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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Da Nooz:

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

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

But it is far from clear whether it can succeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BUT. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From historian Benny Morris:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is getting woke:

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

In Polish:

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

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

From a reader:

From Give Me a Sign:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

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

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

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

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

Larry, nie rób mi tego więcej! 🥹

fot: Damian Burzykowski pic.twitter.com/FmtDC2P8US

— Mikołaj Bujak (@mikolaj_bk) January 13, 2026

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

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

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

From Simon, who says “Best work fast!”

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

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 13, 2026

One from my feed; a cat counts sheep:

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

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) January 14, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

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

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) January 15, 2026

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

Nature can be wickedly cunning.

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

From the article:

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

A video about the orb-weaving spiders:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Da Nooz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is impossible,” he said.

From the second article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Polish:

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

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

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

From The Dodo Pet:

From Cat Memes:

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

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

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

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

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

— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) January 1, 2026

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

— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) January 1, 2026

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

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

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

— REDUXX (@reduxx) January 5, 2026

From Malcolm; a d*g joins some kids:

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

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 2, 2026

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

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

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) January 8, 2026

Two from Matthew. I love this first one!

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

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

We don't know what made this.

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

And it looks like this below the surface.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Da Nooz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Ami Kozak (@amiKozak) January 4, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The duo said Kevin was safely captured Sunday.

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

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

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili feigns ignorance:

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

In Polish:

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

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

From CinEmma:

From Give Me A Sign:

From Meow, Incorporated:

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

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

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

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

From Malcolm, “a dream fulfilled”:

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

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

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 2, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

From Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office:

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

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

One from my feed; LOOK AT THESE SHEEP!

The Valais Blacknose sheep of the Swiss Alps

📹AI
pic.twitter.com/MMgXulTh33

— Science girl (@sciencegirl) January 5, 2026

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

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

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) January 6, 2026

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

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

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

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

Anne Frank stepsister and Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss dies aged 96

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

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

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

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

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

Da Nooz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the article for free by clicking below

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winchester:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oliver Wiseman, Deputy Editor

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

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

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

River Page, Reporter

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

He doesn’t belong there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Lopez and her son beat all the odds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Polish:

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

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

From Give Me a Sign:

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

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

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

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

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

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

& what *is* indigenous math?

U count to 10 & then deliver a religious sermon

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

literally flat out creationism

Thanks @CBCNews pic.twitter.com/aYYYXfG9Vo

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) December 25, 2025

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

Listen to the barnacles sounds

[📹 its_mad_science]
pic.twitter.com/rkenSpQXM6

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 21, 2025

Two from my feed.  First, a sad kitty:

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/7bXcvOZmYd

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

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

Still one of the best videos made here.

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

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

One I posted on The Auschwitz Memorial:

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

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) December 27, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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.

سه زن قرار است جمهوری اسلامی را در دادگاهی در آرژانتین به اتهام «جنایت علیه بشریت» به محاکمه بکشانند. کوثر افتخاری و مرسده شاهین‌کار دو آسیب‌دیده چشمی انقلاب زن زندگی آزادی و مهسا پیرایی دختر دادخواه مینو مجیدی، سه نامی هستند که در این پرونده به عنوان شاکی حضور دارند..

این… pic.twitter.com/yqUqR2x2eX

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 18, 2025

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.

Drawing on the legacy of Nikolai Vavilov, the scientist who built the world’s then-largest seed bank before dying in a gulag, our new PNAS Perspective examines how modern biodiversity rules are undermining both conservation and food security. pic.twitter.com/lwH2QdkJe0

— David Bertioli (@BotanyBert) December 16, 2025

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

Dr. Oz: “We are in a weird place in America where we have mixed politics and medicine. And you know what you get when you mix politics and medicine? Politics. There is no medicine left.” pic.twitter.com/NMX93OB7ub

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) December 18, 2025

From Malcolm, a very fast dog:

Incredible speed of this dogpic.twitter.com/ThOSBBB07x

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 21, 2025

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

Flying fish also known as Exocoetidae pic.twitter.com/l8CYLzndnZ

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) December 17, 2025

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

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. . .

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.

*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

كنسرت مجازى پرستو احمدى كه ميليونها ايرانى را در داخل و خارج از ايران تحت تاثير قرار داد و با وجود خطر ، افكار بسيارى از ايرانيان را وادار به تصويرسازى و خروج از حباب ديكتاتورى كرد.
اين حركت شجاعانه پرستو، ايستادگی و مبارزه عليه جمهورى اسلامى‌ست. هركس به سهم خود قدمى بردارد و… pic.twitter.com/Vx7Vzhu7i1

— United Against Gender Apartheid (@UAGApartheid) December 13, 2025

Larry the Cat presents a poor, frustrated kitty:

Happy #Caturdaypic.twitter.com/hRoijzSBWs

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) December 13, 2025

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

The Motocompo: Honda’s 1980s foldable scooter that fits in a city car.pic.twitter.com/o4HMajt8ES

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 21, 2025

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

GWAS pic.twitter.com/OuDcNbeTdy

— Oded Rechavi (@OdedRechavi) December 12, 2025

One from my feed. Crows are not dumb!

Taking the leaves off strawberriespic.twitter.com/HehaSJ1zMn

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 13, 2025

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was seven years old and would be 89 today had he lived. https://t.co/iRkNe4jCO5

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) December 14, 2025

. . . 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