I can’t believe it! New ducklings on July 15, and likely to be the hottest day of the year.

I’ve been watching the pond regularly, but haven’t seen a hen for at least ten days. I believe it was Margot, named after Margot Fonteyn the ballerina, for the hen had a long, graceful neck. Her partner, the drake Rudolf (Nureyev, of course) hasn’t shown.  This morning I looked on the pondcam and, to my surprise, I saw a hen followed by a bunch of blobs. Ducklings! I ran down to the pond and, sure enough, there was a new brood.

You can see them below in a picture taken at high zoom, so I can’t seem them well enough to know if it’s really Margot, nor do I know how many there are–I think9 or 10.

This is by far the latest brood we’ve had: more often they show up the first two weeks of May.  But Margot hested before and lost her brood to harassing drakes that drove everyone away. Now that we have no drakes, there’s a good chance that this brood will survive to fledging (if they’ll eat), which should be mid-September.  That is not too late to fly, and the weather will be good.

Now you tell me: how many ducklings?

From Murmansk.travel (and other places) we hear about a Russian cat named Semyon (a Siamese) who got lost on a trip to Moscow and eventually traveled on his own to Murmansk (about 2000 km or 1200 miles) in a six-year journey.  After he died they built him a monument (see below). The first bit seems to be translation from Russian:

Before the City Day in October 2013, a monument to the cat Semyon was unveiled on the embankment of the Semenovsky Lake. Its appearance is associated with a beautiful story based on real events.

In 1987, the Sinishin family was traveling home to Murmansk via Moscow. The Siamese cat Semyon traveled with the owners, but in the capital decided to take a walk on his own and jumped out of the car. They tried to find him, but the cat got lost among the lights of the big city. He returned six years later by himself! During his journey, the cat walked more than 2 thousand kilometers and showed up thin and tired on the doorstep of the apartment.

Bronze cat Semyon looks more solid than the original: it weighs almost 120 kg together with the bench, is 1.2 meters high, and 1.6 meters long. The sketch of the monument was drawn by the whole country, and was chosen by popular vote — the drawing of Nadezhda Vinyukova from Moscow won. It was embodied by the Ural masters-the sculpture workshop of Yuri Borisenkov and the foundry workshop “Dubrovin”.

In place of Semyon’s cat, a monument to Cthulhu, canned fish, cod, polar bear or penguin could appear. But it was purr who scored the most points in the popular vote. The money for its creation was collected by the whole city.

Semyon’s cat can be safely called the most popular and family monument of Murmansk and the first frivolous small architectural form in the city. It was included in the Top 15 of the kindest monuments in the world.

And here’s the monument, described by Grok thusly:

On October 2, 2013, a bronze monument to Cat Semyon was unveiled on the embankment of Semenovskoye Lake (Семёновское озеро) in Murmansk (near ul. Geroyev Severomortsev). The statue depicts a plump, content-looking cat sitting on a bench, holding a traveler’s bundle tied to a stick over his shoulder—symbolizing his long journey. It weighs about 120 kg and stands over 1 meter tall. An inscription reads “Кот Семён” (“Cat Semyon”). Visitors often sit beside him, rub his nose for good luck while making a wish, or simply admire the tribute to loyalty. The monument is a popular local attraction and part of guided tours.

Here’s a FB post about Semyon’s adventure and another picture of the statue. Sound up!

And the only YouTube video I can find: four minutes about Murmansk and Semyon. If you’re Russian, you’ll understand it. But you can still benefit from watching it.

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Here’s a story from The Washington Post about a real Cat Lady: an American in Dubai with a big heart. Click below to read it; it goes to a YouTube video that I’ve below:

The YouTube explanation:

Dina Taji has been giving stray cats in the United Arab Emirates a second chance at life at her shelter near Dubai. She said that she’s been able to rescue more than 3,000 cats over the years and built a shelter that now cares for about 600 rescues. She says help includes medical treatment, rehabilitation and long-term care.

When she started caring for strays, she had no car and would instead put them in a backpack and take them to the vet on bicycle. For her, seeing their recovery has made all of the bills worth it.

Dina is a fitness “influencer”, and you can read about her here. The cat part of her story is this:

. . .  there’s another side to me that I want to share—it’s something very close to my heart. I’m also an animal rescuer, especially for cats. Living in the UAE, I’ve seen so many cats abandoned, sick, or injured because of illegal breeders or just neglect. It started with me putting out food bowls for strays, but it quickly turned into rescuing, doing TNR (trap-neuter-return), and eventually creating a sanctuary with my best friend.

This year alone, we’ve rescued over 1,000 cats and now care for 450+ in a seven-bedroom villa. Half of them are recovering from illnesses like ringworm or parvo, and the rest are ready for adoption. We even built a special catio for FeLV+ cats—ones most people would give up on—so they can live happy lives tooI won’t lie—this journey is anything but easy. Caring for over 450 cats is incredibly expensive. Vet bills, food, litter, medicine—it all adds up quickly, and with no government support, we’ve had to take on cases that most would avoid because of the high costs. But this mission is bigger than just what we’re doing now.

We’ve learned so much from running our sanctuary—how to care for sick and injured cats, prevent cross-contamination, and create systems that actually work. Our dream is to take everything we’ve built, everything we’ve learned, and create a large, state-of-the-art shelter that can serve as a model for others. We want to inspire and equip people across the UAE to create similar sanctuaries, using what we’ve learned as a template to make a real, lasting difference.

This isn’t just about sustaining the cats we already have—it’s about solving the stray cat crisis in the UAE. We want to save them all and give every cat a chance at a better life. Every single bit of support we receive feeds directly into this vision. Every sign-up on my fitness app helps us get closer to building that future. It’s not just about getting fit—it’s about being part of something bigger, part of a mission that’s full of purpose and heart.

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When you see a cat walk onstage and is applauded, it’s almost always in Turkey, for the Turks love their cats, and there are many tame ferals wandering free. Here’s a feline doing some scene-stealing in a ballet production of Romeo and Juliet. The YouTube notes:

Everyone came to watch Romeo and Juliet. Nobody expected the real star to be a cat. During the final scene of a ballet performance in Turkey, a curious ginger cat wandered onto the stage and decided that Romeo’s hair was far more interesting than Shakespeare. The audience couldn’t stop laughing. Juliet tried to save Romeo. The cat had other plans. And by the end of the performance, the entire theater had fallen in love with the unexpected guest.

This is hilarious. I like it when Juliet tries to drag the cat away from Romeo, and later when the cat takes a bow at the end.

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Lagniappe: A friend recently sent me two scanned photos taken years ago with my late cat Teddy. He was a rescue cat who came in through the catflap of my prior digs. He’d lived on the streets of Chicago for several years as a stray, and after he came in, he never went out again. I thought he was a yellow cat, but it turned out that that was oil on his fur he acquired from huddling under cars. In reality, after several baths I realized he was pure white.  I loved him a lot:

h/t: Thomas, Marion, Anne

A few days ago I got a “pingback” from a site on the “Skeptic Society Magazine,” showing that someone had linked to my post that criticized ID advocate Michael Egnor’s video defense of libertarian free will. I went to the Skeptic Magazine site, and, as you’ll see, became puzzled. First of all, I’d never heard of the Skeptic Society. Here’s a bit from the Society about its mission and the magazine

Skeptic Society is an independent, secular online magazine dedicated to original ideas, free thought, and freedom of speech. We regularly publish articles on a variety of subjects, including politics, religion, book reviews, science, and technology. We welcome any material that is truly thought-provoking.

We are not affiliated with Skeptic Magazine or The Skeptics Society. This blog started as half joke and half serious notion about promoting scientific articles that are worth reading.

We don’t have membership, and we don’t discriminate no matter what political orientation you may have. If you have a valid point that is rational, we would love to hear about it.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to publish here.

And then I read the pinbacked article in that magazine, which you can also read by clicking below. As you can see, the piece says that it’s “written by Jenni Sidey”. (I’ve archived the article here).

This article is apparently the first in a four-part defense of Egnor’s talk and a critique of my piece I posted on my website.  What struck me immediately, beyond its misleading arguments, was that it was written in the first person, as if it was produced by Egnor himself.  I goes on and on using the first-person “I” in the response. Here are a couple of excerpts showing that:

University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne has now posted, at his blog, Why Evolution Is True, a reply to a talk I gave in March at the 2026 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. In the talk, presented by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, I discussed the reality of free will, and criticized the coterie of scientists, specifically neuroscientist Sam Harris, primatologist Robert Sapolsky, and Coyne himself, who deny it.

. . .I offer four strong arguments to support that view:

1. Everyone believes in free will. Even free will deniers do.
2. Denial of free will is self-refuting.
3. Determinism, which is the ideological basis for contemporary free will denial, has been disproven by modern physics.
4. Neuroscience supports the inference that free will is real.

Those are Egnor’s arguments, not “Jenni Sidey’s”.   At any rate, the first part of “Sidey’s” four-part critique maintains that I don’t “walk my talk” when it comes to free will. “Sidey’s” accusation is that although I have argued that you can still have morality without libertarian you-could-have-done-otherwise free will, that view makes me a hypocrite, for nobody can be held “morally responsible” unless you have free will. From “Sidey’s” piece (indented):

First, morality presupposes free will. No person can be held morally accountable for an act he did not choose. It is self-evident that every sentient human being invokes morality. Even serial killers get offended if you steal from them. Everyone invokes moral law in everyday life.  Everyone has a moral sense, of varying degrees, so everyone at some real level believes in free will. What we believe is not merely what we say. What we believe is how we live our lives. Every free will denier, Jerry Coyne included, invokes moral law day in and day out. Morality presupposes freedom to choose right and wrong.

Apparently “Jenni Sidey” (you’ll see the reason for the quotes shortly) hasn’t read my own work on free will. I have never said that people are or should be deemed “morally responsible” for their good and bad acts. That would assume the ability to freely choose to be moral or immoral, but I am a determinist who rejects that kind of “choice.” What I have said, and which anybody who reads what I’ve written will know, is that you should be held responsible for what you do, but not morally responsible.  That is, you are responsible if you are the person who performed the act. That, to anyone with two neurons to rub together, is absolutely compatible with determinism.

You can also have a morality without determinism, for morality is just the social code that deems actions good (a consequentialist would say “having overall good consequences for society”) or bad.  In my view, you are “immoral” if you kill someone without a good reason like self-defense.  That means you’re doing something that society deems not only bad but worthy of punishment, but you don’t have to have made a libertarian decision to kill or not to kill.  And society enforces its “morality” through punishment and reward, both of which can change people’s behavior, whether they be the person at issue issue or onlookers.

Changed behavior is also perfectly compatible with determinism: if you’re rewarded for good behavior or punished for bad—or see someone else undergo these consequences—you will be more likely to do good things and less likely to do bad things.  I’m sure that “Jenni Sidey” would agree that rewarding dogs for good behavior or punishing them for bad behavior will, in the future, change their behavior; and yet I don’t think that “Sidey”, being religious (see below), would say that dogs have free will.

I explain this again because “Sidey” attacks me for going after people who do bad things and praising people for doing good things, even though I deny free will. That, “Sidey” thinks, is me not “walking the talk.”  “Jenni” gives an example:

In Coyne’s case, there is an element of self-contradiction. Some years ago, he authored a blog post lamenting the moral impropriety of a guy who dented his car in a parking lot and drove off. If Coyne is right that there is no free will and we are meat machines, then all that happened is that a meat machine in a car machine collided with a parked car machine owned by a subsequently unhappy meat machine. If free will isn’t real, the guy who hit Coyne’s car and drove off is no more morally culpable than the car he was driving. Coyne, in his justified moral indignation at the other driver’s moral lapse, affirms his own belief in free will, at least free will in parking lots.

But my chastising someone for hitting my car does not mean I’ve sneakily “affirmed free will ,” nor did I say it at the time. If you read my post, I say nothing about free will or morality. Instead, I talk about selfish and altruistic behaviors, though I could have used “immoral” in the way I construe above. It makes no difference, for what I call “selfish”, “altruistic” or “immoral” has nothing to do with libertarian free will. “Sidey” continues:

Second, in some sense Coyne is right that I am making an argumentum ad populum. But it is actually better understood as an argumentum ad omnes — I’m arguing that everyone believes in free will, including Coyne. I’m saying that Coyne doesn’t walk his talk. On the one hand, he writes sophistry denying free will and on the other hand, he rails at the moral reprobate who dented his fender. In general, his blog is full of moral proclamations — Coyne is a moralizing scold on everything you can imagine. Of course, the fact that Coyne doesn’t really believe his own arguments against free will doesn’t prove that the arguments are wrong. But, as Carl Sagan noted, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Coyne’s claim that every human being, including Coyne himself, is always wrong about the experience of free will is a very extraordinary claim, for which Coyne offers no ordinary, let alone extraordinary, evidence. My suggestion to Coyne is: if you want to be taken seriously in your denial of free will, stop invoking morality. Walk your talk.

Note the “I” in the first sentence, which seems to come not from a “Jenni Sidey” but from Egnor himself.  Once again, if I, Jerry, criticize or praise someone, that doesn’t mean I believe in libertarian free will. I may not have been able to do something other than criticize or praise, but merely deeming something good or bad is not a “choice” I made freely. I had no such choice.  I am constituted so as to defend actions I think are salubrious and damn those that I deem harmful.  I do not understand why “Sidey” doesn’t get this—it’s not rocket science.

Anyway, you have probably concluded that “Jenni Sidey” is none other than Michael Egnor himself, perhaps writing under a pseudonym. And you’d be partly right: all the words in that article do indeed come from Egnor, as I found out when I got a second pingback from the Discovery Institute site Mind Matters—this time to a piece identical to “Sidey’s” at the Skeptic Society Magazine site, but written by Egnor himself (click screenshot to read:

So yes, Egnor did write the talk at the Skeptic Society Magazine site.  But who, then, is Jenni Sidey? Is she a pseudonym for Egnor himself, writing at Skeptic Society Magazine, or was the article stolen by Skeptic Magazine and given another title?

It turns out it’s the second possibility.  First, there is no record on the Internet of a Jenni Sidey, though there is a Canadian astronaut named Jenni Sidey-Gibbons, but this is clearly not the person who wrote the Skeptic Magazine article—and several other articles in the magazine on unrelated topics, so it’s clear that the author is not a real person, much less the Canadian astronaut. But is it a pseudonym for Egnor?

I don’t think so. What seems to be the case is that Skeptic Society Magazine is simply plagiarizing articles from other places and changing the author to a nonexistent “Jenni Sidey.” That is outright plagiarism: attributing Egnor’s words to someone else (“written by Jenni Sidey”). That’s why I archived the article as well as the one below, because it’s proof that Skeptic Society Magazine is engaged in wholesale plagiarism.

You can see the plagiarism simply by Googling sentences from Jenni Sidey’s articles and seeing where they came from.  Here’s another article that was plagiarized; it came from the site Artnews.com and you can read it by clicking on the link below:

Here are the first two paragraphs of Vollaard’s article:

Weaving may be the world’s oldest way of reproducing information—and computing is poised to become its final one. Across millennia, surprising similarities persist: both media operate on binary logic (over/under, on/off), are intrinsically based on counting, and are characterized by patterns that emerge structurally, not on the surface. In fact, the first automated machine, the Jacquard machine, was a loom, and weaving was a favorite metaphor employed by Ada Lovelace while she was working with early computers and algorithms. Even language betrays this lineage: etymologically, before “text” became “textual,” it was “textile.”

Diné weaver Marilou Schultz has been probing the harmonies and dissonances between these technologies since the 1960s. Her first retrospective opens this week at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in upstate New York, where curator Candice Hopkins has brought together some 55 works, threading them together with contextual archival materials. The show highlights Schultz’s range as a weaver, from her command of traditional styles to her penchant for formal experimentation, and hones in on one subject that has preoccupied her practice over the last thirty years: computer chips.

And it’s easy to find that Lua Vollaard is a real person. But Jenni Sidey, on the Skeptic Society Magazine site, has plagiarized Vollaard’s piece, too. Click below to see the plagiarism, which I’ve archived here. Note that “Sidey” has changed the title of the article, but the content is the same:

“Sidey’s” first two paragarphs are identical to those of Vollaard’s piece. This is big-time plagiarism, attributing Vollaard’s words to someone else.

Weaving may be the world’s oldest way of reproducing information—and computing is poised to become its final one. Across millennia, surprising similarities persist: both media operate on binary logic (over/under, on/off), are intrinsically based on counting, and are characterized by patterns that emerge structurally, not on the surface. In fact, the first automated machine, the Jacquard machine, was a loom, and weaving was a favorite metaphor employed by Ada Lovelace while she was working with early computers and algorithms. Even language betrays this lineage: etymologically, before “text” became “textual,” it was “textile.”

Diné weaver Marilou Schultz has been probing the harmonies and dissonances between these technologies since the 1960s. Her first retrospective opens this week at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in upstate New York, where curator Candice Hopkins has brought together some 55 works, threading them together with contextual archival materials. The show highlights Schultz’s range as a weaver, from her command of traditional styles to her penchant for formal experimentation, and hones in on one subject that has preoccupied her practice over the last thirty years: computer chips.

Note again the authorship: “written by Jenni Sidey.”

What can we conclude? First, that Egnor is not writing at a different place using a pseudonym.  Second, that “Jenni Sidey” is a pseudonym—for someone who re-publishes articles stolen from other places, and attributing them to an author at Skeptic Society Magazine. (I haven’t checked “Jenni’s” other articles, but you can bet that they are also stolen from elsewhere and given Jenni’s name as an author.)

The upshot:  Skeptic Society Magazine is engaged in wholesale plagiarism. Nowhere does it say that it’s republishing articles from other sites and giving them a new author.  Real authors, like Egnor and Vollaard, should go after the magazine for stealing their words. Readers might want to investigate the website and see if other authors’ words are being stolen.

And of course this form of plagiarism is IMMORAL, whether or not you believe in libertarian free will.  The magazine should first admit what it did, and then vanish.

If you follow political news at all, you’ll know that three Democratic candidates, all progressives and all endorsed by Bernie Sanders and NYC antisemite mayor Zohran Mamdani, just won their primaries. And with New York being a Democratic state, that means that, with near certainty, they’ll all be seated in Congress next year.

Let’s talk about the youngest and craziest one, a Democratic Socialist with no experience and a past that is, to put it mildly, checkered. As The Atlantic notes:

The mayor made a much bigger bet in backing Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist challenging Espaillat, a five-term incumbent whom Mamdani had initially promised to endorse. Avila Chevalier has taken positions that could make her the most far-left Democrat elected to Congress in the past decade; she has said that “all deportations are wrong,” describes herself as a prison abolitionist, and attended a rally on the day after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that was widely perceived as expressing support for the attack. (Lander, who now accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, condemned the event at the time.) Avila Chevalier narrowly defeated Espaillat, who had the support of Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul, among other establishment figures.

Now left-centrist and centrist Democrats, like me, might be distressed by this, as all the winning candidates were not only “progressives” (we need a new word for that ilk), but also opponents of Israel, desiring Palestine to expand from the river to the sea, forcing Jews to don inner tubes.  But perhaps Avila Chevalier’s kind of lunacy is limited to deep-blue states like New York, so Jews don’t need to start applying for citizenship in Israel.  Still, the Democrats as a whole are turning against the only democratic country in the Middle East, and that’s worrisome. When they get power, like Avila Chevalier, it’s more worrisome.

One reaction is to wring your hands and wail. Another, which is a purgative, is sarcasm, and that’s the direction Jeff Maurer takes in his website post below. Read and laugh (or weep). Quotes are indented, and I quote in extenso because the guy is good and may induce literal LOL:

It’s funny and might offend some, but look at her record (this was written before she won):

How crazy is Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Zohran Mamdani-backed socialist trying to unseat incumbent Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th congressional district in the Democratic primary today? Well…how much time do you have? My challenge in this article is not to establish that Chevalier is crazy; my challenge is to find words to describe just how bonkers this Cirque du Soleil-level shit shows truly is.

Like virtually every socialist candidate, Avila Chevalier has a social media feed full of statements crazy enough to make their as-yet-unborn descendents [sic] feel shame. Here are some of her greatest hits:

• She called for abolishing police, prisons, and borders.
• She clarified her position on defunding the police by writing that her vision “means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever.”
• She retweeted posts saying “yes, literally abolish the border” and “all deportation is wrong”.
• She called the United States “a fucking disgrace”, referred to the US as “occupied” Native American land, and joked about wiping her dirty hands on the American flag.
• She wrote favorably about communism, wrote “seize the means of production”, called for nationalizing utilities, pharmaceutical companies, and “seiz[ing] all properties from landlords”, and wrote that “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me.”
• She called Joe Biden a “rapist” and a “war criminal” and said she wouldn’t vote for him, said “fuck Kamala Harris”, and criticized Bernie Sanders and AOC for being too pro-Israel.
• She retweeted a post saying “Israel doesn’t exist”.
• She wrote that Black and Arab men “[fetishize] ugly colonizer women”.

This type of stuff is why I’ve argued that we need to bring back the word “retard”. “Moron” or “ninny” doesn’t capture the intensity of what we’re dealing with here — those words are a pea shooter when we need an elephant gun. And, just as I use the words “moron” and “idiot” in a non-literal way, my use of “retard” does not refer to anyone with a cognitive impairment, but only to people who could lead normal lives but choose to have cognition similar to that of an oyster or a termite-infested log.

That being said: Chevalier’s posts are deep retard stuff. This is a type of retard that we don’t normally encounter; physicists have previously only theorized that this level of retardation might exist somewhere in the universe. Beyond the event horizon of this level of retard, the laws of space-time are ripped apart, and each new particle of retard that crosses the event horizon destroys intelligence somewhere else in the universe. Chevalier is less of a politician and more of fascinating phenomenon of the physical world — kind of like the Higgs-Boson particle or Ötzi the Iceman — and every newspaper should be running Pearl Harbor-sized headlines that read “QUANTUM RETARD ACHIEVED!!!”

Chevalier says that she has “grown considerably” since those tweets. She also hilariously accused her opponent of “re-litigating social media posts from half a decade ago” — yeah, who can even remember as far back as half a decade!?!?!? Half a decade ago is the early 2020s, a mostly-forgotten, black-and-white era so antiquated that many of us had slightly different haircuts and our around-the-house jeans were still our out-on-the-town jeans. Five years ago, I was a Mormon communist who thought that the global economy was run by the Keebler Elves — just like everybody back then!!! It was the early ‘20s, baby! Chevalier wants us to believe that people change dramatically in five years, and would also like us to elect her to represent a D+32 district, which has an expected incumbency period of 70-90 years.

Go listen to the embedded video in which she recounts the “apartheid” she witnessed when visiting the West Bank and Israel. (I should add that people never explain what they mean by Israel’s apartheid, especially given that 20% of Israeli citizen are Arabs, and of course totally neglect the serious apartheid of Palestine and other Arab states. How many Jews live in Gaza–a land that used to be almost completely Jewish? What would happen to a Jew who wished to live in Gaza?)

But wait! There’s more! (And do look at her interview in New York magazine.)

It actually seems that Chevalier hasn’t changed her extreme views at all. The New York Editorial Board tried to get Chevalier to sanewash her position on prison abolition — they did the thing that Fox News does with Trump where they try to walk him towards sanity but he stubbornly refuses — but Chevalier couldn’t give a straight answer to questions as simple as “What happens to the murderer?” Chevalier has maintained that it is always wrong to deport anyone, even if they’ve committed a crime. And Chevalier failed to get the endorsement of a left-wing New York group (that endorsed Zohran Mamdani) because when they met with her, she “[refused] to condemn Hamas or anything about it.” (my emphasis!) Really…she didn’t have any criticisms of Hamas? Not even, like…the outfits? Just “five stars, no notes” across the board? Even Sgt. Pepper has a few ho-hum tracks — the fact that Chevalier couldn’t find anything to criticize about Hamas forces me to conclude that she’s either unbelievably ignorant or should be contained by some sort of Hannibal Lecter-type prison setup.

So, pick you adjective of choice — “half-wit”, “lunatic”, “certified, notarized nut job” — this person should obviously not have power. I think that anyone who votes for a candidate like Chevalier should have to wear a diaper and a frilly bonnet, and be made to skip around town holding a big lolly and singing “I went boom boom at the ballot box!” Because that is just how egregiously that person has shirked their responsibilities as an adult. I could only imaging voting for Chevalier in the unlikely event that her opponent was somehow worse, such as if she was running against Reanimated Hitler or a robot programmed to skin and eat every human it encounters.

Maurer gives Avila Chevalier his highest rating for lunacy: five Marjorie Greenes.

In another post on his site, Maurer concludes this:

But now for the bad news: These three — especially Chevalier — are a glorious gift to Republican flaks. What Michael Jordan was to Nike, Chevalier is to anyone whose job is to portray Democrats as radical, anti-America lunatics. And that is because she is a radical, anti-America lunatic; I hope normie Democrats loudly denounce her bullshit instead of trying to sanewash it [JAC: remember the sanctification of Kamala Harris?). I would also remind Democrats that considerations about party unity and maintaining a big tent don’t really apply when the core thesis of the person you’re dealing with is that you, personally, are a corrupt monster who is abetting genocide. In fact, you look like a dickless loser when Chevalier calls you a handmaiden of the Epstein class and you respond by saying “I’m more focused on opposing the failed presidency of Donald Trump.”

I also think that this makes the AOC presidential run that I’m dreading like a prostate exam during an earthquake more likely. For starters: Socialists are riding high, they’ll surely want to turn that (real or perceived) mojo into a presidential run. And it’s also probably true that Chevalier is such a freak show that AOC looks downright stateswoman-like in comparison. There is a (maybe true) story that the actress Marlene Dietrich wanted to appear in a scene with a camel because juxtaposing her with a camel would make her look beautiful. I think the same logic applies here; AOC seems sensible when compared to one of the most delusional weirdos our society has ever produced.

And one of the main downsides of an AOC presidential run also just got worse: Democrats will face pressure to take unpopular policy positions. It will be 2020 all over again; we’ll recreate the dynamic of that year’s primary, in which Pete Buttigeig was denounced as a neoliberal monster because he only wanted to create a public health care option (that would not have passed in a zillion parallel universes). The DSA will have a laundry list of terrible ideas, and they’ll push candidates to speak to those ideas, and some candidates will take the bait and make the Democratic brand so toxic that candidates would be better off running as part of the Anal Bleaching For Seniors Party.

Finally, there’s the rather banal belief that our country should not be governed by crazy people. I really am baffled by people who say “This is our Tea Party!” in a positive way!!! The Tea Party was bad! It’s a problem that our government contains so many delusional nincompoops! And that problem got a little worse yesterday. Time will tell just how bad this development turns out to be, but — in the immortal words of Pete Campbell — it’s not great, Bob!

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Below is the candidate explaining all her old “bad tweets”.  She deleted her entire Twitter account but doesn’t really apologize for her sentiments. Instead, she fabricates “regrets” about her past language, saying “I certainly wouldn’t use a lot of language that I used back then today. If you think she’s recanted the views that she expressed in that language, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you.  In another radio interview, conducted in Spanish, she walked out in a huff when confronted with those old social media posts (there’s a video at the site).

Maurer has a good sense of humor and is willing to tell it like it is. You should read his website, as I’ll be doing as the midterms approach. (His X feed identifies says he “wrote for John Oliver back when his show was…different.”)

Did you find the two California toads in this morning’s photo? Here’s Robert Lang’s reveal:

I believe I’ve mentioned before that we’ve lost two broods of ducklings in Botany Pond this year: Vashti’s brood of 7 and then an unnamed duck’s brood of 12.  I was in Savannah, Georgia when Vashti’s brood came down on Sunday, April 19, and several people fed her and her brood, though of course the brood doesn’t each much at first because they’re still going on residual egg yolk.  There was a storm, and then, on Tuesday, April 21, the brood vanished some time in the afternoon. We don’t know what happened, but I have a good idea based on watching the brood of the second duck (see below).

Here’s the only picture I have on hand of Vashti’s first brood, taken by a member of Team Duck with an iPhone. There were seven; I think one is out of range or behind her.

Nobody saw what happened but she was gone.  On May 1, a hen returned to the pond, and she clearly knew me, coming for food on my whistle and consorting with Armon, her spouse, who had patiently abided in the pond the whole time.  Bill photos (not shown) matched her with 100% accuracy to the Vashti who left. She’s shown below. As for what happened to the ducklings, well, it’s best not to think of it.

Below: Vashti returned! After about two weeks she re-nested, using exactly the same first-floor nest she had last time. But more on that in a later post.

That was it for a while, and then, on the afternoon of May 22, someone reported a lone duckling on the other side of the building from the pond side where Vashti had nested. I rescued it at great effort with the help of another Team Duck member; the rescue was hard as it ran into a tangle of vines and leaves at the bottom of an adjacent building, but we got it and I took it to the Chicago Bird Collision monitors for rescue, where it would be taken to rehab. It was clearly a newly-hatched duckling, as it still had its “egg tooth.”

Suspecting that it might have fallen out of a nest somewhere on that side of the building, I went back early next morning, and, sure enouogh, I found yet another newly-hatched duckling on the ground near the same spot. I took it upstairs and put it in a box with soft teeshirts near a space heater (they need to be kept warm). I was fairly sure by then that there was a nest up above on the non-pond side of the building, and, sure enough, when I went back, there was a mother duck with about five babies in tow, trying to get to the pond. The problem was that she was trying to go on the north side, which required going up stairs, across a breezeway, and then going down. The ducklings couldn’t jump that high, so I had to shoo the brood around the south side of the building, through the vegetation and a fence, and into the pond.

But wait! There’s more! After the unnamed hen (I’ll call her “UH”) was in the pond, I went back to the spot where I saw her, and, sure enough, there were six more babies milling about, peeping piteously, and looking for mom.  Several got stuck in a window well. I got them all, put them in a fly net, and walked them back to the pond.  Picking up two at a time, I put them on a rock in the pond. The mother heard their peeping and swam to them immediately. I did this three times until there were eleven ducklings with UH. Then I went back upstairs, got the early-morning straggler, and put it on the rock. Sure enough, UH came back and retrieved that one, too.  Now, with mom and all twelve babies together in the pond, I was happy—and quite proud of myself of retrieving them in the morning all by myself (this was at about 6:30-7:30 a.m.).

Here they are (or rather, were). The mother started, as always, giving them the obligatory tour of the pond.

After the circumnavigation I was glad that Mom took them out of the water to dry off, sitting on a rock and then squatting on the ducklings to dry them off and oil them:

I sat on the benches nearby, for several drakes in the pond (I don’t think Armon was one of them) began harassing the brood; they wanted to mate with the mother. She would fly away and then return to the brood—over and over again.  Sadly, the harassment continued, and I was there until about 11 a.m. when the mother, followed by her entire brood, walked south through the fence into dense vegetation.

That was the last time I saw them; I didn’t want to go tramping through the bushes and weeds lest I squash somebody or scare them. I was sure they’d return, but they didn’t. (Mom later came back, like Vashti did, and she’s still here, but so far didn’t renest.) Every day for four or five days I would scour the area around the pond, including adjacent buildings near the quad, looking for the brood, but they were gone. Like Vashti’s first brood, it is certain that all the ducklings perished. I was—and still am—heartbroken.

In the next post, which I’ll write in a day or two, I’ll relate how Vashti produced seven eggs, and how with the help of Facilities we devised a scheme to capture the whole family before they could get to the pond and be harassed out of existence. But more on that later. How about some brighter topics now?

Turtles are also a perennial favorite, and we have five red-eared sliders (or rather, four red-eared sliders and one yellow-bellied slider; all are members of  two subspecies of the same species, the pond slider Trachemys scripta.)  Here are some photos:

Here are all five sunning on a rock; only rarely do we see them all together like this. You can see that one has more melanin than the others; Greg Mayer, who has visited, calls it “Mel”:

More usually we see two, three, or four.  Everybody who walks by them stops to look, and many people whip out their phones to take photos:

They are cold-blooded (“poikilothermic”), and so to warm up enough to swim and metabolize, they love to lie in the sun, stretching out their limbs and necks to expose as much of the blood-containing tissue as possible. We call this “turtle yoga”, and I always explain to people by the pond what is going on, as they don’t understand the stretching:

More turtle yoga. Look at those stretches!

Head shots:

But I don’t tend the turtles, save for tossing them an occasional pellet of duck food. I just make sure that nobody bothers them (and believe me, people try). With no ducks to play with, I engage with the three resident squirrels by the Pond, two of which are fairly tame and the other one skittish. The tame one will crawl up my pants to get a nut; I give them entire walnuts in the shell, and roasted unsalted peanuts in the shell (I have to worry about their blood pressure!).  Here’s one who climbed on me while I was watching the ducks with binoculars (it’s early in the morning and I’m dishevelled):

The tamest one (I have not given them names):

Look at that adorable face:

That one has, besides being tame enough to know me and crawl up my body, finally allowed me to pet her, which is not something you want to do to a squirrel you don’t know. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!  I had to get her (it’s a lactating female) to get used to being touched and now I can gently place my hand on her back while she positions a nut in her mouth:

Saturday, June 6 was graduation day at the University of Chicago. By that time Vashti had been back nesting for about three weeks (I calculated that she began sitting on a new batch of eggs on May 15, but I was off a bit, as you’ll see in the subsequent post.

Entering the Quad from the street:

Marching to the Quad.  I didn’t go to graduation, but I didn’t hear of any disruptions this year. Congrats to the grads; it’s a hard slog here!

More on Vashti’s second brood in the next post.