Welcome to the first Friday in March: March the sixth to be precise. It’s The Day of the Dude, celebrating the hero of the movie “The Big Lebowski“, released on this day in 1998. Here’s the trailer. And the dude abides.

It’s also Alamo Day (the battle for the structure ended badly for the Texans on this day in 1836),  National Frozen Food Day, National Oreo Cookie Day (they were first sold on this day in 1912), and National White Chocoalte Cheesecake Day.

There’s a special Google Doodle today for the Paralympic Winter Games, which will run between today and March 15. Click below to see the animated page giving details:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 6 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Late breaking news:, Trump has fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The troubles with ICE was partly responsible, and her poor performance at Congressional hearings,  She also refused to answer questions about whether she had an affair with her chief advisor Corey Lewandowski, who was given powers like the ability to sign government contracts. And she bought an expensive jet with a bedroom and 18 seats that, she claimed, was to be used for deportation of immigrants.

President Trump fired Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary on Thursday and announced plans to replace her with Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, concluding a long-building frustration with Ms. Noem that had come to a head this week with her grilling by Republicans at congressional hearings.

Mr. Trump announced the change on social media, along with a new, and previously nonexistent, role for Ms. Noem inside the administration: special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, which he said would be a new security initiative for the Western Hemisphere.

The immediate catalyst for Ms. Noem’s firing appeared to be her answers during two congressional hearings this week, particularly her under-threat-of-perjury statements that Mr. Trump had approved of tens of millions of dollars of government ads in which she was prominently featured. Mr. Trump denied that to Reuters on Thursday, saying, “I never knew anything about it.”

Mr. Trump was shown clips of her answers before a Senate panel and was angry that she blamed him for the contentious spots, according to a person with knowledge of what happened who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The ads were part of a $200 million-plus government-funded campaign that included a subcontractor run by the husband of Ms. Noem’s now-former spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin.

She’s now been accused of perjury at that hearing:

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said on Thursday evening that he would press for a perjury investigation into Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary whom President Trump fired hours earlier.

Mr. Blumenthal said that he would call for the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to investigate whether Ms. Noem had lied under oath during a Senate hearing on Tuesday, when she said that Corey Lewandowski, one of her top advisers, did not approve contracts for the Department of Homeland Security.

Mr. Blumenthal said that Democrats had evidence to suggest that Mr. Lewandowski had done so, and that Ms. Noem’s removal did not protect her from an investigation.

“Her firing doesn’t absolve her or relieve her of potential liability for perjury, and we are going to pursue an investigation of the evidence that she lied, because it relates to corruption in the administration,” said Mr. Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the panel.

*The U.S. Senate rejected a resolution that would have forced Trump to end the strikes on Iran. Voting was pretty much along party lines, with one Democrat objecting (Fetterman, of course, who will not be re-elected), and one Republican (Rand Paul) signing on.

The Senate rejected a resolution Wednesday to block President Donald Trump from ordering further strikes on Iran, declining to halt a war that Trump started without the consent of Congress.

Democrats — along with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) — forced a vote on the war powers resolution over the opposition of most Republicans, who control the Senate. Democrats implored a handful of Republicans to break with their party to end the conflict and reassert Congress’s control over declaring war.

“This essentially is the vote whether to go to war or not,” Paul told reporters.

But Paul was the only Republican who voted to advance the resolution, which failed 47-53 on a procedural vote. One Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) voted against it.

The vote was the latest setback in Democrats’ long-shot strategy to block Trump from ordering military strikes without authorization from Congress. They have forced votes on eight war power resolutions in the House and Senate — a record for a single Congress — since Trump returned to office in an attempt to block him from striking Venezuela, Iran and boats near Latin America suspected of smuggling drugs. All of them have failed.

Republicans in Congress broadly support Trump’s decision to strike Iran, though a few have raised concerns about Congress’s lack of involvement.

“Yes, I wish I would have been consulted,” Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) said in a statement. “I wish my vote would have been asked for before this. But the President did act within his legal bounds to do what he has done.”

Curtis and other Republicans argued that ordering the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the war days after it started would send the wrong message. Sen. Todd Young (R-Indiana) said he wished in retrospect that Congress had done more to assert its authority before the strikes.

“We should’ve been holding hearings and asking probing questions and making the case to get a greater measure of unity around this operation on the front end,” Young told reporters ahead of the vote. “But here we are. We’re at war.”

Democrats countered that it was not too late to halt a war it did not authorize.

Even Democratic Presidents, including Biden, Obama, and Clinton, have struck the Middle East without asking for Congressional approval.  And, in this case when the element of surprise was so important, I think it was risky to put this before Congress in advance, for fear of leaking.  Do we trust, say, members of The Squad not to leak a strike to Iran (you know who I’m talking about)? Given the precedents by Democratic Presidents, it’s not evenhanded for Democrats to make a big deal of this now. The horse is out of the barn.

*An archived article in the Financial Times shows how Israel managed to track down and kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It’s devilishly clever (h/t Jez):

When the highly trained, loyal bodyguards and drivers of senior Iranian officials came to work near Pasteur Street in Tehran — where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli air strike on Saturday — the Israelis were watching.

Nearly all the traffic cameras in Tehran had been hacked for years, their images encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.

One camera had an angle that proved particularly useful, said one of the people, allowing them to determine where the men liked to park their personal cars and providing a window into the workings of a mundane part of the closely guarded compound.

Complex algorithms added details to dossiers on members of these security guards that included their addresses, hours of duty, routes they took to work and, most importantly, who they were usually assigned to protect and transport — building what intelligence officers call a “pattern of life”.

The capabilities were part of a years-long intelligence campaign that helped pave the way for the ayatollah’s assassination. This source of real-time data — one of hundreds of different streams of intelligence — was not the only way Israel and the CIA were able to determine exactly what time 86-year-old Khamenei would be in his offices this fateful Saturday morning and who would be joining him.

The capabilities were part of a years-long intelligence campaign that helped pave the way for the ayatollah’s assassination. This source of real-time data — one of hundreds of different streams of intelligence — was not the only way Israel and the CIA were able to determine exactly what time 86-year-old Khamenei would be in his offices this fateful Saturday morning and who would be joining him.

Long before the bombs fell, “we knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem”, said one current Israeli intelligence official. “And when you know [a place] as well as you know the street you grew up on, you notice a single thing that’s out of place.”

This is again the doing of Mossad, and ranks up there with Beepergate (and the Entebbe rescue) as one of the great feats of Israeli intelligence. It was dumb of the Iranian government to put so many higher-ups in one place at one time. Don’t they have Zoom calls there?

*At the NYT, Bret Stephens and Frank Bruni clash in a conversation about Iran.(article archived here). You already know what sides they’re on.  A few snippets of the conversation:

Bret Stephens: They were among the motivations. A democratic Iran that represented the will of its people would not have spent the past 47 years waging war against the Big and Little Satans — that is, the United States and Israel. It would not have squandered its national treasure financing and arming groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, too. It would not have courted global sanctions through its secretive nuclear program.

That said, if what this war accomplishes isn’t quite regime change — which, I think, has perhaps a 30 percent chance of succeeding — but what might be called “regime modification,” then that also will count as success. By that, I mean an outcome that gets the Iranians to verifiably and irreversibly divest themselves of their nuclear and long-range missile programs and to stop supporting terrorist proxies.

Frank: Accomplishes “regime modification” at what price? And how modified a regime? And why, with all due respect, do I feel that those promoting and defending this war are spreading out a buffet of reasons and goals and asking us skeptics to pick the dish that most appeals to us? You want roast chicken? There’s a wing and a drumstick over here! Oh, no, you craved penne alla vodka? Behold these noodles! I have intellectual and moral indigestion. And a diminishing, not growing, appetite.

Bret: No question President Trump did a terrible job explaining himself. Americans have a right to know why he’s putting service members in harm’s way. But I don’t think the justifications are quite the smorgasbord you suggest.

I’d boil it down to one paragraph:

Iran has been waging a “forever war” against us ever since this regime came to power in 1979. These strikes are an attempt finally to put an end to that war, not to start a new one. We need to do it because the regime has flatly refused to curb its most threatening behavior, even after last June’s war. And we need to do it now for the same reason you try to deal with cancer at Stage 1 rather than Stage 4: Because waiting till they reconstitute their nuclear programs and manufacture thousands of missiles a year would make stopping them in the future much costlier. That they are close allies of Russia and China raises the geopolitical stakes. That they just slaughtered thousands of their own people raises the moral stakes.

To me, that’s a coherent case.

Frank: It’s a case, but is it or was it Trump’s? No insult intended, but your rationale matters considerably less than Trump’s — and as you say, he’s done a terrible job explaining himself. That’s because he has never carefully worked this out in his own mind, and frankly, that’s terrifying. His incoherence on this issue isn’t an asterisk; it’s a devastating tell.

Bret: The best case I’ve heard against the war boils down to one sentence: Do you really trust Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth to fight, and finish, this war? My answer is: The jury is out. But at least the military side of it seems, so far, to have been accomplished with impressive competence.

Both men agree that James Talarico’s victory in the Texas Democratic primary for a Senate seat is a good harbinger for the party, as he seems to be more charismatic and more willing to be bipartisan than other candidates, including his Democratic opponent.

*And Retraction Watch highlights a case of massive medical-reporting fraud lasting 25 years.

A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional.

Paediatrics & Child Health, the journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society, has published the cases since 2000 in articles for a series for its Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program. The articles usually start with a case description followed by “learning points” that include statistics, clinical observations and data from CPSP. The peer-reviewed articles don’t state anywhere the cases described are fictional.

The corrections come following a January article in New Yorker magazine that mentioned one of the reports — “Baby boy blue,” a case published in 2010 describing an infant who showed signs of opioid exposure via breast milk while his mother was taking acetaminophen with codeine. The New Yorker article made public an admission by one of the coauthors that the case was made up.

“Based on the New Yorker article, we made the decision to add a correction notice to all 138 publications drawing attention to CPSP studies and surveys to clarify that the cases are fictional,” Joan Robinson, editor-in-chief of Paediatrics & Child Health, told Retraction Watch. “From now on, the body of the case report will specifically state that the case is fictional.”

The move came as a surprise to David Juurlink, professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Toronto, who has spent over a decade looking into the claim that infants can receive a meaningful or even lethal dose of opioids via breast milk when their mothers take acetaminophen with codeine. The first such case, published in the Lancetin 2006 by pharmacologist Gideon Koren, was the centerpiece of the New Yorker article. (The Lancet case report now bears an expression of concern.) Koren used that case to claim for years that codeine, which gets metabolized to morphine in the body, can pose a lethal risk to breastfeeding infants.

Follow-up work by Juurlink and others has found the doses claimed in the Lancet report — as well as in two other articles, both now retracted, Koren and colleagues wrote about the case — to be pharmacologically unlikely. As the New Yorker reported, a review of the autopsy data and other evidence points to the baby having been given the pain medication directly rather than having been exposed to the drug through breast milk.

While the instructions for authors for Paediatrics & Child Health has at times indicated the case reports are fictional, that disclosure has never appeared on the journal articles themselves.

“Readers of primary source peer reviewed medical scientific journals have an absolute right to believe that the article being read is as accurate as possible, original, and factual, unless clearly specified otherwise,” said former JAMA editor George Lundberg. “‘Alternative facts,’ as popularized by Kellyanne Conway, have no place in a medical or scientific journal.”

. . . The journal decided when it first started publishing the article type “that the cases should be fictional to protect patient confidentiality,” Robinson told us. “Apart from the case that led to the recent New Yorker article, all or almost all were cases of very well recognized conditions (such as congenital syphilis, fetal alcohol syndrome, serious trauma from ATVs, hepatitis C infection) where a single case report would not generate any interest or ever be cited.”

They try to cover their butts, and it is the case that some of the vignettes were true, with only names changed. But not informing people that published details may be made up is unforgivable. Retraction Watch does science a great service.

*I’m a sucker for Democrats dispensing wisdom about how we should win elections, and this one, “Rahm Emanuel floods Democrats with criticisms and ideas. Will his party listen?” is in the WSJ.  Emanuel has had a lot of experience, serving as a U.S. Representative, White House Chief of Staff, and Mayor of Chicago (people didn’t like him much here). But if he were elected, he’d be America’s first Jewish President. What advice does he have for us?

Asked at a recent fundraiser in this affluent Detroit suburb how Democrats might be able to win back the working-class voters who have defected to President Trump, Emanuel faulted his party in 2024 for being too focused on things such as transgender rights and not enough on pocketbook issues.

“We weren’t very good in this last election at the kitchen table. We weren’t very good in the family room,” said the former congressman, mayor and U.S. ambassador to Japan. “The only room we occupied in the house was the bathroom—and it’s the smallest room in the house.”

Emanuel’s diagnosis is the loudest version of a soul-searching exercise playing out among a few members of the prospective 2028 Democratic presidential field, providing a window into their party’s continuing debate about how to win more broadly again.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear implores Democrats to talk more like “normal human beings” and avoid “advocacy speak” he hears when people use phrases such as “substance-use disorder” instead of addiction and “food insecurity” instead of hunger.

Even California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has governed one of the country’s most Democratic states, has begun to distance himself from certain progressive stances, including party orthodoxy on transgender rights. He recently said Democrats need to be “culturally normal.”

In an interview, Emanuel said his party grew too complacent during Barack Obama’s presidency, assuming the demographics of a diversifying nation would favor them going forward. He also said Democrats are now too fixated on Trump and it is hurting their chances in future elections.

“We became intellectually flabby and we became intellectually lazy,” said Emanuel, Obama’s first White House chief of staff. “To gain the confidence of the American people, you cannot just be a resistance, you also have to be a renewal. One of the things I’m trying to do is lay out that agenda.”

During an appearance at the Detroit Economic Club, Emanuel said he plans to offer a lot of bluntness between now and 2028. “I don’t give a crap,” he said. “I’m going to tell you what I think we’ve got to get done. You like it, great. You don’t like it, you can join my family and not like me.”

Kelly Breen, a suburban Detroit state representative who attended the fundraiser here, said Emanuel is on her list of potential 2028 candidates, along with Newsom and Beshear, whom she is most interested in so far. “I would prefer to have a steady and knowledgeable hand,” she said.

Well, yes, many Democrats have called the party out for wokeness and for not listening to the average Joe and Jane, but it’s one thing to pinpoint a problem and another to solve it, especially when the Democratic edifice is weakened by “progressive” termites.  Emanuel is starting to sound like James Carville. That’s not a bad thing, but Rahm’s Jewish, and, more than that, he’s known for being abrasive.  I can’t imagine Democrats, who are growing less fond of Jews, would nominate one as their Presidential candidates. But maybe the Party will at least listen to him.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron don’t seem to like attention:

Hili: And once again we find ourselves in the spotlight.
Szaron: Sometimes the secondary characters look better.

In Polish:

Hili: I znów jesteśmy w świetle reflektorów.
Szaron: Czasem postaci drugoplanowe wyglądają lepiej.

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

From Stacy:

From CinEmma. more cat paws:

From Give Me a Sign, and no, I can’t guarantee this is genuine:

Lagniappe: Yesterday’s cover of Charlie Hebdo (h/t Bat).  They never give up:

From Masih, now taking Elizabeth Warren to task:

I’m not just angry. I’m furious with you Elizabeth Warren.

Stop using the suffering of my people as political ammunition against Donald Trump.

You say you are grieving for those killed in this “unnecessary war.”
Really? I checked your social media. More than 20 posts… https://t.co/p47dBzIUQ3

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) March 4, 2026

Some sardonic humor (with truth in it) from The Babylon Bee via Luana:

To Save Time, Iran Appoints Supreme Leader Who Is Already Dead https://t.co/XHLaudSfs5 pic.twitter.com/jKAdi0sCud

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 4, 2026

From actor and comedian Rowan Atkinson via J. K. Rowling:

Yes. pic.twitter.com/u4VPW090L4

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 26, 2026

From Colin. No comment needed:

“Distinct patterns on her toes that indicate a kneeling activity common in men. This discovery…suggests society ‘tolerated exceptions and was already experiencing the complexity of identities.'”

IT’S 2026. CAN WE STOP THIS NONSENSE PLEASE? pic.twitter.com/vCByNEZZWG

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) March 4, 2026

One from my feed, another great post from Science girl. It’s hard to imagine the evolutionary steps that resulted in this behavior:

Tailor birds construct a cradle for their nest by sewing together leaves with spider silk and plant fibres

pic.twitter.com/9UoOOTbGLw

— Science girl (@sciencegirl) March 4, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz. He was 7 years old and, had he lived, he’d be ninety today. https://t.co/fv70HCQZuF

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) March 6, 2026

Two from Dr. Cobb. The first one is salacious, and I had no idea!  The lyrics and even a recording is further down the thread:

Praise be! It’s the 91st anniversary of Lucile Bogan recording surely the filthiest song in history: Shave ’Em Dry. She worked in the ‘dirty blues’ genre, known for innuendo-heavy lyrics, but Lucile was the sort of person who knew writers who used innuendo, and thought they were all cowards 🧵

— Odd This Day (@oddthisday.bsky.social) 2026-03-05T09:46:20.473Z

A dad joke (click to go to original):

Today is the cruelest day: Tuesday, March 3, 2026, and National Pancake Day (free pancakes at IHOP). Here are two versions I’ve had: a blue-corn blueberry pancake with piñon nuts served in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a cherry pancake with sour cream I ate in Gdańsk, Poland. The world has a great variety of pancakes!

It’s also 33 Flavor Days, celebrating the anniversary of Baskin-Robbins, Canadian Bacon Day, National Cold Cuts Day, National Moscow Mule Day (an excellent drink when made properly), National Mulled Wine Day (ditto), World Wildlife Day, National Anthem Day (“The Star-Spangled Banner became America’s official anthem on this day in 1931), and Purim, the Jewish holiday commemorating the saving of the Jews from annihiliation by Queen Esther (you may remember our last pair of ducks named Esther and Mordecai, who produced a brood of six that fledged last year). Here is the pair. As I posted yesterday, we have a new pair of mallards that are not Esther and Mordecai.

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

Da Nooz:

*Trump is sending more U.S. troops to the Middle East and now predicts a more extended war: a month or more.  (Article archived here.)

The Pentagon said on Monday that more U.S. forces were headed to the Middle East, amid reports that President Trump declined to rule out sending ground troops into Iran and promised that still bigger waves of airstrikes against that country were coming, in further signs of an expanding, lasting war.

In his first public event since the strikes in Iran began on Saturday, Mr. Trump predicted the attacks against “this sick and sinister regime” would go on for at least a month. “Right from the beginning we projected four to five weeks, but we have the capability to go far longer than that,” Mr. Trump said at the White House. “We’ll do it.”

*Over at the Free Press, Elliot Ackerman makes “The case against the war.”

. . . President Trump’s strategy of regime change relies on Iranian citizens returning to the streets. Once our air strikes cease, Trump has urged those everyday Iranians to “take over your government,” telling them in a video on Saturday that “this will be probably your only chance for generations.”

We’ve seen regime change before, but not like this. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, then–Secretary of State Colin Powell evoked what’s sometimes called the Pottery Barn Rule: You break it, you own it. Trump’s strategy rejects that logic. Trump’s rule is: We break it, you own it. His message to the Iranian people is clear: Our obligation does not extend past the opportunity we’ve provided for you to topple your regime and replace it with something better.

Trump has already employed a version of this strategy in Venezuela—except in Iran, he’s pushing this strategy to the limit, using it in a high-stakes region, one with a longer and deeper history of resentment toward the United States. In an interview on Sunday, the president said that he would be open to talks with Iran’s post-Khamenei leadership. Perhaps he’ll cut a deal with the ayatollahs, much as he’s done in Venezuela with the government of Delcy Rodríguez. If Trump and the new Iranian regime fail to strike a deal, that leaves only one pathway for success. The regime must topple.

But will the ayatollahs go quietly? Will it be possible for popular street protests to displace violent regime hard-liners? The specter of further American air strikes makes it unlikely that the regime can again repress its people through slaughter on a scale like in January. But what if a significant number of Iranian citizens reject the demands made by protesters? What if the regime still maintains real, durable support? The Arab Spring offers several dire examples of popular protests for democracy mutating into deadly civil wars, chief among them the decade-long civil war in Syria. A civil war in Iran on the scale of Syria would be catastrophic.

. . .If the operation in Iran remains limited, swift, and successful, like the operation in Venezuela, these objections may amount to little. But the enemy always gets a say in war. Already, three U.S. service members have been killed as a result of our strikes. Should the Iranian regime continue its fight against the United States, a key part of their strategy will be to inflict maximum U.S. casualties. This could quickly erode an already fragile base of support for the war.

Trump has made himself particularly susceptible to such a strategy. He has yet to really sell this war to the American people. He didn’t seek congressional approval for the war or make his case in a national address as presidents have often done. Likely, Trump would say this was because he wanted to maintain the element of surprise, but interacting with Congress and the American people aren’t niceties. They are necessities. War is fundamentally a political act. A president who doesn’t wage politics while also waging war may find himself quickly losing a war on the home front, particularly in a republic.

Yes, these are good questions and valid concerns. Civil war, or war of the people versus the military, would be horrific. All this is in the air. Do these considerations mean that the U.S. and Israel should not have attacked Iran? How can we know without a crystal ball?

*Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah has started up again (Hezbollah broke the cease fire, agreement which it’s been doing sporadically), and Lebanon has pledged to stop Hezbollah’s fighting after Israel killed a big Hezbollah official. From the Times of Israel:

Israel said Monday that the head of Hezbollah’s intelligence arm was killed in an overnight strike and Beirut said it would ban the terror group’s military activities, hours after the Iran-backed organization fired rockets and drones at Israel, leading to major retaliatory strikes.

The IDF confirmed that the overnight strike in the Lebanese capital killed Hussein Makled, whom it called “the head of Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters.”

The military said Makled was responsible for “forming the intelligence picture using various intelligence collection tools to provide the Hezbollah terror organization with intelligence assessments regarding IDF troops and the State of Israel.”

“He also closely cooperated with senior commanders in Hezbollah who planned and advanced terror attacks against Israel and its citizens,” the military added.

The terror group’s overnight attacks — which it said were in retaliation for the killing of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei in the opening minutes of the joint Israeli-US assault on Iran on Saturday — led to waves of Israeli airstrikes across Lebanon, including in the capital.

. . . In a statement after a cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said Lebanon rejected any military actions launched from its territory “outside the framework of its legitimate institutions and affirmed that the decision of war and peace is exclusively in its hands.”

This “necessitates the immediate prohibition of all Hezbollah’s security and military activities as being outside the law, and obliging it to hand over its weapons to the Lebanese state,” he said.

Salam ordered the military and security agencies to take “immediate measures” to implement the cabinet decision and prevent “any military operation or the launching of missiles or drones from Lebanese territory.”

The Iranian regime, decapitated in the first hours of the U.S.-Israeli campaign that started on Saturday, has responded by striking at least nine countries across the Middle East, unleashing a truly regional war.

The apparent calculation was that, by targeting rich Persian Gulf monarchies that hold sway with the Trump administration, Tehran could force Washington and Israel into a rapid de-escalation.

Iran’s expectation was that, by squeezing oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and disrupting air traffic, it would cause unbearable pain to the Gulf nations that depend so much on expatriate workers, tourism and overseas trade.

So far, this calculus seems to have backfired. Gulf states, rattled by volleys of Iranian drones and missiles targeting their hotels, ports and airports, are concluding the Iranian peril must be confronted. Rather than seeking an offramp, the prevailing mood in the Gulf—at least for now—is that the Iranian regime can’t be allowed to get away with this unprecedented onslaught on its neighbors.

“Iran is coming to the countries and people of the Gulf and saying: ‘You know, I am actually your number-one threat.’ This has long-term implications, regardless of whoever is actually in power in Iran,” Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the United Arab Emirates president, said in an interview. “Targeting Gulf states is completely irrational, and very shortsighted.”

Iran has struck all six of the oil-rich Gulf Arab states, including Oman, which had mediated nuclear talks between Tehran and the Trump administration. It also hit Jordan, Iraq and Israel. At first, all the Gulf states publicly opposed the U.S.-Israeli assault on the Iranian regime, which has already resulted in the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the killing of many Iranian military and intelligence commanders.

The mood changed quickly once the brunt of the Iranian response targeted cities such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the U.A.E., Doha in Qatar, and Manama in Bahrain, inflicting widespread damage to infrastructure and civilian casualties. In the U.A.E. alone, Iran killed three people and injured 58 after firing 165 ballistic missiles and 541 drones, most of which have been intercepted, according to the Defense Ministry.

“Many people in the Gulf woke up Saturday pissed off at the United States and Israel, and went to sleep pissed off at Iran,” said William Wechsler, director of Middle East programs at the Atlantic Council in Washington and a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili needs her body fed before her soul. And Szaron shows that he is clearly an educated cat.

Szaron: Have you read Plato’s “The Symposium”?
Hili: No, but I could eat something too.

In Polish:

Szaron: Czytałaś „Ucztę” Platona?
Hili: Nie, ale też bym coś zjadła.

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

Fromn Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices; short people closure!

From Stacy, whose caption is: “Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. It’s been going on all day. The boulevard was shut down. Notice the flags. “

From Masih: Two Iranian women blinded by the regime, and still defiant! Kudos for the brave women of Iran.

To those who call themselves anti-war in the West: Look at these two women.
They were unarmed. They protested the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini for not wearing appropriate hijab and the regime answered with bullets aimed at their eyes.

They wear the scars of a dictatorship that… pic.twitter.com/SaRzjUWIdn

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) March 2, 2026

Also from Stacy, a sarcastic post put up by Peter Boghassian:

But Cenk gave some plaudits to the late Ayatollah. Oy!

I criticized Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei a thousand times. He was oppressing his own people and preventing democracy. But there’s one thing you can’t take away from him, he died on his own two feet, instead of kneeling to Israel. That took courage. He didn’t bow.

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) March 1, 2026

Yep, the Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Chicago is back—not just supporting Iran, but celebrating its striking a U.S. base.  As usual, they are without a moral compass.  They are merely against America and the West.

The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at the University of Chicago is celebrating Iranian missiles hitting a U.S. Navy base in Bahrain. They included an upside-down triangle🔻—a symbol Hamas uses to denote targets

CC @FBIDirectorKash @EDSecMcMahon @HarmeetKDhillon pic.twitter.com/gjAMk2iPxa

— Jessica Costescu (@JessicaCostescu) March 1, 2026

From my feed: Cuteness quadrupled. I visited this breeding center when I visited Chengdu.

Adorable baby pandas on their morning run in Chengdu, China.pic.twitter.com/xH8tYwTGJH

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 2, 2026

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A Norwegian Jewish woman and her young son were gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz, part of the 53% of the train’s occupants that were killed immediately. https://t.co/eXMl76OWPL

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) March 3, 2026

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, an amazing proto-whale skeleton (a transitional form) found in Egypt. See the video in the original post.

37 million years old whale spine found in the hot dunes of Egypt. This is a complete skeleton, the first-ever find for Basilosaurus, a large, predatory, prehistoric archaeocete whale uncovered in Wadi El Hitan, preserved with the remains of its prey.Original post

— Massimo (mirror) (@rainmaker1973-m.bsky.social) 2026-03-01T15:47:35.478Z

Juvenilia from the bollard site:

Grow up.#WorldBollardAssociation

— World Bollard Association™️ (@worldbollardassoc.bsky.social) 2026-02-28T22:27:16.478Z

Welcome to Thursday February 26, 2026, and only two days until Duck Month begins! It’s also National Pistachio Day, one of the trio of World’s Best Nuts (the others are macadamia nuts and cashews).

The seeds of Pistacia vera are not nuts but seeds, at least in the botanical sense. From Wikipedia:

The fruit is a drupe, containing an elongated seed, which is the edible portion. The seed, commonly thought of as a nut, is a culinary nut, not a botanical nut.

Here’s a video about their harvesting and production in Iran, the world’s largest source of the seeds:

It’s also Levi Strauss Day (the Jewish man who dressed the world was born on this day in 1829), National Chili Day, and, in the UK, National Toast Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*More on Trump’s two-hour State of the Union address on Tuesday, which, at 10,599 words, is the longest in American history (George Washington’s address lasted only ten minutes).

Going into the speech, Mr. Trump knew that he needed to use it to maneuver out of a politically treacherous moment for himself and his party. A majority of Americans oppose how Mr. Trump is pursuing his anti-immigration agenda, and more than 70 percent of them think his priorities are in the wrong place. His approval rating has plummeted to 41 percent.

His solution was to wrap himself in the imagery of American heroism with staged asides throughout the speech while throwing the blame for every problem, from the security of elections to the state of the economy, back on his opponents.

In a number of cases, Democrats gave Mr. Trump the confrontations he sought.

Representative Al Green of Texas, who was ejected from the chamber last year for waving his cane at Mr. Trump, was once again removed after he held up a sign proclaiming “BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES” — a reference to a racist video Mr. Trump recently shared on social media.

Representative Lauren Underwood of Illinois got up and walked out rather than “take another minute” of the speech. And Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s, was one of a handful who yelled at him.

“You’ve killed Americans!” she shouted as Mr. Trump talked about immigration enforcement.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the president shot back.

When did these speeches become barroom brawls? Both sides are guilty of disrupting the President when he’s from the other party, and I’d be happier if the audience would be respectful; this would set an example, for instance, for speakers on college campuses. And I’m not sure about whether the Democrats should have remained seated when Trump asked Congress members to stand if they prioritized Americans over immigrants. This was a trap of the “are-you-still-beating-your-wife” variety, but I don’t think it will help the Democrats. Readers?

The NYT has fact-checked some of his assertions, and it’s not pretty. Here two of its verdicts as screenshots:

*In an article called “Why Iran will escalate” (article is archived),  Foreign Policy assesses Trump’s motivations for attacking Iran and warns of potentially dangerous fallout from such an attack.

Trump’s own behavior also increases the risk of escalation. The president’s ever-intensifying wish to be seen as a historic peacemaker has led him to an unnecessarily binary choice—strong-arm Tehran into a major new deal or use substantial force. And the nebulousness of his motives makes this flash point much more dangerous. Trump seems interested, in no particular order, in demonstrating the prowess of the U.S. military, strengthening his negotiating position, showing he was serious when he vowed in a January Truth Social post to protect Iranian protesters, and differentiating his approach from President Barack Obama’s. This mishmash of objectives contrasts with the focus he brought to his previous successful operations and will make him less prepared if a strike does not yield the expected, swift capitulation. All told, today’s conditions mean that an attack by the United States on Iran could result in unexpectedly deadly retaliation—and a much longer and potentially damaging conflict for Washington.

. . . Iran knows that it cannot win an outright war with the United States or Israel. In theory, if Trump strikes, Tehran would be best off seeking a quick de-escalation—as it did with Israel in April and October of 2024 and with both countries in June 2025. But Iran is facing a very different situation now than it did then. Today, Israel and the United States both perceive Iran as a paper tiger. The proxy militias that it used to deter Israel and terrorize the Middle East for years have largely been neutralized. Its nuclear program is in ruins. Its air defenses are in tatters: the June strikes destroyed most of its surface-to-air missile sites and punched massive holes in its early-warning radar network. And in December, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to Mar-a-Lago and got Trump’s permission to strike Iran’s ballistic missile program, the keystone of the country’s defense, at a time and place of Netanyahu’s choosing. This development threatens the very existence of the Islamic Republic. The program is Iran’s only remaining means of threatening Israel. (Iran also mostly makes these missiles domestically, so Israel would have to strike Iran every six months or so to keep the arsenal sufficiently degraded.)

. . . The ambiguity of Trump’s current intentions also changes the Iranian calculus. The U.S. president is not threatening to attack Iran because of any imminent threat or in response to any act of Iranian aggression. His motives are various and unclear: he is disappointed by the negotiations’ progress, he feels compelled to defend the redline he established with his Truth Social post, he is desperate to avoid unflattering comparisons to Obama, and he believes he can undertake major operations with minimal consequences. From Iran’s perspective, both Israel and the United States appear to have concluded that they can strike without any direct provocation and when doing so serves domestic political needs; Iran even thinks the two countries will be tempted to strike frequently. As a result, Iranian officials feel they need to give Trump a bloody nose or they will perpetually be at risk.

. . . . Finally, Tehran could target global oil flows and international shipping, sending energy prices up and creating a serious political liability for Trump. Iran may well encourage the Houthis to resume attacking ships transiting the Red Sea. The country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has also been preparing to selectively seize adversary ships in the Strait of Hormuz. If conflict with the United States deepens, Iran may seriously consider targeting the Gulf Arab states’ energy infrastructure directly. In 2019, during Trump’s last “maximum pressure” campaign, Iran directly attacked Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil processing facility, the world’s largest. That assault appeared to be designed to damage easily replaceable components, thus limiting the consequences to the global energy supply. But if Tehran instead assaulted infrastructure that it knows would take longer to repair, the results would be much more damaging. The relationships between Iran and the Gulf Arab states are stronger now than they were then, but Tehran knows that Gulf leaders carry real influence with Trump and could appeal to him to back down if they came under pressure.

Iran may be weak. But it still has ways to inflict real pain on the United States—and much more incentive to try than it did before. If Trump wants to maintain the playbook that has worked for him, he will need a decisive and low-cost end to this saga. But powerful forces, both within him and external to him, have led him to dismiss the many off-ramps he already had. Iran hawks such as Senator Lindsey Graham are urging Trump not to “talk like Reagan and act like Obama,” a comparison Trump hates and fears. It may seem implausible that Trump, who promised his supporters an end to forever wars, would take out Iran’s leaders or commit ground troops to regime change and nation building. Yet he has come this far. He may well be pushed onward, regardless of the cost

The author, Nate Swanson, clearly doesn’t think the U.S. should attack Iran, noting that he’s not alone: “70 percent of Americans—and a majority of Republicans—oppose military intervention in Iran. Trump will struggle to justify any American deaths in a conflict of his own making.”  I have predicted that Trump will attack, but also that if he really wants regime change, he’ll have to put American boots on the ground, and, as Swanson notes, any American deaths will be hard to justify to the public. But if he just wants to stop the nuclear program, the U.S. and Israel will have to bomb the country over and over again.

*The WaPo surveyed 2,300 Americans for what they think the best and the worst things that Trump has done during his Presidency.

To figure out which Trump measures stand out to the public, a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll asked more than 2,300 Americans to name the best and worst things he has done since January 2025. People who support Trump — 39 percent of U.S. adults in the poll approved of his job performance — were asked to describe his best actions, while the 60 percent of Americans who disapproved were asked to name his worst actions.

Here’s what Trump’s supporters and opponents said. (I added screenshots; the article is archived here):

Immigration is by far the area for which Trump gets the most approval. And while he’s reduced it to nearly a trickle, he’s done it in a scattershot and often hamhanded way, with most of the people apprehended not having committed criminal acts besides illegal entry into the U.S.:

Note that the first two areas, immigration and the economy, are the very areas cited by his supporters as his big accomplishments:

I agree that the Trump presidency has been a disaster for the U.S., but one has to admit that some of his actions (Title IX changes, cutting back on DEI initiatives) have been salubrious.  Yet when I asked readers to name one or two things that Trump did that was good, I was excoriated, and got heated emails that some people had unsubscribed from the site. People can’t admit that any Presidential actions have been a net good, even if the intention wasn’t benevolent. So be it. It’s still good to “steelman” (I hate that verb) the other side, as it increases your own credibility when criticizing it.

*A math professor at Vanderbilt University was the focus of social-media opprobrium when he published a math problem that was really propaganda for Palestine and against Israel. (I believe I reported this before but can’t find the post). The problem is given in the tweet below:

Vanderbilt University – why is mathematics lecturer Tekin Karadǎg bringing his anti-Israel, antisemitic bias into his classroom?

This is unacceptable @VanderbiltU @VU_Chancellor pic.twitter.com/pGqC6fDveu

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) February 21, 2026

I actually emailed Vanderbilt’s Chancellor, Daniel Diermeier (the University of Chicago’s Provost not long ago), calling his attention to this guy, though not asking that he be penalized or fired. Now we find that even before I wrote Dr. Karadağ was under investigation.

Vanderbilt University has launched an inquiry into a mathematics lecturer whose classroom exercise about Palestinian territory drew criticism from the activist group StopAntisemitism.

Tekin Karadağ, a senior lecturer at the university’s department of mathematics, drew the ire of the antisemitism watchdog after it obtained a slide from one of his lectures that used a pro-Palestinian protest slogan and suggested that Israel was shrinking the Palestinian territory.

. . . Karadǎg, a Turkish national who received his PhD from Texas A&M University in 2021, included the question under “examples related to the popular issues” in a survey of calculus class, according to StopAntisemitism, which wrote in a post on X that Karadǎg was “bringing his anti-Israel, antisemitic bias into his classroom.”

In a statement shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Vanderbilt said that the content had been removed and that an inquiry had been launched into Karadağ.

“The university has received reports alleging a member of the faculty engaged in unprofessional conduct related to content shared during course instruction,” the school said. “The content in question has been removed, and a formal inquiry has been initiated consistent with relevant university policy.”

. . . .The inquiry was not the first time that Vanderbilt took swift action against the expression of pro-Palestinian sentiments on its campus.

In March 2024, the university, which has roughly 1,100 Jewish undergraduate students, was among the first universities to expel students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Last year, the school’s antisemitism “grade” from the Anti-Defamation League was bumped up from a “C” to an “A.”

Sadly, the University of Chicago never penalized anyone who violated University rules in a meaningful way  and the ADL gave us a D+ (see below and here; for other schools go here):

The administration has been loath to penalize anyone who, during protests, violates rules like deplatforming speakers, participating in prohibited sit-ins, or encamping.  Diermeier would have done a better job.

*New Zealand’s kakapo (Strigops habroptilus), the world’s only flightless parrot, is one of my favorite birds as it’s ineffably cute—and highly endangered. Moved to islands and isolated areas to stave off invasive predators, the kakapo is now making a comeback. And, as the AP reports in its “odd news,” this is promoted by a bumper crop of berries this year.

. . . the nocturnal and reclusive New Zealand native bird ’s fate is teetering toward survival after an unlikely conservation effort that has coaxed the population from 50 to more than 200 over three decades. This year, with a bumper crop of the strange parrot’s favorite berries prompting a rare enthusiasm for mating, those working to save the birds hope for a record number of chicks in February, which would move the kakapo closer to defying what was not long ago believed to be certain extinction.

Kakapo live on three tiny, remote islands off New Zealand’s southern coast and chances to see them in the wild are scarce. This breeding season has launched one of the birds to internet fame through a livestreamed video of her underground nest, where her chick hatched on Tuesday.

The kakapo is a majestic creature that can live for 60 to 80 years. But they’re undoubtedly weird to look at.

AD

Birds can weigh over 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds). They have owllike faces, whiskers, and mottled green, yellow and black plumage that mimics dappled light on the forest floor.

That’s where the flightless parrot lives, which has made its survival complicated.

“Kakapo also have a really strong scent,” said Deidre Vercoe, the operations manager for the Department of Conservation’s kakapo program. “They smell really musky and fruity — gorgeous smell.”

The pungent aroma was bad news for the parrots when humans arrived in New Zealand hundreds of years ago. The introduction of rats, dogs, cats and stoats, as well as hunting by people and destruction of native forest habitats, drove species of the country’s flourishing flightless birds — the kakapo among them — to near or complete extinction.

By 1974, no kakapo were known to exist. Conservationists kept looking, however, and in the late 1970s, a new population of the birds was discovered.

Reversing their fortunes hasn’t been simple.

It’s hard, with every bird sporting a small backpack that allows researchers to track it. And they remove eggs from females (replacing them with dummy eggs), putting them in incubators to ensure hatching before replacing them beneath the females.

Since January, admirers of the birds have had a rare glimpse into the process through a livestream showing the underground nest of 23-year-old kakapo Rakiura on the island of Whenua Hou, where she has laid three eggs, two of them fertile. So precarious is the species’ survival that the eggs were exchanged for fake replacements while the real ones were incubated indoors.

Go read about their weird behaviors (e.g., male “booming’) and do look at the livestream above. New Zealand is devoting considerable effort to saving this bird, and I think it’s worth it. There’s nothing even close to it in the parrot world. And thank Ceiling Cat for the bumper crop of berries!

“We don’t have the Eiffel Tower or the pyramids, but we do have kakapo and kiwi,” [Operations Manager Deidre] Vercoe said. “It’s a real New Zealand duty to save these birds.”

For sure.  And I can’t write about the kakapo without again showing this classic video clip of Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine studying the bird, with Carwardine becoming the subject of Sirocco’s romantic longings:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej has an armful o’ cats:

Hili: A penny for your thoughts.
Szaron: He’s probably thinking that at least during the night we’ll leave him in peace.

In Polish:

Hili: Grosz za twoje myśli.
Szaron: On pewnie myśli, że przynajmniej w nocy damy mu święty spokój.

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

From Give Me a Sign:

From Stacy:

From Joolz, a house known as the “Hitler House” because it looks like him, Joolz took the photo from Google Earth, but you can also see it, along with a bunch of human-faced houses, at this site. Some info:

Probably one of the most recognisable face houses in the world, this end-of-terrace property went viral in 2016, when someone spotted that its exterior looks like German dictator, Adolf Hitler. Its slanted roofline and prominent door lintel definitely bear a resemblance to Hitler’s side-parting and moustache, don’t you think?

Located in Swansea, Wales, the property hit the headlines again when it went on the rental market for just £85 ($108) per week. Rather unsurprisingly, the Hitler House has been dubbed one of the ugliest in the world.

From Masih, a tweet that I can’t embed (why??). Another woman protestor killed by Iranian cops (click to go to original):

From a reader, a blockheaded and misguided doctor who signed a petition he hadn’t read:

Today on Beyond Gender we interviewed Dr. Gordan Guyatt—the “godfather” of evidence-based medicine—who recently signed a statement calling paediatric gender medicine “medically necessary” despite knowing there is no good quality evidence that it is safe, beneficial and effective.… pic.twitter.com/G8SpVqDQPG

— Mia Hughes (@_CryMiaRiver) September 8, 2025

From Simon, a lovely video of snow in NYC:

Blizzard in New York City – Central Park, February 23, 2026 pic.twitter.com/mhI4pzanh4

— Noel Y. Calingasan • NYC (@nyclovesnyc) February 23, 2026

AOC trying to rebut the word salad she emitted when talking about foreign affairs last week. What’s hilarious about this is that her partner is snoring in the bed right next to her, and snoring LOUDLY. Sound up!

The dangers of drunk, late-night posting🤣🤣! @AOC – not too presidential. https://t.co/7nPRz79X6z

— Jim Walden (@jimfornyc) February 23, 2026

From Susan, a man guides a swan back to the water. This is really why I love “X”:

While on vacation, this man took the time to help guide this confused swan back to the water below.

The bird’s reaction when he is back on the water is pure joy. 🥹 pic.twitter.com/fjboJ2JBCE

— Blonde of War (JJ) (@BlondeOfWar) February 22, 2026

One from my feed; it’s totally bogus but I love it anyway:

pic.twitter.com/5CGQQEWRd4

— CATFLIX (@CatFlixer) February 24, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was eleven years old. https://t.co/5z98COYQ1M

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) February 26, 2026

. . . and two from Dr. Cobb.  Is the Hubble Space Telescope going to drop from the sky?

The inexorable power of entropy. It will get us all, in the end.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-02-25T06:37:05.444Z

Cat train!

Welcome to Monday, February 9, 2026, and National Bagel and Lox Day, one of the few ways I’ll eat fish. I don’t know who got the idea to put salmon on a bagel with cream cheese, but the idea was, as the kids say, “genius”.  Below is a a photo from the Wikipedia “Bagel and cream cheese” page. First, some history:

In American Jewish cuisine, cream cheese toppings (colloquially called “schmear“) of bagels have particular names. For example, a bagel covered with spread cream cheese is sometimes called a “whole schmear” bagel. A “slab” is a bagel topped with an unspread slab of cream cheese. A “lox and a schmear” is a bagel with cream cheese and lox or smoked salmon.  Tomato, red onion, capers and chopped hard-boiled egg are often added.  These terms are used at some delicatessens in New York City, particularly at Jewish delicatessens and older, more traditional delicatessens.

The lox and schmear likely originated in New York City around the time of the turn of the 20th century, when street vendors in the city sold salt-cured belly lox from pushcarts. A high amount of salt in the fish necessitated the addition of bread and cheese to offset the lox’s saltiness.It was reported by U.S. newspapers in the early 1940s that bagels and lox were sold by delicatessens in New York City as a “Sunday morning treat”, and in the early 1950s, bagels and cream cheese combination were very popular in the United States, having permeated American culture.

Jewish cuisine is pretty dire as ethnic cuisines go, but a bagel with lox and a schmear is surely its glory and apotheosis:

And the ducks will arrive in March—if we get any ducks this year.

It’s also Chocolate Day, National Poop Day (the day when the digested food from watching the Super Bowl is excreted), Oatmeal Monday, and Pizza Pie Day.

There’s a Google Doodle honoring ice skating in the Olympics (they change the sport every day or so). Click below to go to the AI site explaining figure skating:

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

Da Nooz:

*Sports: The Seattle Seahawks crushed the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 60 (or LX, as they say), with the final score 29-13.  I watched about five minutes and read the Italian novel The Leopard instead, as I wanted to finish it last night. It was superb and I recommend it very highly. All the news about the Super Bowl appears to be Bad Bunny’s halftime show, and I still don’t know who Bad Bunny is, clearly showing that I am ignorant of modern music.

*The NYT reveals that the Epstein files show a closer connection between Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein than we thought: Epstein’s companion and fellow predator Ghislaine Maxwell was closely connected with Clinton as he founded his Global Initiative, and Epstein may even have funded it (article archived here).

Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, played a substantial role in supporting the creation of the Clinton Global Initiative, one of President Bill Clinton’s signature post-White House endeavors, new documents released by the Justice Department show.

Ms. Maxwell took part in budget discussions related to the first Clinton Global Initiative conference; talked through challenges about it with both Clinton aides and Publicis Groupe, the company that produced the inaugural event; and arranged to wire $1 million to pay Publicis for its work on “the Clinton project,” according to emails in the massive cache of documents collected as part of the government’s investigations of Mr. Epstein.

The source of the money is unclear, including whether Mr. Epstein provided the funds. However, the emails show that he was aware of the payment.

“Ask him to tell you why i million now and where will it be going,” Mr. Epstein wrote to Ms. Maxwell a few days after she received the wiring instructions from Publicis.

Ms. Maxwell’s involvement in the launch of the Clinton Global Initiative took place in 2004, before Mr. Epstein’s 2006 indictment and 2008 guilty plea for solicitation of prostitution with a minor, and long before Ms. Maxwell, a daughter of the media baron Robert Maxwell, was sentenced in 2022 to two decades in prison for conspiring with Mr. Epstein to sexually exploit underage girls.

The emails support an assertion Ms. Maxwell made last year in an interview with the Justice Department that she played a key role in helping set up the global conference.

Mr. Clinton has said he stopped speaking with Mr. Epstein sometime before his 2006 indictment. In a statement, Angel Ureña, a spokesman for the Clintons, said the former president had “called for the full release of the Epstein files” and “has nothing to hide.”

Again, there’s no evidence so far that Clinton participated in any of Epstein’s illicit activities, and this was all before Epstein had been convicted for the first time. Nevertheless, there are allegations that Clinton visited Epstein’s private island, and the ex-President (and Hillary) also refused to testify before Congress, though I think they’ve since agreed to do so. What can I say?—news is scant and papers are touting associations like this that may well turn out to be nothing.

*Iran has sentenced its imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to an additional long stretch in prison—because she went on a hunger strike. It is, of course, Narges Mohammadi, imprisoned several times for criticizing the theocratic government, and awarded the Prize in  2023.

Iran has sentenced the Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi to more than seven more years in prison after she began a hunger strike, her supporters said Sunday, as Tehran cracks down on all dissent following nationwide protests and the deaths of thousands at the hands of security forces.

The new convictions against Mohammadi come as Iran tries to negotiate with the US over its nuclear programme to avert a military strike threatened by Donald Trump. Iran’s top diplomat said on Sunday that Tehran’s strength came from its ability to “say no to the great powers”, striking a maximalist position just after negotiations in Oman with the US.

Mohammadi’s supporters cited her lawyer, Mostafa Nili, who had spoken to her. Nili confirmed the sentence on X, saying it had been handed down on Saturday by a court in the city of Mashhad.

“She has been sentenced to six years in prison for ‘gathering and collusion’ and one and a half years for propaganda and two-year travel ban,” he wrote. Mohammadi had received another two years of internal exile to the city of Khosf, about 740km (460 miles) south-east of the capital, Tehran, the lawyer added.

Iran did not immediately acknowledge the sentence.

Supporters say Mohammadi has been on a hunger strike since 2 Februrary. She had been arrested in December at a memorial ceremony honouring Khosrow Alikordi, a 46-year-old Iranian lawyer and human rights advocate who had been based in Mashhad. Footage from the demonstration showed her shouting, demanding justice for Alikordi and others.

Supporters had warned for months before her December arrest that Mohammadi, 53, was at risk of being put back into prison after she received a furlough in December 2024 over medical concerns. While that was to be only three weeks, her time out of prison lengthened, possibly as activists and western powers pushed Iran to keep her free. She remained out even during the 12-day war in June between Iran and Israel.

Mohammadi has had multiple heart attacks, convulsions, and surgery for what might have been bone cancer. But she has a Nobel Prize, and is serving time as a political prisoner.  Iran should let her go, preferably overseas where she can get decent medical care. I don’t know if, were she released, she would want to stay in Iran, but she will likely die in prison if they don’t let her go soon.

*There’s a news hiatus because of the Superbowl, which gives me a chance to catch up on non-“news” article, like this one in The Dispatch, “Why I don’t regret majoring in the humanities.” by Sharla Moody  (archived here). I read it because I’ve recently been pondering the differences between sciences and humanities, and have defended the latter even though I am (or was) a scientist.

I majored in English, which baffled many of my friends and, I think, worried my parents. Sometimes, when I’m confronted by the salaries of first-year software engineers and the technical training that such salaries require, I worry I made a mistake.

But I remember, too, the first time I read Paradise Lost and felt that there might be more to the world than I knew. I had always considered myself a bookworm, but it wasn’t until I enrolled in my major that I learned that reading the right books, and reading them with other people, was a different experience altogether. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about the problem of evil, or wondered about the existence of fate, before reading Paradise Lost. But reading John Milton gave these questions force and meaning to a degree that nothing prior had. If angels made by God to live in heaven couldn’t resist temptation, what hope was there for me to try to live according to my own values? In other classes, I learned statistical modeling and facts about recent American foreign policy. But nothing gave my life more urgency than the questions that I found in literature. Studying the humanities, for me, was like replacing a too-dim lightbulb. Suddenly I became aware of what was, and always had been, around me. There is so much to the world that I didn’t (and still don’t) know, and before I began studying the humanities, I had no idea that there was so much I was ignorant of.

Much has been made recently about the decline in reading among young people, especially those enrolled at elite universities known for rigorous humanities programs. Professors fret over declining enrollments. While smaller liberal arts colleges shutter, state flagships cut programs, and elite schools reduce Ph.D. admissions and consolidate departments.

While some of this is the result of decades of academic overproduction, practical degree programs absorbing the time of students, and yes, the Internet-phones-AI tripartite, the crisis of the humanities also comes from a lack of clear understanding of what the humanities are for. So argues Humanistic Judgment: Ten Experiments in Reading, a new book published by Yale University Press. Edited by Benjamin Barasch, David Bromwich, and Bryan Garsten—the latter two are Yale professors—the essay collection examines the current state of the humanities.

In recent decades, Bromwich argues in his introduction to the book, the academy has become less focused on understanding the goal of humanistic study as the cultivation of judgment or the development of self-knowledge or even inquiry into the nature of reality and humanity and the world, but rather focused on understanding texts through the lenses of cultural and political debates.. . .

. . .Humanistic study in the Western tradition has long been taught in seminar-style dialogues, taking after Socrates. Scholars commonly refer to works as “in conversation with one another.” At the center of the liberal arts lies this precept that education cannot be a solitary project. In reading and conversing and debating, the student of the humanities is, ideally, always exposed to one who experiences a text, or a painting, or the world differently. Just as reading might expose one’s ignorance, so too might the classroom. But this humility, in turn, should always lead to a desire to understand reality more deeply. In this vein, Barasch, in his contribution to the essay collection, discusses the work of journalist James Agee, writing, “Agee’s radical humanism is a craving for reality, a desire to live in the world as it is, and as he is. In becoming real to himself he discovers again and again the separateness, and thus the reality, of others.”

The sciences, social sciences, and technical fields are noble, good pursuits. But we do a disservice to young people when we discourage them from pursuing the liberal arts and treat education as the mere acquisition of skills and knowledge. To withstand the challenges posed by scientism and politics and AI and declines in reading, the humanities need positive accounts of their value. They have an excellent one in Humanistic Judgment. 

I don’t like the “scientism” bit nor the implication that the humanities helps us “understand reality more deeply” unless that means “subjective reality” or “the fact that different people have different viewpoints.” But, as I said in my Quillette piece, the arts (I’m excluding quasi-scientific humanities fields like economics and sociology), the value of the humanities is to apprehend the diversity of viewpoints of others, and to expand our understanding of how other people view the world.

*I was pulling for Lindsay Vonn to get an Olympic medal in downhill skiing. It was less than two weeks ago that she tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee, a ligament that stabilizes the knee. You’d think that that would end her plans to ski, but this is one tough woman, and although she’s 41, she was bent not just on competing, but on winning. All that came to a grim end when she crashed painfully in yesterday’s competition. The latest report is that she broke her left leg and underwent surgery to stabilize it.

Lindsey Vonn’s pursuit of a downhill medal in her fifth Olympic Games ended violently Sunday morning here with a gruesome crash that left her screaming in pain and being airlifted from the mountain.

Vonn was the 13th of a scheduled 36 athletes to take to the course under baby blue skies at this stunning resort town in the Dolomites. She was just 10 days removed from a crash that tore the ACL in her left knee, and her comeback for these Olympics had already been made possible by a replacement of her right knee.

But with teammate Breezy Johnson, who won gold in the event, waiting at the bottom, Vonn — who was third fastest in Saturday’s final training run — barely got to evaluate herself against the competition before disaster struck. Thirteen seconds into a run that would have taken more than a minute and a half, she clipped the fourth gate with her right arm.

The contact sent Vonn spinning, with snow flying around her. Her head and shoulder violently drove into the surface of the course before she flipped again, her legs splayed.

Various broadcasts captured audio of Vonn crying, “Oh my God!” The crash occurred at noon local time, and it took just nine minutes for a helicopter to arrive to begin the process of flying her from the mountain.

“Certainly hoping she is okay after that terrible crash,” the public address announcer belted to a once buoyant crowd that had grown essentially silent.

. . . In a World Cup career that extends back more than two decades — and includes 84 victories and three Olympic medals, including gold in the downhill in 2010 — Vonn has been injured countless times. Never, though, in this kind of spotlight.

Her comeback bid that began last season — after the knee replacement allowed her to ski without pain for the first time she could remember — had been enormously successful. She won two World Cup downhill races this season, was the leader in the standings and had not finished out of the top three in five downhill starts. This comeback wasn’t a lark. This comeback was legit.

It’s sad, but you have to give her credit; she knew the danger and skied anyway.  And after a knee replacement some time ago!  She’ll be ok financially, and she had her medals.  I doubt she’ll be back at 45 for the next Olympics, but you have to give her kudos for courage and diligence.  Here’s a video of her accident (click on “Watch on YouTube” or here.

*The next movie I’d like to see is “The Testament of Ann Lee“, starring Amanda Seyfried in the title role. It’s about the woman who founded the Shakers in England and their migration to America; it’s also a musical. It’s been highly rated, and there’s buzz about Oscars for both the movie and Seyfried. David French gives his approving take in the NYT, characterizing it as “A movie about American that broke my heart” (the article is archived here).

I couldn’t stop blinking back tears, and I couldn’t understand why.

I’d just walked out of a movie called “The Testament of Ann Lee.” Lee was the founder of the American Shakers, a tiny utopian Christian sect that started in England in the mid-18th century. Lee brought a small band of followers to the United States shortly before the Revolution.

The Shakers were known for their ecstatic worship (hence the name), their egalitarianism and pacifism, their absolute commitment to celibacy and their furniture. Shakers committed themselves to excellence in all things, and their craftsmanship was impeccable.

I’m not exactly the target audience for a film about chair-making religious extremists. I’m more the kind of moviegoer who’s drawn to Will Ferrell or light sabers or dragons. Also orcs. I find great meaning in superhero movies. But my wife and son were going, and I wanted to hang out with them.

So I went, a bit skeptically, hoping that perhaps I might get to see a new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of “The Odyssey.” But then the movie started, and it broke my heart.

. . .In Ann Lee’s case, her radical faith, which mirrored Christ’s and the Apostle Paul’s commitment to singleness and celibacy, also manifested itself in radical love, both for people inside her community and outside it.

In essence, Lee and her followers turned to God and said — as so many believers have — I will do anything for you. And they heard God’s ancient answer to that declaration: Love thy neighbor. And your neighbor includes the enslaved Black man, and the white indentured servant who possessed so few rights, and the Native American who was slowly but surely being driven from his land.

Hours after the movie, I finally realized why I had tears in my eyes. In the final scene, you see Lee’s plain wooden casket sitting alone under a painting of a beautiful tree.

In that moment, you could clearly see the gap between American hope and American reality. And I was reminded once again of one of George Washington’s favorite Bible verses, Micah 4:4 — “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.” In his writings, Washington referred to it almost 50 times.

. . .And so it is with this nation we love. In 250 years, the already of American liberty has expanded. We are a better and more decent nation than the one Ann Lee encountered. But as we see state brutality and state violence spill out across our streets, we know that we are not yet fulfilling the promise of the declaration.

Ann Lee died in 1784. When she was reportedly reinterred in the 1820s, she was found to have a fractured skull. It’s 2026 now, and we still see beatings in the streets. There are still too many caskets under the tree of liberty. But the tree is still alive, and it continues to grow. May we all sit securely in its shade one day.

It looks like the movie broke his heart because it reminded him of Trump’s America. That is a stretch at best. I will see the movie, but won’t go to it looking for analogies between 18th century America and today’s America. I will go to learn a bit about history (the Shakers were celibate, so could grow only through converts) and to admire the artistry.

Here’s the official trailer:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the two downstairs cats affirm their pledge:

Szaron: Between us, veganism is not my option.
Hili: Not mine either.

In Polish:

Szaron: Między nami mówiąc, weganizm nie jest moją opcją.
Hili: Moją też nie.

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

From Jesus of the Day:

From The Language Nerds:

From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

From Masih; the mothers of murdered protestors console each other:

A mother of a sports champion killed in the recent uprising stood at the grave of another grieving mother and held her hands, saying: “Your child is not alone.”

Immediately, other mothers began shouting their children’s names, names the Islamic Republic wants erased.

This is… pic.twitter.com/H8gh2qOLD1

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) February 8, 2026

From Bryan, a long (8-min) clip of Peter Boghossian practicing “street epistemology”.  Peter is damned by progressives, but as you see he’s really good at practicing the Socratic method on ignorant youth (and oy! is this youth ignorant!):

@peterboghossian encountered one of the most brainwashed students ever captured on camera. This perfectly illustrates the problem at the center of all of this pic.twitter.com/nr9V5bCyVt

— Warren Smith (@WTSmith17) February 7, 2026

From Luana: apparently antivaxers are not limited to the U.S., and these data are genuine.

Now do Canada. pic.twitter.com/faUPLEOUg5

— Daniel Boshears (@BoshearsDaniel) February 7, 2026

From Simon; Jock the Chartwell cat:

Well done Winston Churchill pic.twitter.com/AeDsYVh2GM

— dominic dyer (@domdyer70) February 4, 2026

From Gerald Steinberg, President of NGO Monitor. I stopped donations to MSF years ago.

Here’s me in the famous @MSF Doctors Without Borders T shirt, back in 2010

I proudly worked for them

They haven’t posted a single word on the disappearance of Iranian doctors who helped injured protestors

I will never work with them or donate to them again pic.twitter.com/bcpIHCwhtW

— Neil Stone (@DrNeilStone) February 7, 2026

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish boy was gassed to death within an hour or two after arriving at Auschwitz. He was thirteen years old. https://t.co/RqVv2CTRJj

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) February 9, 2026

Two from Dr. Cobb. First: Earth and Moon:

This is Earth and the Moon, photographed by a spacecraft in Mars orbit.

— Paul Byrne (@theplanetaryguy.bsky.social) 2026-02-08T02:21:22.677Z

From Matthew, a hilarious Instagram video (sound up) featuring a British t.v. presenter pretending to ask for kitschy items in a British store. Click on screenshot to watch, or go here to see the original. Ms. Welby cracks herself up.

I LOVE the Edwardian fox with a ruff and human hands who plays the cello:

Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, February 8, 2026, and National Pork Rind Appreciation Day. And today the Big Game kicks off at 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time, because of course it’s Super Bowl Sunday, with the Seattle Seahawks playing the New England Patriots And Bad Bunny, whoever he is, will perform at halftime.

It’s also Boy Scouts Day (scouting came to America on this day in 1909), National Molasses Bar Day, National Potato Lover’s Day (again they misplaced the apostrophe, implying that we’re celebrating only one person who loves potatoes), Opera Day, and Super Chicken Wing Day (thighs have more meat).

In honor of Opera Day, here’s another famous aria: “Vissi d’arte” from Puccini’s Tosca. This is a lovely rendition by Kiri Te Kanawa:

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

Da Nooz:

*The latest hamhanded move by the Trump administration is posting a political video, set to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, showing Trump as a triumphant lion and his opponents as other animals, with the worst part being the depiction of the Obamas as apes (see below). The video was deleted after about 12 hours, and Trump won’t apologize for it.

Here’s the full video, though I thought the Obama bit came at the end:

WATCH: The full Barack Obama “monkey video” portrays numerous elected officials, Republicans and Democrats, as Lion King-like characters, with Trump as a lion and king of the jungle.
Everyone’s an animal. Trump is the lion KING of the jungle
Dems are various animals. Obamas… pic.twitter.com/QEnEphdrHX

— Ape𝕏 (@CubanOnlyTrump) February 6, 2026

*After struggling for something to say about the voluminous Epstein files, Andrew Sullivan wrote a column called, “Notes on Epstein,” with the subtitle, “On an American elite that’s self-dealing, self-obsessed, and long past good and evil.” Well, that a bit hyperbolic, but Epstein did deal largely with the elite. Some quotes:

*The U.S. Olympic team was booed as it marched in Milan’s opening ceremonies, as was VP Vance as he appeared on the big screen.

In a gleefully kitschy Opening Ceremony that featured ancient Romans, dancing espresso pots and a number by Mariah Carey, Italy threw open its arms to welcome the entire world to the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.

Well, nearly the entire world.

In an unmistakable sign of Europe’s rapidly dimming view on America, the U.S. delegation entered the San Siro stadium here on Friday night to a chorus of boos and disapproving whistles from the international crowd of more than 65,000. The jeering only intensified when Vice President JD Vance appeared on the big screen during Team USA’s arrival.

The only other team to receive similar treatment was Israel.

Olympic organizers had braced for the possibility of anti-American sentiment inside the stadium. Small protests had already cropped up on the streets of Milan against the planned presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the city. Asked before the Games on how the Americans might be received, IOC president Kirsty Coventry said she hoped that the occasion would be “seen by everyone as an opportunity to be respectful.”

Even the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee recognized that its athletes might not be the most popular guests at the party—and made sure to warn them about the potentially frosty reception.

“We have done a ton of Games-readiness preparation with the athletes to ensure they feel comfortable and are not walking into an environment that is uncertain,” USOPC chief executive Sarah Hirshland said.

It’s okay for Europeans to boo Vance, as he’s part of a disastrous Administration, but it’s not fair to boo the American team. It not only violates the spirit of comity that’s supposed to pervade the Olympics, but it’s bigotry, pure and simple. At least half of Americans—and probably most of the American athletes—can’t stand Trump, and it’s mean to boo them. When I travel, I am tired of explaining, after I say I’m American, that I detest the Administration. Do Brits apologize for having a bad Prime Minister?

Europeans should lay off the U.S. athletes, who, with the exception of a faux anti-Trump urination in the snow (no, men can’t write like that with pee), haven’t made political gestures.

This is from American skier Gus Kenworthy’s Instagram page.   (No, it’s impossible to write in the snow like this when urinating.  Every guy has tried such writing, and we know this is bogus). Ten to one he used a squeeze bottle with yellow liquid and pretended that he peed:

*The first set of talks between Iran and the U.S. are over, and they’ve pretty much failed, with both sides standing firm on their initial positions.

Tehran stuck to its refusal to end enrichment of nuclear fuel in talks Friday between senior U.S. and Iranian officials, but both sides signaled a willingness to keep working toward a diplomatic solution that could head off an American strike.

According to Iranian state media, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told his U.S. counterparts that Tehran wouldn’t agree to end enrichment or move it offshore, rejecting a core U.S. requirement.

Araghchi, however, said it had been a good start, and he and Oman’s foreign minister said the parties aimed to meet again.

“We likewise had very good talks on Iran,” President Trump told reporters Friday. “Iran looks like it wants to make a deal very badly.”

The two sides didn’t meet face to face but instead held alternating discussions with Omani diplomats. Neither moved much from their initial position, people familiar with the discussions said.

Regional officials and many analysts had low expectations going into the talks, given Iran’s unwillingness to end nuclear enrichment and the U.S. insistence on including Iran’s ballistic missile program and support for regional militias in the negotiations.

Trump has signaled that he wants regime change in Iran, but he doesn’t seem to realize that he won’t get that through diplomacy, for Iran will never agree to give up its desire to make nuclear weapons. Trump must either decide to attack or he’ll decide to let the Iranian regime keep killing protestors. That is the choice he has.

*UPI’s “Odd News” reports that the world’s longest wild snake has been found in Indonesia:

 Guinness World Records confirmed a massive reticulated python [Malayopython reticulatus] discovered in the Maros region of Indonesia is officially the longest wild snake to be formally measured.

The record-keeping organization said it reviewed evidence confirming the female snake measures 23 feet and 8 inches in length.

The snake is currently in the care of conservationist Budi Purwanto, licensed snake handler Diaz Nugraha and natural history photographer Radu Frentiu.

Nugraha and Frentiu said they went out in search of the impressively long snake after hearing of rumored sightings. They dubbed the serpent Ibu Baron, or “The Baroness.”

Reticulated pythons typically grow to an adult length ranging from 9 feet, 10 inches to 19 feet, 2 inches.

Here’s a video and that’s one gynormous snake! I’m glad they didn’t kill it, but why is it so still in the video?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is spooked, but Szaron calms her down:

Hili: Either I’m imagining things, or something’s there.
Szaron: We live in a world of illusions.

In Polish:

Hili: Albo mi się zdaje, albo coś tam jest.
Szaron: Żyjemy w świecie złudzeń.

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

From Cats that Have Had Enough of Your Shit; a thieving moggy:

From Now That’s Wild:

From The Language Nerda:

Merilee sent a hilarious video from Carcass Acres. The woman is a hoot!  (You may have to go to the original site to see it.) The animal names are great: Chicken Elizabeth Nugget and Debbi from Accounting!

From Masih, who rebukes Mehdi Hasan and Zohran Mamdani while showing the photo of an Iranian protestor who was flogged by the authorities. I can’t embed this, so click on the screenshot to see the whole tweet:

From Larry: a circus cat:

Happy #Caturdaypic.twitter.com/sqeup4q24u

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) February 7, 2026

Speaking of Mamdani, here he is touting Islam (and adding “peace be upon him in Arabic after mentioning Muhamad); tweet provided by Luana:

“and I consider my own faith, islam, a religion built upon a narrative of migration” that’s a funny word for 1400 years of invasion, rape, and conquest at the gates of europe https://t.co/G9bgafotLJ

— Mike Solana (@micsolana) February 6, 2026

From Malcolm, lovely life goals:

Life goals pic.twitter.com/E16HNBQXDI

— We don’t deserve cats 😺 (@catsareblessing) January 26, 2026

One from my feed; are we sure the pup isn’t just scratching his belly?

Puppy thinks he’s a turtle. ❤️😂 pic.twitter.com/k0ruDSMuh0

— The Figen (@TheFigen_) February 7, 2026

I haven’t checked this, but it may well be true:

A flood of Iranian regime propaganda has hit @Wikipedia. More than 10,000 images and videos are being mass uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, the site’s media repository.

Almost every piece of content is watermarked by state outlets—including Khamenei’s official website and… https://t.co/Hg6HdHZSuD

— Ashley Rindsberg (@AshleyRindsberg) January 29, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl died in the gas chamber as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was five years old. Had she lived, she’d be 89 today. https://t.co/a9JnSOv3GA

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) February 8, 2026

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, a pheasant who thinks he’s stuck but he isn’t:

He’s been stuck like this for ages. My dude. Just reverse. Truly, achingly vacant.

— Dr Laura Eastlake (@victorianmasc.bsky.social) 2026-02-06T16:03:31.143Z

Matthew calls this “fabulous and apt”:

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

— Omg. WTF is Happening? (@lalahaenzy.com) 2026-02-05T11:50:02.422Z

Welcome to the last Monday in January; it’s January 26, 2026, and Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day. Who among us has not popped the stuff?  Here’s a 3½-minute video about how they make the stuff:

Here’s the weather forecast from Chicago with temperatures (high and low for each day) given in degrees Fahrenheit. My nose is frozen. We will not be above freezing for at least a week, and more snow is on tap.

It’s also National Green Juice Day, National Peanut Brittle Day, and, for masochists, Dental Drill Appreciation Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

NOTE: I will remind people what I wrote about ICE yesterday, since I am getting anonymous emails from trolls accusing me of being in favor of Trump and white supremacy. After reporting the NYT’s analysis of the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, I said this.

The upshot: all signs so far are that Pretti was killed by ICE agents, and though he had a weapon, he was not brandishing it in a way that would justify killing him (there are police protocols on how to deal with armed people, and these were violated). This has all the signs of a murder, with the administration blaming the victim.  I do not trust the government accounts, nor do I trust DHS to conduct an objective investigation of the killing.  I think it’s time for ICE to get out of Minnesota, as what they are doing is not only ripping the country apart, but seems palpably illegal, like the armed response of a dictatorial regime.  I do not know how immigrants with criminal records should be apprehended, as local law enforcement won’t help ICE, but right now it’s more important to stop the violence than continue ICE operations.  The treatment of Pretti by federal agents is both thuggish and incomprehensible.  He seems to have been a good guy, doing a valuable job, and his death is a tragedy.

The government is pushing back on views like mine, and there is no sign that ICE will leave, so more trouble is in store. If what I wrote above is not enough for you, there are other websites completely devoted now to ICE, some even blaming their brutality on Israel.

*The NYT has a long multimedia editorial-board piece called “The great American cash grab,” and the grabber is Trump, who apparently has enriched himself by more than a billion dollars during his Presidency (article archived here).  Bolding is the paper’s

President Trump has never been a man to ask what he can do for his country. In his second term, as in his first, he is instead testing the limits of what his country can do for him.

He has poured his energy and creativity into the exploitation of the presidency — into finding out just how much money people, corporations and other nations are willing to put into his pockets in hopes of bending the power of the government to the service of their interests.

A review by the editorial board relying on analyses from news organizations shows that Mr. Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion. We know this number to be an underestimate because some of his profits remain hidden from public view. And they continue to grow.

A hotel in Oman. An office tower in western India. A golf course on the outskirts of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. These are a few of the more than 20 overseas projects the Trump Organization is pursuing, often requiring cooperation with foreign governments. These deals have made millions for the Trumps, according to Reuters. And the administration has sometimes treated those same governments favorably. One example: The administration agreed to lower its threatened tariffs on Vietnam about a month after a Trump Organization project broke ground on a $1.5 billion golf complex outside of Hanoi. Vietnamese officials ignored their own laws to fast-track the project.

Amazon paid far more for the rights to “Melania” than the next highest bidder — and far more than the company has previously paid for similar projects, according to The Wall Street Journal. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chairman and one of the world’s richest people, has many reasons to curry favor with the administration, including antitrust regulation, Amazon’s defense contracts and his space company’s federal contracts.

Mr. Trump’s sale of crypto has been by far his biggest moneymaker, according to Reuters. People who hope to influence federal policy, including foreigners, can buy his family’s coins, effectively transferring money to the Trumps, and the deals are often secret. One that has become public: A United Arab Emirates-backed investment firm announced plans last year to deposit $2 billion into a Trump firm — two weeks before the president gave the country access to advanced chips.

Nowadays President often get rich in office, simply by putting their assets in a blind trust, but many, like the Obamas, continue to accumulate millions, which I’m not that keen on.

When President Harry Truman left office in 1953, he did not even own a car. He and his wife returned to Missouri by train and lived for a time on his Army pension. He refused to take any job that he regarded as commercializing his public service, explaining, “I knew that they were not interested in hiring Harry Truman, the person, but what they wanted to hire was the former president of the United States.” Mr. Trump has said that when he leaves office, he plans to take with him a $400 million Boeing 747 that was a gift from Qatar, and to display it at his presidential library.

 

This tally focuses on Mr. Trump’s documented gains. The $1.4 billion figure is a minimum, not a full accounting. It is probable that Mr. Trump has collected several hundred million dollars in additional profits from his cryptocurrency ventures over the past year. The Trumps have acknowledged as much. When The Financial Times asked Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, about its estimated value of the family’s crypto gains, he said they were probably even larger than the news organization thought.

Total enrichment of Trump, according to the paper: $1,408,500,000. That’s about 17,000 times the median American household income.  And we’ve got three more years to go. The lesson? We already know it: when it comes to policy decisions, cui bono?

It is impossible to know how often Mr. Trump makes official decisions, in part or entirely, because he wants to be richer. And that is precisely the problem. A culture of corruption is pernicious because it is not just a deviation from government in the public interest; it is also the destruction of the state’s democratic legitimacy. It undermines the necessary faith that the representatives of the people are acting in the interest of the people.

*In an article called “How Iran crushed a citizen uprising with lethal force,” the NYT pronounces the protests in Iran dead in the water (excuse the metaphor).

On Friday, Jan. 9, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered the Supreme National Security Council, the body tasked with safeguarding the country, to crush the protests by any means necessary, according to two Iranian officials briefed on the ayatollah’s directive. Security forces were deployed with orders to shoot to kill and to show no mercy, the officials said. The death toll surged.

Despite Iran’s shutting down the internet and disrupting phone service, some Iranians managed to evade restrictions to share witness accounts and hundreds of videos, many of which The New York Times was able to collect and authenticate.

The Times has verified videos of security forces’ opening fire on protesters in at least 19 cities and in at least six different neighborhoods in Tehran in early January.

These videos show the breadth and ferocity of the regime’s crackdown. So do the testimonies of doctors and a nurse working in hospitals in Iran, and photographs shared by a witness and authenticated by The Times of hundreds of victims taken to a Tehran morgue.

The Times also interviewed two dozen Iranians in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Rasht and Ahvaz who had attended protests, as well as relatives of people killed. Protesters, residents and medical staff interviewed for this article all asked that their names or full names not be published for fear of retribution.

By Monday, Jan. 12, the protests had largely been crushed.

As more information emerges from Iran, the death toll has hit at least 5,200 people, including 56 children, according to the Washington-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based group that also monitors the situation in Iran, has confirmed at least 3,400 killed. Both organizations say that the numbers could prove two or three times as large as verification continues.

Iran’s National Security Council said in a statement that 3,117 people had been killed, among them 427 of its security forces. Officials, including Ayatollah Khamenei, have blamed terrorist cells tied to Israel and the United States for the uprising and killings.

“This is not merely a violent protest crackdown,” said Raha Bahreini, a lawyer and an Iran researcher at Amnest

. . .Across the country, hospitals swamped by thousands of injured protesters were unprepared for the scale of the gunshot wounds they were seeing, according to interviews and text messages with eight doctors and one nurse in Iran.

Gun violence is rare in Iran, and private citizens are not allowed to own weapons. The doctors and the nurse sharing their experiences in Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan and Zanjan described scenes of chaos: medical staff frantically trying to save lives, white uniforms drenched in blood. They said patients lay on benches and chairs, and even on bare floors, in the overcrowded emergency rooms.

They said hospitals were short of blood and searching for trauma and vascular surgeons. The internet shutdown prevented medical staff from checking patients’ names and medical histories, they said.

It’s surprising to me that Americans aren’t protesting this kind of violence, one committed by a theocracy against its own people, who are pining for freedom. The people are almost completely unarmed but brave enough to take to the streets—until that became a lethal exercise.  The next item deals with the possibility that the U.S. and Israel may cooperate in a second attack on the country, this time not to impede its production of weapons-grad uranium (though that will surely be one goal) but to oust the regime. There are, of course, problems with that; see the next item.

*Despite Iran being quieter than a few weeks ago, there are signs that the U.S. and Israel may mount a second attack on the country. The Times of Israel reports:

Commander of the United States Central Command Adm. Brad Cooper was in Israel on Saturday for meetings with senior officials, The Times of Israel learned, as US President Donald Trump indicated he was maintaining the possibility of strikes on Iran amid its crackdown on protests.

Cooper met with IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir at the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv. Intelligence Directorate chief Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder and Operations Directorate chief Maj. Gen. Itzik Cohen also participated in a meeting with the military chiefs.

In a statement Sunday, the IDF said Saturday’s meetings between Cooper, Zamir and other top Israeli military officers enhanced the “close strategic relationship” between the sides.

The military did not specify the topics of the meetings, but Cooper’s visit to Israel comes amid heightened tensions with Iran and a reported disagreement between Israeli and US officials over the next steps in the Gaza ceasefire. The IDF has been also been on high alert and has carried out preparations in recent weeks after Trump threatened military action against Iran.

Cooper and Zamir first held an “extended one-on-one meeting,” which was followed by one with other Israeli generals, the IDF said.

“This engagement serves as another expression of the relationship between the commanders and constitutes an additional step in enhancing the close strategic relationship between the IDF and US military and in strengthening defense cooperation between the two nations,” the statement said.

US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were also in Israel on Saturday to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, mainly to discuss Gaza, two people briefed on the matter told Reuters.

Trump has threatened military action if Iran carried out mass executions of prisoners or killed peaceful demonstrators, but he recently backed away, claiming Iran halted the hangings of 800 detained protesters. He has not elaborated on the source of the claim, which Iran’s top prosecutor called “completely false.”

However, Trump appears to be keeping his options open, saying Thursday aboard Air Force One that his threatened military action would make last year’s US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites “look like peanuts” if the government proceeded with planned executions of some protesters.

He added that the United States had an “armada” heading toward Iran, including an aircraft carrier group and its thousands of troops, but hoped he would not have to use it.

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and three accompanying destroyers left the South China Sea and began heading west earlier this week, a US Navy official said. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military movements, said Friday that the Lincoln strike group was in the Indian Ocean.

Iran, however, is making threats and presumably preparations for a strike:

The commander of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which was key in putting down recent nationwide protests in a crackdown that left thousands dead, warned that his force is “more ready than ever, finger on the trigger,” as U.S. warships headed toward the Middle East.

Nournews, a news outlet close to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, reported on its Telegram channel that the commander, Gen. Mohammad Pakpour, warned the United States and Israel “to avoid any miscalculation.”

I go back and forth on the wisdom of strikes on Iran. On one hand, they could finally topple the regime, which is what the people of Iran want. On the other hand we have to think about the U.S. interfering in internal affairs of another country (Iran, though, is posing a threat to both Israel and U.S. forces), and there’s the not insignificant problem of who will run the country if the theocracy is brought down.

*Rock climber Alex Honnold, famous for free-soloing the face of El Capitan in Yellowstone National Park, successfully completed his climb of Taiwan’s 1,667-foot-tall skyscraper Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building from 2004 to 2009. The climb was streamed live by Netflix with a 10-second delay, presumably because he was free-soloing the building, and they could cut the feed if he feel.

From Climbing Magazine:

After wet weather in Taipei City necessitated a rain check, Alex Honnold began climbing around 24 hours after originally scheduled. A possible rain delay had long been part of the event planning process. Wet conditions would considerably raise the difficulty level of the climb, creating unnecessary risk that Honnold wasn’t willing to take.

After clear skies allowed the glass and steel surfaces of the 1,667ft skyscraper to dry out, Honnold officially began his climb at 6:12 p.m, Mountain Time on January 24.

The climb took Honnold approximately one hour, 31 minutes, and 34 seconds. His own crew, including Brett Lowell, the cinematographer behind The Dawn Wall and The Alpinist, filmed his ascent for live broadcast. More friends, climbing partners, and family also joined Honnold in Taiwan for the event. Pro climber Emily Harrington, who recently starred in the documentary Girl Climber, provided live commentary during the Netflix special.

When Honnold and Netflix first claimed that Taipei 101 would represent the “biggest urban free solo ever,” we initially questioned the veracity of this claim. The night before the event, Climbing sent Alain Robert, the unequivocal GOAT of urban free soloing, a few questions over WhatsApp to verify Honnold’s claim. According to Robert himself, the highest building that he has ever scaled without a rope was one of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which stand 1,483ft (452m) tall. Robert reached the top of the Petronas in 2009. Taipei 101 rises 1,667 feet (508m). That’s 184 feet (56m) taller than the Petronas Towers. No other climber has free soloed a taller skyscraper, according to our research.

The payday from ABC 10:

“If you put it in the context of mainstream sports, it’s an embarrassingly small amount,” he told the New York Times before the climb. “You know, Major League Baseball players get like $170 million contracts.”

Though the number isn’t in the millions, and was less than his agent aimed for, Honnold said he would have done it for free.

“If there was no TV program and the building gave me permission to go do the thing, I would do the thing because I know I can, and it’d be amazing,” he said. “Just sitting by yourself on the very top of the spire is insane.”

Alex Honnold taking a selfie at the top of Taipei 101 after free soloing the skyscraper.

UNBELIEVABLE!!! #SkyscraperLIVE pic.twitter.com/czuxYkoVpY

— Netflix Sports (@netflixsports) January 25, 2026

*Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania has written a new memoir dealing with how he was vetted as the VP candidate by Kamala Harris’s team. It is not pretty. It also suggests that Shapiro may be a Democratic candidate for President in the 2028 election.

Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a prominent Democrat who was a top contender to serve as former Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024, offered his most detailed accounting to date of the vice-presidential search process in his new memoir, which was obtained by The New York Times.

In short: He suggests that it was far uglier than is commonly known.

In Mr. Shapiro’s book, “Where We Keep the Light,” the governor is measured in describing his interactions with Ms. Harris herself. But Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, details a contentious vetting process in which Ms. Harris’s team focused intensely on his views on Israel — so much so that at one point, he wrote, he was asked if he had ever been an agent of the Israeli government.

“Had I been a double agent for Israel?” wrote Mr. Shapiro, describing his incredulous response to a last-minute question from the vetting team. He responded that the question was offensive, he wrote, and was told, “Well, we have to ask.”

“Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?” the questioner, Dana Remus, a former White House counsel, continued, according to Mr. Shapiro, who recounted, “If they were undercover, I responded, how the hell would I know?”

Mr. Shapiro wrote that he understood that Ms. Remus was “just doing her job.” But the fact that he was asked such questions, he wrote, “said a lot about some of the people around the VP.”

Ms. Remus and a representative for Ms. Harris did not respond to requests for comment on Sunday night.

The vetting process unfolded as emotional debates over the Gaza war convulsed the Democratic Party, threatening to tear it apart.

Mr. Shapiro, an outspoken critic of what he saw as antisemitism on college campuses amid the Israel-Hamas war, wrote that he faced skepticism of that record during vetting. When Ms. Harris asked if he “would be willing to apologize for the statements I had made, particularly over what I saw happening at the University of Pennsylvania,” he replied that he would not, he wrote.

“I believe in free speech, and I’ll defend it with all I’ve got,” he wrote. “Most of the speech on campus, even that which I disagreed with, was peaceful and constitutionally protected. But some wasn’t peaceful.”

It’s telling that Shapiro, a Jew, was dumped for Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota who has now said he won’t run again. It’s worth nothing that Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker, who has been an excellent executive for my state, is also Jewish, and has been touted as a Presidential candidate. Would Americans vote for a Jewish President? According to a Gallup poll from 2019, they would, but atheists, socialists, and Muslims would have a hard time (see below).  Of course how people answer polls and how they really feel may not be the same:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are hanging out, and guess what they’re thinking of. Any excuse for noms!

Hili: I feel like history is rushing forward so fast it doesn’t even notice red lights.
Szaron: Maybe so, but I have no idea which way it’s rushing.
Hili: Then maybe we should get something to eat?

In Polish:

Hili: Mam wrażenie, że historia pędzi tak szybko, że nie zwraca uwagi nawet na czerwone światła.
Szaron: Być może, ale ja nie wiem, w którym kierunku ona tak pędzi.
Hili: To może byśmy coś zjedli?

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

From The Language Nerds, an incorrect correction:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih, another Iranian woman killed for protesting.

Hello, Prime Minister @GiorgiaMeloni,
Meet Raha, a brave Iranian woman killed for the “crime” of protesting.
She loved life. She studied the Italian language.
She was murdered by the IRGC a terrorist force.
Yet Italy has still not designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization.… pic.twitter.com/Udtxpyws1J

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 25, 2026

The Number Ten cat decked out for Burns night:

Wishing a happy Burns Night to all my friends around the world celebrating the immortal bard #BurnsNight pic.twitter.com/Wn7YlRbfz2

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) January 25, 2026

From Emma, who calls herself a “niche internet micro celebrity”. I don’t agree with her about cold tortillas.

Tortilla. https://t.co/AlDA7zmVYZ

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) January 24, 2026

Two from my feed. First, a heartwarmer:

The dogs at the shelter are choosing their new owners. It’s a very emotional moment. 🤗🥰

pic.twitter.com/Z9uOYPPsJp

— Tansu Yegen (@TansuYegen) January 25, 2026

Clearly real! The translation: “All these AI cat videos are really getting on my nerves. Thank God this one here is real.”:

Diese ganzen KI-Katzen-Videos gehen mir total auf die Nerven.

Gott sei Dank ist das hier echt: pic.twitter.com/VOpCcRlRSF

— Dr. David Lütke (@DrLuetke) January 25, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was ten years old. https://t.co/LILm2hmOFF

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) January 26, 2026

Two from Matthew. First, his cat Harry, a “break from the horror”:

A break from the horror.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-01-25T09:30:16.565Z

A mutant pink grasshopper. I wonder if a predator will get it:

Ever seen a pink grasshopper? A genetic mutation called erythrism (overproduction of red pigment) leaves some individuals looking pretty in pink! Though these rare insects are beautiful, their vivid coloring makes hiding from predators more difficult.Photo: Back from the Brink, CC BY-NC 2.0, flickr

— American Museum of Natural History (@amnh.org) 2026-01-21T15:08:27.895Z

Welcome to Monday January 19, 2025, and a holiday in America: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (the third Monday in January, which guarantees everyone gets the day off). As always, I’ll put up his famous “I have a dream” speech given in Washington, D.C. Sadly, King’s sentiments are is increasingly irrelevant (see 3:12). If you’ve heard it before, listen again to these seven minutes of rhetoric heard on August 28, 1963. The film is a bit out of synch with the sound.

Google has a special Doodle for Martin Luther King Day.  Click on it below to see where it goes:

It’s also National Popcorn Day, Blue Monday, and Elementary School Teacher Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 19 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Europe is pushing back on Trump’s insane plan to take over Greenland, just exacerbated by his raising tariffs on some European countries.

In a single post on Saturday night, President Trump upended months of progress on trade negotiations with an ultimatum that puts Europe on a crash course with the United States — long its closest ally and suddenly one of its biggest threats.

In the Truth Social post, Mr. Trump demanded a deal to buy Greenland, saying that otherwise he would slap tariffs on a group of European nations, first 10 percent in February, then 25 percent in June.

It appeared to leave little room for Europe to maneuver or negotiate in a harsh and combative era of geopolitics. It also left Europe with few options to counter Mr. Trump without repercussions.

European leaders are loath to accept the forced takeover of an autonomous territory that is controlled by Denmark, a member of both NATO and the European Union.

Officials and outside analysts increasingly argue that Europe will need to respond to Mr. Trump with force — namely by hitting back on trade. But doing so could come at a heavy cost to both the bloc’s economy and its security, since Europe remains heavily reliant on the United States for support through NATO and in Russia’s war with Ukraine.

“We either fight a trade war, or we’re in a real war,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research institute in Brussels.

Europeans have spent more than a year insisting that Greenland is not for sale and have constantly repeated that the fate of the massive northern island must be decided by its people and by Denmark. Last week, a group of European nations sent personnel to Greenland for military exercises — a show of solidarity that may have triggered Mr. Trump, since the same nations are the ones to be slapped with tariffs.

. . . .In that sense, the exercises were part of an ongoing effort to placate Mr. Trump. For weeks, officials across Europe had dismissed Mr. Trump’s threats to take Greenland, even by military force, as unlikely. Many saw them more as negotiating tactics and hoped that they could satisfy the American president with a willingness to beef up defense and spending on Greenland.

But Mr. Trump’s fixation on owning the island and his escalating rhetoric is crushing European hopes that appeasement and dialogue will work. Scott Bessent, the American Treasury secretary, doubled down on that message in a Sunday morning interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

American ownership of Greenland would be “best for Greenland, best for Europe and best for the United States,” Mr. Bessent said, suggesting that would be the case even if Greenland were taken by military force.

I can’t believe this. We do not need to own Greenland and I apologize to my European friends for Trump’s derangement: a fixation that seems to have suddenly emerged from of nowhere. We could have half a dozen military bases there, and that should satisfy any rational person.  The danger of Russia and China taking over the country is nil, nor are their ships swarming around Greenland.  With a couple more bases on Greenland and the presence American submarines, already in the area, that should be enough. We’re already going to be in a trade war, but our so-called President of Peace is going down a road that could get the U.S. involved in a war with NATO.  I hope that Republicans can join with Democrats to stop this mishigass.

*The tweet below was scary, but I was a bit loath to believe it. It turns out it’s true, and a sad testimony to a failure of immigrants to live according to the standards of the European country they came to: in this case the Netherlands.

125 migrants were put in housing with 125 Dutch students, in hopes of integrating them faster. Instead Dutch kids got raped and beaten.

One girl, said: “He wanted to learn Dutch, to get an education. I wanted to help him.”

He raped her the first chance he got.

This is how… pic.twitter.com/uE0HUSQZhv

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) January 17, 2026

First, a tweet in Dutch with the translation:

The municipality of Amsterdam saw the Stek Oost housing project as the dream solution to the housing shortage: refugees and young people together under one roof. But it goes wrong: stabbings, confused behavior, and sexual violence. Zembla reconstructs how the housing experiment could derail so badly.

De gemeente Amsterdam zag het woonproject Stek Oost als de gedroomde oplossing voor het woningtekort: statushouders en jongeren samen onder één dak. Maar het gaat mis: steekpartijen, verward gedrag en seksueel geweld. Zembla reconstrueert hoe het woonexperiment zo kon ontsporen. pic.twitter.com/fswCpFOSLb

— Zembla (@ZEMBLA) January 14, 2026

I have checked with my friends in Amsterdam, who, along with Maarten Boudry (who reads Dutch), have verified the story and sent me links. The story in the Daily Mail is here, at Great Britain’s news channel is here, and a documentary video (alas, in Dutch) is here.

From The Daily Fail:

Terrified Dutch students made to live side-by-side with 125 refugees to aid their ‘integration’ were subjected to years of sexual assault and violence, an investigation has reported.

Stek Oost, located in the Watergraafsmeer district of Amsterdam, was sold to the Netherlands as the dream solution to the housing and refugee crisis.

A total of 125 students and 125 refugees would live alongside each other, and were even encouraged to ‘buddy up’ so the migrants would adapt to life in the Netherlands more quickly.

But students living there told Dutch investigative documentary programme Zembla they faced multiple sexual assaults, harassment, violence, stalking and even claimed a gang rape had taken place.

One woman said she would regularly see ‘fights in the hallway and then again in the shared living room’.

A man told the programme that a refugee threatened him with an eight-inch kitchen knife.

And they claimed they were ignored despite filing multiple reports to authorities.

In one shocking case, a former resident said that a Syrian raped her after inviting her to his room to watch a film then refusing to let her leave.

The woman, identified only as Amanda, said: ‘He wanted to learn Dutch, to get an education. I wanted to help him.’

Amanda described how he asked her several times to come to his room. She eventually relented and agreed to watch a film with him.

However, he soon made her uncomfortable and she asked to leave, only for him to trap her in his room and sexually abuse her.

Despite her filing a police report following the incident in 2019, police dropped the case due to a lack of evidence.

But just six months later, another woman living in Stek Oost raised the alarm over the Syrian, telling the housing association that runs the complex that she was concerned for the safety of herself and other women living there.

But the local authority, which had set up the arrangement, claimed it was impossible for the man to be evicted, the Zembla documentary claims.

It was only when he was formally arrested in March 2022 that he left the student-refugee complex. He was later convicted of raping Amanda and another resident, and was sentenced to just three years in prison in 2024.

Carolien de Heer, district chair of the East district of Amsterdam, where Stek Oost is located, claimed it was legally difficult to remove people from these blocks: ‘You see unacceptable behaviour, and people get scared.

‘But legally, that’s often not enough to remove someone from their home or impose mandatory care. You keep running into the same obstacles.’

. . .For its part, Stadgenoot wanted to shut the complex down as early as 2023, but the local authority refused.

It will, however, be shut down by 2028 after the contract to run the site expires.

There are other stories of gang rapes, and what strikes me (and one Dutch person I know) is that the government ignores these things for two reasons: they regard immigrants as more or less sacred (or at least untouchable), and the authorities have no idea about how “assimilation is proceeding”. (The second possibility is less credible when there have been reports about it. It is incidents like these, repeated in other European countries, which largely explains the turning of Europe towards right-wing politicians.

*The fracas in Minnesota, which is apparently costing Trump support, is about to get more oil poured on its fire as the “President” is apparently preparing to send 1,500 military to the state.

The Pentagon has ordered about 1,500 active-duty soldiers to prepare for a possible deployment to Minnesota, defense officials told The Washington Post late Saturday, after President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to unrest there.

The soldiers are assigned to two infantry battalions with the Army’s 11th Airborne Division, which is based in Alaska and specializes in cold-weather operations.

The Army placed the units on prepare-to-deploy orders in case violence in Minnesota escalates, officials said, characterizing the move as “prudent planning.” It is not clear whether any of them will be sent to the state, the officials said, speaking like some others on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military planning.

The White House said in a statement that it’s typical for the Pentagon “to be prepared for any decision the President may or may not make.” Sean Parnell, a spokesman for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, said in a statement Sunday that the Pentagon is “always prepared to execute the orders of the Commander-in-Chief if called upon.” Two officials said that the orders are unrelated to Trump’s recent rhetoric about the United States needing to take control of Greenland.

. . .Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey on Sunday called the federal government’s surge of immigration enforcement officials, and the possible deployment of active-duty soldiers, an attempt to “bait” protesters in the city.

“We’re not going to give them an excuse to do the thing that clearly they’re trying to set up to do right now, which is these 1,500 troops,” Frey told CNN. “I never thought in a million years that we would be invaded by our own federal government.”

The Insurrection Act, a federal law dating to 1807, permits the president to take control of a state’s National Guard forces or deploy active-duty troops domestically in response to a “rebellion.” Invoking the act would be an extraordinary move and mark the first time a commander in chief has done so since President George H.W. Bush called on the military during the Los Angeles riots of 1992 that killed dozens of people and caused widespread destruction.

Typically, invoking the Insurrection Act is considered a last resort, when law enforcement personnel are unable to keep the peace during times of civil unrest.

Neither the Army nor the National Guard, with the latter already called up,. have experience in law enforcement.  Given that many of the Minnesota protestors are already bent on keeping ICE from apprehending immigrants, you can imagine yet another bloody clash—and that’s on top of our threats to Iran, attacks on Venezuelan ships, threats to Greenland, and what is likely to be a clash between Hamas and Gaza’s new governing board (more on that tomorrow). If protestors would stop impeding ICE from doing its job, and just protest peacefully (and no, that’s not an exculpation of the agent who killed Renée Good), and if ICE would take off their masks and use force only when necessary, then this could be over soon, as it pretty much is in Chicago.

*There’s a column in the NYT called “An old theory helps explain what happened to Renee Good” by David French. It turns out that the old theory comes from James Madison. First, French shows the hopelessness of those who want an investigation of the Renée Good killing:

This all leads up to the “lesson” imparted by Madison in a Federalist essay: we need both internal and external checks and balances on government.  And we don’t have them, at least in practice:

Madison’s next words were crucial. “A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

In the Trump era, those auxiliary precautions have utterly failed. They’ve been undermined to the point where the reverse is now true. Rather than providing additional precautions against the rise of authoritarian rule, American law and precedent seem to presume that angels govern men, and those angels would be free to do even more good if only they possessed a free hand.

Like many, I am wondering how we got to this point, and, of course, how we get out of it. Protests are not enough, and the courts, while they do their best, are impotent before the Trump-approving Supreme Court. What about Congress? It’s dominated by Republicans who are in lockstep with Trump, and they will do nothing. They will not stop wars that may be illegal, and they certainly won’t impeach Trump. Congress thus seems impotent.  When one feels powerless, as many of us do, it creates anxiety, and believe me—I’m anxious and low.  When Machado gave her Nobel Prize medal to Trump, that crushed the last faith in humanity that I have.

*More advice for Democrats! On the front page of The Dispatch, writer Nick Cattogio’s article is called, “What Democrats should be saying,” but the title inside is “The Good Guys: Democrats shouldn’t campaign on ICE or Greenland..” I’m a sucker for any column that tells Democrats how to win, so let’s see what Cattogio says. An excerpt:

. . . . The tricky part of all this for America’s opposition party is that it’s a grave political sin to assume that voters know things. (Some voters know pretty much nothing.) The art of democracy is educating people on the issues, convincing them that your position is the right one, and steering the electoral conversation toward subjects where the majority is on your side. Messaging, messaging, messaging: There’s a reason every elected official in Washington has a communications staff.

That being so, one could argue that Democrats should be devoting more time and money to highlighting ICE’s abuses and opposing Greenland’s seizure. They’re hot topics, and most adults agree with the left on the merits, which means they’re a no-brainer for midterm ad campaigns. Right?

I don’t think so, for a simple reason. If Americans still think of themselves as the good guys, not much needs to be said about either issue; if Americans no longer think of themselves as the good guys, nothing Democrats say will matter.

So apparently we don’t think of ourselves as the good guys. Why? Because, I guess, Trump represents “America” to the world.  But French is a bit wonky because many individuals still think of themselves as the good guys.

. . . .The 2024 election blackpilled me about our country’s virtue, as regular readers know. An ex-president whose last major act during his first term was to attempt an autogolpe was returned to office because swing voters hoped he’d reduce prices at the supermarket.

George Washington’s heirs elected a fascist in exchange for cheaper groceries. (Oops.) The lesson going forward, inescapably, is that if your party has an advantage on kitchen-table issues, it would be insane to run on anything else. Especially appeals to civic conscience, which is what messaging about ICE’s brutality or respecting Denmark’s sovereignty would necessarily involve.

Last week Politico asked Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, how Democrats should address the capture of Nicolás Maduro and the White House’s exploitation of Venezuela this fall. They shouldn’t, Emanuel replied—except to use the subject as another example of Trump losing the plot on affordability. His recommended line of attack: “The president wants to focus on Venezuela? Democrats are focused on Virginia. He wants to talk about what’s happening in Caracas? I want to talk about what’s happening in Columbus.”

Seems right to me. If “he’s a fascist” didn’t work in the last election, why would it work in the next one? If the winds on managing the cost of living have shifted to favor Democrats, why would they trim their sails and squander such a momentous advantage by focusing on anything else? Pivoting to other issues would signal that the party still has yet to learn its own lesson about the primacy of affordability after the debacle of 2024, a political gift to the White House.

Well, the economy isn’t doing badly though the price of groceries has outpaced inflation. My concern is that running on the price of groceries alone, and ignoring inflation and ignoring the fact that the economy is indeed growing, is a losing cause for Democrates.  Rahm’s message is that of James Carville in Clinton’s 1992 campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” But the economy isn’t bad and can Democrats win on the high price of eggs?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,​ Szaron is apparently anti-China:

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

Remember Laura Helmuth, former editor of Scientific American who woke-ified the magazine and, after an epic Twitter bout of cursing and unhinged ranting on the last election night, she parted ways with the magazine. What happened to her? Well, she’s now an advice columnist for Slate magazine, which of course will not fire her for being woke because the site is, as they say, “progresive”. But her anger persists, and comes out sometimes, as you can see on this public Facebook note about gardening—from 2025.

From Stacy:

From Jesus of the Day; how would you like to get this in your cookie?

Masih highlights another Iranian woman killed while protesting. Her Instagram account is now private.

Aida Aghili was 34.
loved nature, dance, and Iran.
Islamic Security forces answered her with a bullet during recent uprising.💔

She was shot in the head with live ammunition. After days of searching, her family found her body in Kahrizak.

She was active on social media.
Her… pic.twitter.com/6IWufVSK4K

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 18, 2026

Simon sent this, which saddens me because it reminds me of Maria Machado, hamhanded act with her Nobel medal. (I’ve used a linked screenshot because, again, I can’t post the original BlueHair post.). It is, of course, made with AI:

From Malcolm; I think this couple is in trouble, but it could be a set-up:

«Infinite loop»pic.twitter.com/wSnvd5GlS0

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 1, 2026

One from my feed. One plaint; it’s not a pup but a CUB!

That moment the mother’s head appears gives you an instant reality check on just how small the pup actually is. 🐯pic.twitter.com/YbCCN5K57y

— Curiosity (@MAstronomers) January 17, 2026

The Number Ten cat isn’t having Trump’s lunacy, and I’ve never seen Larry use profanity:

1. The tariffs are paid by US consumers
2. Greenland isn’t for sale
3. Go f**k yourself https://t.co/FTvGs0DnNG

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) January 17, 2026

One I posted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two Hungarian Jewish children were gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. They were four and six years old. The girl, Sarolta, would be 86 years old today had she lived. https://t.co/Jwg0vudnlW

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) January 19, 2026

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a Venn diagram:

Can confirm, British people do be like this.#Meme #Funny #VennDiagram #British #Ant #Insects #BritishPeople #Joke #LOL #WhyDoHashtagsWorkWtf #LikeThisPostOrElseTheBritishAreComing #BritishPeopleBeLike

— Garbodog (@garbodog.com) 2025-12-31T09:45:57.682Z

Matthew says this of this post: “There’s a big argument on Reddit and on Bsky as to whether this is real or AI. I don’t know and I don’t care as it’s clearly staged one way or another and is still funny. If it’s AI, props to whoever came up with the repeated cycle of prompts!

New Batman

— Space Cowboy 🚀 (@teknasty.bsky.social) 2026-01-09T16:31:14.118Z