shrinking habitat, rising temperatures and a toxic array of pesticides kill off the delicate insects.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the most comprehensive tally of U.S. butterfly populations to date.

Nick Haddad, a Michigan State University ecologist who co-wrote the study, said he once had a hard time believing his neighbors when they told him they see fewer butterflies than in the past.

“In my mind, I was nodding, thinking, ‘Oh, they just went out on a bad day,’” he said. But now, the data has him convinced.

“Butterflies are vanishing from the face of the earth,” he added.

The crisis for butterflies is part of a troubling downturn in the number of bumblebees, fireflies and other insects that has been observed in Europe, the Caribbean and other places worldwide. It could signal a potential “bugpocalypse” that scientists are fiercely debating — a shift that may spell trouble for both nature and society.

The loss of insects — “the little things that run the world,” as naturalist E.O. Wilson once put it — has dire implications for ecosystems in which birds and mammals rely on them for food and plants depend on them for pollination. Farmers and gardeners, meanwhile, may be losing allies that act as pollinators and natural pest control.

David Wagner, a University of Connecticut entomologist not involved in the study, said butterflies act as a “yardstick for measuring what is happening” among insects broadly. He called the new findings “catastrophic and saddening.”

“The study is a much-needed, Herculean assessment,” he wrote in an email. “The tree of life is being denuded at unprecedented rates. I find it deeply disheartening. We can and must do better.”

I worry that we’ll see a time when the sight of a butterfly will be a delightful rarity.

*Literal trigger warning: account of execution by firing squad.   Reporter Jeffrey Collins, who has watched men die via lethal injection and the electric chair was on hand as a witness yesterday when Brad Sigmon, executed for killing his girlfriend’s parents in 2001 with a baseball bat, was taken out by a firing squad of three riflemen in South Carolina.

The firing squad is certainly faster — and more violent — than lethal injection. It’s a lot more tense, too. My heart started pounding a little after Sigmon’s lawyer read his final statement. The hood was put over Sigmon’s head, and an employee opened the black pull shade that shielded where the three prison system volunteer shooters were.

About two minutes later, they fired. There was no warning or countdown. The abrupt crack of the rifles startled me. And the white target with the red bullseye that had been on his chest, standing out against his black prison jumpsuit, disappeared instantly as Sigmon’s whole body flinched.

It reminded me of what happened to the prisoner 21 years ago when electricity jolted his body.

I tried to keep track, all at once, of the digital clock on the wall to my right, Sigmon to my left, the small, rectangular window with the shooters and the witnesses in front of me.

A jagged red spot about the size of a small fist appeared where Sigmon was shot. His chest moved two or three times. Outside of the rifle crack, there was no sound.

A doctor came out in less than a minute, and his examination took about a minute more. Sigmon was declared dead at 6:08 p.m.

Then we left through the same door we came in.

Another AP report says this:

The armed prison employees stood 15 feet (4.6 meters) from where he sat in the state’s death chamber — the same distance as the backboard is from the free-throw line on a basketball court. Visible in the same small room was the state’s unused electric chair. The gurney used to carry out lethal injections had been rolled away.

The volunteers all fired at the same time through openings in a wall. They were not visible to about a dozen witnesses in a room separated from the chamber by bullet-resistant glass. Sigmon made several heavy breaths during the two minutes that elapsed from when the hood was placed to the shots being fired.

The shots, which sounded like they were fired at the same time, made a loud, jarring bang that caused witnesses to flinch. His arms briefly tensed when he was shot, and the target was blasted off his chest. He appeared to give another breath or two with a red stain on his chest, and small amounts of tissue could be seen from the wound during those breaths.

A doctor came out about a minute later and examined Sigmon for 90 seconds before declaring him dead.

. . . .Sigmon’s lawyer read a closing statement that he said was “one of love and a calling to my fellow Christians to help us end the death penalty.”

Prison spokeswoman Chrysti Shain said Sigmon’s last meal was four pieces of fried chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes with gravy, biscuits, cheesecake and sweet tea.

This is the method of execution I’d choose if I had a choice, as it seems very quick and the pain can’t last for long.  South Carolina had paused its executions because lethal injection didn’t work well, but it’s resuming them, and with more than a dozen men on death row, I suspect that those who hear how quick this execution was may choose a firing squard.

Of course I don’t believe that anybody should be subject to a death sentence, but I won’t go into my reasons here.

*And from the AP’s reliable “oddities” section, a Cheeto was auctioned off for a huge sum. Why?

A Cheeto shaped like the beloved Pokémon Charizard has sold at auction for a total cost of $87,840.

The Goldin auction house listed the snack as sold on Sunday.

“Presented is a 3-inch long Flamin’ Hot Cheeto in the shape of the Pokémon Charizard, affixed to a customized Pokémon card and encapsulated in a clear card storage box,” the auction’s description states. “It was initially discovered and preserved sometime between 2018-2022 by 1st & Goal Collectibles. The Cheeto surged in popularity on social media platforms in late 2024.”

There were 60 bids on the uniquely shaped snack, according to the listing. The winning bid was $72,000 plus a buyer’s premium.

Here’s a video showing the flaming hot Cheeto lizard; and below that, since I know bupkes about Pokemon, a picture of the Charizard:

A Charizard from Wikipedia for illustrative purposes, Charizard artwork by Ken Sugimori, apparently qualifies for fair use. I’m not sure how good the resemblance is, but someone dropped $88K for it!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is dissatisfied with her environment (a niche used to store firewood)

Hili: I’ve told you so many times.
A: What?
Hili: This space should be cleaned, painted and never again used for storing wood.
In Polish:
Hili: Tyle razy mówiłam.
Ja: O czym?
Hili: Tę wnękę trzeba oczyścić, odmalować i nigdy nie wkładać tu drewna.

And in Berlin, Stupsi finds Spring:  Stupsi sagt: „Es ist Frühling. Schau mal, die Krokusse blühen!“ (Translation:  Stupsi says, “It’s Spring. Look—the crocuses are bloooming!”

x

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From  Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From Things With Faces:

From Cat Memes:

From Masih. Trump has made the EXTREMELY UNWISE decision to try negotiating with Iran, trying to curb its nuclear ambitions. What an idiot! It didn’t work before with any President, and it won’t work now.

From Luana (read the whole thing), who found this very sad but wanted to make the point that puberty blockers can cause permanent loss of sexual attraction, arousal, and orgasm.

From my BlueHair feed. Remember that in seahorses the males carry the fertilized eggs until “birth”. From the post:

Females, until you can become pregnant yourselves, kindly keep your opinions out of my brood pouch.

If Females Could Get Pregnant, There’d Be An Abortion Clinic On Every Coraltheonion.com/if-females-c…

— The Onion (@theonion.com) 2025-03-07T19:06:34.394Z

And from my Twitter feed, which has much more good stuff like this!

. . . and Noa Tishby, introducing a Druze restaurant in NYT. If you live there you should try it:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a man who lasted about six weeks in the camp after arrival.

8 March 1920 | Polish Jewish man, Abram Dawidowicz, was born in Tomaszów Mazowiecki. A weaver.In #Auschwitz from 6 June 1942.No. 38120He perished in the camp on 26 July 1942

— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-03-08T06:00:08.910Z

Two from Dr. Cobb, both byproducts of his upcoming Crick biography. HOWEVER, note that Crick was not an experimental biologist!

Reassuring news for PhD students everywhere. Extracts from Crick’s lab-book 1949-50:

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T08:32:47.892Z

I was sad to hear this. Fortey was a nice guy and an excellent popularizer of science (and scientist):

 

 

Sunday: Hili dialogue

March 2, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, March 2, 2025, and National Banana Cream Pie Day. Wikipedia has an article on it with tasty photos:

Dale Cruse, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s a thin day for holidays, but there’s an important one: International Rescue Cat Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 2 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Now that Zelensky has been publicly and harshly had his tuchas smacked down by Trump and Vance, and then kicked out of the White House, what will he do now? He left without the mineral-rights deal Trump wanted, and, I think, Trump came off looking like a narcissistic bully, which is what he is.  Ukraine demands security rights (i.e., someone to guarantee that Russia won’t attack again and take more land), but Europe can’t provide that in the way that the U.S. can. Zelensky is in a dilemma, but doesn’t deserve the crap he had to take from Trump. The NYT analyzes the situation (article archived here):

After President Volodymyr Zelensky’s disastrous meeting with President Trump in the White House on Friday, many Ukrainians were moving toward a conclusion that seemed perfectly clear: Mr. Trump has chosen a side, and it is not Ukraine’s.

In one jaw-dropping meeting, the once unthinkable fear that Ukraine would be forced to engage in a long war against a stronger opponent without U.S. support appeared to move exponentially closer to reality.

“For Ukraine, it is clarifying, though not in a great way,” Phillips O’Brien, an international relations professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said in an interview. “Ukraine can now only count on European states for the support it needs to fight.”

An immediate result was that Ukrainians, including opposition politicians, were generally supportive of Mr. Zelensky on Saturday for not bending to Mr. Trump despite tremendous pressure.

Mr. Zelensky signaled on Saturday that he had not completely given up hope of repairing the relationship with Mr. Trump. Posting on social media, he went out of his way to thank the United States, perhaps trying to address Mr. Trump’s complaint on Friday that he was ungrateful.

“I’m thankful to President Trump, Congress for their bipartisan support, and American people,” he wrote. “Ukrainians have always appreciated this support, especially during these three years of full-scale invasion.”

At the same time, Mr. Zelensky began laying the groundwork for moving ahead with the European countries that have stood by Kyiv’s side. Ukraine announced plans on Saturday for a joint weapons venture with France that would be financed by the interest earned from frozen Russian assets.

Later in the day, Mr. Zelensky met with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, who has been a supporter of the Ukrainian president in the face of Mr. Trump’s harsh rebukes. On Sunday, Mr. Zelensky will attend a summit of European leaders hosted by Mr. Starmer.

The real affront that prompted the spectacle, many Ukrainians and analysts believe, is that Mr. Zelensky pushed back against some of Mr. Trump’s terms.

Along the front lines, some soldiers said that the realization was sinking in that Mr. Trump would probably not help Ukraine. “Trump chose his side in this war,” said Pvt. Serhiy Hnezdilov in a telephone interview from the front on Saturday.

It’s sad that European leaders are now supporting Zelensky while Trump supports the autocrat Putin, creating a rift between us and our European allies. And there’s no chance of NATO providing security guarantees, because the U.S. would have to approve that, and it won’t.  It sucks to be Zelensky now, but I admire him a lot.

*When we look back on this era from the remove of a few decades, we’ll see that sex and gender extremism had deeply corrupted liberals, leading to distrust of Democrats. That, at least, is the conclusion reached in this new Boston Globe column, “A new low for free speech: Democrats strip voting rights from Maine state representative over post on trans athletes.”  The subtitle is “Democrats can’t win the argument and know they’re out of step with public opinion. So they seem intent on silencing their opponents instead.” (h/t Jez)

Democrats fancy themselves the party that fights for women.

But on Tuesday, Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, a Democrat, led the charge to take the vote away from one.

House Democrats voted, 75-70, to censure state Representative Laurel Libby, a Republican, and strip her of her vote and, by extension, her constituents of their representation in the Legislature until she apologizes for a Facebook post she made about a transgender student winning a girls high school track meet.

Her Feb. 17 post includes two pictures: one, from two years ago, that showed a male student standing on the fifth-place podium at a track meet; the other was from last week and showed the same student on the first-place podium, standing next to two girls with their faces blurred. The face of the transgender student — a minor — is shown clearly.

And this is where I pulled up.  If the transgender student is a minor, it’s not kosher to show their picture, and, indeed, that’s why Libby was formally censured.

Whether it’s fair for transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sports is something Libby could theoretically vote on in the Maine Legislature. While she could have made her point without a picture, she’s entitled to her opinion — and her constituents are entitled to hear it.

But in a scene that almost felt like satire, Fecteau gazed down from his lectern at Libby, mother of five, after she gave a speech about the importance of protecting girls’ sports ahead of the vote to censure her.

Or tried to give a speech. Over the course of about 10 minutes, Libby tried to explain herself, only to be interrupted mostly by Democratic men. “The member is beginning to skate on thin ice, as it relates to the course of debate in this chamber,” Fecteau told her from on high — after yet another interruption. Libby managed to get through less than one page of her seven-page floor speech.

Libby’s choice to depict a minor in a post was bound to draw criticism. Perhaps the inclusion of the photo was even unnecessary, with a national consensus on her side when it comes to the question of transgender athletes participating in girls’ sports. But she didn’t break any laws, and, as she has pointed out, public photos of the student had circulated widely before she posted about the track meet.

Nonetheless, instead of disagreeing with her, or debating with her, the Maine House moved to take away her vote, a sanction that should be reserved for politicians who commit only the most serious crimes related to corruption or public integrity. The punishment, on a party line vote, is vastly out of proportion to the supposed sin.

It’s a move that only underlines the illiberalism that’s associated with a progressive movement that refuses to see how certain instances of transgender participation in sports compromise the safety and fairness of girls’ athletics. A movement that has opted for shouting down dissent instead of debating their position.

Apparently, until she apologizes, which Libby has no intention of doing, she will not longer be entitled to speak or vote in the Maine House. Thus, it’s not just censuring but censorship. That is far too strict a punishment for something that, after all, is legal. One gets the feeling that the severity of the punishment—the vote was along party lines—is out of line with the magnitude of the transgression. And you know why: it’s blasphemy for a Democrat to suggest that trans-identified males should not compete in women’s sports. (Libby’s Twitter series that got her in trouble is here.)

*In his Weekly Dish post, Andrew Sullivan, a conservative, finds some solace from “The other resistance—on the Right.”  His piece launches from the opprobrium that the Republican Tate brothers, indicted in Romania for sexual violence (but allowed to leave that country), are receiving from fellow Republicans.

 Andrew Tate explained why he held out hope they could soon return to abusing women in the US:

The Tates will be free, Trump is the president. The good old days are back. And they will be better than ever.

I mention this not because I’m shocked. The two most prominent men in the Trump administration, after all, have either regularly “grabbed women by the pussy” or sired 13 kids from four different mothers — and evangelicals love them all the more. So of course, the Tates are beloved by Candace Owens, Benny Johnson, Richard Grenell, among other MAGA luminaries.

I mention it solely because some on the right actually don’t like the Tates at all. Ben Shapiro has fumed: “The right should DUMP Andrew Tate.” Chris Rufo called him “a common pimp with social media following.” Washington Examiner’s Kimberly Ross thundered: “The Left and Right don’t agree on much. But when it comes to a misogynistic predator such as Tate, we can agree on this: We don’t need more like him.” Senator Josh Hawley just said, “I don’t think conservatives should be glorifying this guy at all.” Super-rightist Pedro Gonzalez agreed: “Andrew Tate is a scumbag. Whatever cultural forces propelled his rise, Trumpworld’s embrace of him is disgusting and wrong.” And yesterday, Ron DeSantis told the Tates they weren’t welcome in Florida.

I know this is not exactly a big ask: distancing from alleged rapists and human traffickers. But in the current cult-like climate, as the Trump peeps repeatedly huff their own methane, and the crazies appear to be pushing on countless open doors, it’s something. (I wish there had been similar liberal call-outs of left-extremists under Biden at the very start.) And it’s not the only sign of internal, conservative resistance to a reactionary, lawless populism.

. . .So let us now praise National Review, whose writers Ed Whelan, Andrew McCarthy, Charles CW Cooke, and executive editor Mark Antonio Wright have consistently called out Trump’s rhetorical assaults on core American values. [JAC: where’s Bret Stephens?] Substacker Richard Hanania has been on a roll as well, decrying the dumbness of the Muskovites: “Coming around to the idea that it’s all just stupidity. I can’t think of any obvious or 4d chess reason why you would stop funding biomedical research.” Me neither.

Among veterans on this lonely path: Jonah Goldberg, George Will, David Brooks, and David French (the latter somewhat defanged by being coopted as the NYT’s darling). And let’s also note Jack Goldsmith’s erudite deconstructions of Trump’s violations of even unitary executive theory, rightly understood.

. . . Other conservatives have been decrying the “woke right,” by which they mean those so caught up in their far-right bubble that they risk jeopardizing the entire project of restraining the left. Two honorable mentions: Bari Weiss’ speech at the ARC conference in London, raising alarm about Tate-like excesses; and James Lindsay, a constant wild card, who nonetheless sees the same groupthink, cultish behavior, and intolerance on the right that we saw on the woke left under Biden. Here’s Lindsay, for example, on Bannon’s kinda-Nazi salute:

Bari Weiss is not what I’d consider a conservative, though I don’t know where Lindsay places himself on the political spectrum (no, it’s not binary).  A bit more:

The WSJ, the highest quality right-of-center paper, has also been airing dissent on a regular, intelligent basis. Today alone, in a Trump symposium, you’ll find one regular columnist decrying the chaos of Musk’s appointment, another worrying about Trump’s military designs on Panama, another that, “under this administration, for better or worse, it’s not clear there is a script,” and another that the administration is opening “the Overton window in ways good and bad.” The paper openly campaigns against Trump’s tariffs. Its chief political columnist, Kimberley Strassel, wrote this week:

Trump, through his own narcissism and stupidity, is destroying whatever coalition he forged in November. Sullivan sees this as a watershed time for the GOP:

But this is the very beginning of the second-term roller-coaster ride, the moment when all doubts are supposed to be set aside by the faithful exulting in the honeymoon. And these small acts of conservative defiance matter. They are putting on record all of Trump’s overreach, in a manner unknown among dissident Democrats when Biden began his woke Kulturkampf. They keep the conservative tradition alive, even as most of the GOP abandons it in favor of strongman, tech-bro authoritarianism. That’s something. And when in the future we begin to undo the madness of this moment, it will, unlike Trump’s derangement, age remarkably well.

*The oldest living Holocaust survivor has died at 113 (see also here; h/t Jez and Frau Katze). And Rose Girone has her own Wikipedia page. From the Guardian first:

Rose Girone, believed to be the oldest living Holocaust survivor and a strong advocate for sharing survivors’ stories, has died. She was 113.

She died on Monday in New York, accrding to the Claims Conference, a New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

“She just was a terrific lady,” her daughter, Reha Benicassa, said by phone on Friday. “Nothing was too hard. She wasn’t fearful. She was an adventurous person. She did well.”

Girone was born on 13 January 1912 in Janow, Poland. Her family moved to Hamburg, Germany, when she was six, she said in a filmed interview in 1996 with the USC Shoah Foundation.

When asked by the interviewer if she had any particular career plans before Adolf Hitler, she said that he “came in 1933 and then it was over for everybody”.

Girone was one of about 245,000 survivors still living across more than 90 countries, according to a study released by the Claims Conference last year. Their numbers are quickly dwindling, as most are very old and often of frail health, with a median age of 86.

From the NYT:

Rose Girone was eight months pregnant and living in Breslau, Germany, in 1938 when her husband was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. She secured passage to Shanghai, only to be forced to live in a bathroom in a Jewish ghetto for seven years. Once settled in the United States, she rented whatever she could find while supporting her daughter with knitting.

Despite the hardships, including two pandemics, Ms. Girone embraced life with urgent positivity and common sense. “Aren’t we lucky?” she would often say.

Ms. Girone was believed to be the oldest survivor of the Holocaust. She died at a nursing home in North Bellmore, N.Y., on Long Island, on Monday, her daughter and fellow survivor, Reha Bennicasa, said. She was 113.

Her secret to longevity was simple, she would say: dark chocolate and good children.

“Holocaust survivor” clearly means not somebody who survived a concentration camp (though we have some of them), but any Jew who lived through the period and lived in a country controlled by Nazis. I wonder if I’ll be alive when the last one dies (this won’t be too far from the last solder in WWII dying, either).

Here’s Rose Girone, a screenshot from The Algemeiner (a screenshot):

*Finally, let’s end the weekend by saying, as they say on NBC News, “there’s GOOD NEWS tonight.” This time it’s the rescue of a horse who fell through the ice into a freezing New York pond.

A horse that fell through the ice of an upstate New York pond was saved by rescuers who pulled together to free the animal from the frigid water.

Body-camera footage from responding officers shows the team of Saratoga Springs police and neighbors grunting and straining to pull Sly, a 1,300 pound (590 kilogram) horse, from a hole in the ice late Monday afternoon. Sly can be seen flailing his front legs while rescuers shout “One, two three, pull!” and “C’mon, baby. We got ya!”

Sly’s owner, Ali Ernst, said she noticed her three horses playing on the pond when she came home from work, which was not uncommon. But when she looked out again, the 22-year-old quarter horse had fallen through the ice.

Ernst made a series of calls for help as she ran to the hole in the ice, grabbed Sly’s halter to keep his head up and waited for help.

AP correspondent Julie Walker reports on two separate dramatic ice rescues in New York of a man and a horse.

“I was losing the battle to keep him above water alone,” she said in a phone interview Wednesday.

Officer Kyle Clinton arrived first and helped Ernst get Sly’s full head back up on the ice. They were soon joined by others, including two more officers, neighbors and family members.

Here’s the video. It reminds me of the old Jewish saying, “If you save one life, it’s as if you saved the world entire.” And they did—for this horse.  I never accepted the “ACAB” slogan, and this shows that it’s false.

Click on the “watch on YouTube” link.

 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a good question:

Hili: I have a question.
A: What question?
Hili: Who is manufacturing the moral compasses?
In Polish:
Hili: Mam pytanie.
Ja: Jakie?
Hili: Kto produkuje busole moralne?

And a photo of the loving Szaron:

And from Berlin, Stupsi has a few words upon seeing a spider:

Stupsi:  “Es ist wieder kalt draußen. Dort sind wir von Feinden umgeben. Siehst Du meine neuen Freunde hier? Diese Spinnen sind Vorboten des Frühlings und sie geben mir Hoffnung.” (Translation: “It is cold outside. We are surrounded by enemies. Can you see my new friends here? These spiders are messengers of spring and they give me something to look forward to.”)

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

From Things With Faces, a sleepy eggplant:

From My Cat is an Asshole:

From The Dodo:

From Masih, another Iranian woman jailed for . . . SINGING:

From Luana. I’ll try to report on this paper within a day or two:

From Bryan, who says “… I’m simply captured by this performance. I have been singing it in my head the past week!  I gather – unexpectedly – that Just The Two Of Us on ukelele is a fad. I have not looked into that. I bet the clip you shared of McCartney on ukelele factors in the machine-learning that brought this up.”

From Malcolm, a fearless moggy:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted,

2 March 1925 | A Polish Jewish girl, Jeannette Woda, was born in Siedlce. She lived in Paris.On 13 July 1942 she was deported to #Auschwitz. She did not survive.

— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-03-02T03:00:13.819Z

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first is from the Onion:

FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States

— The Onion (@theonion.com) 2025-02-05T18:31:39.298Z

And it looks like most cats engage in ronronning:

The purr article on French Wikipedia has a chart that sorts cats into the groups "purrs," "uncertain," "probably purrs," and "no data"

— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-02-05T04:29:59.688Z

Sunday: Hili dialogue

February 23, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, February 23, 2025, National Banana Bread Day, a comestible infinitely better than zucchini bread (no dessert save carrot cake is improved by the inclusion of vegetables).  Here’s a tasty Filipino banana bread:

Joost Nusselder, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Dog Biscuit Appreciation Day and World Understanding and Peace Day (sadly, this ain’t being celebrated).

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

Da Nooz:

*Israel is holding back Palestinian prisoners supposed to be exchanged for the six hostages released Saturday by Hamas. Trouble is brewing in Israel’s war cabinet.

Hamas released six Israeli hostages from Gaza on Saturday, delivering the last living captives set to be freed in the first phase of a fragile cease-fire. That truce was already jolted this week when the militant group initially returned remains purportedly of an Israeli hostage that testing revealed to be someone else.

Early Sunday, Israel announced that it would continue to delay the release of 620 Palestinian prisoners whom it had pledged to free on Saturday until the release of further hostages “has been assured,” and Hamas commits to releasing them without “humiliating ceremonies.” Hamas has been releasing hostages in performative ceremonies aimed at showing that it is still in control of Gaza, which many Israeli officials have condemned.

The announcement, delivered in a statement from the prime minister’s office hours after the prisoner release had already been delayed without explanation, added tension to the shaky cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that is set to expire next week.

On Thursday, Hamas had returned four bodies it said were those of hostages who had died in captivity, among them Shiri Bibas, an Israeli women who had been abducted with her two young children during the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023, that began the war. Forensic testing by Israel determined that the body was not Ms. Bibas, however.

Late Friday, Hamas transferred another set of remains, which Israeli officials confirmed early Saturday as those of Ms. Bibas, whose kidnapping and death with her children have become a symbol of Israeli grief.

The delivery of the wrong remains set off an uproar in Israel. Additionally, Israeli authorities, rejecting Hamas’s assertions that Ms. Bibas’s children were killed in Israeli airstrikes, said that their captors had killed them “with their bare hands.” The episode raised doubts about the next steps of the cease-fire agreement, including whether Saturday’s exchange would proceed as planned.

From what I heard, the Bibas family was strangled by hand, which one can apparently tell because a certain delicate bone is broken in the process. Hamas tried to cover it up by stoning the dead bodies, but the forensics told the tale.  This should enrage anybody who demonstrates for Palestine, which is now pretty much equivalent to demonstrating in favor of Hamas. Israel might return the prisoners today, or they might try to renegotiate the agreement. As I predicted, Israeli sentiment was going to change when they began swapping coffins of dead hostages for living imprisoned Palestinian terrorists.

*Another one of Trump’s executive orders has been put on hold by the judiciary: this time his anti-DEI program.

A federal judge in Maryland has temporarily blocked some enforcement of a series of executive orders by President Trump targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs, halting a widespread crackdown on such initiatives across the federal government.

In his ruling late Friday, Judge Adam B. Abelson of the District of Maryland said that the defendants shall not “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate any awards, contracts or obligations,” or “change the terms of any current obligation” related to equity programs. The executive orders had required a halt to spending on diversity initiatives throughout the federal government.

Judge Abelson wrote in his opinion that the plaintiffs in the case — groups representing college professors and school diversity officers — had established that they would suffer irreparable harm under the order, and had “shown they are likely to prove” that provisions of the orders were “unconstitutionally vague on their face,” and beyond that, provisions of the orders “squarely, unconstitutionally,” violated freedom of speech.

“As plaintiffs put it, ‘efforts to foster inclusion have been widespread and uncontroversially legal for decades,’” Judge Abelson wrote, adding that “plaintiffs’ irreparable harms include widespread chilling of unquestionably protected speech.”

The Trump administration has moved to shut down diversity initiatives in government agencies, going so far as to quickly take down government web pages that referred to equal employment opportunity programs and diversity initiatives.

Among the most aggressive orders signed by Mr. Trump were ones that mandated the immediate purge of hiring practices that sought to reverse the effects of systemic discrimination against women, minorities and people with disabilities. Administration officials also threatened federal employees with “adverse consequences” if they failed to report on colleagues who defied the orders.

Judge Abelson made note of the Trump administration’s aggressive moves in his ruling, writing that the orders sought to punish people for constitutionally protected speech.

“The White House and Attorney General have made clear,” Judge Abelson wrote, that “viewpoints and speech considered to be in favor of or supportive of D.E.I.” are “viewpoints the government wishes to punish and, apparently, attempt to extinguish.”

Now I’m not a lawyer (I just play one on television), but what Trump seeks to eliminate seems to be not so much words as action: programs that, he considers, foster discrimination.  It’s not illegal to go around promoting things like “equity,” but I wonder what the “irreparable harm” the plaintiffs will suffer if Trump’s EO is enforced, save their DEI-related jobs. And it’s not true that efforts to foster inclusion have been “uncontroversially legal for decades,” as we can see from the Bakke case. Further, the Supreme Court, not long ago, banned preferential race-based admission to colleges, another effort to “foster inclusion.”

*The right-wing WSJ op-ed column has gone after RFK Jr and his agenda! The topic: the man’s anti-vaccine agenda.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been Health and Human Services secretary for all of a week, but he’s already pressing what looks like an anti-vaccine agenda. Mr. Kennedy never did disavow his vaccine views in the runup to Senate confirmation. He merely said he wouldn’t take away anyone’s vaccines. But the HHS secretary has many tools to undermine vaccines, and his early moves are revealing.

News reports this week say he’s preparing to sack members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. This is the group that decides whether and how to recommend vaccines for the public. Its recommendations help determine which vaccines are covered under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

That’s the program Congress established to compensate individuals injured by vaccines. Its aim is to limit litigation against vaccine makers so they’ll take the high risk of developing them. Plaintiffs can only sue if they first file claims with the special vaccine courts and are rejected. Trial lawyers hate the system since it makes it harder to round up plaintiffs.

Mr. Kennedy is targeting the committee members for alleged conflicts of interest. But none of the members work for drug companies. They’re medical professors and physicians with careers studying vaccines.

Perhaps Mr. Kennedy doesn’t like that they have done research showing vaccines are beneficial and may have—oh no!—even advocated for them. One member advised a presidential cancer panel during President Trump’s first term on how to boost uptake of the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. If the committee withdraws a vaccine recommendation, it could be removed from the vaccine compensation program and open manufacturers to mass tort liability.

I’ve always thought that the man was the worst of Trump’s appointees. And with no vaccine compensation program, new vaccines might not be developed. Sometimes, as in covid, they need to be developed rapidly. And remember, RFK Jr. is going to be in charge of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Whopee; we’re all gonna die!

*From the NYT: “Six things E.R. doctors wish you’d avoid“. Read carefully (article archived here).  A bit of each

Adaira Landry, an E.R. physician at Harvard Medical School-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said knife injuries in the kitchen were among the most frequent injuries she saw.

Avocados are a major culprit, Dr. Landry added. “Sometimes I’ll even ask, ‘Oh, were you cutting avocado?,” she said. “And they’re like: ‘Yes! How did you know?’”

The best way to cut something like an avocado or a bagel is to use a secure, nonskid surface such as a wooden cutting board, and to cut away from your body, said Matt Shannon, the director of community emergency medicine at University of Florida Health.

Several doctors said they avoided trampolines. “They’re a broken-bone factory,” Dr. Sugalski said. “We see fractures, dislocations, spinal injuries, head injuries, all the time.”

Dr. Pratt is a dog lover, but after seeing many canine attack victims in the E.R., he doesn’t pet unfamiliar dogs. “You don’t know what kind of trauma that animal has been put through and what kind of triggers it has,” he said.

But is it okay to pet strange cats? I do that all the time! The last three:

Dr. Landry takes her own unexpected and extreme symptoms seriously. If you experience something like severe chest pain or paralysis of a body part, come to the E.R. immediately, she said.

And if you have heart attack or stroke symptoms, do not drive yourself to the hospital, said Michael E. Silverman, the vice chairman of the department of emergency medicine at Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey.

If you’re not wearing a helmet, whether it’s for sports or e-bikes, “you’re just looking for serious injury,” Dr. Sugalski said. “We see folks come in with helmets and without helmets, and it’s night and day.”

The last one is buried in the story:

Don’t wear Crocs when it’s snowy or icy outside.

Or any other time! (That’s from me.)

*Just for fun, I found a 14-minute video giving the late Roger Ebert’s list of the ten greatest movies of all time. Click on “watch on YouTube” on the video screenshot below.

The list in reverse order of ranking: “Gates of Heaven,” “28Up,” “Floating Weeds,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Notorious,” “Raging Bull,” “The Third Man,” La Dolce Vita,” “Casablanca,” and “Citizen Kane”. I realized to my horror that I’ve seen only “Raging Bull,” “Casablanca,” and “Citizen Kane,” all of them great movies.  I have some movie-watching to do!”

But the first one I’d like to see is “Floating Weeds,” directed by Yasujirō Ozu, who made “Tokyo Story,” which is on my own list of greatest films, and, along with Kurosawa’s “Ikiru,” is one of the two best foreign films.

Click for Ebert’s ten best:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s concerned that Malgorzata is using Andrzej’s mouse pad. (He got a new one and gave the old one to Malgorzata.) But it has upset the order of things:

Hili: This is your old mouse pad.
A: Yes, Małgorzata’s mouse pad was dilapidated and I don’t have time to buy her a new one.
In Polish:
Hili: To twoja stara podkładka pod mysz.
Ja: Tak, Małgorzaty podkładka się zniszczyła, a nie mam teraz czasu, żeby jej kupić nową.
And in Berlin, Stupsi is chewing on grass and notes: “Heute hast Du die Wahl. Ich wünsche uns allen viel Glück.” (Translation: “Today is the election. I wish us all good luck.” (A very far-right party is running.)

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

Barry caught some bad grammar at the Associated Press. Did you know some monkeys can live for two hundred years or more?

From Things With Faces, a tired cappuccino:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Meow:

From Masih, and it’s not just in Europe:

Erin Molan (Aussie, eloquent, not Jewish) on the nature of Hamas. Worth hearing!

From Malsolm, two disparate cats:

DO NOT DO THIS TO CATS!

From my Twitter feed:

From Ricky Gervais:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I posted.

Sixteen-year old French girl, died in Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-23T10:32:59.870Z

Two tweets from Matthew, who’s now in America!  First, a political/religious one:

From FB – “The car in front of me had a bumper sticker on it. It read: "Pray for Trump Psalm 109:8." When I got home l opened my bible to the scripture and read it and started laughing.Psalm 109:8 -"Let his days be few and brief; And let others step forward to replace him."

— (@deezgan.bsky.social) 2025-02-11T04:07:23.103Z

Photos from where Matthew is now:

Heard of Asilomar, the meeting that discussed the dangerous new technology of genetic engineering in February 1975? The world was in black and white back then (or at least the meeting photos were), right? Wrong! Previously unseen colour slides! digital.sciencehistory.org/collections/…

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-02-10T08:25:58.157Z

Friday: Hili dialogue

February 21, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the end of the “work” week: it’s Friday, February 21, 2025, and it’s National Sticky Bun Day, a celebration of those oversized cinnamon rolls that I love so much.  Ann Sather is the most famous place in Chicago to get them, and sometimes people would bring a dozen to the lab, but, if you ask me they’re a tad on the small side.

It’s also National Caregivers Day, National Grain-Free Day (not if you have a cinnamon roll!), and World Kombucha Day, celebrated the fermented tea drink that I’ve never had–but would be glad to try.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 21 Wikipedia page.

Finally, there is a Google Doodle today in which you can play a game against an opponent, a game involving the Moon and the lunar cycle. Click below to begin:

Da Nooz:

*The NYT describes the return of the four dead Israeli hostages in a piece called, “With coffins and taunts, Hamas hands dead hostages back to Israel”  (article archived here).

Hamas handed over on Thursday what it said were the remains of four Israelis abducted during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, including a woman and her two young children whose abduction was widely seen as emblematic of the viciousness of the Hamas assault.

Crowds of Palestinians gathered near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis to watch the theatrical handoff staged by Hamas: four coffins placed on a stage in front of a cartoonish, vampiric picture of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Triumphant music thumped in the background.

One casket bore a picture of Kfir Bibas, who was less than nine months old when he was kidnapped. A few yards away, another poster threatened that if Israel went back to war against Hamas, even more hostages would return in coffins.

Miles away, Israelis watched the scene unfold in horror and anguish, a sharp contrast to the catharsis evoked by the recent releases of hostages who had survived. Israel’s leaders had vowed to topple Hamas and bring home the roughly 250 hostages the militant group and its allies abducted in October 2023.

But some of those taken captive are now coming home dead.

Critics in Israel say Mr. Netanyahu shares at least part of the blame, arguing that he pressed on with his campaign against Hamas rather than agreeing earlier to a cease-fire that would have saved some lives.

And despite more than a year of devastating war, Hamas’s show of force at the exchange demonstrated that the group was still very much in charge in Gaza. Scores of gunmen — most clad in green Hamas headbands — patrolled the area around the exchange.

On Thursday, the coffins containing the hostages’ remains were the latest props.

Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, called the display “abhorrent and cruel,” adding that it “flies in the face of international law.”

I suspect that when all the hostages (or their remains) are back in Israeli or Thai hands, Israel will resume activities assuring that Hamas will not govern Gaza in the future.

*Mitch McConnell is 83, and though many of us disliked him in the past, he’s found more favor with Democrats lately since he’s been voting with them.  But he’ll be gone soon, for he’s not going to run again.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and longest-serving Senate leader who played a pivotal role in obstructing major Democratic agenda items and stacking the federal courts with conservatives, said Thursday that he would not seek another term in 2026.

In a speech on the Senate floor that fell on his 83rd birthday, Mr. McConnell made official what had been widely expected since he announced last year that he would step down as Republican leader. He said that representing Kentucky was “the honor of a lifetime,” but that “I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last.”

When he stepped down as leader, Mr. McConnell had said he was committed to finishing out his seventh term in Congress. He had not announced his political plans, but it had become clear that he was nearing the end of his career. Mr. McConnell has suffered a series of health issues over the past year, including a back-to-back pair of falls recently that left him temporarily using a wheelchair to navigate the Capitol.

Mr. McConnell established himself as a master tactician in the Senate during 18 years as minority and majority leader, making shrewd use of the chamber’s rules to thwart his opponents and empower his allies, including President Trump. He blocked former President Barack Obama from filling a Supreme Court seat at the end of his tenure and then led a Republican effort to install deeply conservative jurists on the bench under the first Trump administration, culminating in the confirmation of three Supreme Court justices.

But he has a deeply fraught relationship with Mr. Trump, despite the key role he played in enacting Mr. Trump’s agenda and allowing him to return to power. In recent weeks, he has found himself increasingly isolated within his own party, particularly on the issues of national security and safeguarding democracy.

All told, he was not good for the Republic, but I did admire his recent votes against Trump’s nominees.

*Trump issued an early EO that people born in the U.S. but whose parents immigrated here illegally, were here on temporary work visas, or were on student and tourists visas, did not deserve “birthright citizenship.” Since birthright citizenship is in the Constitution, I agreed with the many people who said that Trump’s dictum was unconstitutional. And one federal judge agreed, blocking the order. Now a federal appellate judge has done the same, setting up a Supreme Court case that, if all be right with the world, Trump will lose:

A federal appeals court panel denied a Justice Department bid to reinstate President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at curbing birthright citizenship, edging the battle over the order’s constitutionality closer to a potential Supreme Court showdown.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit declined on Wednesday the administration’s emergency request to immediately lift a nationwide block on Trump’s executive order, rejecting its claim that the preliminary injunction was overly broad. It is the first time an appellate panel has weighed in on one of the several lawsuits challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship order.

Justice Department lawyers had argued that the court’s injunction — which blocked Trump’s order nationwide after a lawsuit from four Democratic-led states — was harmful because it stymied Trump’s effort to “address the ongoing crisis at the southern border” and implement an immigration policy designed to combat “significant threats to national security and public safety.”

The three-judge panel unanimously rejected the request, with Judges William C. Canby Jr. and Milan D. Smith Jr. writing in their order that the administration had not made a “strong showing” that it would succeed on the merits of its appeal.

In a six-page concurring opinion, Judge Danielle Forrest wrote that setting aside a court order on an emergency basis should be the exception rather than the rule, and that the injunction did not meet the bar. “A controversy, yes. Even an important controversy, yes. An emergency, not necessarily,” wrote Forrest, who was nominated to her seat by Trump in 2019.

In rejecting the emergency plea, the panel upheld a nationwide injunction ordered Feb. 6 by U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour in Seattle, who called Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional,” while paving the way for the case to be brought before the Supreme Court.

If you want to get rid of birthright citizenship, you’ll have to amend the Constitution, not issue executive orders. And that simply isn’t going to happen. Even Clarence Thomas won’t be able to find enough daylight to say that Trump’s order was lawful.

*Trump’s decision to settle the Ukraine war without the presence of Zelensky has just ticked off the Ukrainian leader, and rightly so.  A sign of that animosity is that, following talks between Zelensky and Trump’s “Ukraine envoy” (what a snub!), there was going to be a press conference with the two. Now, however, it’s been canceled.

A news conference that was planned to follow talks between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Donald Trump’s Ukraine envoy was canceled Thursday as political tensions deepened between the two countries over how to end the almost three-year war with Russia.

The event was originally supposed to include comments to the media by Zelenskyy and retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, but it was changed at the last minute to a simple photo opportunity where the two posed for journalists. They did not deliver statements or field questions as expected. The change was requested by the U.S. side, Ukrainian presidential spokesman Serhii Nikiforov said.

Kellogg’s trip to Kyiv coincided with recent feuding between Trump and Zelenskyy that has bruised their personal relations and cast further doubt on the future of U.S. support for Ukraine’s war effort.

Dozens of journalists gathered at Ukraine’s presidential office in Kyiv after being invited to take photos and observe a news conference with Zelenskyy and Kellogg. As the meeting began, photographers and video journalists were allowed into a room where the two men shook hands before sitting across from each other at a table.

Journalists were then informed that there would be no news conference with remarks by the leaders or questions from reporters. Nikiforov gave no reason for the sudden change except to say that it was in accordance with U.S. wishes.

The U.S. delegation made no immediate comment. The White House did not immediately respond to questions about why the news conference was called off.

. . . Kellogg, one of the architects of a staunchly conservative policy book laying out an “America First” national security agenda, has long been Trump’s top adviser on defense issues.

What did they expect? Trump is talking to Putin while Zelensky gets fobbed off on some factotrum.  Is he supposed to sit there twiddling his thumbs while the Russian dictator and American dictator President decide how to slice up his country.  Trump’s “diplomacy” in this case is execrable, but he’s never seen a part of Putin’s buttocks that he wouldn’t osculate.

*I have never swung a golf club in my life, save at miniature golf places as a kid, but the pros have now developed a new and weird way of putting called AimPoint:

When the best golfers in the world line up a putt these days, many of them look completely deranged.

Their process for reading greens everywhere from Augusta National to St Andrews involves standing over the line of the putt, closing one eye and sticking a couple fingers in the air as if they’re trying to hail a cab to the clubhouse. Never in the centuries since a bunch of Scots started malleting balls toward a cup had anyone studied greens quite like this before.

But that hasn’t stopped professionals from adopting the unorthodox putting strategy known as AimPoint, a technique that has become as popular as it is polarizing. One PGA Tour veteran, 2009 U.S. Open champion Lucas Glover, recently inflamed the controversy when he called for AimPoint to be banned and cited it as a factor in golf’s pace-of-play debate. Others have criticized it for simply looking silly—or worse, violating the game’s unwritten rules when players stomp around too close to the hole.

Still, a growing number of top pros swear by it. They argue it makes the maddening art of reading a green more scientific and that the backlash against it is just uninformed.

“AimPoint has 1,000% helped me,” two-time major champion Collin Morikawa said. “I don’t think people understand how AimPoint works to really say this is right or wrong.”

I don’t even understand the description. What is the “biggest break”?

Here’s what you have to understand: First, you straddle the putt’s line at the point of the biggest break. Then you use your footing to discern the amount of tilt, at which point you assign a number—usually one, two or three—to the slope’s severity. Next, standing behind the ball with one eye closed and a pointer finger aimed at the center of the hole, you raise the number of fingers that corresponds to that slope. And that’s your line. So if you estimate the slope at 2% from right to left, you aim at the point outside your middle finger. Voilà.

Here’s an explanation and a demonstration, which sort of makes sense:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, it appeared  that Hili made up with Baby Kulka! But the truce was short-lived. Malgorzata explains:

Kulka was eating from Hili’s bowl and Hili was not hissing. That’s why Andrzej thought that she finally accepted Kulka. But, as Hili said, it was just a temporary ceasefire. Half an hour later they were hissing at each other again and ready to fight. Andrzej took Kulka and deported her upstairs. 

A: Finally you accepted Kulka.
Hili: It’s just a temporary ceasefire.
In Polish:
Ja: Nareszcie zaakceptowałaś Kulkę.
Hili: To tylko chwilowe zawieszenie broni.

And in snowy Berlin, a photo of Stupsi in the wild “Hatte ich Dir schon ein Bild von Stupsi geschickt, wie sie durch unseren Iglu läuft?” (translation: Did I already send you a photo of Stupsi walking through our ignloo?)

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

From Things With Faces, and the caption, “A forgotten potato at the bottom of the pantry turned into a Moose.”

From The Dodo Pet:

A thoughtful moggy from Jesus of the Day:

A 16-minute discussion between Masih and Quillette editor Jonathan Kay. Masih explains how Western feminists “Iransplain” to her: “hijabs are part of your culture,” etc.

Philosopher Bogardus said this:

I found these two responses to the new definitions:

CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/19/health/hhs-sex-man-woman-definitions
Washington Post: https://archive.ph/jLdGb

CNN offers this objection: “the new definitions fail to account for people such as those who identify as intersex.”
WaPo offers this objection: “Intersex people and those with chromosomal conditions do not fit into a simple binary construct.”
So he tweeted this out (there is more in his thread):

From Ken. Translation: “It turns out that debris from the second stage of the Falcon9 rocket fell near Poznań [Poland] photo: Adam Borucki”

From Malcolm; an old man waits for his cat to catch up to him. (Sound up for the “meow” song.)

I found a frogs amidst all the progressive virtue-signaling on BlueSky!

Tonight’s Dinner Menu has included Wriggly Crickets, Fingers, and also a Bath because Voigt Reasons!

— Stickyfrogs (@stickyfrogs.bsky.social) 2025-02-20T14:56:52.258Z

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

This Polish teacher lived barely a month after arriving at Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-21T11:01:36.857Z

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a very unusual fly larva:

This nearly decade-old observation was finally identified as fly larva of the genus Rhyncomya thanks to the publication of a new scientific paper and it's our Observation of the Day! Seen in South Africa by peterwebb.Read the discussion at: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations…

— (@inaturalist.bsky.social) 2025-02-15T16:50:58.102Z

I may have posted this, but so what? It’s amazing! Look at all those mRNA molecules wiggling around. And they have to be fast because proteins have to be made fast:

67 years after Pardee, Jacob and Monod called this stuff “X” (pronounced “eeex” à la française), now we can actually see mRNA molecules wriggling about. Quite amazing. Source in linked post.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-02-18T15:51:10.260Z

 

Saturday: Hili dialogue

February 15, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, the Cat Sabbath until sundown on February 15, 2025, and National Gumdrop Day.  Here’s how they’re made (did you know they were “cured” to remove excess water?):

@how_it_madez

Gumdrops #howitsmade #gumdrop #fyp #foryou

♬ original sound – HOW IT’S MADE

It’s also National I Want Butterscotch Day, National Clementine Day (the name of Winston Churchill’s wife, too), Susan B. Anthony Day (she was born on this day in 1820), National Hippo Day, World Whale Day, and World Pangolin Day.  Here’s a post from Matthew on Hippo Day:

It’s #WorldHippoDay! 🦛 ❤️To celebrate and spread some hippo happiness here are some Ancient Egyptian blue hippos made by artisans some 4,000 years ago! Which is your favourite? 😍Photos my own.#Archaeology

— Alison Fisk (@alisonfisk.bsky.social) 2025-02-15T11:10:16.292Z

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 15 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*This story reminds me of the Saturday Night Massacre in 1973, when two Attorneys General resigned rather than obey Richard Nixon’s order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox.  Now, fifty years later, Justice Department employees are resigning rather than sign off on the demand of Emil Bove III (Trump’s former attorney, now #2 at the Justice Dept.) that they dismiss corruption charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams. These are people with integrity. (See also here.)

In less than a month in power, President Trump’s political appointees have embarked on an unapologetic, strong-arm effort to impose their will on the Justice Department, seeking to justify their actions as the simple reversal of the “politicization” of federal law enforcement under their Biden-era predecessors.

The ferocious campaign, executed by Emil Bove III — Mr. Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer who is now the department’s acting No. 2 official — is playing out in public, in real time, through a series of moves that underscore Mr. Trump’s intention to bend the traditionally nonpartisan career staff in federal law enforcement to suit his ends.

That strategy has quickly precipitated a crisis that is an early test of how resilient the norms of the criminal justice system will prove to be against the pressures brought by a retribution-minded president and his appointees.

On Thursday, the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned rather than sign off on Mr. Bove’s command to dismiss the corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. Ms. Sassoon is no member of the liberal resistance: She clerked for the conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, and had been appointed to her post by Mr. Trump’s team.

Dropping the charges, “for reasons having nothing to do with the strength of the case” went against the “duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor,” she wrote in a letter to Mr. Bove explaining her decision.

Mr. Bove, rebuffed by Ms. Sassoon, tried a procedural end-around, asking officials in the department’s Washington headquarters to take over the case, then have someone on their staff sign the dismissal.

Instead, five prosecutors in the criminal division and public integrity unit also quit, leaving their colleagues to furtively discuss their options, expressing their hope that they would not be called upon to take actions that would end with their resignation or termination.

The motion to dismiss charges against Adams has still not been filed! I’m sure that they, like Nixon, will eventually find a useful idiot to sign off on the dismissal. The lead prosecutor, Hagen Scotten, who also resigned, wrote:

Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor on the federal corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, resigned after Justice Department officials ordered the dismissal of charges he had helped bring, suggesting that only a “fool” or a “coward” would obey.

In an undated, scathing resignation letter, Mr. Scotten wrote that any federal prosecutor “would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials.”

He added: “If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

*As usual, I’m stealing a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at The Free Press, called this week “TGIF: Be (my limestone) mine.”

→ And what of the Jews: It hasn’t exactly been a good week for my tribe, and it’s probably the moment to admit I’ve started seeing a therapist. Let’s begin our session:

Georgetown Law planned to host a terrorist, Ribhi Karajah, to speak about “Palestinian Prisoners.” A member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terror group, Ribhi was jailed for knowing about plans for a 2019 West Bank bombing and not stopping it (i.e., basically for being a member of PFLP). Now he’ll be feted on campus. Big Ribhi on campus! The bombing managed only to kill one Jewish teenager, though, so the honorary diploma is magna cum laude, not summa. It’s different.

The BBC has been covering the hostage releases in a curious way. Seeing the three starved Israeli hostages trotted across stage by Hamas, the BBC chyron read simply: “Concerns over appearance of hostages on both sides.” Or there’s this presenter on BBC Arabic speaking as the hostages were handed over to the Red Cross: “Of course, they are very precious to the Hamas fighters.” So very precious. Like little treasures who need to be chained to the furniture.

→ Being anti-cocaine is racist: The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, said last week that cocaine gets a bad rap only because it originates in Latin America. “Scientists have analyzed this,” he said. “Cocaine is no worse than whiskey.” Even the president of Colombia has adopted the follow the science mantra.

“If you want peace, you have to dismantle the business (of drug trafficking). It could easily be dismantled if they legalize cocaine in the world. It would be sold like wine.”

Cocaine sold like wine. I love it. I’ve never done cocaine myself—I already talk over people and think I’m the smartest person I’ve ever met. But the idea of a cocaine store next to the weed store next to the wine store is compelling. Each will have its own unique vibe. The wine store will have lots of oak barrels and a shop attendant slurring his words, the weed store will feature flashing neon schizophrenia-inducing lights, and the cocaine store will be full of items that make finance bros feel safe (stacks of Patagonia quarter-zips, Top-Siders). Imagine taking cocaine and having to pretend you can tell the difference, “Is this a 2024? I can really sense the terroir in the back of my throat. Is this from the University of Arizona region?” As AI takes all our jobs, people will need little activities. Coke’s a hobby. . . .

→ Chicken nuggets are essential: I swear to god these are true stories I’m about to tell you from one single week in the UK, both reported in The Telegraph.

An Albanian criminal’s deportation was halted after an immigration tribunal found that it would be “unduly harsh” in part because it would force his 10-year-old child to eat foreign chicken nuggets. The kid has a distaste for the “type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad,” a distaste that a judge decided should allow his father to remain in the UK. That is real. It is that easy not to be deported. You can just say you’ve gotten used to the fast food where you are (which, to be fair, was an argument I tried to use to remain in California).

Also real: A Pakistani man jailed on charges of sex offenses against children avoided deportation after a judge found it would be “unduly harsh” for his children “to be without their father.” The children need to be. . . near their dad. . . a pedophile.

At this point, UK policy is just that no one is ever deported. It’s a little island, and you can do what you want with it. These chicken nugget justifications are beneath us all.

→ U.S. pays for all sides of the war: Now that USAID has been laid bare by the boys of DOGE, more strange facts about its spending are coming to light. In Gaza, USAID seems to have been basically a group committed to fighting against Israel, so we were essentially funding both sides of the war. Exciting!

USAID sent money to organizations whose leaders promoted or were tied to various terrorist groups. Like: Six days before October 7, USAID awarded $900,000 to a Gaza charity that the son of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was involved with. USAID also funded a Gazan “educational and community center” controlled by an association whose leader once said that Jerusalem needed to be cleansed “from the impurity of the Jews.” (This is all from a great Free Beacon story.)

These sound like little numbers, but it adds up. In the aftermath of the war, USAID provided more than $2 billion for aid in Gaza, which was and is completely controlled by Hamas (the war’s gone great, why do you ask?). Samantha Power, who led USAID under Biden, reportedly tried to rewrite Biden adm

*Here’s a satirical sketch about the hostage release presented by an Israeli comedy show. Only Jews can make fun of their own suffering! (h/t: Malgorzata)

*Although Hamas is still formally the ruler of Gaza, I didn’t know that the land in Gaza is privately owned and can be sold to anyone. The WSJ asks,  “Trump want the U.S. to control Gaza. So, who owns it anyway.”  A few questions and their answers.

Who controls Gaza now?

Gaza is effectively run by Hamas militants, but the United Nations says it is unlawfully occupied by Israel. Most countries consider the war-torn Strip part of Palestine, which itself isn’t recognized as a state by the U.S., among others. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel doesn’t want to occupy Gaza at the end of the war, and he has praised Trump for what he said was creative thinking in proposing to relocate Palestinians from the Strip, something the U.N. has warned could contravene international law.

How would Trump take over?

Trump has offered few concrete details about his plans for Gaza, beyond saying the U.S. would invoke “United States authority” to control it. He has said that the U.S. wouldn’t buy Gaza or use American troops to take it, but that the U.S. should have long-term control to turn the Philadelphia-size territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

The nearly two million Palestinians living in Gaza would relocate to Jordan and Egypt in Trump’s vision. He has threatened to withhold aid from those countries if they refuse to take the displaced people, though he has since said such freezes wouldn’t be necessary.

Who owns the land in Gaza?

Because Gaza has changed hands so often, the legal framework governing individual ownership of the land is a knot of British, Egyptian and Palestinian laws. Some rules even date to when the area was under the control of the Ottoman Empire during the 400 years leading up to World War I.

Private individuals own as much as half of the land in Gaza, which can be freely bought or sold, according to a 2015 study of land ownership in the enclave by the Norwegian Refugee Council.

But more than one-third of that land is estimated to be unregistered because of difficulties, including establishing what is called a chain of ownership, and complex land laws and registration procedures, according to the study. Some owners in the past didn’t register land to avoid paying tax, it said.

Isn’t most of Gaza under rubble now?

Estimates vary, but the U.N. says about 70% of the structures in Gaza are either destroyed or damaged, including more than 245,000 housing units. Entire city blocks are flattened and Palestinians say their neighborhoods are unrecognizable, making working out who owns what and where even more challenging.

About 50 million tons of debris created during months of bombing are expected to take more than a decade to remove, and experts say it will take tens of billions of dollars to rebuild Gaza. The rubble also sits on top of hundreds of miles of Hamas-built tunnels that the Israeli military has tried to destroy, leaving a fragile demolition site both above and below ground.

What do international treaties say?

The U.N. says international law generally prohibits the forced displacement of people from land, but exceptions can be made for national security or public-order reasons, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. In those instances, the U.N. says, the people affected should be given the opportunity to challenge the decision and provide their consent. “Displacement should never be carried out in a manner that violates the rights to life, dignity, liberty and security of those affected,” according to the UNHCR.

I don’t know if the last bit applies to Israel, which forcibly moved all of its own people out of Gaza in 2005 before handing the territory over to the Palestinians. But I do know one thing: it would be unwise for any Jew or Israeli to buy Palestinian land. That is a capital crime in both Gaza and the West bank, so the seller would be executed.

*And, as they say at the end of each evening’s NBC News, “There’s good news tonight.” Here’s some from the AP’s “oddities” section:

A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters, ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring arrives.

Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart and rewards shoppers who could see higher prices, or possibly lose stores, if thefts continue. The car washes will be free.

“I don’t think everybody that steals is a bad person. Sometimes people are just down on their luck,” said Clothier, who was recently elected to Genesee County District Court. “But there’s going to be consequences when you break the law.”

Clothier told The Associated Press that he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for misdemeanor shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township, 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Detroit. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars at weekend events at that location in March and April.

The judge said Walmart is “on board” and will provide water and supplies. The company’s Arkansas headquarters didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Friday.

Clothier said he was shocked to see the breadth of retail thefts when he joined the bench in January, adding that offenders were from all over Michigan and outside the state.

“It’s just crazy,” he said, noting he had 48 such cases on his docket one day.

“I think it will be humiliating to be out there washing cars if you see someone you know,” the judge said.

And shoplifters won’t be the only people up to their elbows in suds.

“I will be there washing cars with them,” Clothier said.

MORE SENTENCES LIKE THIS ARE NEEDED!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is full of half-baked ideas:

Hili: We have to change the paradigm.
A: Which paradigm and change it to which one?
Hili: That remains to be discussed.
In Polish:
Hili: Trzeba zmienić paradygmat.
Ja: Który paradygmat i na jaki paradygmat?
Hili: To jest jeszcze do dyskusji.
And in Berlin, Stupsi is cold and sleepy: “Stupsi hat eine aufregende Nacht im Berliner Schnee verbracht. Den gibt es hier nicht so oft. Stupsi sagt: “Der Schnee ist magisch. Aber die Kälte macht mich müde.”

Translation: “Stupsi spent an exciting night in the Berlin snow. It doesn’t happen that often here. Stupsi says, ‘The snow is magical, but the cold makes me tired.”

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

From Things with Faces:

An owl-like cat from Meow:

From Cat Memes (look for the photobomb):

Masih’s appeal to Germany’s foreign minister Baerbock (shown to the left).  Jamshid Sharmahd was an Iranian-German engineer abducted from Dubai by Iran and subsequently executed.

From JKR. Sometimes biological sex is useful to know.

From Malcolm; a cat charger filled to capacity:

From my feed:

From my BlueSky feed, a lovely frog:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

A well known Polish athlete was shot in the camp, apparently for trying to smuggle a letter out. He was only 33. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3…

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-15T11:29:20.602Z

Two from Matthew. Paul Noth is the cartoonist in the first one.

Paul Noth said it.

— (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-02-14T18:34:48.562Z

And an “absolute unit”.  Wait for it, as the Brits say.

Absolute unit

— Soxic (@soxic.bsky.social) 2025-02-12T20:49:29.143Z

Monday: Hili dialogue

February 3, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the first day of the “work” week: Monday, Februay 3, 2025 and National Carrot Cake Day, the only dessert made with vegetables that is tolerable. In fact, when made well (with cream-cheese frosting), it can be excellent. Here’s a large piece I had at a restaurant in Chicago on June 10 of last year (note the candied carrot curls on top):

It’s also American Painters Day, International Golden Retriever Day, Four Chaplains Memorial Day (read about them here), and The Day the Music Died, honoring the day in day in 1959 when Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens died in a plane crash.  Here’s a newspaper clipping of the tragedy:

Distributed by Associated Press, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

. . .and the four chaplains, who went down with their torpedoed ship on this day in 1943 (they were all of different faiths, but stayed together, having given up their life jackets). Goode was a rabbi, Fox a Methodist minister, Poling from the Reformed Church of America, and Washington a Catholic priest.

From Wikipedia:

During the early morning hours of February 3, the vessel [the S. S. Dorchster] was torpedoed by the German submarine U-223 off Newfoundland in the North Atlantic.  The chaplains helped the other soldiers board lifeboats and gave up their own life jackets when the supply ran out. The chaplains joined arms, said prayers, and sang hymns as they went down with the ship.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 1 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT has a transcript of an Ezra Klein podcast called “Don’t believe him,” and the “him” is Trump.  He says Trump is instantiating a policy articulated earlier by Steve Bannon:

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. …

All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to —

Michael Kirk: What was the word?

Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

And what Klein says:

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

. . . There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

. . . . This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

We’ll just have to see how this all shakes out when the lawsuits are settled, and that will take a long time.  Right now I’m suspending judgment on many of the EOs, but am glad that we can at least discuss their substance without being silenced.

*A survey by the Torygraph reveals that nearly half the world’s people are anti-Semitic. Surprise! (h/t Ginger K.)

Nearly half of people worldwide hold anti-Semitic views, with hatred of Jews doubling in a decade, a major survey has revealed.

Research by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that 46 per cent of adults globally – and 12 per cent in the UK – have entrenched anti-Semitic beliefs.

This means an estimated 2.2 billion people worldwide, including 6.7 million adults in Britain, hold anti-Semitic views – twice the 1.09 billion identified in 2014.

The record level of anti-Semitism uncovered by the ADL’s second Global 100 Index Score survey has led its directors to warn of a “global emergency” and call on governments to act.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the ADL, said: “Anti-Semitism is nothing short of a global emergency, especially in a post-October 7 world.

“We are seeing these trends play out from the Middle East to Asia, from Europe to North and South America”.

The ADL, founded in 1913, is the world’s leading anti-hate organisation. Its latest poll of 58,000 adults across 103 countries measured belief in anti-Semitic tropes, identifying those who agreed with six or more of 11 negative stereotypes about Jews.

An average of 76 per cent in the Middle East and North Africa endorsed most tropes, including “Jews have too much power in business,” “Jews’ loyalty is only to Israel,” and “Jews have a lot of irritating faults”.

This dropped to around half in Asia, Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, while in Western Europe one in five adults still held significant anti-Semitic views.

“Jews have a lot of irritating faults”?  Where did that come from?  The only explanation for a doubling of anti-Semitism in a decade is Israel defending itself by going after Hamas in Gaza. Had Israel done nothing and just let Hamas kill Jews, anti-Semitism would not have increased. The lesson is that Jews are not allowed to defend themselves when attacked: Israel is the only nation on Earth that is not allowed to win a war—or even fight back when attacked. But of course what we’re seeing is underground anti-Semitism just coming to the surface.

*Over at the Free Press, you can see the bad bargain that Israel made with Hamas in an essay by Gideo Black: “The terrorist who murdered my cousin now walks free.”

Ashraf Zughayer, the Hamas leader who arranged for the killing of my cousin and attempted to have me killed, got out of prison January 25 as part of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. He had served 22 years of what were supposed to be six life sentences—one for each person whose murder he orchestrated.

Yoni Jesner, my cousin and closest friend, was 19 years old when a Hamas suicide bomber whom Zughayer dispatched murdered him and five others on a bus in Tel Aviv in 2002. More than two decades later, emotional scarring from that bombing—which I survived by the slightest margin—is still etched into my soul. So are physical scars on my torso.

Time, it turns out, does not heal all wounds. Perhaps it might when those wounds are given an uninterrupted chance to heal. But that is impossible in Israel, where the war against us never ends and where the freeing of the man responsible for that attack cuts at the scar tissue and forces me and every other Israeli into an impossible corner. We are being asked to weigh our profound grief and our concerns about terrorists reoffending against our bond with the hostages whom we want back home with every fiber of our being. This is an unsolvable conundrum, especially for those who have lost loved ones to terror.

Zughayer masterminded the attack that killed Yoni, but he is now home, having been welcomed back to his East Jerusalem neighborhood as a hero, draped in Hamas flags atop a white Toyota pickup truck just like the ones his Hamas comrades rode as they stormed southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

It isn’t simply releasing our enemies that vexes us. Israeli society—and Jews around the world—find ourselves in an impossible ethical quagmire. We cannot leave our hostages in Gaza. We are morally and mystically connected to their well-being and dare not return to normal daily existence until they are free. We need to use every lever at our disposal—financial, diplomatic, military, and spiritual—to bring them home.

At the same time, releasing terrorists has been proven to lead to more terror. Radicalized Palestinian youth have been reared on a curriculum of Jew-hatred. Their time in Israeli jail does not heal them of it. They know they are lionized in the streets of Nablus, Jenin, and Khan Yunis, and they are only too eager to burnish their legacies further. A deal Israel struck in 2011 saw a single captured soldier, Gilad Shalit, freed in return for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, of whom a staggering 280 were serving life sentences for terrorism. Many have reoffended—most prominently, Yahya Sinwar, who immediately upon his release took charge of the Gaza Strip’s terror network and subsequently masterminded the October 7 attack.

Strategically, releasing terrorists is a reckless, shortsighted move. It is likely to lead to the death of more Jews in the future than if those same terrorists were kept imprisoned. And yet the trade for the definite safety of Jews who are currently in captivity and whose lives are presently in mortal danger takes precedence. We must move mountains to bring them home, even as we fear that those very mountains may bury our loved ones in the future. The moral dilemma is excruciating.

. . . . . There is no simple answer. We dare not leave the hostages in Gaza. We dare not free the terrorists, and endanger our people for years to come; truly, a deal with the devil. We should not be having to make this decision in the first place: given the sea of enemies that surrounds Israel, its security apparatus simply cannot afford to have any blind spots.

This unspoken national pact—that we will not leave anyone behind despite the extraordinary risks—raises the threshold of physical danger in the name of collective healing. There is a sacred irony to this, but it’s the price of a homeland in a hostile world, and our commitment to this ideal gives our nation its spine. It is precisely the intimate kinship we feel with all Jews no matter their background or ideology—and our willingness to act on it—that will allow Israel to emerge from this terror and stand strong once again.

Well, maybe the answer is not as hard as Black thinks. If releasing a gazillion terrorists will, in the end, result in killing more Jews than not trying to swap prisoners for hostages (meaning of course that the hostages will either die or might be released in an unconditional surrender), then what is the point of trading one hostage for fifty terrorists? After all, it was Yahya Sinwar who, serving a life sentence for terrorism in an Israeli prison, was part of the thousand-plus terrorists exchanges for a single Israeli soldier. One IDF life was saved. Sinwar then masterminded the October 7 massacre, which killed more than a thousand people, mostly Israeli Jews.

*The WSJ enumerates some items that, in view of the upcoming trade wars, you might want to buy now.  I’ll concentrate on food and drink:

Yes, prices of automobiles or Canadian lumber are likely to go up. But you also might pay more for these more-surprising things:

Cherry tomatoes: Canada is a big supplier of these to the U.S. Canadian producers grow them in giant greenhouses near the U.S. border. Mexico supplies them, too. The U.S. grows a huge volume of produce and may be able to step up tomato production, but economists warn that domestic producers will be tempted to increase their prices to match prices on imports.

Maple syrup: Canada and the U.S. are the only two countries that produce this at commercial scale, according to Canada’s agriculture department. More than 60% of Canada’s production is exported to the U.S.

Tequila: The U.S. is the largest market for Mexican tequila, which has soared in popularity with American drinkers over the past decade. Shots and sugary margaritas have given way more recently to higher-end tequilas intended to be sipped or imbibed with soda. Celebrities from George Clooney to Kendall Jenner have piled into the category with their own made-in-Mexico brands.

Avocados: That guacamole you are looking to make for the Super Bowl could cost a bit more this year, thanks to tariffs. More than 80% of U.S. avocados come from Mexico, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. Mexico provides about half of U.S. fresh produce imports and is a particularly important supplier in the winter, according to Ed Gresser, a former assistant U.S. trade representative now working at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Smartphones: The U.S. imposed import tariffs on a slew of industrial goods from China during President Trump’s first term—and again during the Biden administration—to protest what it has long called China’s unfair trade practices. But most consumer goods, including smartphones, were spared to avoid the wrath of American consumers. An across-the-board 10% tariff on goods made in China will hit smartphones for the first time and possibly cause price increases.

There are also sledgehammers, but we’ll ignore those. But yes, we’ll be hit in the pocketbook by these tariffs, and Americans may lose their jobs when other countries retaliate. Tariffs are a bad idea, even if the threat of them did make Colombia accept 110 immigrants who had entered the U.S. illegally.

*I had thought that there was good reason to believe that the D.C. airplane/helicopter crash that killed 67 was caused by the Army Black Hawk flying higher than its mandated limit of 200 feet. But now the AP says it’s not at all clear.

Preliminary data from the deadliest U.S. aviation accident in nearly 25 years showed conflicting readings about the altitudes of an airliner and Army helicopter when they collided near Reagan National Airport in Washington, killing everyone aboard both aircraft, investigators said Saturday.

Investigators also said that about a second before impact, the jet’s flight recorder showed a change in its pitch. But they did not say whether that change in angle meant that pilots were trying to perform an evasive maneuver to avoid the crash.

Data from the jet’s flight recorder showed its altitude as 325 feet (99 meters), plus or minus 25 feet (7.6 meters), when the crash happened Wednesday night, National Transportation Safety Board officials told reporters. Data in the control tower, though, showed the Black Hawk helicopter at 200 feet (61 meters) at the time.

Investigators hope to reconcile the altitude differences with data from the helicopter’s black box, which is taking more time to retrieve because it became waterlogged after it plunged into the Potomac River. They also said they plan to refine the tower data, which can be less reliable. [They have the black boxes; what they mean is that the DATA are hard to retrieve.]

“That’s what our job is, to figure that out,” said NTSB member Todd Inman, who grew increasingly agitated with reporters’ questions seeking more information and clarity about the readings during a Saturday evening news conference.

He acknowledged that there was dissension within the investigative team about whether to release the information or wait until they had more data.

Officials say the helicopter’s maximum allowed altitude at the time was 200 feet (61 meters).

We will know pretty soon, as families are demanding early answers. And The Black Box will tell all.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is sick to death of winter:

Hili: Let’s start negotiations.
Andrzej: What about?
Hili: I demand  the immediate return of Summer.

In Polish:

Hili: Zaczynamy negocjacje.
Ja: W jakiej sprawie?
Hili: Żądam natychmiastowego przywrócenia lata.

And going west to Berlin, Stupsi the Cat is enjoying the weather, saying ““Ich liebe die Sonne.” [“I love the sun.”]

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

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From Things with Faces:

From Cat Memes:

From Masih; this time the woman protester has stripped completely as an objection to Iranian modesty laws. And she climbed on a cop car! I hope they don’t kill her. Brave woman!

From Luana. The Newsweek piece is here; you decide whether it’s a puff piece. An excerpt:

The vast majority of inmates in Oregon State Penitentiary are men, but Lee said she is able to wear makeup, eye shadow, foundation, eyeliner and even lipstick on occasion. She also cherishes her jewelry, including rings and necklaces, as well as bras, panties and what she called a “slightly feminized” uniform. That had eliminated her thoughts of suicide. She’s now seeking breast augmentation and hair replacement therapy since male pattern baldness drastically enhances her gender dysphoria.

Lee said that she had initially been diagnosed at the age of 16 with the condition – a feeling of distress that can happen when a person’s gender identity differs from the sex they are born with. But Lee said she wasn’t told of the diagnosis at the time and that “intolerance” simmered inside her for decades.

“I hurt, so I hurt others,” she said.

SHE said. . .

From Jez: More funny school tweets:

From Malcolm, a Darth Vader cat:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

This little sailor boy was gassed to death upon arrival at Auschwitz. He was eight years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-03T11:24:36.694Z

Two posts from Herr Doktor Professor Cobb. First, flatulence apparently made illegal!

it's the 14 year anniversary to the time Malawi tried to ban farting

— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-01-29T20:33:21.654Z

Bats! Be sure to enlarge the left photo.

We saw these adorable Long-nosed bats in the rainforest in Ecuador. Because there are no caves for them to sleep in these have adapted to hanging on tree trunks. You had to look hard to notice them. #wildlifephotography

— Carol Pope Gordon (@carolpopegordon.bsky.social) 2025-01-24T14:44:09.049Z