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

Welcome to Thursday, January 15, 2026 and National Bagel Day, celebrating a contribution of Jewish cuisine, such as it is, to world culture. Everybody eats bagels now, save those counting their carbs.  Below is one of the few places in the world you can still get them as they should be: small and chewy.  The city: Montreal.  I believe Steve Pinker, a Canadian who grew up there, used to patronize this place, whose motto is simply, “The best bagels in the world.” The bagels are first boiled in water with a bit of honey, and then baked in a wood-fired oven. I can attest to their quality.

It’s also National Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice Day, Wikipedia Day, National Booch Day, celebrating the drink kombucha, and National Strawberry Ice Cream Day.

What’s kombucha? Let’s look on Wikipedia given that it’s Wikipedia Day:

Kombucha (also tea mushroom, tea fungus, or Manchurian mushroom when referring to the culture; Latin name Medusomyces gisevii) is a fermented, effervescent and sweetened black tea drink. Sometimes the beverage is called kombucha tea to distinguish it from the culture of bacteria and yeast. Juice, spices, fruit, or other flavorings are often added. Commercial kombucha contains small amounts of alcohol.

Kombucha is believed to have originated in China, where the drink is traditional. While it is named after the Japanese term for kelp tea in English, the two drinks have no relation.

Here it is, but it looks scary. Has anyone had it?

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

Da Nooz:

*The U.S. is naming a committee of Palestinians to run Gaza, but Hamas still hasn’t laid down its arms. (Article archived here.)

The cease-fire plan that was backed by President Trump and that went into effect in October called for the committee to be apolitical, engaged largely in providing public services, and that the staff be independent Palestinian experts.

But it is far from clear whether it can succeed.

Officials have so far said little publicly about who will join the committee, how exactly it will administer Gaza and who might finance its operations.

Analysts say that the announcement of its composition might be aimed at injecting some momentum into Mr. Trump’s broader plans for Gaza, which have appeared to hit a roadblock.

While the truce between Israel and Hamas has largely held, the Palestinian militia has not laid down its arms, and U.S. efforts to persuade countries to send peacekeepers to Gaza have found few takers.

Announcing the committee could reflect “a desire to show progress, given that progress on other fronts has been tough,” said Michael Koplow, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, a research group based in New York.

“It seems to me that a lot of this is just to show that they’re doing something,” he added.

Yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like.  And fixing Gaza technically still leave Hamas in de facto control of policing and military action. For you can be sure that the new “technocratic” government won’t be allowed to do anything that Hamas thinks will impede its mission. We are a long way from peace, and even farther from a two-state solution.  Hamas has not met the most important terms of the cease-fire agreement: that they disarm and disband. And I don’t see how they will do so unless countries like Qatar apply more pressure to the group.

*As the turmoil escalates in Minnesota, with protestors showing up in droves to harass and jeer ICE agents, (the Free Press has an article about how well organized the protestors are), a number of federal prosecutors in D.C. and Minnesota have quit their jobs rather than investigate the background of Renée Good’s wife. They also quit because the government is impeding investigations by Minnesota authorities, and, further, because an important part of the Department of Justice was also cut out of the investigation.

The Minnesota resignations followed demands by Justice Department leaders to investigate the widow of Renée Good, the 37-year-old woman killed last week by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot into her car, according to two people familiar with the resignations who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for retaliation. Good’s wife was protesting ICE officers in the moments before the shooting. Prosecutors also were dismayed over the decision by federal officials to exclude state and local authorities from the investigation, one of the people said.

Five senior prosecutors in the criminal section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division also said they are leaving, according to four people familiar with the personnel moves who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.

The departures strip both the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section and U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota of their most experienced prosecutors. The moves are widely seen as a major vote of no-confidence by career prosecutors at a moment when the department is under extreme scrutiny.

The criminal section of the Civil Rights Division is the sole office that handles criminal violations of the nation’s civil rights laws. For years, the Justice Department has relied on the section to prosecute major cases of alleged police brutality and hate crimes. The departures followed the administration’s highly unusual decision to not include the Civil Rights Division in the initial investigation of the shooting.

BUT. . .

The department has been offering voluntary early retirement packages to certain sections, and some of the departing civil rights prosecutors qualified for that option. Some indicated to their colleagues before the Minnesota shooting that they were considering the retirement packages.

Now the Minnesota affair may indeed have induced these agents to retire early, but they are smart enough to keep their mouths shut about it in this climate of Trump-ian retribution.  But it makes no sense not to use every agency that could be involved to participate in the investigation, or to share data. What is there to lose? It looks as if the Administration doesn’t want the law to look to closely to what happened to Renée Good.

*At the Free Press, conservative historian Niall Ferguson discusses what he sees as “The myth of revolution in Iran“, and in fact argues that’s what going on in Iran now is not a revolution but a counterrevolution. The difference? The latter, says Ferguson, usually involves replacing one autocracy with another, as it did in Iran in 1979. Ferguson is deeply sympathetic with the protestors, but thinks they are misguided.

There is a difference between a revolution and a counterrevolution. It is a recurrent mistake of the American media to conflate the two. That is because the success of 1776—the 250th anniversary of which we celebrate this year—predisposes us to sympathize with revolutions. I can think of no better explanation for the naivete of much liberal commentary on subsequent revolutions: France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, Nicaragua in 1979, Egypt in 2011 and, most relevant to today, Iran in 1979.

. . .I am sure Sadjadpour and Goldstone are right about the basic reason for the widespread dissatisfaction with the regime. An inflation rate of 50 percent—and 70 percent for food—would make any kind of government unpopular. They are right, too, that ordinary Iranians are disgusted by the corruption and hypocrisy of today’s political elite. (Take a look at the Rich Kids of Tehran on Instagram for some choice examples.) The 1979 revolution, like the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the Maoist revolution in China, began with austere dogma but swiftly descended into graft.

Yet the people in the streets of Iran today do not aspire to build Utopia; they just want the old Iran back—an idealized, nostalgia-tinged version, no doubt, but above all a country of stability, not ideology. Hence the chant: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon; my life for Iran.” Aside from the failure of its economic policy, nothing has alienated people more than the catastrophic blowback from the regime’s ideologically driven policy of funding terrorist proxies to wage war on Israel.

. . . . Four questions need to be asked by anyone hoping for a counterrevolution to succeed:

1. Is there a leadership crisis or vacuum as the original leaders of the revolution die off?
2. Does the old regime have a credible candidate to restore?
3. Can foreign powers provide assistance without discrediting domestic opposition?
4. Can the forces of repression be divided or somehow outgunned?

I am not sure that in Iran today the answer is “yes” to any of those questions.

. . . . In Iran today, you would need a significant portion of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to see better opportunities for profit from a post-Islamic regime than from the status quo. And we do not seem to be there yet.

At some point after Supreme Leader Khamenei dies—as the haggard old murderer eventually must—I expect we shall see Iran take a Bonapartist turn. From the ranks of the IRGC, there will emerge the successor to General Qasem Soleimani, who might have played the Napoleonic role if the United States had not killed him in 2020.

I passionately wish it could be otherwise. The images of the slaughter in Iran—of the corpses in body bags strewn contemptuously on the ground—are agonizing to contemplate. For the people of Iran, I have little doubt, it would be far preferable if the genial Mr. Pahlavi could resume his father’s Peacock Throne with the support of the United States and its allies. If President Trump can do anything at all to impede, if not destroy, the Islamic Republic’s massacre machine, I wish Godspeed to those who receive the orders to strike.

But happy restorations are very rare in history. Repression is so much more common—and so effective—that it rarely makes the front page.

Ferguson cites many examples from history to support his thesis, and who am I to question a historian? But what bothers me is that many of the protestors are calling for the restoration of leadership by Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah of Iran.  He’s the only credible leader they can think of. Ferguson suggests not only will he not have the support of the Revolutionary Guards, but also that he could also become a dictator if he resumes power.  We simply don’t know. All we know is that the present regime in Iran is horribly oppressive and needs to be somehow replaced. One of my friends predicts that the U.S. will attack Iran withing 72 hours.

*Speaking of Iran, Trump is still weighing his options there, which are many. He seems to have decided on a course of action, but some interventions are quite risky (Benny Morris also points this out in Quillette.) From the WaPo first:

President Donald Trump signaled he would assist anti-government protesters in Iran as the White House convened top officials on Tuesday to weigh military options.

The president indicated that the time for negotiations with Tehran had passed, saying in a social media post Tuesday morning that he had “cancelled all meetings” with Iranian officials. But some political allies are warning against the dangers of entanglement in another overseas conflict and the domestic costs of abandoning the “America First” foreign policy Trump campaigned on.

. . .The arguments against a strike include the danger of an accident or failure as the U.S. military and spy services attempt more high-risk operations, as well as the possibility that the fall of the Iranian government could lead to a more militant regime or another failed state in the Middle East, according to former officials and people close to the White House who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive private conversations.

At the same time, the people said, skeptics of a strike are hoping to avoid the open acrimony leading up to the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites in June, which stoked divisions in Trump’s base over the wisdom of intervention in a Middle Eastern conflict and the meaning of his “America First” slogan.

The National Security Council met Tuesday without Trump to prepare options for the president, a person familiar with the meeting said. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials are presenting options to Trump without preference, the person said.

The president has repeatedly threatened that the United States could use military force if the government in Tehran keeps killing demonstrators. Other options could include increased economic pressure on the government, cyberattacks and stepped-up support for the protest movement.

From historian Benny Morris:

Recent reports from Washington indicate that Trump and his advisors are weighing “very strong options,” in Trump’s words, for intervention and now that the death toll among the demonstrators is rising, it is difficult to see how Trump can back down, after his repeated public threats to intervene. Clearly, America is not going to put boots on the ground. And air strikes—using carrier-based aircraft or units operating out of Incirlik, Turkey—against Basij or IRGC bases or Iranian government institutions is not a very attractive course of action, either, since it would require a massive, protracted operation. The US Air Force would need to first clear a path through Iran’s air defences, which have presumably been reconstituted since Israel demolished them last June, in the first days of its twelve-day offensive, before it targeted sites in Tehran and in the interior of the country.

At the moment, it appears, the US has insufficient forces in the Middle East to launch a major aerial offensive against Iran. One readily available alternative might be a massive one-off cruise missile strike, which might make Tehran back down, send the IRGC back to barracks, and begin negotiations with the protesters—though what exactly the government could offer them short of abdicating power is unclear. The government has no money and at this point, the protesters will not be easily bought off anyway.

Nothing here really looks like a feasible intervention by the U.S. that would actually topple the regime.  Surely economic pressure, cyberattacks,or “stepped-up support for the protest movement (what kind of support?) don’t look propitious. We’ll have to wait and see, but it looks as if “peacemaker” Trump, longing for his Nobel Prize, will certainly do something.

*And some persiflage from UPI’s “odd news” section: a record for one person keeping a soccer ball in the air: more than 28 hours! (there were breaks every three hours):

A Swedish soccer enthusiast broke a Guinness World Record when he juggled a ball — using only his knees, chest, head and feet — for 28 hours, 21 minutes and 2 seconds.

Daniel Yaakob took on the record for the longest marathon controlling a football (male) at the Rydshallen sports complex in Linköping, Sweden.

Yaakob, who was allowed a 15-minute break every three hours, beat the record set by Briton Dan Magness at 26 hours in June 2010.

Soccer juggling is also sometimes known as kick-ups or keepie-uppies.

“I want to inspire others to push their limits, promote consistency and focus, and show how social media can be used to spotlight positive challenges and achievements,” Yaakob told Guinness World Records. “This record is the perfect combination of my passion for football, content creation and personal growth.”

Here’s their weekly 2-ninute summary of odd news. The Altadena bear was evicted, but seems to have found a home underneath yet another house. And. . . loose monkeys of uncertain origin.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is getting woke:

Szaron: You’re using your white privilege.
Hili: Spare me that fashionable nonsense.

In Polish:

Szaron: Wykorzystujesz swój przywilej białości.
Hili: Zachowaj te modne bzdury dla siebie.

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

From a reader:

From Give Me a Sign:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Masih; estimates of the dead in Iran are as high as 12,000, and that could still be low:

Don’t look away, @BarackObama.
In 2009 they chanted: “ Obama, Obama, Either with us or with them.”
How ironic your name in Persian means “He is with us.”
But you chose them, our killers. You chose to deal with them behind closed doors.
Where are you now?#IranRevolution2026 pic.twitter.com/co0KLY5ftO

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 13, 2026

From the Number Ten Cat, who somebody apparently tripped over. Translation from the Polish: “Larry, don’t do this to me anymore!  photo: Damian Burzykowski”

Larry, nie rób mi tego więcej! 🥹

fot: Damian Burzykowski pic.twitter.com/FmtDC2P8US

— Mikołaj Bujak (@mikolaj_bk) January 13, 2026

Emma Hilton posted a threadreader in which the Paint the Roses Read podcast breaks down the Supreme Court judges’ stands on trans issues based on Tuesday’s question session.

@mattym000 Guten Tag, please find the unroll here: https://t.co/LMzGFCLCnc Enjoy 🙂 🤖

— Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) January 14, 2026

From Simon, who says “Best work fast!”

Meanwhile, inside the box, Schrödinger’s cat plans its revenge. pic.twitter.com/I6cGsIA5Bx

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 13, 2026

One from my feed; a cat counts sheep:

Counting the sheep.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/47ZSiCtO40

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) January 14, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

The Polish Jewish woman was yet another victim of Auschwitz. She was in her early thirties. https://t.co/hSJSdYG2uO

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) January 15, 2026

One from Dr. Cobb, as there’s a video. The “decoy spider” is something I talked about in my evolution lecture on mimicry. Have a look at the linked article.  And note that one of the spiders has eight fake legs!

Nature can be wickedly cunning.

— John Shirley (@johnshirley2024.bsky.social) 2026-01-06T02:03:11.988Z

From the article:

Researchers believe the “decoy spider” serves a dual purpose. It may mimic a larger predator that birds, lizards, and other enemies would prefer to avoid, while also creating a diversion, drawing an attack away from the smaller, real spider.

A video about the orb-weaving spiders:

Welcome to Thursday, January 8, 2026; I hope you’ve learned to write “2026” when you date your checks (but who writes checks any more?). It’s also National English Toffee Day, classically covered with chocolate. The Heath Bar is a high expression of this confection, comme ça:

It’s also Argyle Day (break out those socks; even I have a pair), celebrating a Scottish design worn by members of Clan Campbell.  It’s also  Healthy Weight, Healthy Look Day, Bubble Bath Day, and Earth’s Rotation Day, honoring this:

On January 8, 1851, Foucault performed an experiment in the cellar of his home, in which he swung a five-kilogram weight attached to a two-meter-long pendulum. He put sand underneath it to mark the pendulum’s path, allowing him to see any changes in it. He observed a slight clockwise movement in the plane—the floor, and thus the earth, were slowly rotating; the pendulum kept its position. His experiment showed that the earth rotated on its axis. No longer was it just a hypothesis.

My question has always been “if the pendulum is attached to the Earth, as is the floor, why do they move relative to each other? I know I’m stupid about this, but I’m not afraid to admit my ignorance, Here’s an explanation, which didn’t help me. Readers are welcome to enlighten me why the pendulum always stays in the same plane.

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

I’m quite depressed about the world situation, and posting has been thin. However, I haven’t found much to write about that stimulates me, so hang on until I do. Readers are invited (and welcome) to send me links to interesting stuff, but do not ask or expect such things to be posted, as I have to winnow them to find what gets my juices flowing.

Da Nooz:

*As expected, the U.S. is now going to take over and sell all the blockaded Venezuelan oil (which won’t be much for a long time).  Conspiracy theories are flying about this, and about Trump striking a deal with Russia, allowing Putin to have part of Ukraine in return for the U.S. getting some assets in Venezuela, though I don’t know which such assets Russia can give us. But there’s no doubt that we’re gonna get the oil.

The U.S. will sell blockaded Venezuelan oil “indefinitely,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Wednesday, a day after President Trump said Venezuela will give the U.S. between 30 million and 50 million barrels of sanctioned oil.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that he has directed Wright to carry out his plan for the oil to be taken by storage ships and transported to the U.S.

“This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!,” said Trump.

Trump’s post offered the most detail to date about how he intends to make good on his promise to extract oil from the country.

A senior administration official said the sale of oil outlined by Trump would begin immediately. The U.S. is selectively rolling back sanctions to enable the transport and sale of Venezuelan crude and oil products to global markets, according to the official.

Wright said Wednesday that he was working with the Venezuelan government and that the U.S. would receive Venezuelan oil that is backed up in onshore facilities and floating tankers and then sell it. Many of those barrels were likely bound for China or Russia, say analysts, but have been blocked from the market by a U.S. blockade of sanctioned Venezuelan oil tankers.

“We’re going to market the crude coming out of Venezuela—first this backed up, stored oil, and then indefinitely, going forward, we will sell the production that comes out of Venezuela into the marketplace,” Wright said at a Goldman Sachs conference in Miami.

The proceeds of the sale will be deposited into accounts controlled by the U.S. government, Wright said, and would eventually flow back to the Latin American country to “benefit the Venezuelan people.”

“We need to have that leverage and that control of those oil sales to drive the changes that simply must happen in Venezuela,” he said.

Well, we’re still facing a hostile government in Venezuela. I smell trouble but won’t make any predictions.

*According to the NYT, an old agreement between Greenland and the U.S. gives us almost unlimited rights to occupy Denmark’s territory, even without having to take it over. (Note, though, that another article reports Marco Rubio saying that the U.S. wants to buy Greenland.)

He seems increasingly fixated on the idea that the United States should take over this gigantic icebound island, with one official saying the president wants to buy it and another suggesting that the United States could simply take it. Just a few days ago, Mr. Trump said: “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”

But the question is: Does the United States even need to buy Greenland — or do something more drastic — to accomplish all of Mr. Trump’s goals?

Under a little-known Cold War agreement, the United States already enjoys sweeping military access in Greenland. Right now, the United States has one base in a very remote corner of the island. But the agreement allows it to “construct, install, maintain, and operate” military bases across Greenland, “house personnel” and “control landings, takeoffs, anchorages, moorings, movements, and operation of ships, aircraft, and waterborne craft.”

It was signed in 1951 by the United States and Denmark, which colonized Greenland more than 300 years ago and still controls some of its affairs.

“The U.S. has such a free hand in Greenland that it can pretty much do what it wants,” said Mikkel Runge Olesen, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen.

“I have a very hard time seeing that the U.S. couldn’t get pretty much everything it wanted,” he said, adding, “if it just asked nicely.”

But buying Greenland — something that Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers on Tuesday was Mr. Trump’s latest plan — is a different question.

Greenland does not want to be bought by anyone — especially not the United States. And Denmark does not have the authority to sell it, Dr. Olesen said.

“It is impossible,” he said.

From the second article:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told lawmakers that President Trump plans to buy Greenland rather than invade it, while Mr. Trump has asked aides to give him an updated plan for acquiring the territory, U.S. officials said on Tuesday.

Mr. Rubio made his remarks in a briefing on Monday with lawmakers from the main armed services and foreign policy committees in both chambers of Congress. The same day, Mr. Trump told aides to deliver an updated plan.

As I wrote to a friend who was amazed that Trump was even thinking of acquiring Greenland, “If he tries it, it would be the stupidest thing he’s ever done, and that’s saying a lot! ” I think he needs more medical tests.

*Journalist Anne Applebaum is critical of the way Trump attacked Venezuela to apprehend Maduro, but she thinks that removing him was justifiable. An article on her Substack website, “Spheres of influence” tells us why (h/t Bat).

Even though the the military raid that took Nicolás Maduro into custody does resemble some past American actions, especially the ouster of the Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega in 1989–90, the use of this new language to explain the Venezuelan raid makes the story very different.

At his press conference on Saturday, Trump did not use the word democracy. He did not refer to international law. Instead, he presented a garbled version of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, a policy originally designed to keep foreign imperial powers out of the Americas, calling it something that sounded like the “Donroe Document”: “Under our new National Security Strategy,” he said, reading from prepared remarks, “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

As I wrote in my recent book, Autocracy Inc, Nicolas Maduro was an extraordinarily corrupt, venal, and repressive leader. He was supported by Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Iranian money and weapons. He stayed in power by jailing, killing and exiling his opponents. A case could have been made, not only to Congress but to America’s allies and Venezuela’s neighbors, that his removal would restore democracy to his country and stability to the region. But this is not what the Trump administration chose to do.

Instead, Trump has gone out of his way to portray the capture of Maduro as nothing more than a “win,” for the US president and for US oil companies (who were also not consulted before the raid). On Saturday, Trump patronized and verbally dismissed the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, Maria Corina Machado (a compelling, dedicated woman, whom I interviewed in December 2024). His administration has half-heartedly justified the raid by indicting Maduro for drug trafficking. Given that Trump himself just pardoned the former president of Honduras, who was indicted on drug charges six years ago, this hardly fits into a broader logic.

This is a criminally short-sighted policy. For seventy years, American prosperity and influence have been based on a network of allies who worked with us, not because they were coerced, but because they shared our values. Now those allies will begin to hedge:

Trump’s pursuit of an illusory sphere of influence is unlikely to bring us peace or prosperity—any more than the invasion of Ukraine brought peace and prosperity to Russians—and this might become clear sooner than anyone expects. If America is just a regional bully, after all, then our former allies in Europe and Asia will close their doors and their markets to us. Sooner or later, “our” Western Hemisphere will organize against us and fight back. Far from making us more powerful, the pursuit of American dominance will make us weaker, eventually leaving us with no sphere, and no influence, at all.

Trump and his henchmen will also eventually discover that Venezuelans do have agency. They might even discover that Americans don’t like their expensive, well-trained military being used to replace one dictator with another, for the benefit of Trump’s oil-industry donors. On Saturday afternoon, a few hours after the US military took Nicolas Maduro into custody, I discussed these topics with with my Atlantic colleague, David Frum:

Here’s a 30-minute discussion between Applebaum and David Frum about this (there’s also a transript):

Click to go to her Atlantic article, or find it archived here.

I guess what bothers me is that, given the Internet, all the pundits have to have an INSTANT TAKE on what Trump did.  And, of course, it lines up with their political ideology: Left: TRUMP BAD, Right: TRUMP GOOD. That is not a coincidence.  Given the recalcitrance of interim President Delcy Rodriguez to change the Maduro policy, the U.S. should set up and help enforce free elections in Venezuela, and then get the hell out. That is my “pundit” take. But an article in today’s NYT reports Trump saying that it could take “years” before the U.S. stopped controlling the country.

*After the Russian sent a vessel to escort the Bella 1, the sanctioned tanker from Venezuela that was fleeing from the Coast Guard, and declared itself as a Russian ship (it can’t do that), the U.S. finally intercepted it.

The U.S. military seized two oil tankers on Wednesday as it tries to choke off most Venezuelan exports of crude, including a Russian-flagged tanker that had been evading American forces for weeks, escalating a confrontation with Moscow after the ouster of its ally, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.

The military issued a statement saying that U.S. forces had “seized” the Russian-flagged vessel in the North Atlantic, between Scotland and Iceland, for violating U.S. sanctions.

It later said, in a separate statement, that it had “apprehended a stateless, sanctioned dark fleet motor tanker,” the M/T Sophia, in international waters in the Caribbean, where it was “conducting illicit activities,” and the ship was being escorted to the United States.

The Coast Guard boarded the Russian tanker after a roughly two-week pursuit, according to one U.S. official briefed on the operation. The Coast Guard encountered no resistance or hostility from the crew, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military operation.

Russia’s Ministry of Transport confirmed that U.S. forces had boarded the vessel in international waters, adding in a statement that contact with it had been lost. The Russian state-owned broadcaster RT published images of a helicopter approaching the Russian-flagged tanker being pursued by the Coast Guard and said it appeared that U.S. forces were attempting to board. The New York Times was not able to determine when the images were captured.

The thing is that the Russians might have been sending their own navy ships and a submarine to accompany the Bella 1, raising the possibility of a nasty US/Russia confrontation, but all is well; the Russians didn’t try anything funny.

*We all need to watch the new movie “Nuremberg”, which has been highly recommended to me by several people, including my movie-obsessed nephew. And here’s Andrew Sullivan’s reaction that he put on the Substack notes page:

I watched the new movie, Nuremberg, on Amazon last night. I very rarely get emotional watching a film, but I found myself sobbing at a couple of points.

It’s so so easy to get distance from what the Nazis did, to get to some nearFuentes-style abstraction, and to forget the sheer, fathomless, brutal evil of it. The scene when the court – and the world – first sees the footage of the camps is beyond gutting. Silence is the only response imaginable.

And then there is simply the American defense of the rule of law against the rule of men – which was the entire point of the trials. Another abstraction for too many, but the key thing we fought for, as the Allies’ chief prosecutor explained.

And that was the second time I wept. To remember what America once was and did. And to see what this foul presidency and its cancerous fumes now tell the world about us. A permanent stain. A rebuke of all those who once gave their lives for the West. An indecency.

From Rotten Tomatoes. I’m surprised that it’s rated only 72% of critics (but 95% of viewers). The somewhat lower critics’ rating is summarized on the site:

Critics Consensus
Driven by a commanding performance from Russell Crowe, Nuremberg is a handsomely crafted historical drama, but its measured pacing and emotional restraint keep it from fully realizing the complexity of its subject.

Screw the critics; I’m going with my nephew and Sullivan and am gonna watch it. Wikipedia gives a longish summary.

Here’s the trailer. I was surprised to see that Russell Crowe plays Nazi Luftwaffe head Hermann Göring, the most powerful Nazi after Hitler. I thought Crowe would be a judge or something. We all know what happened to Göring.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron discuss food and thought, which is for for thought.

Hili: Have you thought about the question of good food being better than bad?
Szaron: That’s for the deep thinkers. I’m a food lover – some things I gulp down, others I chew over.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy rozważałeś kwestię przewagi dobrego jedzenia nad złym?
Szaron: To pytanie dla wielkich umysłów, ja jestem smakoszem, Jedne rzeczy połykam szybciej, inne jem wolniej.

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

From Terrible Maps; a mnemomic to remember the names of America’s Great Lakes:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Cat Memes:

From Masih. The protests in Iran are continuing, and here protestors push back the security forces:

Unarmed Iranians pushed regime security forces to flee. Despite more than 30 deaths over 11 days, protesters are back in the streets from Mashhad to Shiraz, Tehran, and across 100 cities. This isn’t about prices or paychecks, it’s about a nation fed up with the entire regime. pic.twitter.com/8XgbQLpqA6

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 7, 2026

*Maarten Budry highlights the GOOD news of 2025, and there is pleny.  Here is the introduction and just one tweet in his thread:

I spend a lot of time reading about progress, trying to dig out positive trends beneath all the mayhem & disaster in the news. Yet every year, I discover that I’ve missed the most important (i.e. positive) news. Luckily, Fix the News put together this awesome, inspiring overview. pic.twitter.com/m4O7AHctlK

— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) January 1, 2026

First read the horrible descripion of trachoma, then realize how amazing this victory is. “It’s one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever heard of, one of best things happening in the world right now, yet not a single major news organisation reported anything about trachoma.” /2 pic.twitter.com/yv6HTk583r

— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) January 1, 2026

From Luana; another male, and a murderous one, was put in a women’s prison. The trans-identified male only started transitioning after he was confined in a men’s prison. His crime? Killing his wife, and in a brutal way.

A violent male inmate is being held in a women’s prison in Massachusetts after filing a legal complaint with the assistance of the ACLU.

Robert Kosilek brutally murdered his wife after he claimed she had been “transphobic” towards him.https://t.co/jg4x4ihi87

— REDUXX (@reduxx) January 5, 2026

From Malcolm; a d*g joins some kids:

A German Shepherd sits down to play with a group of children in the street… Because for them he is one of them. pic.twitter.com/w2M1h26Cnx

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 2, 2026

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial; a tale of human sacrifice and bravery. Read the Wikipedia link.

Kolbe voluntarily sacrificed his life to keep another prisoner alive. After six of the ten men sentenced to be starved to death died, the guards became impatient and killed Kolbe with an injection. His story is here: https://t.co/x7y0Vf7B48 https://t.co/PgMEZ7uVvO

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) January 8, 2026

Two from Matthew. I love this first one!

— Nina Willburger (@drnwillburger.bsky.social) 2026-01-07T18:03:34.498Z

We STILL don’t know what creature made these patterns on the deep ocean bottom:

We don't know what made this.

— Andrew D Thaler (@drandrewthaler.bsky.social) 2026-01-07T18:01:06.923Z

And it looks like this below the surface.

— Andrew D Thaler (@drandrewthaler.bsky.social) 2026-01-07T18:01:51.106Z

Welcome to The Cruelest Day, when, boundless and bare, the lonely and loony week stretches far ahead. Yes, it’s Tuesday, January 6, 2026, and National Cuddle Up Day. Here’s a kitten not only cuddling with a deer, but also making biscuits on the deer. Please don’t let it be AI!

First time seeing a kitten cuddling with a deer 🥺 pic.twitter.com/SsyBNsHHgS

— cats with powerful impression 🐾 (@catshealdeprsn) August 7, 2025

It’s also Apple Tree Day, National Shortbread Day, National King Cake Day (read about it here), Epiphany (that’s when king cakes are eaten), and National Bean Day.   King Cakes contains a figure of the baby Jesus, usually in plastic (see below), and the person who bites Jesus wins a prize, often having to buy next year’s king cake, which is not really a prize.  And couldn’t you choke on a plastic Jesus, or break your dental work?

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

Da Nooz:

*After his “takeover” of Venezuela, Trump is now, Putinlike, thinking of other ways to expand the American Empire. Colombia is on the radar, and now he’s revived talk about the U.S. needing to take over Greenland!

Barely 48 hours after toppling the leader of Venezuela and asserting U.S. rights to the country’s oil, President Trump threatened Colombia with a similar fate, declared that Cuba was not worth invading because “it’s ready to fall,” and once again claimed that Greenland needed to come under American control as an issue of national security.

Mr. Trump’s claims, in interviews on Sunday and then a lengthy back-and-forth with reporters aboard Air Force One as it returned from his private club in Florida, offered a glimpse of how emboldened he felt after the quick capture of Nicolás Maduro, the strongman who was seized on narco-trafficking charges.

“We’re in charge” of Venezuela, Mr. Trump claimed, as he described his plans to breathe new life into the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 foundational statement of U.S. claims over the Western Hemisphere.

Or, more specifically, he invoked a more recent update that he refers to, characteristically, after himself: the “Donroe doctrine.”

Mr. Trump never described his philosophy in detail, or whether it applied beyond the Saturday attack on Caracas. But he certainly suggested that he could use the forces amassed in the Caribbean for new purposes, this time aimed at Colombia and its president, Gustavo Petro.

The country, he claimed, was “run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.”

“He’s not going to be doing it for very long,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “He has cocaine mills and cocaine factories. He’s not going to be doing it.” Asked whether the United States would conduct an operation against Colombia, the president said: “It sounds good to me.”

And let’s not forget Greenland, which formally belongs to Denmark, a member of both the EU and NATO:

But the logic of this past weekend would suggest that Mr. Trump now believes the way is clear to claim resources that, in his view, the United States cannot live without. He is already setting up a parallel argument for Greenland which may — or may not — have substantial, recoverable rare earths.

“We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security,’’ Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday night. “Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.”

“Denmark is not going to be able to do it,” he added. He said that to boost security for Greenland, “it added one more dog sled.”

Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, was clearly rattled earlier in the day by Mr. Trump’s renewed interest in the vast, if frozen, territory.

“It makes absolutely no sense to talk about the U.S. needing ⁠to take over Greenland,” Ms. Frederiksen wrote on social media. “The U.S. has no right to annex any of ​the three countries in the Danish Kingdom.”

I had no idea that “Greenland was covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place.”  Maybe they are referring to “the Arctic,” but Denmark’s prime minister is right and even Trump isn’t stupid enough to try to annex Greenland.

*Trying to overwhelm the American blockade of Venezuelan oil, at least 16 sanctioned tankers are fleeing into the Caribbean, hoping to evade capture by turning off their transponders and moving en masse.

At least 16 oil tankers hit by U.S. sanctions appear to have made an attempt to evade a major American naval blockade on Venezuela’s energy exports over the last two days, in part by disguising their true locations or turning off their transmission signals.

For weeks, the ships had been spotted on satellite imagery docked in Venezuelan ports, according to an analysis by The New York Times. But by Saturday, in the wake of President Nicholas Maduro’s capture by U.S. forces, all were gone from those locations.

Four have been tracked by satellite sailing east 30 miles from shore, using fake ship names and misrepresenting their positions, a deceptive tactic known as “spoofing.” These four have left port without the interim government’s authorization, according to internal communications from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company and two people in the Venezuelan oil industry, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. The departures could be seen as an early act of defiance of interim President Delcy Rodríguez’s control.

The other 12 are not broadcasting any signals and have not been located in new imagery.

. . .So far, U.S. forces have confronted three tankers trying to trade Venezuelan oil. One, called Skipper, was halted and seized by the Coast Guard on Dec. 10, on its way to China. A second, the Centuries, was halted and boarded, but not seized, on Dec. 20, and a third, then called the Bella 1, now Marinera, is still being pursued by U.S. forces.

In response to questions from The Times, a U.S. official on Sunday said that “the quarantine is in effect focusing on sanctioned shadow vessels transporting sanctioned” Venezuelan oil.

The tankers’ evasion strategies as part of this latest exodus appear to be relying on deception, but also saturation. At least three of the ships were in proximity as they left Venezuelan waters in the same direction, suggesting at least some coordination.

. . .Fifteen of the 16 ships that were on the move on Saturday were under U.S. sanctions for hauling Iranian and Russian oil.

. . . .The techniques used to skirt the sanctions are part of a modern-day arsenal of deception used by a loose-knit group of illicit tankers known as “the ghost fleet.” They include broadcasting and painting on the hull the names of vessels that have been decommissioned, and spoofing their locations to appear elsewhere.

If the sanctioned tankers stay in Venezuela, they could easily be boarded by U.S. forces, so I guess they’ve made the decision to take off.  And their departure does not bode well for the new President, who seems to have some misguided support from “President” Trump.

*According to Olivia Reingold at the Free Press, Venezuelans in NYC are peeved that their new Mayor opposed the capture and arrest of Maduro and his wife in Venezuela.

On New Year’s Eve Vanessa Sanchez ate 12 grapes, as is customary in Latin America, making a wish for each one. Her first wish was for God to save Venezuela from Nicolás Maduro, the socialist president whose brutal rule drove her to flee the country nine years ago.

When her phone began to buzz on Saturday with news that the U.S. had captured Maduro, she could hardly believe it.

“This is what all Venezuelans wished for,” said Sanchez, who lives in Port Washington, Long Island. “We were waiting 25 years for this.”

Despite her brush with socialism, Sanchez, 32, told me she wasn’t opposed to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who was sworn in just last week. “He’s young—I feel like he knows what the people need,” she said. Then she saw Mamdani’s post on X criticizing Trump’s capture of the Venezuelan dictator.

“Unilaterally attacking a sovereign nation is an act of war and a violation of federal and international law,” Mamdani wrote, calling it a “blatant pursuit of regime change” and promising to protect New York City’s Venezuelan community.

“He’s crazy,” she said, shaking her head when I met her on Sunday afternoon in Corona, Queens. “He needs to live in Venezuela for one year. He wouldn’t be saying that anymore.”

Since Saturday a split-screen reaction has played out in New York City, where Venezuelans have made up the largest number of migrants since 2022, according to a 2024 New York Times article. On Saturday, dueling rallies took over Times Square, with celebratory Venezuelans dancing through the streets just hours after demonstrators showed up chanting “hands off Venezuela.” Similar scenes unfolded outside the federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan and the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are currently being held as federal prosecutors pursue criminal charges against them.

Almost immediately, as news of Maduro’s capture began to spread online, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) started to organize against the Trump administration. Since 2017, Mamdani has belonged to the group as a dues-paying member. On Saturday, the DSA released a statement demanding the return of Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, an end to the “failed” war on drugs, and a “U.S. foreign policy centered on peace, multilateralism, and respect for national sovereignty and self-determination.”

. . .On Saturday, a number of prominent figures within the Democratic Party condemned the military operation, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former vice president Kamala Harris, and Senator Ruben Gallego.

“It’s not a good look,” said Daniel Di Martino, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank. Di Martino left Venezuela in 2016 to attend Indiana University in Indianapolis on a full-ride scholarship. “You might disagree with what President Trump did, but we must celebrate that he captured an indicted criminal, and he did it with zero U.S. casualties.”

Here’s Mamdani’s tweet. I have a feeling he’s going to be pronouncing on foreign affairs at least as often as he does on matters affecting NYT. I’ve left in one response:

“Unilaterally attacking a sovereign nation is an act of war and a violation of federal and international law” – sorry I thought this was a statement from October 8th 2023, but I think you had phrased that one differently…

— Ami Kozak (@amiKozak) January 4, 2026

*Although Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota kept pushing back against people calling out the childcare and healthcare fraud in Minnesota, he’s finally given up: Walz has decided not to run for another term.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has dropped his bid for a third term amid a massive welfare-fraud scandal, a remarkable political fall for a politician who had ascended to the national stage in 2024 as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the state’s senior senator and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, is seriously considering a run for his job, three Democrats informed of her thinking said. She met with Walz on Sunday, the officials said.

“As I reflected on this moment with my family and my team over the holidays, I came to the conclusion that I can’t give a political campaign my all,” Walz said.

“Every minute I spend defending my own political interests would be a minute I can’t spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who prey on our differences,” he said. “So I’ve decided to step out of the race and let others worry about the election while I focus on the work.”

The large-scale theft—still being tabulated and growing—has been a major distraction for Walz and his fellow Democrats as their party struggles without a national leader or any real power in Washington.

The controversy has also handed a political weapon to Republicans, who have been capitalizing on the scandal to portray the state and Walz as a national symbol of government waste and Democratic mismanagement. Trump administration officials have criticized him on a nearly daily basis and amplified videos critical of him.

. . .The incumbent’s decision triggers a scramble for Democrats to find a candidate in a state that leans blue, but one that also has a legislature nearly evenly divided between the two parties.

Other possible Minnesota Democrats vying for the governor’s post include Secretary of State Steve Simon or Attorney General Keith Ellison. But Klobuchar would be the most dominant candidate with the biggest following and political organization in the state.

Well, Walz wasn’t doing so well with the scandal. What puzzles me is why Amy Klobuchar would give up a plum job as Senator for a measly Governorship.  Does she want to move back to Minnesota for good?

*I discovered that the UPI not only has a news site, but also one with a big “Odd News” page, that is better than the AP’s “oddities” page as it has more items. Here’s one about an escaped and recaptured emu:

A pet emu was captured in Arizona a few days after escaping from her owners’ home amid New Year’s Day fireworks.

Josh Kondziola and Savannah Smith said their emu, Kevin, escaped from the yard of their Peoria home on New Year’s Day.

They said Kevin had escaped before, but didn’t get far.

“When we first moved into this house, she did the same thing. She flipped open the gate latch and escaped,” Kondziola told 12 News. “But that time it was easy because we watched her get out, and we just went and got her. But we thought we had done the gate up where she couldn’t get out anymore.”

The couple posted about Kevin’s escape on Facebook, and sightings started to roll in.

“There’s been a lot of people, especially from Facebook, that have been out looking or who will send me little updates,” Smith said. “These two little boys got a picture of Kevin and sent it over to their mom, who messaged me on Facebook, but it is crazy to see how many people are here for the emu.”

The duo said Kevin was safely captured Sunday.

Here are the three Facebook posts about Kevin’s escape and recapture:

He’s a big ‘un!  Kevin is a very weird name for an emu.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili feigns ignorance:

Szaron: Do you know the answer to the question…
Hili: I doubt it, but you can always ask it to keep the old tradition alive.

In Polish:

Szaron: Czy znasz odpowiedź na pytanie…
Hili: Wątpię, ale zawsze możesz je zadać dla podtrzymania starej tradycji.

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

From CinEmma:

From Give Me A Sign:

From Meow, Incorporated:

Masih continues to post during the turmoil in Iran.  And have a gander at this one. There’s a note about the hospital attack in a Guardian article about the killing of over 20 protestors

BREAKING
Armed regime forces carried out a brutal attack on a hospital in Ilam.
They broke down hospital doors, stormed inside, and opened fire on civilians and the injured.

What the regime is doing to the people of Iran is a crime against humanity.
Be the voice of the Iranian… pic.twitter.com/QBgWIlByFs

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

From Malcolm, “a dream fulfilled”:

Amid laughter and hugs, they took him to fulfill a dream: to see the sea.

His friends accompanied him to the shore, where happiness was reflected on his face and the waves seemed to celebrate with him.pic.twitter.com/xMmqqagSml

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 2, 2026

One from Luana; Mamdani apparently deleted someone’s tweet he didn’t like:

Hey @NYCMayor – I responded to your tweet yesterday with a few constructive suggestions as you enter office.

It looks like you hid the reply after it got substantial support.

Hopefully I am wrong about that, but multiple people have confirmed they can no longer see the reply.… https://t.co/b0L8jnUIM8 pic.twitter.com/Kwf42jGOmm

— Anthony Pompliano 🌪 (@APompliano) January 4, 2026

From Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office:

My heart goes out to those of you sad to be returning to work today. I’ve been on duty throughout the Christmas break, though my role includes unlimited napping and belly rubs – I recommend you look for a job that offers the same!

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) January 5, 2026

One from my feed; LOOK AT THESE SHEEP!

The Valais Blacknose sheep of the Swiss Alps

📹AI
pic.twitter.com/MMgXulTh33

— Science girl (@sciencegirl) January 5, 2026

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Czech Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was ten years old. https://t.co/NP8Lmcg6E0

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) January 6, 2026

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a mystery: an organism that has been living the same traces on the sea floor for 500 million years, and we don’t know what it is. See the link to the paper.

As well as being a fabulously unresolved biological detective story, it also shows why deep-sea mining is A VERY BAD THING.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-01-05T18:08:57.908Z

Anne Frank’s stepsister just died at 96 (her father Otto, the only survivor of the Holocaust, remarried after the war to a woman who already had a daughter, Eva, who was herself a Holocaust survivor. Born in 1929, Eva was the same age as Anne Frank.

Anne Frank stepsister and Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss dies aged 96

— The Guardian (@theguardian.com) 2026-01-04T19:42:36.732Z

Welcome to CaturSaturday, December 27, 2025: the third day of Koynezaa, the sabbath for Jewish cats, and National Fruitcake Day, the day you are supposed to receive one—which you’ll pass on to someone else. The only subspecies I like is Italian panettone.  This Welsh one, from Wikipedia, reminds me of an elephant dropping, and may well taste like one. . . :

It’s also Visit the Zoo Day, which reminds me of Mencken’s great essay on zoos (1918): A quote showing their scientific uselessness, which still holds:

. . . . But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned men to study this or that. Again the facts blast the theory. No scientific discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals themselves, has ever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology, and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not in the groves of actual learning, but in the yellow journals. He is to biology what the late Camille Flammarion was to astronomy, which is to say, its court jester and reductio ad absurdum. When he leaps into public notice with some new pearl of knowledge, it commonly turns out to be no more than the news that Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian lady walrus, has had her teeth plugged with zinc and is expecting twins. Or that Pishposh, the man-eating alligator, is down with locomotor ataxia. Or that Damon, the grizzly, has just finished his brother Pythias in the tenth round, chewing off his tail, nose and remaining ear

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

Da Nooz:

*According to the WaPo, a scientific article now distinguishes, by lumping together symptoms into clusters, four distinct types of autism. I haven’t read the article yet but I’ll link to it below.

This summer, a team from Princeton and the Flatiron Institute released a paper showing evidence for four distinct autism phenotypes, each defined by its own constellation of behaviors and genetic traits. The dense, data-heavy paper was published with little fanfare. But to the Eastons, who are among the thousands of families who volunteered their medical information for the study, the findings felt seismic.

“This idea that we’re seeing not one but many stories of autism made a lot of sense to me,” Cristina said.

. . . For decades, autism has been described as a spectrum — an elastic term that stretches from nonverbal children to adults with doctorates. Beneath that vast range lies a shared pattern of social communication and behavioral differences, long resistant to neat explanations.

Now, advances in brain imaging, genetics and computational science are revealing discrete biological subtypes. The discoveries could one day lead to more accurate diagnoses and treatments — raising profound questions about whether autism should be seen as something to cure or as an essential facet of human diversity.

There are a few high-impact mutations that alone appear to lead to autism. But researchers now suspect that the majority of cases arise from a subtler genetic architecture — common variants scattered throughout the population that, in certain combinations and under certain environmental conditions, can alter development.

You can read the article for free by clicking below

Here’s a figure I pulled showing the frequency and direction of different types of behaviors in the four identified “clusters” (“DD” is “developmental delay”).

I haven’t yet read this, but it’s always useful, especially given the history of psychiatric diagnoses and the fact that this malady appears to usually reflect the action multiple genes of small effect, to be skeptical.  As always, the conclusions will be vetted and tested by other groups of workers. Stay tuned. Oh, and if what was previously recognized as a “spectrum” is now four fairly discrete classes, perhaps this will prompt people to recognize that biological sex is not a spectrum, either, but falls into two easily-recognized classes.  Naah, won’t happen.

*In October of 2022 I gave a very enthusiastic to the novel Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, and I’ve simply forgotten about the book, which is terrific.  It’s a fictionalized account of Shakespeare’s composition of Hamlet (he did have a son named Hamnet, who died young), but the bard himself makes almost no appearance in the novel, which largely recounts (with a bit of magical realism) the doings of his family while Shakespeare was away in London. Now it’s apparently been made into an eponymous movie. And, according to Sarah Wildman of the NYT, a very good movie, as we can see in her op-ed, “This is why ‘Hamnet’ made me cry.”

And yet some of the best art is art that does precisely this sort of imagining, refusing to look away from the very human condition of grief.

This season, the standouts of such work are “Hamnet,” the film directed by Chloé Zhao and adapted from the magnificent book by Maggie O’Farrell, and the surprise best-selling novel “The Correspondent,” by Virginia Evans.

“Hamnet” is an imagined narrative surrounding the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, in this telling, to the bubonic plague. In Ms. O’Farrell’s mind, it is this death that inspired “Hamlet,” the tragic play. But the brilliance of both book and film is to focus on the pain not of one of the world’s most famous men, but that of Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife.

. . . As heart rending as the scenes of illness and death are — and they are remarkable, in their rendering, the full-bodied scream of a mother who has released her own child from this mortal coil — part of the reason “Hamnet” had me still sobbing in my seat as the credits rolled is how well it captures the lingering drudgery of grief, the dull way in which it silvers the hair and deadens the eyes, the way in which time means so little. It captures completely how the very fact that a person could be here one day, and simply gone the next, scrambles sanity.

“I may run mad with it. Even now, a year on,” Shakespeare says to Agnes, both in the text and the film. “A year is nothing,” Agnes replies, dry-eyed, dry-toned. “It’s an hour or a day. We may never stop looking for him. I don’t think I would want to.” And then it all makes so much sense to see the ghost of Hamlet onstage, to hear the famous soliloquies rendered as not a call for applause but instead, perhaps, a means of resurrection.

In approaching “Hamnet,” novel or film, you know you are preparing for a story both about creation and about loss, about child death and about creativity.

Wildman also extols, for different reasons, the recent novel The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (you can read the archived piece here). The book is, says Wildman, “lauded for its remarkable depiction of a septuagenarian woman seeking to find her way in the world, through her own adoption story, her estrangement from her children and her former husband, and finding (however belatedly) new love.” I’ve ordered it via interlibrary loan.

And I will definitely see the movie “Hamnet”, for, says Wildman, the movie rivals the book in quality, and I see that the reviews are nearly all positive.  Here’s the trailer:

*I’d never hjeard of Rook T. Winchester before, but reader Barry sent me a link to his piece on the Substack site Closer to the Edge, where Rook is an editor. The piece is called “A letter to Bari Weiss” (the subtitle is “The only thing you pulled is the mask off yourself”) and it’s a passionate attack on her decision to hold the “60 Minutes” segment about the U.S. sending Venezuelan immigrants to captivity at the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador.  Winchester does seem to think that the episode was pulled after it aired, though, which is not the case. Even in Canada, it aired only on the CBS app before it was taken down; it was never aired in the U.S.

Winchester:

Your explanation for pulling the 60 Minutes CECOT report wasn’t just weak. It was the kind of weakness that tries to pass itself off as seriousness, mistaking hesitation for wisdom and calling it leadership because admitting fear would be too honest.

Calling a fully vetted, corroborated investigation into torture “not ready” because the alleged torturers didn’t get enough airtime is not editorial judgment. It’s hostage negotiation with yourself. You didn’t uncover errors. You didn’t dispute facts. You didn’t challenge a single sworn testimony. You just decided that reality needed a permission slip from power before it could be broadcast.

That’s not journalism. That’s customer service for monsters.

. . .And the hypocrisy. My god, the hypocrisy. You made a career out of lecturing institutions about cowardice, censorship, and the moral rot of elite gatekeeping, then walked into one of the biggest newsrooms on earth and reenacted the exact behavior you built your brand trashing. Free speech, it turns out, is sacred right up until it becomes inconvenient for your job title. When the pressure arrived, courage was suddenly “not ready.”

Here’s the funniest part, though. It didn’t even work. The transcript exists. The testimony exists. The evidence exists. The reporting exists. The only thing you successfully buried was your own credibility. You didn’t protect CBS News. You stapled your name to the moment it flinched. History won’t remember the delay. It’ll remember who grabbed the wheel and swerved.

So let’s drop the pleasantries. If you can’t stand behind your newsroom when it publishes verified reporting that implicates power, you have no business running a news organization. If your first instinct when faced with documented human rights abuse is to ask whether the perpetrators feel sufficiently heard, then you are not an editor. You are a liability with a press badge.

For the sake of CBS News, its journalists, and the public that still believes journalism is supposed to punch up instead of bow down, you should resign.

It’s a bit over the top, but does make the point that no facts are in dispute, and asking yet another White House employee to badmouth the report adds nothing to what was already scheduled to be aired.

*Several editors of the Free Press give their funniest news items of the year. (I swear, the only reason to subscribe to this site is for the humor, and that mostly from Nellie Bowles). Here are two:

Oliver Wiseman, Deputy Editor

It has been a heavy year in news, but 2025 was not without its lighter moments. After all, this was the year someone known as “Big Balls” briefly held a very important government job. And the year that the leader of the free world sprayed an Islamist fighter turned Syrian president with cologne and asked him how many wives he has. And the year that FIFA, an organization charged with running international soccer tournaments, launched its own “Peace Prize” and awarded it to—who else?—Donald Trump.

But my personal favorite moment of levity this year came in September, with the publication of Kamala Harris’s election memoir, 107 Days. The book is not supposed to be funny, but it is. As I wrote at the time, the former vice president’s day-by-day account of her doomed White House bid is a petty burn book. It is strangely authentic. She roasts assorted senior Democrats (an odd thing to do if you plan on running for president again, as she seems to). When she’s not outwardly aggressive, she’s spectacularly passive-aggressive. And no one is spared, including her poor husband, Doug. The most entertaining entry in the book is for October 20, 16 days before the election and Harris’s birthday. The former vice president gives a detailed rundown of all the ways in which her poor Doug failed to meet the moment that was her 60th. It is amusing. Whether she meant it to be, I’m not so sure.

Another funny thing: The book tour is still happening. Harris has recently added dates through April next year, featuring a few stops in swing states. How will this work? Will she go straight from plugging 107 Days into the Iowa caucus, where she can start gathering material for the sequel?

River Page, Reporter

On Black Friday, a raccoon broke into an Ashland, Virginia, ABC store, got wasted, and passed out in the bathroom. There’s no footage of the incident because, apparently, the little guy—nicknamed “Rocky” by county officials—came in through the ceiling and “took the cameras down with him.” However, there is a hilarious and, for some of us, relatable photo of him passed out next to the toilet. Sadly, Rocky, after sobering up, was rereleased into the wild.

He doesn’t belong there.

Just a month before Rocky’s drunken escapade, researchers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock published an article claiming that raccoons are beginning to show early signs of domestication, like reductions in snout length. Rocky, as well as many of his compatriots, clearly wants to join our society—and he and they should be able to. Yes, Rocky has his issues. But there are resources available. He can go to Alcoholics Anonymous and smoke cigarettes in the basement of a Methodist Church. I have an uncle who did that and it kind of worked. The point is, it’s Christmas, and nobody should be left out in the cold, even raccoons. If you’re craving eggnog, they’re craving eggnog. Let them in.

*It’s the holidays, not much is happening, and I want to put in a bit more upbeat news until 2026 comes crashing in. One upbeat item from the Associated Press is the successful completion of a pregnancy that’s not only rare but usually doomed: an ectopic (or extrauterine) pregnancy.

Suze Lopez holds her baby boy on her lap and marvels at the remarkable way he came into the world.

Before little Ryu was born, he developed outside his mom’s womb, hidden by a basketball-sized ovarian cyst — a dangerous situation so rare that his doctors plan to write about the case for a medical journal.

Just 1 in 30,000 pregnancies occur in the abdomen instead of the uterus, and those that make it to full term “are essentially unheard of — far, far less than 1 in a million,” said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, where Ryu was born. “I mean, this is really insane.”

Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse who lives in Bakersfield, California, didn’t know she was pregnant with her second child until days before giving birth.

When her belly began to grow earlier this year, she thought it was her ovarian cyst getting bigger. Doctors had been monitoring the mass since her 20s, leaving it in place after removing her right ovary and another cyst.

Lopez experienced none of the usual pregnancy symptoms, such as morning sickness, and never felt kicks. Though she didn’t have a period, her cycle is irregular and she sometimes goes years without one.

Lopez experienced none of the usual pregnancy symptoms, such as morning sickness, and never felt kicks. Though she didn’t have a period, her cycle is irregular and she sometimes goes years without one.

. . . . Shortly after the game, Lopez began feeling unwell and sought help at Cedars-Sinai. It turned out she had dangerously high blood pressure, which the medical team stabilized. They also did blood work and gave her an ultrasound and an MRI. The scans found that her uterus was empty, but a nearly full-term fetus in an amniotic sac was hiding in a small space in her abdomen, near her liver.

“It did not look like it was directly invading any organs,” Ozimek said. “It looked like it was mostly implanted on the sidewall of the pelvis, which is also very dangerous but more manageable than being implanted in the liver.”

Dr. Cara Heuser, a maternal-fetal specialist in Utah not involved with the case, said almost all pregnancies that implant outside the uterus — called ectopic pregnancies — go on to rupture and hemorrhage if not removed. Most commonly, they occur in the fallopian tubes.

A 2023 medical journal article by doctors in Ethiopia described another abdominal pregnancy in which the mother and baby survived, pointing out that fetal mortality can be as high as 90% in such cases and birth defects are seen in about 1 in 5 surviving babies.

But Lopez and her son beat all the odds.

On Aug. 18, a medical team delivered the 8-pound (3.6-kilogram) baby while she was under full anesthesia, removing the cyst during the same surgery. She lost nearly all of her blood, Ozimek said, but the team got the bleeding under control and gave her transfusions.

Since then, Ryu — named after a baseball player and a character in the Street Fighter video game series — has been healthy and thriving. His parents love watching him interact with his 18-year-old sister, Kaila, and say he completes their family.

With Ryu’s first Christmas approaching, Lopez describes feeling blessed beyond measure.

“I do believe in miracles,” she said, looking down at her baby. “God gave us this gift — the best gift ever.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, out on the veranda with Szaron, shows some literary acumen:

Andrzej: What are you guys doing here?
Hili: Waiting for Godot to let us in.

In Polish:

Ja: Co tu robicie?
Hili: Czekamy na Godota, żeby nam drzwi otworzył.

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

From Give Me a Sign:

From Things With Faces; a sprouted potato looks like a duck:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

Masih is quiet but here’s J. K. Rowling not writing on sex. (I have enough socks, thank you, and they all match because I buy just one type.)

Yesterday my son pulled a box of new socks out of his stocking and said ‘ah, this is great because I’m down to only two matching pairs.’ I had no idea we failed to teach him that socks can be purchased by the prospective wearer themselves. https://t.co/mSkoca5bAL

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 26, 2025

So you thought math couldn’t be corrupted by sacralizing indigenous culture? Think again:

& what *is* indigenous math?

U count to 10 & then deliver a religious sermon

Specifically, tell kids that “Sky Woman” will save everyone from the apocalypse…but only if they accept the Good News of Sky Woman’s “creation story”

literally flat out creationism

Thanks @CBCNews pic.twitter.com/aYYYXfG9Vo

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) December 25, 2025

From Malcolm, a tweet about the good side of barnacles. Sound up!

Listen to the barnacles sounds

[📹 its_mad_science]
pic.twitter.com/rkenSpQXM6

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 21, 2025

Two from my feed.  First, a sad kitty:

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/7bXcvOZmYd

— LAnDo NIFFIRG™️🇨🇦 (@llandoniffirg) December 26, 2025

Arrant ignorance, but you don’t need to go to college to learn this stuff.

Still one of the best videos made here.

I’m sure that even today most people at these universities don’t understand what they’re shouting about and why they hate Jews. pic.twitter.com/JUWXpW2IpP

— Eli Afriat 🇮🇱🎗 (@EliAfriatISR) December 26, 2025

One I posted on The Auschwitz Memorial:

A rare survivor, and I can’t find a record of his death. If he’s still alive, he’s 101 today. https://t.co/DMJsAJBMEF

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) December 27, 2025

Two from Dr. Cobb. I used to post about treehoppers because they are plain weird (we don’t know what these shapes are really for), and here’s a weird one:

Brazilian treehopper, is a small, bizarre-looking insect known for the cluster of hollow, ball-like appendages on its head, which are extensions of its pronotum. These growths likely confuse predators, making the insect appear larger or harder to eat.#science #biology#Entomology

— Tim Edwards (@timzero4.bsky.social) 2025-12-26T18:58:46.394Z

Matthew asked me if this were true, and I said “YES!” Though it’s less common now than it used to be.  This is from a whole Wikipedia article on the subject.

— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-12-24T15:37:52.333Z