Category: Szaron

Saturday: Hili dialogue

December 27, 2025 • 6:45 am

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. . . :

zingyyellow…! from Wales Cymru UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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”).

(From paper): b, To demonstrate differences in phenotypic patterns, we assessed the propensity of each class toward seven phenotype categories. Values close to 1 indicate that the majority of phenotypes within the category were significantly and positively enriched for the phenotype domain compared to probands in other classes (indicating higher difficulties), and values close to −1 indicate significant negative enrichment or depletion for a given phenotype domain compared to probands in other classes (indicating lower difficulties). Sample sizes for all analyses shown were as follows: Broadly affected, n = 554 (magenta); Social/behavioral, n = 1,976 (green); Mixed ASD with DD, n = 1,002 (blue); Moderate challenges, n = 1,860 (orange); unaffected siblings, n = 1,972.

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.”

You can ignore the last line; all’s well that ends well.

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.)

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

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

Two from my feed.  First, a sad kitty:

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

One I posted on The Auschwitz Memorial:

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

Friday: Hili dialogue

December 19, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, December 19, 2025, the fifth day of Hanukkah and National Hard Candy Day. Here’s a short video about complex hard candies are made:

It’s also National Oatmeal Muffin Day (ugh, but they’re better than rhubarb muffines), Holly Day, National Emo Day, and National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day. Why do people wear them (see here for a panoply of them)? Chat GPT gives a long answer which is summarized this way:

Ugly Christmas sweaters are about irony, humor, nostalgia, and togetherness—a way to make the holidays less polished and more playful.

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

Da Nooz:

Nooz will be truncated today as I was busy all day yesterday, when I prepare most of the dialogues.

*The suspect in the killing of two people at Brown University (and perhaps the killing of an MIT professor) was found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire. I don’t know how they tracked him to that place, but it was surrounded by cops and as they closed in, the suspect apparently killed himself.

The body of a man suspected in the killing of two students at Brown University and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor was found in a storage unit in New Hampshire on Thursday night, law enforcement officials said.

The authorities had swarmed the storage facility, in Salem, N.H., earlier in the evening in pursuit of a man wanted in connection with the two deadly attacks, which had stunned New England and set off days of frustrated searching.

Federal investigators obtained a warrant for a unit that they believed was linked to the person they were seeking, according to one official with knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing matter. Col. Oscar Perez, the police chief in Providence, R.I., where Brown’s campus is, said the suspect had died by suicide.

Colonel Perez identified the person as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente. He said the man was a 48-year-old former Brown student whose last known address was in Miami, and that the motive was not clear for the attack at Brown or the shooting Monday night of the M.I.T. professor in Brookline, Mass. But Christina H. Paxson, Brown’s president, said it was “safe to assume” that the suspect had, during a brief stint as a graduate student in the early 2000s, spent considerable time in the campus building where the Brown attack unfolded.

And the MIT connection (apparently a similar rental car was seen near MIT, as well as the suspect himself):

Federal prosecutors said Thursday that the suspect in the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor was his former classmate.

Claudio Manuel Neves Valente had attended the same academic program in Portugal as Nuno F.G. Loureiro, the M.I.T. professor, from 1995 to 2000. Dr. Loureiro, 47, graduated with a degree in physics from the Instituto Superior Técnico in 2000, according to his M.I.T. profile.

. . .Security footage showed Mr. Neves Valente within a half mile of Dr. Loureiro’s residence, the authorities said.

Ms. Foley said Mr. Neves Valente drove to Salem, N.H., and entered a storage facility within hours of shooting Dr. Loureiro. He was seen in security footage entering a storage unit, wearing the same clothes he had worn in Brookline.

I’m amazed at how quickly the cops can apprehend these suspects. One of the factors appears to be the presence of security cameras everywhere. While you may consider that an infringement on privacy, if it can keep mass murderers at bay, it’s okay with me.

*I’m not quite sure what this means yet, but it’s going to cause a fracas: the NYT reports that “Trump moves to end access to gender-related care for minors.”

The federal government on Thursday acted to put an end to gender-related care for minors across the nation, threatening to pull federal funding from any hospital that offered such treatment.

The move reflects the laserlike focus on the issue by President Trump, who in his first days in office called gender treatments for minors “a stain on our Nation’s history.” The administration’s action is not just a regulatory shift but the latest signal that the federal government does not recognize even the existence of people whose gender identity does not align with their sex at birth.

If finalized, the proposed new rules, announced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a news conference Thursday morning, would effectively shut down hospitals that failed to comply. Medicare and Medicaid account for nearly 45 percent of spending on hospital care, according to KFF, a nonprofit health policy research group.

It follows other efforts by the administration to pull back from or eliminate policies that recognize gender identities beyond being born male or female.

“We want our hospitals returning to healing, not harming, the patients entrusted in their care, or they’re going to pay a very steep price,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said at the news conference.

The new rules come one day after a divided House of Representatives voted to approve legislation that would criminalize gender transition treatments for minors and would subject providers to up to 10 years in federal prison. The House is expected to pass another bill Thursday that would bar Medicaid payments for gender-related treatments for minors. The two bills have little chance of passing in the Senate but showed how far the ultraconservative Republican majority was willing to go to deliver on President Trump’s campaign promise to end such medical treatment.

But the proposed rules go much farther, by trying to force hospitals nationwide to stop providing the treatments altogether. A 60-day public comment period will follow, and the rules will most likely be subject to legal challenges before going into effect. If finalized, the rule would be “a death sentence — hospitals have such razor-thin margins as it is,” said Caroline Farrell, a former C.M.S. lawyer, and now an attorney with the firm Foley Hoag. The proposed rule “means just forcing them to stop the care,” she said.

Gender-related treatments for minors, which can include puberty-blocking drugs, hormone therapies and, in rarer cases, surgeries, have been a subject of fierce debate worldwide but are endorsed by most medical groups in the United States.

I haven’t read the bill itself, but it seems a bit harsh to prohibit every single bit of medical care related to gender.  What about children who are deeply distressed to the point of suicide (not “suicidality”) and need at least psychiatric care. Andresumably children with “precocious puberty,” a medical condition in which you begin puberty way too early, can still be treated with blockers.  I’ve often said that blockers, other hormones, or surgery should not be given to children with gender dysphoria until they are of age to make a decision (usually past the age of puberty), but surely there must be valid medical exceptions. And is psychiatry—part of medicine—off-limits as well?  It should not be, because gender dysphoria should be treated with compassionate but objective therapeutic (not “affirmative care”), which can be considered a medical intervention.

*The WaPo has an editorial-board op-ed wholeheartedly endorsing Trump’s oil blockade on Venezuela.

A Russian oil tanker en route to Venezuela turned around last week after the U.S. military seized another tanker, full of Caracas crude, bound for Cuba and China. That’s how deterrence is supposed to work, and it underscores why President Donald Trump has announced a full blockade of all sanctioned tankers going in and out of Venezuela. He is moving to choke off the lifeblood of Nicolás Maduro’s illegitimate regime in hopes that the socialist dictator abdicates without firing a shot.

There are three significant risks. First, a blockade risks provoking a confrontation on the high seas that could drag the U.S. into a land war in South America. Second, Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis will worsen if Trump stops the export of oil, which could trigger a fresh wave of mass migration toward America’s southern border. Third, if Maduro goes, there’s no guarantee whoever replaces him will be friendlier to U.S. interests.

Nevertheless, the oil blockade is a more coherent and legally defensible strategy to bring about regime change in Venezuela than continuing airstrikes on alleged drug smugglers, which have killed at least 95 people.

The administration frames its Venezuela policy as a drug war against “narco-terrorists,” and Trump this week issued an executive order declaring fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction.” That added to the atmospherics, but according to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s annual reports, Venezuela plays little role in the fentanyl trade. It’s far more enmeshed with cocaine. Considering how poorly Iraq went, another president playing the WMD card gives us déjà vu.

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair that Trump will keep striking boats until “Maduro cries uncle.” But whatever product these speedboats are moving is nothing compared to oil for Maduro’s bottom line. If the U.S. really wants to drive a wedge between Maduro and his generals, squeezing oil exports will make it harder for the regime to meet payroll.

Again I’m conflicted (wonky day today).  Yes, we have sanctions to prevent Venezuelan oil from reaching other countries, mainly Cuba and China, but do we have the right to do this to foster regime change? Trump, of course, casts this as a way to keep drugs from reaching the U.S., but that’s not the only aim.  I would like to see Trump at least say that we will NOT send ground troops into Venezuela, nor start a ground war, and I would like, as far as possible, proof that small boats incinerated by our military are carrying drugs.

*Luana called my attention to a piece in a usually satirical site, the Babbline Beaver, about the arrest of canceled professor Francis Widdowson, formerly of Mount Royal University in Canada. Widdowson’s cancellation, which seems unjustified, is based on her questioning whether a Canadian Residential school was “genocidal, and whether a number of bodies of children are buried in unmarked graves around those schools. (there’s no evidence for that, but she was demonized anyway and eventually fired.) Anyway, Widdowson was arrested for trespassing into a campus lawn after she was invited to give a talk about the “graves” and was disinvited by the university disinvited her.  As Luana says, Widdowson “decided to go anyway and speak to students outside.  They banished her from campus and prohibited her from entering.  She showed up anyway and was mobbed then arrested.” From the BB:

Those of you tracking the decaying state of free speech and respect for facts and reason in our woke-mind-virus infected neighbors to the north are probably familiar with the Kamloops Indian Residential School graves hoax. You can read a detailed summary here.

This is a case study of moral panic triggered by fake science peddled by tribal grifters infused with anti-Catholic bigotry. Since launched, it has been adopted as a colonialist-atonement cause célèbre by the Canadian press, academia, and government.

The narrative roiling Canada for over four years asserts that ground-penetrating radar revealed unmarked graves of 215 native children killed at an Indian residential school in British Columbia formerly operated by the Catholic Church.

Before we go further no human remains have been excavated and confirmed. Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the hoax continue working overtime to deflect attempts to dig up the apple orchard that they claim is full of dead children.

Do a search on “Kamloops Graves” and you will be inundated with sensationalist stories from both mainstream media outlets and . In a campaign that would impress George Orwell, this bit of fabulism has been elevated into a species of “my truth” that will live forever in the bowels of leading Artificial Intelligence training sets.

Standing against this onslaught has been Dr. Frances Widdowson, the formerly tenured then fired professor from Mount Royal University. Her recently released book “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us” has mobs of “anti-denialist” indigenous rights protestors foaming at the mouth.

Widdowson was released without charges.  She is an abrasive person, and when I met her I didn’t find her very congenial, but that’s of no matter: she’s been heavily demonized for simply asserting what is true: we don’t know if there are a gazillion dead Native American children buried in unmarked graves in a Canadian residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. There is no evidence for the claim, but in Canada it’s simply unacceptable to even ask that question. And the Canadians won’t permit people to actually try to verify the assertion by looking for bodies. Read the link given above to see what we do and don’t know.

*Trump announced yesterday that he had settled “eight wars in ten months,” and that surely includes the war in Gaza. But the war in Gaza is far from being settled: there is a precarious cease fire and, as the WSJ reports, Hamas is not upholding its promise to disarm and disband.

President Trump’s phased peace plan for Gaza is struggling to move beyond its initial stage, hitting obstacles in Hamas’s refusal to disarm and Israel’s unwillingness to retreat from the enclave until that happens.

The 20-point peace plan that Trump touted as bringing peace to the Middle East helped end two years of brutal warfare and achieve the release of the remaining living Israeli hostages as well as the bodies of all but one of the dead. The initial phase left Gaza divided in two, with Israel controlling a little over half of the enclave and Hamas the rest.

The second phase of the plan requires Hamas to give up governance, disarm and transfer control of the territory to an international force of troops and a technocratic committee of Palestinians who would run it. A Board of Peace, chaired by Trump, would oversee the process. Israel would retreat from most of Gaza and the massive undertaking of rebuilding the shattered land would commence.

But Hamas still controls half of Gaza and refuses to disarm, creating a domino effect that stalls the plan and risks leaving it in limbo between war and peace.

Most countries won’t send troops into Hamas territory as long as the U.S.-designated terrorist group remains there. Some countries are considering sending troops into the territory controlled by Israel, but many, especially Arab countries, don’t want to appear to be supporting an Israeli occupation.

It is a problem that many observers predicted.

“I think the most important sticking point here is reality,” said Ofer Shelah, director of national security policy research at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. “From the get-go, the whole idea of what’s beyond phase one was very vague, but this U.S. administration does not do details, does not do complicated, and does not do long term.”

Crikey, even I predicted that this would happen! You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that this would happen given that no other Arab state is interested in taking part in the pacification.  The war will not be settled, nor Gaza reconstructed, until Hamas disbands and disarms, and they don’t see any reason why they should.  Until they do, the war cannot be considered nearly over, and the vaunted “two-state solution” is a no-go.  I wonder if all those countries like Canada and the UK which have recognized Palestine as a sovereign state are happy recognizing a sovereign state ruled by terrorists.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron seem to be in the closet:

Andrzej: What are you doing here?
Hili: Keeping my distance from the crowd.

In Polish:

Ja: Co tu robisz?
Hili: Unikam tłumów.

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

From Jesus of the Day:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Chicago Born and Raised:

From Masih: three women (two of them with an eye shot out) bring Iran to court, but in Argentina. The English translation from Farsi is given first:

Three women are set to bring the Islamic Republic to trial in a court in Argentina on charges of “crimes against humanity.” Kowsar Eftekhari and Mersedeh Shahinkar, two eye-injured victims of the Woman, Life, Freedom Revolution, and Mahsa Piraei, the justice-seeking daughter of Minoo Majidi, are the three names present in this case as plaintiffs.

This request to initiate criminal investigations has been filed in Argentina’s judiciary with the assistance of the “Iran Human Rights Documentation Center” and the support of the Strategic Accountability Project at the Atlantic Council.

This complaint requests that the Argentine court investigate the role of senior members of the intelligence apparatus, military forces and police, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and also civilian officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s government in this widespread and organized attack against civilians. This indictment names 40 individuals who have committed crimes against humanity, including targeted blinding and murder, but their identities are currently being kept confidential.

The Islamic Republic had previously been tried and convicted in this country for the bombing of the Jewish center in Argentina.

Since the request is only for criminal investigations and not a civil lawsuit, the plaintiffs have no claim for financial damages.

Powerful women who now stand to reveal the hideous and criminal face of the Islamic Republic to the world more than ever.

But I wonder if anything can be accomplished by initiating a court case against Iran in Argentina.

From Luana. Vavilov died at 55 after being put in a gulag by the Soviets. His crime? Sticking up for genetics and opposing the ridiculous theories of the charlatan Lysenko. This man is a hero.

From Simon, who says, “I guess i found something i agree with him on.”

From Malcolm, a very fast dog:

One from my feed; a flying (or rather, gliding) fish:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

https://x.com/Evolutionistrue/status/2001969370864783746

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. The first one he describes as “Munching its way through condensed spirals of chloroplasts”.  I seems quite full at the end!

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress – though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known"- Bertrand Russell, 1976.Time-lapse video of Vampyrella lateritia eating Spirogyra algae from Science Source/Oliver Skibbe. 🦠

— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2025-12-17T16:53:05.725Z

Clearly from Matthew’s new biography of Crick, which I’m well into now (it’s superb):

Was Rosalind Franklin a secret football fan? Cryptic note in her US address book.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-12-18T10:44:10.663Z

Sunday: Hili dialogue

December 14, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, December 14, 2025, and National Bouillabaisse Day.  It is very cold today: 2°F, which is -17°C.  Your hands start freezing within 15 seconds of exposure (I forgot my gloves!).

Hanukkah starts tonight at sundown and ends on Monday, December 22.  Here’s Gal Gadot and Noa Tishby, two of my heartthrobs, discussing the holiday:

Here’s a bowl of that fish soup from Wikipedia, with the caption, “A version by three-star Lyon chef Paul Bocuse from his restaurant ‘Le Sud’.” You can bet this will cost you some. . .

Arnaud 25, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Screwdriver Day (the drink), Monkey Day, Roast Chestnuts Day (where can I find them?), and National Biscuits and Gravy Day, a great indigenous American food.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 14 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Two shootings occurred yesterday: one at Brown University killed two people and injured nine, and at last ten people were killed by snipers on Bondi Beach, Australia, during a Jewish celebration; it appears to be a targeted attack. More in tomorrow’s Nooz.  Things are horrible everywhere.

*The government closed because Congress could not agree on whether to extend Obamacare subsidies. Now that Congress is back in session, it’s clear that this doesn’t mean a compromise is in the works. The Senate has rejected both Democratic and Republican plans, guaranteeing that premiums will go up at the end of the month, and presages yet another government closure in 2026.

The Senate rejected dueling health care bills Thursday, all but guaranteeing that Obamacare subsidies used by more than 20 million Americans will lapse at the end of the year.

Senators voted 51-48 on advancing a GOP health care plan that would have expanded health savings accounts as an alternative to the expiring tax credits. Democrats’ plan to extend the Covid-era enhanced subsidies for three years also received a 51-48 vote. Both proposals fell well short of the 60 votes needed to vault a key procedural hurdle.

The votes both went largely, but not entirely, along party lines. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only Republican to oppose the GOP plan. Meanwhile, Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Dan Sullivan of Alaska voted to advance the Democrats’ health care plan. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who would have voted for the GOP plan, missed the votes.

. . . Thursday’s Senate votes were part of a deal Senate Majority Leader John Thune made with Democrats to end the government shutdown that ended last month. Senators have widely acknowledged for weeks that the votes were aimed more at messaging than forcing through passable bipartisan compromise.

Still, a deal in the Senate was likely Congress’ best shot at preventing the subsidies from lapsing and raising premiums for many Americans who buy their insurance directly through Affordable Care Act exchanges. While the lapse will not completely eliminate the tax credits, they will revert back to pre-pandemic levels and many families could still see their premiums rise by $1,000 a year or more.

If you look at how much people’s healthcare premiums will go up if a bill doesn’t pass, a fair estimate would be a doubling of the monthly rate, but for some people it will be much more—perhaps fourfold.  It’s not right to play hob with people’s health for political gain, but it looks as if a compromise is not in the works.

*Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan celebrates “Ten years of marriage equality“: the right of gays to marry which, a great moral advance, Sullivan largely helped to forge.  He assesses what the movement gained and what it lost.

And then, of course, we’ve had ten years of nationwide marriage equality since 2015’s Obergefell decision — a cause I imagined, helped kick-start in 1989, and spent a quarter century arguing everywhere I could. It included my own civil marriage and, in true American fashion, my sad but amicable divorce more than a decade later.

“If you live long enough” is a cliché for a reason. And, against the odds, thanks to protease inhibitors, I did live long enough to see these two evolutions in media and society unfold. “Did they do more good than harm?” is a question I’ve found myself pondering in my third trimester of life. The media revolution? A truly mixed bag, I’d say, especially in the iPhone and now AI era. A story for another time.

But gay marriage? Personally, I feel I failed in my own journey, but nonetheless tried hard, and treasure the enduring love and deep friendship I still have with my ex-husband. My marriage helped me mature, grounded me more firmly, taught me what sacrifice and generosity can be. Maybe it will happen again.

And collectively? A much higher grade surely — with the caveat that we’ve only had a decade of evidence. My opponents feared it would destabilize marriage more generally. It didn’t. Marriage rates were 6.9 per 1,000 in 2015 and 6.1 today — a decline in line with the previous half-century. Not great, but there’s no sign that gay marriage had any serious impact. Divorce rates? They have actually improved since 2015: from 3.1 to 2.4 per 1,000 in 2023.One small contributing factor is that divorce rates among gay men are actually lower than that for straight couples. Who predicted that? Certainly not Bill Kristol.

How has marriage affected these gay men and lesbians? It’s been a boon. Married couples have higher household incomes, lower poverty rates, higher levels of employment, better health than unmarried ones, higher home-ownership rates — and report greater social acceptance. Gay men have been thriving in education. . . 

. . . . The queer activists, of course, loudly insisted that same-sex couples rejected the institution of marriage and would never join it. But the number of married gay men and lesbians more than doubled from 390,000 in 2015 to 823,000 now; and nearly 60 percent of same-sex cohabiting couples are now married, compared with 40 percent in domestic partnerships.How has this reform been greeted in the country at large? Gallup shows that support has grown from 58 to 69 percent. In 2024, the GOP removed opposition to gay marriage in its platform. A married gay man with two sons is now the Treasury Secretary in a hard-right Republican administration — a more senior position than any openly gay Dem has ever held.

As social reforms go, it’s hard to do better than this. It sure hasn’t been a panacea for marriage as a whole, but it has shored up the thing a bit and broadened its base. And then there are things for which there are no statistics. The young mercifully don’t know much of the immense psychic pain, deep spiritual anguish, emotional trauma, and intense self-hatred that the past contained for so many of us — a pain far worse for the countless generations before.

And the downside, involving the alphabet characterization:

The trouble, of course, is that success breeds its own set of problems. Successful civil rights movements — think of the mid-1960s — can radicalize and curdle. And as most normie gays got on with their lives, queer extremists duly took over the gay infrastructure and institutions, and the era of more general woke madness set in.

The goal was to re-marginalize us as “queer” again, to indoctrinate kids with leftist lies about human biology, and create an entirely fake history of gay and lesbian rights. Dissent was punished, old leaders ousted, and an ever-expanding alphabet of ever-more bizarre and niche identities — often approaching mental illness — replaced any idea of gay and lesbian identity.

They changed the flag and merged its colors with the BLM movement; they pioneered untested medical experiments on pre-pubescent children with gender dysphoria, including gay and lesbian kids; they sterilized them and rendered many incapable of orgasm for life; they perverted the English language — “chest-feeding” anyone? — and tried to abolish the whole idea of homosexuality as a distinct human experience, in favor of their generalized, post-modern, intersectional queerness. And they replaced the principles of live-and-let-live by forcing others to take the knee to their radicalism. No-enemies-to-the-left syndrome became a pandemic. Sore winners.

. . . I remain deeply proud of what we did. Nothing will ever take that away. The current madness is based on lies about human nature, and lies always fail in the end. We will emerge from it because it’s built on sand. Meanwhile, you carry on, hoping some kind of moderation will happen, but seeing no sign of it at all. I realize don’t belong in this intolerant “LGBTQIA+” community any more. And it doesn’t want me or any gay men like me. The price of success is always failure, I suppose. But the success was real.’

Well, I apologize for the long excerpt, but Sullivan is an eloquent exponent of the unpredicted attacks on gays by the whole “intolerant “LGBTQIA+” community.”  Still, he did well in life. No matter how much I disagree with Sullivan over things (increasingly it’s limited to religion as he moves towards the center), I could never hope to have improved the well-being of society as much as he did by promoting gay marriage. And that will not go away.

*After several years of calling Israel genocidal while keeping silent on Hamas, Amnesty International finally admitted that Hamas committed crimes against humanity (h/t Stephen). It’s a measure of the degree of anti-semitism that this happened only this week.  Amnesty International, like Doctors Without Borders (DwB) or even the UN itself, has a horrible record of persistently criticizing Israel and ignoring Hamas, though it did accuse Hamas once of committing “war crimes”, ignoring the humanitarian crimes.

Amnesty International on Thursday accused Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups of crimes against humanity, including extermination, during and after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war.

“Palestinian armed groups committed violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and crimes against humanity during their attacks in southern Israel that started on 7 October 2023,” the human rights watchdog said in a 173-page report.

The group has previously accused Hamas and others of committing war crimes.

War crimes are serious violations of international law against civilians and combatants during armed conflict. Crimes against humanity can occur in peacetime and include torture, rape and discrimination, be it racial, ethnic, cultural, religious or gender-based. They involve “a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.”

Amnesty has also accused Israel of genocide, an accusation that Jerusalem vehemently denies. However, Amnesty said any Israeli wrongdoing, or Palestinian groups’ crimes against other Palestinians, were outside the scope of this report.

Amnesty said that the mass killing of civilians in Israel on October 7 amounted “to the crime against humanity of extermination.” Among the other crimes listed were murder, imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearance, and sexual violence.

Hamas rejected the report, saying it contained “inaccuracies and contradictions.”

Israel also critiqued the report, noting that it came out more than two years after the attack, with the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Oren Marmorstein, saying it “falls fa

Crikey! They did not even condemn Hamas for the October 7, 2023 massacre of civilians as well as kidnapping.  What has happened to organizations like Amnesty International and DwB? How did they lose their moral compass?

*The NYT reports that the CIA enlisted a team of climbers in 1965 to put a plutonium-generated device on the top of the famous Himalayan peak Nanda Devi, designed to spy on China. There’s a lot of plutonium in it, but it was abandoned and never used. It’s still spewing radioactivity somewhere on the peak:

The mission demanded the utmost secrecy.

A team of American climbers, handpicked by the C.I.A. for their mountaineering skills — and their willingness to keep their mouths shut — were fighting their way up one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas.

Step by step, they trudged up the razor-toothed ridge, the wind slamming their faces, their crampons clinging precariously to the ice. One misplaced foot, one careless slip, and it was a 2,000-foot drop, straight down.

Just below the peak, the Americans and their Indian comrades got everything ready: the antenna, the cables and, most crucially, the SNAP-19C, a portable generator designed in a top-secret lab and powered by radioactive fuel, similar to the ones used for deep sea and outer space exploration.The plan was to spy on China, which had just detonated an atomic bomb. Stunned, the C.I.A. dispatched the climbers to set up all this gear — including the 50-pound, beach-ball-size nuclear device — on the roof of the world to eavesdrop on Chinese mission control.

But right as the climbers were about to push for the summit, the weather went haywire. The wind howled, the clouds descended, a blizzard swept in and the top of the forbidding mountain, called Nanda Devi, suddenly disappeared in a whiteout.

From his perch at advance base camp, Capt. M.S. Kohli, the highest-ranking Indian on the mission, watched in panic.

“Camp Four, this is Advance Base. Can you hear me?” he recalled shouting into a walkie-talkie.

No response.

“Camp Four, are you there?”

Finally, the radio crackled to life with a faint voice, a whisper through the wash of static.

“Yes … this … is … Camp … Four.”

“Come back quickly,” Captain Kohli remembered ordering them. “Don’t waste a single minute.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Then Captain Kohli made a fateful decision. He needed to, he said — to save the climbers’ lives.

“Secure the equipment. Don’t bring it down.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The climbers scampered down the mountain after stashing the C.I.A. gear on a ledge of ice, abandoning a nuclear device that contained nearly a third of the total amount of plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb.

It hasn’t been seen since.

And that was 1965.

Every mountain-lover knows of Nanda Devi, India’s second highest mountain at a height of 7817 m (25,646 ft). It was notoriously hard to climb, and infamous for being the mountain that killed 22-year-old Nanda Devi Unsoeld, the daughter of Willi Unsoeld, who conquered Everest via its West Ridge in 1963 and named his daughter after Nanda Devi.

From 1965 to 1968, attempts were made by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in co-operation with the Intelligence Bureau (IB), to place a nuclear-powered (SNAP-19C RTG) telemetry relay listening device on the summit of Nanda Devi.This device was designed to intercept telemetry signals from missile test launches conducted in the Xinjiang Province, at a time of relative infancy in China’s missile program. The expedition retreated due to dangerous weather conditions, leaving the device near the summit of Nanda Devi. They returned the next spring to search for the device, which ended without success. As a result of this activity by the CIA, the Sanctuary was closed to foreign expeditions throughout much of the 1960s. In 1974 the Sanctuary re-opened.

But now, because Nanda Devi has religious significance, nobody of any stripe is allowed to climb it. If the device ever turns up, it will be inside a glacier, and that is unlikely to be found given the new restrictions.

Sumod K Mohan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

*Amherst College has to get the prize for the most bizarre student orientation of 2025. Luana sent me this article (yes, from the Washington Free Beacon) of the stuff that transpires when first-year Amherst students are indoctrinated oriented.

Amherst College was founded over two centuries ago to prepare young Christian men for the ministry. Today, however, the prestigious college has become a hotbed of administratively sanctioned sex performances and “sexual skills” programs, with a focus on “queer” and transgender students and on free-sex practices such as polyamory. The graphic nature of school-sanctioned sex events has made many current Amherst students deeply uncomfortable, according to students who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

Amherst, in central Massachusetts, is one of the country’s most exclusive small liberal arts colleges. The acceptance rate for the class of 2029 was 7 percent and annual tuition plus room and board exceeds $93,000, making it the sixth-most expensive college in the country.

Every year, first-year students are instructed, as a part of orientation, to attend an event—dubbed “Voices of the Class”—in which they are familiarized with Amherst’s “code of conduct” through a theatrical performance scripted using out-of-context excerpts from their own admissions essays. An entire section of the performance is dedicated just to sex.

The event takes place in Johnson Chapel, which Amherst calls its “most important building,” and is used for worship services, convocations, senior assemblies, and other significant gatherings. Johnson Chapel displays 36 portraits of the college’s most notable figures and alumni—including all 19 former presidents of the college, influential trustees, clergymen, civil rights leaders, poet Emily Dickinson, and former U.S. president Calvin Coolidge, who all likely would have looked on in horror if they saw the event on August 31st, 2025.

On the chapel’s chancel, students performed mock sex acts including oral sex, masturbation, and group sex. A young woman bent over while another student pretended to penetrate her from behind. Others pretended to do drugs and shared their “high thoughts.”

Every first-year was urged to attend the performance by their orientation leader. The administration advertises the event as a “lighthearted tradition” to “celebrate the humor, creativity, and individuality of your class.” The school funds the performance, and Amherst administrators work closely with the student performers, offering feedback and approving the script.

. . . . Following the event, the Office of Student Affairs asserted in an email that “Voices of the Class” is “not graphic.”

Um. . . .

Niemi, who’s from Idaho, describes the skits as simulated sex, with students moaning and thrusting under a blanket, and says that the peer educators “showered handfuls of condoms on students like confetti.”

“I thought about leaving 10 minutes in. I’m not someone who breaks rules or skips mandatory events, but it was disgusting enough it almost forced me to leave,” Niemi recalled.

But Amanda Vann, Amherst’s “director of health and wellbeing education,” told the Free Beacon that the skits help students build up their skills when it comes to sex. “The skits are part of our broader commitment to promoting wellbeing and sexual respect on campus,” she said

Right.  The script is written by juniors and seniors taking excerpts from admissions essays written by first-year students (or maybe those who didn’t get in as well).  Here are two videos of the event:

I don’t consider myself a prude, but I just don’t get this.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are again discussing Andrzej:

Hili: He’s not paying any attention to us at all.
Szaron: All we can do is pretend we don’t care.

In Polish:

Hili: On w ogóle nie zwraca na nas uwagi.
Szaron: Możemy tylko udawać, że nas to nie obchodzi.

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

From The Dodo (click to enlarge). DO NOT FEED BEA A MUFFIN! (And read it if you can.)

From Give me a Sign; notice that all ursids are prohibited in the sixth bullet point for having bear feet:

From Stacy; a great wrestling match:

From Masih, another brave Iranian woman, singing without a hijab, breaking two rules. She did this in Iran, I think, and had been arrested for it, but released in the face of national outrage.

The translation:

The virtual concert by Parastoo Ahmadi, which impacted millions of Iranians inside and outside Iran and, despite the danger, prompted many Iranians to visualize and break out of the dictatorship’s bubble. This courageous move by Parastoo is a stand and a fight against the Islamic Republic. Everyone should take a step in their own way and challenge the Islamic Republic until the day all the pieces of the puzzle come together and the Islamic Republic is forever removed from Iran and Iranians. If male singers inside Iran stand alongside brave women like Parastoo, Zara, and the young rappers who are currently fighting for their natural rights these days, they will reduce the cost of the struggle for female singers. #بدون_زنان_هرگز

Larry the Cat presents a poor, frustrated kitty:

From Malcolm; I’m sure they don’t make these any more:

From Simon, who asks, “Who even lets them drive?”

One from my feed. Crows are not dumb!

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

. . . and two from Dr. Cobb.  First, a headline you don’t see every day:

We don’t do court reports, especially when it comes to violent crime, but there’s always an exception.

— Angry People in Local Newspapers (@apiln.bsky.social) 2025-12-09T14:30:20.280Z

Second, the late ecologist Sir Bob May takes issue with how this famous story is related:

There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of the distinguished British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”

Looking into a paper about beetles reminds me of Bob May's firm riposte to his account in Nature about God's famous inordinate fondness for beetles.

— Roland Pease (@peaseroland.bsky.social) 2025-12-08T15:35:15.535Z

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

December 10, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Pukkeldag” in Danish): December 10, 2025.  It’s winter in Chicago, the streets clotted with ice and slush that has turned a dirty gray. Welcome, winter! It’s National Lager Day, and here’s a good one to drink now, from the excellent website A Potable Pastime (note the plastic goat around the neck). A quote from the article:

Appears very dark, near black until held up to the light, then a deep, glowing burgundy displays. Perfect clarity; amazing color! The tan head starts out big and settles to an 1/8″ thick or so and leaves behind some partial foam rings during the session.

Aroma is deepest, darkest caramelized malt, rich, sweet, with baked pit fruit notes and molasses.

Full bodied and smooth, with very finely beaded carbonation tickling the tongue briefly. There’s some viscosity as it rides over my tongue.

Loaded with the dark malty flavors the aromas promised. Gently sweet, with layered and complex malt character. It dries a bit leading into dark caramel and toffee, suggestions of dryish baked dark plums and raisins, molasses, and teasing of German-roast coffee that expands towards the finish. This is about as dark tasting as I think one can get without going into overtly roasty or cocoa-heavy flavors.

Article by Bill Lau

It’s also Dewey Decimal System Day (born on this day in 1851), Nobel Prize Day (already? stay tuned), and Human Rights Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 10 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I haven’t written about the corruption scandal involving Somalis in Minnesota, but the details, given in this NYT article from Nov. 30, are pretty clear (article archived here). And there’s a new article in the Free Press called “Minnesota  Vice: How corruption took hold of my state.” (Ironically, it’s by Dave Kansas.) First from the NYT:

The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.

Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.

Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.

Outrage has swelled among Minnesotans, and fraud has turned into a potent political issue in a competitive campaign season. Gov. Tim Walz and fellow Democrats are being asked to explain how so much money was stolen on their watch, providing Republicans, who hope to take back the governor’s office in 2026, with a powerful line of attack.

From the FP:

Things have changed in the past few years. If I had a save/get key on my computer that wrote “so strange for this to happen in Minnesota,” it would be worn out by now. George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police. We had Somali immigrants go to Syria to fight alongside ISIS. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar joined the Squad. Democratic socialists were chic here long before Zohran Mamdani. “Murderapolis,” the nickname Minneapolis received during a murder surge in the 1990s, made a comeback. A Minnesota state representative and her husband were shot dead in the middle of the night in their home by a man posing as a police officer. A shooter fired through the windows of Annunciation Catholic School during a Mass to celebrate the start of the school year, killing two children and injuring dozens.

I have probably overlooked some examples. It has been like that. A state proud of its high-trust, quiet, chilly ways has been a dark, Lynchian movie for half a decade now.

Our state’s famously passive-aggressive ways might explain why it took a hard-edged, Eastern-bred U.S. attorney to uncover the Feeding Our Future mess. Andrew Luger, appointed to his second stint as U.S. Attorney for Minnesota in 2022, grew up in Cresskill, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Yonkers, New York. He played football at Amherst as an offensive lineman and earned his law degree at Georgetown. Minnesota was not in his frame of reference. “I’d never been west of Philadelphia,” he told me.

Well, there are two factors at play here. First is the Somali community’s cohesion and slow assimilation, so that any cultural tendencies towards corruption (and there are such data from Somalia) spread through the group. (People do not like to hear about the fact that the miscreants were almost all Somali, though it hardly needs pointing out that the majority of Somalis did not participate.) The second is the reluctance of the authorities, a mixture of Somalis and non-Somalis, to dig deeper into this.  As for the state’s “famously passive-aggressive ways,” well, the article doesn’t explain why Minnesota is an outlier in that respect. Could it be institutional naiveté? If so, why Minnesota?

*I’ve always been opposed to vaccine exemptions, which give a school kid a pass from vaccination on religious grounds—but sometimes on philosophical grounds.  In the last chapter of Faith Versus Fact (a book that would make a nice Koynezaa present to a friend), I point out that nearly all states in the U.S.allow religious exemptions from vaccination. Others allow philosophical or personal exemptions from vaccination. Neither of these are justified since the cost of catering to religious or philosophical dictates (epidemics) is greater than of adhering to those dictates vis-à-vis vaccination. (In contrast, medical excemptions for vaccination, allowed in all states, are justifiable.) But at least five states—California, Maine, New York, Connecticut and West Virginia—bar all non-medical school exemptions from vaccination. Here’s a map from the National Conference for State Legislatures:

Now the Supreme Court may take action to further loosen those requirements in New York state (article archived here):

The U.S. Supreme Court signaled on Monday that it may favor loosening New York’s strict school vaccine requirements, which do not allow for religious exemptions.

The court vacated a federal appeals court ruling upholding the vaccine requirements and ordered the lower court to reopen the case “for further consideration.”

For years, New York had allowed exemptions to school immunization requirements for students who held religious objections to vaccines or were unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons. But after a large measles outbreak that was concentrated in Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn and Rockland County, New York State eliminated the religious exemptions in 2019.

In the years since, childhood vaccination rates against measles climbed in New York. But the change to the law was challenged by a lawsuit filed in Rochester by a number of Amish people and Amish schools on the grounds that it interfered with their right to practice their faith and impart their religious values to their children. At least two federal courts in New York rejected their arguments.

New York is one of only five states not to offer an exemption from school vaccine requirements for religious or personal reasons, and, in one of those states, West Virginia, the governor has sought to introduce them.

In its March ruling, the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, in Manhattan, noted that in the years before the 2019 change a growing number of parents were receiving religious exemptions from vaccines for their children, undermining disease control efforts.

At private and parochial schools, the percentage of students invoking religious exemptions had jumped from .54 percent to 1.53 percent, according to the court record. In Rockland County, an epicenter of the 2019 measles outbreak and home to a large ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, up to 20 percent of students had religious exemptions at some schools.

The religious exemptions “resulted in clusters of low vaccination rates and an inability to achieve herd immunity in certain communities,” the ruling said.

Epidemiologists estimate that at least 95 percent of a community needs to be vaccinated to protect a community from a measles outbreak.

And “reconsidering the case” has a historical precedent favoring religious accommodation—but towards storybooks:

The Supreme Court order directed the Second Circuit to reconsider the case in light of a recent ruling on religious freedom involving a very different topic. The ruling that the Supreme Court cited, Mahmoud v. Taylor, decided in June, involved storybooks with L.G.B.T.Q. themes and whether parents with religious objections could have their children excused from classes where the books were discussed.

First Liberty has argued that the Supreme Court’s ruling in the storybooks case shows that the Second Circuit was too dismissive of the Amish parents’ claim about how the school vaccine requirements threatened their religious beliefs.

I was naive to think that the Supreme court would curb the excesses of Trump—and I count vaccination opposition as one of these. And I was equally naive to think that this Court would follow precedent: the principle of stare decisis. But I never said I was a political pundit!

*Speaking of vaccinations, pediatrician and infectious disease expert Paul Offit explains why the new vaccine recommendation about Hepatitis-B for newborns is misguided. (The subtitle is “A recent recommendation by RFK Jr.’s vaccine advisory committee shows why trusting experts is still a good idea”; h/t Bat.  The “experts” are not the members of RFK, Jr.’s handpicked anti-vax committee, of course.

On June 9, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the 17 experts that served on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Two days later, he replaced them with people who, like him, had been anti-vaccine and anti-science. A few weeks later, on July 1, 2025, RFK Jr. told Tucker Carlson that “we need to stop trusting experts.” In his revamped ACIP, RFK Jr. has gotten his wish. Unfortunately, because these non-experts are now making policy decisions, we are forced to trust them. Even though their lack of expertise has put our children at unnecessary risk.

On December 5, 2025, RFK Jr.’s ACIP reconsidered the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose. They reaffirmed the birth dose recommendation for all infants whose mothers were found to have been infected with hepatitis B virus during a first trimester screening test and for infants whose mother’s testing status was unknown. Maintaining the previous birth dose recommendation in these situations was easy. About 90 percent of infants infected with hepatitis B virus at birth will develop cirrhosis or liver cancer.

Then they crossed a line, arguing that babies born to mothers who were not infected with hepatitis B virus didn’t need a vaccine. Parents could decide whether to get the vaccine or not, but in either case should wait until at least two months of age. To understand why this was a dangerously uninformed decision, we need to go back to the beginning.

Here are the facts, with the bad stuff from the Administration’s committee turning on the second paragraph below (my bolding):

The hepatitis B vaccine was first licensed in 1981. One year later, in 1982, the CDC recommended a birth dose before leaving the hospital for all babies born to mothers infected with hepatitis B virus during first-trimester screening. The birth dose recommendation in 1982 didn’t make much of a dent on the incidence of hepatitis B infection. In response, in 1988, the CDC expanded the birth dose to include racial and ethnic groups at highest risk of hepatitis B virus infection (such as Alaskan Natives and Southeast Asian refugees). Again, not much impact. The RFK Jr.-led ACIP now wants us to go back to a program that between 1982 and 1991 failed to dramatically lower the incidence of hepatitis B infections in young children.

In 1991, the CDC further expanded its birth dose to all U.S. newborns. At the time, about 30,000 children less than 10 years of age were infected with hepatitis B virus. About half of those children were infected from their mother, but the other half weren’t. These other 15,000 children less than 10 years old weren’t sex workers and they weren’t intravenous drug users. Rather, they got infected from relatively casual contact with one of the millions of people in the United States who were chronically infected with hepatitis B virus. The source of infection could be shared towels, washcloths, nail clippers, toothbrushes or even partially eaten food or candies. More than half of those with chronic hepatitis B infection with whom the children had come in contact didn’t know they were infected. Worse, children who are infected with hepatitis B virus between 1 and 5 years of age have a 25 percent chance of suffering chronic liver damage or liver cancer later in life. The change to a universal birth dose decreased the incidence of hepatitis B infections in children by more than 99 percent, a remarkable achievement.

And Offit’s summary:

To their credit, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) immediately stood up for America’s children. “This irresponsible and purposely misleading guidance will lead to more hepatitis B infections in infants and children,” said AAP President Dr. Susan Kressly: “I want to reassure parents and clinicians that there is no new or concerning information about the hepatitis B vaccine that is prompting this change, nor has children’s risk of contracting hepatitis B changed. Instead, this is the result of a deliberate strategy to sow fear and distrust among families.”

The ACIP’s laxity on when a child should be vaccinated will undoubtedly lead to a higher proportion of infected children, for some parents will just ditch the vaccination. And reread the first bold sentence above about the connection between childhood infection and liver disease.

*A report in the Washington Post tells tells us about a “New study shows how your brain changes at four key ages: 9, 32, 66, and 83.” OY! Here’s a précis of the five stages involving the four transitions; the work was done at the University of Cambridge, and the article is archived here.

In the new study, [Alexa] Mousley and colleagues looked at around 4,000 scans from healthy people ages 0 to 90 and analyzed their brains. They found four major times when the brain underwent developmental changes, around ages nine, 32, 66 and 83, dividing the lifespan into five distinct phases.

Childhood: From infancy to nine years old, the brain is busy. There is a lot of consolidation of neural connections happening, competitive elimination of synapses and rapid increases in gray and white matter. But interestingly the brain is becoming less efficient during this time — so it takes longer for information to get from one region of the brain to another. The researchers don’t fully understand why this would be the pattern, but they have some theories.

“We know that in very early life, the brain makes more connections than it needs, and then it prunes them away,” Mousley said. “It’s unclear if that is kind of what’s happening here, but it is potentially what’s happening.”

Adolescence:

There is a dramatic turning point that the researchers saw occurring around the age of nine on average — a time when many children begin to enter puberty. The brain switches gears and starts rewiring to become more efficient.

The adolescence phase the researchers identified lasts for two decades, into the early 30s on average. This is when people are most vulnerable to developing a mental health disorder, but it’s also a critical time for braindevelopment. . . . this research adds to a growing body of work suggesting that the brain isn’t fully developed or stable until our late 20s or even early 30s.

Adulthood:

Adulthood is the longest phase — lasting for more than three decades from around 32 years old until around 66 years old.

“It does seem to be this kind of period of relative stability,” Mousley said. “It’s consistent for a very long period of time.”

That doesn’t mean that the brain isn’t changing during this period, but the changes are less dramatic than during other phases. This is also a period of stability in terms of intelligence, behavior and personality.

Early aging:

Around 66 years old on average, the researchers saw another turning point. This is a time when the brain seems to become more vulnerable to age-related diseases — but the news isn’t all bad for the aging brain.

“There’s an expected and healthy, typical way for the brain to shift,” Mousley said.

Insel noted that in addition to some of the negative changes people might associate with aging, like memory loss, there are also positive changes. Older adults tend to be wiser and better at emotional regulation.

Late aging: 

From 83 onward, the researchers identified a “late aging” phase.

“What we’re seeing during that late aging phase is something called ‘increasing centrality,’” Mousley said. Particular regions of the brain become more important than others during this time. There is reduced connectivity, but there seems to be a pattern to that change.

The metaphor Mousley used was that of changing bus routes. If you had a direct bus to work, but one day it stopped running and you had to take two buses, the transfer station would suddenly become very important. She theorized that the brain might be prioritizing important connections if other connections drop off.

I could add “Death: brain stops functioning,” but that would be morbid. The article concludes by saying that the next steps are to figure out how these measures of brain structure relate to cognition, but also to figure out how they’re affected by things like exercise, diet, and “social connection.”  I’m just glad I’m still in the penultimate stage.

*This is the most-clicked article in yesterday’s NYT: “Katy Perry posts photos with Justin Trudeau amid romance rumors.” Such is the NYT, which is increasingly focusing on popular culture and lifestyle stuff (e.g., “Wirecutter”):

Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau have not publicly commented on the monthslong rumors of their romance, but Ms. Perry, a pop star, and Mr. Trudeau, the former prime minister of Canada, have reached a celebrity couple milestone.

On Saturday, Ms. Perry posted photos and videos on Instagram of herself and Mr. Trudeau posing cheek to cheek and exploring Japan, making them “Instagram official.”

The carousel of images Ms. Perry posted included a short video of her sitting with Mr. Trudeau while she tasted uni, or sea urchin, as well as Trudeau-less shots of sumo wrestling and fluffy pancakes.

Ms. Perry was in Japan as part of her Lifetimes Tour to promote her 2024 album, “143.” She performed in Tokyo on Wednesday after appearances in other Asian countries, as well as in South America, the United States and Europe.

Her “Instagram official” declaration was slightly undermined in a way possible only for those in the unconventional pairing of A-list celebrity and former prime minister.

The former prime minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, last week shared a photo on social media of him, his wife, Yuko Kishida, Mr. Trudeau and Ms. Perry.

The translation of his caption described Ms. Perry as Mr. Trudeau’s “partner.”

The iconic instagram Post. Click on it to go to the original, which has several pictures and videos of the pair. I didn’t even know that Justin Trudeau was divorced until I read the article.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, a competition between Hili and Szaron is impending:

Szaron: He put the laptop down and took a book.
Hili: I’m just about to climb onto his lap.
Szaron: So am I.

In Polish:

Szaron: On odłożył laptop i sięgnął po książkę.
Hili: Zaraz mu wskoczę na kolana.
Szaron: Ja też.

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

From Give Me a Sign: don’t fear the Reaper.

From The Language Nerds:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

I may have posted this before, but if you missed it, here’s Masih presenting a number of Iranian women singing or protesting the regime’s ban on singing:

From Luana.  Birthright citizenship is in the Constitution, so I haven’t recommended that it be eliminated. To do that, you’d probably need a Constitutional amendment (or the Supreme Court, which seems to be making its own constitution):

From Larry the Cat, a photobomb:

From Malcolm, a nice cat game:

One from my feed (I reposted it). This is a fantastic ad:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, an article (free access) by Jennifer Ouellette on the Egyptian Pyramids:

Three Generations Built the Pyramids of Giza Over time, But How Is Debated http://www.discovermagazine.com/three-genera…

— Jennifer Ouellette (@jenlucpiquant.bsky.social) 2025-12-09T13:24:02.295Z

. . . and Matthew traces a neologism:

I've done a lot of reading about ideas of heredity in the past, and "bloodline" never appears (I am still in the 16th century). Here's why: it's a eugenicky 20th century invention, boosted by Dan Brown. It's eugeno-bollocks.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-12-09T13:36:04.530Z

Thurday: Hili dialogue

November 27, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, November 27, 2025. This is a special Thanksgiving edition of WEIT as it’s a holiday. For Americans who are celebrating, happy Thanksgiving!

From Allison:

Today is also National Bavarian Cream Pie Day, though everyone will be eating pumpkin or sweet potato pies (two of my favorites).  According to Wikipedia, Bavarian cream is “a French dessert consisting of an egg-based cooked custard (milk thickened with eggs) and gelatin or isinglass, into which whipped cream is folded.” I’m sure it would be good in a pie, but I’ve never had one. Nor can I find a photo, but here’s what Wikipedia says is a Bavarian cream bismark, which looks like a type of donut:

Tanis Coralee Leonhardi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Today I am giving thanks for the fact that I am alive and pretty healthy, but also for the cats and ducks of the world that brighten our lives. If you’re thankful for something this year, please put it in the comments.

There’s a Google Doodle today that is, I think, the first one to use AI in its link. Click below to see where it goes:

It’s also National Electric Guitar Day, National Turtle Adoption Day, and National Craft Jerky Day (is there turkey jerkey?) In honor of Electric Guitar Day, here’s the world’s best, Jimi Hendrix, jamming in Stockholm in 1969. It’s an hour long:

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

Da Nooz:

*Two members of the National Guard were shot yesterday in Washington D.C.  Both are alive, but are in critical condition, while the suspected perp, an Afghan man who came to the U.S. four years ago, has been apprehended. It’s regarded as a terrorist attack. From the NYT:

Two National Guard members remained in critical condition on Thursday, a day after they were shot near the White House, as the authorities investigated the background of the suspect in what they said was a targeted attack.

The two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot near a metro station in downtown Washington, D.C., on Wednesday afternoon by a lone gunman who was also injured and later detained, officials said.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the suspect had come to the United States in September 2021 through a Biden-era immigration program for Afghans fleeing their country after the government fell to the Taliban. People familiar with the investigation identified the suspect as Rahmanullah Lakanwal.

The FBI director, Kash Patel, and other law enforcement officials were expected to address the news media at 9 a.m. Eastern.

After officials disclosed the suspect’s nationality on Wednesday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency overseeing immigration in the United States, said that it had stopped processing immigration applications from Afghanistan. The pause will affect Afghans seeking to remain in the United States through immigration avenues like asylum and permanent residency, or those trying to enter the country.

In a video address late Wednesday, President Trump said he had ordered 500 more National Guard troops to Washington, though it was unclear when they would arrive or where they would come from.

*As always, the President pardoned turkeys for Thanksgiving. Although millions of gobblers will be killed and consumed today, the two turkeys, named Gobble and Waddle, were pardoned, joining many other cronies of Trump this year. But Trump couldn’t resist turning the occasion into an attack on his enemies.

President Trump wandered far off topic during the pre-Thanksgiving turkey-pardoning ritual at the White House on Tuesday, talking about gas prices, Hunter Biden, drug dealers who’d “poured into our country like we were stupid people” and a governor he considers a “big, fat slob.” [JAC: that was our governor, J. B. Pritzker]

“I think those turkeys were standing there being, like, ‘Just [expletive] kill us. Put us out of our misery,’” Seth Meyers said on Wednesday.

A few quotes from comedians about the ceremony.

“Now, most presidents at the turkey pardon keep it light. They make a few bad puns, they wish everyone a ‘Happy Thanksgiving’ and they go back to work. But that’s not Donald Trump.” — JIMMY KIMMEL

“In that same press conference, he said there’ve been no murders in Washington D.C. in the last six months because of him. There’ve been 62 murders in Washington, which already indicates a vivid imagination. But does he really look at himself in the mirror and go, ‘I am thin’?” — JIMMY KIMMEL, referring to Trump’s remarks about the Illinois governor’s weight

“Again, this was supposed to be a turkey-pardoning ceremony.” — SETH MEYERS

“This morning, on the freshly paved-over Rose Garden, our commander in chief presided over an important American tradition — the annual pardon of the turkeys. Which, at this point, are the only thing Trump hasn’t pardoned this year.” — JIMMY KIMMEL

“President Trump participated in the National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation at the White House and pardoned both turkeys, Gobble and Waddle. And then, like everyone else he pardons, they were both rearrested on weapons charges.” — SETH MEYERS

“That’s right, President Trump participated in the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardoning, passing out pardons to Gobble, Waddle and Ghislaine.” — SETH MEYERS

“Their names are Gobble and Waddle, which is what Trump does every night at dinner.” — JIMMY KIMMEL

Here’s Trump’s twaddle during his pardon. Note that he also goes after Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden.

*Speaking of Trump, and of free speech, we learn that the FBI is now seeking interviews with the six Democratic lawmakers in the ad below, telling soldier’s that it’s not just okay but imperative to refuse to obey illegal orders.

The FBI is working to schedule interviews with the six Democratic lawmakers who appeared in a video urging members of the military and intelligence community not to comply with illegal orders, according to a person familiar with the efforts.

The move, first reported by Fox News, comes days after President Donald Trump accused the Democrats, all of whom served in the military or in intelligence roles, of “seditious behavior.”

Details of the investigation were not immediately clear. The lawmakers confirmed they had heard from the House or Senate sergeants-at-arms about the FBI effort.

In a joint statement, four of the Democrats in the video, all members of the House, accused Trump of “using the FBI as a tool to intimidate and harass Members of Congress.”

“No amount of intimidation or harassment will ever stop us from doing our jobs and honoring our Constitution,” the statement from Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, and Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania said. “We swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. That oath lasts a lifetime, and we intend to keep it. We will not be bullied. We will never give up the ship.”

The other two Democrats in the video are senators: Mark Kelly, of Arizona, and Elissa Slotkin, of Michigan.

Slotkin said at an event in Michigan on Tuesday afternoon that the lawmakers were contacted by the FBI on Monday evening.

“Last night the counterterrorism division at the FBI sent a note to members of, the members of Congress saying they are opening what appears to be an inquiry against the six of us,” she said.

Justice Department guidelines require investigative steps against sitting members of Congress to go through an approval process within the Justice Department to ensure that federal law enforcement power isn’t being used for political purposes. But the Trump administration has dismantled the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which traditionally served as a check on investigations into political figures. That office now has just two prosecutors, down from 36 at the beginning of Trump’s second term, according to a source familiar with the office.

I don’t think there should be an investigation of statements that are legal.  This is free speech and should not be suppressed (investigation of such speech counts as an attempt to suppress it by chilling it).  On the other hand, it was unwise for the lawmakers to produce such a video, as no specific unlawful orders are specified. It thus comes off as a swipe against Trump with no substance behind it, and that can’t be good for these Democrats or for their party.

*Speaking of Trump for the third time, he’s once again off the hook for crime: a Georgia state judge dismissed charges against him that he interfered with the Georgia election results in 2020.

A judge in Georgia dismissed the last pending criminal prosecution against President Trump on Wednesday, effectively ending efforts to hold him criminally responsible for attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

The president has now seen three criminal cases against him dissolve since he was re-elected last year. A number of his allies are also defendants in the Georgia racketeering case, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff.

A motion seeking to end the prosecution was filed Wednesday morning by Pete Skandalakis, the executive director of the state’s nonpartisan prosecutor council. The case was once seen as one of the most serious legal threats to Mr. Trump, because state criminal convictions are not subject to presidential pardons.

Mr. Skandalakis, a career prosecutor who ran for office early in his career as a Democrat but later as a Republican, shredded the case originally brought by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, taking it apart charge by charge in a 22-page filing. He asserted that “it is not illegal to question or challenge election results.”

Mr. Skandalakis concluded that the inquiry undertaken by Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department under President Biden, was the more appropriate venue for an investigation of Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power after the 2020 election. He added that the idea of pursuing a case against a sitting president in Georgia was impractical.

He noted that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year, which granted presidents “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for acts within their constitutional authority, meant that it would take “months, if not years” to litigate immunity issues in the Georgia courts — and that all of this would have to occur after Mr. Trump left office in 2029.

“Bringing this case before a jury in 2029, 2030 or even 2031 would be nothing short of a remarkable feat,” Mr. Skandalakis wrote, adding that “the citizens of Georgia are not served by pursuing this case in full for another five to ten years.”

Mr. Trump’s indictment in August 2023 prompted a unique moment in the history of the American presidency, when he traveled to Atlanta to be booked at the county jail. Mr. Trump, who was out of office at the time, would soon embrace his scowling mug shot as a symbol of defiance; his campaign still markets the image on coffee mugs, posters and pins.

The man is made of Teflon, though I wouldn’t recommend him trying to shoot a guy in the middle of NYT’s Fifth Avenue.  And he’s been extraordinarily lucky, though he did lose one civil suit. The important cases, however, are those that will go before the Supreme Court this coming term, cases dealing with matters like birthright citizenship, banning trans people from the military, and deporting people at will,

*Not long ago I wrote a critical review of a letter in the San Francisco Chronicle by Roughgarden and Veale arguing that sex and gender are both spectra.  Now Colin Wright has done a better job than I in dismantling that dreadful paper. Colin’s dismantling is in an article in The Washington Examiner called “Activists are redefining ‘gender’ to save a collapsing narrative.” It’s long but you can read it for free, so I’ll just show my favorite bits,

My favorite line is the question that ends this section:

. . . Roughgarden and Veale’s first move is to try to root transgenderism in biology by claiming that “transgender people are a natural part of the human species” who have existed “across cultures and through time.” This statement is misleading. It relies on yet another definitional sleight of hand in which activists expand the definition of transgender into “an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression, or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.” But no reasonable person, let alone any biologist, denies that masculine girls and women, or feminine boys and men, are natural parts of human variation. Of course they are. And it must be pointed out that gay and lesbian people are considered transgender according to this expansive definition, as being attracted to the same sex is a behavior that “does not conform to that typically associated” with one’s sex.

Calling such people “transgender,” a label that implies a pathological misalignment between one’s brain and body, is both regressive and harmful. It is regressive because it effectively reclassifies masculine girls as boys and feminine boys as girls. And it’s harmful because activists have constructed a “gender-affirming” medical pathway — puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries — designed to “correct” this perceived misalignment. This pathway permanently alters healthy bodies and can render people sterile and medically dependent for life.

Roughgarden and Veale defend this medical pathway and cite seven major medical associations that “support transgender people and their right to appropriate care.” But statements from medical associations are not a substitute for evidence. And as revealed in the highest-quality systematic reviews conducted to date by multiple countries, there is no clear evidence of benefit and a growing list of known harms and possible risks. It is therefore grossly irresponsible for the authors to characterize these interventions as “appropriate care” when the available evidence provides no basis for such a claim.

Roughgarden and Veale then pivot to the central aim of their essay, which is to set the record straight on the biology of sex and gender. Here, we witness an attempt to redefine the debate landscape in real-time.

They begin with an apparent concession to sex realists such as myself. While medical practice might rely on “practical but inconsistent markers to define sex, such as genitals, chromosomes and hormones,” they argue that these traits only “statistically correlate with human sex, but do not define it.” They go on to accept the universal, binary definition of the sexes: “males make small gametes (sperm), females make large gametes (eggs).”

But immediately after this concession, Roughgarden and Veale unveil a new framework entirely. They claim that although an individual’s sex is defined in terms of gamete production, “gender” refers to “all the anatomical and behavioral traits that correlate with sex taken together.” “Beyond gamete size,” they write, “everything else — including secondary sex characteristics, body size, shape, color, behavior and social roles — is gender.”

Everything beyond gametes is now gender?

Apparently so!

*See also Alex Byrne’s critique of the Fuentes and Lents article (also asserting that sex is a spectrum) that I also went after; Alex’s piece on the Reality’s Last Stand site is called “Beyond the binary is a sea of nonsense.”

Fuentes and Lents are not saying, “There is no such thing as biological sex,” or that “sex differences are purely the result of culture.” Good! The authors have a passed a sanity check. They are not saying, “Male and female are not real or useful categories for humans.” Another sanity check passed. However, in the “What we are saying” column, Fuentes and Lents cannot admit the obvious, namely that male and female will continue to be indispensable because people need to categorize others as one sex or the other. People of one sex usually want to find someone of the other sex and make babies. To meet girl, boy must recognize girl, which means being able to categorize others as girls (a type of female).

Fuentes and Lents might object that this is problematically heteronormative. According to them, the main reason why “sex categories remain important” is “equity and justice.” Perhaps they think that when full equity and justice have been achieved, the words “man” and “woman” will become as outdated as “Betamax” and “VHS.”

Despite Fuentes and Lents’s talk of “sex categories,” the upshot is supposed to be that the “nature of sex” is “non-categorical.” This is, they say, “best illustrated by example.” What is the example going to be? Sex-changing clownfish? Pregnant male seahorses? Pseudo-penis-wielding female hyenas? Gender-bending sunfish? No, it’s us:

… the totality of the human experience, including our bodies, cannot be reduced to either specific innate (biological) or external (environmental/cultural) influences; it is a synthesis of both; humans are biocultural.

In effect, the point is to downplay the relevance of sex to humans by picturing it as one minor player in a blizzard of “complex interactions,” “lived experiences,” “biotic and abiotic factors,” “sex related traits,” “biological, cultural, individual, and environmental variables,” “synergistic roles,” “globally dynamic cultural processes,” and so forth. This rhetorical tactic leads to the most remarkable sentence in the entire essay:

… other than infertility, it’s difficult to imagine a social or healthcare context in which gamete type or production matters much at all.

“Gamete type or production” refers to sex as standardly understood by biologists. Fuentes and Lents do absolutely nothing to dislodge the equation of “male” with “small-gamete producer,” and similarly for “female” and “large-gamete producer.” Indeed, Lents endorses (for the most part) this equation in his book, and in Fuentes’s Sex is a Spectrum he appears to fleetingly endorse it at one point. So the quoted sentence could be written more perspicuously:

… other than infertility, it’s difficult to imagine a social or healthcare context in which being male or female matters much at all.

It really isn’t difficult to imagine!

Alex is a professor of philosophy (at MIT) and a lot of the article is written in a philosophical way, showing conclusiont that don’t follow from premises and so on. The upshot is the same, the arguments against a sex binary don’t work.  Will this pack of the benighted admit they’re wrong? Hell no, for they’re doing this for ideological rather than scientific reasons. Nor will they ever engage their critics; they make the same arguments over and over and over and over and over and over again. . . .

*Finally, from the AP’s reliable “Oddities” section, we have a very high-priced comic book (bolding is mine):

A copy of the first Superman issue, unearthed by three brothers cleaning out their late mother’s attic, netted $9.12 million this month at a Texas auction house which says it is the most expensive comic book ever sold.

The brothers discovered the comic book in a cardboard box beneath layers of brittle newspapers, dust and cobwebs in their deceased mother’s San Francisco home last year, alongside a handful of other rare comics that she and her sibling had collected on the cusp of World War II.

She had told her children she had a valuable comic book collection hidden away, but they had never seen it until they put her house up for sale and decided to comb through her belongings for heirlooms, said Lon Allen, vice president of comics at Heritage Auctions. The brothers uncovered the box of comics and sent a message to the auction company, leading Allen to fly out to San Francisco earlier this year to inspect their copy of “Superman No. 1″ and show it to other experts for appraisal.

“It was just in an attic, sitting in a box, could have easily been thrown away, could’ve easily been destroyed in a thousand different ways,” Allen said. “A lot of people got excited because it’s just every factor in collecting that you could possibly want all rolled into one.”

Here’s a video showing the comic:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are nice and cozy in bed, and contemplating the future.

Hili: What lies ahead?
Szaron: Brew some tea and check the leaves.

In Polish:

Hili: Co ukrywa przyszłość?
Szaron: Powróż sobie z fusów.

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

Three cat memes today. First, from Stacy:

From CinEmma:

From Cats, Coffee, and Chaos:

Retweeted by Emma Hilton; an upcoming “trial” of the effects of puberty blockers appears to be deeply flawed (see The Quackometer):

From Luana; the Inside Higher Ed article by Geiser is here (you may have to create a free account; you get 5 articles per month at the site):

From Malcolm; a lovely short video:

One I found from Larry the Cat, who is smarter than this moggy:

One from my feed; interspecific love:

One I retweeted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, his cat Pepper:

Pepper on my lap

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-09-16T20:01:33.460Z

And one from the mesmerizing Ziya Tong.  The article to which she refers is free here.

“Thiel does not hesitate to name potential Antichrists, including Greta Thunberg, communism, and even tech regulation.” It’s almost like if you were the *actual* antichrist you’d be trying to concoct a red herring. 🤔

— Earthling (@ziyatong.bsky.social) 2025-09-16T15:23:31.043Z

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

November 18, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, November 18, 2025, and Mickey Mouse Day, celebrating the rodent’s first appearance in a Disney cartoon. It was in Steamboat Willie, released on this day in 1928.  Here’s the cartoon, and they don’t make them like this any more! (Mickey appears 30 seconds in). Don’t miss the musical duck (cruelty to animals).

I have to go to the sleep doctor today, so posting will be light.

It’s also Apple Cider Day and National Vichyssoise Day.

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

Da Nooz:

*After long opposing the release of the “Epstein files”—the Justice Depoartment’s dossier on the late Jeffrey Epstein—President Trump, under Congressional pressure, has changed course and urged the House to vote for releasing the files.

In a sharp reversal, President Donald Trump said late Sunday that House Republicans should support a measure that would require the Justice Department to release the information it has related to its investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — after key lawmakers said support was building ahead of a closely watched vote.

Trump, who has resisted backing such a measure for weeks, said on social media that he believes Republican lawmakers “should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide.”

“Nobody cared about Jeffrey Epstein when he was alive and, if the Democrats had anything, they would have released it” before the 2024 election, Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social, urging Republican lawmakers to focus on the economy instead.

The measure, which would compel officials at the Justice Department to release all unclassified records, documents, communications and investigative materials relating to the investigation and prosecution of Epstein in its possession, could face hurdles in the Senate. It is not clear whether Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) would bring the measure up for a vote, and Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) was noncommittal in an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

If the measure passes both chambers, Trump would have to sign it before it took effect. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether the president would do so, and Trump was silent on whether he wants to see a Senate vote as well as a House vote.

. . .On Friday, at Trump’s request, the Justice Department launched an investigation to examine the relationships between Epstein and several prominent Democrats and donors. Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly tapped federal prosecutors in Manhattan to take on the job.

Legal experts raised concerns over the weekend that Trump’s demand for a new investigation could give Justice Department officials an excuse not to release all the documents.
I originally thought that Trump wouldn’t sign it, but he more or less has to given that he’s pushing for the release. Still, I think he’s counting on the bill to be stalled in or rejected by the Senate.  But why aren’t they releasing everything anyway? There are no national secrets involved, save perhaps for the names of national figures who were involved in Epstein’s scheme.

*Seattle has a new mayor who says she’s a socialist: 43-year old Katie Wilson. She’s also the daughter of a biologist that some of you will recognize: David Sloan Wilson, an advocate of group selection and the “extended evolutionary synthesis” (hje also thinks that human altruism evolved by group selection; perhaps that influenced his daughter). At any rate, the WaPo has an editorial-board op-ed that’s quite critical of Wilson, ” Seattle’s coming socialist experiment,” with the subtitle, “The mayor-elect has little experience but plenty of bad ideas.”

With much of the country fixated on New York’s decision to elect as mayor a socialist with little experience, it was easy to miss the news that Seattle has done the same. Voters from coast to coast will now get to witness two real-time experiments in radical governance.

Katie Wilson, an activist with even less experience than New York’s Zohran Mamdani, narrowly defeated the incumbent mayor of Seattle earlier this month. The 43-year-old community organizer, a first-time candidate with no meaningful management experience, will soon lead a city of around 800,000 residents with nearly 14,000 municipal employees and an $8.9 billion budget.

Who is Wilson? She does not own a car. She lives in a rented 600-square-foot apartment with her husband and two-year-old daughter. By her own account, she depends on checks from her parents back east to cover expenses. To let them off the hook, she seeks to force residents of Seattle to pay for “free” child care and other goodies.

Sound familiar? She’s the West Coast Mamdani, seeking to govern a city with a high cost of living by broaching unworkable programs:

. . . Seattle’s office vacancy rate is now above 33 percent. Major employers like Amazon, which was founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos, have relocated thousands of workers from Seattle to Bellevue, right across Lake Washington, because it’s safer and friendlier.

The mayor-elect’s plans will simultaneously accelerate the exodus of businesses while making the city more of a magnet for vagrants and criminals. For example, Wilson criticized Harrell’s sweeps of homeless encampments. She backed off previous support for defunding the police, but many officers remain nervous.

Like the mayor-elect in New York, Wilson wants to open government-run grocery stores, despite their record of failure. She suggested during a September event that she won’t allow private supermarkets to close locations that aren’t profitable. Instead, she wants to require them to give more notice and pay generous severance packages to their employees. “Access to affordable, healthy food is a basic right,” Wilson said.

. . . Wilson may be less constrained than Mamdani. Fellow progressives also toppled the incumbent president of the Seattle City Council and the city attorney while picking up two other seats. Only two of the seven council members have served more than one term. There are not many silver linings here, except that the country may be able to more quickly see the failures of their policies — which could prevent voters in other cities from falling for socialism.

“I will appoint a cabinet of exceptional leaders,” the mayor-elect promises on her website, “whose lived experiences reflect the diversity of Seattle’s Black, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latinx/Hispanic, and People of Color communities as well as that of women, immigrants and refugees, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, people with disabilities, people of all faith traditions, and residents from every socioeconomic background.”

Well, the Post has gotten more conservative since Jeff Bezos took it over, but even so this report is dire: the voters of Seattle appear to be committing suicide. One can hope that Wilson can fix the place, but given her lack of experience, I doubt it. I have the same doubts about Mamdani.

*SCIENCE! The NYT notes that we can now track individual Monarch Butterflies as they make their journeys from north to south and back again (article archived here).

For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America, actively monitoring individual insects on journeys from as far away as Ontario all the way to their overwintering colonies in central Mexico.

This long-sought achievement could provide crucial insights into the poorly understood life cycles of hundreds of species of butterflies, bees and other flying insects at a time when many are in steep decline.

The breakthrough is the result of a tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200. Researchers have tagged more than 400 monarchs this year and are now following their journeys on a cellphone app created by the New Jersey-based company that makes the tags, Cellular Tracking Technologies.

Most monarchs weigh 500 to 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrator making the transcontinental journey is, by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice.

Here are the journeys of two tagged and released monarchs who flew all the way from Ontario to Mexico, where they spend the winter.  Figure from the NYT. I didn’t think that individual monarchs actually flew that whole distance, but I was wrong. Some of them go down the East Coast to the Florida Keys:

“There’s nothing that’s not amazing about this,” said Cheryl Schultz, a butterfly scientist at Washington State University and the senior author of a recent study documenting a 22 percent drop in butterfly abundance in North America over a recent 20-year period. The movements of monarchs and other flying insects are cloaked in mystery, and “now we will have answers that could help us turn the tide for these bugs.”

Tracking the world’s most famous insect migration may also have a big social impact, with monarch lovers able to follow the progress of individual butterflies on the free app, called Project Monarch Science. Many of the butterflies are flying over cities and suburbs where pollinator gardens are increasingly popular. Some tracks could even lead to the discovery of new winter hideaways.

 . . . . Monarchs have evolved two highly sophisticated navigational systems. Most of the time, they rely on a system that orients them in relation to the sun, keeping them pointed south throughout the day by compensating for the sun’s movements across the sky. When clouds get in the way, monarchs switch to a backup compass that relies on ultraviolet light to detect the angle of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Their twin compasses usually keep migrating monarchs headed in the correct general direction. But how the butterflies manage to locate the same isolated colonies their great-great grandparents occupied the year before is a longstanding mystery.

No more than one in four is likely to survive the journey, with the rest succumbing to unfavorable winds, hungry birds, vehicle traffic or sheer exhaustion, among other perils.

The migrators who manage to reach the colonies join a spectacle in which huge flocks circle overhead in kaleidoscopic whirls and roost so thickly on fir trees that even the sturdiest branches bend under their collective weight.

To me the most amazing part of this navigation system is that it’s evolved. That is, there are specific genes passed on by the migrants that, in their offspring tell them how to head back to where their parents came from (the ones that make it to Mexico do not return to the U.S.: their offspring do). The study, with lots of cool photos and videos, shows that the previous “common knowledge” that individual monarchs never fly all the way from the U.S. to Mexico, but do it in several generational hops, which each generation going further towards the Mexican reserves. We now know, from the tracking above and others given in the article, that his is not true. The southern journey is made by single individuals, while the return trip made by several generations.

And this is the sad part:

In the 1990s, the winter population at the Mexican colonies was regularly estimated in the hundreds of millions, but it now rarely tops 60 million. Last winter, the estimate was roughly 38 million. The much smaller West Coast monarch population is even more vulnerable. Last winter, fewer than 10,000 were seen huddling in their usual spots along the California coast.

Experts cite a host of reasons for the decline, all related to human influence.

Here’s a video showing the amazing congregation of overwintering Monarchs in Mexico:

*The BBC has described what seems to be a horrible war crime committed by U.S. Marines in Iraq 20 years ago, with 24 civilians killed, including women and infants:.

Bullet holes pepper the front door to the house in the Iraqi town of Haditha, where she grew up. Inside the back bedroom, a colourful bedspread covers the bed where her family was shot.

This is where she hid with her five siblings, mum and aunt when US marines stormed into their home and opened fire, killing everyone apart from Safa, on 19 November 2005. Her dad was also shot dead when he opened the front door.

Now, 20 years on, a BBC Eye investigation has uncovered evidence that implicates two marines, who were never brought to trial, in the killing of Safa’s family, according to a forensic expert.

The evidence – mainly statements and testimony given in the aftermath of the killings – raises doubts about the American investigation into what happened that day, and poses significant questions over how US armed forces are held to account.

The killing of Safa’s family was part of what became known as the Haditha massacre, when US marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians, including four women and six children. They entered three homes killing nearly everyone inside, as well as a driver and four students in a car, who were on their way to college.

The incident triggered the longest US war crimes investigation of the Iraq war, but no-one was convicted of the killings.

This reminds me of the My Lai massacre of 1968, involving around 100 U.S. soldiers wantonly murdering hundreds of Vietnamese civilians. Only one person was convicted, Lt. William Calley, who served only 3 years of house arrest for his crime.

In the Iraq incident, Marine, Frank Wuterich pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty (unrelated to the massacre), and, in a plea deal, was broken down to private and then given a general discharge.  Here’s a one-hour documentary video of the incident, which is available for viewing only outside the UK.

*There’s not much interesting news going on (Epstein, Venezuela, etc.) but I wanted to put up this heartwarmer from the AP showing a sea otter pup, separated from its mom, who finally gets reunited with her.  It’s fairly easy to find places to watch sea otters in California, and you should avail yourself of the chance if you’re around Monterrey.  I love the way they use recordings to lure the mom.  Ms. Zink and her colleagues deserve kudos!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron recall the bad old days in Poland.

Szaron: Waiting in lines is so boring.
Hili: You’ll see real lines when the Marxists come back to power.

In Polish:

Szaron: Nudne to czekanie w kolejkach.
Hili: Prawdziwe kolejki zobaczysz jak marksiści znowu dojdą do władzy.

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

From Clean, Funny, & Cute Animal Memes:

From Things with Faces; lotus root:

From The Dodo Pet:

NOTE: CLOUDFLARE, TWITTER, AND MANY OTHER SITES ARE DOWN THIS MORNING, SO THE TWEETS MAY BE MISSING PICTURES OR VIDEOS. COME BACK IN A WHILE AND THE PROBLEM SHOULD BE FIXED. 

From Emma Hilton. Psychiatrist Jack Turban is an ideologue, and I think his gung-go “affirmative care” views are harmful to adolescents.

From Luana: an attempt to explain away grade inflation:

From Simon; some miscreants are dissing Larry the Cat. How dare they?!

From Malcolm; a white blood cell doing its job:

One from my feed. Yes, this is a Japanese squirrel: the Ezo flying squirrel (Pteromys volans orii), native to Hokkaido and one of the cutest of all mammals. Does it beat out the giant panda?

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial.

Two from Dr. Cobb.  A double pun first:

Brush your teeth after eating these or else you'll get calculus.

— Phil Plait (@philplait.bsky.social) 2025-11-16T20:41:08.818Z

. . . and the chemistry of skunk spray and how to remove it:

The latest edition of #PeriodicGraphics by @compoundchem.com explores the smelly chemicals in skunk spray and how to get rid of the stink. cen.acs.org/biological-c… #chemsky 🧪

— C&EN (Chemical & Engineering News) (@cenmag.bsky.social) 2025-11-14T20:15:52.228Z

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

October 22, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“수요일” in Korean): October 22, 2025, and National Tavern-Style Pizza Day.  As Wikipedia notes, this is a thin pizza with a crunchy crust and is cut into squares rather than slices. It’s popular in Chicago and other parts of the Midwest. Here’s one. I don’t like it: pizza should be in SLICES (do you eat pie in squares), and a square is not a substantial amount:

Shsilver at en.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Birth of the Báb, INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY, Eat a Pretzel Day (preferably the big soft ones, served with mustard), National Nut Day, and Wombat Day. You may remember that wombats are unique in pooping CUBES, and scientists now understand how that happens.  Here’s a video:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 22 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Surprise: the Wall Street Journal has praised the peacefulness of the “No Kings” rallies, which were numerous and widespread, for their peacefulness and even for their patriotism. The op-ed by William Galston, a regular writer for the conservative section, says this:

Ahead of the past weekend’s No Kings rallies across the country, the Trump administration and its congressional allies warned that protests would be ugly.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that they would feature the “most unhinged in the Democratic Party.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said they were “part of antifa.” Press secretary Karoline Leavitt alleged that “the Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson wrapped up this bill of particulars with a prediction during a press conference last week. “We call it the Hate America Rally that will happen Saturday,” Mr. Johnson said. “Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet you you’ll see Hamas supporters, I bet you’ll see antifa types, I bet you’ll see the Marxists in full display, the people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic.”

The speaker lost this bet. That isn’t what I heard when I talked with rally attendees from my synagogue, not exactly a nest of Marxist Hamas sympathizers. That isn’t what I saw when I drove by rallies in my neighborhood. For the most part, that isn’t what America saw. Instead, we saw millions of Americans exercising their First Amendment right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” This right is pretty central to a constitutional democracy. You might even call it foundational.

The administration’s supporters seem to believe that if you criticize President Trump, you must “hate America.” If so, a solid majority of Americans hate their country. They turn their thumbs down on his job performance, overall and on specific issues, and they believe that he is acting in ways that exceed his constitutional authority.

Before the rallies, Sen. Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) predicted on Newsmax that No Kings would be paid for by George Soros, and that “agitators” would show up to demonstrate. “We’ll have to get the National Guard out,” he said. Wrong again. The rallies were almost completely violence-free, as Mr. Johnson acknowledged during an ABC interview the day after the protests.

This was no accident. The nonviolence resulted from the organizers’ message to, and training for, rally attendees. The No Kings website includes this warning: “A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events.”

It was peaceful in Chicago, too, and even humorous in places, as demonstrators dressed up in animal costumes and offered doughnuts to the cops. I am very glad about this: the demonstrations that really make a difference have always intended to be peaceful (Vietnam, the Civil Rights marches, etc.), and they make even more of a difference if the cops or National Guard brutalize the demonstrators (Bull Connor, Kent State, etc.), for that shows the immorality of the powers that be. However, I wouldn’t want the “No Kings” demonstrators to be attacked, as that wouldn’t, at least to me, do much towards getting rid of Trump. The massive scale of the demonstrations conveyed the public’s message clearly, a message reflected in Trump’s low approval rating.

*Harvard has slashed Ph.D. admissions in both humanities AND science for the next two years (h/t: Bat). Even at the poorer University of Chicago, we’ve cut only humanities (eliminating departments as well), not the sciences.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.

The scale of reductions in the Social Science division was not immediately clear, though several departments in the division experienced decreases over the coming two years ranging from 50 percent to 70 percent.

The reductions — detailed by five faculty members and in emails obtained by The Crimson — stipulate smaller Ph.D. admissions quotas across dozens of departments. Departments were allowed to choose how they would allocate their limited slots across the next two years.

Departments that would only have one new Ph.D. seat after accounting for the percentage reductions will not be allowed to admit any students, according to a faculty member with knowledge of the matter, who added that there might be some narrow exceptions.

The German department is currently projected to lose all its Ph.D. student seats, according to a faculty member familiar with the matter. The History department will be admitting five students each year for the next two years, down from 13 admitted students last year, according to two professors in the department.

The Sociology department has opted to enroll six new Ph.D. students for the 2026-27 academic year, but forfeit its slots for the following year, according to an email from the department’s chair.

The Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department will shrink its class size by roughly 75 percent to three new Ph.D. students, according to two professors. Molecular and Cellular Biology will reduce its figure to four new students, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology will go down to four or five admits, one of the professors added.

The reduction in admissions slots puts a figure to FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra’s announcement in late September that the school would be admitting Ph.D. students at “significantly reduced levels.” Hoekstra cited uncertainty around research funding and an increase to the endowment tax — which could cost Harvard $300 million per year — as sources of financial pressure.

The reason, then, is this increased tax on endowments and research funding, which involves not just the Trump administration’s cuts to Harvard’s grants but also a general reduction in the NIH and NSF budget (Harvard is apparently looking over the long term, as Trump will be gone in three years).. It’s a shame, but the OEB cuts are the hardest for me, because I was in OEB when it was thriving (1973-1978). Now it is a meershaum of what it was then. In other words, it doesn’t smoke. Still, Harvard has an endowment of $57 billion, and isn’t now the time to use it?

*Two bits of news from the NYT. First, VP Vance in Israel, would not give a deadline for Hamas to surrender all its weapons, and also waffled on other questions.

Vice President JD Vance, in a visit to Israel, declined to give a deadline for Hamas to disarm, and sidestepped questions of how officials would guarantee several critical planks of the fragile U.S.-brokered cease-fire in Gaza. While Vance echoed President Trump in saying Hamas would be “obliterated” if it refused to disarm, he said he didn’t know if the militant group would play of a role in the territory’s future governance — a prohibition that is explicit in the plan agreed to by Israel and Hamas.

Also:

Kushner just said the United States and its allies were considering beginning the reconstruction of Gaza — much of which has been reduced to rubble — in parts of the enclave currently held by Israeli forces. That’s about half of Gaza, according to the Israeli military.

“No reconstruction funds will be going into areas that Hamas still controls,” he added, even as the cleanup could commence in a “new Gaza.”

That would “give the Palestinians living in Gaza a place to go, a place to get jobs, a place to live,” Kushner said. He added that this was just one proposal under consideration, and left unclear whether the area in question would be under the control of the Israeli military or an international force that has not yet been created.

Kushner has been a lot more savvy about things than Vance, who basically knows nothing about what to do. His failure to say explicitly that Hamas will NOT play a role in the future governing of Gaza shows what a dumbass he is. If there is to be peace, Hamas must not be a part of governing, as it would metastasize into more terror no matter what its role was.  Kushner’s decision is, to me, far more sensible, and provides a Hamas-free way for Gazans to reclaim their homes, jobs, and lives.

The second is that countries that should be able to send troops to Gaza to control it until a proper government is set up are waffling:

The fragile cease-fire in Gaza that came into force last week rests on some key assumptions: that Hamas militants give up their weapons and that an international troop presence keep the peace as Israel withdraws its military from the enclave.

But the countries that might make up that force are skittish about committing soldiers who could potentially come into direct conflict with Hamas while it is still an armed group, diplomats and other people familiar with the deliberations say.

President Trump’s 20-point plan, which led to an Israel-Hamas cease-fire and an exchange of hostages for prisoners and detainees, envisioned the immediate deployment of a “temporary International Stabilization Force” in Gaza. The idea was for the international corps to secure areas where Israeli troops have withdrawn, prevent munitions from entering the territory, facilitate the distribution of aid and train a Palestinian police force.

The creation and deployment of an international force in Gaza could determine whether the current cease-fire has a chance to evolve into a lasting agreement, and whether Israelis and Palestinians move toward the broader aim of a durable peace.

Diplomats and other officials from several countries who are familiar with the situation say there has been little progress on when the force might be assembled because of confusion over the force’s mission, which appears to be the most serious stumbling block.

This is going to delay things farther, and will be harder on the Gazans than on Israel. Gazans deserve to start normal, non-terrorist lives NOW, and we need a peace force in the area.

*Trump has ordered (and I didn’t know he had the power) that large portions of the East Wing of the White House be demolished to make way for an unnecessary ballroom, one larger than the working portion of the White House itself. The demolition has started, but it’s a mystery about who’s paying for it. The President has said it will be covered by private donations, but of course that could lead to organizations donating to curry favor with Trump.

As construction begins on President Donald Trump’s new, $250m (£149m) White House ballroom, mystery continues to swirl around the identities of the wealthy donors and corporations paying for it.

Groundbreaking for the ornate 90,000 sq ft (8,360 sq m) project began on Monday, with excavators and construction workers tearing out portions of the East Wing.

The US president has said that he personally will pay for significant portions of its construction, and suggested that some still anonymous donors would be willing to spend more than $20m to complete the project.

The funding model has sparked concern among some legal experts, who say it may amount to paying for access to the administration.

“I view this enormous ballroom as an ethics nightmare,” Richard Painter, a former chief ethics lawyer in the Bush White House between 2005 and 2007, told the BBC.

“It’s using access to the White House to raise money. I don’t like it,” he added. “These corporations all want something from the government.”

A dinner for potential donors held at the White House on 15 October included senior executives from prominent American companies including Blackstone, OpenAI, Microsoft, Coinbase, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

. . .The White House had originally said that the gigantic structure would have a seated capacity of 650 people. This week, Trump said that it will be able to hold 999.

Only one contributor has so far been revealed.

Court documents show that YouTube will pay $22m towards the project as part of a settlement with Trump regarding a lawsuit over the suspension of his account following the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

Also, the Wall Street Journal reports that employees if the Treasury Department (right next door to the White House; my dad used to work at Treasury) have been ordered not to show any images of construction of the ballroom, as parts of the White House are being demolished. Here’s a video, and the demolition is more extensive than nearly everyone suspected.

*You may have heard that “away” fans from the Tel Aviv soccer team Maccabi have been banned from a scheduled Nov. 6 soccer match between Aston Villa and the Israeli team. That caused a huge fracas, with cries of antisemitism, but it looks as if this isn’t antisemitism, but a way to prevent violence, which has broken out between even British teams (there’s a lot of nastiness in British footy).  The website The Empty City goes through the issue and concludes that the ban on “away” fans (mostly Jews, of course) is justified as a way to protect public safety.

Indeed, banning away fans or even cancelling matches for public safety reasons happens a lot.

. . . . Indeed, in Israel itself, a match has recently been called off on public safety grounds:

Many have strong opinions about whether teams from Israel should play in European competitions – but the public safety issue is not and should not be a proxy for that issue.

The away fans of Legia Warsaw were not allowed at Villa Park in 2023 because of public safety concerns, and two years later the away fans of another team were not allowed on the same basis.

But whether it is Legia Warsaw or Macabbi Tel Aviv or any other club the issue of public safety must be paramount.

Further, according to the Guardian, history shows that “Maccabi fans were considered likely to be the perpetrators of trouble.”

Matthew agrees, writing this to me:

As you may have heard, Maccabi have decided they will not accept any tickets so there will not be any Israeli fans coming officially to the match.

This blog post [above] is by David Allen Green, a very smart lawyer, a Villa fan and a Jew. It is, as you might imagine given his profession, very precise. The whole situation has become a complete mess, largely because politicians have got involved, but this is clear.  DAG (as he is known) emphasises that the police decision was simply about security, not to do with antisemitism. It got turned into a political row by politicians interfering, both for and against. As a regular match-goer he is very aware of the dangers and his article emphasises the problems there have been when the police have not emphasised public safety (not simply because of a threat hooliganism but when they did not take heed of the crowds  (eg in Paris in 2022 wheee catastrophe was narrowly avoided). 

This seems sensible to me, and you won’t hear me crying anti-Semitism. It’s not justified given the fact that non-Jewish fans have been banned in several games to avoid violence.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, both cats are checking up on Andrzej:

Hili: What is he doing?
Szaron: I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s what he’s supposed to be doing.

In Polish:
Hili: Co on robi?
Szaron: Nie wiem, ale chyba nie to, co powinien.

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

From Behind the Music on FB.  Here’s the story:

Kangaroo Breaks Into Grow Farm Held 4 Days Until He Sobers Up. Farm workers in Australia were stunned this week after discovering an unexpected intruder inside their grow operation: a kangaroo that had broken in and helped himself to the crop.By the time authorities arrived, the marsupial was stumbling, glassy-eyed, and clearly not his usual self. Rangers said he had been feasting for hours before anyone realized. The kangaroo was safely detained and placed in custody for monitoring. Officials reported it took nearly four full days before he fully sobered up.

You can guess what the crop was! (In Australia, cannabis is grown for medicinal purposes.) I am assuming this is true, as there’s a YouTube video about it.

From Stacy. “AITA” means “Am I the asshole?”

From The Dodo Pet, interspecies love!

Masih has a nine-minute report on the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime. It’s in Farsi, but there are English subtitles (it’s intended for Iranians, but worth watching).

From Luana. Yes, cellphones should be banned in school and now we have some evidence:

Also from Luana. According to the BBC:

The president-elect of the Oxford Union has lost a no-confidence vote after he was criticised for comments appearing to celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk.

The motion against George Abaraonye had met the required two-thirds threshold to oust the student from his position, the society has announced.

It comes after Mr Abaraonye reportedly posted on social media to seemingly welcome the attack on the US conservative activist in September.

The Oxford Union is way woke, but I’m actually surprised at this vote:

Mr Abaraonye is disputing the no-confidence vote, telling the BBC people campaigning to oust him had “unsupervised access” to the email account collecting proxy ballots.

From Malcolm, who is just as baffled as I am:

One from my feed; a smart rooster and a hassled owner:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death along with her three siblings, all soon after their train pulled in at Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would be ninety today has she lived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-10-22T10:50:51.835Z

Two from Dr. Cobb, soon to be back in the UK.  First, a reprise from above:

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%- Social Sciences by 50–70%- History by 60%- Biology by 75%- The German department will lose all PhD seats- Sociology from six PhD students to zero

— jon ben-menachem (@jbenmenachem.com) 2025-10-21T17:11:09.971Z

And a lovely murmuration, whose significance is unknown (it gathers birds together before nightfall, but why all the flying about?). Click the screenshot to go to the original because for some reason the video won’t embed: