Category: Szaron

Saturday: Hili dialogue

April 5, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to shabbos for Jewish cats. It is CaturSaturday, April 5, 2025, and National Deep Dish Pizza Day, celebrating one of the culinary glories of Chicago, and certainly the best species of pizza in America (do not bother to question this). Here is a short video showing you Chicago’s highlights:

It’s also National Dandelion Day, National Raisin and Spice Bar Day, National Caramel Day, and National Flash Drive Day.

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

The Biological Sciences Division is hosting a free field trip to the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie today, and I’m going (there’s also a free lunch catered by Kaurman’s a Jewish deli), so posting will be light. Bear with me; I do my best!

Da Nooz:

*Don’t worry!: even though the stock market tanked yesterday, with the Dow down 2200 points (about 5.5%%)—the second huge drop in a row caused by Trump’s idiotic tariff imposition—things will be okay. Or so Trump tells us, as he says the markets will come roaring back and America will be prosperous again.  Does he really believe what he’s saying, or is he simply lying? It’s hard to tell with this man.

A sharp rise in trade-war intensity sent Wall Street spiraling Friday, pushing the Nasdaq into a bear market denoting a 20% decline from its peak.

China’s decision to apply a 34% levy to all imported goods from the U.S. next Thursday, after President Trump’s tariffs go into effect, rattled markets in part because it further deflated hopes that a global settlement could be reached soon.

Further hitting sentiment, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the U.S. economy was more likely to face a period of higher prices and weaker growth than seemed possible a few weeks ago because of larger-than-anticipated tariff hikes.

The S&P 500 dropped 6%, the Nasdaq slid 5.8% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2231 points. The carnage was widespread, with 14 S&P 500 stocks rising for the day and 28 dropping 10% or more. The marketwide toll from the two-day tariff rout surged to a record $6.6 trillion.

The torrent of selling late this week shows investors coming to grips with the grim implications of the standoff. The levies announced late Wednesday were deeper and more aggressive than the business world expected. Retaliation stands to intensify the economic effects of the policies, which could reduce consumer income and slow economic growth.

Now investors are bracing for further conflict—none of which is likely to improve the outlook for the global economy or corporate profits, the strongest driver of stock prices.

Even as Trump left the door open to making deals, he vowed new tariffs on drugs and microchips. Investors took little comfort from Trump’s stated willingness to negotiate.

JPMorgan analysts on Thursday boosted their odds on a global recession to 60%.

Trump remained unbowed, saying that now is a great time to get rich and that “China played it wrong, they panicked.”

We may well fall into a recession (from now on, the “r-word”), and it doesn’t make me feel any better than Trump’s stupid decision may make people think twice who voted for him. After all, he’s not going to lose his 401k savings or have to tighten his belt because of rising prices at the grocery store or used-car lot. The decision to raise tariffs across the board is one of the craziest things he’s done, and that’s among a lot of crazy things. I am sure that this will be the lead story on the evening news, and also that he will find a way to construe this as a good thing.

*I guess today is Tariff Day, as the NYT has an article contradicting what I said above, declaring that Trump’s aides insist the tariffs are a good thing.  But perhaps they’re just lying to keep their jobs (article is archived here).

In the weeks leading up to his expansive global tariffs, President Trump and his top aides tried to prime the public for economic pain. They warned that while there would be fallout from their aggressive trade strategy, it would prove short-lived and benefit the economy in the long run.

Investors, businesses and others made clear on Thursday that the U.S. economy was not ready to accept that approach. Global markets tumbled, economists warned of a possible recession and consumers braced for price increases on cars, food, clothing and more.

The early tumult underscored the high stakes of Mr. Trump’s agenda, which the president has framed as a painful medical procedure to rescue an economy he likened to a “sick patient.” In the eyes of Mr. Trump, the United States is going to “boom” once his tariffs have had time to reset the nation’s trade relationships, raise revenue and boost domestic production.

But those tariffs are expected to send prices skyrocketing in the interim, an unwelcome development for Americans already struggling with years of elevated prices. Several economists have increased the odds of a recession in their forecasts as they projected a slowdown in consumer spending, business investment and economic growth.

A new analysis from the Yale Budget Lab found that Mr. Trump’s overall tariffs could cause price levels to rise 2.3 percent in the short term. That would translate into an average loss of $3,800 in purchasing power per household based on 2024 dollars.

In an interview on Thursday, Stephen Miran, who leads the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, acknowledged that the economy could be “bumpy” for an unspecified period as the administration pursued its agenda, which includes tariffs, tax cuts and deregulation.

“It shouldn’t be surprising, given the historic scope and speed of the president’s actions, that there are some reactions around financial markets, like what you’re seeing,” he said.

But Mr. Miran maintained that the true cost of the president’s trade policies would ultimately be borne by other countries, adding: “I don’t agree with the argument Americans are ultimately going to be paying for these tariffs.”

That is a lie, and Miran knows it.

The White House assurances offered a stark contrast with the view broadly adopted by economists, who believe Mr. Trump’s tariffs threaten to exacerbate inflation, possibly undermining the recent work of the Federal Reserve to try to bring prices under control.

And I’ll end here, as I’m being overcome by the strong odor of mendacity.

*Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, has a NYT op-ed called, “Your life will never be the same after these tariffs.”  Never? Oy vey!

Small tariffs create small problems. Big tariffs create huge ones. Take Mr. Trump’s 25 percent tariff on vehicles, which is expected to raise their prices by roughly $4,000. Many families, like mine, will probably decide not to buy a second car. That creates far bigger problems than an aging washer. Now, we’re constantly juggling how to get our kids to all their activities, and ourselves to work, with only one set of wheels.

And it’s not just cars. These are across-the-board tariffs, so they will distort virtually every purchase you make. In each case you’ll have to stop your baked-in calculations, recalibrate and find a way to make do — perhaps substituting frozen vegetables for fresh vegetables, a less effective medication for a higher-priced import, or corn syrup for sugar. And in each case, you’re worse off.

. . . . By the way, tariffs don’t distort just your buying decisions, they also distort what businesses make. Just as tariffs lead you to buy less desirable alternatives, they lead businesses to channel labor and capital into less desirable — that is, less productive — activities.

The tariffs announced on Wednesday are roughly 10 times as high as most other industrialized countries, and higher than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs (of Great Depression fame).

Mr. Trump’s latest tariffs will lead folks to rethink not only whether to replace their washing machine — as they did in 2018 — but also their dryers, refrigerators, stoves, groceries, clothes, cars and even everyday essentials.

Many of the substitutions we’ll make will be quite painful. If a 1 percent tariff leads you to switch from real guacamole to a pea-based alternative, then you really didn’t care about guac all that much. But if it takes a 20 percent tariff to get you to switch, that’s a sure sign that going without the real thing is a serious hardship. And this is why higher tariffs generate a far greater amount of pain. These forces aren’t independent of each other. They interact. Or in math, they multiply, which means their costs rise in the square of the tariff rate. That leads to some pretty painful arithmetic.

. . . Perhaps voters pulled the lever for Mr. Trump with warm memories of the good economic times. But the reality of his first term is that there was a lot more tariff talk than action. They were barely more than a bump in the road. This time, they’re a mountain. And so the impact will be more like a crash than last time’s comfortable jolt.

Maybe Trump, whose economic advisors certainly told him not to do what he did, will come to his senses and cut the tariffs back. And maybe the Moon will turn to cheese.

*As always on Friday, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-humor column, called this week, “TGIF: Our beef is beautiful.”

→ UATX merit-first admissions: My wife’s fake university, the University of Austin at Texas (I think), is making a lot of “university” noises lately. UATX recently announced their merit-based admissions policy: automatic admission for students who score 1460+ on the SAT (didn’t realize it was a school for the educationally challenged), 33+ on the ACT (could get that in my sleep), or 105+ on the CLT. What, you may ask, is the CLT? If you don’t know, you’re clearly not cut out for the meritocratic bloodbath that would be your freshman year. Me, I got a 108.

UATX also said that admission depends on students meeting “basic eligibility” and an “integrity check.” “Basic eligibility” is such a broad category that I’m a little alarmed at what it could include. But I love this. I do. Merit is so in. Until my kids have to apply to college—then what matters is soul and grit and whether Yale wants a water polo–compliant pool next to the dorm or not. What troubles me is that UATX seems very real. Which means, of course, that I’d like to reiterate that I was always for it, always a vocal UATX champion, and actually, I founded it, despite the complaints of my wife, who didn’t believe in me. You’re welcome, America.

→ Are you hiding DEI in your attic? After the University of Michigan announced that it planned to close its DEI office and discontinue its DEI strategic plan, the dean of their art and design school announced that he intended to maintain DEI, saying: “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) will continue at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design because our academic program and DEI initiatives are legally compliant, in alignment with our university values, and an extension of the mission of our school.” It’s been a little strange to see how fast everyone has rolled over for Trump’s cultural revolution, and my only explanation is that most people—especially in corporate America—hated this stuff and wanted any excuse to be done with it. But not the University of Michigan art school. They’re putting up a fight. They’re #Resisting. They must continue to discriminate against men, and I can’t even blame them. Men should not paint. So, all in all, I support them. As I tell Suzy when she’s asking for dating advice (i.e., sitting nearby), men should not be artists. If it takes a DEI bureaucrat to explain that to them, so be it.

I didn’t believe this one, but look at the link. The quotes are real—including Katy Perry’s!

→ Blue Origin women’s crew: Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, is sending an all-female crew to space—insane, I agree, since what exactly is the plan when one of the valves break and there’s no husband to call?—and they sat down with Elle. Gayle King, who, along with Katy Perry, was chosen to take part in the flight, said, “I can honestly say it has never been a dream of mine. I was having a conversation with Katy, and she said, ‘Well, maybe you need to get different dreams.’ And I just thought, Wow.”

Then Katy Perry said, “We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut,” which I do love. I’ve never been more interested in a space journey. Their plan is to bring lipstick and lash extensions to space, which they claim to be a first, but you really never know. People have interests. I don’t judge.

→ Wow, the entire Hamas narrative was a lie? Hamas recently revised its casualty figures, dropping the names of thousands of previously reported deaths in the Israel-Hamsa war. And it looks like they vastly overcounted the number of women and children. The Jerusalem Post reports that 72 percent of all deaths are men between the ages of 13 and 55. It suggests a very different story from their previous claim that 70 percent of casualties were. . . women and children. We anxiously await the splashy corrections. The groveling mea culpas. When my lovely hummus lady at the local farmers market in Los Angeles found out I was Jewish, she said it was totally cool as long as I didn’t “want to kill babies.” So I can’t wait for this important correction to trickle down her way as the American mainstream media engages in a broad reflection that I am sure is coming right. . . about. . . now?

*I want to end this dire week with some good news, and there is some. Ophelia, one of the escaped otters from a Wisconsin Zoo, has been recaptured, but her mate Louie is still on the loose. A huge leatherback sea turtle (400 lb.; this is the largest species of sea turtle), who was entangled in ropes in Cape Cod Bay, has been freed by rescuers. As the website notes:

The turtle was disentangled, given a health assessment including bloodwork, and tagged with satellite and acoustic tags for post-release monitoring. The tags applied include an acoustic transmitter, which operates like an EZ Pass transponder, allowing the turtle to be detected for up to ten years by a vast array of underwater receivers that stretch from Canada to Florida. The turtle also received a “survivorship” tag to determine short-term (30-day) outcome, and a traditional satellite tag that will monitor the turtle’s movements and dive behavior in near real-time for up to a year. The turtle, nicknamed ‘Phinney’ by Barnstable Harbormaster responders, can be followed on the New England Aquarium’s Sea Turtle Tracker.

At Botany Pond, Mordecai and Esther are still schmoozing, but the hen hasn’t yet started nesting. We’re told that next week they’ll be putting the final touches on the pond. Stay tuned; I think that nesting is imminent as soon as the weather warms up.

Finally NBC’s “Today” show site has “150 Dark Humor Jokes” (I know ones a lot darkers!), and I’ll try to put a few amusing ones here. Several of  these are groaners.

  • A man goes to a therapist and says, “Doctor, why do people keep ignoring me?” The therapist replies, “Next!”
  • When ordering food at a restaurant, I asked the waiter how they prepare their chicken. “Nothing special,” he explained. “We just tell them they’re going to die.”
  • Don’t challenge Death to a pillow fight. Unless you’re prepared for the reaper cushions.
  • Today, I asked my phone “Siri, why am I still single?” and it activated the front camera.
  • I’d like to have kids one day. I don’t think I could stand them any longer than that, though.
  • At home, they treat me like God. I’m generally ignored until someone wants something.
  • Why did the lion go to therapy? He found out his wife was a cheetah.

Tha-tha-that’s all, folks! I’ll be here all year!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, a chonky Hili makes it up a tree:

Andrzej: It’s been a long time since you climbed on the tree.
Hili: There is an alien dog running around so it’s safer here.
In Polish:
Ja: Dawno nie wdrapywałaś się na drzewa.
Hili: Obcy pies tu biegnie, więc tu jest bezpieczniej.

And a picture of Szaron. Polish caption: Po tej trawie coś chodzi.   Translation: ““Something is walking on the grass.”

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From Dave, who took this photo. Is the one on the right superfluous?

From Now That’s Wild:

From The Dodo Pet:

Masih is quiet, but Titania is tweeting again. If you see “Community notes” under the tweet, be sure to read them!

From Barry, who said, “He doesn’t look pleased.”

I told him about tariffs.

— Comfortably Numb (@numb.comfortab.ly) 2025-04-03T10:43:07.031Z

The woman is Stephanie Turner, her act was not “hate speech,” but bravery (she was expelled from the tournament), and USA Fencing is reprehensible.  Note that USA Fencing’s motivation for this dumb policy is to create “inclusive safe spaces”.  But the male fencer could have competed against other males, and fencing even has “mixed tournaments.”

Here’s an interview with Turner in which she describes her actions:

And of course ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio weighs in. His ignorance is the hill he will die on:

From Luana; I didn’t know that Muhammad discouraged public acts of prayer:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

A Belgian Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. Has she lived, she'd be 92 years old today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T10:08:58.051Z

Two posts from Doctor Cobb.  First, things with faces:

I googled "houses that look surprised" and I'm glad I did.

— Kalvin the Reindeer (@kalvinmacleod.bsky.social) 2025-04-04T14:33:36.639Z

The not-so-good old days! A lot of the guys are wearing striped pajamas, too.

Our throwback from the University Archive this week celebrates World Party Day! It shows students dancing at a Valentine's pyjama hop in February 1959. 📷 EUL UA/P/3h #WorldPartyDay #ThrowbackThursday #UniOfExeterArchive #Archives

— University of Exeter Special Collections (@exeterunispeccoll.bsky.social) 2025-04-03T08:53:15.297Z

Friday: Hili dialogue

April 4, 2025 • 7:00 am

Welcome to the first weekend in April: it’s Friday, April 4, 2025 and International Carrot Day. Carrots are best consumed as an ingredient in carrot cake. Below is my usual picture of one giant piece of a carrot cake that I ate in a restaurant in Chicago. It has cream-cheese frosting, of course, and candied carrots on top and on the side. It was terrific.

It’s also 404 Day, National Vitamin C Day, Ramen Noodle Day, World Rat Day, National Cordon Bleu Day, and National Walk to Work Day (I did).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*As expected, and I’m writing this on Thursday at about 1 p.m., the stock market is tanking because of Trump’s big new tariffs.  What else did anyone else expect?.

U.S. markets slid Thursday in their steepest decline in more than two years, as investors grappled with the threat that President Trump’s sweeping new tariff plan will hurt economic growth and corporate profits.

Major stock indexes dropped as much as 5% and stood poised to suffer their worst day in more than two years. Stocks have lost roughly $2.7 trillion in market value Thursday, on track for their largest decline since March 2020.

The Dow industrials dropped about 1200 points, nearly 3%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq, which powered the market higher for years, slid 4.8%, led by big declines in Nvidia, Apple and Amazon.com.

The dollar slipped to its lowest level of the year, a sign of unease over the growth outlook and fears that the flow of international funds into the country will be sharply curtailed. Inflation expectations rose.

Dozens of household-name stocks posted double-digit declines, including HP, Nike, Williams Sonoma and Ralph Lauren. Stellantis also fell sharply. The Jeep maker said it is temporarily halting production at its auto assembly factories in Mexico and Canada.

The turmoil has spread broadly, with oil prices dropping more than 6% and investors selling gold after its sharp run over the past year to fresh records. But so far, traders said, selling has been orderly and though the scale of U.S. tariffs came as a shock, few investors are surprised to see stocks pull back following their gains over the past two years.

Even so, the big decline sets up financial markets for one of their most eventful days in recent years. Despite the 2025 retreat in major indexes, investors have remained generally sanguine this year about the prospects for global growth and the opportunities that the U.S. markets and economy can offer to those around the world. But the tariffs and the international reaction will test that faith, and Thursday’s action may be a gauge of the extent to which that outlook is changing.

The market is going to drop even more today after China imposed a 34% tariff on all U.S. goods.

And, from Professor Ceiling Cat: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW.  The next thing that will happen will be widespread inflation, and perhaps even a recession. Consumers will be peeved and feel deceived by Trump, and, overall, the American economy will be worse off. There are a few people, like steelmakers, who think Trump’s tariffs are good, but they are thinking only of themselves.  I’m hoping Americans aren’t dumb enough to ignore the fact that the coming economic downturn is Trump’s fault.

*Trump’s tariffs are supposed to be “reciprocal,” that is, tariffs enacted only in response to other countries who had already put tariffs in American goods. But that isn’t always the case, and the list of countries on which he slapped tariffs is quite bizarre.

The chart slapped some surprisingly high tariffs on key allies — including Israel and Vietnam — while sparing nations like Russia, Cuba and North Korea altogether.

. . . .As economist journalist James Surowiecki quickly figured out, the White House seems to have used a very simplistic formula: Our trade deficit with that country, divided by the country’s exports to us. That’s a measure of something, but it’s not, strictly speaking, about tariffs. It’s about a trade imbalance.

The White House denied Surowiecki’s claim, pointing to a mathematical formula featuring Greek symbols. But in fact, when you broke down that formula, it appears as simple as he claimed. The percentages listed for each country on the chart are indeed products of that formula.

Here’s how the math played out with some notable countries and territories.

Among the countries and territories supposedly ripping us off and requiring such harsh responses are some curious ones, as The Post’s Rachel Pannett and Niha Masih report.

One entry on the list is the Heard and McDonald islands, an Australian territory that is uninhabited by humans (there are penguins and other animals) and thus exports nothing to the United States. It nonetheless is listed as charging us 10 percent tariffs and earning a 10 percent “reciprocal” tariff.

Another is a territory of Norway called Svalbard and Jan Mayen. Svalbard is at least populated by a few thousand humans — Jan Mayen has none — but it exported nothing to the United States in 2024. It also got slapped with a 10 percent tariff.

One other telling one is Norfolk Island, an Australian territory and former British penal colony once dubbed “Hell in the Pacific.” It’s home to about 2,000 people and accounted for a reported $200,000 in U.S. imports in 2024. Its goods will now be tariffed at 29 percent.

It would seem logical that some of these territories — especially the uninhabited ones — are being charged according to what the countries that control them are being charged. But there are many differences between the rates charged to countries and their territories. Norway, for instance, is charged 15 percent (versus Svalbard and Jan Mayen’s 10 percent), while Australia is charged 10 percent (versus Norfolk Island’s 29 percent).

“I’m not sure what Norfolk Island’s major exports are to the United States and why it’s been singled out, but it has, on the table,” Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Wednesday.

The article notes that although both Israel and Vietnam charge either no tariffs on American goods or only small ones, they’re being slapped with high tariffs by us: 17% and 46%, respectively.

You can see the full list here, and here are the countries being taxed the most. It is, as Rachel Zegler said, “Weird. . .weird.” (Click to enlarge):

*A NYT op-ed by Kristen Soltis Anderson, identified as “a contributing Opinion writer.  . .  a Republican pollster and a moderator of Opinion’s series of focus groups,” tells us “What should worry Republicans the most right now.”  The answer is the election of a liberal state supreme court justice in Wisconsin. From this she spins a mighty tale:

Just a few months ago, Republicans were triumphant, while Democrats were demoralized. But something real has happened: Democrats’ fury is building. Perhaps they have had it with Elon Musk. Perhaps Senate Democrats’ capitulation on government funding ignited voters who felt abandoned by their party leaders. Perhaps it was all the institutions cutting deals under pressure from President Trump. Whatever it was, Democrats are proving a political axiom: Anger is a more powerful motivator in voting than happiness and satisfaction.

And Republicans had better watch out, as they learned Tuesday night in a Wisconsin statewide election for a State Supreme Court seat, in which the Democratic-backed candidate prevailed by 10 percentage points just five months after Mr. Trump beat Kamala Harris there by just one point.

As a pollster, I’ve been focused recently on gauging what voters think of Mr. Trump’s performance back in office. One way to do this is by asking if they approve or disapprove of the job he is doing across a range of issues — a metric that in the past few weeks showed gently declining but overall middling approval ratings.

But I think studying how voters feel is also important — maybe even more important than studying what they think. In my polling, when I ask voters how they feel about what the Trump administration is doing, Democrats are not simply dissatisfied. When I offered voters a range of seven emotions in a poll in mid-March, from “furious” to “thrilled,” the top response from Democrats was “furious,” at 38 percent. Only a quarter of Republicans described themselves as “thrilled,” by contrast (though, make no mistake, Republicans support Mr. Trump a great deal).

What should worry Republicans most is that when a party wins elections and its supporters are satisfied with what their side is doing, it becomes easy to rest on one’s laurels and miss the bubbling rage of the other side or not find ways to counter it. Democrats did this, to some extent, during the rise of the Tea Party movement, dismissing it as AstroTurf — activism masquerading as grass-roots energy — and paying dearly for it in the first Obama midterms, in 2010. Republicans may wish to dismiss some of what they see appearing at angry town hall meetings, but this isn’t just the usual anger of an opposition party: Mr. Trump is supercharging the anger in two important ways that add up to even greater potential peril for Republicans in the short run.

The two important ways? First, the bull-in-a-china shop dismantling of government by Trump, including the imposition of tariffs on foreign goods. The second is Trump and the Republicans concentration on corralling “low propensity voters”: those voters who aren’t likely to come to the polls if Trump isn’t on the ballot. Well, perhaps Anderson is right, but of course Democrats are looking for any reason to be optimistic. And remember that Americans’ approval rating of the Democratic Party is dire: on March 7-11, “55 percent of respondents said they had a negative view of the Democratic Party, while 27 percent said they had a positive perception. That is the lowest level recorded since NBC News began asking the question in 1990.”  It’s a long way until 2028, but the pundits are telling us “what we need to know”. (I am not a pundit; I just play one on this website.)

*An article from The Jerusalem Post notes that Hamas has revised its death tolls, figures copied widely and credulously by the media. The new figures show that, contrary to its previous reports, Hamas now admits that a substantial majority of the dead were males of fighting age and less than 30% (half of what was previously claimed) were women and children (h/t Malgorzata):

Hamas quietly removed the names of thousands of Palestinians it had previously alleged were killed during the Israel-Hamas war, Salo Aizenberg, from the US-based non-profit organisation Honest Reporting told The Telegraph on Tuesday after analyzing Hamas’s March 2025 casualty update.

Hamas has previously claimed that 70% of casualties have been women and children, a claim no longer reflected in their recently updated lists, according to the research. Approximately 72% of fatalities between the ages of 13-55 are men – the demographic category aligns with Hamas combatants.

“Hamas’s new March 2025 fatality list quietly drops 3,400 fully ‘identified’ deaths listed in its August and October 2024 reports – including 1,080 children. These ‘deaths’  never happened. The numbers were falsified – again,” Aizenberg asserted.

A similar report by the Henry Jackson Society in December also concluded that Hamas had inflated the number of casualties in the war.

“We knew there were rafts of errors in their reporting,” report author Andrew Fox said. “There’s a reasonable explanation in that their computer systems went down in November 2023, so it’s been challenging for them to report accurately, but the lists are so unreliable that the world’s media shouldn’t be quoting them as reliable.

“The UN also just takes Hamas’s figures and publishes them with a note stating the figures are unconfirmed.”

Hamas will “have gone through the list, trying to make it as convincing as possible. They’ve been accepting names onto that list with no evidence whatsoever,” Fox explained. “So what I’m guessing they’re trying to do is thin out the names they cannot substantiate at all.”

“Salo’s research would be looking for names that were on previous lists but have now disappeared,” Fox explained. “Hamas releases lists as PDFs, so it’s harder to do comparisons but we transfer names to an Excel sheet to do a mass comparison this way.”

The next time you see either total death tolls that don’t give you the number of terrorists included, or the ridiculous figure of 70% of Gazan casualties being women or young children, you will know you’re dealing with someone more interested in dissing Israel than in telling the truth. This includes most of the mainstream media.

And since it’s Friday, I’ll give you a true shaggy dg story from the AP. Whale/dog encounter!

A Hawaii boat captain who rebuilt her whale-watching tour business after losing three boats in the deadly 2023 Lahaina wildfire captured iPhone footage of her dog barking excitedly when a humpback swam near them over the weekend and poked its head out to greet Macy, a golden retriever.

Chrissy Lovitt and Macy, 11, were in a fishing boat about 2 miles (roughly 3 kilometers) off Lahaina on Saturday when they spotted a humpback whale in the waters.

“And he heard her barking and he just swam over to meet her,” Lovitt recalled Tuesday. “And it was the best day of her life.”

In the video, Macy is seen barking frantically as the whale nears the boat. The whale’s head emerges and it appears to turn and look at the excited dog.

“She’s been barking at whales her whole life, but they haven’t wanted to do anything with her,” Lovitt said.

Macy is Lovitt’s trusty companion when she leads a boatload of tourists to marvel at whales. “She loves the ocean,” said Lovitt, now a Maui boat captain for 25 years. “She grew up on it.”

Macy is “obsessed with sea life and whales,” Lovitt added. “She’s 11 and I know we don’t get forever with her. But this has been on her bucket list so I’m just super happy for her.”

Here’s the video!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,  Hili is trying to turn Andrzej against Kulka:

Hili: Watch out!
A: What is it?
Hili: Kulka is on the shelf and she is going to push the vase off onto your head.
In Polish:
Hili: Uważaj!
Ja: Na co?
Hili: Kulka jest na półce i zaraz zrzuci ci wazon na głowę.

Reader Divy sent in a picture of Jango, for whom she is staff. She captions it, “Worshipping the patch of sun 🌞.”

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From Cat Memes:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Things With Faces, an ebullient corkscrew:

Masih’s quiet today, but here’s a tweet from another woman demonized for her views, and JKR tweets about yet another heroine (h/t Luana):

. . . and here’s her opponent to whom she forfeited the match. You can read the story here.

From Malcolm,  captioned “A ‘loving’ cat.”

A disadvantage of the burqa I hadn’t thought of:

Two from my feed. First, something I’d love to do: play with a giant anteater!

I didn’t know this one:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

Gassed to death upon arrival at Auschwitz. He was probably no more than four years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-04T09:49:38.066Z

A post from Professor Cobb, showing Polish frogs having a high old time:

Side entrance to Art Nouveau “Frog House” in Bielsko-Biała, Poland, built for the owner of a wine bar originally located there, with carousing frogs ~ one lounges, smoking a pipe, glass in hand & leaning on a barrel, as the other plays a mandolin (1903)

— Journal of Art in Society (@artinsociety.bsky.social) 2025-04-03T05:50:31.328Z

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

April 2, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (” يوم الحدبة” in Arabic ): Wednesday, April 2, 2025. It’s National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day, celebrating the item I most often eat for lunch.  I’m sure it’s America’s favorite sandwich (it has its own Wikipedia page), especially in the version below, labeled “A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, made with Skippy peanut butter and Welch’s grape jelly on white bread.” That’s exactly how I have it, and the bread must be cheap white sliced bread. The first mention of such a sandwich was in 1901.

It’s also International Children’s Book Day (when will someone publish my children’s book?) and National Ferret Day.  Please enjoy five minutes of baby ferrets playing: But I do not recommend getting one as a pet. They are troublesome, demanding, and they BITE! (They are cute, though.)

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 21 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I believe it was Christopher Hitchens who said that the key to kick-starting a developing nation was empowering the women by enabling them to control their reproduction, and that makes a lot of sense. However, the Trump administration has decided to withhold aid for contraception that it used to give to poorer countries, and you know what that entails. (article archived here)

The United States is ending its financial support for family planning programs in developing countries, cutting nearly 50 million women off from access to contraception.

This policy change has attracted little attention amid the wholesale dismantling of American foreign aid, but it stands to have enormous implications, including more maternal deaths and an overall increase in poverty. It derails an effort that had brought long-acting contraceptives to women in some of the poorest and most isolated parts of the world in recent years.

The United States provided about 40 percent of the funding governments contributed to family planning programs in 31 developing countries, some $600 million, in 2023, the last year for which data is available, according to KFF, a health research organization.

That American funding provided contraceptive devices and the medical services to deliver them to more than 47 million women and couples, which is estimated to have averted 17.1 million unintended pregnancies and 5.2 million unsafe abortions, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual health research organization. Without this annual contribution, 34,000 women could die from preventable maternal deaths each year, the Guttmacher calculation concluded.

“The magnitude of the impact is mind-boggling,” said Marie Ba, who leads the coordination team for the Ouagadougou Partnership, an initiative to accelerate investments and access to family planning in nine West African countries.

The funding has been terminated as part of the Trump administration’s disassembling of the United States Agency for International Development. The State Department, into which the skeletal remains of U.S.A.I.D. was absorbed on Friday, did not reply to a request for comment on the decision to stop funding family planning. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described the terminated aid projects as wasteful and not aligned with American strategic interest.

. . . Among the countries that will be significantly affected by the decision are Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As the paper says, “Demand for contraception has been rising steadily,” and clinics in these countries are already running out of products since the distribution has ground to a halt. Is there anybody Trump isn’t punishing these days?  And why is the money for family planning “wasteful”? It seems to me that the waste in such a program would be minimal.

*Luigi Mangione, accused of assassinating UnitedHealth executive Brian Thompson in Manhattan, will be facing the death penalty. And the evidence against him is strong, leading most people to think he is guilty (however, some miscreants think that Mangione did a good thing).

Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty against Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of a UnitedHealth executive, calling the slaying a “premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America.”

“After careful consideration, I have directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in this case as we carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again,” Bondi said in a statement.

Mangione, 26 years old, faces state and federal charges in the murder of UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Brian Thompson last year. Prosecutors have accused Mangione of waiting outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel where the executive was set to attend an investor meeting. Mangione shot Thompson with a 3D-printed ghost gun, prosecutors said, then fled the scene on an e-bike. Following a nearly weeklong manhunt, he was arrested after being spotted at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.

Federal prosecutors in December charged Mangione with offenses including using a firearm to commit murder, which made him eligible for the death penalty if convicted. The New York state case against Mangione is expected to proceed to trial before the federal one.

After taking the helm at the Justice Department as attorney general, Bondi pledged to revive the death penalty and lift a federal moratorium on capital punishment ordered under the Biden administration in 2021. The first Trump administration had reactivated the federal death penalty after a 17-year hiatus and put 13 inmates to death in its final months.

Of course I’m opposed to the death penalty for anyone, as it’s not a deterrent, it costs more than life without parole, and there’s always the possibility that a guilty verdict was wrong. If you kill someone and he’s subsequently vindicated, you can’t bring him back.  What made this case so notable was not only that it was a cold-blooded assassination, but that so many people then (and some even now) think it was okay for Mangione shoot a guy who was supposedly denying valid health claims (I don’t think he had a role in that). One of the miscreants who seemed to favor shooting executives was our old friend at Pharyngula (click on screenshot below), who, soon after posting this, began backing off of his stand when he realized that he had advocated murder. To wit:

*“Better to let a hundred guilty men walk free than to jail one innocent man,” the saying goes.  You may not agree with that calculus, but it does make some sense.  And it might well be happening with the Trump administration’s deportation of people who say things the administration doesn’t think should be said, like “From the river to the sea. . . “.  The fear was always that somebody who wasn’t guilty at all would be deported.  One would think they could be returned to the U.S. when the mistake was discovered, but that doesn’t seem to have happened in at least one case:

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing that it had wrongly deported an immigrant living in Maryland to a mega-prison in El Salvador despite a court ruling prohibiting it, but alleged that U.S. officials are unable to pressure the Central American nation to return the man to his family in the United States.

Officials deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is Salvadoran, on March 15 as part of a surprise airlift of purported gang members to the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, where they were surrounded by armed soldiers and hooded police who shaved their heads and locked them inside high-walled cells. His removal came six years after an immigration judge found that Abrego had testified credibly that he could be harmed or killed by gang members in that country.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers acknowledged in court records that they were aware of internal forms forbidding them from sending Abrego to El Salvador, and called his removal an “oversight.”

“On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government wrote in a declaration, first reported by the Atlantic.

Abrego’s lawyers filed an emergency lawsuit last month saying the rapid removal violated federal and international law, and warning that Abrego is being “subjected to torture and an imminent risk of death.” His lawyers urged a federal judge to order the U.S. government to negotiate with El Salvador for his release and return to his family in the United States.

But the Justice Department, even as it acknowledged the mistake, said it could not use diplomacy or financial pressures to free Abrego because it would threaten U.S. foreign policy and its relationship with an ally in the fight against gangs.

Umm. . . that last paragraph basically says this: “Better to let one innocent man spend the rest of his life in a horrific prison than to endanger U.S. foreign policy.”  Seriously, how does it endanger U.S. policy to return an innocent man to America, where he lived?  And what’s wrong with El Salvador that they won’t cooperate? And how many more are there like Garcia? Finally, have you seen an El Salvadoran prison? Have a look; this one, used to house deportees from America, is supposed to be one of the most horrible prisons in the world (also see this video).

*I’ve pointed out the many problems Disney had with the remake of “Snow White,” including criticism of both Rachel Zegler (Snow White had made pro-Palestinian comments), and Gal Gadot (the Wicked Witch was Israeli and was in the IDF), as well as the pervasive wokeness of removing real dwarfs and replacing them with computer-generated images (dwarfs beefed that they were cut out of acting jobs).  I think Zegler’s unwise comments about how backward the original movie was contributed to the movie’s awful performance on both the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and Rotten Tomatoes.  Forbes notes that the IMDB has even flagged the movie because there were so many low ratings by contributors.

Every time the idea that a movie or show is being review-bombed comes up, there is always a contingent of people who say that no, this thing really is that bad, everyone rating it saw it, and this is all perfectly legitimate.

Well, in the case of Snow White, IMDB would seem to disagree.

Snow White has 284,000 reviews come in, with 91% of them being one star, which makes its final total a 1.5/10. That is not just the lowest for any major blockbuster in history, but looking at IMDB’s all-time bottom films, it’s almost one of the worst-rated period.

The obvious illegitimacy of this has caused IMDB to put up an actual warning on the ratings page, saying that its “rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title.” That’s a note you do not see often unless something incredibly extreme is happening. I’m reminded of the instance of when Captain Marvel was bombed so badly by supposed viewers (again, due to comments its actress had made) that Rotten Tomatoes had to invent its “verified audience” metric where users have to prove on some level they’d watched the film. Using that metric, incidentally, the RT audience score for Snow White is a perfectly fine 74%. IMDB has no such system in place.

It’s been review-bombed:

Forbes’s explanation:

There are hundreds if not thousands of movie with 40% critic scores. They are not review-bombed into being one of the worst-rated movies in history, a distinct honor for Snow White alone. The movie has as many reviews in less than two weeks as the most-popular live-action Disney film, The Lion King, has gotten in its entire lifespan. That is not normal.

Again, this entire thing is happening mainly due to a campaign against Rachel Zegler, deemed enemy #1 for a certain crowd. This has happened from the start, her race deemed not appropriate to play Snow White, her suggestion that the source material (90 years old) was not relevant enough in its current form for present day, and her tweets supporting Palestine in the current conflict. But in the wake of this, other actors have offered support to her, including most recently the busiest man in Hollywood, Pedro Pascal, who called her an “icon” on Instagram.

“Certain crowd”? Who would they be? Well, it can’t be pro-Israelis, so it must be woke people offended by Zegler’s dissing of the earlier movie, including calling the Prince a “stalker” and saying that the movie was not a love story, but aimed to empower Snow White as a leader.  But I believe anybody who loved the earlier movie would find Zegler’s comments cringeworthy, and she seems unable to shut up or apologize. She’ll never work for Disney again.

Here are the Rotten Tomato ratings. They’re abysmal for the critics, but the audience liked it better than the IMDB reviewers. The moral: don’t try to wokeify a beloved and classic movie, or, if you do, don’t mouth off about your wonderful, virtuous actions:

*Finally, the reliable AP’s “oddities” section describes some notable April Fools’ pranks of the past.

In 2021, then-first lady Jill Biden pretended to be a flight attendant on an airplane traveling from California to Washington. She wore a “Jasmine” nametag and passed out Dove ice cream bars while wearing a black mask, black pantsuit and wig. A few minutes later, “Jasmine” reemerged without the wig — revealing herself to be Jill Biden, laughing and proclaiming, “April Fools!”

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin became known for announcing outlandish ideas every April Fools’ Day soon after starting their company more than a quarter century ago. One year, Google posted a job opening for a Copernicus research center on the moon. Another year, the company said it planned to roll out a “scratch and sniff” feature on its search engine.

In 1992, NPR ‘s “Talk of the Nation” program announced that former-President Richard Nixon, who resigned in 1974, would be running for president, according to the Museum of Hoaxes. A comedian had impersonated Nixon to say, “I never did anything wrong, and I won’t do it again.”

Outside of the U.S., one of the most notable pranks involved the BBC World Service in 1980 declaring that Big Ben would become a digital clock and renamed Digital Dave, according to the UK Parliament.

And similar days in other lands:

In Scotland, April Fools’ has a history of being a two-day event. April 1 is known as “Gowkie Day” or “Hunt the Gowk,” explained Encyclopedia Britannica. Gowk is a term used to describe a fool. On April 2, the celebration may become more physical, with children attaching “kick me” signs to people’s backs.

The day is also celebrated in Iceland, with the aim being to get people to “hlaupa apríl,” or “make an April run.” In other words, to trick someone in a way that makes them travel to a different location. News agencies have also been known to participate in pranking people. In 2014, for example, Iceland Review ran a story with the headline, “Google Signs Deal with Iceland,” saying the fake news was part of “a long-standing tradition of the Icelandic media.”

Let us know in the comments if you pulled a prank or were the victim of one.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili mourns the inaccessibility of birds:

Hili: It’s a tragedy.
A: What happened?
Hili: The starlings are building nests in inaccessible places.
In Polish:
Hili: To jest tragedia.
Ja: Co się stało?
Hili: Szpaki budują gniazda w niedostępnych miejscach.

And a photo of Szaron and Baby Kulka:

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

From Stacy:

From Jesus of the Day. This is definitely me!

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

 

From Masih, yet another brave Iranian woman doffing her hijab and getting arrested for it–and forced to say that Masih coerced her into removing the headscarf!

From Simon, Larry the Cat plays an April Fools’ joke:

I actually think Twitter's better since Elon Musk took it over.

— Larry the Cat (@number10cat.bsky.social) 2025-04-01T07:39:18.069Z

From Malcolm: an adorable video of dolphins playing ball with a girl:

From my feed. Christopher Walken was 82 yesterday:

They got their drummer and bass guitarist:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

This Hungarian woman died in Auschwitz at about age 36.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-02T10:04:18.868Z

Two posts from Doctor Cobb. I’ve seen this first movie, and it is indeed very good. This was posted by Matthew himself, whose biography of Crick will be out this fall:

If you haven’t seen Life Story, the 1987 BBC version of the discovery of the double helix, it’s available on iPlayer. It’s a terrific account, in particular the portrayals of Franklin and Wilkins (Jeff Goldblum as Watson not so good). Wilkins was the main advisor. H/t @syntenicman.bsky.social 1/n

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-04-01T17:45:06.124Z

Dead man’s fingers and live man’s fingers. But the terrestrial fungus of the same name looks more realistic (see here).

Dead man’s fingers & live man’s fingers. This seaweed is rad because it is “coenocytic;” the entire individual is one, single, multinucleate cell. #Codium #Seaweed #MarineLife 🦑🌊

— Matt Bracken (@brackenlab.bsky.social) 2025-03-11T04:57:11.569Z

Monday: Hili dialogue

March 31, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Monday of a busy week, and also the last day of March: it’s March 31, 2025, and the month is not going out like a lamb (showers in Chicago yesterday, near freezing this morning). It’s International Taco Day, and who doesn’t love these? (I do eschew the fish tacos).  Here’s food maven Mike Chen sampling what he thinks are the five best tacos in Mexico City:

It’s also Nation Clams on the Half Shell Day (okay, but I prefer oysters), National Tater Day, Eiffel Tower Day, National Crayon Day, and National Bunsen Burner Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 31 Wikipedia page.

This is a busy ten days to come: writing tasks, duck tending, attending a memorial service for a late colleague, a breakfast meeting with other emeritus faculty with the University President (oy!), my biannual tooth cleaning, and a second visit to the ophthamologist to measure my corneas for future cataract surgery. I grow old. . . . .  Posting may be a bit lighter over the next two weeks, but bear with me. I try my best. But I am sad that there were so few comments on the wonderful Duckapalooza Post. Don’t people like ducks?

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first: Richard Chamberlain died at 90. Dr. Kildare is no more!

Richard Chamberlain, an actor who got his start playing a hunky TV doctor and went on to become a miniseries maestro, died on Saturday, according to his publicist. He was 90 years old.

Chamberlain died in Hawaii of complications following a stroke, publicist Harlan Boll said in a statement. The award-winning “Thorn Birds” star would have turned 91 on Monday.

Chamberlain, a three-time Golden Globe winner, wore many hats over the years – actor, singer, soldier, painter, author – but he first rose to prominence and cemented his heartthrob status playing a handsome young physician in the 1960s series, “Dr. Kildare.”

The series aired on NBC between 1961 and 1966. In 1963, Chamberlain won a Golden Globe for best male TV star for his performance as Dr. Kildare.

“It took right off all around the world, as a matter of fact,” Chamberlain said in a 2021 interview. “I was getting all of this attention and stuff and it was my absolute, total dream come true. I was so happy with it.”

Chamberlain also had a thriving film career. In 1970, he played Octavius Caesar in “Julius Caesar,” alongside Charlton Heston and Jason Robards, and appeared in 1973’s “The Three Musketeers” alongside Raquel Welch and Oliver Reed. In 1974, he had a role in the Oscar-winning film “The Towering Inferno.”

In the 1980s, Chamberlain also became known as the “king of the mini-series,” according to the Associated Press. And it’s clear to see how he earned the moniker.

He starred in the hit miniseries’ “Shōgun” in 1980 and “The Thorn Birds” in 1983. Each earned him a Golden Globe. In 1996, he reprised his “Thorn Birds” role of Father Ralph de Bricassart in the TV movie “The Thorn Birds: The Missing Years.”

He was a handsome fellow!  And there was Yoko Shimoda, the beautiful Mariko, who would sometimes talk about “pillowing” with John Blackthorne, the Western navigator played by Chamberlain.

I used to watch Dr. Kildare every week, and remember it competing with another doctor drama, “Ben Casey,” starring Vince Edwards, who died in 1996. I also watched every episode of Shõgun, and even read the book. Here’s Chamberlain talking about Shõgun:

*It’s no surprise that Trump, feeling his oats, has threatened to impose tariffs on Russian oil to countries that buy it. This seems a bit counterproductive if Trump is cozying up to Putin. (Article archived here.)

President Trump leveled his strongest criticism to date against President Vladimir V. Putin on Sunday, threatening to impose “secondary tariffs” on Russia’s oil if the country thwarted negotiations on a cease-fire deal with Ukraine that would stop the fighting.

The comments, relayed on “Meet the Press” by the show’s host Kristen Welker, reflected a conversation she said she had hours earlier with Mr. Trump, in which he signaled growing impatience with the negotiations. Mr. Trump told her that tariffs of 25 to 50 percent on Russian oil could be imposed at “any moment” and that he planned to speak with his Russian counterpart this week.

“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Trump has previously referred to secondary tariffs as levies on imports from countries that purchase products from a nation he’s targeted in his foreign policy. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The comments were notable given the steps that Mr. Trump has taken to align himself with Mr. Putin, despite the United States’ support for Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion more than three years ago. Since taking office, Mr. Trump has declined to acknowledge that it was Russia who started the war, falsely declared Mr. Zelensky a “dictator” but not Mr. Putin, and accused Mr. Zelensky of not wanting peace.

Mr. Trump’s remarks also reflected his increasing promise to use tariffs to compel countries to bend to his domestic and foreign policy goals. In the same phone call, he said he would consider secondary tariffs on Iran if it did not reach a deal with the United States to ensure it did not develop a nuclear weapon, Ms. Welker said.

Trump is using money (which talks, of course) to blackmail countries into doing his will, but other sticks are also in play, like the revocation of security clearances threatened for law firms.  As for Iran, it’s going to develop a nuclear weapon come hell or high water, and nothing Trump does can stop that.

*I’ll try not to do too much Trump-dissing, though I remember when readers chewed my tuchas for not doing enough.  His latest gaffe, of course, is the Big Tariff threat, for tariffs don’t do anybody any good and will ultimately hurt the American consumer, whose disaffection with inflation helped Trump get elected in the first place. Now he says he doesn’t give a hoot if car prices rise in America. (article archived here). Bad optics!

President Trump said he “couldn’t care less” if foreign automakers raise their prices for U.S. consumers in response to new tariffs, doubling down on an aggressive strategy to remake the American economy with heavy tariffs set to go into effect this week.

In an interview with NBC News on Saturday, Trump said a new 25% tariff on all imported vehicles and parts starting this week would make foreign cars more expensive and bolster sales of U.S. vehicles.

In addition, Trump has declared April 2 as “Liberation Day” for the U.S., when he will put in place what is called reciprocal tariffs that seek to equalize U.S. tariffs with the duties charged by trading partners, as well as tariffs on a range of sectors. Other tariffs he has already implemented have started to scramble supply chains and driven up some costs—a price Trump says is worth it to bring more manufacturing back to the U.S.

“I couldn’t care less, because if the prices on foreign cars go up, they’re going to buy American cars,” Trump said. “I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are gonna buy American-made cars. We have plenty.”

In the interview, the president also disputed that he had instructed U.S. automaker CEOS on a call in early March to not raise prices, which executives have said is inevitable in the face of tariffs. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump had warned executives that the White House would look unfavorably on such a move, leaving some of them rattled and worried they would face punishment if they increased prices.

“I never said that,” Trump told NBC.

Another Big Lie. Of course prices will go up; we can’t expect American automakers and retails to absorb a 25% increase.  I wonder who ever put the idea of tariffs in his ear? Could it have been Musk?

*Yesterday morning I spent $5 for a dozen eggs, which is about five times what I used to pay when they were on sale in my local supermarket. That hurt, but I am making a recipe that calls for eggs.  Now the WaPo notes that egg prices are bellwethers of consumer discontent. Their article is called, “Eggs are president now” (archived here).

What is an egg worth?

Do not confuse the question with what an egg costs, which this week was about $5.90 by the dozen, on average, going up to as much as $10 retail, depending on where you live in the country.

Every trip to the grocery store is, for Sheri Yasuna, a lesson in Egg Math. Yasuna, 47, lives on the south coast of Oahu, where groceries are expensive even in normal times. She usually buys eggs in cartons of 18. But this month she saw them priced at $15.99 — nearly a dollar an egg.

“I said ‘My god, do I need 18 eggs?’” says Yasuna, whose family has decided to cut back their egg consumption. “Something that was such a common household item has become almost a luxury.”

Do the Egg Math, and maybe they’re worth $500. That will get you a six-month rental of a chicken coop, plus chicken feed and two laying hens, which will produce a dozen or more eggs per week — all from Jenn Tompkins’ business, Rent the Chicken, in Freeport, Pennsylvania. Tompkins, known as “Homestead Jenn,” has received five times the usual number of inquiries this month, ever since Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins suggested on Fox News that a solution for skyrocketing egg prices — a problem that her boss, President Donald Trump, pledged to fix on day one — is for Americans to simply raise their own hens.

But for everyone else, egg prices are a big flocking problem. Eggs have become a symbol for everything that’s rotten these days: inflation, the supply chain, bird flu, the controversy over vaccination, the inability of government to crack basic problems. Eggs signify the failure of the Biden administration or the Trump administration, depending on which side of the coop you’re standing.

Eggs may be the new gasoline, in the way that satisfaction with our economy seems to rise and fall inversely to their price — a soufflé of discontent that isn’t settling.

But get a load of this:

The furor over egg prices “really underscores to us how essential eggs are in people’s lives,” says Ed Hoffman, the American Egg Board’s vice president of marketing and communications, who is not having a great month. It’s not the best time to be in the egg promotion business. Instead, the Chicago-based commodity board — you might remember their catchy “The Incredible, Edible Egg” jingle from the 1970s — has been focusing on helping people stretch their egg supply.

“Maybe if you mix in cottage cheese, for example, you can use one fewer egg or a couple fewer eggs and still have a really delicious breakfast,” says Hoffman.

These are not, incredibly, the worst egg prices that America has ever seen. In the early days of California’s gold rush in the mid-1800s, when rapid population growth and lack of poultry hiked up the price of an egg to $1 apiece (more than $30 today), forty-niners engaged in violent combat for control of a rocky island 26 miles off the coast of San Francisco where foul-tasting wild eggs could be foraged amid a high concentration of bird poop, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

They must really have been hungry for eggs to pay the equivalent of thirty bucks for one. I got queasy paying 40 cents per egg.  And believe me, I’ve cut down. Perhaps egg prices will be the nail in Trump’s coffin.

*And, as NBC News says at the end of each show, “There’s GOOD news tonight.” I’ll end this with some good news: the world’s longest known cat tail has been determined by Guinness.

 A silver Maine coon cat from Minnesota was awarded a Guinness World Record after his tail was measured at 18.5 inches long.

Amanda Cameron said her family’s 2-year-old cat, Mr. Pugsley Addams, has always had a long tail, and the subject even came up during his first visit to the vet.

Cameron said the veterinarian mentioned it again 6 months later, inspiring her kids to research the Guinness World Records for the longest tail on a domestic cat living.

“And what do you know — to our shock, Pugsley beat it,” Cameron said.

She said Pugsley is a remarkably easy-going and friendly feline.

“Everybody always wants to meet him, and falls in love with his calm demeanor. He is pretty level-headed, even in new situations that might be scary for some cats,” she said. “He is super soft, and is always purring. He’s just a great little guy to be around. When we go out and about, they call him a ‘local celebrity!'”

Look at this tail!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is demanding attention from Andrzej:

A: Take your paws off my keyboard.
Hili: Hili: It’s the best way to get your attention.
In Polish:
Ja: Zabierz swoje łapki z mojej klawiatury.
Hili: To najlepszy sposób zwrócenia twojej uwagi.
And a picture of Szaron resting comfortably:

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

From My Cat is an Asshole:

From Things With Faces (I hope it’s real):

From Now That’s Wild:

From Masih. I can’t remember if I posted this earlier, but it is good to remind ourselves of the oppression faced by Iranian women. This one, like many, had an eye shot out by good of the regime. (Masih’s assassins were convicted.)

Luana got this from Swarthmore.  Note the “stimulation accessible,” which, according to Google’s AI, means: “generally it means making stimulation (whether sensory, mental, or otherwise) easily accessible to individuals, particularly those with disabilities or specific needs, or promoting activities that encourage engagement and well-being.”  I’m still not sure what it means in this context.

From Malcolm; cats properly lined up to watch television:

From my feed, some mighty generous people:

From my Bluesky feed. I don’t know what a gadwall OR the Beastie Boys sound like, but you can hear a gadwall here.

#science #FieldBiology #BeastieBoys #intergalactic #gadwall #bio #AnimalBio #ducks #funny #TeachingResources

— Behind the Frequency (@behindthefrequency.bsky.social) 2025-03-30T17:58:59.692Z

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

One of the lucky ones: he survived Auschwitz and lived to be 92.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-03-31T10:20:37.860Z

Two posts from Doctor Cobb. The first one is adorable!

I try to stay away from politics but this crab eating a grape is very important.

— Paul Bronks (@slendersherbet.bsky.social) 2025-03-29T21:21:30.134Z

Is this bison shedding, or does he have mange. Either way, he’s HUGE! Matthew says he’s an “absolute unit.”

Met this big boy at Antelope Island State Park in Davis County, Utah. Majestic AF. 🦬 #utah #BlueskyArtShow #antelopeisland #stateparks #bison #nature #animals

— Jess (@crochetedjess.bsky.social) 2025-03-29T17:10:01.161Z

Sunday: Hili dialogue

March 30, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: March 30, 2025, and we’re nearly in April. Today is National Hot Chicken Day, and “hot” here means “very spicy”. The #1 emporium for this item is Prince’s in Nashville. To wit: watch two Brits burning out their palate and gullets with Prince’s chicken. It’s hilarious!

It’s also Pretzel Day, National Doctors Day, Turkey Neck Soup Day, and Pencil Day, celebrating the day in 1858 when “Hyman Lipman [applied for] the first patent for a modern pencil with an attached eraser.”

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 30 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Facing pressure from all sides, Katrina Armstrong, the President of Columbia University, resigned on Friday night. (Article is archived here.) This was after Columbia caved to the Trump Administration’s demands that the University reform itself so it can get back $400 million in science funding withheld by the Administration.  Oy, gewalt!

The interim president of Columbia University abruptly left her post Friday evening as the school confronted the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding and the Trump administration’s mounting skepticism about its leadership.

The move came one week after Columbia bowed to a series of demands from the federal government, which had canceled approximately $400 million in essential federal funding, and it made way for Columbia’s third leader since August. Claire Shipman, who had been the co-chair of the university’s board of trustees, was named the acting president and replaced Dr. Katrina Armstrong.

The university, which was deeply shaken by a protest encampment last spring and a volley of accusations that it had become a safe haven for antisemitism, announced the leadership change in an email to the campus Friday night. The letter thanked Dr. Armstrong for her efforts during “a time of great uncertainty for the university” and said that Ms. Shipman has “a clear understanding of the serious challenges facing our community.”

Less than a week ago, the Trump administration had signaled that it was satisfied with Dr. Armstrong and the steps she was taking to restore the funding. But in a statement on Friday, its Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism said that Dr. Armstrong’s departure from the presidency was “an important step toward advancing negotiations” between the government and the university.

The statement included a cryptic mention of a “concerning revelation” this week, which appeared to refer to comments from Dr. Armstrong at a faculty meeting last weekend. According to a faculty member who attended, Dr. Armstrong and her provost, Angela Olinto, confused some people when they seemed to downplay the effects of the university’s agreement with the government. A transcript of the meeting had been leaked to the news media, as well as to the Trump administration, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Ms. Shipman, a journalist with two degrees from Columbia, is taking charge of one of the nation’s pre-eminent universities at an extraordinarily charged moment in American higher education.

The federal government is threatening to end the flow of billions of dollars to universities across the country, many of which are facing inquiries from agencies that range from the Justice Department to the Department of Health and Human Services.

But the Trump administration’s punitive approach to universities is playing out most acutely at Columbia. The university, a hub of last spring’s campus protest movement against the war in Gaza, has spent months confronting accusations from one side that it condoned antisemitic behavior and permitted lawlessness to dominate, and from the other that it stifled academic and political speech.

The government’s move this month to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in support to Columbia — which draws roughly a fifth of its operating revenues from Washington — represented a dire threat to the university. The government told Columbia it would consider restarting those grants and contracts only after the university agreed to a list of demands.

Here’s what Armstrong announced during the Big Caving:

Among other steps, Columbia said it would have 36 campus safety officers with arrest powers, a shift with enormous resonance at a university that has a long history of campus activism and fraught ties with law enforcement. The university also said it would adopt a formal definition of antisemitism, review its admissions policies and, in a turn that was especially alarming to professors who cherish academic freedom, impose new oversight of the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department.

Although university officials said they had already been considering some of the government’s demands, Columbia’s acquiescence drew significant condemnation on the campus and beyond. Other higher education leaders watched nervously, fearing that the university’s decision, without mounting a court challenge that many felt stood a reasonable chance of success, would provoke the government to target other universities.

Two days before Columbia announced its decision, the government said it would withhold about $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania because the school allowed a transgender woman to be a member of its women’s swim team in 2022.

That would be Lea Thomas. I oppose her being allowed to swim against biological women, but I don’t think the government should be blackmailing universities to do Trump’s behest (this is the NCAA’s job.) Will Penn cave, too? Put your predictions below. And remember that Trump is using the same bullying against law firms, too. See the next piece:

*Yes, law firms are caving to Trump, too. Have a look at the first paragraph below. Skadden Arps caved! But other firms are fighting back, and winning.

Earlier Friday, President Trump said the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom would provide $100 million in pro bono work on issues that he supports, heading off an expected executive order akin to those he aimed at the other firms.

What a bunch of cowards. Pro bono work for Trump! But others have taken the President to court; after all, they are law firms:

Federal judges dealt twin blows to President Trump’s retaliation campaign on Friday by issuing temporary restraining orders blocking much of his executive orders targeting two major law firms that participated in investigations of him, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale.

The rulings barred the administration from carrying out punishments described in the executive orders, like banning their lawyers from government buildings, meetings, or jobs.

Mr. Trump went after Jenner & Block because the firm once employed a lawyer who became part of the special counsel team that investigated Mr. Trump in his first term. But Judge John Bates of Federal District Court in the District of Columbia took issue with Mr. Trump’s order because it also punished the firm for its pro bono work, a common feature of many large law firms to provide legal representation to unpopular or poor clients.

Judge Bates said he found that action “disturbing” and “troubling.”

Shortly after Judge Bates’s ruling, another judge in the same courthouse, Richard Leon, issued a similar temporary restraining order against a Trump executive order targeting a different firm, WilmerHale, where Robert S. Mueller III worked before and after he served as special counsel in the Trump-Russia investigation.

The judges let stand the parts of the president’s orders stripping security clearances from lawyers at the firms.

Jenner & Block and WilmerHale had filed lawsuits in federal court in Washington earlier Friday. Now they and a third firm, Perkins Coie, have won initial victories in court.

Trump may have the legal right to withhold security clearances from law firms, or punish them in other ways. It may be legal, but it sure ain’t ethical!

*In his Weekly Dish column, Andrew Sullivan assesses “Two perfect months.”  His judgement isn’t favorable, and he’s right:

In all fairness, let’s start with a real, substantive achievement. The Southern border is more secure than it has been in decades. Biden helped a lot with his belated executive orders, but reinstating Remain in Mexico and ending largely fraudulent asylum claims have been even more effective. In February 2024, Border Patrol picked up some 140,641 migrants between legal ports of entry; this February, it was 8,347. Huge success. And proof that previous administrations actively chose to keep the border open.

But the rest is chaos, malice, revenge, and failure, tinged with levels of indecency never before seen from the Oval Office.

Start with immigration itself. If the administration had wanted to, they could have hailed the quiet border and focussed on deporting illegal immigrants by usual means. But nah. Trump decided he wants to go after legal immigrants and even legal permanent residents who have been charged with no crimes or immigration violations — because they have criticized a foreign country, Israel. He’s deploying a McCarthyite 1952 law to target any legal noncitizen who has criticized or demonstrated against the Jewish state’s wiping of Gaza off the face of the earth, proudly gutting the First Amendment for no good reason.

Wait, there’s more. Trump has also abandoned habeas corpus and due process by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to seize mere suspects off the streets and transport them instantly to a terrifying foreign jail in El Salvador. The law has only been used twice before in wartime, and, ahem, we are not at war. Anyone with brown skin and the wrong kind of tattoo is therefore now at risk of being carted off to torture by the US government, with absolutely no safeguards that they have gotten the right people. Or do you think that an administration that confuses billions with millions, and puts classified intelligence on a Signal app, is incapable of making an error?

We therefore have no way of knowing if a makeup artist who legally sought asylum was rightly grabbed off the street to face certain rape and violence. And when Tom Homan was asked about due process in this case, he actually answered: “What due process did Laken Riley get?” Unbelievable that this thug is in charge of anything.

Then the utter indecency. These wannabe fascists publicly delight and revel in their acts of domination in a manner that even despotic regimes avoid. For the DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, to posture in front of a third-world gulag, with a $50,000 Rolex on her wrist, in order to scare any brown person with a tattoo in the US, is an exercise in authoritarian pornography. It is fascistic in its essence. For the White House to put out photographs of an obese criminal detainee, and add a cartoon of her in tears so that Trump can get a dictator’s boner, is pure depravity. No Christian, no believer in human dignity, no decent human being, would ever do such a thing.

He even takes out after The Free Press:

I’m not naive. As televised and online theater, the first two months have been worthy of Roger Ailes. Deporting foreigners, attacking college students, terrifying legal noncitizens, bullying other countries, brandishing brutality, and mocking left lunacy all have a real constituency. A state-sponsored cancel culture campaign against Israel’s critics gives the base and The *Free Press a real thrill. And I’ve been chastened by the obvious online enthusiasm for deporting foreigners. It appears that many Americans believe that noncitizens have no rights in this country and can be treated any way the government feels like. Suddenly, you see how fragile liberal democracy is in the hands of a duplicitous mob-boss like Trump.

. . . . Trump is now a textbook definition of a tyrant attempting to break a republic, propelled by propaganda, fueled by bigotry, contemptuous of law. And so, so many Americans are here for it. This, I truly fear, is not a drill.

Amen, brothers and sisters, friends and comrades. I am trying to have patience for 3½ more years.

*A NYT op-ed by Greg Weiner, the president of Assumption University in Worcester, MA, argues that “Colleges have to be much more honest with themselves.”  (archived here; h/t Luana). By “being honest,” he want colleges to admit to and then get rid of the unequal treatment of Left vs. Right ideologies.

. . .A recent study sponsored by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the American Association of University Professors purported to show strong the strength of scholars’ commitment to free speech. In the survey, professors reported feeling pressure from administrators and policymakers to align with conservative views. But they also disclosed, perhaps inadvertently, how much they exert pressure from the opposite direction on their peers.

One question asked whether professors who hold a range of views should be allowed to teach undergraduates. While more than 80 percent of those surveyed would apparently tolerate a teacher who believes in a right to abortion “with no exceptions or limits,” those numbers dropped precipitously when conservative views were tested. For example, only about six in 10 said that someone who believes that “efforts to redress racial inequalities represent anti-White racism or disadvantage White individuals” should be allowed to teach undergraduates.

The contrast between those views of liberal and conservative professors, both of which are stated in cartoonish extremes, is striking regardless of what one thinks of the views being expressed. The question says nothing about whether the professors in question should be allowed to teach classes that pertain to civil rights. Yet almost 40 percent of professors surveyed seemingly oppose allowing someone espousing that view to teach undergraduates at all. By sitting on hiring and tenure committees, these scholars help regulate access to their profession. Far from defending academic freedom, their views resemble those of the Athenian jury that condemned Socrates so he could not corrupt the youth.

The reality is that for the vast majority of college courses, it should not matter what a faculty member thinks of current events because they are, or should be, irrelevant to the classroom. There is neither conservative chemistry nor progressive calculus. The same is true of honest efforts to reflect on great works of literature or philosophy.

. . . Taken together, those survey results suggest that some of the most intense pressure to conform to political orthodoxy comes from within the academy. The solution is neither more regulation nor more denial. It is sitting in front of us: Colleges and universities should retreat from politics and renew our core mission of teaching, learning and discovery.

. . . Colleges and universities have a compelling story to tell. But we will have neither an audience for that story — nor the moral authority to tell it — until we are as fearless about examining ourselves as we are about decrying interference from beyond our walls.

Indeed, and although the University of Chicago has $100 million donated to examine these issues, I still hear stories of professors here proselytizing about irrelevant stuff in the classroom. However, we’re trying! See The Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression.

*Even the AP’s reliable “Oddities” section is devoid of light news, but we can at least find something that’s not about Trump or his goons. This one is about a monster hiding under the bed. For real!

A babysitter looked under a bed to reassure a worried child that there wasn’t a monster hiding there — and came face-to-face with a man who wasn’t supposed to be there, a sheriff’s office in Kansas said in a news release.

The 27-year-old was booked into jail this week after a struggle with the babysitter that knocked the child to the ground.

The Barton County Sheriff’s Office said deputies were called late Monday to the home near Great Bend, a city of around 15,000 in the western part of the state. The suspect was gone when they arrived, but the babysitter told them that the child had been complaining about a “monster” before she found the suspect.

The man once lived in the home, but that there was a protection from abuse order issued against him to stay away from the property, the sheriff’s office said.

Deputies searched but were unable to find the man until the next day, when he was captured after a foot chase, the news release said.

Online court records show the man had posted bond about 10 days earlier after he was charged with criminal threat, domestic battery and violating a protection from abuse order. Those allegations were alleged to have occurred in January and February.

But following his latest arrest, a judge ordered him jailed without bond. The sheriff’s office said additional requested charges include aggravated burglary, aggravated battery and child endangerment.

DO NOT TELL THIS STORY TO KIDS! They will never go to bed again. I wonder why the kid suspected there was a monster under the bed. Is that a constant worry for the kid, or did it hear something?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is a bit peckish:

Hili: Are you sure we discussed all the problems?
Andrzej: Oy, I forgot that we have to talk about dinner.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy jesteś pewien, że przedyskutowaliśmy już wszystkie problemy?
Ja: Oj, zapomniałem, że musimy jeszcze porozmawiać na temat obiadu.

And a photo of Szaron the Kulka together:

Meanwhile in Berlin, Stupsi notes that her staff Natalie has just recovered from a week of very bad flu But of course Stupsi wants food. She says:

„Na endlich bewegst du dich wieder. Ich brauche neues Katzenfutter.“  And that means, “Finally you’re moving again. I need new cat food.”

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From Reader Pliny the in Between’s Far Corner Cafe (click to enlarge):

Cat Memes:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Things With Faces, a happy cookie:

I love Masih’s tee-shirt in this video. And it’s great that her would-be assassins were convicted:

From Cate: Duck with frozen beak thaws itself out:

From Andrzej; at my school and in CHEMISTRY!  Note the plethora of antisemitic comments following this post. Oy. . . .

And from Malgorzata. This is not only from my university, but from the Department of CHEMISTRY.

From Malcolm, a sandworm:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

A Polish girl gassed to death at twelve years old. Today would have been her 94th birthday.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-03-30T09:32:57.001Z

 

Two posts from Doctor Cobb. Poor Paul Bronks!

When my doctor asks me if I've been having any feelings of anxiety or depression.

— Paul Bronks (@slendersherbet.bsky.social) 2025-03-12T10:14:02.074Z

Look at this crystal amphipod!

Whoa. Cystiosoma! My what big eyes you have! youtu.be/h9a4ejqD_h4?…

— Chris Mah (@echinoblog.bsky.social) 2025-03-11T18:44:51.735Z

Thursday: Hili dialogue

March 27, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, March 27, 2025, and National Spanish Paella Day (is there any other kind?) When I gave a talk in Valencia in 2011, they took me to what was supposed to be the best paella place in the city—the Spanish city most famed for its paella. The small restaurant was way out in the country, and in the back were two old men cooking paella over a wood fire. It was fantastic. Here’s a photo of the cooking and one of the final product.

Posting will be light for the next two days as today I have to take my car in for maintenance (oil change, tire rotation, etc.) and tomorrow I have a number of tasks. Bear with me; I do my best.

It’s also International Whisky Day and World Theatre Day.

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

Da Nooz:

*The Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, whom no rational person wanted to take that position, is starting to look like the biggest bumbler in the Signal fiasco in which US plans to attack Yemen were leaked by accident to the editor of the Atlantic–and before the attacks took place. I wish Trump would replace that guy. From the WSJ:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted plans for the timing and weapons to be used in a military strike against Houthi militants on a nongovernmental group chat at least two hours before the first bombs were scheduled to drop, according to texts published Wednesday by the Atlantic magazine.

The release of the texts comes after days of contentious dispute between the magazine and the White House over whether classified information about the military operation had been shared in the unclassified chat group in violation of longstanding security procedures and possibly legal requirements.

The new messages that were made public by the magazine showed the texts included details about the specific times that F-18s, MQ-9 drones and Tomahawk cruise missiles would be used in the attack and mentions intelligence that an unnamed target of the attacks was at a “known location.”

Such information is normally guarded carefully by the Pentagon before imminent strikes to avoid disclosures that could help adversaries.

In a statement Wednesday, Hegseth said, “The Atlantic released the so-called ‘war plans’ and those ‘plans’ include: No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information.”

His texts before the strikes in Yemen, though, included multiple specific details of the looming attack.

In a text entitled “Team Update” on the Signal service, Hegseth wrote that the weather was favorable for the military operation and that “we are a GO for mission launch.”

The text was posted at 11:44 a.m. E.T. on March 15, about 30 minutes before the first U.S. F-18s warplanes that carried out the strikes took off from a U.S. aircraft carrier.

All the participants, especially Tulsi Gabbard, said that no classified information was shared, nor any methods, locations, or war plans. This, given what has been reported elsewhere, sounds like flat-out lying. See Tulsi Gabbard’s video testimony at the WSJ piece, and she simply says she simply does not recall the details of the conversation when denying that it contained any sensititive information.

*And The Atlantic has finally released the transcript of the Signal chat, and yes, it gives sensitive information including methods and locations. As they say:

As we wrote on Monday, much of the conversation in the “Houthi PC small group” concerned the timing and rationale of attacks on the Houthis, and contained remarks by Trump-administration officials about the alleged shortcomings of America’s European allies. But on the day of the attack—Saturday, March 15—the discussion veered toward the operational.

Hegseth’s text:

  • “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
  • “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”

Let us pause here for a moment to underscore a point. This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg’s cellphone—at 11:44 a.m. This was 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched, and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi “Target Terrorist,” was expected to be killed by these American aircraft. If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.

The Hegseth text then continued:

  • “1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
  • “1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”
  • “1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”
  • “MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)”
  • “We are currently clean on OPSEC”—that is, operational security.
  • “Godspeed to our Warriors.”

Shortly after, Vice President J. D. Vance texted the group, “I will say a prayer for victory.”

And they discuss matters of foreign policy about Europe. And they even use EMOTICONS. Oy!

*This is a surprise; there was an anti-Hamas protest in Gaza, and it was even reported by the BBC (h/t Neil). You can see two minutes of video and read an article about this at MEMRI, too.

Hundreds of people have taken part in the largest anti-Hamas protest in Gaza since the war with Israel began, taking to the streets to demand the group step down from power.

Masked Hamas militants, some armed with guns and others carrying batons, intervened and forcibly dispersed the protesters, assaulting several of them.

Videos shared widely on social media by activists typically critical of Hamas showed young men marching in the streets of Beit Lahia, northern Gaza on Tuesday, chanting “out, out, out, Hamas out”.

Hamas has not commented directly on the protest, but in a statement on Wednesday it blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for resuming the war.

Pro-Hamas supporters downplayed the significance of the protests and accused the participants of being traitors.

The protests in northern Gaza came a day after Islamic Jihad gunmen launched rockets at Israel, prompting an Israeli decision to evacuate large parts of Beit Lahia, which sparked public anger in the area.

Israel has resumed its military campaign in Gaza following nearly two months of ceasefire, blaming Hamas for rejecting a new US proposal to extend the truce. Hamas, in turn, has accused Israel of abandoning the original deal agreed in January.

. . . . Open criticism of Hamas has grown in Gaza since war began, both on the streets and online, though there are still those that are fiercely loyal and it is hard to accurately gauge how far support for the group has shifted.

There was opposition to Hamas long before the war, though much of it remained hidden for fear of reprisals.

Mohammed Al-Najjar, from Gaza, posted on his Facebook: “Excuse me, but what exactly is Hamas betting on? They’re betting on our blood, blood that the whole world sees as just numbers.

“Even Hamas counts us as numbers. Step down and let us tend to our wounds.”

Here’s an ABC News video of the protests:

All I can say is that I’m mystified why Hamas didn’t shoot these protestors, for they used to do that. And bravo for the Gazans brave enough to know that they won’t begin to prosper until the get rid of Hamas and its culture of death. It’s possible that they are trying to court world opinion by showing that they tolerate dissent, or maybe they’re saving their ammo for Israelis.

*Neil Gross, a sociology professor at Colby College, asks in a NYT op-ed, “Have young people really turned MAGA?” Betteridge’s Law of Headlines suggests that the answer is “no,” and sure enough, that’s the case.

Democrats were alarmed last spring and summer when polling suggested that voters ages 18 to 29 were softening in their longtime commitment to the Democratic Party. After the November election, when exit polls indicated that Kamala Harris had won the young adult vote by only a slim margin (if that), it seemed that the ground had shifted. A post-inauguration cover story in New York magazine on young Trump supporters partying it up in Washington captured a widespread impression that this was a generational realignment: the rise of a cadre of MAGA youth.

After examining new survey data and interviewing more than 100 young adults for a book I’m writing on how politics is reshaping the college experience, I’m doubtful. Young MAGA types may feel newly energized and empowered, but empowerment is different from numerical growth. The data suggest that the swing in young adults voting for Donald Trump did not reflect a major shift in ideology. Rather, the swing seems to have resulted from moderate-to-somewhat-liberal young voters deciding to bet on Mr. Trump out of concern about the state of the economy — and from young moderates and progressives who chose to stay home because they thought Ms. Harris was either too progressive or not progressive enough. This is a point with implications for Democrats and Republicans alike.

The most striking feature of the young adult Trump swing is that it occurred even though there has been no significant recent increase in the proportion of young adults who identify as conservative. Data from the Cooperative Election Study, a national survey with more than 50,000 respondents during election years, show that between 2006 and 2023, about 23 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 identified as either “conservative” or “very conservative” on average, a number that fluctuated only modestly year to year. The 2024 numbers, which the study’s researchers have shared with me, show no meaningful departure from this pattern. (Despite fears of the influence of a misogynistic online “manosphere,” the ratio of young men to young women who identify as conservative did not change appreciably, either.)

Likewise, the survey registered only modest changes in the political party affiliations of young adults over the past two decades. Young people have been softening in their commitment to the Democrats, but they’ve been softening in their commitment to the Republicans as well. In place of these loyalties a growing number say they are independents.

. . . .Republicans, for their part, should heed the limits of their mandate from young Americans, such as it is. The G.O.P.’s core base remains older white people who say they no longer recognize the country that young people are ushering into being. The more the Trump administration caters to these voters by doubling down on prayer in public schools, for example, or pursuing a national abortion ban or imposing restrictions on L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, the more it risks alienating younger, more socially accepting voters who swung toward Mr. Trump for bigger paychecks and less expensive housing — especially if the economy falters.

Perhaps today’s young voters will more fully embrace partisan identities as they grow older. But it is also possible that dissatisfaction with both parties is so great that we are witnessing the emergence of a cohort of swing voters who are open to persuasion each political cycle. If this has the effect of tempering our polarized and dysfunctional politics, we will owe today’s young people our gratitude.

Well, I’m not sure if this is good news for Democrats. If the economy tanks it is, but the young folks aren’t that keen on wokeness, either. I get the feeling that Gross is trying to squeeze as much good news out of his data as he can, but I couldn’t find much to hearten me.

*Republicans have called for the defunding of NPR and PBS because they’re biased, and of course they are. Have you listened lately? I can hardly turn it on without hearing something woke, but at least Krista Tippett is no more. Yesterday House Republicans lit into the chief executives of both organizations for this bias.

Congressional Republicans laced into PBS and NPR on Wednesday, accusing the country’s biggest public media networks of institutional bias in a fiery hearing that functioned as the latest salvo against the American press by close allies of the Trump administration.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who organized the hearing — which she called “Anti-American Airwaves” — derided PBS and NPR as “radical left-wing echo chambers” that published skewed news reports and indoctrinated children with L.G.B.T.Q. programming.

Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS, and Katherine Maher, the chief executive of NPR, rejected those claims, arguing that their stations served as a crucial source of accurate information and educational programming for millions of Americans.

And Democratic committee members mocked the proceedings as a cynical exercise by Republicans to air a predictable list of grievances against the news media. Representative Stephen Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, tried to shift focus onto the Trump administration, including the revelation that top security officials inadvertently included the editor of The Atlantic on a group chat planning a military operation.

Mr. Lynch said that Republicans would rather go after Big Bird than President Trump. “If shame was still a thing, this hearing would be shameful,” he said.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a government-funded company, received $535 million from the government for this year. Most of that money is spent on public radio and TV stations across the United States, with some of it going directly to NPR and PBS.

According to the NYT, fans of the stations are relieved that neither executive made major flubs.  Christopher Rufo published ten questions for Katherine Maher on his Substack site, but I seriously doubt that any of them were asked. More tomorrow.

Over at The Free Press, Uri Berliner, notorious for having quit as an NPR editor and writing about how woke the station is, continues to say that it’s woke, losing listeners, and that its promise to become more objective has failed. Berliner argues that NPR should just stop taking public money, quit pretending, and come out as a “progressive” radio station.  That sounds okay to me, because the station sure is not evenhanded in how it covers news. I would like to be challenged sometimes when I listen to it, and it’s the only station I listen to on my car radio.

*Finally, the AP reports two river otters escaped from a zoo (North American river otters: Lontra canadensis). I expect they’ll be caught and returned.

Two river otters, Louie and Ophelia, weaseled their way out of their Wisconsin zoo enclosure last week during a winter storm, appearing on security camera footage cavorting across the snow, as the search continued Tuesday.

The NEW Zoo & Adventure Park said the two North American river otters escaped through a small hole that they enlarged in a buried fence, and their flight was quickly noticed by zookeepers on their morning rounds.

But Louie and Ophelia don’t appear to have gone far, their tracks showed them exploring nearby bodies of water and returning to the zoo’s perimeter now and again, the zoo said in a news release.

Footage released by the zoo shows an otter leaving the stoop of a building and launching itself into a belly slide on the snow, its forepaws snapping to its side, nose leading the way and back legs thrusting for an extra boost.

It’s the undeniable “bounce, bounce, sliiiiide” of the otter, the zoo said in a Facebook post, and creates one of the more recognizable mammal tracks.

Louie and Ophelia are expected to stay close because otters are territorial creatures, the zoo said, adding their species are native to the area and capable of surviving, with the local ponds and streams offering food and shelter.

Here’s a news report (click “Watch on YouTube”)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is tired and says that it’s time to put Listy to bed:

Hili: Switch off the computer and let’s go to sleep.
A: Just let me check the articles for tomorrow.
In Polish:
Hili: Zgaś ten komputer i idziemy spać.
Ja: Jeszcze tylko sprawdzę artykuły na jutro.

. . . and a photo of the loving Szaron:

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From John Schuermann:

 

From Jesus of the Day (this is me):

From Things With Faces, a sad cookie:

From Masih’s site: a tweet with a video of Gazans protesting against Hamas:

From Luana; education or indoctrination?

From Malcolm, who adds, “Big ears, too.”

Two from my feed. First, a biker d*g:

Caracal mom is very watchful!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted.

A 43-year-old German engineer was gassed to death upon arrival at Auschwitz (I believe he's holding a slide rule).

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-03-27T10:06:52.750Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, an amphipod hitching a ride on a jellyfish:

This was a jelly sort of day. Featuring a handsome jelly-riding amphipod with a tail like antlers

— Keishu Asada (@cephwarden.bsky.social) 2025-03-25T23:11:36.349Z

An old tweet that chuffed Matthew’s daughter:

An old tweet.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-03-26T09:44:58.872Z

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

March 26, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a “Hump Day” (“Kilumbu ya Hump” in Kituba), Wednesday, March 26, 2025, and National Spinach Day. This is one of the very few green vegetables I like, and it makes you STRONG. Remember?

Most important, it is National Science Appreciation Day. Why today?:

On March 26, 1953, American medical scientist Dr. Jonas Salk revealed the successful development of his polio vaccine. It was a landmark achievement of science and continues to make life healthier and safer even today.

The CDC estimates the polio vaccine has prevented 18 million cases of paralysis and saved 1.5 million lives worldwide since 1988.

It somehow pleases me to know that, like Salk, Albert Sabin, who invented the attenuated live vaccine (the Salk vaccine used dead virus), was Jewish. And between them they saved 1.5 million lives. Now THAT is a legacy!

Here’s a very famous exchange between Salk and Edward R. Murrow about who owned the patent for the Salk vaccine. Salk did not get a dime!

It’s also Purple Day (my favorite color), National Nougat Day, World Math Day, and Manatee Appreciation Day. Remember that mammals have independently invaded the sea seven times, with two lineages extinct and five still with us. Here are the five: cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises), sirenians (manatees and dugongs), pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, and walruses), mustelids (otters), and ursids (polar bears).  I’m not sure the polar bear counts as a marine mammal, though. 

Here’s a NASA photo of Paris from Space.com, taken from the ISS, 261 miles above (h/t NASA and Bat). It’s pretty amazing, and makes me want to return.  They don’t call it the “City of Light” for nothing! Notes from the site:

This photo of Paris was taken at 9:54 p.m. local time on March 14, 2025 from 261 miles (420 kilometers) above the city through a window aboard the International Space Station.

The astronaut who captured this shot — possibly Expedition 72 flight engineer Don Pettit, who has been working on photo documenting cities at night — used by Nikon Z9 full-frame mirrorless camera with a 200mm lens.

From this orientation, the Eiffel Tower can be seen glowing brightly in yellow light left of center. Just north of it, lit in white is the Arc de Triomphe.

The Palais Garnier and the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre can be seen above the center of the photo,

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 21 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*You all know about how several members of Trump’s security team fluffed a supposedly confidential group text chat on military action in Yemen, including by mistake the head editor of the Atlantic, Jeff Goldberg. And Goldberg did disclose some of what he learned–after the action in Yemen came about (there was some disagreement among the members of the chat, which included Vice President JD Vance, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.  But they all denied that classified material was revealed. even though that seems misleading:

Two of the Trump administration’s top intelligence officials denied in a frequently contentious Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday that classified information was shared in an encrypted group chat in which details of an attack on Yemen were discussed in the presence of a journalist who had been mistakenly added to the conversation.

Pressed repeatedly about the security breach in the previously scheduled intelligence committee hearing, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, both denied that classified material had been shared in the chat in which they were included.

The White House also sought to downplay the serious nature of the extraordinary security breach, as bipartisan criticism of the incident grew and leading Democrats called for the resignation of the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who set up the group chat, and the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who reportedly shared classified war plans in it.

  • Bipartisan criticism: The vice chairman of the intelligence committee, Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, denounced what he called “sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior” by the country’s top intelligence officials. Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska and a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, told reporters that the White House should “be honest and own up” to what happened.

  • Defending Waltz: President Trump defended Mr. Waltz, saying in an interview with NBC News that the national security adviser had “learned a lesson” and suggested a staff member was to blame for including a journalist in the secret group chat.

  • Damage control: The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said no classified material was sent to the group chat, despite the inclusion of specific details of the Yemen strike before it took place, and she attacked the journalist who revealed it, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, as “sensationalist.” Her statement came a day after Mr. Hegseth suggested the leak was a “hoax.”

Some of the Republicans who were part of that call had criticized Hillary Clinton for using her own email to do government business, which wasn’t too cool, but the beefing about those Republicans for hypocrisy doesn’t move me much.  What bothers me more is how something like this could happen in the first place, especially with the ability of some countries, like China, to do pretty good jobs of hacking.

*Columbia University caved to the Trump administration, making a number of demanded changes in return for restoration of $400 million in federal funds withheld from the University.  I think some of those changes needed to be made, but I don’t at all like the government using science funding as a lever to alter universities in ways it wants. After all, a liberal administration could do the same thing to make universities less conservative! The principle is that the government should not use science funding to impose its ideology on universities, a precious resource in America. And now the interim President of Columbia is in trouble with the faculty for caving:

Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong met with anxious faculty over the weekend in an effort to generate support, warn of the jeopardy the school faces and play down concerns that the deal the school cut with the government on Friday undermined its academic independence.

In meetings with about 75 faculty leaders, Armstrong and her team said six federal agencies are investigating the school and could pull all federal support from it. The Trump administration has already canceled $400 million in grants and contracts over concerns Columbia failed to protect Jewish students from harassment.

“The ability of the federal administration to leverage other forms of federal funding in an immediate fashion is really potentially devastating to our students in particular,” Armstrong said, according to a transcript of the meetings reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “I think it is a really critical risk for us to understand.”

Lawyers for the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights are scheduled to visit campus and question faculty this week about potential violations of federal civil rights laws, people familiar with the matter said.

Columbia receives more than $1 billion a year in federal funds, Armstrong said. Much of the school’s approximately $15 billion endowment is earmarked by donors for specific programs. The school has begun to consider what it would give priority to if all federal funds were cut, according to a transcript.

. . . . The weekend meetings with faculty highlight the tangle of pressure points Armstrong is navigating. The Trump administration could end funding, a potentially existential threat. At the same time, internal conflicts are dividing faculty. Without enough support, Armstrong could face a faculty vote of no confidence, undermining her ability to lead.

Medical and research faculty, who are most affected by federal cuts, are angry they are bearing most of the financial brunt for the political activism of more liberal co-workers in arts and humanities. Many also believe Columbia hasn’t adequately protected Jewish students.

Arts and social sciences professors worry more about ceding independence to Trump, suffering reputational damage and not yielding to what they perceive as an authoritarian erosion of civil liberties. Some criticized Armstrong for not taking a harder line with President Trump.

Others expressed frustration that the school has received little support from other university presidents.

This is a tough one because the money withheld hurts mostly scientists and, as the report notes, it is people in the humanities who created most of the troubles. And, of course, President Trump shouldn’t be doing this, though there’s a small part of me that has some approbation for him doing this. However, I have no idea what I’d do were I president of that beleaguered school. I suppose this is one reason why college Presidents make so much money. (The penultimate President of Columbia made nearly $4 million per year.)

*The law in New York mandates that products to help with menstruation be freely available, but enforcement (and availability) is spotty. Now a nonprofit group and a student are suing the state for noncompliance:

Alisa Nudar was in the middle of her math exam when she realized she had unexpectedly started her period.

Nudar raised her hand and asked for permission to go to the bathroom. When she got there, she found that she had bled through her underwear. She didn’t have any period products with her, and there were none in the bathroom. “I kept asking people who were coming in and they were, like, Oh, I’m so sorry, I don’t have any,” Nudar said. “And already 10 minutes had passed.”

She walked out of the bathroom looking for a better solution and bumped into a friend who ran back to her classroom to get one of her own pads.

All of that searching took about 15 minutes, Nudar said — wasted time that she could have put into her exam. Back then, in 2021, Nudar was a freshman at Bard High School Early College in New York City. And legally there should have been tampons and pads in the school bathroom, provided for free by the New York City Department of Education.

Now a nonprofit organization called Period Law and an anonymous student are suing the Education Department for not providing those products in schools, a failure that, according to the legal complaint, effectively amounts to discrimination against menstruating people.

In 2016, New York City became the first jurisdiction in the country to pass a law mandating every school to be stocked with free period products. The law paved the way for other legislators to pass their own versions of a similar law. Today, 28 states and the District of Columbia have laws on free period products in schools.

In the years since, however, implementation in New York has been weak and inconsistent, said Laura Strausfeld, founder and executive director of Period Law, which was instrumental in crafting the law.

The failure makes it seem as though period products are an optional benefit rather than a necessity akin to toilet paper or soap, Strausfeld said. “No kid is sitting in class worried whether there will be toilet paper in the bathroom — that is where a lack of access to menstrual products is discriminating against menstruators.” Filing this lawsuit at a time when equity initiatives are being scaled back across the country is an attempt to keep the issue front and center, Strausfeld said, rather than let it get “back burnered.”

Studies have shown that the lack of availability of these products has an inimical effect on students’ performance, as periods cause girls to miss school or class.  I agree with this free dispensation, for period products are a necessity to women.  All you need to realize in adjudicating this is that if men had periods, this would be a non-issue: free tampons or pads would be everywhere.

*Trump didn’t like the 2019 portrait of him posted in the Colorado State Capitol, and so it’s being removed. Even the Democrats agreed to take it down!

President Donald Trump likes having his name and image on things, but there’s one representation of his likeness that he wanted gone — a portrait that hangs in the Colorado Capitol. Trump took to Truth Social to complain about the painting Sunday night, blaming the state’s Democratic governor for it and demanding that it be removed.

On Monday, Republican state lawmakers in Colorado followed Trump’s directive. They asked for the portrait to be taken down, and the Democratic lawmakers who hold the majorities in the legislature signed off on removing it, Colorado House Democrats spokesman Jarrett Freedman said.

“If the GOP wants to spend time and money on which portrait of Trump hangs in the Capitol, then that’s up to them,” Freedman said in a statement.

In his complaints Sunday evening on social media, Trump falsely claimed that the portrait had been arranged for by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) and alleged that his likeness had been “purposefully distorted” — but in reality, the portrait was commissioned during Trump’s first term and backed by Republicans. It has hung in Colorado’s Capitol since 2019, and its funding was led by a Republican former state Senate president, Kevin Grantham.

“Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the Governor, along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before,” Trump wrote Sunday night on Truth Social.

Trump didn’t say why he didn’t like the portrait or what had prompted him to post about it, but he used its existence as a chance to take jabs at Polis, writing, “Jared should be ashamed of himself!”

Here; you can see the portrait in question. I don’t think it’s so bad, but remember how vain Trump is.  Does he wanted to be bare-chested with a six-pack sitting on a horse?

*And, on the light side, two engineers from the Royal Air force were chewed out by a British judge for breaking and then stealing a statue of–Paddington Bear!

They didn’t look after this bear.

In fact, two men who had been drinking kicked and yanked on a statue of Paddington, the fictional orphaned bear who came to England from Peru, until it broke in half. Then they took it.

A judge on Tuesday chastised the duo — both military personnel — for being the “antithesis” of everything Paddington’s character stands for.

Daniel Heath and William Lawrence, both 22 and engineers in the Royal Air Force, admitted in Reading Magistrates’ Court that they were responsible for the March 2 vandalism in Newbury, the hometown of Paddington creator Michael Bond.

“Paddington Bear is a beloved cultural icon with children and adults alike,” Judge Sam Goozee said. “He represents kindness, tolerance and promotes integration and acceptance in our society. … Your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for.”

The statue of the bear in his signature blue coat and red hat was one of 23 installed last fall as part of a Paddington trail across England to mark the release of “Paddington in Peru.” The introspective bear is gazing skyward while clutching a sandwich — with marmalade about to drip on his lap.

The judge noted that the label on Paddington’s coat says, “Please look after this bear.”

Prosecutor said Jamie Renuka said the men were drunk during the escapade that was captured by a surveillance camera on the empty street just before 2 a.m. The two spirited away half of the statue in a taxi and returned to RAF Odiham base where the purloined Paddington was later found in Lawrence’s car.

Goozee said the crime could “only be described as an act of wanton vandalism” and that the two had failed to uphold the respect and integrity expected in the military.

The pair, who admitted criminal damage, were ordered to perform community work and each to pay 2,725 pounds ($3,527) for repairs to the damaged statue.

Military discipline might be imposted on top of this, but that would be a private matter. Here’s a video of the very moment of the vandalism and theft:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, a leak in the ceiling was fixed, but Hili ponders everyone’s increasing age:

Hili: Has the water stopped dripping from the ceiling in the kitchen?
A: Yes, the plumber exchanged the old gasket.
Hili: Gaskets are also getting old.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy w kuchni woda z sufitu przestała kapać?
Ja: Tak, hydraulik wymienił w łazience na górze starą uszczelkę i wszystko jest już w porządku.
Hili: Uszczelki też się starzeją.

And a photo of Szaron and Kulka, also getting old. . . .

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

From Seth Andrews (I am that guy holding the sign):

From Jesus of the Day:

From Godless Mom:

From Masih: another brave and blinded Iranian woman, shot in the face for dissenting. Sound up (there are subtitles).

From Bryan. There’s never any end to Schrödinger’s Cat memes, but here’s a new one:

And from Malcolm; one minute of smart cats:

It may be illegal to wear political symbols on your clothes in this school, but everybody is overheated.  Then the student makes himself really stupid by pointing to the “Gulf of America”. This is America in 2025:

From my feed: ants solve a problem:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

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

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-03-26T10:08:32.282Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a thread of cat art (there are some lovely pieces in the thread):

Inagaki Tomoo – Black Cat, c. 1940-1950

— Rabih Alameddine (@rabihalameddine.bsky.social) 2024-12-19T00:11:31.820Z

It’s hard for me to believe that this is real!

youtu.be/GQcN7lHSD5Y

— Ehud (@duhe.bsky.social) 2025-03-19T20:35:15.872Z