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 origami master and physicist Robert Lang, who’s rebuilding his house and studio destroyed by fire, sends part 1 of a two-part series on California wildflowers. Roberts’s captions and ID’s are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Reader’s Wildlife Photos: Southern California Wildflowers, Part 1
Although my usual Altadena hiking routes are off-limits due to closures resulting from the Eaton Fire in January 2025, there are still some pretty nice hikes not far away, and the end of May is a superb time to see wildflowers. This installment (which is a two-parter) includes wildflowers of Southern California from a route up Mount Lukens, the highest point in the city of Los Angeles, at 5075 feet elevation. Although the route is pretty much chaparral all the way, the changes in elevation and slope direction encompass a variety of climatic conditions within a single jaunt, providing a variety of blooms to see along the way. These are in no particular order: I shot some of them going up, some coming down. IDs are courtesy of iNaturalist.
Annual cryptanthus (Cryptantha sp.) has a common name of “popcorn flower,” and indeed, its tiny clusters of white blossoms do look a bit like popcorn kernels (and they’re about that size).
Blue elder (Sambucus cerulea) is technically a shrub, rather than a tree, but they get pretty big along the Lukens trail.
There are a lot of paintbrush (Castilleja) species in Southern California; iNat thinks this is Camp Martin paintbrush (Castilleja martini):
This time of year, caterpillar scorpionweed (Phacelia cicutaria) has tiny lavender flowers. In the fall, their seed heads look amazingly like caterpillars (especially after they fall off the plants):
Chaparral whitethorn (Ceanothus leucodermis) has beautiful plumes of lavender flowers and in places, carpets the mountainside with their blooms for a few weeks. Their thorns are vicious, though, and it forms impenetrable thickets at higher elevations in the San Gabriels:
Palmer ceanothus (Ceanothus palmeri) looks a lot like the more common chaparral whitethorn but has pure white blossoms. This one was getting the once-over from what looks like a European honeybee (Apis mellifera):
Dudley’s clarkia (Clarkia dudleyana) continues the theme of purple. It’s in the primrose family.
Golden yarrow (Eriophyllum confertiflorum) has clusters of yellow flowers that, from a distance, look like they might be dandelion flowers, but they’re clusters of small flowers, just roughly the same size and color as the former.
Hoary rock-rose (Cistus creticus) is a non-native member of the rose family. It’s not particularly aggressive, and its crepe-paper-like petals are delicate and lovely, so I like it:
There are several varieties of Lupine (Lupinus sp.) in Southern California; neither iNat (nor I) could pin down this one. It’s a member of the pea family. Behind this are the San Gabriel mountain peaks to the north of Mount Lukens:
All photos were taken with an iPhone, as my “nice” camera is currently a lump of slag that I haven’t yet replaced. More flowers coming in part 2.
The big news today is Israel’s attack on Iran; see the previous post (and below) for details.
Welcome to the tail end of the week; it’s Friday, June 13, 2025 and National Cupcake Lover’s Day, implying that only a single lover of cupcakes is being honored. Here are some fancy ones:
Katjaskupcakes katja Seaton, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Thomas Saint of England took out the first patent for a complete sewing machine. He was given patent #1764 in 1790. Some sources say that he received his patent on June 13, explaining why Sewing Machine Day takes when it does. The machine was to have an awl that punched a hole, and then a needle that would go through the hole. It is unknown if Saint created a prototype of his sewing machine, and only the drawings of it survive.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 13 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
NOTE: The articles below were posted yesterday afternoon, and some of the first ones are a bit obsolete:
Israel appears to be preparing to launch an attack soon on Iran, according to officials in the United States and Europe, a step that could further inflame the Middle East and derail or delay efforts by the Trump administration to broker a deal to cut off Iran’s path to building a nuclear bomb.
The concern about a potential Israeli strike and the prospect of retaliation by Iran led the United States on Wednesday to withdraw diplomats from Iraq and authorize the voluntary departure of U.S. military family members from the Middle East.
It is unclear how extensive an attack Israel might be preparing. But the rising tensions come after months in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has pressed President Trump to seize on what Israel sees as a moment of Iranian vulnerability to a strike.
Mr. Trump waved off another plan by Israel several months ago to attack Iran, insisting that he wanted a chance to negotiate a deal with Tehran that would choke off Iran’s ability to produce more nuclear fuel for a bomb. Two weeks ago, Mr. Trump said he had warned Mr. Netanyahu about launching a strike while U.S. negotiations with Iran were underway.
It is not clear how much effort Mr. Trump made to block Mr. Netanyahu again this time, but the president has appeared less optimistic in recent days about the prospects for a diplomatic settlement after Iran’s supreme leader rejected an administration proposal that would have effectively phased out Iran’s ability to enrich uranium on its soil. Mr. Netanyahu has walked up to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities in the past, only to back off at the last minute.
Word of the U.S. decisions to withdraw personnel from the region, along with a warning from Britain about new threats to Middle East commercial shipping, came hours after Mr. Trump told The New York Post in a podcast released on Wednesday that he had grown “less confident” about the prospects for a deal with Iran that would limit its ability to develop nuclear weapons.
. . . and from the second:
The International Atomic Energy Agency declared on Thursday that Iran was not complying with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations, the first time the U.N. watchdog has passed a resolution against the country in 20 years.
The long-anticipated vote by the agency’s board of governors in Vienna came at a time of high tension over Tehran’s nuclear program, with American and European officials saying they believe that Israel may be preparing an imminent military strike against Iran.
The I.A.E.A. said that Iran had consistently failed to provide information about undeclared nuclear material and activities at multiple locations.
The resolution was put forward by the United States, Britain, France and Germany, and passed easily, with 19 votes of the 35-nation board. Russia, China and Burkina Faso voted against, and 11 other countries abstained, while two did not vote at all.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry and national atomic energy agency issued a joint statement condemning the vote, calling it political and saying the resolution had “completely called into question the credibility and prestige” of the nuclear watchdog.
The statement added that Iran would now “launch a new enrichment center in a secure location and replace the first-generation machines” at another site with more modern equipment.
Iran had reacted angrily to the prospect of the vote and had threatened to leave the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which came into force in 1970. Iran is a signatory but has not ratified a section that would allow inspectors to search areas of the country where they suspect nuclear activity. But the vote was also seen as part of the diplomacy around the fraught negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program between Washington and Tehran.
US officials believe Israel is ready to carry out an attack on Iran and could launch military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities in the coming days, reports suggested early Thursday, even as high-level talks aimed at a diplomatic deal over Tehran’s nuclear activity remained on track for Sunday.
The reports, from US networks NBC and CBS, that Israel was moving toward a long-threatened military strike came hours after the US announced it would evacuate some personnel from the region amid fears they could be targeted by Iran in reprisal actions.
. . . . According to the report, Israel was weighing the option of striking the Islamic Republic’s nuclear infrastructure, fearing that Washington could agree to a deal that falls short of its demands regarding Iran ending all nuclear enrichment.
Sources told the news network that they were not aware of any plans in the US to aid Israel in its endeavor to strike Iran, directly or indirectly, in the form of aerial refueling or intelligence sharing.
But the sources said US officials were on alert.
CBS News, citing multiple sources, said US officials have been told Israel is “fully ready to launch an operation into Iran.”
Both reports cited worries that Iran could retaliate against US personnel stationed in neighboring Iraq as the reason the State Department and Pentagon authorized some US officials and their families to leave the region on Wednesday.
I have mixed feeling about this. While I’ve already said that there’s no doubt that Iran is pursuing a bomb, and that Israel, preferably in combination with the U.S., should destroy the bomb-making and uranium-refining facilities, this could well trigger a wider war in the Middle East. There is no way that Iran would not retaliate after such a strike, and then all hell will break loose.
NOTE: The attack, years in the planning, took place, doing considerable damage to Iranian facilities (and officials), and Iran’s attempt to retaliate, by sending 100 drones towards Israel, was unsuccessful (Jordan helped take them down).
An aid group in Gaza backed by Israel and the United States said that on Wednesday night a bus carrying some of its Palestinian workers was attacked by Hamas, leaving at least five people dead and others injured.
At the time of the attack, the bus was carrying about two dozen of the group’s workers and was en route to an aid distribution site in southern Gaza, according to a statement from the group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Some of the workers “may have been taken hostage,” it said, adding that it was still gathering information.
“We condemn this heinous and deliberate attack in the strongest possible terms,” said the foundation, which is run by American contractors. “These were aid workers. Humanitarians. Fathers, brothers, sons, and friends, who were risking their lives every day to help others.”
The New York Times could not independently verify the attack. Hamas did not comment on the accusation that it had attacked workers from the group, and the Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The foundation said it held the militant group “fully responsible” for the deaths of “dedicated workers who have been distributing humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people.” The group called on the international community to condemn Hamas for the attack.
The aid organization has repeatedly criticized Hamas, saying that for days it had “openly” threatened workers and civilians. On Saturday, the foundation said it was “impossible to proceed” with aid distribution because Hamas had menaced its staff.
Hamas has denied those accusations and has accused the aid group of lacking neutrality.
Of course Israel will be blamed for this, as it has been for distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza:
The United Nations and many humanitarian organizations have accused Israel of “militarizing” aid distribution in Gaza, and have said the group was violating the international organizations’ principles of independence. They have warned that residents could face danger from the Israeli military as they sought food and other aid.
Israel does not want the UN to participate in distributing aid because of its connections to Hamas, particularly through the odious UNRWA, and the UN
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday announced eight new picks for a key immunization committee, including vaccine opponents.
Kennedy’s move came two days after abruptly removing all 17 of the prior members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The panel makes vaccine recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including when and how often children and adults should get them.
Kennedy said the new panel would review not just new vaccine recommendations, but existing ones as well.
“All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense,” he wrote in a post on X. “They have each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations.”
Kennedy earlier this week promised not to pick “ideological antivaxers” for the committee.
Among his picks are Vicky Pebsworth, a nurse with a public-health doctorate, who is a board member of the National Vaccine Information Center, an organization that advocates against vaccines. She has said that she became interested in vaccine safety because her child suffered long-term health effects after receiving immunizations.
“Most vaccine injuries are not recognized, acknowledged, treated or compensated,” she said in a 2011 video for NVIC. Many scientists have said vaccine injuries are real but rare and that the benefits of the federally recommended shots outweigh the risks.
Kennedy has also tapped Dr. Robert Malone, a virologist who worked on research into several mRNA Covid-19 vaccines before he grew skeptical of the shots. Malone has voiced fears that Covid vaccines come with dangerous, unknown risks. His 2021 appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” prompted musicians and podcasters to leave Spotify for allowing Rogan’s podcast to spread what they decried as dangerous coronavirus misinformation.
Retsef Levi, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology management professor Kennedy tapped for the panel, called for Covid vaccines to be withdrawn from the market in a 2023 video.
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, another Kennedy pick and a former professor of medicine at Harvard University, became known during the pandemic as a critic of coronavirus mitigation measures, such as lockdowns. He has said he was fired from the school for his opposition to vaccine mandates. He has studied vaccine safety monitoring systems.
The other appointees include former ACIP member Dr. Cody Meissner, a pediatrician and infectious-disease specialist respected by other vaccine experts; psychiatrist Dr. Joseph R. Hibbeln; emergency physician Dr. James Pagano; and Dr. Michael Ross, a gynecologist.
“This committee as a whole does not deserve public or expert trust,” said Dorit Reiss, a University of California San Francisco law professor who has studied the antivaccine movement. “Most of these people have no scientific expertise related to vaccines.”
The White House was involved in vetting the new members, a White House official said.
Four of the eight are therefore dubious since they’ve come out against vaccines or mandates (granted, some mandates, like closing schools for a long time, were misguided). But this sounds like a panel loaded with members that have an antivax agenda. As I’ve said, I think RFK Jr. may have been Trump’s most dangerous appointment. This mass firing and reappointment supports that supposition.
An Air India passenger plane bound for London Gatwick crashed shortly after taking off in Ahmedabad on Thursday, leaving at least 204 people dead.
The flight was carrying 242 passengers and crew, including 53 British nationals, when it came down in the western Indian city.
Ahmedabad’s police chief told the BBC that 204 bodies had been recovered, while 41 people were being treated for injuries.
GS Malik earlier told news agencies there appeared to be no survivors from the crash, and that some local people would also have died given where the plane came down.
He later said one passenger survived the crash, with Indian media reporting that it was a British national.
Details are still emerging from the scene.
. . . . Air India flight AI171 left Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport at 13:39 local time (08:09 GMT), Air India said.
It was scheduled to land at London Gatwick at 18:25 BST.
The plane crashed on departure from Ahmedabad – where all operations have since been suspended.
According to flight tracking website FlightRadar24, the signal from the aircraft was lost “less than a minute after take-off”.
Flight tracking data ends with the plane at an altitude of 625ft (190m).
The plane gave a mayday call to air traffic control, India’s aviation regulator said. No response was given by the aircraft after that.
It crashed into a residential area called Meghani Nagar. Police told ANI news agency that it had crashed into a doctors’ hostel.
Some of the people on the ground in the doctors’ hostel were also killed. For some reason, the BBC has a whole article on where one surviving British passenger (born in India) was sitting: seat 11A. Will that now become peoples’ lucky seat number? Now I read in the NYT that the lucky guy may have been the only person to survive that crash. On the news last night, it was reported that video of the plane as it was heading to ground showed that the tail flaps were in the wrong position for getting lift, and the landing gear was out, though it should have been retracted. U.S. and British investigators are on the site helping the Indian investigation.
In the heart of Spain’s capital, Sobrino de Botín holds a coveted Guinness World Record as the world’s oldest restaurant. Exactly three hundred years after it opened its doors, Botín welcomes droves of daily visitors hungry for Castilian fare with a side of history.
But on the outskirts of Madrid, far from the souvenir shops and tourist sites, a rustic tavern named Casa Pedro makes a bold claim. Its owners assert the establishment endured not just the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and the Napoleonic invasion in the early 1800s, but even the War of Spanish Succession at the start of the 18th century — a lineage that would make Casa Pedro older than Botín and a strong contender for the title.
“It’s really frustrating when you say, ‘Yes, we’ve been around since 1702,’ but … you can’t prove it,” said manager and eighth-generation proprietor Irene Guiñales. “If you look at the restaurant’s logo, it says ‘Casa Pedro, since 1702,’ so we said, ‘Damn it, let’s try to prove it.’”
Guiñales, 51, remembers her grandfather swearing by Casa Pedro’s age, but she was aware that decades-old hearsay from a proud old-timer wouldn’t be enough to prove it. Her family hired a historian and has so far turned up documents dating the restaurant’s operations to at least 1750.
That puts them within striking distance of Botín’s record.
Both taverns are family-owned. Both offer Castilian classics like stewed tripe and roast suckling pig. They are decorated with charming Spanish tiles, feature ceilings with exposed wooden beams and underground wine cellars. And both enjoy a rich, star-studded history.
AD
Botín’s celebrated past includes a roster of literary patrons like Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Graham Greene. In his book “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway described it as “one of the best restaurants in the world.” While Casa Pedro may not have boasted the same artistic pedigree, it boasts its own VIPs. Its walls are adorned with decades-old photographs of former Spanish King Juan Carlos I dining in one of its many rooms. The current Spanish monarch, King Felipe VI dines there, too, albeit more inconspicuously than his father.
Well, there’s empirical evidence to support Botin’s claim, but Casa Pedro’s claim rests on shaky ground. I remember going to Botin when my girlfriend and I hitchhiked around Europe for 5.5 months, starting in Athens and working our way to Crete (where we lived for a month), then back to Greece, up to Istanbul, through Europe and eastern Spain down to Morocco, and then back to Spain, where we returned to the U.S. from Madrid. That was a great trip, and we celebrated in Madrid with a dinner in Botin that blew most of our remaining dosh. As Hemingway would say, “we had suckling pig, and it was good.”
Masih is quiet again. This is from JKR, who has a sharp tongue, but a well-aimed one:
My opinion on magic is the same as my opinion on women with dicks: neither are real. However, if you want to prove me wrong, by all means jump off a roof on a broomstick. pic.twitter.com/jyiFxKJ2Cr
From Bryan, a cool old machine. You can see a video here.
Made with 6,000 moving parts, The Writer is a 240-year-old machine created by watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz, his son Henri-Louis, and Jean-Frédéric Leschot around 1770-1772.
I did not expect this to happen so soon. Last night Israel, with the knowledge of the U.S. (but not necessarily with its material help) attacked Iranian bases and officials, and apparently did considerable damage to facilities, as well as killing nuclear scientists and the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. From the NYT:
Israel launched a stunning series of strikes on Friday morning against Iran’s nuclear program and killed three of the nation’s security chiefs, in a remarkable coup of intelligence and military force that immediately decapitated Tehran’s chain of command, prompted threats of severe retaliation and raised fears of a wider conflict.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel described the attacks as a last resort to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran, which Israel views as an existential threat. In addition to targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, Israel’s strikes killed top Iranian officials and nuclear scientists and hit Tehran’s long-range missile facilities and aerial defenses.
Israel has exchanged previous volleys of strikes with Iran and fought its proxy forces across the Middle East, but this was the first time it successfully hit Tehran’s nuclear facilities after years of preparation and threats. Though the extent of the damage at the nuclear sites was not yet clear, the scale of the strikes stunned Iranians and Israelis alike.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that Israel “should anticipate a harsh punishment.” Later on Friday morning, the Israeli military announced that Iranian forces had fired about 100 drones at Israel, as Mr. Netanyahu vowed the fighting would last “as many days as it takes.”
It was also not immediately clear whether the United States, Israel’s most important ally, had blessed the attack. For weeks, President Trump’s envoys have been holding talks with Iranian officials on a new agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program. As recently as Thursday evening, Mr. Trump suggested that Israel should not yet attack Iran because such an assault would “blow it” for the nuclear negotiations.
Three other bits of news and a NYT map of where the attacks occurred:
Iranians assassinated: The strikes dealt a heavy blow to Iran’s military leadership. Mohammad Bagheri, the commander in chief of the military and the second-highest commander after the supreme leader, was killed, according to the Israeli military and Iranian media, as well as other top security officials.
Here’s who was killed:
Iranian Military Generals
Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the armed forces and the second-highest commander after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Gen. Hossein Salami, commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iran’s primary military force.
Gen. Gholamali Rashid, deputy commander in chief of the armed forces.
Nuclear Scientists
Fereydoun Abbasi, the former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.
Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, a theoretical physicist and president of the Islamic Azad University in Tehran.
What was hit: Israel said Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz was among the targets. Rafael Grossi, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Iran had informed him that there was no increase in radiation levels at Natanz. Another nuclear site, at Isfahan, “has not been impacted,” Mr. Grossi said.
How it happened: Israel attacked at least six military bases around the capital Tehran, residential homes at two highly secured complexes for military commanders and multiple residential buildings around Tehran, according to four senior Iranian officials.
The operation was stunning in planning and scope. Read this from the Times of Israel:
Israel spent years preparing for the operation against Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, a security official tells The Times of Israel, including building a drone base inside Iran and smuggling precision weapons systems and commandos into the country. [JAC: note how far Iran is from Israel. Those are some brave commandos.]
The effort hinged on tight joint planning between the IDF and the Mossad intelligence agency.
According to the official, Mossad agents set up a drone base on Iranian soil near Tehran. The drones were activated overnight, striking surface-to-surface missile launchers aimed at Israel.
In addition, vehicles carrying weapons systems were smuggled into Iran.
These systems took out Iran’s air defenses and gave Israeli planes air supremacy and freedom of action over Iran.
The third covert effort was Mossad commandos deploying precision missiles near anti-aircraft sites in central Iran.
The operations relied on “groundbreaking thinking, bold planning and surgical operation of advanced technologies, special forces and agents operating in the heart of Iran while totally evading the eyes of local intelligence,” says the official.
Iran launched 100 drones at Israel in response, but none of them made it (see below).
Jordan’s air force intercepted missiles and drones entering its airspace Friday, according to its state news agency.
The interceptions took place because the missiles and drones were likely to fall within Jordanian territory, posing a threat to civilians, it said. Israel has been intercepting some of the 100 drones launched by Iran outside Israeli airspace, the Israeli military said.
Lebanon’s government informed the Hezbollah terror group that it would not tolerate the Iranian proxy joining in Tehran’s response against Israel following the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the Saudi news outlet al-Arabiya reports.
“The time when the organization bypassed the state in deciding to go to war is over,” the group was told, according to the report.
The report adds that Lebanese authorities also warned Hezbollah that it would bear responsibility for dragging the country into war.
Israel’s setting up a full drone base in Iran without the country detecting it (along with trucks bearing weapons, which would have to cross Iraq somehow] is an amazing feat, but that’s what Mossad specializes in (remember Beepergate?) The pronouncement by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran was not adhering to its agreements probably prompted Israel’s attack, giving them a reason to take out nuclear facilities. And the semi-breakdown of the U.S. negotiations with Iran didn’t hurt, either.
It’s early days yet, and more retaliation from Iran can be expected, if not a full-scale war, but Israel saw Iranian nukes as an existential threat, which they were, and the bombs could be made within a few months (it would take longer to construct delivery missiles). My fondest hope, which is probably a pipe dream, is that the Iranian people would rise up and throw out the theocracy that they despise and set up some kind of democracy, but the military still has the power.
Based on the Jesus and Mo post yesterday, which commented on a British man fined for burning a Qur’an, a reader sent me a commentary that he/she wrote fifteen years ago about burning a Koran, and revised yesterday. Given the ideological climate, the reader of course wishes to remain anonymous, so I’ve changed the name. It’s published below with permission.
Burning My Koran
by Jean Smith (name changed to protect the writer)
September 24, 2010, revised June 11, 2025
The short version:
The sooner everybody in the world burns a Koran, the sooner we can get back to things that really matter.
The longer version:
I’m here in the back yard of my house. I am holding a copy of the Koran which I purchased with money I earned — I have the receipt. This is not a rare edition — it is a cheap paperback copy, one among millions in the world today. I’m about to douse it with charcoal lighting fluid and set it on fire.
If you’re the kind of person who takes violent exception to this sort of activity, please note that I am alone. There is no one here who is either encouraging or trying to stop me, so if you are thinking about taking bloody vengeance, be sure that it is directed only at me.
If this were a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, or a biography of Einstein, or a telephone directory, burning it might seem like an odd thing to do, but it would have no great importance to anyone. Since I am an atheist, and therefore I don’t believe in the god described in this book, or in any other god, then as far as I am concerned this book is like any other – nothing but a mass-produced assembly of paper with ink on it. So one less Koran in the world is inconsequential to me.
I am not burning this book for the purpose of offending any person or group of persons, so if you do take offense, you are missing my point. I am doing this because I can, in response to a recent news item: the police in a town in England arrested six people for burning a Koran and posting a video about it on YouTube. Their so-called “crime” was not that they violated a fire code, nor that they destroyed a book which they didn’t own — but “inciting racial hatred”.
From the news reports, it appears that these Koran burners are crude racists. In other words, ignorant, fearful people. These are not people I admire or feel much sympathy for. But if anyone feels “racial hatred” towards me, as a white atheist Westerner burning my own paper with ink on it, then that person is every bit as much a crude racist.
I have my own reason for burning this book — not to express racism (which I do not feel), nor contempt for the ideas set forth in the book (which I do feel), but to demonstrate that no one’s personal choice of religious rules and beliefs is in any way binding on me or anyone else. If you have a book that you hold to be sacred, then you probably won’t burn it. That’s easy. But that’s all you get.
This book is not a sacred account of the words of God. After all, there is no god. And what would a god need with a book anyway? Books are made by people, for people. Books are paper with ink on it, this particular one belongs to me, and I am going to burn it.
I take the matches from my pocket. Are you starting to feel a bit uneasy? But what if you knew that a whole shipping container of Korans was about to be washed overboard in the middle of the ocean — would the harm be thousands of times greater? Would that diminish Islam in any way? Would the world even notice? Of course not. It would merely be a monetary loss to the publisher, and a trivial amount of pollution. And if the loss of a shipping container full of Korans wouldn’t diminish the faith, how can the loss of a single copy?
Do you call me intolerant of others’ beliefs, a racist, a bigot? Now it is you who are offending me (Because I am tolerant. Just not respectful) – should you therefore be forbidden to say that I am intolerant? Of course not. In this society, you have a right to express yourself, just as I do. But if you have a right to say things that I find offensive, it necessarily follows that you can’t invent a right not to be offended yourself.
Time to strike the match.
One other thing. Those guys in England who burned a Koran were idiots. From the news reports, they even managed to set their gas can on fire in the process, so they’re lucky they didn’t hurt themselves. But despite their ineptitude, they managed to pull it off. If there really were a god, an omnipotent creator and destroyer of worlds, a timeless master of every atom of the universe, and if this god had the slightest concern about the book, couldn’t he have sent a thunderbolt, or a rain shower, or at least caused these guys to forget to bring matches? What does a supreme being have to worry about anyway? And if all you want is what He wants, what do you have to worry about?
Reader Scott Ritchie photographed a bird in Costa Rica that I also saw there. It’s nearly invisible and was pointed out to us by a boatman. Scott’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them:
A bird of the day from Costa Rica. The Great Potoo [Nyctibius grandis]. They are “related” to frogmouths, and certainly resemble them in looks and behaviour. They sit motionless atop branches, resembling a dead stump. And they have a bizarre nighttime call, ghost-like. Once thought by locals to be a spirit or ghost. At night, they take large insects on the wing.
Can you spot the potoo (an immature Great Potoo) in the 1st picture? I love the old stump festooned with bromeliads and orchids. Atop this the potoo surveys his paddock kingdom.
JAC: This is the most cryptic bird I’ve ever seen. Note that natural selection has molded not only its appearance but also its behavior: it sits motionless at the end of a branch, looking just like the end of the branch!
But wait! Scott sent two more pictures of a similar species with this caption:
For comparison, here are Papuan Frogmouths (Podargus papuensis) from Cairns (OLD photo). Note chick in first shot. They like sitting IN the forest in contrast to the Potoo.
Top o’ the morning to you on Thursday, June 12, 2025, and National Red Rose Day. Here are some roses I photographed at the flower market in Bogotá, Colombia in 2020 (the U.S. gets many of its flowers, and nearly all its roses, from Colombia).
It’s also Clean Your Teeth Day, as I have a dentist appointment downtown this morning for my biannual cleaning. Posting may be very light today, even limited to this post. Bear with me; I do my best.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 12 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*A few pieces of nooz about the protests about arresting immigrants. First, the protests are spreading, and we even had some in Chicago on Tuesday.
The streets of Los Angeles were quiet on Wednesday morning after an overnight curfew imposed by the mayor in the city’s downtown. Cities across the country prepared for more demonstrations later in the day.
The curfew in Los Angeles, which lifted at 6 a.m. local time, brought calm to the area, where five days of protests over the federal immigration raids have occasionally turned violent. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California blamed President Trump for unrest that began with federal deportation raids on Friday.
Tensions remained high after the U.S. military announced that 700 Marines would join National Guard troops in the city on Wednesday. A spokeswoman for the U.S. military’s Northern Command said that the Marines, who have arrived in the area, were undergoing preparatory training, would help protect federal property and personnel, including immigration enforcement agents.
On Tuesday, protests that began in Los Angeles grew in size and intensity across the country. Some demonstrators in downtown Chicago threw water bottles at police officers and vandalized at least two vehicles. In New York, officers made dozens of arrests near federal buildings in Lower Manhattan, the police said. In Atlanta, they used chemical agents and physical force to drive a few dozen protesters from their foothold on a highway.
More protests were planned in several cities on Wednesday, including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, San Antonio and Seattle. Some organizers said that local demonstrations this week were a prelude to nationwide ones planned for Saturday against President Trump and an unusual military parade in Washington, D.C.
. . . . Arrests: Since protests began last Friday in response to federal immigration raids in Los Angeles’s garment district, hundreds of people have been arrested in several cities, including more than 330 in Los Angeles, more than 240 in San Francisco and a dozen in Austin, Texas, officials said. The encounters have turned tense at times, but the protests have remained largely confined to small sections of cities.
Many of these arrests may be of protestors, not immigrants. The protestors should of course be allowed to demonstrate all they want, so long as it’s in accordance with the First Amendment. And there should be no violence or vandalism. Protestors who do such things deserve to be arrested, regardless of whether you feel their cause is just. That’s civil disobedience: the willingness to take the punishment for breaking what you see as an unjust law or acting illegally but in a cause you see as just.
The Trump administration is preparing to begin the transfer of potentially thousands of foreigners who are in the United States illegally to the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, starting as early as this week, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The foreign nationals under consideration hail from a range of countries. They include hundreds from friendly European nations, including Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey and Ukraine, but also other parts of the world, including many from Haiti. Officials shared the plans with The Washington Post, including some documents, on the condition of anonymity because the matter is considered highly sensitive.
The administration is unlikely to inform the foreigners’ home governments about the impending transfers to the infamous military facility, including close U.S. allies such as Britain, Germany and France, the officials said.
The plans, which are subject to change, come as immigration hard-liners inside President Donald Trump’s Cabinet push for more deportations and arrests of undocumented migrants.
The preparations include medical screening for 9,000 individuals to determine whether they are healthy enough to be sent to Guantánamo, notorious for its history as a prison for suspected terrorists and others captured on battlefields in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some of these details were reported earlier by Politico.
It is far from clear whether the facilities there can accommodate 9,000 new detainees, an influx that would amount to a massive increase from the several hundred migrants moved to and from the base earlier this year.
But Trump administration officials say the plan is necessary to free up capacity at domestic detention facilities, which have become overcrowded amid Trump’s pledge to implement the biggest deportation of undocumented migrants in American history. A document reviewed by The Post said that “GTMO,” the government acronym for the base, “is not at capacity.”
Another bad move. First—and I’m not sure about this—does being at Guantánamo mean that incarcerated foreigners aren’t subject to all the provisions of the U.S. legal system? They do have the right of habeas corpus, according to the Supreme Court, but the Trump administration has been notably unwilling to provide justification for holding undocumented immigrants. Second, if the foreign governments aren’t informed, then they can provide no legal assistance to their citizens, something that should be done. Third, we all know the sordid history of suspected terrorists held in that place, and it isn’t pretty. Now it’s not clear that this will happen, but it’s a bad idea as well as an inhumane one,
Gavin Newsom is, once again, in the eye of a tempest. “It is a profoundly important moment,” the California governor said in an interview Monday evening as protesters massed in the streets and U.S. Marines made their way to the state on the president’s orders.
It is also an important moment for Newsom, widely seen as a top potential Democratic presidential candidate, who has leaned into the conflict to position himself as the leader of the opposition. “Seven hundred brave men and women are being used as pawns in Trump’s war on the Constitution,” he told The Wall Street Journal of the Marine deployment, speaking from the Los Angeles County emergency operations center where he has been holed up helping coordinate the protest response. “Our Founding Fathers didn’t live and die for this.”
Newsom traveled to Los Angeles on Sunday to try to quell sometimes-violent protests there, prompted by the Trump administration’s mass immigration arrests. On Monday, President Trump said Newsom should be arrested, calling him grossly incompetent. Newsom, in turn, accused Trump of “authoritarian overreach” and insisted the rule of law itself was at stake.
It is a moment of both opportunity and political peril for the two-term leader of the nation’s most-populous state, whom Trump has singled out to blame for the violence and rioting he says local officials have failed to control. Newsom’s pugilistic response to Trump’s provocations has gladdened the hearts of Democrats hungry for a crusader. But at a time when Newsom has attempted to moderate his image, playing to the Democratic base runs the risk of cementing his profile as a left-coast progressive and associating him with images of urban unrest.
Asked about his presidential aspirations, Newsom, who will leave office next year, didn’t deny he might seek higher office. “I’m not thinking about running, but it’s a path that I could see unfold,” he told the Journal. The 57-year-old said it was too early to make a decision and he would wait to see if the moment felt right.
I’ll bet he’s gonna run, as the credible competition is very thin. Now people are saying that he’s got no chance since he leads California, seen as a progressive state. In today’s Free Press there is in fact an article called “Why Gavin Newsom will never be president.” I’m not sure about his candidacy, but remember that Americans in general want illegal immigration cut way back. Whether Trump’s way of doing that will redound to his credibility with Republicans remains to be seen, but I have a feeling that the Right won’t care that much about Trump calling in the National Guard or the Marines. I suspect the bottom line in 2028 will be whether people feel they’re better off economically.
*Charlotte Allen joins nearly the whole world in panning the new Disney version of “Snow White” (at Quillette): “It’s no longer 1937. . . “. A few excerpts:
The Disney company’s 2025 live-action version ofSnow White is just as terrible as nearly everyone says it is. The film has attained an abysmal score of 1.7 on IMDb from 360k ratings and 2.2k reviews (although the site warns, “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title.”) At Rotten Tomatoes, meanwhile, the film has racked up a more generous audience score of 71 percent and a critics’ score of forty percent (although many of the positive reviews are of the “not quite as terrible as you have heard” variety). The upshot has been an eye-wateringly expensive box-office flop as well as a critical disaster. Disney’s animated 1937 adaptation of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale—the first animated feature film ever made—remains a beloved classic (7.1 on IMDb nearly ninety years after it was released, and no unusual voting activity flagged). So how did Disney manage to take a bankable property and produce something this bad?
The new Snow White is bad because, while its 24-year-old lead, Rachel Zegler, is a decent singer, she can’t act very well and she’s been woefully miscast—probably because she is half-Latina and thus qualified the movie for post-#OscarsSoWhite “representation and inclusion” points. (With a Peruvian mother, I’m half-Latina myself, so why didn’t someone ask me to play Snow White?) In Disney’s animated 1937 version (titled Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), our heroine was a sweet and cheery innocent, but Zegler’s character has been rewritten as a Mary Sue girlboss who shows off what a smartypants she is by reciting all the dwarfs’ names in reverse alphabetical order upon being introduced to them. And instead of cleaning their house in return for their hospitality, she makes them do their own cleanup. It’s “Whistle While You Work” for thee, but not for me. If you found yourself hoping that this obnoxious know-it-all would remain dead after biting into the poisoned apple, you were not alone.
I don’t care at all if she’s a Hispanic cast as a “snow white” character, but I do care about Ziegler’s modification of the film into some kind of woke fantasy, and I especially don’t like the seven dwarves being P.C.’ed into computer-generated characters called “magical creatures” (see below). That took jobs away from real dwarves, who wanted those roles!
The new Snow White is bad because the seven dwarfs are crudely rendered CGI motion-capture creations. They look less like the Doc, Grumpy, and co. we fondly remember than what one critic described as “garden gnomes.” Unlike the 1937 cartoon originals with their seven distinctive comic personalities, the new uncanny-valley dwarfs are difficult to tell apart, except for Dopey, who looks like Alfred E. Neuman in a medieval hat. (The new Snow White, by the way, won’t even let Dopey be Dopey; he has to have a lugubrious back story in which he doesn’t speak because he’s “afraid.”)
And the new Snow White is bad because it gets rid of the handsome prince. Why? At Disney’s D23 Expo in September 2022, Zegler bragged that she and her fellow cast members were bringing a “modern edge” to the story. Asked by Variety to elaborate, Zegler enthused: “I just mean that it’s no longer 1937. … [Snow White] is not going to be saved by the prince, and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love; she’s going to be dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be.” Well, OK—but try telling that to the 99 percent double-X chromosome Hallmark Christmas-movie-binge demographic, for whom “Someday My Prince Will Come” is the whole point. . . .
The girlboss heroine, the anonymous CGI dwarfs, and the substitution of romance with ambition are all bad and depressing things, but they are not the worst thing about the new film. The worst thing is its failure to recreate or even understand the story it is trying to tell or the power that story has exerted over generations of readers and re-tellers. Snow White cost US$270 million, making it one of the most expensive movies Disney has ever produced—a fortune in shoots and re-shoots as the project floundered amid delays, antagonistic media reports, and Zegler’s running social-media commentary about feminism, Trump, the Americans who voted for Trump, and Israel’s Gaza war. Disney selected Marc Webb to helm the project, a top-rated fantasy director who had previously made The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and its sequel.No fewer than seven writers pitched in on the screenplay, but only Erin Cressida Wilson (The Girl on the Train, 2016) received a screen credit. (Greta Gerwig is reported to have been called in on a script-rescue mission mid-shoot, and since she has a track record of turning preadolescent girlhood favourites like Little Women and Barbie dolls into instruments of feminist consciousness-raising, it is possible that she tanked the new Snow White single-handedly.)
The review goes on, and it’s snarky for sure, but I ain’t gonna see this movie, and I doubt that many here have, either. The movie has apparently gone beyond the point of where ideology trumps entertainment, and the public doesn’t like that. Here’s the trailer:
*Harvey Weinstein is serving a 48-year sentence in California for sex crimes, and was convicted in New York, but a New York case, in which he was convicted of rape and sexual assault, was thrown out because of issues with the judge. Now, in the retrial, all hell is breaking loose in the jury room:
Jury deliberations in Harvey Weinstein’ sex crimes retrial teetered Wednesday as the foreperson again requested to speak to the judge about “a situation” he found troubling.
While the jury was in court to hear the answer to an earlier request to re-hear the text of a rape law, the foreperson signaled to Judge Curtis Farber that he wanted to talk.
“He said words to the effect of ‘I can’t go back in there with the other jurors,’” Farber explained later. The foreperson was sent to wait in a separate room, where he penned a note saying, “I need to talk to you about a situation.”
When briefly brought into court, the foreperson said he wanted to speak in private. He, the judge, prosecutors and Weinstein’s lawyers then went behind closed doors.
The discussion was closed to the press and public, but Farber later said the foreperson had expressed that he didn’t want to change his position — whatever it may be — and was being bullied.
“He did indicate that at least one other juror made comments to the effect of ‘I’ll meet you outside one day,’ and there’s yelling and screaming,” the judge said.
Weinstein lawyer Arthur Aidala characterized the foreperson’s concerns more severely, saying that the man had said he was concerned for his safety after his fellow panelist talked about meeting him outside and added, “you don’t know me.”
“I don’t think the court is protecting this juror. Period,” Aidala said, going on to ask for a mistrial.
Apparently the foreperson is stubborn and said nothing would make him change his mind. That’s not a good thing to say, even if you’re thinking it!
The episode was the latest sign of strain among the jurors. On Friday, one of them asked to be excused because he felt another member of the group was being treated unfairly.
Weinstein’s lawyers asked unsuccessfully for a mistrial then, and again after the foreperson expressed his concerns Monday. The jury kept deliberating and went through Tuesday without sending any more messages about interpersonal tensions.
The seven female and five male jurors started their fifth day of deliberations Wednesday by re-hearing accuser Jessica Mann’s testimony that he raped her in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013. The group wrapped up Tuesday’s deliberations by asking to revisit that testimony.
Well, it doesn’t matter much, does it—even if Weinstein is found not guilty. He’s 73 and serving 48 years in California, so he’ll die in prison no matter what happens.
I’ve never been on a jury; I’ve been in the pool several times, but was never selected. In fact, I’ve never even been questioned; I just sit in the jury pool and they fill the jury with people before they get to me, Now, I guess, I’m too old to fulfill this civic duty, as Illinois has age limits.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are on the beat:
Szaron: Where are you going?
Hili: To check what this sunbeam is landing on.
In Polish:
Szaron: Gdzie idziesz?
Hili: Sprawdzić na co świeci ten promień.
*******************
From Jay, who gives this a progressive headline:
Inhumane! Thunberg, Kidnapped, Forced to Fly Economy in Back-Row, Non-Reclining Seat
From The Language Nerds (click to enlarge); what happens in different countries of Europe when you try to speak their language. I think France is wrong, at least in my experience,
From Stacy:
From Masih, another Iranian woman missing an eye. The English translation:
We are the daughters of White Wednesdays and stealthy freedoms, the voice of protest of the #Woman/Life/Freedom generation; Campaigns led by the courage of dear Masih Alinejad against compulsory hijab and in the direction of overthrowing The Islamic Republic was formed. We proudly stand in the front line against compulsory hijab. There is a sea of blood between us, the subversives, and the scoundrel Faezeh Hashemi. Certainly, a prince who defends his father’s crimes and a bloodthirsty government is a cursed person, but we are ordinary people and we gave our lives for it. Reformist, conservative, the whole story is over. No to compulsory hijab. #Woman/Life/Freedom
ما دختران چهارشنبههای سفید و آزادیهای یواشکی، صدای اعتراض نسل #زن_زندگی_آزادی هستیم؛
کمپینهایی که با شجاعت مسیح علینژاد عزیز علیه حجاب اجباری و در راستای براندازی
جمهوری اسلامی شکل گرفتند.
ما با افتخار در صف اول نه به حجاب اجباری ایستادهایم.
بین ما براندازان و فائزه هاشمی… pic.twitter.com/DYGIIvOFj5
The Norwegian Forest Cat is a breed of domestic cat originating in Northern Europe and it’s one of the oldest, as it’s believed to have been brought to Norway about 1000 CE by the Vikings.
Hamas filmed every terrible thing they did to our family. They broadcast it live to Tsachi’s wife’s social media. It was how many of us found out what horrors were happening.
One of the sad parts about having lived through the best era of rock music is watching the musicians drop away, one by one, mown down by the Grim Reaper. The latest musician to go, and a great one, was Brian Wilson, who just died at 82 (the date and cause of death wasn’t revealed).
His family announced the death on Instagram but did not say where or when he died, or state a cause. In early 2024, after the death of his wife, Melinda Wilson, business representatives for Mr. Wilson were granted a conservatorship by a California state judge, after they asserted that he had “a major neurocognitive disorder” and had been diagnosed with dementia.
I have to run, but I do want to list and put up versions of what I think are his best songs. The guy was a fricking musical genius. I’ll post five, but I haven’t had time to ponder, so this is a gut reaction. Feel free to add your own choices.
Caroline No (1966), performed at the Royal Festival Hall in London, England.
Don’t Worry Baby (1964), performed below in Japan in 2012. I think this is the best of the “early” Beach Boys songs, though it preceded God Only Knows by just two years.
And his best song, the one Paul McCartney called his favorite song: God Only Knows(1966). This is a fantastic and complex song that took days to record (you can find takes on YouTube). What amazes me is that Wilson had it all in his head to begin with.
There are so many more good songs, but no time to write about them. RIP, Brian.
Lagniappe: George Martin, a big fan, meets Wilson, who talks about how he writes his songs. I’ve watched this video a gazillion times.
