Category: Szaron

Sunday: Hili dialogue

September 14, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats; it’s Sunday, September 14, 2025 and National Eat a Hoagie Day.  By now even foreign readers, if they’re regulars, will know what a hoagie is, so I needn’t explain it. Here’s a hoagie place close to me in Chicago (we call them “subs”), and I must go there and get the wagyu combo:

@dafattestninja

Bronzeville Hoagie & Panini Cafe 238 E 35th St Chicago IL #chicagofoodie #chicagofoodguide #chicagofoodspots #chicagofoodies #chicagofoodscene #chicagofoodauthority #chicagofoodreview #chicagofoodmag #chicagorestaurants #chicagorestaurant #chicagoeats #chicagocheck

♬ original sound – DaFattestNinja

It’s also National Cream-filled Donut Day (beware if they spell it “creme”), National Gobstopper Day (and Americans need to know what a “gobstopper” is), National Black and White Cookie Day (I didn’t even know what those were), and Racial Justice Sunday.

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the WNBA (Women’s National Basketball Association); click the logo to go to the schedule. There are four games today.

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

Da Nooz:

*I still can’t determine what part of the political/ideological spectrum the accused murderer of Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson, dwells on.  It isn’t really that important to me, though, as that segment of the spectrum, whatever it is, will get blamed as a whole, yet over the last decade we’ve had shooters from every part of the Political Rainbow.  I am not worried about the Left being blamed for the shooting.  If I have political worries, they’re that the celebrations of Kirk’s death come largely from the Left, as he was clearly a conservative, no matter who killed him. That is going to hurt the Democrats. But I feel churlish in even pondering such things in the face of Kirk leaving behind a wife and two young children. They were there when he was murdered–and in a gruesome way. I can’t imagine how they feel, along with Kirk’s friends, relatives, and colleagues.  We get an inkling from this public statement  below from his wife Erika.  She is devastated but defiant, and he would be proud of her.  Yes, she vows to continue the movement that Kirk started, and I don’t at all like its principles, but the movement fostered discussion, not violence.

How can you say how great it was that Kirk was killed when you hear his grieving widow?

You can’t tell whether he was even on the Left or Right from his doings so far, though we know he didn’t like Kirk. From the WSJ:

One thing is apparent about Robinson: He lived much of life on the internet. By age 15, he had developed enough of an online presence that he dressed up as “some guy from a meme” for Halloween, according to his mother. Writings on the bullet casings found by police appeared to reference various memes and online culture.

One unfired casing was inscribed with lyrics from “Bella Ciao,” an Italian song dedicated to those who fought against fascism during World War II that has been revived on TikTok.

“It’s very clear to us and to the investigators that this was a person who was deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology,” [Utah Governer Spencer] Cox said in an interview with the Journal.

Online, however, X users have noted that a version of the song also appears on a Spotify playlist for Groypers, the name for followers of Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist personality who has criticized Kirk, including for his support of Israel. Fuentes has publicly condemned the shooting of Kirk and posted on X that “my followers and I are currently being framed” for Kirk’s killing “based on literally zero evidence.”

*After seeing this article I’m now convinced that The Free Press is touting religion for the masses as a curative for our ills. The piece, by Paul Kingsnorth, is called “How the West Lost Its Soul,” with the subtitle, “We’ve abandoned the founding religious story that has sustained us for 1,500 years. The result is the greatest age of abundance we’ve ever known—and a complete lack of meaning.” Shades of Ross Douthat! And this is only one of several such article the FP has published (it appears to be a series). My theory, which is mine, is that Bari Weiss is religious and so she allows her pages to be used to spread superstition. A few excerpts:

After so many centuries of this, after so many years of humans missing the mark, of wandering from the path, of civilizations rising and falling and warring and dying, of eating the fruit again and again, the creator stages an intervention. He comes to Earth in human form to show us the way back home. Most people don’t listen, naturally, and we all know how the story ends. God himself walks on Earth and what does humanity do? We torture and kill him.

But the joke is on us, because it turns out that this was the point all along. The way of this creator is not the way of power but of humility, not of conquest but of sacrifice. When he comes to Earth he comes not as warlord, king, or high priest, but as a barefoot artisan in an obscure desert province.

He walks with the downtrodden and the rejected, he scorns wealth and power, and through his death he conquers death itself, releasing us from our bondage. He gives us a way out, a way back home. But we have to work at it. The path back to the garden can only be found by giving up the vainglory, the search for power and the unearned knowledge which got us exiled in the first place. The path is the path of renunciation, of love, and of sacrifice. To get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross.

Clearly they’re pushing Christianity as the nostrum rather than, say, Judaism or Islam. But there’s more, there’s the damn god-shaped hole that no article like this fails to mention:

If you knock out the pillars of a sacred order, the universe itself will change shape. At the primal level, such a change is experienced by people as a deep and lasting trauma, whether they know it or not. No culture can just shrug off, or rationalize away, the metaphysics which underpin it and expect to remain a culture in anything but name—if that.

When such an order is broken, what replaces it? The end of the taboos doesn’t bring about some abstract “freedom”; it strips a culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but once the formal architecture is gone too, there is an empty space waiting to be filled—and nature abhors a vacuum.

. . . . We are now at this point in the West. Since at least the 1960s, our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years the last remaining monuments have been—often literally—torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. Instead, we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all.

This is an excerpt from Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine: The Unmaking of Humanity. And the thesis is bogus. Even if Kingsnorth is correct in that religion’s demise leaves a lacuna in our souls or our societies that must be filled with something supernatural, that doesn’t address the question: Is what I believe really true? If you say, “It doesn’t matter,” then you’re living a lie. But in fact the secular countries of the West have, as Steve Pinker maintains, only gotten better without faith, and religion has held back progress. Of course some things are bad now, but would you rather live in 1350, when everyone in the West was religious, and mostly Christian? Back then you’d be dead at 35 from a tooth absess (if you had any teeth).

I didn’t think you’d want to live back then. I’d love to write a piece for the Free Press about why this kind of palaver is nonsense, but I’m not even going to try.

*I’ve written recently about the murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska, stabbed to death by a mentally ill career criminal on a Charlotte, NC rail train. At the time there was almost no media coverage of this event. An article in Quillette by Jukka Savolainen (identified as a “former Director of the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (USA) and a professor of sociology & criminology at Wayne State University”) asks why this murder has become a “flashpoint on the Right” and tries to answer three questions:

Why did this particular killing cut through the daily background noise of American violence? And why did it elicit such a powerful reaction from the political Right? The answers lie in three interrelated concerns: (1) the inconsistency with which victims and offenders of different races are treated by mainstream media, (2) the problem of urban disorder and impunity, and (3) the characteristics of the victim herself.

. . . Every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu, or Taoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.

Here are Savolainen’s reason why the killing is now getting traction (quotes from the article indented)

a.) Identitarian media bias:

In other words, there is a pronounced tendency to suppress information about black crime, and this racialised double-standard is obvious to millions of Americans. The Zarutska case struck a nerve because it inverted the usual script—a young white female refugee was brutally slain by a black man with a long criminal record on video, and yet the story barely registered in the pages of the legacy press or in headlines of mainstream broadcasters until it exploded on X. And when the story finally did appear in the New York Times, its reporters were less concerned with the circumstances of the murder itself than with how the incident had ignited a “firestorm” on the political Right.

b.) Urban disorder and impunity in the Post-Floyd Era:

As Kat Rosenfield has argued, “we have fallen for the misguided idea that compassion and permissiveness are one and the same.” In practice, the taboo against insisting on order and decency has meant abandoning shared spaces—trains, platforms, sidewalks—to the most disturbed and dangerous people among us. The Daniel Penny saga, meanwhile, taught bystanders a cruel lesson: if you intervene, you may be punished, so the safest course is to do nothing.

c.) The victim herself:

Finally, this senseless crime resonated because of who Iryna Zarutska was. She was neither a career criminal nor a drug dealer nor any other kind of lawbreaker participating in a dangerous lifestyle. She was a young woman who had fled war, found work in America, and was heading home from her shift when she was stabbed three times by a stranger for no reason. Compare her to the individuals elevated into icons by the social-justice movement. George Floyd had a long criminal history for which he had served several jail terms; Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend was a drug dealer; Michael Brown assaulted a store clerk minutes before his fatal encounter with a police officer. Yet their deaths, tragic as they were, were transfigured into myths of oppression and sainthood.

Zarutska, on the other hand, embodied the sort of immigrant success story Americans are supposed to celebrate: she was industrious and hopeful and her grotesque murder was entirely unprovoked. That is why her story elicited sympathy and outrage on the Right, and why it was met with icy indifference from many progressives.

d.) Fairness and care:

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory holds that conservatives place a strong emphasis on “fairness” and “proportionality”—punishing cheaters, rewarding those who play by the rules, and protecting the innocent from predators. Progressives, on the other hand, place greater emphasis on “care” and “liberation,” but struggle with proportionality, especially when it cuts against their preferred identity-based narratives.

So in the progressive moral matrix, the murder of George Floyd becomes evidence of systemic oppression, while the murder of Iryna Zarutska is just another crime or an opportunity to feel compassion for her killer. In the conservative matrix, it is the reverse: a hard-working immigrant murdered by a repeat offender is a paradigmatic symbol of unfairness and a profound violation of proportionality. To ignore that fact is itself immoral.

It does surprise me that the MSM talked more about the killer than about the murdered woman; it is the opposite with Charlie Kirk.  The accused killer, Decarlos Brown Jr., had fourteen crimes under his belt, and needs to be kept out of society. To me that means institutionalization in a place where he can get help, though it looks as if he’ll never be releasable.  But if he’s seen as a victim, than surely Zrutska was even more of a victim.

*Reader Jay sent me a link to this disturbing new poll, adding this:

In a YouGov survey just out today, when asked, “Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to resort to violence in order to achieve political goals?” fully one in four (25%) of those who rate themselves “very liberal” answered “Yes, violence can sometimes be justified,” compared to an almost trivial 3% of those who rate themselves “very conservative.” (Source: What Americans really think about political violence.)

First, concern about political violence has risen in all age groups:

Happiness: liberals and younger folk find being happy about public figures’ deaths more acceptable:

Justification for political violence is more pervasive in younger people and more liberal people:

Finally, Luana thought this was telling. This comes from a Generation Lab/Axios poll reported by Axios. Man, if you’re a Republican in college, your love life is in the toilet!

*I wrote yesterday about Ghost the octopus, a giant Pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini), laid a bath of unfertilized eggs in a California aquarium, and she’s caring for them. Unto death! When octopuses lay eggs (only once in their lives), they stop eating and then die from starvation. Ghost is dying, and is in her last month or few months, and is receiving an outpouring of affection from her fans. I find this ineffably sad, but if you want to see this in its full wonder and sadness, watch the Oscar-winning documentary “My Octopus Teacher.”  Here’s a news story on Ghost:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, we get all three cats in one photo! They assembled to have a serious discussion:

Hili: You interrupted an interesting discussion.
Andrzej: About what?
Hili: About the superiority of feline intelligence over Artificial Intelligence.

In Polish:

Hili: Przerwałeś nam ciekawą dyskusję.
Ja: O czym?
Hii: O przewadze kociej inteligencji nad Sztuczną Inteligencją.

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

From Now That’s Wild:

From Give me a Sign:

From Jesus of the Day:

Masih is still quiet, but her substitute isn’t, and probably won’t ever be. Rowling’s been reading genetics!:

From Simon: the expected degree of sympathy that Trump evinces for Charlie Kirk:

Q: My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. How are you holding up?TRUMP: I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get for about 150 years.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-09-12T15:40:40.445Z

From Maarten, the usual antisemitism in Belgium (the Netherlands are pretty bad, too):

A tweet that originated from reader Michael. He thought if it as embodying “a lot of [his] feelings about peer review and commercial journals like Nature” (it was retweeted with a Nature caption), but I like mine better:.

One from Malcolm, the happy-cow compilation we need:

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish boy was gassed to death immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. He was nine.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-09-14T10:11:19.956Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, an illusion. Can you figure out how it’s done?

コレクションが増えた。

— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@akiyoshikitaoka.bsky.social) 2025-09-13T10:10:41.114Z

. . . . and do you think these elephants are, as claimed, “joyful”? Click here to go to the video, as I can’t embed the “skeet”:

Tuesday: Hili Dialogue

September 9, 2025 • 6:45 am

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:

Kobako, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

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):

What is my name?

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.

As Chicagoans braced for a potential activation of the National Guard in their city, President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said residents of cities with pro-immigrant policies all over the United States should also expect stepped-up immigration enforcement in their neighborhoods.

“You can expect action in sanctuary cities across the country,” Homan told CNN on Sunday.

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.”

“We’re not going to war,” Trump replied. “We’re going to clean up our cities.”

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.

*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. . .

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

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

Cat art from Malcolm:

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

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

Thursday: Hili dialogue

August 14, 2025 • 6:45 am

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….”

Mr. Trump has taken a strong interest in the Kennedy Center’s affairs ever since naming himself chairman in February, when he purged its traditionally bipartisan board of Biden-era appointees and restocked it with loyalists.

In March, Mr. Trump toured the center and met with his new board for the first time. He floated the idea of hosting the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony himself, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Trump referred to himself then as “the king of ratings.”

He boycotted the ceremony during his first term after several of the artists who were being honored criticized him.

In his post on Tuesday hyping the new honorees, he wrote: “GREAT Nominees for the TRUMP/KENNEDY CENTER, whoops, I mean, KENNEDY CENTER, AWARDS.”

(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.)

From Luana: antisemitism at Harvard:

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:

One from my feed: an independent toddler:

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

Wedneday: Hili dialogue

August 6, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Andro Hump” in Malagasy): July 5, 2025, and National Root Beer Float Day. (This is also known as a “Black Cow”.)  Here’s one, and here’s an audio version with great electronic piano and trumpet solos:

Arnold Gatilao, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Fresh Breath Day, Farmworker Appreciation Day, and Hiroshima Day, marking the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima at 8:45 a.m. on this day in 1945. Video of the explosion is below, and let’s hope that the two bombs dropped in Japan will be the last (who knows?):

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

Da Nooz:

*For reasons I don’t understand, the U.S. has slapped neutral Switzerland with huge tariffs of 39%. The Swiss president is hightailing it to the U.S. to stave this off.

The Swiss president is heading to the U.S. in a last-ditch effort to head off punishing tariffs that threaten to cripple key sectors of the country’s export-reliant economy.

President Trump’s recent decision to impose a 39% levy—one of the highest in the world—stunned the Alpine nation and upended months of negotiations in which Swiss officials believed they were on the verge of securing a favorable deal.

The aim of President Karin Keller-Sutter’s trip Tuesday is to “facilitate meetings with the U.S. authorities at short notice and hold talks with a view to improving the tariff situation for Switzerland,” the Swiss government said.

The tariff tiff presents a test for Switzerland’s export model and an example of how vulnerable even staunch U.S. allies are to abrupt shifts in U.S. policy in the new era of transactional, deficit-focused negotiations under Trump.

Keller-Sutter, whose delegation also includes Economy Minister Guy Parmelin, aims to present “a more attractive offer to the United States in a bid to lower the level of reciprocal tariffs for Swiss exports, taking U.S. concerns into account,” the government said. It is unclear whether Keller-Sutter will meet with Trump or what is included in her new offer.

Chief among those concerns is the fact that Switzerland has one of the largest trade deficits in goods with the U.S., at $48 billion this year through June. Around a fifth of Swiss exports such as watches, chocolate, pharmaceuticals and machine tools go to the U.S., its largest market. “That’s a big deficit,” Trump said last week after the Swiss tariffs announcement.

Switzerland’s government said its trade surplus wasn’t the result of any “unfair trade practices.” The country unilaterally scrapped all tariffs on industrial goods as of Jan. 1, 2024, meaning more than 99% of U.S. goods enter Switzerland tariff-free, it said. It is now the sixth-largest foreign investor in the U.S. and major companies such as Nestlé, Roche and Novartis support some 400,000 American jobs, according to Swiss business organization Economiesuisse.

So if Switzerland imposes no tariffs on U.S. goods, what possible rationale can there be for us to impost nearly 40% tariffs on their goods? As one Swiss official said, ““Switzerland is not a threat to U.S. national security,” said Jan Atteslander, member of the executive board at Swiss business organization Economiesuisse. “Our chocolate and watches don’t endanger U.S. manufacturing.”

Can someone explain this to me?

*Even Trump can’t stop the Republicans from trying to get their hands on the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein. The House Republicans just issued a subpoena for those files, but also files on Bill and Hillary Clinton, and a bunch of other people.

The Republican-led House issued a subpoena to the Justice Department for files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, potentially setting up a contentious standoff between Congress and the Trump administration over an issue that has sparked major headaches for President Donald Trump.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Kentucky) formally issued the subpoena Tuesday, nearly two weeks after one of the panel’s subcommittees — with some GOP support — voted to compel the Justice Department to release the files. Under House rules, Comer was obligated to issue the subpoenas and no full House vote was required. Along with a demand for the Epstein documents, the chairman also issued subpoenas for several high-profile figures, including Bill and Hillary Clinton and former FBI director and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

In all, Comer issued 11 subpoenas for documents and testimony spanning over two decades and including a slew of former attorneys general under Democratic and Republican administrations.

Comer set an Aug. 19 deadline for records to be released from the Justice Department related to Epstein and his imprisoned associate, Ghislaine Maxwell.

“While the Department undertakes efforts to uncover and publicly disclose additional information related to Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell’s cases, it is imperative that Congress conduct oversight of the federal government’s enforcement of sex trafficking laws generally and specifically its handling of the investigation and prosecution of Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell.” Comer wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“The Committee may use the results of this investigation to inform legislative solutions to improve federal efforts to combat sex trafficking and reform the use of non-prosecution agreements and/or plea agreements in sex-crime investigations. Documents related to the Department’s investigation and prosecution of Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell are relevant to the Committee’s investigation.”

The Justice Department had no immediate comment.

Well, all this kerfuffle has made me very curious to see what is in the records. Now that Epstein is dead, why not release them (names of people who should be hidden can be redacted)? You’ve probably heard that Ghislaine Maxwell, serving a 20-year sentence at a federal medium-security prison, has been transferred to the same minimum-security prison as white-collar prisoners like Elizabeth Holmes. But it’s not normal for felons to be in that type of prison. And I’m infuriated that Trump is making noises about a possible pardon for Maxwell.  She was convicted of conspiracy to sexually abuse minors, and if Trump pardons her soon for that, well, it’s just wrong!

*Over at Commentary, in an article called, “When the narrative collapses,” author Seth Mandel discusses the New York Times’s misleading use of a sick Gazan child to buttress the paper’s narrative of starvation in Gaza.

it turns out that New York Times editors tried desperately to avoid using a photo of a child with preexisting conditions precisely because they understood it to be unethical. Semafor relates some of the behind-the-scenes discussions at the Times:

“Last Thursday at 3 pm, the Times was preparing to run images of Youssef Matar, a young child in Gaza with cerebral palsy who was suffering from lack of nourishment, alongside its July 24 story that cited doctors in Gaza finding ‘an increasing number of their patients are suffering and dying — from starvation.’

“But the Times’ topmost editors wanted to err on the side of caution. After viewing the gutting photo, according to communications viewed by Semafor, they worried that it might inadvertently call into question the paper’s reporting, which said that many of the children suffering from hunger did not have preexisting health issues.”

According to Semafor, the Times‘ managing editor Marc Lacey asked why they would use a misleading picture “when there is presumably no shortage of images of children who were not malnourished before the war and currently are?” Executive editor Joe Kahn, per internal communications seen by Semafor, put it simply: “The story isn’t framed around people with special needs and the lead art really should not do that, either.”

Absolutely correct, as anyone who has worked in news reporting would know.

So the idea that it would be fine to use the picture knowing the boy had cerebral palsy has been obliterated: The Times had already changed its prospective front page to avoid that very mistake.

But there’s more to learn from the Times’ internal communications. Notice that the editors tell the staff that the story is specifically supposed to make the point that children in Gaza without preexisting conditions are suffering from malnutrition. If the reports of such widespread hunger are true, they explained, there should be plenty of photos that show exactly that. And therefore the Times must reject its first proposed front-page photo, which did not meet those criteria.

And yet, the photo they replaced it with also did not meet that criteria. It must be very easy to find proof that Israel is deliberately starving otherwise healthy children, they said—our reporting makes that claim! And then they proceeded to fail to find a usable example of such a case. They hadn’t realized, they say, that this child also had cerebral palsy, just like the first child they considered using.

You can see it slowly dawning on them that there’s something else entirely going on here, that the trend is not what they believe it to be. You can even sense the frustration creeping into their communication: You reporters, they explain, are saying one thing and then showing us another—and then after we corrected you on it, you did it again!

The unspoken next thought is: Perhaps it isn’t so easy to prove this claim about Israel.

It’s almost completely taboo to say that Gaza is not subject to widespread starvation. But before the West buys into that, we need data, and not data provided by Hamas or its Gazan Health ministry, nor by the UN nor even the NY Times.  People won’t accept what Israel has to say, so how do we determine what the truth is? The article concludes:

This conversation echoes what Israel’s defenders have been saying for some time. When Israel’s defenders say it, though, they are accused of pushing hasbara, of spinning for atrocities.

The apologies owed won’t be coming any time soon. That’s because the people accusing Israel supporters of cruelty are themselves the very definition of propagandists: They will defend the printing of terrorist propaganda even knowing its falsity. That is worth keeping in front of mind, because they will soon do it again.

But, as I’ve said, Israel should send enough food into Gaza to stuff everyone—so long as it can be guaranteed that none of that food goes to Hamas. You tell me how to do that.

*In a related article, the Times of Israel reports that, as of September, Canada will join France and the UK in recognizing a Palestinian state.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Wednesday that Canada will recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly in September, in a fresh diplomatic blow to Israel as it faces increasingly intensifying international criticism over the war in Gaza.

He said the move was “predicated on the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to much-needed reforms,” including elections in 2026, anti-corruption measures, and a demilitarized Palestinian state. Carney stressed he was “not in any way or shape minimizing that scale of that task.”

“Clearly that’s not a possibility in the near term,” the prime minister said, adding that Canada has joined the efforts of other states to “preserve the possibility of a two-state solution.”

“Much has to happen before a democratic, viable state is established,” he added.

Canada had long stated it would only recognize a Palestinian state at the conclusion of peace talks with Israel. But Carney said the reality on the ground, including the mounting hunger crisis in Gaza, meant “the prospect of a Palestinian state is literally receding before our eyes.”

Among the reasons, he said, were “the pervasive threat of Hamas terrorism to Israel,” accelerated settlement construction and a vote by the Knesset calling for the annexation of the West Bank.

“Canada condemns the fact that the Israeli government has allowed a catastrophe to unfold in Gaza,” he said.

Recognizing a Palestinian state now, a state without a non-terrorist candidate leader and including Gaza, run by an explicitly terroristic and genocidal state, would be a huge mistake: it would give Hamas exactly what it wants, a sovereign state from which it can go after Israel (and of course it will). Now I don’t think that any of this recognition is going to produce a Paletinian state, though I’m not opposed to such a state under the right conditions. But rewarding Hamas for helping engineer the starvation of its own people is an absolutely stupid thing to do. For more reasons why, read the Quillette article “Against Palestinian statehood.”

Previous efforts to create a sovereign Palestinian entity failed to address even the most basic requirements of statehood, such as that the prospective state have a permanent and precisely defined territorial contour; and possess a functional government capable of maintaining law and order over such territory. That deficiency persists to this day: the main reason why Israel remains militarily engaged in Gaza is that no competent government-in-waiting exists, as Hamas (which is classified as a terrorist organisation by both the European Union and Canada) has spent the last two decades dismantling all forms of civil society lying outside its direct control. Nurturing an alternative government in this kind of politically stunted society will be the work of generations. It can’t be summoned into existence by Western leaders seeking to appease domestic constituencies.

The reader who sent me this link commented astutely, “How can the hostages survive this? It only emboldens Hamas and buys them more time to buy more time. This is a slap in the face.”

*Colossal Biosciences continues to push back on critics of its de-extinction program. Now they say they’re going to de-extinct several species of moas! Nature reprises the brouhaha without, of course, taking any stand on the issue. Perhaps they shouldn’t, but any fool knows that Colossal has not brought back the dire wolf. Rather, they created a gray wolf with 15 tweaks in its DNA.  The article? “This company claimed to ‘de-extinct’ dire wolves. Then the fighting started.” (Link goes to archived version; h/t Matthew). I’ll give a few back-and-forth quotes:

The company’s announcement of the [dire wolf] pups in April, which described them as dire wolves, set off a media maelstrom. The ensuing debates over the nature of the animals — and the advisability of doing such work — have opened a chasm between Colossal’s team and other scientists.

“I don’t think they de-extincted anything,” says Jeanne Loring, a stem-cell biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. She and many others say that the hype surrounding Colossal’s announcement has the potential to confuse the public about what de-extinction technologies can achieve.

Colossal, meanwhile, has taken an increasingly combative tone in addressing criticisms, issuing rapid rebuttals to researchers and conservationists who have publicly questioned the company’s work. The firm has also been accused of taking part in a campaign to undermine the credibility of some critics. The company denies having played any part in this.

Colossal stands by its claims and insists that it is listening to dissenters and seeking advice from them. “We have had this attitude of running towards critics, not away,” says Ben Lamm, a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the company.

No, Colossal is running away from its critics. Remember when its head scientific officer, Beth Shapiro, said that no, they didn’t produce real dire wolves, but then did a 180-degree turn, declared that they were dire wolves because they looked like dire wolves (were the originals white?), and rejected any kind of biological species definition.  But wait! There’s more! Here’s Shapiro buying into Colossal’s hype:

. . . .Shapiro argued in her 2015 book that forming a wild population is a requirement for successful de-extinction. She nevertheless considers the dire wolves to be an example of de-extinction, and says that creating them will have conservation benefits for wolves and other species.

Many scientists disagree. A group of experts on canids that advises the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) issued a statement in mid-April rejecting Colossal’s claim that gene-edited wolves could be considered dire wolves, or even proxies for the extinct species. The statement cites a 2016 IUCN definition for de-extinction that emphasizes that the animal must fill an ecological niche. The work, the group said, “may demonstrate technical capabilities, but it does not contribute to conservation”. Colossal has disputed this on the social-media platform X (formerly Twitter) saying that the dire-wolf project “develops vital conservation technologies and provides an ideal platform for the next stage of this research”.

. . . [Evolutionary geneticist Tom] Gilbert, who was a co-author of a preprint describing the ancient dire-wolf genomes2, says he is concerned that Colossal is not being sufficiently clear to the public about what it has done. “It’s a dog with 20 edits,” he says. “If you’re putting out descriptions that are going to be so easily falsified, the risk is you do damage to science’s reputation.”

Here’s Shapiro backing off her earlier claim:

But [Shapiro] and Colossal were quick to respond. “Some of y’all are real mad about this,” she began in a video posted on X in April. “You can call these animals proxy dire wolves or Colossal’s dire wolves. All of that would be correct. We chose to call them dire wolves because they look like dire wolves and reflect the key traits we found by sequencing their genome.”

Key traits my tuchas!. What about behavioral traits? They made fifteen edits to the wolf genome based on dire wolf DNA. A wolf with 20 DNA bases changed is not a dire wolf.  Finally,

. . . . the company remains bullish on its other efforts, predicting that mammoth-like elephants could arrive as early as 2028. Some critics are becoming concerned about how the company will conduct its work in the future, and what the impacts of that might be. In a 2021 opinion piece in Nature3, Herridge, who had previously turned down an invitation to serve as a scientific adviser to Colossal, wrote that she felt the company’s founders were “driven by a real desire to help the world”. But after the dire-wolf roll-out, she’s concerned about Colossal’s approach and its priorities.

“We have a company that is only listening to people who agree with them, who is pushing forward with statements that they aren’t backing down from,” she says. This “is not really where we want to be with a technology that has the potential to change the way our world will look”.

I’ve written about my feelings about Colossal: they have great power to make technical advances in changing genomes, but I don’t think they’re going to de-extinct stuff in our lifetime (read my Boston Globe piece on their efforts).  They are not behaving like scientists, but rather more like P. T. Barnum. Well, let’s see if they get a herd of mammoths in Siberial within three years.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is speaking with Hili, but their words are still somewhat opaque:

Szaron: I see light at the end of the tunnel.
Hili: That might be a train heading this way, or just a lamp that’s not moving.
Sure, it could also mean we’re near the exit and about to resurface. Just don’t get ahead of yourself.
Szaron: You always have to jinx it.

In Polish:

Szaron: Widzę światło w tunelu.
Hili: To może być nadjeżdżający pociąg, albo stacjonarna latarnia.
Tak, może to być również  koniec tunelu i powrót na powierzchnię. Nie ciesz się przedwcześnie.
Szaron: Ty zawsze musisz krakać.

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

From Jesus of the Day (read the description):

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

From Masih: English translation by Grok. Both men are alive but in prison as political detainees. What did they do? Criticized the government, especially after the death of Masah Amini:

#Hassan_Ronaghi and #Hossein_Ronaghi, dear brothers, as long as they were with us, fought without any discrimination for freedom and a better future for all walks of life, with their pens, with their words, peacefully and honorably. Now it is our turn to be the voice of these two brothers whose throats have been silenced. For freedom of expression, for all the prisoners in chains, for a brighter tomorrow, for our beloved Iran.

From Luana:

From Malcolm: I love this  one!

And another from Malcolm; a thread of the world’s most beautiful place:

From my feed, interspecific love:

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial; this is the anniversary of the gassing of 2,514 Jews

Two from Dr. Cobb. First one unethical:

Last month, 140,000 Danes found out that their genetic data was being used in a massive research project– without their consent. I unpacked how this happened, and why it matters for @science.org http://www.science.org/content/arti…

— Annika Inampudi (@annikainampudi.bsky.social) 2025-08-04T15:57:51.557Z

How sad that we can recycle Soviet-era jokes now, and they make sense!

— George Conway 👊🇺🇸🔥 (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2025-08-03T00:48:02.039Z

Thursday: Hili dialogue

June 12, 2025 • 6:45 am

Top o’ the morning to you on Thursday, June 12, 2025, and National Red Rose Day.  Here are some roses I photographed at the flower market in Bogotá, Colombia in 2020 (the U.S. gets many of its flowers, and nearly all its roses, from Colombia).

It’s also Clean Your Teeth Day, as I have a dentist appointment downtown this morning for my biannual cleaning. Posting may be very light today, even limited to this post. Bear with me; I do my best.

It’s also National Jerky Day, National Peanut Butter Cookie Day, International Cachaça Day (celebrating the spirit distilled from sugarcane used in making the famous Brazilian cocktail caipirinha), International Falafel Day, and Loving Day, celebrating the legal end to the ban of mixed-race marriage that occurred in the case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967(!).   Here are Mildred and Richard Loving, plaintiffs in the case, photographed in 1967:

Fair usage; Bettmann/Corbis via New York Times

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 12 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*A few pieces of nooz about the protests about arresting immigrants. First, the protests are spreading, and we even had some in Chicago on Tuesday.

The streets of Los Angeles were quiet on Wednesday morning after an overnight curfew imposed by the mayor in the city’s downtown. Cities across the country prepared for more demonstrations later in the day.

The curfew in Los Angeles, which lifted at 6 a.m. local time, brought calm to the area, where five days of protests over the federal immigration raids have occasionally turned violent. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California blamed President Trump for unrest that began with federal deportation raids on Friday.

Tensions remained high after the U.S. military announced that 700 Marines would join National Guard troops in the city on Wednesday. A spokeswoman for the U.S. military’s Northern Command said that the Marines, who have arrived in the area, were undergoing preparatory training, would help protect federal property and personnel, including immigration enforcement agents.

On Tuesday, protests that began in Los Angeles grew in size and intensity across the country. Some demonstrators in downtown Chicago threw water bottles at police officers and vandalized at least two vehicles. In New York, officers made dozens of arrests near federal buildings in Lower Manhattan, the police said. In Atlanta, they used chemical agents and physical force to drive a few dozen protesters from their foothold on a highway.

More protests were planned in several cities on Wednesday, including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, San Antonio and Seattle. Some organizers said that local demonstrations this week were a prelude to nationwide ones planned for Saturday against President Trump and an unusual military parade in Washington, D.C.

. . . . Arrests: Since protests began last Friday in response to federal immigration raids in Los Angeles’s garment district, hundreds of people have been arrested in several cities, including more than 330 in Los Angeles, more than 240 in San Francisco and a dozen in Austin, Texas, officials said. The encounters have turned tense at times, but the protests have remained largely confined to small sections of cities.

Many of these arrests may be of protestors, not immigrants.  The protestors should of course be allowed to demonstrate all they want, so long as it’s in accordance with the First Amendment. And there should be no violence or vandalism. Protestors who do such things deserve to be arrested, regardless of whether you feel their cause is just. That’s civil disobedience: the willingness to take the punishment for breaking what you see as an unjust law or acting illegally but in a cause you see as just.

*There are already 15 detained “terrorists” in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. a tactic for avoiding American legal jurisdiction. Fifteen prisoners remain, some convicted and some in legal limbo. Now Trump is preparing to send detained immigrants there.

The Trump administration is preparing to begin the transfer of potentially thousands of foreigners who are in the United States illegally to the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, starting as early as this week, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The foreign nationals under consideration hail from a range of countries. They include hundreds from friendly European nations, including Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey and Ukraine, but also other parts of the world, including many from Haiti. Officials shared the plans with The Washington Post, including some documents, on the condition of anonymity because the matter is considered highly sensitive.

The administration is unlikely to inform the foreigners’ home governments about the impending transfers to the infamous military facility, including close U.S. allies such as Britain, Germany and France, the officials said.

The plans, which are subject to change, come as immigration hard-liners inside President Donald Trump’s Cabinet push for more deportations and arrests of undocumented migrants.

The preparations include medical screening for 9,000 individuals to determine whether they are healthy enough to be sent to Guantánamo, notorious for its history as a prison for suspected terrorists and others captured on battlefields in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some of these details were reported earlier by Politico.

It is far from clear whether the facilities there can accommodate 9,000 new detainees, an influx that would amount to a massive increase from the several hundred migrants moved to and from the base earlier this year.

But Trump administration officials say the plan is necessary to free up capacity at domestic detention facilities, which have become overcrowded amid Trump’s pledge to implement the biggest deportation of undocumented migrants in American history. A document reviewed by The Post said that “GTMO,” the government acronym for the base, “is not at capacity.”

Another bad move. First—and I’m not sure about this—does being at Guantánamo mean that incarcerated foreigners aren’t subject to all the provisions of the U.S. legal system? They do have the right of habeas corpus, according to the Supreme Court, but the Trump administration has been notably unwilling to provide justification for holding undocumented immigrants. Second, if the foreign governments aren’t informed, then they can provide no legal assistance to their citizens, something that should be done.  Third, we all know the sordid history of suspected terrorists held in that place, and it isn’t pretty. Now it’s not clear that this will happen, but it’s a bad idea as well as an inhumane one,

*The WSJ reports that California governor Gavin Newsom is using his opposition to Trump’s anti-immigration actions in California as a way to advance his own political career.

Gavin Newsom is, once again, in the eye of a tempest. “It is a profoundly important moment,” the California governor said in an interview Monday evening as protesters massed in the streets and U.S. Marines made their way to the state on the president’s orders.

It is also an important moment for Newsom, widely seen as a top potential Democratic presidential candidate, who has leaned into the conflict to position himself as the leader of the opposition. “Seven hundred brave men and women are being used as pawns in Trump’s war on the Constitution,” he told The Wall Street Journal of the Marine deployment, speaking from the Los Angeles County emergency operations center where he has been holed up helping coordinate the protest response. “Our Founding Fathers didn’t live and die for this.”

Newsom traveled to Los Angeles on Sunday to try to quell sometimes-violent protests there, prompted by the Trump administration’s mass immigration arrests. On Monday, President Trump said Newsom should be arrested, calling him grossly incompetent. Newsom, in turn, accused Trump of “authoritarian overreach” and insisted the rule of law itself was at stake.

It is a moment of both opportunity and political peril for the two-term leader of the nation’s most-populous state, whom Trump has singled out to blame for the violence and rioting he says local officials have failed to control. Newsom’s pugilistic response to Trump’s provocations has gladdened the hearts of Democrats hungry for a crusader. But at a time when Newsom has attempted to moderate his image, playing to the Democratic base runs the risk of cementing his profile as a left-coast progressive and associating him with images of urban unrest.

Asked about his presidential aspirations, Newsom, who will leave office next year, didn’t deny he might seek higher office. “I’m not thinking about running, but it’s a path that I could see unfold,” he told the Journal. The 57-year-old said it was too early to make a decision and he would wait to see if the moment felt right.

I’ll bet he’s gonna run, as the credible competition is very thin.  Now people are saying that he’s got no chance since he leads California, seen as a progressive state. In today’s Free Press there is in fact an article called “Why Gavin Newsom will never be president.” I’m not sure about his candidacy, but remember that Americans in general want illegal immigration cut way back. Whether Trump’s way of doing that will redound to his credibility with Republicans remains to be seen, but I have a feeling that the Right won’t care that much about Trump calling in the National Guard or the Marines. I suspect the bottom line in 2028 will be whether people feel they’re better off economically.

*Charlotte Allen joins nearly the whole world in panning the new Disney version of “Snow White” (at Quillette): “It’s no longer 1937. . . “.  A few excerpts:

The Disney company’s 2025 live-action version of Snow White is just as terrible as nearly everyone says it is. The film has attained an abysmal score of 1.7 on IMDb from 360k ratings and 2.2k reviews (although the site warns, “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title.”) At Rotten Tomatoes, meanwhile, the film has racked up a more generous audience score of 71 percent and a critics’ score of forty percent (although many of the positive reviews are of the “not quite as terrible as you have heard” variety). The upshot has been an eye-wateringly expensive box-office flop as well as a critical disaster. Disney’s animated 1937 adaptation of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale—the first animated feature film ever made—remains a beloved classic (7.1 on IMDb nearly ninety years after it was released, and no unusual voting activity flagged). So how did Disney manage to take a bankable property and produce something this bad?

The new Snow White is bad because, while its 24-year-old lead, Rachel Zegler, is a decent singer, she can’t act very well and she’s been woefully miscast—probably because she is half-Latina and thus qualified the movie for post-#OscarsSoWhite “representation and inclusion” points. (With a Peruvian mother, I’m half-Latina myself, so why didn’t someone ask me to play Snow White?) In Disney’s animated 1937 version (titled Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), our heroine was a sweet and cheery innocent, but Zegler’s character has been rewritten as a Mary Sue girlboss who shows off what a smartypants she is by reciting all the dwarfs’ names in reverse alphabetical order upon being introduced to them. And instead of cleaning their house in return for their hospitality, she makes them do their own cleanup. It’s “Whistle While You Work” for thee, but not for me. If you found yourself hoping that this obnoxious know-it-all would remain dead after biting into the poisoned apple, you were not alone.

I don’t care at all if she’s a Hispanic cast as a “snow white” character, but I do care about Ziegler’s modification of the film into some kind of woke fantasy, and I especially don’t like the seven dwarves being P.C.’ed into computer-generated characters called “magical creatures” (see below). That took jobs away from real dwarves, who wanted those roles!

The new Snow White is bad because the seven dwarfs are crudely rendered CGI motion-capture creations. They look less like the Doc, Grumpy, and co. we fondly remember than what one critic described as “garden gnomes.” Unlike the 1937 cartoon originals with their seven distinctive comic personalities, the new uncanny-valley dwarfs are difficult to tell apart, except for Dopey, who looks like Alfred E. Neuman in a medieval hat. (The new Snow White, by the way, won’t even let Dopey be Dopey; he has to have a lugubrious back story in which he doesn’t speak because he’s “afraid.”)

And the new Snow White is bad because it gets rid of the handsome prince. Why? At Disney’s D23 Expo in September 2022, Zegler bragged that she and her fellow cast members were bringing a “modern edge” to the story. Asked by Variety to elaborate, Zegler enthused: “I just mean that it’s no longer 1937. … [Snow White] is not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love; she’s going to be dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.” Well, OK—but try telling that to the 99 percent double-X chromosome Hallmark Christmas-movie-binge demographic, for whom “Someday My Prince Will Come” is the whole point. . . .

The girlboss heroine, the anonymous CGI dwarfs, and the substitution of romance with ambition are all bad and depressing things, but they are not the worst thing about the new film. The worst thing is its failure to recreate or even understand the story it is trying to tell or the power that story has exerted over generations of readers and re-tellers. Snow White cost US$270 million, making it one of the most expensive movies Disney has ever produced—a fortune in shoots and re-shoots as the project floundered amid delays, antagonistic media reports, and Zegler’s running social-media commentary about feminism, Trump, the Americans who voted for Trump, and Israel’s Gaza war. Disney selected Marc Webb to helm the project, a top-rated fantasy director who had previously made The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and its sequel.No fewer than seven writers pitched in on the screenplay, but only Erin Cressida Wilson (The Girl on the Train, 2016) received a screen credit. (Greta Gerwig is reported to have been called in on a script-rescue mission mid-shoot, and since she has a track record of turning preadolescent girlhood favourites like Little Women and Barbie dolls into instruments of feminist consciousness-raising, it is possible that she tanked the new Snow White single-handedly.)

The review goes on, and it’s snarky for sure, but I ain’t gonna see this movie, and I doubt that many here have, either. The movie has apparently gone beyond the point of where ideology trumps entertainment, and the public doesn’t like that. Here’s the trailer:

*Harvey Weinstein is serving a 48-year sentence in California for sex crimes, and was convicted in New York, but a New York case, in which he was convicted of rape and sexual assault, was thrown out because of issues with the judge. Now, in the retrial, all hell is breaking loose in the jury room:

Jury deliberations in Harvey Weinstein’ sex crimes retrial teetered Wednesday as the foreperson again requested to speak to the judge about “a situation” he found troubling.

The man — who complained Monday that other jurors were pushing people to change their minds and talking about information beyond the charges — was being questioned in private, at his request.

While the jury was in court to hear the answer to an earlier request to re-hear the text of a rape law, the foreperson signaled to Judge Curtis Farber that he wanted to talk.

“He said words to the effect of ‘I can’t go back in there with the other jurors,’” Farber explained later. The foreperson was sent to wait in a separate room, where he penned a note saying, “I need to talk to you about a situation.”

When briefly brought into court, the foreperson said he wanted to speak in private. He, the judge, prosecutors and Weinstein’s lawyers then went behind closed doors.

The discussion was closed to the press and public, but Farber later said the foreperson had expressed that he didn’t want to change his position — whatever it may be — and was being bullied.

“He did indicate that at least one other juror made comments to the effect of ‘I’ll meet you outside one day,’ and there’s yelling and screaming,” the judge said.

Weinstein lawyer Arthur Aidala characterized the foreperson’s concerns more severely, saying that the man had said he was concerned for his safety after his fellow panelist talked about meeting him outside and added, “you don’t know me.”

“I don’t think the court is protecting this juror. Period,” Aidala said, going on to ask for a mistrial.

Apparently the foreperson is stubborn and said nothing would make him change his mind. That’s not a good thing to say, even if you’re thinking it!

The episode was the latest sign of strain among the jurors. On Friday, one of them asked to be excused because he felt another member of the group was being treated unfairly.

Weinstein’s lawyers asked unsuccessfully for a mistrial then, and again after the foreperson expressed his concerns Monday. The jury kept deliberating and went through Tuesday without sending any more messages about interpersonal tensions.

The seven female and five male jurors started their fifth day of deliberations Wednesday by re-hearing accuser Jessica Mann’s testimony that he raped her in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013. The group wrapped up Tuesday’s deliberations by asking to revisit that testimony.

Well, it doesn’t matter much, does it—even if Weinstein is found not guilty. He’s 73 and serving 48 years in California, so he’ll die in prison no matter what happens.

I’ve never been on a jury; I’ve been in the pool several times, but was never selected. In fact, I’ve never even been questioned; I just sit in the jury pool and they fill the jury with people before they get to me, Now, I guess, I’m too old to fulfill this civic duty, as Illinois has age limits.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are on the beat:

Szaron: Where are you going?
Hili: To check what this sunbeam is landing on.
In Polish:
Szaron: Gdzie idziesz?
Hili: Sprawdzić na co świeci ten promień.

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

From Jay, who gives this a progressive headline:

Inhumane! Thunberg, Kidnapped, Forced to Fly Economy in Back-Row, Non-Reclining Seat

From The Language Nerds (click to enlarge); what happens in different countries of Europe when you try to speak their language.  I think France is wrong, at least in my experience,

From Stacy:

From Masih, another Iranian woman missing an eye. The English translation:

We are the daughters of White Wednesdays and stealthy freedoms, the voice of protest of the #Woman/Life/Freedom generation; Campaigns led by the courage of dear Masih Alinejad against compulsory hijab and in the direction of overthrowing The Islamic Republic was formed. We proudly stand in the front line against compulsory hijab. There is a sea of ​​blood between us, the subversives, and the scoundrel Faezeh Hashemi. Certainly, a prince who defends his father’s crimes and a bloodthirsty government is a cursed person, but we are ordinary people and we gave our lives for it. Reformist, conservative, the whole story is over. No to compulsory hijab. #Woman/Life/Freedom

From Luana, a Big Lie in USA Today:

From Malcolm. LOOK AT THIS CAT!

Two from my feed:

A polychaete worm with a weird body:

Fancy footwork from a Swima polychaete #OkeanosExplorer ex1711 dive 11 #MarineLife

— Lisa (@tuexplorer1.bsky.social) 2025-06-11T13:04:45.395Z

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Polish baker lived but two months in the camp before he perished.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-12T09:54:31.253Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb.  First, life can live nearly everywhere on Earth, even boiling hot springs—or on a PVC windowsill:

Weird sigil-like lichen growing on a PVC window-sill

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-06-11T11:34:23.131Z

And if you’re teaching evolution, you may want to read this:

Its here! Finally published. http://www.tes.com/magazine/tea…

— EvoNerdette (@bethmorillo-hall.bsky.social) 2025-05-31T05:04:38.835Z

Saturday: Hili dialogue

June 7, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, June 7, 2025 and shabbos for Jewish cats. It’s National Black Bear Day,  Here are some Ursus americanus cubs being human-raised until they’re ready to be released into the wild:

 

And it’s Graduation Day at the University of Chicago. I’m locked in my building but have access to Botany Pond, so the ducks won’t go hungry. Yesterday they had their “montiversary,” as they hatched on May 6 and hit the water on May 7. (I guess today is “First Swim Day”.)

It’s also National Fun Day, Metric System Day (will we ever join?), Sweet Potato Day, National Beer Day, National Coffee Cake Day, and International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, in which at least half a million Tutsi, and members of other groups, were slaughtered.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 7 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*In a telling sign of enmity, the PA daily—the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority—has urged Hamas members in Gaza to kill their leaders, release all the hostages, and then commit suicide! (The PA and Hamas have never liked each other.) This is from Palestinian Media Watch, with the PA daily quotes doubly indented:

While the Palestinian Authority has spent months leveraging the civilian suffering in Gaza to criticize its political rival, Hamas, today the official PA daily took things a step further. The paper called on Hamas leaders to emerge from their tunnels in Gaza armed with two bullets: one to be used on the Hamas political leadership living in luxury in Qatar, and the other on themselves—arguing that suicide would be preferable to the disgrace they should feel for the countless Palestinian deaths they have caused.

“Leave [the tunnels] with your handgun, with two bullets in its magazines… and then admit your crime. Then aim it [the gun] at the heads of your admired [Hamas] politicians, in [foreign] capitals… Ask yourselves what benefit this gun has, and the answer will come to you from the last bullet, since your suicide is better than disgrace.”

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 5, 2025]

Hamas should unconditionally release all Israeli hostages, the PA daily continues, because Israel is killing three times the number of hostages every day.

“Enough, Hamas leaders. Release them [Israeli hostages] now. Unconditionally remove the handcuffs of death from more than two million [Gazan] hostages who are still alive, and from twenty [Israeli hostages] who you are still haggling over.”

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 5, 2025]

This reflects the ongoing messaging from the Palestinian Authority, which continues to defend the horrific atrocities committed against Jews on October 7 as “legitimate resistance,” while simultaneously criticizing Hamas for enabling Israel’s reentry into Gaza and its subsequent counteroffensive. In doing so, the PA seeks to bolster its popular support by defending the October 7 massacre—an event widely celebrated among Palestinians—while also shifting responsibility for the claimed 55,000 deaths in Gaza onto Hamas.

Despite this, recent polls indicate that Hamas remains significantly more popular than Fatah, especially since the October 7 attack elevated Hamas terrorists to the status of Palestinian icons. According to surveys conducted in May 2025, 59% of West Bank Palestinians still believe that the October 7 assault on Israel was the “correct decision” [PSR]. In the hate-saturated Palestinian consciousness, their one day of glory, in which they raped, tortured, burned families alive, and murdered nearly 1200 Jews, was worth the cost of 55,000 Gazans lives.

This enmity is one reason why there can’t be a two-state solution now. It can’t be run by Hamas because they’re terrorists, and it can’t be run by the PA because they’re less popular than Hamas, even though the PA also fosters terrorism, as in their “pay for slay” program that rewards Jew-killing. So who runs the “Palestinian state”?

*The WaPo, in yesterday’s morning announcement, says: “What happened? Their alliance publicly imploded. Musk used X to fire off memes, put-downs and explosive allegations against the president. You can scroll through every insult here.” The Epstein accusation by Musk is particularly nasty:

Here are a few if the back-and-forth tweets between Musk and Trump in chronological order: the Battle of the Narcissists:

 

 

*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly and snarky news column in the Free Press, called this week “TGIF:  The real housewives of Pennsylvania Avenue.”

→ Biden press sec turning on Biden: Speaking of trashy, the Dems are turning on each other all over the place. Some are announcing they’re not even Dems. That’s what former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has done. Karine has declared herself an Independent Voter and announced a new tell-all about Biden, positioning herself as a lone, brave voice of truth. Her book is called Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines. Which is strange, because she spent two years viciously enforcing those party lines and lashing out at anyone who dared challenge the acuity of her boss. She was the press secretary in charge of the biggest press-driven cover-up of a president in history. She promoted the term cheap fakes to describe real videos of an obviously confused old man wandering deliriously through the world. And now Karine wants to claim independence and make it her whole thing, like she’s a Free Press columnist or something.

But here’s my real issue: Only now that Biden’s down does Karine Jean-Pierre have the guts to kick him. Biden’s out of power. He’s done. He’s dying. So now the knives can come out! Now for the unveiling of how bad it always was. Where was all this independent-minded reporting when Biden was powerful? Crickets. I guess we need these Biden takedowns for the historical record. But I reserve my admiration for folks who kicked Biden while he was president. Which is why I admire only myself. Just keeps it cleaner.

→ Dyke March bans me, specifically: Organizers of the New York Dyke March—the special lesbian event at New York Pride weekend—banned Zionists from participating. So now, to participate, you need to believe that the country of Israel should be disbanded and all Jews should be expelled from that land, and also be into home renovations and motorcycles. Right. Well. I’m fine, thanks for asking. See, every time I go for a walk, it’s a Dyke March. I don’t need a special flag. My Tevas say enough. My many children. My tactical clothing. It’s all that’s required.

In other news, Ana Kasparian, executive producer and host of the popular online leftist news show The Young Turks, is toying around with blaming Jews for 9/11. She wrote: “I’m old enough to remember the ‘dancing Israelis,’ who happened to be Mossad agents filming and celebrating as the planes hit the World Trade towers.” There’s nothing people won’t blame on the Jews. Except for good things. Ana will never give us credit for anything good.

Meanwhile, over at the University of Michigan, in a botanical garden, hundreds of blooming peonies were destroyed, and signs were added that read: PLANT LIVES DON’T MATTER. HUMAN LIVES DO. This will surely win people over to the cause of the Palestinians. Then in Toronto, outside a pizza shop, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy was doing one of his on-camera pizza reviews when someone screamed at him “Fuck the Jews.” We’re entering the stage of antisemitism when many great and highly differentiated people start to get one very specific word hurled at them.

Ana Kasparian? Seriously?

→ Something new in the trans sports battles: A leaked medical report from 2023 appears to indicate that Imane Khelif, a boxer who competed in and won women’s boxing at the 2024 Paris Olympics, is a biological male.

Doraine Lambelet Coleman, a professor at Duke Law School, told Newsweek: “The IOC would not revoke medals won by athletes who were eligible according to the rules it set for the boxing competition in Paris. . . . those rules did not require competitors to be biologically female.” If you have XY chromosomes but a ponytail? You, too, can win women’s boxing. Are you a male who wants to (legally!) punch women in the face, and are you okay being called Paula for two (2) days? I’ve got just the sport for you.

Now something interesting is happening. Around the company, women are balking. In Washington State, audience members booed when a male handily won the girls 400-meter dash. Which, to be clear, I think is mean and people shouldn’t do—the teenager should never have been put in that position—but it’s interesting to note that the taboo around this is falling and frustration is mounting. When a male won the girls’ high jump at Oregon’s state track and field championships last week, two teens stepped off the podium in protest. This kind of broad pushback is new.

I do think that there’s been a sea change in the boosterism heaped upon trans women competing in sports against biological women, so I predict that women’s sports, which have been changing their rules to prohibit this, will increasingly do so. I’m not sure what the Olympic women’s boxing rules are now.

*Here’s a mystery: a lot of large balloons in the water around the North Korean warship that capsized upon launching.

North Korea confirmed Friday its capsized warship was upright and stable, but a layer of intrigue lingers around the salvage work: Why the armada of massive balloons?

Satellite imagery shows dozens of balloons floating around the 5,000-ton destroyer that toppled into the water at a May 21 launch event attended by the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un.

The balloons aren’t thought to have played a leading role in righting the vessel, a task that appeared to have been primarily accomplished with cranes, maritime experts said. But the balloons could have helped keep the ship afloat, obscured the view from the skies or lifted objects off the destroyer, they added.

North Korea’s use of balloons for salvage operations of a warship lacks a modern precedent, said Decker Eveleth, a weapons analyst at CNA, an Arlington, Va.-based think tank, who reviewed recent satellite imagery of the warship.

“It’s all a mystery,” said Eveleth, who counted roughly 40 balloons. He estimated that each balloon measures about 20 feet wide.

North Korea is no stranger to using balloons in unusual ways, having sent thousands filled with trash into South Korea last year.

The warship-adjacent balloons weren’t mentioned in a state-media report championing the salvage operations on Friday. The “Choe Hyon-class” warship represents a crown jewel in one of Kim’s top priorities: modernizing his Soviet-era naval fleet.

The 41-year-old dictator has vowed to have the destroyer fixed by the end of this month, a timeline that naval experts have called ambitious. The vessel, which is currently at a shipyard in the northeastern port city of Chongjin, will be moved to a dry dock in Rajin, state media reported. The repair work should take seven to 10 days.

Warships and balloons have a historical connection. So-called “barrage” balloons—blimp-shaped floating devices—created aerial obstacles or defended ground targets during both world wars. More recently, Russia has deployed tethered aerial devices for border surveillance and intelligence gathering.

Nick Childs, a senior naval analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank, said modern navies wouldn’t turn to large balloons to provide buoyancy to a submerged ship. Instead, the balloons could signify that North Korea lacks equipment like heavy-lift cranes.

Here’s a Sun video suggesting what caused the disaster and also showing the balloons:

Who knows? But I’m pretty sure that whoever The Great Leader deems responsible for the capsized ship will be executed. Four of them have already been arrested.

*Transgender U.S. military troops faced a deadline yesterday to leave the service. If they do so now, they get some money, but the gutsy ones are staying to fight in court.

As transgender service members face a deadline to leave the U.S. military, hundreds are taking the financial bonus to depart voluntarily. But others say they will stay and fight.

For many, it is a wrenching decision to end a career they love, and leave units they have led or worked with for years. And they are angry they are being forced out by the Trump administration’s renewed ban on transgender troops.

Active duty service members had until Friday to identify themselves and begin to leave the military voluntarily, while the National Guard and Reserve have until July 7. Then the military will begin involuntary separations.

Friday’s deadline comes during Pride Month and as the Trump administration targets diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, saying it’s aiming to scrub the military of “wokeness” and reestablishing a “warrior ethos.”

Warrior ethos my tuchas! These troops were doing satisfactory service, and are being deep-sixed because of their chosen gender presentation. I still see no big problem with transgender troops, and I have heard no reports of trans womn attacking biological women in the service. This order should be rescinded, but it won’t be.  More:

“They’re tired of the rollercoaster. They just want to go,” said one transgender service member, who plans to retire. ”It’s exhausting.”

For others, it’s a call to arms.

“I’m choosing to stay in and fight,” a noncommissioned officer in the Air Force said. “My service is based on merit, and I’ve earned that merit.”

The troops, who mainly spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear reprisals, said being forced to decide is frustrating. They say it’s a personal choice based on individual and family situations, including whether they would get an infusion of cash or possibly wind up owing the government money.

“I’m very disappointed,” a transgender Marine said. “I’ve outperformed, I have a spotless record. I’m at the top of every fitness report. I’m being pushed out while I know others are barely scraping by.”

That Marine makes my point.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is, I’m told, really waiting for a miracle.

Andrzej: Are you waiting for somebody to open the door for you?
Hili: No, I’m waiting for a miracle.
In Polish:
Ja: Czekasz aż ktoś ci otworzy drzwi?
Hili: NIe, czekam na cud.
And a picture of the affectionate Szaron:

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

From CinEmma:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Meow:

Masih is still quiet, so we have JKR explaining why a lot of people are misinterpreting the UK Supreme Court’s decision on sex (i.e., you can’t legally change your natal sex by getting a certificate):

It’s good to see Obama again, and a bit of rationality (note, though, that his administration deported several million undocumented immigrants):

From Luana. The authors resisted publishing this study, and you can see why. But, thank Ceiling Cat, it’s now published:

Greta is sailing motoring to Gaza with enough supplies for a dozen people. Isn’t it hypocritical of her to use gasoline instead of the wind? (For more on this train wreck of a mission, see here; h/t Norman).

From Simon, a post by a comedian:

Starting to really regret my DOGE tattoo

— Brent Terhune (@brentterhune.bsky.social) 2025-06-05T23:05:22.862Z

From Malcolm, some kitty amusement:

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A French Jewish boy was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. He was ten years old, and had he lived, he'd be 93 today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-07T09:40:35.903Z

One post from Dr. Cobb. Now what is Satan knitting?

Good one 😆

— Nina Willburger (@drnwillburger.bsky.social) 2025-06-04T17:47:12.094Z

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue

June 5, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, June 5, 2020, and National Gingerbread Day. I love the stuff, but it’s best when served with whipped cream, vanilla ice cream, or, in a pinch, applesauce.  Here are some gingerbread angels at a fair I photographed in Katowice, Poland on December 7 of last year:

It’s also Sausage Roll Day, National Ketchup Day (Heinz is the only acceptable variety), National Moonshine Day, and National Veggie Burger Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 5 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*It looks as if the Trump/Musk lovefest is over, given Musk’s reaction to Trump’s “big beautiful budget bill”.  Musk called it a “disgusting abomination.”

Former White House cost-cutting czar Elon Musk called President Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax-and-spending package a “disgusting abomination,” stepping up his criticism just as the Senate is trying to quickly pass the measure and get it signed into law by July 4.

Musk’s comments are his latest sharp words about the package, which includes tax cuts as well as reductions to spending on Medicaid and food assistance. Last month, he gave new fuel to GOP critics of the Republicans’ multitrillion-dollar agenda, saying that the current measure failed to reduce the federal deficit.

“Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it,” said Musk, in comments on his X social-media platform. Musk, who left the administration last week, called the package a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill.” He issued a warning on the midterm elections: “In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people.”

“This immense level of overspending will drive America into debt slavery!” he wrote in an overnight post.

Here’s his tweet (or “X emission”):

The bill narrowly passed the House last month by one vote. It is now in the hands of the Senate, where some fiscal hawks, including Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah and Rick Scott of Florida, have demanded deeper cuts.

The Senate is aiming to make changes to the bill and then send it back to the House. Backers can afford to lose no more than a handful of GOP votes in either chamber, with all Democrats expected to be opposed. Still, the White House and GOP leaders said that Musk’s statements didn’t shake their confidence in passing the measure.

Trump “already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday when asked about Musk’s social-media post. “It doesn’t change the president’s opinion.”

I don’t know what’s going to happen to this bill, but I for one would prefer that they don’t lower taxes on the very rich and ensure that those who need Medicaid get it.

*At the risk of beating a dead horse, I’ll give a few excerpts from Colin Wright’s newest post, “Imane Khelif is male—and the evidence was always clear.” As I wrote recently, a test a few years ago revealed that Khelif had XY chromosomes, and thus was a biological male, though he was raised as a female. He won the welterweight gold medal in women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics. Despite his indubitable maleness, he Khelif still has his defenders.  Wright:

Rather than accept the biological reality, Khelif and his team launched a carefully staged PR campaign after the Olympics, designed to portray him as hyper-feminine. Social media was flooded with images of Khelif in flowery dresses and heavy makeup, striking exaggeratedly feminine poses. It was a cringe-worthy attempt to sway public opinion with aesthetics rather than facts. But no amount of eyeliner can alter your chromosomes. Womanhood is not achieved through hairspray and posturing; it is a matter of biology.

Despite what should have been a straightforward matter, the media played a central role in confusing the public. Outlets like NPR referred to Khelif as a “female athlete.” The Associated Press described him as someone “assigned female at birth.” GLAAD called him a “cisgender woman,” and The Economic Times chalked up Khelif’s hormonal profile to “endogenous testosterone that is naturally produced.”

Let’s be clear: Khelif is not female. That’s the one fact that actually matters in a women’s sporting category. The other descriptors might be technically accurate within the bizarre framework of gender ideology, but they fail entirely to describe objective reality. If someone is born with XY chromosomes and internal testes due to a DSD like 5-ARD, then the sex recorded on their birth certificate is a clerical error—not a truth that must shape our sporting policies. Calling Khelif “cisgender” because he was misidentified at birth and identifies with that incorrect label is linguistic gymnastics that ignores the fundamental biological truth: Khelif is male.

Of all the distractions thrown up to obscure this reality, none were more absurd than the idea that Khelif’s disqualification in 2023 was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The theory went something like this: because IBA President Umar Kremlev has ties to Vladimir Putin, and because Khelif once beat a prized Russian boxer, the Kremlin retaliated by fabricating Khelif’s DNA test results. This theory ignores several inconvenient facts. First, the IBA allowed Khelif to appeal the ruling, and even offered to cover the costs. Second, the easiest way to discredit Russia would have been to publicly release new, independently verified test results. Instead, Khelif withdrew the appeal, and Algeria sent a legal threat demanding the results be sealed. That doesn’t sound like someone who was confident the test was wrong. It sounds like someone who knew the test was right.

Even more bizarrely, Khelif threatened lawsuits against J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk for spreading what he claimed were lies about his sex. But if those statements were truly false, the path to vindication was simple: release the medical records. Instead, Khelif’s team has fought to keep them hidden while trying to convince the public through press releases and staged photo ops. Meanwhile, everyone with an understanding of basic biology, or frankly just common sense, could already see the truth.

. . . . The lesson here is simple. Had we put truth before ideology from the beginning, this wouldn’t have been a controversy at all. The facts were always there. The science was always clear. If you understood how human sex works and followed the evidence, then this revelation was no revelation at all. It was merely the inevitable emergence of the truth, which has a funny way of eventually surfacing no matter how deep it’s buried.

Blame ideology and the media.  After all, if he thinks of himself as a woman (and he well might have, as he was raised as a female) doesn’t that make him a woman?  Here’s the document at issue:

As Richard Feynman said about the Challenger accident, ““For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

*Mohamed Sabry Soliman, accused of committing the Boulder firebomb attacks on Jews peacefully calling attention to the hostages in Gaza (at least a dozen people were injured), has been taken into custody by ICE—along with his entire family.

Federal authorities said Tuesday that they had taken into custody the family of the man accused of injuring at least a dozen people at a Colorado demonstration to support Israeli hostages in Gaza and that they are expediting their deportation from the United States.

The White House and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said on social media that Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Mohamed Sabry Soliman’s wife and five children two days after he allegedly used molotov cocktails to attack marchers in Boulder. Noem said the agency was investigating “to what extent his family knew about the heinous attack” and “if they provided support.”

On its X account, the White House wrote that the family had been placed in expedited removal proceedings and that “THEY COULD BE DEPORTED AS EARLY AS TONIGHT.”

Immigration and criminal defense lawyers struggled Tuesday to recall similar examples of entire families being detained for deportation proceedings immediately after a relative was charged with a crime. And some immigration experts questioned the legality of deporting Soliman’s family members under expedited removal, a fast-track deportation process created in 1996 that does not allow immigrants to have a hearing before an immigration judge. They are also not entitled to a lawyer.

“It’s not normal,” said Derege Demissie, who has been practicing law for nearly 30 years and is a former president of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “I don’t remember a situation where family members who are not connected with any criminal activity are targeted by ICE because a close or related family member is charged in connection with a crime.”

Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said Tuesday that the State Department had revoked the family’s visitor visas.

There are two questions here. First, if the guy committed terrorism and attempted murder, why are they deporting him rather than putting him on trial?  There’s little doubt of his guilt: there are videos and he was apprehended on the spot. Second, why are they deporting his family? If they entered illegally, well, yes, they can do that because they violated the law, but if they don’t have any evidence that the family was complicit in the attack—and how could they be with five children?—then they can get in line after the deported convicted criminals.  The lack of a trial for an accused attempted murderer baffles me.

*The last jailed member of the Manson Family (save Charles “Tex” Watson), Patricia Krenwinkel has been recommended for parole. She is 77, and was convicted of brutal stabbings in the Tate-LaBianca murders.

Patricia Krenwinkel, a onetime follower of the cult leader Charles Manson who was convicted in the murders of seven people in the summer of 1969 in Los Angeles, should be released on parole, a panel of the California parole board recommended on Friday.

Ms. Krenwinkel, 77, the state’s longest-serving female inmate, is one of two Manson followers connected with the August 1969 murder spree who remain in prison.

She was sent to death row in 1971. After the state’s highest court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972, Ms. Krenwinkel’s sentence was reduced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, as it was for all those convicted in the Manson group’s murders.

Ms. Krenwinkel, who has spent the last 54 years in the California Institution for Women in Chino, first became eligible for parole in 1976. This was her 16th appearance before the parole suitability panel.=

The provisional decision has to be reviewed by the legal division of the Board of Parole Hearings. That process can take up to four months, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

If the full board agrees with the panel’s recommendation, Gov. Gavin Newsom has 30 days to review its decision. He could reject it, or send it back for further review.

In 2022, the parole board panel recommended that Ms. Krenwinkel be paroled but Mr. Newsom reversed its decision, according to state records. Mr. Newsom wrote at the time that Ms. Krenwinkel “still poses an unreasonable danger to society if paroled at this time.”

And what she is in for (from Wikipedia):

Krenwinkel was a participant in the murders on August 9, 1969, at 10050 Cielo Drive, home of actress Sharon Tate and four others. After stabbing Abigail Folger, Krenwinkel went back inside and summoned Tex Watson, who also stabbed Folger. During her trial, Krenwinkel said, “I stabbed her and I kept stabbing her.”  When asked how it felt, Krenwinkel replied: “Nothing, I mean, what is there to describe? It was just there, and it was right.”

Krenwinkel participated willingly in more murders the following night. She recounted during her December 29, 2016, parole hearing the events of the night of August 10, 1969.[9] Along with Manson, Watson, Atkins, Clem Grogan, Leslie Van Houten, and Linda Kasabian, she went to the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca where she, Watson, and Van Houten murdered the couple.

Here’s a photo of Krenwinkel from 1973:

Fitzgerald Whitney, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Well, if she’s no longer a danger to society, I think 50 years in jail is a sufficient deterrent to let her go.  I suspect she isn’t going to kill any more people.

*The whole world is baying for Israel’s blood after Hamas leveled an accusation that the IDF killed 30 Gazans as they approached a distribution center for humanitarian aid.  That is most likely false, a confection of the liars at Hamas, yet both the BBC and Washington Post bought the story. Now they  have both retracted their stories.  First, about the WaPo:

The Washington Post on Tuesday filed a correction to a recent article claiming the IDF killed over 30 people near an aid site in Gaza, naming the source as “health officials.”

The article, published Sunday and viewed over two million times before the correction, was changed because the Washington Post claimed it “didn’t meet Post fairness standards.”

According to a social media post on X/Twitter, the article “failed to make clear if attributing the deaths to Israel was the position of the Gaza health ministry or a fact verified by The Post.”

Although the original article included statements from Israel, including an initial inquiry indicating IDF soldiers did not fire at civilians at the aid centers, the newspaper admitted it didn’t “give proper weight to Israel’s denial and gave improper certitude about what was known about any Israeli role in the shootings.”

. . .The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution center in Rafah denied on Sunday claims that the IDF attacked a food distribution point near Rafah, contradicting widely circulated Hamas reports.

Security camera footage from Sunday’s aid distribution site shows calm civilian activity, with no incidents reported. Aid was delivered without disruption, and the available evidence does not support claims of injuries or fatalities. While some media outlets have reported these allegations, others have contacted the organization to verify the facts, the GHF stated.

The WaPo’s tweet:

And the BBC (which denies that it changed its story):

On June 1, the BBC issued a breaking update claiming that “Israeli tanks” opened fire on a crowd of Palestinians at an aid site, killing 26. The allegation was presented without confirmation, based solely on anonymous sources: “residents and medics” and a “local Palestinian journalist.” The details, according to the BBC’s own Middle East Editor Sebastian Usher, included bodies carted away by donkey, and “thousands” of civilians gathered near the U.S.-backed aid center in Rafah.

The story appeared as a major headline update to an already misleading and sympathetic headline about Hamas’ ceasefire rejection: “Hamas pledges to free 10 living hostages but seeks permanent ceasefire in response to US plan.”

That headline stayed live for much of the day. The claim of 26 dead later became 31, courtesy of Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry. And despite a firm denial from the GHF — stating unequivocally that reports of deaths and injuries were “false and fabricated” and warning that the lies were being “actively fomented by Hamas” — the BBC did not retract the story.

The headline:

The IDF denies firing at any civilians, and the retractions of two organizations that it did, along with the assurance of the Gaza Humanitarian foundation above, makes it nearly certain that the claims of Israel attacking Gazan civilians trying to get humanitarian aid was false. (And ask yourself: what would be the IDF’s interest in doing that?)  Here’s the IDF’s tweet:

But it’s too late: the world has laid another blood libel at the doorstep of Israel. Media like the WaPo and BBC will believe any lie from Hamas that demonizes Israel. It’s infuriating.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,  Hili and Szaron want to rest:

Hili: He wants to make the bed.
Szaron: Tell him that we are still asleep.
In Polish:
Hili: On chce posłać łóżko.
Szaron: Powiedz mu, że jeszcze śpimy.

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

From Jesus of the Day via Adam Ziemann at Art is Art. Jesus is recharging at night:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Meow, mother and children (again, I hope this is real!):

Masih’s still recuperating, I guess, but here’s JKR responding to a nasty person. She loves to do this stuff.

From Luana; a performative gesture by Greta:

From Malcolm, Green peace:

Two from my feed:

Nautilus from @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 390 #visioningcoralsea #MarineLife

— Lisa (@tuexplorer1.bsky.social) 2025-06-05T03:05:57.375Z

Natasha fights for the truth on the Piers Morgan show.

One from the Auschwitz Memorial that I reposted:

A Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was nine.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-05T09:46:53.348Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. The first one is wonderful: flying foxes everywhere!

Just reached Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania and was greeted by thousands of fruit bats flying over the city.

— Kory Evans Ph.D (@sternarchella.bsky.social) 2025-06-04T05:03:23.731Z

This bird got two free rides to a restaurant:

A female Western Gull was recorded riding 150km in a garbage truck from San Francisco to a compost facility in Central CA, probably to forage. TWICE. An innovator, an icon, a genius.This is one of my favorite @waterbirdsociety.bsky.social papers I've ever handled as managing editor #ornithology

— Paige Byerly, PhD (@paigebyerly.bsky.social) 2025-06-03T08:24:31.625Z