Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Today ecologist Susan Harrison has kindly provided another photo installment. Susan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
An Oriole helper at an unusual nest
In Ashland, Oregon in late May, some Bullock’s Orioles (Icterus bullocki) were tending their young in a beautifully woven nest along Bear Creek. Unlike normal Oriole nests I’d seen nearby in the past, which were suspended from branches of tall Fremont cottonwoods (Populus fremontii), this one was nestled in the foliage of a small Oregon oak (Quercus garryana) only 10 feet or so above a well-used bike and footpath. (See here for a lovely article about how Bullock’s Orioles weave their nests.) The unusual positioning of this nest made it easy to photograph, but I sure hoped it was safe from predators.
Here’s the adult male, feeding the chicks with a parental dedication not always seen in gorgeous male birds:
He also took time off periodically to sing his territorial song:
As unusual as the nest location was that a second male helped feed the chicks. While observing, I mistook this bird for the female, but later realized his pale orange coloring and faint black markings were those of an incompletely mature male.
The male helper:
“Helpers at the nest” in many bird species are young adult offspring who may opt to stay around the nest and assist their parents in raising their next brood, while learning how to parent and waiting for a future year with better breeding opportunities. Nest helping is not a widely observed behavior of Bullock’s Orioles, though. The only reference I could find to a similar observation suggested that the female of the pair might have died. Alarmed by this possibility, I raced back to the nest and was relieved to find the female present.
Here’s mom:
The lucky chicks, who will spend 2 weeks in their woven home, were being tended by three adults!
My speculation is that when the terrible Almeda fire of 2020 burned several towns and miles of riparian forest along Bear Creek, in addition to displacing thousands of people, it created a shortage of Bullock’s Oriole nesting sites — thus leading to both the unusually-placed nest and the young male helping his parents rather than breeding.
The next photo shows the burned riparian forest in the general location of the nest. Most of the fire-killed trees are Fremont cottonwoods. I took the photo because of the Canada Geese (Branta canadensis) artfully posed on a fire-killed Ponderosa Pine (Pinus ponderosa).
Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, June 17, 2025, and National Apple Strudel Day. Here is an apple strudel and an Einspänner (coffee) I consumed at one of the great coffee shops in Vienna, the pink-themed Aida chain, Home of Strudel (photo taken in October, 2012). From Wikipedia:
Einspänner Coffee: A Viennese specialty. It is a strong black coffee served in a glass topped with whipped cream. It comes with powder sugar served separately.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 17 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The war between Iran and Israel goes on, with some Iranian missiles getting through Israeli defenses, with a total of 24 Israelis killed and over 600 injured. On the other side, the toll of Iranians has been 224 killed and over 1400 injured. On Monday, Israel claims to have struck the headquarters of Iran’s Quds Force, an elite branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, now decapitated. (According to several sources, though, Trump nixed Israel’s plain to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Here are some excerpts:
Israel expanded its attacks on Iran on Monday, striking the headquarters of state television after ordering residents to leave part of Tehran, as the fiercest and deadliest confrontation in the history of the Israeli-Iranian conflict entered its fourth day.
With civilian casualties climbing on both sides, the war, in its fourth day, now seems likely to last for more than a week. Israel appears to be acting with increasing confidence as it tries to destroy Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure, while attacking a broader range of targets including energy installations and command centers.
Broadcasting stations are legal targets in wartime as they are organs of propaganda. Here’s some live broadcasting during the missile strike:
. . . The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Nimitz is leaving Southeast Asia for the Middle East as part of a planned deployment, a Defense Department official said. The Nimitz sailed west through the Singapore Strait on Monday. It had been operating in the South China Sea last week, the official said.
President Trump nixed Israel’s plan to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a U.S. official. Calling Iran’s leadership weak, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested in a Fox News interview on Sunday that the conflict could prompt a regime change.
From the AP:
The Israeli military has warned residents in part of Iran’s capital to evacuate ahead of Israeli strikes.
*Like me, you may be wondering how Israel managed to set up both drone bases and vehicles carrying rocket interceptors—over 1000 km from the Jewish state. It’s Mossad, Jake, and it’s explained in two articles, one in the Wall Street Journal(archived here) and the other in the Times of Israel.
From the WSJ:
Israel had spent months smuggling in parts for hundreds of quadcopter drones rigged with explosives—in suitcases, trucks and shipping containers—as well as munitions that could be fired from unmanned platforms, people familiar with the operation said.
Small teams armed with the equipment set up near Iran’s air-defense emplacements and missile launch sites, the people said. When Israel’s attack began, some of the teams took out air defenses, while others hit missile launchers as they rolled out of their shelters and set up to fire, one of the people said.
The operation helps explain the limited nature of Iran’s response thus far to Israel’s attacks. It also offers further evidence of how off-the-shelf technology is changing the battlefield and creating dangerous new security challenges for governments.
. . .The spy agency began preparing for the current drone operation years ago, the people said. It knew where Iran kept missiles to be ready for launch but needed to be in a position to attack them given the country’s size and distance from Israel.
Mossad brought the quadcopters in through commercial channels using often unwitting business partners. Agents on the ground would collect the munitions and distribute them to the teams. Israel trained the team leaders in third countries, and they in turn trained the teams.
The teams watched as Iran rolled out missiles, then hit them before they could be erected for launch, the person said. Mossad knew the trucks that move the missiles from storage to the launch site were a bottleneck for Iran, which had four times as many missiles as trucks.
The teams took out dozens of trucks
And from the ToI:, which pretty much reprises the above:
It was previously reported that Israel spent years preparing for the operation against Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, including building a drone base inside Iran and smuggling precision weapons systems and commandos into the country.
Unnamed sources revealed more details in the Journal report, saying Israel spent months smuggling bomb-laden quadcopter drone parts into Iran via suitcases, trucks, and shipping containers. In some cases, business transactions were made with partners who were unaware of the cargo being shipped. Mossad agents inside Iran then gathered the equipment and handed it out to teams who prepared the drones for use. Team leaders were trained outside Iran and then returned to pass on the skills to the teams on the ground.
When the airstrikes began, the teams used the weapons to take out air defense systems while also hitting surface-to-surface missile launchers as they emerged from shelters and were being set up to fire in retaliation at Israel, the sources said.
You have to be pretty brave to be a Mossad agent spending any time at all in Iran, for if you’re caught it’s instant death. Israel screwed up on October 7, but the performance of Mossad, killing Iranian nuclear scientists, diabling Hezbollah fighters with beepers and walkie-talkies, and now the operation in Iran, well, that’s pretty amazing.
As President Donald Trump visits western Canada for this week’s Group of Seven economic summit, a passionate minority is thrilled by his talk of making them part of a 51st state.
Across most of Canada, Trump’s annexation talk has caused outrage. His antagonism has stirred displays of flag-waving patriotism that are unusual here. In downtown Calgary, shops that sell maple syrup and other Canadian souvenirs have seen a surge in purchases of Canadian-flag lapel pins. Abookstore says “Proudly Canadian” in its window.
But the U.S. president’s expansionist designs have also galvanized a “Make Alberta Great Again” movement, which has gained traction among some in western Canada long frustrated by a Liberal government that they say stifles the oil and gas industry that drives their economy.For them, Trump’s 51st-state talk is not a provocation, but a chance for lower taxes, Second Amendment gun rights and a shot at the American Dream.
At the Red Deer Curling Center, about 90 miles north of Calgary, hundreds of Albertans gathered Saturday to discuss their frustrations with Ottawa at an event hosted by the right-wing media company Rebel News. Several in the crowd wore black or red Make Alberta Great Again caps, and provincial flags flew from their trucks in the packed parking lot. Most cheered as a speaker standing in front of a black curtain that partially covered the rink’s scoreboard made the case for forming a 51st state.
Jacob Fraser, selling bags of Resistance Coffee at the event, said he was “excited” when Trump began talking about annexing all or part of Canada. The 37-year-old sees joining the United States as an opportunity to gain more freedom of speech, more gun rights and more opportunities to pursue his own businesses.
“We’re very much intertwined with the States, and as Albertans, especially, we’re very much more compatible with the American perspectives than the current Canadian perspective,” he said. “For me and a lot of my social groups, it’s a hopeful moment and an exciting time in history.”
Nationwide, that’s clearly a minority view. Backlash to Trump, who was set to arrive here Sunday night, helped fuel Prime Minister Mark Carney’s victory in late April — a stunning comeback by his Liberal Party over the Conservatives, who had a healthy lead before Trump’s taunts.
About 15 percent of all Canadians supported joining the United States as of a January poll by YouGov. That percentage was slightly larger in the prairie provinces, including Alberta — “Canada’s Texas” — where some say they have more in common with Republicans in the U.S. than with their compatriots in the rest of the country.
Albertans who support joining the U.S. are a faction of a broader group of western Canadians who are alienated by Canada’s government. They have made their presence visible with billboards and blue-rubber bracelets that say “AB USA.”
Well, despite Trump’s blustering, this ain’t gonna happen. Nor would I want it to happen. Canadians are proud, friendly, and do not want to be part of the U.S. Why would they. But if they did join uis, the politeness quotient of America would shoot up drastically.
*Yesterday I noted how the residents of Barcelona are fighting back against overtourism, even squirting visitors with water guns. Now kvetching about overtourism has spread to France, as in this AP story, “The world’s most-visited museum shuts down, sounding the alarm on overtourism.” Yep, workers on the Louvre, who can’t handle the crowds, are on strike.
The Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum and a global symbol of art, beauty and endurance, has withstood war, terror, and pandemic — but on Monday, it was brought to a halt by its own striking staff, who say the institution is crumbling under the weight of mass tourism.
It was an almost unthinkable sight: the home to works by Leonardo da Vinci and millennia of civilization’s greatest treasures — paralyzed by the very people tasked with welcoming the world to its galleries.
Thousands of stranded and confused visitors, tickets in hand, were corralled into unmoving lines by I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid.
“It’s the Mona Lisa moan out here,” said Kevin Ward, 62, from Milwaukee. “Thousands of people waiting, no communication, no explanation. I guess even she needs a day off.”
The Louvre has become a symbol of tourism pushed to its limits. As hotspots from Venice to the Acropolis race to curb crowds, the world’s most iconic museum, visited by millions, is hitting a breaking point of its own.
Just a day earlier, coordinated anti-tourism protests swept across southern Europe. Thousands rallied in Mallorca, Venice, Lisbon and beyond, denouncing an economic model they say displaces locals and erodes city life. In Barcelona, activists sprayed tourists with water pistols — a theatrical bid to “cool down” runaway tourism.
The Louvre’s spontaneous strike erupted during a routine internal meeting, as gallery attendants, ticket agents and security personnel refused to take up their posts in protest over unmanageable crowds, chronic understaffing and what one union called “untenable” working conditions.
It’s rare for the Louvre to close its doors. It has happened during war, during the pandemic, and in a handful of strikes — including spontaneous walkouts over overcrowding in 2019 and safety fears in 2013. But seldom has it happened so suddenly, without warning, and in full view of the crowds.
I’m really glad I’ve seen these big tourist sights earlier in my life, when they weren’t so crowded. When I was a kid, I used to play soldier with a wooden sword inside the ruins of the Parthenon. You couldn’t do that now, and your really shouldn’t, but that was about 1955 and there were few tourists in a country still recovering from the war. I’ve been to the Louvre many times (the last time, to see the Leonardo exhibit, was impossibly crowded), and I won’t be devastated if I don’t see Barcelona again. But what about the people who haven’t yet?
For most of my life, sports was one of the most accessible forms of entertainment in America. You turned on the TV, flipped to the game and cheered or booed — with your family, your neighborhood, your city. Being a fan was simple. It was community.
This community is dying, because some of its shared moments are disappearing. Take the N.B.A. playoffs. Wanted to watch the Denver Nuggets? You needed to shell out at least $8.99 a month for NBA TV — unless you happened to live in Denver, in which case you had to spend an additional $20 a month for a regional basketball streaming subscription.
It’s not just basketball. I subscribe to nearly every service there is with live sports — YouTube TV, MLB.TV, NBA League Pass, NFL Sunday Ticket, Peacock, Apple TV+, Max, Amazon Prime, Paramount — for $2,634 a year. But to watch the Boston Red Sox play the New York Yankees earlier this month, I would have had to fork over an additional $19.99 a month for some obscure baseball-focused service that has that slice of one of the most iconic rivalries in America’s national pastime.
For decades, our national sports leagues — the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League — operated more like civic institutions. These organizations may have always chased the mighty dollar, but they also wanted their sports to last. And as such, they cared about strengthening such powerful intangibles as local pride, generational fandom and public ritual. Tradition was good business. Community built loyalty. Loyalty built value.
Then came the streaming wars. Starting in the early 2010s, live sports events were one of the last types of programming that guaranteed hundreds of thousands if not millions of real-time viewers, and the leagues began to be flooded with requests from streamers, such as Amazon Prime, Peacock and Max, begging for a piece of the pie. At the same time, the leagues were looking for a way to raise the cash required to invest in the lucrative opportunities offered by overseas expansion. And that’s when the business of sustaining sports in America took a back seat, and our country’s sports leagues stopped acting like caretakers and started thinking like asset managers.
The result is that dozens if not hundreds of games that make up America’s national pastimes are being sliced and diced and sold off to the highest bidder — be that a cable giant, or a streaming upstart, or a regional sports network or a subscription app. Games jump from one service to another with so little notice or apparent logic that even some of the biggest superfans struggle to track what’s available where.
Going to a game is similarly growing out of reach: From 1999 to 2020, the average price of a seat across all sports rose roughly twice as fast as overall consumer prices. It increased 19.5 percent between May 2023 and May 2025 alone, one of the biggest jumps of any category tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Some solutions:
For our national games, it’s time for Congress to amend the antitrust exemption with a ban on blackouts, a cap on what streaming services can charge fans and a requirement that media companies offer affordable bundles. For local games, state legislators can force teams vying for taxpayer dollars to help pay for their gleaming new stadiums to offer affordable local streams, guaranteed public simulcasts and, similarly, no blackouts. Some teams already do this. The Dallas Stars of the N.H.L. stream their regional games free with ads — proving that it’s possible.
Congress could also take inspiration from Britain’s “Crown Jewel” rule and designate key sporting events — perhaps the World Series, the Super Bowl, the N.B.A. Finals — as nationally significant and require that they air on free, widely accessible platforms.
Crikey, I remember when you could watch all sports on the major t.v. stations: CBS, NBC, and ABC, and all FOR FREE. Hell, I was sick at home, staying out of school, when in 1960 the Pirates’s Bill Mazeroski hit the home run in the bottom of the ninth that gave the Pirates the world championship. I can still remember that: lying in bed but cheering (I was a Pirates fan after I was a Cardinals fan). I couldn’t have done that if we had to pay! I’m gonna put that video up to jog my memory:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is peeved! When I asked Malgorzata what Hili was made about, the reply was “I don’t know. She is just a cat.”
And meet a reader’s cat, Sparkle, who is staffed by reader Tom. Here’s Sparkle in an apple tree making a blep:
Here Masih excoriates the Iranian regime, which is doing bupkes to protect its citizens:
My heart breaks for the innocent civilians, the children, the families, under attack in Iran. No one is helping them.
And this is my message to @khamenei_ir the coward, the spineless so-called leader, hiding in a bunker while using Iranian people as human shields. Disgusting.… pic.twitter.com/fyQiFepvVM
Retweeted by JKR, these burqa-clad women are, of course, forbidden to sing. But they do it anyway, and make a video. At least they can’t be identified.
Though their voices tremble, they sing with unyielding strength — Afghan women continue to defy the Taliban’s oppressive “vice and virtue” laws that ban them from speaking in public or showing their faces.
Their courage speaks louder than any restriction.
با آنکه صدایشان می… pic.twitter.com/auPFnExMOg
While Greta Thunberg and her “Freedom Flotilla” were getting turned back from Gaza, a bunch of activists were approaching Gaza from the Egyptian side, heading to Palestine in buses. I figured the Egyptians would turn them back, and they did. Luana sent this tweet of a tearful, thwarted pro-Palestinian activist:
Activists of pro Gaza were stranded in the desert and forced into buses by Egyptians to send them back where they came from!
Some of them started crying and calling for help to be allowed to march to Gaza!pic.twitter.com/JlPDglwFQ1
Two posts from Professor Cobb, almost completely over his illness. First, an optical illusion that many people (including me) cannot see. I won’t tell you what it is, but see if you can make it out. Scroll it up or down quickly for the best results.
Scroll slowly and then think about where the image you will recognise is contained in this apparently uniform set of stripes, and the amazing processing that goes on, instantaneously, in your brain.
Here’s the massive, magnificent but very rare Octobasse, invented in 1850. To play it, the musician must stand on a platform. You can hear its rather alarming deep bass tone, and see it being played, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12X-…
You can get the world news from this morning’s “Hili post,” and it’s depressing, so this post serves as a palliative. Japan is the land of “kawaii,” or cuteness, and so it’s no surprise that the world’s cutest bird and cutest rodent are found there.
I came across the first video below with the caption, “The Shima-Enaga this is is a type of long-tailed tit that lives only in Hokkaido. Unlike the Northern long-tailed tits in the rest of Japan, this one doesn’t have brown “eyebrows” – its face is completely white.”
It turns out that the Shima-Enaga—meaning in Japanese “long-tailed island bird”—is indeed ineffably cute, and is a subspecies of the widespread long-tailed restricted to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaida, so it’s not a full species. Wikipedia says this:
The long-tailed tit (Aegithalos caudatus), also named long-tailed bushtit, is a common bird found throughout Europe and the Palearctic. The genus name Aegithalos was a term used by Aristotle for some European tits, including the long-tailed tit.
Looking at photos of the species, there appears to be considerable color variation, probably associated with geography.
The videos have music.
The species ranges widely across Eurasia, and I suppose the white color of this subspecies is evolved camouflage for the snowy area where it lives. The range:
(Compiled by: BirdLife International and Handbook of the Birds of the World (2016)
Here’s an AI voice accompanying a video showing photos of the arboreal gymnastics this bird engages in.
Well, is it the cutest bird ever? (For more photos, go here.)
Speaking of kawaii in Japan, that country also harbors what is without doubt the world’s cutest rodent, the Japanese dwarf flying squirrel (Pteromys momonga). I won’t bore you with details of behavior or morphology; it’s enough to look at the videos. The rodent does bear a resemblance to the bird: rotund and whitish with big black eyes.
Of course you’ll want to see it glide, so here’s a short video showing that behavior:
My insomnia continues apace, and every night is pretty much the same—or so it seems. I fall asleep at about 8:45 after reading for over an hour, which makes me quite tired. I never have problems falling asleep; the issue is that I wake up very early. And by “very early,” it could be 11 p.m., or, most often, between 1 and 2 a.m. I try not to look at my watch, which I put on the other side of the room with my phone, but after tossing and turning for a long time, I’m compelled to look, only to be depressed when I find out that it will be several more hours before my alarm goes off. (I long for the days when I’d fall asleep at 11 p.m. and arise, sans alarm, at 6 a.m.)
What’s curious is that many times when I think I’ve been awake most of the night I’ve actually fallen asleep without knowing it. The reason I know this is that I remember dreams I’ve had, and people don’t dream when they’re awake. Last night I woke up, looked at my watch, and found it was 1 a.m. “Oy!’, I thought, “I’ll be tossing and turning for several more hours.”
But somehow I fell asleep and had a very realistic—and disturbing—dream. I was in an urban area somewhere in Africa, in a car with a woman I did not know. As a present, she gave me a leather wristband, and fastened to it, with a leather thong, was an ugly, wriggling larva of some insect. The kicker was that this insect was apparently the cause of some terrible disease that killed many people. (I don’t know the species, but I could say it was the larva of a tsetse fly, which causes sleeping sickness.)
At any rate, somehow the larva broke loose, and with it all hell. The whole country somehow learned that I was responsible for releasing a deadly disease vector among the people, and soon everyone not only recognized me, but hated me. People avoided me on the streets, nobody would look me in the eye, and anything that went wrong was blamed on me. In the last incident before I woke up, I was at a big dinner and a huge plate full of food fell off the table, making an unholy mess. It was not my fault, but everyone agreed that “Jerry did it.”
This dream was so realistic that I woke up immediately (immediate waking helps you remember dreams), and felt awful. In fact, I felt so awful that I decided I was not going to get any more sleep, and so heaved myself out of bed at 3 a.m. and came to work. The curious thing, besides the dream, is that I feel very well rested. I suppose there are Apple-Watch-like devices that tell you how much sleep you get, but I don’t want to know: I gauge my sleep by how rested I feel the next day.
Readers are invited to share their dreams and nightmares, or even proffer an interpretation of my dream, though I’m not big on thinking that dreams have a meaning beyond reprising some things that happened or some things that you fear. (The most common dream of academics, which my advisor Dick Lewontin had every night of his life, is that it’s the day of your final exam and you either haven’t studied for it or can’t find the exam room.)
I ask only one thing, please don’t offer remedies for insomnia. I appreciate people trying to help, but I’ve been to at least five doctors, sleep experts, meditation counselors, anxiety specialists, and the like, and none of them helped. And I don’t want to try gummies.
Here’s a rendition of my dream from a reader, who said this:
I described your dream to ChatGPT and asked it to create an illustration of it. See attached—hopefully for your amusement.
Today we have photos sent in by Mark Joseph, all taken by one of his friends and reproduced with permission. Mark’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Here are photos from the fourth and last of my photographing friends in the local Audubon group (previous sets can be found here, here, here, and here. Her name is Connie, and these are pictures from the large city park in Grand Rapids, where the group walks every Thursday morning (and where the birds are considerably less exotic than on the birding trips of my other friends). She tends to be more “artsy” and less “birdy” than the others, and has a good eye:
Droplets on a plant:
Mini-icicle:
Patterns in the water on a pond:
But she also takes very good bird (and other critter) photos:
Yellow warbler(Setophaga petechia), a serious candidate for the cutest bird in the world (my vote probably goes to the Piping plover, but this guy might just be a close second):
Female, sitting on a nest just off of the path; we’ve seen her each of the last three Thursdays (May 22, 29, June 5); there were chicks in the nest on June 12:
That does it for now, but I will come back to my friends (I have lots of great pictures from them). Next time I’ll (re-)introduce myself, explain why I’m not much of a photographer, and present one nevertheless truly astounding picture.
Welcome to the top o’ the week again: Monday, June 16, 2025, and National Fudge Day, a confection good in nearly all its forms. Here’s how it’s made at the Jersey shore, and it’s a bit tricky:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 16 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The suspect in the murder of two Minnesota lawmakers and wounding of two other people has been apprehended:
A man suspected of assassinating a Minnesota state lawmaker and shooting another was arrested on Sunday, officials said, ending a two-day manhunt that rattled the state.
Investigators had pursued the suspect, identified as Vance Boelter, 57, throughout the weekend, as Minnesotans reeled from the killings of Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman. In a separate attack, the gunman also wounded State Senator John A. Hoffman and his wife, Yvette Hoffman, at their home in the Minneapolis suburbs.
“One man’s unthinkable actions have altered the state of Minnesota,” Gov. Tim Walz said at a news conference on Sunday night.
The suspect was charged with two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of attempted second-degree murder, according to a criminal complaint obtained by The New York Times.
A one-sentence gaffe from Iowa’s junior senator has become a line of attack against Republicans nationally, with Democratic fundraising solicitations, political ads, social media and T-shirts now highlighting her words heading into the midterm elections.
Sen. Joni Ernst’s response of “we all are going to die” to a constituent who was complaining about proposed Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” has also helped produce a 2026 GOP primary challenger for her and prompted several Iowa Democrats to announce bids for her seat.
The incident has shone a fresh spotlight on the Republican Party’s political vulnerabilities as well as Ernst’s uncertain political future, with some Iowa watchers wondering whether she will stand for re-election. She angered Trump’s MAGA allies last year, delayed her trademark summer motorcycle ride until the fall, and now has become the face of what Democrats paint as Republican cruelty toward poor people.
. . . Democrats accuse Republicans of cutting Medicaid spending to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) playfully calling the GOP bill the “Well, We’re All Going to Die Act.” ‘
. . . .Ernst’s utterance at a May 30 town hall was prompted by a Democrat in the audience who was yelling that people would die if the Medicaid cuts become law.
The senator doubled down on her original comment a day after she made it with a sarcastic apology video that appeared to be filmed in a cemetery. She said she assumed everyone knows “we are all going to perish from this Earth” and added that she was glad she didn’t have to bring up “the tooth fairy as well.”
Well, it’s as good a rallying cry as any, and Medicaid cuts will certainly lead to some people dying, but not all of us. In my view, “No Kings” is far better. (The anti-Trump protest rallies on Saturday, by the way, far exceeded the size of groups who voluntarily came out to cheer Trump.)
*While Nicholas Kristof and Tom “I am dumb” Friedman are wringing their hands over the new war between Israel and Iran, Bret Stephens, always the most sensible NYT op-ed writer on the war, has a piece called “Israel had the courage to do what needed to be done.”
In plain English, Iran has been deceiving the world for years while gathering the means to build multiple nuclear weapons. In a better world, diplomacy would have forestalled and perhaps eliminated the need for Israeli military action.
But President Trump, who tried to dissuade Israel from striking, failed to get a deal after five rounds of negotiations and noted this week that Tehran had become “much more aggressive” in the talks. Make of his testimony what you will, but it’s worth recalling that a much more pliant and patient Biden administration spent years trying to reach an agreement, and also gave up in frustration with Iran’s repeated prevarications.
As for other alternatives, the clandestine means of sabotage and targeted assassinations that Israel had long used, and which probably delayed Iran’s nuclear breakout moment by years, had plainly run their course — otherwise, Israel would have continued to use them rather than risk Iranian retaliatory strikes using drones and missiles that could overwhelm Israel’s defenses.
Those strikes have begun. But they underscore, from an Israeli point of view, how crucial it is that Iran be prevented from being able to mount any of those missiles with a nuclear warhead. Academic theorists in, say, Chicago may be convinced that an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would merely help create a stable balance against a nuclear-armed Israel.
Yet that fails to take into account the millenarian mind-set of some of Iran’s theocratic leaders, for whom the ideological objective of destroying Israel may be worth the price of mass martyrdom in a nuclear exchange. It also ignores the prospect that an Iranian nuclear bomb would lead Saudi Arabia, and perhaps Turkey and Egypt, to seek nukes of their own. How stable is a balance of terror if there are three, four or five nuclear powers in the world’s most volatile region, operating in uncertain diplomatic combinations, each at daggers drawn with the others?
. . . Also worth noting is that Hezbollah has been quiet since Israel’s attack. That could always change, but it’s a result of its swift decimation at Israeli hands last September. That, too, was denounced by Israel’s critics as dangerously escalatory. But now it’s paying dividends in the form of constricted Iranian retaliatory options, the end of the pro-Iranian regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the first possibility in two generations for the Lebanese people finally to govern themselves.
. . .It also matters that Iran’s leadership has again been bested on its home turf, not by the “Great Satan” of the United States but, much more humiliatingly, by the “Little Satan” of Israel. The weaker and more uncertain the regime looks in the eyes of ordinary Iranians, the likelier it will spark the kinds of mass protests that nearly brought it down in 2022. An end to the regime that has inflicted so much misery on so many people for so many years offers the only sure route to ending the nuclear crisis for good.
I’m writing in the first hours of a conflict that surely still has many surprises in store. It’s far too soon to say how it will end. But for those who worry about a future in which one of the world’s most awful regimes takes advantage of international irresolution to gain possession of the most dangerous weapons, Israel’s strike is a display of clarity and courage for which we may all one day be grateful.
Yay for Stephens! He doesn’t know what will happen, and neither do we, but while many Democrats are beefing, criticizing Israel for what it did, Stephens is one person who says, correctly, that it needed to be done.
Israel and the US carried out a multi-faceted misinformation campaign in recent days to convince Iran that a strike on its nuclear facilities was not imminent, an Israeli official told The Times of Israel on Friday.
The official asserted that US President Donald Trump was an active participant in the ruse, and knew about the military operation since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to move forward with the strike on Monday.
Some parts of the ruse:
Netanyahu and Trump spoke by phone for 40 minutes that same day. At the time, unnamed officials leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 that Trump had told Netanyahu in a “dramatic” conversation to remove an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites from the agenda as negotiations continue. According to the TV report, Trump stressed that there would be no discussions on a military strike until the president concluded that nuclear talks with Iran had failed.
This, the Israeli official argued on Friday, had all been untrue.
. . .At the same time, Israel had to sell Iran a believable story, and not ignore the nuclear issue. Instead, Israel wanted Tehran to think it was still debating the matter of a potential strike with the White House.
It thus announced that Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and Mossad Chief David Barnea would take off for talks with US special envoy Steve Witkoff ahead of the next round of talks between Tehran and Washington, set for Sunday, claiming the trip was meant to “clarify Israel’s position.”
The Prime Minister’s Office wouldn’t even answer a direct question from The Times of Israel as to where the purported meeting was to take place. It is now clear that the meeting was never on the schedule.
. . .Israel clearly hoped the Iranians would believe there was no way it would attack before the Sunday talks.
On all fronts, Israel sought to put forth an air of business as usual. Netanyahu’s office put out a statement on Thursday stressing that despite some media reports to the contrary amid the rising regional tensions, he would not be canceling his weekend vacation in the north.
. . . Trump contributed to the effort. “He played the game together with Israel,” said the Israeli official. “It was a whole coordination.”
Trump said Thursday that an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites “could very well happen” but advised against it, saying the possibility of a deal was “fairly close” if Tehran compromised on its atomic ambitions in ongoing talks with the US.
There is more, but the important parts are that the Trump administration was part of the ruse, and is collaborating with Israel, and Israel, after the security disaster of October 7, is back on the beam, taking out Hezbollah (with Beepergate!), much of Hamas, and now this surprise attack on Iran. I’m not quite as pessimistic about Israel’s future as I used to be.
BTW, Iran is committing war crimes by attacking civilians in Israeli, while the IDF warns Iranian citizens before an attack. Will there be publicity about Iran’s crimes? Of course not!
Here are two headlines from yesterday’s NYT:
and….
*You may note that I put up relatively few posts from Bluesky as opposed to Twitter, as the former is a “nice” site that avoids political discussion and, above all, heterodox opinions. This “bubble” is described by Josh Barro on his Very Serious site; the post is called, “Bluesky isn’t a bubble. It’s a containment dome.”
My friend Megan McArdle warns in a column that the social media platform Bluesky is a harmful bubble for liberals. By decamping together for Bluesky, she writes, liberals have cloistered themselves in a place where their views won’t be challenged. And because the conversational norms on Bluesky are so hostile and obnoxious — do you ever use AI? Former “Reply All” host Alex Goldman wants you to know you should be thrown into a volcano — the platform fails to appeal beyond its niche political audience, is losing users, and is unlikely to become a place where posting is a good way to influence public opinion.
Megan correctly describes these dynamics, but she’s wrong about them being harmful. In fact, these dynamics are why Bluesky is an important harm reduction tool for liberals. Twitter used to be a place where the most neurotic and censorious liberal influencers were highly effective at influencing events within media organizations and the Democratic Party. But was that actually ever good for liberal causes?
. . . A lot of the blame for the self-inflicted wounds of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary should go to The Groups: it was the ACLU that got Kamala Harris to commit to taxpayer-funded sex changes for criminals and detained migrants. But one of the reasons Democrats didn’t realize it was a big mistake to make promises and statements that made them sound wacky was that they were constantly being yelled at on Twitter by people whose unpopular viewpoints they mistook for broad public opinion.1 The screamers won the battle but they lost the war: they pressured their own candidates into manufacturing attack ad fodder for Republicans, and as a result, Donald Trump is president again.
The “screamers” are presumably loud “progressive” liberals.
. . . There is much to regret about the ways Elon Musk has changed Twitter. But there’s been one obvious change for the better: By rupturing the Twitter user base, he (accidentally?) created a firewall between the most maladjusted liberal posters on the internet and the reporters, Democratic politicians and operatives who used to pay an excessive amount of attention to their harangues. (Media reporter Max Tani wrote about this for Semafor last month: “I spoke with a few congressional staffers who said that they had tried using Bluesky as an alternative to Twitter after Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, but they gave up after their bosses kept getting yelled at by Democratic users angry at their impotence.”) I believe the emergence of this firewall is one reason for the renaissance that we were seeing at WelcomeFest last week: Democrats are becoming more cognizant of public opinion and less fearful of breaking with the activist base because they are no longer receiving so much activist messaging in the form of aggrieved Twitter push alerts on their phones.
. . . The problem with a “bubble” is that it prevents the people inside from accessing the information on the outside. But the core functionality of Bluesky is not that it keeps information out; it’s that it keeps information in. Like the containment dome over a nuclear reactor, Bluesky serves the important safety purpose of ensuring that whatever meltdowns occur within produce minimal fallout. So while I’m not on Bluesky, I value the platform, and I encourage its users to continue screaming at each other about how much the rest of us all suck. Please do not leave.
So his thesis is that liberals on Bluesky are insulated from the progressive Left and thus will confect a moderate Democratic party. Would it were so! I find Bluesky curiously anodyne as well as censorious: very critical of “heterodox” people like Jesse Singal. But the Bluesky dictum is to protect moderate liberals from hearing anything outside their bubble, but there’s a lot going on outside that bubble, including AOC and Bernie Sanders’s propaganda tour. And some of that stuff is going to hurt Democrats in general. Does Bluesky really think its liberal base needs to be protected from free speech?
Protesters used water pistols against unsuspecting tourists in Barcelona on Sunday as demonstrators marched to demand a re-think of an economic model they believe is fueling a housing crunch and erasing the character of the Spanish city.
“The squirt guns are to bother the tourists a bit,” Andreu Martínez said with a chuckle after spritzing a couple seated at an outdoor cafe. “Barcelona has been handed to the tourists. This is a fight to give Barcelona back to its residents.”
Martínez, a 42-year-old administrative assistant, is one of a growing number of residents who are convinced that tourism has gone too far in the city of 1.7 people. Barcelona hosted 15.5 visitors last year eager to see Antoni Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia basilica and the Las Ramblas promenade.
That’s 9.1 tourists to every resident!
Martínez says his rent has risen over 30% as more apartments in his neighborhood are rented to tourists for short-term stays. He said there is a knock-on effect of traditional stores being replaced by businesses catering to tourists, like souvenir shops, burger joints and “bubble tea” spots.
“Our lives, as lifelong residents of Barcelona, is coming to an end,” he said. “We are being pushed out systematically.”
Similar demonstrations against tourism are slated in several other Spanish cities on Sunday, including on the Balearic islands of Mallorca and Ibiza, as well as in the Italian postcard city of Venice, Portugal’s capital Lisbon and other cities across southern Europe — marking the first time a protest against tourism has been coordinated across the region.
In Barcelona, protesters blew whistles and chanted, “Everywhere you look, all you see are tourists.” They held up homemade signs saying “One more tourist, one less resident” and “Your Airbnb was my home.” They stuck stickers saying “Citizen Self-Defense,” in Catalan, and “Tourist Go Home,” in English, with a drawing of a water pistol on the doors of hotels and hostels.
. . . There was tension when the march stopped in front of a large hostel, where a group emptied their water guns at two workers positioned in the entrance. They also set off firecrackers next to the hostel and opened a can of pink smoke. One worker spat at the protestors as he slammed the hostel’s doors.
. . .Cities across the world are struggling with how to cope with overtourism and a boom in short-term rental platforms, like Airbnb, but perhaps nowhere has surging discontent been so evident as in Barcelona, where protesters first took to firing squirt guns at tourists during a protest last summer.
Spaniards have also staged several large protests in Barcelona, Madrid and other cities in recent years to demand lower rents. There has also been a confluence of the pro-housing and anti-tourism struggles: When thousands marched through the streets of Spain’s capital in April, some held homemade signs saying “Get Airbnb out of our neighborhoods.”
Can you blame the residents? (Overall in Spain last year, there were two tourists for every resident.) For sure Barcelona is one of the world’s loveliest cities, but when I walked down the Ramblas some years ago, it was already mostly tourists and way too crowded. Still, I would urge people to visit it for its beauties, which include some of the world’s finest architecture, including Gaudi’s now-completed cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, which I found stunning despite the Guardia Civil having detained me in the church strip-searching me. (I was falsely accused by two British tourists of having pickpocketed their money and passports, a story I’ve already told.) But don’t stay long, and there are less crowded parts of Spain that have their own allure (try Galicia).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s question is answered with a double response. When I asked Malgorzata what it meant, she said, “Anything you want: Viruses are mico. human bodies are macro. Viruses can destroy human bodies. Israel is micro, Iran is macro. It seems that Israel is destroying Iran.
Hili: What is the difference between micro and macro?
The Coyne building from Amy, who writes: “Never noticed this before. The Coyne building at Pico and Crenshaw blvd. In Los Angeles. ( was on my way to a lecture at center for inquiry in LA).”
Now that a war with Israel is on, the Iranian Masih is back tweeting—and rooting for Israel, which threatens to bring down the theocracy that she hates.
Here’s the Google translation of the tweet below:
The Islamic Republic’s insistence on continuing confrontation with Israel is based on illusions, ideological slogans, and unrealistic calculations, and it has no result other than the destruction of our Iran. A disaster whose costs will not only be political, but also human and security. And what’s even more bitter is that these costs will be paid with the lives of people who have no role or authority in these decision-making. How long will the Iranian people have to pay the price for a war that was neither their choice nor their benefit?
اصرار جمهوری اسلامی بر تداوم تقابلجویانه با اسرائیل، بر اساس توهمات و شعارهای ایدئولوژیک و محاسبات غیرواقعبینانه است و بس و هیچ نتیجهای ندارد جز ویرانی ایران ما.
فاجعهای که هزینههای آن نه صرفاً سیاسی، بلکه انسانی و امنیتی خواهد بود. و نکتهی تلختر آنکه، این هزینهها از… pic.twitter.com/6EmVZz84pn
Two posts from Dr. Cobb, who’s nearly recovered form his respiratory ills. First, a live cowrie, a mollusc whose shells are often collected. They’re much nicer alive
Oy, how the ducklings have grown! Remember, today has been only 40 days since they hatched on May 6. In all respects save their inability to fly, they are slightly small adults, though they still hang together as the Brood of Six. Here are some photos and videos taken over the last two weeks.
The pictures and videos below are presented chronologically, and were taken on four days: June 1, 5, 7, and 11. You can see the change in the ducklings over a period of only ten days: they’ve lost most of their fuzz and are mostly feathered, and their wings are getting larger.
Mother Esther, June 1:
More “babies”, if they can be called that. Esther stands on a plant pot and watches her offspring:
On June 1 the ducklings were growing feathers, most notably on their wings.
A video of ducklings leaving the water on June 1 for a postprandial grooming session and then a nap. They are able to leave the water and jump on the pond edge very easily now.
More preening on the same day:
And, after preening, they often form a clump o’ ducklings, keeping warm and together. Esther, as you see, is always nearby. They’re also nibbling at the grass:
A single duckling giving itself a thorough cleaning.
By June 6, the ducklings had developed more extensive feathering, especially on their breasts. They look to me like little dinosaurs, which of course they are:
And they look quite plump after feeding, often with their craws hanging over the edge of the pond. We call these “Dali ducks”. But they are not fat.
The babies dunking themselves on June 6:
Father Mordecai, who hasn’t been around for a few days:
After dining, swimming, diving, and preening, the ducklings plop themselves down for a nap. I love the plopping:
On June 7 we had a bout of postprandial zooming:
Esther the Queen:
Esther always does thorough ablutions, for as mom, she has to be in good condition. (Soon she’ll molt and gradually lose her feathers, replacing them with shiny new ones. This process is gradual so she is not of course bald!)
Meanwhile, Mordecai, when he was there, would drive other ducks out of the pond. Here he subtly but insistently forces Haman the Evil Duck out of the pond:
By June 11 the ducklings had gotten almost all of their feathers, but their wing feathers are small and they can’t yet fly. They’re also a bit smaller than Esther, but not by very much. Here’s one sunning on a rock:
Duckling ablutions:
Dabbling. They seem to get some food from the pond, and I’ve seen them slurping down algae. Here they all seem to have homed in one one area:
Homing as Esther watches:
A big-time case of the zoomies:
A duckling. It’s now hard to tell them from mother, and at a distance you have to concentrate on color (Esther is lighter) rather than on size. There’s just a bit of fuzz near the tail, but otherwise they are fully feathered. I predict they’ll be flying in two weeks.
As a reminder, here are two of them the day they hit the water: May 7:
Here I am hand-feeding a stray hen, who we call “Hoover” because she comes right up to us when we’re sitting and cleans up all the duck food spilled on the ground at feeding time. I felt sorry for her and gave her a handful of food, which she quickly grabbed, one pellet at a time. I don’t really want to feed her, but when a duck looks straight at you with their beautiful faces and liquid eyes, it’s hard to resist. I am not feeding these stray ducks much at all, and they are often gone (eating elsewhere, I hope). Photo by Elsie Holzwarth:
