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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Da Nooz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the FP:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Offit’s summary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adolescence:

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

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

Adulthood:

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

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

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

Early aging:

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

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

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

Late aging: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Polish:

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

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

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

From The Language Nerds:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

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

I launched new initiative calling on male singers in Iran to finally take a stand: “Without Women, Never.” Refuse to perform on stage that bans women from singing. Listen to female singers from inside Iran demanding this act of solidarity.#بدون_زنان_هرگزpic.twitter.com/AYU7Abm2CS

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 4, 2025

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

CITIZENSHIP: The UK ended birthright citizenship in 1983. Australia did so in 1986. India did in 1987. Ireland followed in 2005. New Zealand followed in 2006. Many European democracies have long required a parental tie. Canada and the United States have stood almost alone among… pic.twitter.com/JALwmSEGq6

— @amuse (@amuse) December 8, 2025

From Larry the Cat, a photobomb:

Feline diplomacy. https://t.co/r7En54kcec

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) December 8, 2025

From Malcolm, a nice cat game:

Their favorite game…🤣 pic.twitter.com/EmVUlFZA0u

— The Internet of Cats 🐈🐈‍⬛ (@KittiesInternet) November 21, 2025

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

A fantastic ad for a French supermarket, featuring a vegetarian wolf. https://t.co/Nsbfo8FTT7

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) December 9, 2025

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

The suitcases, carefully addressed because their owners expected to get them back, are the most poignant part of the museum—except for the piles of hair shaved from women’s heads, intended to stuff mattresses. https://t.co/WvfOyaeZtK

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) December 10, 2025

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

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

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

. . . and Matthew traces a neologism:

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

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

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

From Allison:

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

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

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

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

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

Da Nooz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few quotes from comedians about the ceremony.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My favorite line is the question that ends this section:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything beyond gametes is now gender?

Apparently so!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It really isn’t difficult to imagine!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a video showing the comic:

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

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

In Polish:

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

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

Three cat memes today. First, from Stacy:

From CinEmma:

From Cats, Coffee, and Chaos:

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

My thoughts on the PATHWAYS clinical trials starting now into puberty blockers. I suspect you can guess what they are. https://t.co/7AEIr3kq7A

— Andy (@lecanardnoir) November 25, 2025

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

In which the author explains how his failed policy is actually a great success.

keep in mind that the students at UCSD that enrolled because of his policy got A’s and B’s in algebra, geometry, and trig, but couldn’t do middle-school math.https://t.co/SQcfBx5PgT https://t.co/aJJpkMip3Z pic.twitter.com/Re2yupVJBU

— Joel Fish (@joelwatsonfish) November 25, 2025

From Malcolm; a lovely short video:

Fall colors of Yorkshire, England

[📹 timholt]pic.twitter.com/arxXjXMMlU

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 5, 2025

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

Happy #Caturdaypic.twitter.com/rV58kcB5R4

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

One from my feed; interspecific love:

pic.twitter.com/62wxgwQRhd

— Cats for Happiness. (@JoyfullCat) November 26, 2025

One I retweeted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would be 88 today had she lived. https://t.co/Ijz3jmeuqk

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 27, 2025

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

Pepper on my lap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Da Nooz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legal experts raised concerns over the weekend that Trump’s demand for a new investigation could give Justice Department officials an excuse not to release all the documents.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is the sad part:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Polish:

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

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

From Clean, Funny, & Cute Animal Memes:

From Things with Faces; lotus root:

From The Dodo Pet:

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

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

Turban presents this list of “dimensions of sex” as if they are unrelated features, rather than physically and mechanistically interlinked parts of a whole system.

A whole system that has two discrete forms attached to two discrete functions separated across two classes of… https://t.co/44L0AxHoiH

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) November 17, 2025

From Luana: an attempt to explain away grade inflation:

People constantly say this sort of thing but not one Harvard professor actually believes their students are better at coursework today than a decade ago (and As are more common than ever) pic.twitter.com/VFhNZuc9YY

— alex bronzini-vender (@alexbronzini) November 17, 2025

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

These toxic briefings from Downing Street just got personal… https://t.co/rqhxVRnhJ8

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) November 14, 2025

From Malcolm; a white blood cell doing its job:

White blood cell wandering between red blood cells and checking for harmful organisms.pic.twitter.com/eFdPUO5lCS

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 5, 2025

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

This is a Japanese squirrel. pic.twitter.com/UkicTe9cX1

— The Best (@Thebestfigen) November 16, 2025

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial.

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was four years old. She would be 87 today had she lived. https://t.co/4fZG03vgBF

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 18, 2025

Two from Dr. Cobb.  A double pun first:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Da Nooz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew agrees, writing this to me:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Dodo Pet, interspecies love!

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

Watch my investigative report. The children of Iran’s regime, the same people who jail women for showing hair throw luxury weddings, then move to America to enjoy freedom and wealth. Hypocrisy at its peak.
Crush freedom at home, then cash in on it here.
pic.twitter.com/GRj5jDkGTI https://t.co/HvWwxPX2H5

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) October 19, 2025

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

New evidence on the effect of cell phone bans in schools just dropped.

“Enforcement of cellphone bans in schools led to a significant increase in student suspensions in the short-term … but disciplinary actions began to dissipate after the first year, potentially suggesting a… pic.twitter.com/cgXpzTmW3s

— John B. Holbein (@JohnHolbein1) October 20, 2025

Also from Luana. According to the BBC:

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

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

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

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

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

George Abaraonye has lost his vote of no confidence at the Oxford Union in a landslide, with 70% voting to remove him as President-elect.

Today is a good day for Britain. At last, we can say goodbye to this nasty little thug and his gang of bullies.

Charlie Kirk wins again. pic.twitter.com/cJxMmFKmuX

— Nicholas Lissack (@NicholasLissack) October 21, 2025

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

pic.twitter.com/4WUMICRqGr

— NO CONTEXT HUMANS (@HumansNoContext) September 16, 2025

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

Rooster looks for his owner inside the house to wake him up. 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/WK0mibm8E3

— The Figen (@TheFigen_) October 20, 2025

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, and it’s September 9, 2025, and National Wiener Schnitzel Day, a day of cultural appropriation. Here’s a traditional version, though I’d prefer fries rather than greenery:

It’s also National “I Love Food” Day (don’t trust someone who doesn’t), National Teddy Bear Day, National Steak Au Poivre Day, and National Ants on a Log Day, celebrating a dire 1950s concoction described as “nts on a log consist of a spread, such as peanut butter, placed on celery sticks, with raisins put on top. Peanut butter is the most common spread, but ricotta and cream cheese or other spreads may be used. A variation of the snack, gnats on a log, uses currants instead of raisins, and ants on vacation is a variation without raisins. ”

Forget that and have a look at my teddy bear, a bear I got the day I was born. Like me, he’s worn and battered. Kudos to the first reader to tell us his name (he’s still in my office):

The latest Google Doodle (below) celebrates back-to-school time by showing us how quadratic equation works when making a 3-point basket in basketball (click to see what the Doodle links to:

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

Da Nooz:

*This is a surprise to me: the Supreme Court has overturned a lower court’s order that ICE cannot be allowed to stop and detail people who they think violated immigration law.  And it looks like the usual 6-3 vote. But the final ruling isn’t yet in.

The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a federal judge’s order prohibiting government agents from making indiscriminate immigration-related stops in the Los Angeles area that challengers called “blatant racial profiling.”

The court’s brief order was unsigned and gave no reasons. It is not the last word in the case, which is pending before a federal appeals court and may again reach the justices.

The court’s three liberal members dissented.

In the near term it allows what critics say are roving patrols of masked agents routinely violating the Fourth Amendment and what supporters say is a vigorous but lawful effort to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

The lower courts had placed significant restrictions on President Trump’s efforts to ramp up immigrant arrests to achieve his pledge of mass deportations. Aggressive enforcement operations in Los Angeles — including encounters captured on video that appeared to be roundups of random Hispanic people by armed agents — have become a flashpoint, setting off protests and clashes in the area.

Civil rights groups and several individuals filed suit, accusing the administration of unconstitutional sweeps in which thousands of people had been arrested. They described the encounters in the suit as “indiscriminate immigration operations” that had swept up thousands of day laborers, carwash workers, farmworkers, caregivers and others.

“Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force,” the complaint said, “and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from,” violating the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.

The ruling is short, and is below, though the full document with concurrences and dissents is 31 pages long.  It seems to me that stopping people by the way they look constitutes race-based profiling, which is illegal. Still, I thought the court would be more anti-Trump than this ruling suggests:

*Trump’s “Border Czar” has threatened Democratic “sanctuary cities” that they are facing “action,” which means an incursion of the National Guard or other law-enforcement agencies, followed by arrests and deportations.

Trump and members of his administration have long railed against “sanctuary city” policies, which can encompass a spectrum of practices, such as jails being unable to hold immigrants accused of committing crimes beyond their allotted time or hand them over to ICE custody, or prohibiting police from inquiring about immigration status during arrests. On Sunday, Homan said the president is prioritizing federal action in cities with these policies because they “knowingly release illegal aliens, public safety threats, to the streets.” In recent days, Trump has also threatened to deploy the National Guard to New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon.

Homan declined to say how many National Guard troops will be deployed to Chicago, or where else they might be sent, but said the troops are a “force multiplier” to support immigration enforcement. Homan said the National Guard troops would not be arresting undocumented migrants in these cities but would rather support the work of ICE officers and Border Patrol agents.

“The National Guard does provide protection for us,” he said. “It does provide us infrastructure, provides us transportation, provides us additional processing capability that allows the ones with immigration authority, the badges and guns on the street, to continue arresting the bad guy.”

The comments come a day after Trump, on Truth Social, threatened Chicago with mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, sharing an edited illustration of himself as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore from the Vietnam War film “Apocalypse Now.” Alongside the image, Trump wrote, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”

“Chicago [is] about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” Trump wrote. On Friday, the president signed an executive order rebranding the Defense Department as the Department of War without congressional approval.

As he made his way to the U.S. Open in New York on Sunday, Trump was asked by reporters whether he was “threatening to go to war with Chicago.”

So far we have no National Guard in Chicago, and, as Ben Shapiro said in yesterday’s interview with Coleman Hughes, Trump often acts precipitiously and then doesn’t complete his act if he gets too much pushback. Bringing the guard to Chicago may be one of these retreats, as the Governor has not okayed their presence—an okay that I think is required by law.

*Greta Thunberg’s “Freedom Flotilla” has temporarily stopped in Tunisia to gather more boats and supplies before it heads to Gaza, where it will be stopped by the Israeli navy.

Huge crowds gathered at Tunisia’s port on Sunday to welcome Greta Thunberg as her aid flotilla, bound for Gaza, docked at the port.

The Swedish climate activist is travelling with 350 pro-Palestinian activists on boats stocked with aid that they are hoping to deliver to Palestinians in Gaza.

Pictures from the Sidi Bou Said port show hordes of people surrounding the 22-year-old as she addressed the crowd. “We all know why were are here,” she said. “Just across the water there’s a genocide going on, a mass starvation by Israel’s murder machine.”

Israel has repeatedly denied that there is starvation in Gaza and has blamed any hunger on Hamas and aid agency failures.

Last month a UN-backed body confirmed that there was famine in the territory and the UN’s humanitarian chief said it was the direct result of Israel’s “systematic obstruction” of aid entering Gaza.

French-Palestinian Member of the European Parliament Rima Hassan was at the port.

“The Palestinian cause is not in the hands of governments today. It is in the hearts of peoples everywhere,” she said, adding praise for those who stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

This latest attempt started on Monday, when the flotilla of about 20 vessels set sail from Barcelona.

The group will now stay in Tunisia for a few days, before resuming the journey to Gaza, Reuters news agency reports.

“Some of the flotilla ships bound for Gaza has reached Sidi Bou Said port in Tunisia, where it will be expanded, loaded with additional aid, and joined by the Tunisian team for the next stage of the mission,” the collective group of activists Global Sumud Flotilla wrote on X.

Israeli authorities have characterised Thunberg’s previous attempt to sail aid to Gaza as a publicity stunt that offered no real humanitarian assistance.

This one will fail, too, for if Israel lets them through, they can let anybody through, including ships that might supply Hamas with goods or weapons.  I predict that there will be a peaceful interception, people in Flotilla given water and sandwiches and an offer (which they’ll refuse) to watch the 47-minute video of Hamas’s activities on October 7, 2023 (they were given that chance before, and turned their backs).  They’ll then face the choice of being detained or being flown home (Greta chose to fly home after the last attempt, but then cried that she was “kidnapped.”) I hope to Ceiling Cat nobody on the Flotilla has weapons or tries to resist, as we don’t want bloodshed.  Here’s Greta dwelling on the nonexistent genocide:

*The Jerusalem Post reports that NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has vowed not to invest the city’s money in any Israeli bonds.

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, has said that if elected, he will oppose restoring the city’s historic investments in Israel Bonds.

The city’s investments in Israel Bonds — totaling some $39 million as of January 2022 — were not renewed when they matured in 2023. The decision was made by Mamdani’s ally, city comptroller Brad Lander, who cited a general policy of avoiding debt to foreign governments, saying Israel had been an exception and was now being treated in accordance with the rule.

In an interview with CBS New York broadcast Sunday, Mamdani stopped short of calling to divest from Israeli businesses, though he did not explicitly reject the position, either, saying the city should focus on where it is “directly implicated” in violations of international law.

“And in the city pension fund, purchasing Israel Bonds, that, to me, is something that is a clear indication of our values — and we know that our values are actually with international law,” he said.

In a July letter to New  York Mayor Eric Adams, Lander said that as of May 2025, the city’s public pension systems held more than $315 million in Israeli assets other than Israel Bonds, mostly common stocks.

Well, if Israel was an exception at one time and bonds weren’t renewed two years ago because of that, then it’s no big deal not to renew them again—so long as Israel was the only exception. But listen to Mamdani below, invoking “international law” as a reason to not only not renew the bonds, but perhaps not invest further in Israel. (I don’t know if “international law” says anything about investing in Israel.) It’s pretty clear that, if elected, he’ll pull a BDS. It amazes me that anybody wants to vote for him—not just because of his stand on Israel, but because many of his proposed policies are unworkable.

🆕 Mamdani tells @MKramerTV he backs Brad Lander’s decision not to purchase new bonds in Israeli government debt securities — known as Israel Bonds — as a political statement during his mayoralty.

The NYC comptroller oversees these investments.

More ⬇️ https://t.co/C0cy6kCIYb pic.twitter.com/YRTph1NeIE

— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) September 7, 2025

*The French government seems to have collapsed on a non-confidence vote in the Prime Minister (note, not President Macron), a vote based on a budget lawmakers didn’t like.  And, as Matthew says, “Because there is no clear majority and hasn’t been for nearly a year, since the last election. No idea what will happen now.”

The French government has collapsed after Prime Minister Michel Barnier was ousted in a no-confidence vote.

MPs voted overwhelmingly in support of the motion against him – just three months after he was appointed by President Emmanuel Macron.

Opposition parties had tabled the motion after the former Brexit negotiator controversially used special powers to force through his budget without a vote.

It marks the first time the country’s government has collapsed in a no-confidence vote since 1962.

The development will further France’s political instability, after snap elections in summer led to no single group having a majority in parliament.

MPs were required to either vote yes or abstain from Wednesday’s vote, with 288 votes needed for the motion to pass. A total of 331 voted in support of the motion.

Barnier is now obliged to present the resignation of his government, and the budget which triggered his downfall is defunct.

However, he is likely to stay on as caretaker prime minister while Macron chooses a successor.

Both the left and far right had tabled motions of no-confidence after Barnier pushed through reforms to social security by invoking presidential decree on Monday, after failing to win enough support for the measures.

The left-wing alliance New Popular Front (NFP), which won the most seats in the parliamentary elections, had previously criticised Macron’s decision to appoint centrist Barnier as prime minister over its own candidate.

Alongside the far-right National Rally (RN), it deemed Barnier’s budget – which included €60bn (£49bn) in deficit reduction – unacceptable.

Marine Le Pen, the RN leader, said the budget was “toxic for the French”.

Ahead of the vote, Barnier told the National Assembly that voting him out of office would not solve the country’s financial problems.

“We have reached a moment of truth, of responsibility,” he said, adding that “we need to look at the realities of our debt”.

“It is not a pleasure that I propose difficult measures.”

. . .Macron, who has returned to France following a state visit to Saudi Arabia, is due to give a televised speech to the nation on Thursday evening.

He is not directly affected by the result of the vote, as France votes for its president separately from its government.

Macron had said he would not resign whatever the outcome of Wednesday’s vote.

Well, we’ll have to wait almost a year until the next election is held: in July of 2026!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are having a gloomy chinwag:

Hili: I opened my eyes this morning and saw the whole truth.
Szaron: And?
Hili: I shut them immediately.

In Polish:

Hili: Otworzyłam dziś rano oczy i zobaczyłam całą prawdę.
Szaron: I co?
Hili: Natychmiast je zamknęłam.

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

From Stacy:

From Fat Cat Art:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

We’re still getting squat from Masih in the Tweetosphere, so again I default to her replacement. Are Iranians listening in droves to her podcast, which seems to be in English? We’ll have a tweet from JKR as we wait. . .

Tell me again how gender identity ideology isn’t homophobic. Would you trust this UK doctor, who was suspended from practicing by the medical council and now heads up quasi-medical trans advocacy group GenderGP, to be sympathetic to a young girl who’s attracted to other girls? pic.twitter.com/yDRZL6DrcL

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 8, 2025

Good news! Tufts joins the list of about three dozen American colleges that are institutionally neutral:

Great news!

Tufts University has adopted institutional neutrality (although calling it institutional pluralism) and founded a Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education (directed by Dr. Eitan Hersh). pic.twitter.com/MYrDoer4a5

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) September 4, 2025

Ricky Gervais isn’t afraid of saying what he thinks, regards of who’s offended:

The greatest live television moment of all time. 👏🏻

pic.twitter.com/Dn6eK7zS34

— The Ricky Gervais Clips (@gervaisclips) September 6, 2025

Cat art from Malcolm:

Art Artist pic.twitter.com/ITiCoOcRxR

— The Cats 𝕏 (@TheCatsX) August 22, 2025

One from my feed. What a variety of reactions!!!

Cats reacting to their owner’s voice coming out of the camera 😭pic.twitter.com/8CHs6fQmUr

— Antidepressant Content (@depressionlesss) September 7, 2025

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

A Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz. She was six. Had she lived she'd be 88 today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-09-09T10:30:50.693Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. The first one he says is self aggrandizing, but you should listen to the podcast anyway (I haven’t done so yet). Matthew’s famous!

I was on David Eagleman's podcast INNER COSMOS the other week, talking about the brain. A lot of fun we had, too!www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHyg…

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-09-08T15:50:09.852Z

Look at this blood moon in Australia!

4am lunar eclipse (red moon) on campus @sydney.edu.au 🔭

— Tara Murphy (@taramurphy.bsky.social) 2025-09-07T18:42:42.008Z

Welcome to Thursday, August 14, 2025, and National Navajo Code Talkers Day.  Read about the unbreakable WWII code here, and there’s a short video below. (There were also Native American code talkers besides the Navajo.)  A few words from Wikipedia:

Because Navajo has a complex grammar, it is not mutually intelligible with even its closest relatives within the Na-Dene family to provide meaningful information. It was still an unwritten language at the time, and Johnston believed Navajo could satisfy the military requirement for an undecipherable code. Its complex syntax, phonology, and numerous dialects made it unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training. One estimate indicates that fewer than 30 non-Navajo could understand the language during World War II.

It’s also National Creamsicle Day and Social Security Day, honoring the day when this system was founded in 1935.

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

Posting will definitely be light today as I have an appointment downtown with yet another sleep doctor in my desperate search for a cure for insomnia.  My doctor now sees it as a chronic condition that will wax and wane, but I won’t accept that! Do not expect more than this post—not even Readers’ Wildlife. My apologies, but sleep calls (or does not call!). As always, I do my best.

Da Nooz:

*Now Trump is trying to dominate the arts in America, at least judging by the Kennedy Center Honors, which he insisted on hosting this year (and chose the honorees himself). The NYT reports:

President Trump is scheduled to visit the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington on Wednesday morning to announce this year’s Kennedy Center honorees.

Who might those honorees be? The Kennedy Center teased the announcement in a social media post Wednesday. “Coming soon,” the post read, “A country music icon, an Englishman, a New York City Rock band, a dance Queen and a multibillion dollar Actor walk into the Kennedy Center Opera House….”

(The above is from an earlier post; Trump’s announcement was over the top). This is from the new article

“Since 1978, the Kennedy Center honors have been among the most prestigious awards in the performing arts,” he said before a small group of top aides, Kennedy Center employees and a bank of television cameras. “I wanted one. I was never able to get one. It’s true, I would have taken it if they would’ve called me. I waited and waited and waited, and I said to hell with it, I’ll become chairman, and I’ll give myself an honor. Next year we’ll honor Trump, OK?”

. . .The faces of the sufficiently unwoke were revealed.

Among them were the men of Kiss, the glam rock metal band known for the way the members do their makeup. “They made a fortune, and they’re great people, and they deserve it,” Mr. Trump said.

There was also Gloria Gaynor, a disco queen who sang “I Will Survive,” widely considered to be one of the most popular gay anthems of all time. “I will say, ‘I Will Survive’ is an unbelievable song,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ve heard it, you know, like everyone else here, thousands of times, and it’s one of those few that gets better every time you hear it.”

Sylvester Stallone’s mug was up there, too. Mr. Trump recalled the first time he saw the first “Rambo” movie, which came out in 1982. “I’ll never forget, I was a young guy, and I went to see a thing called ‘Rambo,’” he said. “It had just come out and I didn’t know anything about it. I was in a movie theater. We used to go to movie theaters a lot … .”

The other honorees are Michael Crawford from Phantom of the Opera, and singer George Strait. Truly a distinguished bunch!

*Here’s an essay from The Hill: “Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed.“; the authors are two researchers at Northwestern University.

On today’s college campuses, students are not maturing — they’re managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity.

Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe.

The result is not conviction but compliance. And beneath that compliance, something vital is lost.

. . .To test the gap between expression and belief, we used gender discourse — a contentious topic both highly visible and ideologically loaded. In public, students echoed expected progressive narratives. In private, however, their views were more complex. Eighty-seven percent identified as exclusively heterosexual and supported a binary model of gender. Nine percent expressed partial openness to gender fluidity. Just seven percent embraced the idea of gender as a broad spectrum, and most of these belonged to activist circles.

Perhaps most telling: 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains as sports, healthcare, or public data — but would never voice that disagreement aloud. Thirty-eight percent described themselves as “morally confused,” uncertain whether honesty was still ethical if it meant exclusion.

Usually, surveys of self-censorship involve five criteria, including views on race, politics, the conflict in Gaza, and so on. I find the 77% figure heartening, but what is disheartening is that most students will not say out loud that, in sports, biological sex should override gender identity when they conflict—even though they agree with that. This is why denial of the sex binary is going to last a long time: it’s passed on from generation to generation through academics. Trump will be long gone before students are empowered to say what they really feel about this issue—or about other issues.

*This is unbelievable. Reader Williams Garcia sent this headline from the Times of Israel. Click to read:

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) announced this week that it had canceled its invitation to screen a documentary about the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, due to ostensible copyright concerns stemming from the fact that the filmmakers did not receive permission from the Hamas terrorists whose clips are featured in the film.

The festival was set to show “The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue,” which tells the story of Maj. Gen. (res.) Noam Tibon, who set out to save his son, journalist Amir Tibon, and his son’s family as they were attacked by Hamas-led terrorists at their home on Kibbutz Nahal Oz. The film was created by Canadian filmmaker Barry Avrich.

The movie features footage taken from the cameras of terrorists, who filmed their atrocities as they marauded through Israeli communities. Over a quarter of Nahal Oz’s 400 residents were killed or taken hostage that day.

News of the movie’s disinvitation was first published in Deadline, which said TIFF pulled the screening due to fear of anti-Israel protesters disrupting the festival, as well as the copyright issue.

Sources close to the film’s production said the festival’s claimed reason for the cancellation was that the filmmakers had not received explicit permission to use videos of the Hamas operatives during the attack, with the festival fearing a potential lawsuit.

A potential lawsuit? Give me a break! Those clips were filmed TO BE SHOWN, and I’d love to see Hamas go to court and say that nobody can show them without permission. They’ve already been shown widely, and there have been no lawsuits. That’s why I’m pretty sure that the TIFF is acting not out of prudence, but pure cowardice. More:

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) announced this week that it had canceled its invitation to screen a documentary about the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, due to ostensible copyright concerns stemming from the fact that the filmmakers did not receive permission from the Hamas terrorists whose clips are featured in the film.

The festival was set to show “The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue,” which tells the story of Maj. Gen. (res.) Noam Tibon, who set out to save his son, journalist Amir Tibon, and his son’s family as they were attacked by Hamas-led terrorists at their home on Kibbutz Nahal Oz. The film was created by Canadian filmmaker Barry Avrich.

The movie features footage taken from the cameras of terrorists, who filmed their atrocities as they marauded through Israeli communities. Over a quarter of Nahal Oz’s 400 residents were killed or taken hostage that day.

News of the movie’s disinvitation was first published in Deadline, which said TIFF pulled the screening due to fear of anti-Israel protesters disrupting the festival, as well as the copyright issue.

Sources close to the film’s production said the festival’s claimed reason for the cancellation was that the filmmakers had not received explicit permission to use videos of the Hamas operatives during the attack, with the festival fearing a potential lawsuit.

The truth is what I’ve put in bold below:

A TIFF spokesman told Deadline: “The invitation for the Canadian documentary film The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue was withdrawn by TIFF because general requirements for inclusion in the festival, and conditions that were requested when the film was initially invited, were not met, including legal clearance of all footage.”

“The purpose of the requested conditions was to protect TIFF from legal implications and to allow TIFF to manage and mitigate anticipated and known risks around the screening of a film about highly sensitive subject matter, including potential threat of significant disruption,” they added.

Yep, they were scared that sympathizers with Hamas would cause trouble: “significant disruption.” What a bunch of invertebrates!

*You meteorology buffs probably know that we recently recorded the world’s longest lightning strike: 515 miles long!  It touched ground in five locations. The details from the WSJ:

There is a new king of lightning: A record-setting strike that lasted more than seven seconds and stretched 515 miles, from eastern Texas almost to Kansas City, Mo.

The massive size of the megaflash, which touched ground in five states in 2017, was revealed by a new analysis of satellite imagery from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The next largest lightning flash, recorded in the Great Plains in 2020, was 38 miles shorter. The average lightning strike is between 2 and 10 miles long.

NOAA’s Geostationary Lightning Mapper, the instrument that detected the flash, launched in 2016 and routinely records lightning flashes across all of North America. The data helps forecasters watch storms grow in real time.

While researchers have been tracking lightning flashes for decades with ground-based instruments, they have only recorded such large megaflashes since the launch of the instrument, according to Randall Cerveny, professor of geographical sciences at Arizona State University and an author of the paper, published in the July issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, that described the event.

Lightning is a giant spark of electricity between the atmosphere and the ground. As thunderstorms grow, air acts as an insulator between the positive and negative charges in the cloud and between the cloud and the ground. At some point, the differences in the charges become too great, and there is a rapid discharge of electricity.

Megaflashes happen when a charge accumulates over a large area and then spreads for miles behind a line of thunderstorms, according to Michael Peterson, senior research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, who analyzed the NOAA data for the study.

Here’s a short video about the megaflash, which was recorded using satellite technology that can monitor the atmosphere. The WSJ link has a “visualization” of the strike from above.

*Quillette reports that an LGBTQ+ literary prize is endangered because one of the authors long-listed for the prize admires—get this—J. K. Rowling. He didn’t admire her in his book, he simply admires her. But that was enough to talk about stripping him of his semi-honor and endangering the prize itself.

The Polari Prize, which annually honours the best books written by LGBT authors in the British isles, is the latest arts institution to be rocked by identity politics. This year’s Polari jury selected John Boyne’s Earthfor its Book of the Year longlist. Controversy erupted immediately, and has since metastasised on so large a scale that it threatens not only this year’s award but the viability of the fifteen-year-old Polari Prize itself.

The problem isn’t the book, a compelling read that focuses on two football players charged with rape and accessory to rape, while touching on important themes such as social class, privilege, and institutional corruption. Rather, it’s the opinions of the author—the best-selling gay Irish novelist best known for his 2006 novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (and its 2008 film adaptation). Boyne had the temerity to publicly celebrate Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling on her sixtieth birthday. In The Irish Times, he wrote of her, “As a writer, I’m in awe of her achievements. As a reader, I love her work. And as a fellow TERF, I stand four-square behind her.”

Oops!  The activists swung into action, and petitions are being signed as I write. The article describes other pushback, too.

. . . American-British author Patrick Ness led the charge on Bluesky: “You can’t call yourself a prize for LGBTQ+ literature and longlist a self-proclaimed TERF. Anyone can give any prize to anyone they like, of course. But don’t pretend you’re a prize for my community when you’re platforming someone who’s actively fighting against it.” His intervention, and that of others who piled on, led trans juror Nicola Dinan—a British-Malaysian novelist whose debut novel won the Polari First Book Prize in 2023—to resign her position. Four authors longlisted for a Polari prize (there would be more) withdrew their books from consideration.

But—surprise!—the Polari People defended their decision!

On 7 August, rather than bend the knee to the righteously offended, the Polari Prize organisers issued a statement in defence of freedom of expression and the merit principle:

The Polari Prize was founded on the core principles of diversity and inclusion. We are committed to supporting trans rights and amplifying trans voices… The role of the prize is to discover the best LGBTQ+ books written in the UK and Ireland each year. The books are read and deliberated over by the jury, and progress through the competition stages on the merits of craft and content. The Polari prize is awarded to books in a spirit of celebration of the work and the stories they tell. We have always cherished freedom of expression in our determination to find our voice both as writers and readers. It is inevitable given the challenges we face and the diversity of the lived experience we now represent under the LGBTQ+ Polari umbrella, that even within our community, we can at times hold radically different positions on substantive issues. This is one of those times. John Boyne’s novel Earth was included on The Polari Prize longlist on merit as judged by our jury, following the process and principles stated above.

The organisers also made it clear that they “do not eliminate books based on the wider views of the writer,” and that “books are one of our best means to explore the most difficult and divisive issues, and we encourage an open dialogue across our community.” While they nodded to the importance of trans and non-binary people feeling “welcome, safe, and supported,” their refusal to be bullied was extraordinary given the radicalised state of Alphabet politics.

That is so rare! Now it’s certain that Boyne will not win (how could he after this?) but the statement above, extolling the merit of Boyne’s book rather than how odious the community sees him, is something nice to behold.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are pondering time. (It’s been a while since we’ve seen the Dark Tabby):

Hili: I’m thinking about the future.
Szaron: Let’s focus on the present.

In Polish:

In Polish:

Hili: Myślę o przyszłości.
Szaron: Zajmijmy się teraźniejszością.

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

From Cat Memes:

From Arriza:

From Things With Faces; a boat giving you the raspberries:

Masih is still quiet, so again we default to JKR, this time her retweet of censorship of a “gender-critical” book. It’s described here, and “Wheesht” is Scots for “shut up”. (Rowling has an essay in this collection, which seems to have been a bestseller.)

We have written to the National Librarian about her decision to remove The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht from the centenary exhibition for the National Library of Scotland, Dear Library, in response to complaints from its LGBT staff network. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/lQlv2x0tsO

— The Frontline (@EthelWrites) August 12, 2025

From Luana: antisemitism at Harvard:

BREAKING: Witness testimony confirms it was a “mob” outside @Harvard.

“It started when someone in the crowd noticed my wife’s Star of David necklace… Moments later, she was followed and surrounded by a mob… Then a man slammed his fist into her hand, sending her phone flying.” https://t.co/gsHreIHtDT pic.twitter.com/r0yKlVKEqc

— Will Sussman (@realWillSussman) August 11, 2025

Barry sent an xkcd cartoon, wondering what an evolutionist would say. You got me! I guess I’d say, “from the union of gametes from the two sexes.”

Where Babies Come Fromxkcd.com/3127/

— Randall Munroe (@xkcd.com) 2025-08-12T23:02:09.037Z

From Malcolm: cat gives d*g the stinkeye, intimidates the cur:

Cat vs dog.. 😂 pic.twitter.com/PxjKLrHAKD

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) July 18, 2025

One from my feed: an independent toddler:

7-month-old baby was spotted walking like a pro and refused Mom’s help.😮♥️🍼 🔥
pic.twitter.com/B7uTRhnlfd

— Rain Drops Media (@Raindropsmedia1) August 12, 2025

One I retweeted from the Auschwitz Memorial. Read more about Kolbe here.

This man volunteered to be executed (by carbolic acid) in place of another prisoner. Kolbe was imprisoned for refusing to accept certain Nazi dictates for Catholic monks. He was declared a saint.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-08-14T10:03:20.680Z

Two from Professor Cobb. First, some photobombing of ducks:

I don't know what's happening in this video?? But, i support it… 👀😅🤣 #bluesky

— I Post Animal Vids… 😊 (@realjfairclough.bsky.social) 2025-08-13T00:15:12.853Z

Mr. Cigarette handing out ciggies in a hospital!

— Paula- The Blue Warrior (@resist61.bsky.social) 2025-08-13T15:08:55.343Z