Wednesday: Hili dialogue

July 30, 2025 • 6:45 am

Today may be a short dialogue as yesterday I had to go to the dentist, eliminating the afternoon time I devote to the next day’s Hili. (Note: I succeeded in producing a normal Hili!)

But anyway, welcome to a hump day (“Húfudagur” in Icelandic): Wednesday, July 30, 2025, with one more day to go until the dreaded month of August. However, today is National Cheesecake Day. Here’s how Junior’s serves it (when she was alive, my mom would send me an entire Junior’s Cheesecake on my birthday.) This lucky woman tried them all!

It’s also World Snorkeling Day, Paperback Book Day, and Father-in-Law Day.

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

Da Nooz:

*Breaking news: A tsunami caused by one of the biggest earthquakes known to humans is about to reach the U.S. Fortunately, no catastrophic damage is foreseen.

Tsunami waves began to reach the U.S. West Coast early Wednesday morning as the effects of an 8.8-magnitude earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded, were felt in nations on both sides of the Pacific. Waves as high as 5.7 feet above normal washed onto Hawaii, though officials said the threat of widespread destruction there had passed.

The tsunami was moving down the California coast, where just before 2 a.m. Pacific a surge of 3.6 feet was detected in Crescent City, a low-lying northern community near the Oregon state line. Authorities closed some of California’s beaches, docks and harbors, warning of strong and dangerous currents.

There were no immediate reports of major casualties, but forecasters warned that the first waves to arrive may not be the largest, and that higher waters could return several times in the next 24 hours.

Experts said the earthquake, which struck off Russia’s Far East early Wednesday, could be the sixth largest on record. It prompted tsunami warnings and evacuations in Hawaii, Alaska, California, Russia and Japan, leaving millions anxiously awaiting waves that forecasters said could approach 10 feet in places. In Hawaii and Russia, however, the worst fears did not appear to be realized.

*In an incident rare in NYC, a gunman in killed four people before turning the gun on himself.  The shooter was apparently targeting the National Football League, but also had a brain disease:

Investigators on Tuesday were focusing on whether a gunman had been targeting the headquarters of the National Football League when he burst into an office tower in Midtown Manhattan and killed four people, including a police officer, in a rare episode of deadly mass violence in the city.

Mayor Eric Adams said on Tuesday morning that the authorities “have reason to believe that he was focused on the N.F.L.,” which has offices at the tower, 345 Park Avenue. A three-page note found on the gunman mentioned the league, as well as claims that the man had suffered from the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., from playing football, the police said. It asks that his brain be examined for signs of C.T.E. and accuses the league of concealing the dangers of the game.

An employee of the N.F.L. was “seriously injured” in the shooting on Monday evening and was in stable condition, according to a statement from Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner.

Mr. Adams said that investigators believe the gunman entered an elevator bank at 345 Park Avenue that did not have access to the N.FL.’s offices, so he instead traveled to offices of Rudin Management, which owns the tower. The man was later found dead there, on the 33rd floor.

The New York City police officer, Didarul Islam, 36, who was working off duty as a security guard, was the first person shot by the gunman when he entered the lobby of the building at 6:28 p.m., according to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. A woman killed in the shooting was identified on Tuesday as Wesley LePatner, an executive at the investment firm Blackstone, which also has offices in the tower. The authorities have not identified the other victims.

Ms. Tisch identified the gunman as Shane Devon Tamura, 27, of Las Vegas. In recent days, he drove from Nevada to Manhattan, where he abandoned his car moments before entering the building, Ms. Tisch said.

One issue, which is now moot, is what kind of charges Tamura would have faced had he lived, given that his brain was injured.  That may have been the motive, but it also implies that, perhaps like the Texas shooter Charles Whitman, Tisch woule be found “not guilty by reason of insanity”. (He would have of course been confined in a mental hospital.) However, this is true of all crimes: our brains made them do the crimes, and they had no choice. This realization should inform our justice system.

*The WSJ describes how the advent of AI is wrecking an already precarious job market for recent college grads:

What do you hire a 22-year-old college graduate for these days?

For a growing number of bosses, the answer is not much—AI can do the work instead.

At Chicago recruiting firm Hirewell, marketing agency clients have all but stopped requesting entry-level staff—young grads once in high demand but whose work is now a “home run” for AI, the firm’s chief growth officer said. Dating app Grindr is hiring more seasoned engineers, forgoing some junior coders straight out of school, and CEO George Arison said companies are “going to need less and less people at the bottom.”

Bill Balderaz, CEO of Columbus-based consulting firm Futurety, said he decided not to hire a summer intern this year, opting to run social-media copy through ChatGPT instead.

Balderaz has urged his own kids to focus on jobs that require people skills and can’t easily be automated. One is becoming a police officer.

Having a good job “guaranteed” after college, he said, “I don’t think that’s an absolute truth today any more.”

For the Class of 2023, participation in the labor force declined in the first year after graduation, a deviation from typical patterns.

There’s long been an unwritten covenant between companies and new graduates: Entry-level employees, young and hungry, are willing to work hard for lower pay. Employers, in turn, provide training and experience to give young professionals a foothold in the job market, seeding the workforce of tomorrow.

A yearslong white-collar hiring slump and recession worries have weakened that contract. Artificial intelligence now threatens to break it completely.

That is ominous for college graduates looking for starter jobs, but also potentially a fundamental realignment in how the workforce is structured. As companies hire and train fewer young people, they may also be shrinking the pool of workers that will be ready to take on more responsibility in five or 10 years. Companies say they are already rethinking how to develop the next generation of talent.

*Shades of the First Amendment! Reader Barry contributed a link to a new WaPo article, “Trump administration urges federal employees to talk religion at work” (archived here).

Federal employees can display religious items at work, pray in groups while not on duty and encourage co-workers to adopt their faith, according to guidance released Monday by the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal civilian workforce.

In a memo titled “Protecting Religious Expression in the Federal Workplace,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said that the government workforce should be “a welcoming place” for employees who practice a religious faith.

“Allowing religious discrimination in the Federal workplace violates the law,” Kupor said in the memo. “It also threatens to adversely impact recruitment and retention of highly-qualified employees of faith.”

Although the core of OPM’s guidance on religious expression differs little from past administrations, it “presents a substantial shift in that it encourages employees to express their religious beliefs in the workplace,” said Stefanie Camfield, associate general counsel and director of human resource services at Engage PEO.

Historically, Camfield said, employers have been advised to keep religious conversation at work to a minimum, noting that “the more religion is allowed into the workplace, the more likely it is that differences of opinion are raised.”

“In the current political environment, these types of differences have a way of turning into arguments,” Camfield said. “In some cases, it leads to outright hostility, which makes it more likely that an emplo

If it causes divisiveness, Trump’s for it.  As the article notes, this stuff was already legal, but now it’s encouraged.  And I’m wondering if this isn’t really a violation of the First Amendment, because religious chitchat is not related to the job, but there is no encouragement of nonreligious chitchat. Further, there’s no encouragement for people to talk about atheism at work, and atheism sort of fits in there with religion, as it’s a form of nonbelief.  Regardless, this is an attempt by the government to increase religiosity.

*This comes from Greg Mayer, and I quote his submission in full:

So, irony of ironies, it turns out that the NY Times’ February puff piece on Felisa Wolfe-Simon is what drove Science to retract the paper. [JAC: The NYT puff piece on the “arsenic life” paper is here, and I wrote about it here.]

Money quote:

Then last year, Science’s stance shifted. A reporter contacted Science for a New York Times article about the legacy of the #arseniclife affair.

That inquiry “convinced us that this saga wasn’t over, that unless we wanted to keep talking about it forever, we probably ought to do some things to try to wind it down,” said Holden Thorp, editor in chief of Science since 2019. “And so that’s when I started talking to the authors about retracting.”

The “reporter” in the quote is almost certainly Sarah Scholes, the author of both the February puff piece and the article quoted above on retraction, referring to herself in the third person. (No other Times reporter is credited with additional reporting in either article.)

So, instead of rehabilitating Wolfe-Simon, the reporter got the  paper retracted and her name dragged through the mud again.

*As one of the solutions to the problem of transgender people wanting to participate in sports, I suggested that while trans-identified men should be prohibited from competing in women’s sports (and they largely have now), I also suggested that trans-identified women, or others not fitting the “biological woman” category, should compete in men’s sports.  But I forgot a very important issue, and one that Colin Wright discusses in a new piece on his Substack, “Keep men out of women’s sports—and women out of men’s.”  It’s the issue of biological women who identify as men having a higher susceptibility to injury when playing in a men’s league. A quote:

Despite its name, Nebraska’s Stand With Women Act, signed into law on June 4, 2025, does not actually establish sex-based categories for sports. While the Act bans males from participating in women’s school and university athletics, it does not prohibit female students from joining male teams.

For an interscholastic athletic team or sport sponsored by a public school, a private school whose students or teams compete against a public school in an interscholastic sport, or a private school that is a member of an athletic association…a team or sport designated for females, women, or girls shall not be open to a male student…a team or sport designated for males, men, or boys shall not be open to a female student unless there is no female team offered or available for such sport for such female student. [italics added]

My aim here is to highlight the problems with the asymmetrical structure of Nebraska’s Stand With Women Act.

A few issues:

Inconsistent philosophy on injury risk:

A commonly cited justification for excluding men from women’s sports is the increased risk of injury to female athletes. However, Nebraska’s Stand With Women Act permits girls and women to participate in boys’ and men’s sports. This creates a logical inconsistency. If the presence of a male athlete in a women’s event raises safety concerns, why wouldn’t a female athlete competing against a full team of male athletes pose an even greater risk to herself? All else equal, a woman is more likely to be injured competing against a team of males than against a team of females that includes just one male participant.

. . . Male spaces

Even if girls and women have no natural performance advantages over boys and men, that would still not justify allowing females to compete in the male category of sport. Boys and men ought to be entitled to male-only spaces for the same ethical and social reasons that girls and women ought to be entitled to female-only spaces.

Yet the Stand With Women Act is oddly inconsistent on this point. On the one hand, it asserts a principle of sex-based exclusivity: “a team or sport designated for males, men, or boys shall not be open to a female student.” This language implies that there was some absolute ethical principle guiding the decision to preserve male-only categories. But the Act immediately undermines this principle by including a carveout: a female student may join a boys’ or men’s team if no equivalent female team is available. In other words, the right of males to their own spaces is conditional, while the right of females to theirs is absolute.

. . . . Preferential treatment and its consequences

Another important concern with allowing girls and women to participate in boys’ and men’s sports is the issue of differential treatment—particularly the burden it places on male athletes to alter their playing behaviors to accommodate female athletes. This is not just a matter of etiquette; it introduces ethical, psychological, and practical conflicts on and off the field.

In a recent conversation I had with Dan Romand from Men Need to Be Heard, he shared a story from his high school football days that illustrates the problem well (story begins at 27:25). Dan’s team included a girl on the roster. Dan played offensive lineman and the girl played linebacker. Dan recalled a play in practice where he was the lead blocker for the running back. His assigned blocking target was the linebacker (i.e., the girl). Dan knew that he would have “erased her” if he hit her with his full capacity. So instead, he held back to avoid injuring her.

Why should Dan—or any other male athlete—be put in that position? Why should a male athlete be forced to choose between his natural instincts—to protect, respect, and compete for women—versus hitting and competing against women?

Policymakers, including those in Nebraska’s legislature, put players like Dan in no-win situations when they allow such scenarios to exist. If Dan goes easy on the girl, he compromises his integrity as a player. He’s practicing in a way that contradicts both his instincts and the way he’s been trained to play.

Now there may be some sports (equestrian ones? Archery?) in which there may be no sex segregation since there are no dressing rooms and possibly no physical advantages of men (I’m just guessing here), but the likelihood of injury to trans-identified women is a serious issue in some sports. World Rugby, for example, has a policy stating this:

  • Transgender men must confirm they understand any increased risk to themselves
  • An experienced independent medical practitioner must provide confirmation that the player is physically capable of playing men’s rugby

This is an asymmetry in treatment, but I can live with it so long as the criteria are satisfied, for trans-identified women (“trans men”) have no inherent athletic advantage on  average over biological men.  There is no unfairness to men here, but there is still that physical risk, and World Rugby found a way to dealt with it. Now whether a trans-idenfied woman would really want to play this very rough sport is another issue. But if they want to play, this is one way to accommodate them.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili recites what, from her observations, Andrzej (“The Administrator”) is up to. It’s a bit hard to get, but I think that “Memoirs Found in an Old Head ” refers to an autobiography that Andrzej is writing. 

Hili:  This is all very suspicious. The Administrator is taking care of it. The car is insured, the information about where to print the album is obtained and secured. The hallway is turning into a museum for “Nawojki” and more. Mariusz is installing a ping-pong table in the basement. The biggest sensation is Danka, the editor of “Memoirs Found in an Old Head .” They don’t just like each other—they’re conspiring, and I don’t know what to think. I wanted to listen and share it, the Administrator patted me, but they were cautious. Anyway, he said he’d never seen an editor like her before.
Interesting phenomenon—he stopped swearing. We’ll see, maybe he’ll be more normal, but is that a good thing or a bad thing?

In Polish:

Hili: To wszystko jest bardzo podejrzane. Administrator załatwia. Samochód ubezpieczony, informacja, gdzie wydrukować album, zdobyta i zabezpieczona. Korytarz zmienia się w muzeum „Nawojki” i nie tylko. Mariusz instaluje stół pingpongowy w piwnicy. Największą sensacją jest Danka, czyli redaktorka Pamiętników znalezionych w starym łbie. Oni sobie nie tylko przypadli do gustu — oni spiskują, i sama nie wiem, co o tym myśleć. Chciałam posłuchać i udostępnić, Administrator pogłaskał mnie, ale byli ostrożni. Tak czy inaczej, on powiedział, że takiej redaktorki jeszcze nie widział.

Interesujące zjawisko — przestał kląć. Zobaczymy, może będzie bardziej normalny, ale czy to dobrze, czy źle?

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

From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

From In Other News:

From Stacy:

From Masih: Kurds in Iran honor those who died saving burning forests that the government ignored.

From Luana: Just two neuropeptides appear to be responsible for caste differentiation in behavior (and those are big differences) in leafcutter ants:

From Barry, a “beautiful catfish”:

Take your time to admire this beautiful catfish…. 🥰🐈‍⬛

— Pets Against Trump… (@petsunited.bsky.social) 2025-07-21T13:17:29.288Z

From Malcolm, one contented moggy:

From my feed. Keanu is the BEST!

One that I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Polish Jew lived about a month after arriving in Auschwitz. His expression shows that he's terrified, and rightly so.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-07-30T10:27:52.918Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a free link to a great obituary in the WaPo for Tom Lehrer:

The Washington Post has a wonderful obit of Tom Lehrer. I laughed out loud many times. Here's a gift link, and here's this piece (or its traffic) will convince whoever is running that place to replenish and respect the obit section. 1/2 🎁https://wapo.st/3J6GVeA

— Jill Lawrence (@jilldlawrence.bsky.social) 2025-07-27T20:08:51.021Z

This is a really weird letter from Albert Einstein to Marie Curie, but I assume it’s real:

einstein sent this to curie in 1911 when she was being harassed by tabloids. it contains everything you’d want in such a letter:(1) your haters are trash(2) you’re a baller, a true queen(3) i have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in planck’s radiation field 🧪⚛️

— Microplastics Sommelier (@leastactionhero.bsky.social) 2024-06-27T14:17:23.246Z

The political erosion of American med schools

July 29, 2025 • 10:15 am

Sally Satel (a psychiatrist) and Thomas Huddle (an academic clinician) have an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that you can read by clicking on the title below. If you’ve followed how med schools are changing their curricula to emphasize social justice (including rewriting the Hippocratic Oath that they must recite), this may not come to a surprise to you.

If you don’t have a free Chronicle subscription (you get a certain number of articles per month, you can find the same article on Glenn Loury’s Substack for free.

Some quotes:

Over the past decade, we’ve grown ever more concerned about dubious strains of social-justice advocacy infiltrating medicine. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, doctors’ pursuit of social reform coalesced, almost overnight, into a mission.

Within a week of Floyd’s death, for example, the Association of American Medical Colleges, which is a co-sponsor of a major accrediting body, announced that the nation’s 155 medical schools “must employ antiracist and unconscious bias training and engage in interracial dialogues.” A year later (and again in 2024), the American Medical Association released a Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity that encouraged physicians to dismantle “white patriarchy and other systems of oppression.” Over two dozen medical schools issued their own similar plans.

. . . . Today, doctors perform political advocacy in myriad ways. State medical boards have added a requirement for training in “antiracism” in order to be eligible for a medical license, according to the Federation of State Medical Boards. The University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) created a document titled “Anti-Racism and Race Literacy: A Primer and Toolkit for Medical Educators.”

Certain debates have become off-limits. Consider, for instance, a 2020 incident involving Norman C. Wang, a cardiologist with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. After Wang published a peer-reviewed critique of affirmative action in a respected medical journal, his colleagues denounced him on social media for his “racist thinking” and condemned his paper as scientifically invalid and “racist.” The journal retracted his article and the school removed him as director of the electrophysiology program. (Wang sued for retaliation and discrimination, but was unsuccessful.)

Researchers are promoting unscientific modes of thinking about group-based disparities in health access and status. The University of Minnesota’s Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity decrees “structural racism as a fundamental cause of health inequities,” despite the fact that this is at best an arguable thesis, not a fact. (The center was shut down last month.) The Kaiser Family Foundation states that health differentials “stem from broader social and economic inequities.”

In what borders on compelled speech, the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University issued a 164-page report from a diversity task force insisting that “Health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism are at the root of [Black-white] health disparities.” Other variables influencing the course of chronic disease, prominently the patient’s health literacy and self-care, receive scant attention.

But those disparities are far more complicated than that. This brings to mind the claim, promulgated in 2020, that black babies delivered by white physicians had over twice the mortality rate than when delivered by black physicians (see this PNAS paper). It got a lot of publicity, and cries of “racism” were loud and pervasive. But later analysis showed that racism was not a factor, but a difference among races in birth weight. As The Economist reported:

Now a new study seems to have debunked the finding, to much less fanfare. A paper by George Borjas and Robert VerBruggen, published last month in PNAS, looked at the same data set from 1.8m births in Florida between 1992 and 2015 and concluded that it was not the doctor’s skin colour that best explained the mortality gap between races, but rather the baby’s birth weight. Although the authors of the original 2020 study had controlled for various factors, they had not included very low birth weight (ie, babies born weighing less than 1,500 grams, who account for about half of infant mortality). Once this was also taken into consideration, there was no measurable difference in outcomes.

The new study is striking for three reasons. First, and most important, it suggests that the primary focus to save young (black) lives should be on preventing premature deliveries and underweight babies. Second, it raises questions about why this issue of controlling for birth weight was not picked up during the peer-review process. And third, the failure of its findings to attract much notice, at least so far, suggests that scholars, medical institutions and members of the media are applying double standards to such studies. Both studies show correlation rather than causation, meaning the implications of the findings should be treated with caution. Yet, whereas the first study was quickly accepted as “fact”, the new evidence has been largely ignored.

The reason why white doctors at first looked like such a “lethal” combination with black babies, say the authors of the recent paper, was that a disproportionately high share of underweight black babies were treated by white doctors, while a disproportionately high share of healthy-weight black babies were treated by black doctors. Being born severely underweight is one of the greatest predictors of infant death. Just over 1% of babies in America are born weighing less than 1,500 grams, but among black babies the rate is nearly 3%.

You can find the Borjas and VerBruggen paper here.  Their finding, as The Economist wrote, got far less publicity than the original finding, clearly because the real reason didn’t play into the social-justice Zeitgeist.

But back to Satel and Huddle’s article. Note that the following caveat appears later in the essay, accepting the possibility that past racism is involved in health disparities but questioning whether current structural racism is causing present disparities:

. . . . .We do not deny that much of the health disadvantage suffered by minority groups is the cumulative product of legal, political, and social institutions that historically discriminated against them. But past discrimination is not necessarily a factor sustaining those problems now. We must address the discrete causes that operate today.

Back to their text, giving a few more examples of social-justice medicine:

In what borders on compelled speech, the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University issued a 164-page report from a diversity task force insisting that “Health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism are at the root of [Black-white] health disparities.” Other variables influencing the course of chronic disease, prominently the patient’s health literacy and self-care, receive scant attention.

Some medical professionals have even endorsed racial reparations in health care decision-making.At one point,the CDC vaccine advisory committee proposed prioritizing the anticipated Covid vaccine by race rather than age, solely because older cohorts disproportionately comprised whites. This plan would have delayed vaccination of the elderly—the highest risk group—and, according to the CDC’s own projections, resulted in more overall deaths. Other sponsors of health equity lobbied for a rationing scheme that prioritized the assignment of ventilators to Black patients, negating customary triage procedures.

These “reparations” are unethical because they would cause deaths than would occur otherwise. Nevertheless, people proposed them knowing this. 

But wait! There’s more!

Perhaps the most dramatic recent display of ideological intrusion into the medical sphere took place last June at the UCSF Medical Center, where keffiyeh-draped doctors gathered on the grounds to demand that their institution call for a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas. Their chants of “intifada, intifada, long live intifada!” echoed into patients’ rooms.

These doctors were not putting patients first—if anything, they were offending and intimidating patients. They were putting their notion of social justice first.

You can see a video along these lines from UCSF here, though I’m not sure it’s the demonstration referred to in the article.

The authors then propose three guidelines that “should advocate for policies that 1) directly help patients and 2) are rooted in professional expertise, while 3) ensuring that their advocacy does not interfere with their relationships with their colleagues, students, and patients”:

1.) First, the reform they promote must have a high likelihood of directly improving patient health. “Dismantling white patriarchy and other systems of oppression” is not an actionable goal. Our primary job is to diagnose and treat, and to do no harm in the process. We have no expertise in redistributing power and wealth. Even seasoned policy analysts cannot readily tease out strong causal links between health and economic and social factors that lie upstream.

. . . . 2.) Second, physicians’ actions or their advice to policymakers should be rooted in expertise that is unique to their profession. Opining and advocating on behalf of general social issues exploits their moral authority, turns medicine into a vehicle for politics, and risks the trust of the public. Medical professionals will, of course, have their own views of the public good. They are free to take to the barricades as citizens—but not while wearing their white coats.

3.) Third, doctors must not lose sight of the impact of advocacy on patients and students. While advocating for one’s own patients is a basic obligation of being a doctor, advocating on behalf of societal change can work against those patients, drawing time and attention away from their care.

One action the authors suggest is that young physicians who are truly dedicated to helping the oppressed, poor, and those deprived of medical care, should work in rural areas that suffer from a shortage of doctors:

A new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that newly licensed clinicians from top-ranked medical institutions were half as likely to initially practice in socioeconomically deprived areas as graduates from other medical institutions. Specialists were also less likely to practice in deprived areas compared with primary-care clinicians.

Well, that sounds good, but do you really think that the entitled social-justice doctors are willing to leave the cities and work in rural areas with a shortage of medical care?

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 29, 2025 • 8:15 am

Today we have three photos of a Southern Cassowary by Scott Ritchie, who hails from Australia. Scott’s caption is indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Here are a few photos of a Southern Cassowary[Casuarius casuarius] that I took in the last month at Mission Beach, Queensland. They are truly an iconic bird and our evidence the dinosaur still lives. They have actually killed people, although this is very rare. But it has happened. They have a huge dagger-like inner toe. That’s about 6 inches long that when it kicks out at you can eviscerate you. Not a pleasant way to go.

JAC: Here’s a picture of its “dagger toe” that I took from Wikipedia:

Dezidor, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

July 29, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day, Tuesday, July 29, 2025, and it’s going to be a hot two days in Chicago given the humidity, though things cool down on Wednesday. It’s also National Chicken Wing Day, and here’s one of my favorite actors, Jennifer Lawrence, sampling wings that get hotter and hotter. She winds up crying from the heat.

I have to go to the dentist at noon, so the Hili dialogues may be extra short tomorrow (I do most of them the afternoon before). Bear with me; I do my best.

t’s also International Tiger Day and National Lasagne Day, a day of arrant cultural appropriation.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 29 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I’ve been dubious about the ubiquitous headlines (see the NYT, for example) that Gazans are starving or “on the brink of starvation”, something I’ve heard for over a year despite the fact that food trucks are parked in Gaza waiting for the UN (which refuses)to distribute the aid). Also, all the information you hear about starvation comes from the Gaza Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas and has a history of gross distortion. The Free Press has two pieces with independent views of the issue, and I’ve given long quotes from each. The upshot is that yes, impending widespread hunger might be a real phenomenon in Gaza, and Israel needs to prevent it, both to hasten the end of the war and to avoid world opprobrium of the Jewish state.

One is Matti Friedman’s “Is Gaza starving? Searching for truth in an information war.” Quotes:

Around the same time [a few weeks after October 7], we started reading that Israel’s response to the October 7 terror attack—a war that Palestinians started, and which had barely begun at the time—was actually a “genocide,” an ideological slur thrown at Israel by Soviet propagandists, Arab dictators, and the Western left beginning in the 1970s. In the following months, hundreds of Israeli soldiers were killed fighting house-to-house in areas where Palestinian civilians—and combatants—were warned that troops were coming so they could leave.

Reports of impending hunger engineered by Israel in Gaza have been commonplace not just since the beginning of this war but for at least a decade and a half, since Hamas seized the territory and Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade that supposedly turned Gaza into an “open-air prison.” The famine never materialized. Now we hear claims that this same period of supposedly extreme deprivation was actually a Gazan idyll that Israel has cruelly destroyed in this war.

In an attempt to understand the truth of the reports, I called several trusted colleagues, veteran Israeli journalists intimately involved in covering events here and concerned both with the health of our society and that of innocent Palestinians. It was clear in speaking to them that our plight as journalists is only marginally better than that of the average citizen.

The consensus was that there were nearly no trustworthy sources regarding reality in Gaza—certainly not the “Gaza Health Ministry,” which answers to Hamas; or Palestinian reporters intimidated by Hamas; or the international organizations, like the UN refugee agency UNRWA, embroiled in various forms of collaboration with Hamas. All of the above are engaged in a successful information campaign that uses Palestinian suffering, real and imagined, to catalyze international anger and tie Israel’s hands.

The international press isn’t the answer. During my years as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press, I saw coverage altered by Hamas threats to our staff, while this fact was concealed from readers. I know firsthand that nearly no information coming from Gaza can be taken at face value.

But neither can we Israelis trust our own government, which has regularly misled the public about the war’s progress (Netanyahu assured Israelis over a year ago that we were “a step away” from victory); about the shifting goals of the campaign; about the success of various operations, which have seen soldiers repeatedly return to areas that have already been cleared at great cost; and about the priority assigned to the release of hostages, many of whom were released in prisoner swaps only because of American pressure and 50 of whom remain, alive and dead, in Hamas hands.

. . .The hunger in Gaza managed to belatedly penetrate the consciousness of the Israeli mainstream last week, in large part thanks to individual journalists who command public trust and who speak regularly to Palestinians they know. One such journalist is Ohad Hemo, the Palestinian affairs reporter for Channel 12 News, the country’s most widely watched news program, whose report last Wednesday was shared widely. Food warehouses serving Hamas fighters are still full, he reported, and the crisis wasn’t only Israel’s fault. However, he continued, “I don’t know if people are dying directly from hunger, as is being claimed in Gaza, but there is hunger in Gaza, and we need to state this loud and clear.” Even when aid makes it in, he explained, it’s only fit young men who have any shot at fighting for the sacks and crates beside the trucks and food centers. The aid isn’t reaching many who need it. He’s spoken to people, he said, who hadn’t eaten in days.

You might have thought that hunger in Gaza would work against Hamas, forcing the group to have mercy on its own civilians and accept the ceasefire desired by Israel and the U.S. and currently under discussion in Qatar. But Hamas knows that the opposite is true.

The same reality was described by sources with whom I spoke late last week. One told me that hospitals had cut meals from three a day to one. Even a senior figure in the Israeli military told one of my colleagues at the end of last week that while there isn’t mass starvation as claimed by pro-Hamas propaganda, Gaza really is on the brink this time.

. . .Israel says Hamas bears the responsibility, as the group has diverted aid both to hoard for its fighters and to sell to finance the war—and then cynically uses Palestinian suffering as a propaganda tool. But internationally, nearly all the blame has been directed at Israel, with the implicit or explicit explanation being malevolence or genocidal intent. Israel has periodically tried to exert pressure on Hamas by blocking aid, and earlier this year began trying to conclusively break Hamas’s control of food by providing it through a new organization, American-run and Israeli-affiliated, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Because the GHF is an acute threat to its power, Hamas has been doing what it can to foment unrest around its distribution sites, kill its workers, and intimidate people accepting its food. The Americans running the sites have reported the distribution of more than 90 million meals directly to Gazans.

But on the ground, the word directly—according to friends of mine serving with reserve army units close to GHF operations—has often meant chaotic scenes of thousands of men descending on the distribution sites and picking them clean, coming into dangerous and sometimes fatal contact with Israeli soldiers who are understandably scared of disguised Hamas fighters and unprepared for the kind of mass chaos they’re expected to control.

. . . An experienced Israeli civilian involved in the aid efforts, from an organization that works both with international aid groups and the Israeli military, said on Friday that mass starvation is not yet the reality but could be in the near future. There are already “pockets” of malnutrition and real hunger, he told me. The only way to avert a deterioration, he said, is for Israel to abandon the mistaken idea that withholding aid weakens Hamas, and to urgently flood Gaza with food. It’s the right move morally, he said, but also strategically, because the humanitarian crisis is devastating what’s left of Israel’s international support.

. . . One of the terrible facts of this war is that the Palestinians who started the war, and who constructed the twisted battlefield on which it has been fought, won’t act to save their own people. Starvation and death serve the Hamas plan. That means that Israel must decide how far it wants to push—and when to stop.

*The other FP story, by Amit Segal, is “The price of flour shows the hunger crisis in Gaza.”

Yesterday, Yannay Spitzer, an assistant professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, shared his findings on food prices in Gaza before and during the war. Well aware of the propaganda that Hamas and its international allies have been pumping out of the strip since October 7, 2023, Spitzer noted that “the situation [in Gaza] is radically different from everything up to now.”

He goes one step further, suggesting that “without immediate change, a state of mass starvation seems inevitable.”

What makes him think that? Spitzer tracked the price of flour, which, as he notes, is “the most essential consumer good.”

In September 2023, flour, which is sold in 25 kilogram sacks, cost around 47.5 shekels (14 U.S. dollars) in the Gazan city of Deir al-Balah, which until recently was untouched by the Israel Defense Forces and therefore less affected by the war.

Since October 7, 2023, according to Spitzer, flour’s price, per 25 kilogram sack, changed as follows:

January 2024: Over 300 shekels.

January 2025, before the most recent ceasefire: 500 shekels.

During the ceasefire: It dropped back down to 50 shekels—almost its pre-war price.

Why the volatile prices? That’s war—and while a tenfold increase in the cost of flour likely indicates a significant drop in supply, it doesn’t necessarily prove widespread hunger, let alone famine.

But here’s why Spitzer is worried. After the last ceasefire ended in March, the cost of flour shot back up to 500 shekels by the end of April. It then hit 875 shekels by the second week of May, and 1,750 by the end of the month.

Here’s the worst part. “According to reports from the past few days,” Spitzer wrote, “if the price of a kilogram of flour has indeed reached 150 shekels—meaning 3,750 shekels per sack—we are looking at an 80-fold price increase.”

In other words, Spitzer is arguing that whatever flour shortage there was in Gaza up until now doesn’t even come close to what the strip is currently experiencing. In summary, he writes, “very few households can sustain themselves under such shortages for more than a few days.”

The key question: Is he right? While I can’t force you to believe his report, it should certainly be taken with more seriousness than the propaganda spouting out of the United Nations and Al Jazeera.

. . .Of course, the political and military echelon is well tuned into this—and concern over hunger in the strip is one of the key reasons Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants a ceasefire. As he has repeated throughout this war, preventing a famine in Gaza—which would see Israel lose even its most strident supporters—is the one essential condition to continuing the war and defeating Hamas.

Speaking of Hamas, what does it make of all this? For one, Hamas took its war against humanitarian aid to new heights last night, firing a rocket at the aid distribution center near the Morag Corridor. Thankfully, it landed around 250 meters (273 yards) short of its target.The sentiment, however, is nothing new. The closer Gazans are to real hunger, the better it is for Hamas, and the less likely the group is to cave in ceasefire negotiations. After all, its logic is simple: If our people are actually starving, Israel will be forced to end the war anyway—and without us having to agree to a deal we don’t particularly like.

Hence Hamas’s gleeful hoarding of food in its warehouses, keeping it far away from Gazan civilians and driving up the prices of basic goods—without which the strip would not be facing the current food shortage.

For both Israelis and the ordinary Gazans caught in the crossfire, the result is brutal: When starvation becomes a strategy, peace moves further out of reach.

It’s odd but absolutely understandable that Israel’s enemy actually wants its people to starve, but Israel should take that as a sign that distribution of food, however unusual, must be done.  And it is being done. What I can’t figure out from the news is whether the reports of starvation (or “imminent starvation”) are real. Regardless, feed the Gazans until they’re plump. Then destroy Hamas.

*President Trump has evinced a new urgency to ending the war between Ukraine and Russia, but he’s applying the pressure on Putin:

President Trump said he would give Russian President Vladimir Putin 10 or 12 days to reach a cease-fire with Ukraine or face more economic pressure from the U.S., as he seeks to bring the Russian leader to the negotiating table.

Trump earlier this month said Putin had 50 days to agree to a cease-fire in Ukraine or the U.S. would unleash a tariff package on Russia’s trading partners. On Monday, he shortened that time frame. “We just don’t see any progress being made,” Trump said in Scotland on Monday as he met with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

During a wide-ranging discussion in his golf resort at Turnberry, Trump also said that the U.S. would get more involved in the distribution of aid in Gaza and outlined plans to impose tariffs of 15% to 20% on countries around the globe.

Sitting in a winged armchair, the president spoke of his desire to end global conflicts and how he already used the threat of cutting U.S. trade to bring peace among several warring nations across Africa and Asia. But Trump said Putin had so far ignored his entreaties, and expressed his frustration.

“We thought we had that settled numerous times,” he said, adding he was “very disappointed” with the Russian leader. “And then President Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city…bodies lying all over the street.”

He added that on several occasions he had what he thought were positive talks with Putin, only to see attacks on Ukraine intensify, sometimes only hours after the pair had spoken. “You know, this has happened on too many occasions, and I don’t like it,” Trump said. He declined to say that Putin was lying to him but said he was “not so interested in talking anymore” to him.

*Analyzing the dangerous shortage of air traffic controllers in the U.S., the Washington Post attributes some of it to faulty training that leads prospective controllers to either quit or be washed out:

Higgins’s experience was far from unusual, according to a Washington Post examination of data and interviews with trainees who pursued a career in the federal system but ultimately washed out. The FAA’s high trainee dropout rate is a leading cause of the nation’s dangerous shortage of air traffic controllers. In some cases, recruits failed their training and were dismissed. In others, they left of their own accord rather than endure what they described as haphazard instruction, organizational dysfunction and abusive conditions.

The agency employs about 11,500 certified controllers, about 3,000 short of its goal, a shortfall that affects almost every airport in the country. Chronic shortages put safety at risk and force flight delays when towers are understaffed, according to independent reviews of the system, while also requiring controllers to work grueling overtime schedules that contribute to fatigue and burnout.

Overall, about 20 percent of trainees fail to certify as a controller at the first assigned facility, according to FAA data. Some get a second chance, but almost 1,400 recruits hired since 2010 never became a controller. And those national figures don’t reveal the full scope of the problem. At many individual air traffic hubs the washout rates are far worse than the FAA average, reflecting what critics call a lack of standardization and poor FAA oversight.

At the Oakland control center where Higgins worked, 45 percent of trainees fail to earn full certification, according to data compiled by the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union. At a key New York facility that is one of the busiest in the country, the failure rate was 69 percent.

New controllers are almost entirely trained by the FAA at taxpayer expense. Candidates must pass a screening test and a background check before attending the agency’s Oklahoma City academy. Those who successfully finish the three-to-four-month academy are assigned to one of the FAA’s hundreds of facilities for their apprenticeship — the longest phase of their training, typically lasting between 18 months and four years before they become fully certified.

The FAA has for decades been unable to resolve its controller shortage. Under the Trump administration, it has vowed to improve the academy in a bid to increase readiness and retention of recruits. When trainees graduate from the academy and reach control towers, they are often insufficiently prepared to manage flights in busy, high-stress conditions, trainees and experienced controllers said.

Note that the article blames the high washout rate on “haphazard instruction, organizational dysfunction and abusive conditions”.  But note that being an air traffic controller is a high stress job that requires close attention and skill, and did the Post consider that most people simply aren’t qualified for the job?

*Finally, in yet another judicial rebuke of Trump’s executive orders, a federal judge has blocked his attempt to defund Planned Parenthood:

A federal judge on Monday ruled Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide must continue to be reimbursed for Medicaid funding as the nation’s largest abortion provider fights President Donald Trump’s administration over efforts to defund the organization in his signature tax legislation.

The new order replaces a previous edict handed down by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston last week. Talwani initially granted a preliminary injunction specifically blocking the government from cutting Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood members that didn’t provide abortion care or didn’t meet a threshold of at least $800,000 in Medicaid reimbursements in a given year.

“Patients are likely to suffer adverse health consequences where care is disrupted or unavailable,” Talwani wrote in her Monday order. “In particular, restricting Members’ ability to provide healthcare services threatens an increase in unintended pregnancies and attendant complications because of reduced access to effective contraceptives, and an increase in undiagnosed and untreated STIs.”

A provision in Trump’s tax bill instructed the federal government to end Medicaid payments for one year to abortion providers that received more than $800,000 from Medicaid in 2023, even to those like Planned Parenthood that also offer medical services like contraception, pregnancy tests and STD testing.

Although Planned Parenthood is not specifically named in the statute, which went into effect July 4, the organization’s leaders say it was meant to affect their nearly 600 centers in 48 states. However, a major medical provider in Maine and likely others have also been hit.

In her Monday order, Talwani said that the court was “not enjoining the federal government from regulating abortion and is not directing the federal government to fund elective abortions or any healthcare service not otherwise eligible for Medicaid coverage.” Instead, Talwani said that her decision would block the federal government from excluding groups like Planned Parenthood from Medicaid reimbursements when they have demonstrated a substantial likelihood of success in their legal challenge.

Note how Talwani got around the accusation that she was punishing the government for preventing abortion.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has taken to explaining Andrzej’s activities in detail, but in the end she assures us that Hili dialogues will continue.

Hili: The Administrator was handling important matters today. At the bank, they told him he needs to settle inheritance issues first. So – a notary. Well, perfect – Małgorzata has been pushing for a new will and a different executor for two years. Elżbieta is too ill. He ordered better hearing aids because he can no longer rely on Małgorzata. He’ll get them on Friday. He bought four photo frames. He still needs fifteen more – mostly for pictures of Marta and Elżbieta from the old days. The hallway has turned into a gallery. The Administrator bought two pipes and some tobacco. He’s very pleased. He said he prefers electric trains to electronic cigarettes. The police stopped him – turns out he missed his MOT deadline. After an hour and a half, they asked him to just go, lest their superiors give them trouble. At the Vehicle Inspection Station, he spoke about the encounter with the police (there was no need to mention Małgorzata’s death – after all, everyone in Dobrzyń knows), and the owner nodded and took the car key from him. He left the car in for MOT and continued on foot. Tomorrow – insurance.

When asked whether there will be dialogues with me, Paulina said: “We’ll manage.” When she says that, the matter is settled. There will be dialogues.

In Polish:

Hili: Administrator załatwiał dziś ważne sprawy. W banku powiedzieli, że musi najpierw uregulować sprawy spadkowe. Czyli notariusz. No i świetnie — Małgorzata od dwóch lat naciskała na nowy testament i innego wykonawcę. Elżbieta jest zbyt chora. Zamówił lepsze aparaty słuchowe, bo już nie może wyręczać się Małgorzatą. Dostanie je w piątek. Kupił cztery ramki do zdjęć. Potrzebuje jeszcze piętnaście — głównie na Martę i Elżbietę z dawnych czasów. Korytarz zmienił się w galerię. Administrator kupił dwie fajki i tytoń. Jest bardzo zadowolony. Powiedział, że woli elektryczne pociągi od elektronicznych fajek. Zatrzymała go policja — okazało się, że przegapił termin przeglądu. Po półtorej godziny poprosili, żeby już sobie pojechał, bo im przełożeni krzywdę zrobią. Na Stacji Kontroli Pojazdów opowiedział o spotkaniu z policją (o śmierci Małgorzaty nie musiał mówić, bo przecież tu, w Dobrzyniu, wszyscy wiedzą), właściciel kiwnął głową i wziął od niego klucz do samochodu. Oddał samochód do przeglądu i dalej poszedł pieszo. Jutro ubezpieczenie.

Na pytanie, czy będą dialogi ze mną, Paulina powiedziała: „Damy radę”. Jak ona tak mówi, to sprawa jest jasna. Dialogi będą.

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

From Cat Memes:

From The Language Nerds:

From Jesus of the Day, and yes, the story is true.

Jesse Singal posts about a 13-year-old girl who was given blockers and a double mastectomy. Kaiser stopped such actions for those below 19, but people object to that.

And related mishigass from Emma Hilton (h/t Luana):

From Barry. I hoped somebody helped that squirrel!

“A little help here, Danny?”

— Uncle Duke (@uncleduke1969.bsky.social) 2025-07-21T18:56:49.843Z

A lesson: do not romance your keeper. From Malcolm:

From my feed: Trump’s caddy CHEATS! Are you surprised?

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

She survived several years in the camp, no doubt because she played in the camp orchestra. And she survived the war, dying at 103.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-07-29T10:20:31.658Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, some old rocks:

See this rock?It's something called komatiite, and it's the oldest rock I've ever seen. It's about 3.3 *billion* years old. That's three quarters the age of Earth itself.Or 25% the age of the observable universe.

— Paul Byrne (@theplanetaryguy.bsky.social) 2025-07-26T13:33:57.471Z

Matthew calls this “14 legs,” and it’s a great example of “aggressive mimicry”:

I finally saw it! A turtle ant mimicking crab spider actually attacking a turtle ant. This had been in presentations of mine for 7+ years now and I finally saw it!Waita Lodge, Ecuador

— Nancy 🪲SciBugs🪲 Miorelli (@scibugs.bsky.social) 2025-07-14T15:42:24.902Z

French President Macron: a blockhead whose ignorance will harm Israel

July 28, 2025 • 11:00 am

A fair number of countries have decided to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state (the U.N. can’t as it requires Security-Council approval, and the U.S. is on that council).  This has had little effect as simple declarations like this have no force in international law (see reference to Natasha Hausdorff below).

Now, however, another state has decided to recognize Palestine, and it’s an important one: France. For President Emmanuel Macron of France has decided to join the queue, and France’s recognition will have a lot more influence than those of other countries. It is a move guaranteed to further endanger the sovereignty and safety of Israel.  Yet whether one likes it or not, Israel was recognized by the UN as a sovereign Jewish state, and so it remains.

And yes, I can understand that people don’t like all the killing of Gazan civilians associated with the war between Israel and Hamas, but they seem to forget that Hamas can stop this war instantly by disarming, surrendering, and letting the hostages go.  But for some reason Americans seem to overlook Hamas’s war crimes and its tactic of conducting urban war in a way that guarantees the death of Gazan civilians, and have laid all the onus for the Gazan war on Israel.

One of those people appears to be Macron, who wrote the letter below to Mahmoud Abbas. The original letter from Macron to Abbas is below, and, weirdly, I cannot find an English translation. Instead, I’m forced to rely on an AI summary, which says this:

Recent news reports indicate that French President Emmanuel Macron sent a letter to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas confirming France’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state.

Based on these reports, the letter outlined several key points:

  • Recognition of a Palestinian state: Macron confirmed France’s decision to recognize Palestine as a state, according to the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. He stated he would formally announce this at the United Nations General Assembly in September, notes CBS News.
  • Focus on a two-state solution: Macron reiterated that this recognition is consistent with France’s historical commitment to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, according to The Economist.
  • Need for an immediate ceasefire and humanitarian aid: Macron emphasized the urgency of ending the war in Gaza and providing relief to the civilian population.
  • Demilitarization of Hamas and rebuilding Gaza: He stated that the demilitarization of Hamas is key to securing and rebuilding Gaza.
  • Viability and security of a Palestinian state: Macron wrote that it is essential to build the state of Palestine, ensure its viability, and enable it to contribute to regional security by accepting its demilitarization and fully recognizing Israel.

If you are fluent in French, or can find a translation of what’s below, by all means put it in the comments or send it to me:

Macron’s entire letter, though, is below in French:

Abbas, you may recall, was elected as President of Palestine and the Palestine National Authority in 2005 for a four-year term, but somehow that’s been extended to twenty years. He supports terrorism against Israel, and it was under his regime that the “pay for slay” program (or “Martyr’s Fund“), which reimburses Palestinians (and their families) for killing Jews, was put into practice. It is still in practice, and over 90% of Palestinians approve of it.

Hamas, of course, doesn’t recognize Abbas as President, and Gaza would never accept Abbas (or the Palestinian Authority) as a legitimate government.  This leads to two immediate questions:   where is the new state that Macron wants going to be located, given that Palestine is divided into Gaza and the West Bank? And who is going to run it?

These lead to a bigger third question:  why should we recognize a sovereign state unless everything is in place, and agreed on, for how that state is to be run and where its borders will be? As I mentioned yesterday, it’s jumping the gun to create a Palestinian state next to Israel until these questions are settled. Otherwise, Israel still faces existential threats. Although Macron in his letter calls for release of the hostages, a ceasefire, and the demilitarization of Hamas, these are not preconditions for his recognition of a Palestinian state. They are just what he wants, but he’s going to go ahead and recognize a Palestinian state whether or not these things are done. What kind of blockhead is this guy? He think he’s on the right side of history, but this gesture is performative, although it may be influential. As the NYT said:

It was not clear whether other members of the Group of 7 would follow the French example, although France indicated it hoped that would happen. Nor was it clear what territory France would recognize as comprising a Palestinian state.

“It’s a powerful symbol, but without really doing anything on the ground to change Palestinians’ plight,” Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in an email message. “It’s largely virtue signaling.”

The best critique of offers like Macron’s comes from Paul Friesen’s site “Minority of One,” which you can access by clicking on the headline below. Friesen apparently read the letter in French and his translation is the basis of his critique.

You should read the whole post, but I’ll give a few excerpts, which I’ve indented (all bolding is Friesen’s):

The state with no coordinates?

Let’s start with the simplest geographical question: where is this Palestine Macron plans to recognize? The 1967 lines? Adjusted borders? A demilitarized Gaza under Mahmoud Abbas’ theoretical authority, which he hasn’t been able to exercise even over Ramallah’s traffic lights without Israeli security coordination?

No answer.

A state without borders is either a fantasy or a threat. Fantasy, because you can’t govern what you can’t locate. Threat, because ambiguity is always the friend of maximalism; it gives every faction the right to fill in the map with its preferred crayons—green flags for some, blood-red slogans for others.

Which government? The Cadaver or the Caliphate?

Recognition means recognizing something sovereign. In this case, sovereignty would need to be exercised by either:

  1. The Palestinian Authority: A sclerotic bureaucracy funded by Western donors, dedicated to the moral pedagogy of “pay-for-slay,” where murderers’ families are salaried for their grief; or
  2. Hamas: A jihadist organisation whose founding charter reads like a fever dream of medieval Jew-hatred fleshed out by Iranian steel, Qatari cash, and Western indulgence.

Macron writes to Abbas as if the PA can govern Gaza by decree. He writes about demilitarizing Hamas as if it’s a customs offence. He speaks of elections in 2026 as if the militant factions will queue politely and accept the result. This is not policy; it is therapeutic prose—designed to soothe the conscience of a continent that outsourced its moral courage to metaphors.

I can’t imagine anybody taking issue with the bit above.  Hamas will never voluntarily demilitarize (remember, it’s sworn to destroy Israel), nor will it accept the Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza.

. . . The Gaza Experiment: a controlled study in delusion

Gaza already answered the question Macron refuses to ask. In 2005, Israel uprooted every Jew, dismantled every settlement, and even removed the dead. Gaza became a laboratory. The reagents: international aid, Israeli withdrawal, and Palestinian self-rule. The result: rockets, tunnels, human shields, and ultimately the largest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust. The experiment ran for eighteen years. The conclusion writes itself.

Unilateral gestures reward unilateral violence. Recognition without prior disarmament and constitutional guarantees converts terror into diplomacy. Europe calls it “statehood”; the region experiences it as war.

“147 countries have recognized palestine.” And then?

One hears the refrain: 147 countries have recognized Palestine. The implied argument runs: majority equals morality equals inevitability. This is a Foreign Ministry version of argumentum ad populum. The supposed avalanche of recognitions has produced neither peace nor governance, neither civic pluralism nor demilitarization. The guns didn’t fall silent; they multiplied. Hezbollah didn’t retreat; it rearmed. Hamas didn’t moderate; it industrialized cruelty.

Recognition divorced from reform hardens the worst actors and punishes the best arguments. It tells the Palestinian street: why vote out the militants when Europe will hand you a state regardless? It tells the Israeli public: your self-restraint is evidence of guilt, your survival is evidence of aggression.

The operant phrase here—and the notion that makes hash of Macron’s proposal, is that it calls for “recognition divorced from reform.”

More:

[Macron] speaks to Abbas about “trust, clarity, commitment.” Trust must be earned. Clarity requires maps, laws, and leaders who survive without stipends from terrorists. Commitment begins with a single test: renounce the destruction of Israel in Arabic, in writing, in schools, and in mosques. No backchannels, no “resistance,” no flirtation with martyrdom culture. Then we can talk borders. Until then, we are not in the realm of diplomacy, but in the showroom of European performative statesmanship.

There is an alternative—it just requires adult terms

The alternative to Macron’s gesture politics exists, and it has three pillars:

  1. Prior Disarmament and Constitutional Guarantees: Any Palestinian state must be a state that ends “pay-for-slay,” purges genocidal education, and constitutionally recognizes Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
  2. Regional Accountability: Iran and Qatar finance, arm, and launder this conflict. No Palestinian “state” stabilizes while the patrons of jihad remain unpenalized. Recognition that bypasses this reality is fraud.
  3. Moral Reciprocity: Israel’s Arab minority has rights. Jews in a Palestinian state must have rights. If the future Palestinian state rejects pluralism in principle, it forfeits recognition in practice.

What’s above is Friesen’s solution (he offers another version below), and it sounds reasonable. Will it happen? No way! And what’s below is both savvy and true, and Macron is a blithering idiot for promoting these consequences:

The consequences will not stop at the Green Line

Those who think this is just about Israel are already asleep. What Macron is normalizing is the West’s capitulation to grievance without responsibility, to victimhood without introspection, and to diplomacy without memory. Today it’s Palestine. Tomorrow, it will be Lebanon’s reinvention under Hezbollah’s rebranded PR team. Then it will be the Syrian regime getting a cosmetic makeover from its Russian backers. All in the name of “regional stability,” which—if recent history is any guide—is diplomatic code for “we can’t afford to care anymore.”

And let us not kid ourselves: this will echo through the democracies of the West. Macron’s recognition gives license to every armchair revolutionary and anti-Zionist campus demagogue to declare victory. It emboldens those who set fire to synagogues in Europe while chanting “intifada.” It tells the “Free Palestine” mobs: you no longer have to argue—Paris has already agreed.

It delegitimizes Israel’s defensive war by presuming symmetry where there is none. It casts the aggressor as a co-equal interlocutor, rather than a regime that kidnaps children, slaughters civilians, and builds tunnels under schools. It gaslights the Israeli dead into mere “complications,” and elevates the architects of their murder into state-builders.

Finally, Friesen reiterates his preconditions for peace, something Macron neglected entirely. Macron states what he wants, but they are no “preconditions for peace.”

The only way forward—clarity before recognition

There is a path forward. It is not a utopia, but it is achievable:

  • Palestinian reform must come before international recognition, not as a reward for avoiding it.
  • Hamas must be defeated, not “demilitarized.” You do not negotiate disarmament with a group that views compromise as apostasy.
  • Education must be de-radicalized, not subsidized. Palestinian children deserve books that teach coexistence, not maps that erase Israel.
  • The right of return must be relinquished, not romanticized. No peace will come from imagining that Tel Aviv is negotiable.
  • And finally, Israel must be recognized not merely as a fact, but as a moral necessity—a refuge state for a people nearly extinguished, and the only one of its kind.

Until those terms are met, every recognition letter, every UN podium gesture, every Elysée photo-op is an act of profound irresponsibility—a theatre of virtue where tragedy is the curtain call.

A few final statements from Friesen:

Macron’s letter is already being archived as “historic.” It is no such thing. It is the bureaucratic paraphrase of a failure to learn, a polished signature at the bottom of a diplomatic hallucination. The same moral calamity that allowed Europe to whisper through the rise of Islamism at home now shouts Palestine abroad, hoping it buys a little more credibility in the salons of global virtue.

Let it be remembered, when the next war breaks out—and it will—that the match was struck not in Rafah or Tel Aviv, but in the offices of those who mistook theatrical compassion for strategy, and who never paid the price for their illusions. Others always do.

. . . I don’t write this from a place of cynicism, but of conclusion. At this point, I consider the two-state solution—and the rush to recognition—not merely premature, but illusory. That said, I’m open to being proven wrong. Not swayed by sentiment, applause lines, or diplomatic euphemisms—but by reasoned, evidence-based arguments.

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

One final note: as I’ve said, I consider anti-Zionism—the opposition to the existence of a Jewish state—as a form of anti-Semitism. And, in a new Pharyngula column (archived here), P. Z. Myers, who has bought deeply into Hamas propaganda, shows himself to be an anti-Zionist in this way. In fact, he wants Israel abolished and turned over to Palestine.

I no longer support the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist. Dismantle that horrible government and turn the entire country over to Palestinians, with independent UN monitoring to prevent retaliation. Although, to be honest, I think some retaliation is necessary for justice to prevail — Netanyahu, for instance, ought to spend the rest of his disgusting life in prison.

Additionally, it’s committing genocide. I don’t care to hear from people who are splitting hairs to deny that Israel is a genocidal monster of a state.

Myers is no fool. He realizes that turning Israel over to Palestine will result in the mass slaughter of Jews, and “independent UN monitoring” will not stop that.  What good has “independent UN monitoring” done to stop the depredations of Hezbollah in Lebanon? The UN declared in Resolution 1701 that Hezbollah cannot attack Israel, must disarm itself, and had to stay north of the Litani River. UN forces are in fact in Lebanon to explicitly prevent these things, but they have done exactly nothing.And that’s what they’ll do in Myer’s “Palestinian + Jewish state.” If you think otherwise, you’re deluded.

In fact, Myers says that “some retaliation” is necessary for justice to prevail. Is that only imprisonment, or should the consequences be more severe? He says only that Netanyahu should be imprisoned for life.  Is that the only retaliation necessary?

As for Israel committing genocide, Myers is notably silent on Hamas’s explicit genocide as instantiated in its initial charter and in its actions in the various intifadas. Shouldn’t there be some “retaliation” for Hamas having killed thousands of Jewish civilians on October 7 two years ago, as well as having kidnapped and held Israeli citizens as hostages? (Hamas also killed some Israeli civilian hostages).  No, because Myers apparently has no existing beef with Hamas as well as remaining woefully ignorant of the tricky geopolitics of a two-state solution.

And so, along with Macron, we have another blockhead, and one who calls loudly for the abolition of the state of Israel. In fact, in 2010, the U.S. State Department under Secretary John Kerry declared that “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, and denying Israel the right to exist” was one form of antisemitism. As far as I know, this criterion still holds.

Draw your own conclusions.

Readers’ wildlife posts

July 28, 2025 • 8:15 am

Regular Mark Sturtevant has sent in a passel of photos of insects and other arthropods. His captions are indented and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them:

Now that our host is back from his travels, I can share another set of pictures of arthropods from near where I live, which is in eastern Michigan. These were done over the previous season.

First up are early immature grasshoppers. The first two are a Coral-winged Grasshopper nymph (Pardalophora apiculata). This grows into what I think is the largest ‘hopper species in our area. Adults have lovely pinkish-orange wings, as the attached picture shows. The second is a Northern Green-striped nymph (Chortophaga viridifasciata) – another early-season species.

Next up is a small Aphid Wasp (Pemphredon sp.) that had emerged from winter hibernation. These solitary wasps provision their nest with aphids, and on one occasion while photographing a colony of aphids, I was approached by one of these that had flown near, snatched up an aphid right in front of me, and flew away. I swear I could hear the little aphid screams receding into the distance.

Here is a portrait of an Eastern Black Carpenter Ant (Campanotus pennsylvanicus). I am exploring more artsy modes of photography, and this black and white is an early attempt.

In the previous season I had the good fortune to find two species of Saturniid (giant silk moth) caterpillars, and one was shown here recently. Their cocoons spent the winter in our refrigerator, of course, and good luck continued since I was able to photograph the emerged adults before they were quite ready to fly. So here are pictures of a Luna Moth (Actias luna), followed by pictures of a Polyphemus Moth (Antheraea polyphemus). The latter pictures were taken with a wide-angle macro lens, which is by far the most challenging lens that I have since you have to basically take pictures without being able to see if it’s in focus. Wide angle macro is a welcome change, however, since with this one can see much more the surrounding environment of the subject rather than the narrow field of view that is normally presented by a regular macro lens.

Finally, one subject I’ve been meaning to get back to are House Centipedes (Scutigera coleoptrata). These fast-moving animals get pretty big, as shown in the attached picture, and they will at times run up and down our walls, usually near the fireplace, which is probably how they get inside. The hostility they inspire from nearly everyone seems unfair since their only reaction to us is to run away. So here is one, photographed while being contained in the bathtub (as one does of course), followed by a portrait. The latter is an attempt to show that they really are sort of cute. The things that look like fangs are called forcipules, and they are actually a modified pair of front legs. They don’t bite. I swear.

Monday: Hili dialogue

July 28, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Monday, July 28, 2025, as we inch ever closer to the dreaded month of August. It’s National Milk Chocolate Day, and though as I get older I prefer the darker chocolate (all the way to 90% or higher), I still like this brand of milk chocolate:

It’s also National Hamburger Day (again?), National Soccer Day, and World Nature Conservation Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 28 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first: Tom Lehrer died. At least he had a good long life:

Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ’60s on college campuses and in all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.

His death was confirmed by David Herder, a friend.

Mr. Lehrer’s lyrics were nimble, sometimes salacious and almost always sardonic, sung to music that tended to be maddeningly cheerful. Accompanying himself on piano, he performed in nightclubs, in concert and on records that his admirers purchased, originally by mail order only, in the hundreds of thousands.

But his entertainment career ultimately took a back seat to academia. In his heart he never quit his day job; he just took a few sabbaticals.

He stopped performing in 1960 after only a few years, resumed briefly in 1965 and then stopped for good in 1967. His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.

As popular as his songs were, Mr. Lehrer never felt entirely comfortable performing them. “I don’t feel the need for anonymous affection,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “If they buy my records, I love that. But I don’t think I need people in the dark applauding.”

Mr. Lehrer’s songwriting output was modest, but it was darkly memorable. In the tasteless world he evoked, a seemingly harmless geezer turned out to be “The Old Dope Peddler” and spring was the time for “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.”

Here’s my favorite Tom Lehrer song (I had no idea he was an academic mathematician!),  And see one comment below from a reader tangentially involved with him.

*According to a Wall Street Journal poll, Democrats are getting the lowest rating from voters in 35 years. And this despite the missteps and bully (and often illegal) thing that Trump has done. What is going on? (h/t Luana)

The Democratic Party’s image has eroded to its lowest point in more than three decades, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll, with voters seeing Republicans as better at handling most issues that decide elections.

The new survey finds that 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party—the highest share in Journal polls dating to 1990 and 30 percentage points higher than the 33% who hold a favorable view.

That is a far weaker assessment than voters give to either President Trump or the Republican Party, who are viewed more unfavorably than favorably by 7 points and 11 points, respectively. A mere 8% of voters view the Democrats “very favorably,” compared with 19% who show that level of enthusiasm for the GOP.

Here’s a time chart of the parties’ popularity over the last 35 years. Both have gond down, but the Democrats more so:

Democrats have been hoping that a voter backlash against the president will be powerful enough to restore their majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections, much as it did during Trump’s first term. But the Journal poll shows that the party hasn’t yet accomplished a needed first step in that plan: persuading voters they can do a better job than Trump’s party.

On the whole, voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, inflation, tariffs and foreign policy. And yet in each case, the new Journal poll found, voters nonetheless say they trust Republicans rather than Democrats to handle those same issues in Congress.

In some cases, the disparities are striking. Disapproval of Trump’s handling of inflation outweighs approval by 11 points, and yet the GOP is trusted more than Democrats to handle inflation by 10 points. By 17 points, voters disapprove rather than approve of Trump’s handling of tariffs, and yet Republicans are trusted more than Democrats on the issue by 7 points.

The only issues on which voters prefer congressional Democrats to Republicans, among the 10 tested in the Journal survey, are healthcare and vaccine policy.

What do we need? LEADERSHIP!  When do we need it? NOW!  The article suggests that the Democrats may take the House back in the midterms, but not nearly by as much as they did in Trump’s previous midterms. (And remember, Trump can veto anything coming out of Congress.) If we Democrats have policies to articulate (and if we don’t we shouldn’t be Democrats), then we need a credible spokesperson, and then for the Democrats to get behind him or her.  Neither of these seems very plausible at this moment.

*From Greg via Brian Leiter, we have an article by David Pozen in Balkanization on how colleges are now being governmentally regulated by “The Deal”. Pozen doesn’t like it, and neither do I:

Earlier this evening, Columbia University announced an agreement with the Trump administration in which Columbia makes a host of concessions in order to restore its eligibility for federal funding. The agreement is already being described as “unprecedented,” “the first of its kind.” These descriptions are true but ambiguous, because the agreement breaks new ground on any number of levels.

For instance, the agreement marks the first time that antisemitism and DEI have been invoked as the basis for a government-enforced restructuring of a private university. The agreement was engineered by a novel collaboration among the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the General Services Administration, and the White House, which pooled their resources to ratchet up the pressure on Columbia (with some help on the side from the Department of Justice). The agreement is also the first to require a university to fork over money to the government as a condition of receiving money from the government, bringing a new brand of pay-to-play into the world of scientific and medical research.

And let’s not forget that the agreement grows out of the executive branch’s first-ever cutoff of congressionally appropriated funds to a university, so as to punish that university and impel it to adopt sweeping reforms, without any pretense of following the congressionally mandated procedures. Lawyers have been debating the exact circumstances under which the executive branch may freeze particular grants and contracts to particular schools. Yet as far as I’m aware, no lawyer outside the government has even attempted to defend the legality of the initial cutoff that brought Columbia to its knees and, thereafter, to the “negotiating” table.

In short, the agreement gives legal form to an extortion scheme—the first of its kind!—that defies the relevant statutes as well as the constitutional separation of powers and the First Amendment.

. . .This emerging model raises profound concerns not just for universities’ budgets and independence but also for the rule of law. By relying on “particular transactions to effectuate government policy,” scholars have observed in other contexts, regulation by deal bypasses all of the “notice, comments, [and] due process standards that we ordinarily expect from public administration.” While guidance documents may share some of these deficits, they are not actually binding on regulated parties and at least aspire to uphold bedrock legal principles of “generality, clarity, publicity, stability, and prospectivity.” The style of regulation reflected in the Columbia deal is at once far more coercive and far more arbitrary—opaque in development, unpredictable in application, deeply susceptible to personalism and corruption, and only contingently connected to the laws Congress has written. As compared to the familiar fare of public administration, “one-off dealmaking is more about back-door terms, forceful results, and unequal application of standards, to the extent standards exist at all.”

. . . The spread of regulation by deal would be worrisome in any period, but it is especially worrisome at this time and in this domain. Authoritarianism feeds on manufactured emergencies and hardball tactics that give the executive leverage to attack political opponents and compel obedience. Basic research, on the other hand, thrives under stable institutional frameworks, reliable funding commitments, and a climate of free inquiry. Deals like Columbia’s enhance the power of presidents and their allies within targeted universities; sideline Congress, the courts, and most faculty; and sow fear and uncertainty throughout civil so

What worries me about this is that although Harvard has taken the government to court over this dealmaking, the courts seem rather unpredictable in their rulings these days, and what if Harvard loses—especially in the Supreme Court. If that were the case, we can kiss colleges and universities as we know them goodbye, for the government (at least ones like Trump’s) can make them do anything it wants simply by threatening to freeze federal grant money. Oy, what a world, what a world!

*Matthew sent in a link to a Guardian article showing the nefarious traits of evangelical Christians: they are surreptitiously broadcasting Jesus messages to Brazilian tribes in the forest which it’s illegal to contact.  It’s called “Missionaries using secret audio devices to evangelise Brazil’s isolated peoples.”

Missionary groups are using audio devices in protected territories of the rainforest to attract and evangelise isolated or recently contacted Indigenous people in the Amazon. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Brazilian newspaper O Globo reveals that solar-powered devices reciting biblical messages in Portuguese and Spanish have appeared among members of the Korubo people in the Javari valley, near the Brazil–Peru border.

Drones have also been spotted by Brazilian state agents in charge of protecting the areas. The gadgets have raised concerns about illegal missionary activities, despite strict government measures designed to safeguard isolated Indigenous groups

This is not thought to be the first recent attempt by missionary groups to reach isolated and uncontacted communities in the Javari valley. Shortly before the pandemic, a group of US and Brazilian citizens affiliated to evangelical churches were allegedly reported to be planning to contact the Korubo people. It was claimed they had used seaplanes to map trails and locate longhouses.

Three missionaries were identified as planning these alleged contact efforts: Thomas Andrew Tonkin, Josiah McIntyre and Wilson de Benjamin Kannenberg, linked to the Missão Novas Tribos do Brasil (New Tribes Mission of Brazil – MNTB) and a humanitarian group known as Asas de Socorro – or Wings of Relief. They were prohibited from entering Indigenous territory by court order during the Covid crisis.

Now it has emerged that missionaries have returned to the Javari valley and surrounding towns, such as Atalaia do Norte, with a new tool.

The first device uncovered, a yellow and grey mobile phone-sized unit, mysteriously appeared in a Korubo village in the Javari valley recently. The gadget, which recites the Bible and inspirational talks by an American Baptist, can do so indefinitely, even off-grid, thanks to a solar panel. Up to seven of the units were reported by local people, but photo and video evidence were obtained for just one.

A message on the device located by the Guardian states: “Let’s see what Paul says as he considers his own life in Philippians chapter 3, verse 4: ‘If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more’.”

The Brazilian government does not permit proselytising in the Korubo’s territory. Its policy, dating from 1987, stipulates that isolated groups must initiate any contact, a stance that made Brazil a pioneer in respecting Indigenous self-determination.

The state also strictly controls access, to protect the Korubo and other uncontacted peoples in the region from common diseases to which they have little or no immunity.

I have just four words for these misguided and criminal Jesus-lovers: LEAVE THOSE PEOPLE ALONE!

*In an article in the that tries to understand why minority voters largely deserted the Democrats in the last election, a NYT analysis seems to avoid blaming the Democrats.

In many ways, the story of Milwaukee’s disillusioned Black voters encapsulates the tectonic shifts in American society that voters of color have faced in recent years. Like many other distressed cities, Milwaukee continues to reel from the foreclosure crisis, the opioid epidemic and chronic funding shortfalls. Together, these problems have created cracks in the bedrock of Democratic support in these communities.

That bedrock was formed over the last 70 years. In the 1960s, as the civil rights movement pressed for governmental action to address longstanding patterns of discrimination and inequality, the national Democratic Party slowly aligned itself with this vision. Landmark legislation on issues like segregation and equal opportunity employment established Democrats as the party that could deliver for nonwhite voters. The party formed alliances with the places and institutions that were pillars of these communities: churches and places of worship, community newspapers, labor unions and other civic organizations where voters of color congregated.

But the America that this version of the Democratic Party emerged from has changed drastically. The restructuring of the U.S. economy over the last 40 years, along with the yawning inequality it has spurred, has disproportionately hurt communities of color. The Democratic-championed civil rights protections and social welfare programs that have defined the party’s appeal to nonwhite voters have proved inadequate in the face of the interconnected crises that define America now. Policies to address residential segregation some 70 years ago can do little to ease the housing shortages plaguing many communities today. The 1965 Immigration Act was not designed to manage the migration driven by economic downturns, military strife and climate catastrophes unfolding around the globe.

And yet, Democrats have largely doubled down on promising relatively modest policy reforms meant to speak to the interests of voters of color. Shana Gray, a cafe owner in Milwaukee, told me how frustrated she had become with Democrats in her community. “‘Oh, just give us your vote.’ That’s all we heard,” she told me. “There was no action behind that. Maybe they were speaking the language of reform for themselves, but the people who had mattered were not feeling that.”

Disappointed in the party that they saw as presiding over these profound economic shifts, nonwhite voters found that the institutions where many of them found their political identities — churches, unions, clubs — have been in decline.

Unmoored from these places and groups, voters of color today are shaped by many new forces, including right-wing podcasts, influencers and social media — some of it specific to individual ethnic and linguistic groups — that have atomized people even within their own community.

. . . . Democrats and progressive advocacy groups remain mired in a debate about whether they need to tack right to stem the hemorrhaging of voters of color to the G.O.P., or double down on the agenda of racial and economic liberalism that originally built the party’s base among minorities. What I’ve found in my conversations is that the forces moving multiracial voters rightward are more often rooted in economic vulnerabilities.

Well, Carville said that years ago: “It’s the economy, stupid.”  Yes, the article does say that the Democrats didn’t do enough, but doesn’t say what more they could have done. And it doesn’t blame the Democrats for pushing policies on immigration, women’s rights, and use of language, that were performative but without effect.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,  things get more and more mysterious.  I’m not even sure that Hili is doing the talking here, though there is a photo of her.

There’s no new material today. I don’t know if there will be tomorrow. Sunday revolved around Saturday, Monday stretches out its arms to Tuesday. Dobrzyń is whispering about a reward, or “people are talking.” The editorial team is preparing for a month-long break. Work on the book needs to be accelerated. It’s not yet known whether this will be a full break, or whether dialogue will appear every day as usual. We don’t know anything yet.

Oy!

In Polish:

Nie ma dziś nowych materiałów. Nie wiem, czy będą jutro. Niedziela kręciła się wokół soboty, poniedziałek wyciąga ręce do wtorku. Dobrzyń szepcze o nagrodzie, czyli „ludzie mówią”. Redakcja przygotowuje się do miesięcznej przerwy. Trzeba przyspieszyć prace nad książką. Jeszcze nie wiadomo, czy to będzie pełna przerwa, czy jednak dialogi będą pojawiać się każdego dnia jak zawsze. Jeszcze nic nie wiemy.

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

From Stacy:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From the Smithsonian Natural History Museum:

From Masih: a woman finds out that her father was executed

I found this one on Twitter:

From Malcolm: Ozzy Osborne loses his cat:

From Barry: a turtle becomes all powerful:

Please enjoy this turtle being given the gift of speed, and immediately using it to chase a kitty

— Ben Kahn (also Bee) (@benkahncomics.bsky.social) 2025-07-20T02:32:16.484Z

From Simon: a post by Larry the Cat of 10 Downing Street:

What do you mean the nearest McDonald's is 20 miles away?! Isn't Scotland the home of McDonald's?!"

— Larry the Cat (@number10cat.bsky.social) 2025-07-26T21:48:58.181Z

One that I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Polish Jew would be 99 today had he survived. But he was murdered in Auschwitz at about age sixteen.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-07-28T10:24:45.835Z

From Dr. Cobb.  Jeremy Berg, once editor of Science, pondered what to do with the arsenic-life paper, considering whether to retract it (it’s been retracted by Holden Thorp the current editor). But after consideration Berg decided (and I agree) that the paper should NOT have been retracted.

Why I didn't retract this paper when I was Editor-in-Chief at Science (THREAD 🧵)

— Jeremy Berg (@jeremymberg.bsky.social) 2025-07-27T11:48:13.584Z

 

Some other posts in Berg’s thread: