Tuesday: Hili dialogue

June 3, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, in this case June 3, 2025. It’s also Chimborazo Day, celebrating the Ecuadorian mountain that has this distinction.

Chimborazo Day celebrates the spot on the Earth that is closest to the moon and farthest from the center of the Earth. Chimborazo is an inactive volcano that is in the Cordillera Occidental range of the Andes Mountains in central Ecuador, and has an elevation of 20,565 feet. Although Chimborazo has a lower elevation than Mt. Everest, because of its spot near the Equator it is the farthest from the Earth’s center and closest to the moon. The Earth is not a perfect sphere, but rather it is an oblate spheroid. The Equatorial diameter is larger than the Polar diameter, and Chimborazo lies close to the former. Being that it lies on this Equatorial bulge, it sticks about a mile and a half farther into space than Mt. Everest.

Here’s the mountain as seen from Riobamba in Ecuador (I’ve also seen it):

Eduardo Navas, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Egg Day, World Cider Day, and National Chocolate Macaroon Day (the good kind, not the overpriced macaron).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 3 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*People in Boulder, Colorado, demonstrating peacefully for the Israeli hostages in Gaza, became the victims of a terrorist attack—a man with a flamethrower and Molotov cocktails.

A weekly demonstration in support of Israeli hostages erupted into chaos in Boulder, Colo., when a man using what was described as a “makeshift flamethrower” by officials attacked a group quietly marching down a pedestrian mall.

The group, a familiar one in Boulder, has walked through downtown regularly since late 2023, to remind the community of the hostages taken by Hamas in the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel. They often wear red, speak the names of the hostages, and sometimes sing. And they agree to return the next Sunday, same time, same place.

That ritual was shattered when the man, later identified as Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, yelled “Free Palestine” and threw an incendiary device into the crowd, according to Mark Michalek, the F.B.I. special agent in charge. Within moments, smoke and screams filled the air. Victims fell to the ground. Others tried to put out flames with discarded clothes.

The incident intensified fears as the latest attack on the Jewish community in the United States, coming after two Israeli embassy employees were shot and killed last month outside an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and the residence of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania was burned by an arsonist. . . .

  • Suspect arrested: The suspect, Mr. Soliman, was taken into custody after witnesses pointed him out, the chief said. He was later booked on multiple charges in the Boulder County Jail.

  • Footage of the attack: Video verified by the news agency Storyful showed a man, shirtless and holding two bottles, shouting while bystanders helped injured people nearby. Patches of grass in front of the courthouse were on fire.

  • A peaceful gathering: The victims were participating in Run for Their Lives, a weekly event that has brought attention to the Israeli hostages being held in Gaza since the Thanksgiving after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel. “Our walk has been nothing ever but peaceful, and this was a blatant act of antisemitism on the streets of Boulder,” said Rachel Amaru, a leader of the group.

Here’s a news video showing the perp, who faces multiple charges, including murder. Apparently he expected to die in the attack, but did not.

*Breaking (as of yesterday afternoon): The suspect, who has been charged with attempted murder, was in the U.S. illegally:

The suspect in the Boulder, Colo., attack on supporters of Israeli hostages in Gaza is an Egyptian citizen whose American tourist visa had expired, the Department of Homeland Security said on Monday. Investigators were delving into the background and motive of the suspect, who left eight people hospitalized with burns and other injuries.

The Boulder Police Department said that none of the victims had died in the attack.

The suspect, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, entered the United States from Egypt in August 2022 and stayed illegally after the visa expired in February 2023, said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Colorado Terrorist attack suspect, Mohamed Soliman, is illegally in our country,” Ms. McLaughlin said in a post on social media. She added that he had filed for asylum in September 2022, but gave no additional details.

The attack, which the authorities said they were investigating as an act of terrorism, occurred on Sunday when a man used a “makeshift flamethrower” to attack people who were marching peacefully in support of Israeli hostages being held in Gaza, officials said. Mr. Soliman, 45, was taken into custody after witnesses identified him as the assailant, and was booked on multiple felony charges in the Boulder County Jail. He was due in court Monday at 1:30 p.m. local time.

Two of those injured were in serious condition on Sunday, officials said.

You can be sure that Kristi Noem will make a television commercial touting the illegal dalliance in the U.S., but as we know from the D.C. shooting, whether or not someone is here illegally isn’t the main factor in these antisemitic crimes.

*Iran, bent on having nuclear weapons, has said it’s rejecting the U.S. proposal to loosen sanctions in return for Iran not making bombs.

Iran is poised to reject a U.S. proposal to end a decades-old nuclear dispute, an Iranian diplomat said on Monday, dismissing it as a “non-starter” that fails to address Tehran’s interests or soften Washington’s stance on uranium enrichment.

“Iran is drafting a negative response to the U.S. proposal, which could be interpreted as a rejection of the U.S. offer,” the senior diplomat, who is close to Iran’s negotiating team, told Reuters.

The U.S. proposal for a new nuclear deal was presented to Iran on Saturday by Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, who was on a short visit to Tehran and has been mediating talks between Tehran and Washington.

After five rounds of discussions between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, several obstacles remain.

Among them are Iran’s rejection of a U.S. demand that it commit to scrapping uranium enrichment and its refusal to ship abroad its entire existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium – possible raw material for nuclear bombs.

Tehran says it wants to master nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and has long denied accusations by Western powers that it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

“In this proposal, the U.S. stance on enrichment on Iranian soil remains unchanged, and there is no clear explanation regarding the lifting of sanctions,” said the diplomat, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Araqchi said Tehran would formally respond to the proposal soon. The U.S. State Department declined to comment.

Tehran demands the immediate removal of all U.S.-imposed curbs that impair its oil-based economy. But the U.S. says nuclear-related sanctions should be removed in phases.

Dozens of institutions vital to Iran’s economy, including its central bank and national oil company, have been blacklisted since 2018 for, according to Washington, “supporting terrorism or weapons proliferation”.

Now why on earth would Iran want to keep enriching uranium beyond that needed for “peaceful purposes”? More important, why does anybody believe what this terrorist nation of Islamist lying autocrats say?  Well, if they reject the U.S. proposal, I’d say that the chance are better than even that Israel would be given the go-ahead by the U.S. to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, perhaps even in consort with the U.S., which has bombs big enough to do serious damage.  Why does Iran want a bomb so badly? Guess!!

*Greg Lukianoff’s new article in The Atlantic (archived) is called “Trump attacks threaten much more than Harvard“; the subtitle is “If the government succeeds in bullying the riches university into submission, what institutions will be safe?”

On May 22, the Department of Homeland Security stripped Harvard University of its Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, instantly jeopardizing the visas of nearly 6,800 international students—27 percent of the student body.

But the Trump administration’s attack didn’t end there. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s letter announcing this move also doubled as a request for documents, instructing Harvard to deliver five years of video or audio of “any protest activity involving a non-immigrant student,” plus disciplinary files, before the ban will be reconsidered.

The administration justified its actions by invoking Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the federal law that prohibits colleges and universities from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. However, the proper enforcement of Title VI requires an investigation, an attempt to negotiate a resolution, a formal hearing, and 30 days’ notice to Congress before a single dollar is yanked.

The Trump administration took none of those steps before announcing the intended outcome.

This is one among many reasons these moves are so egregious and unconstitutional. The government’s demand that Harvard turn over five years of footage of protests—a time frame that, tellingly, is not limited to the Gaza protests since October 7 that got out of control or involved illegal behavior—is one of the more chilling things I’ve seen in my almost-25-year career defending free expression on college campuses. These actions threaten not just Harvard, but every institution of higher education on American soil. That’s true regardless of your criticisms of Harvard, and I have plenty of those.

Lukianoff has criticized Harvard strongly, as he does here, saying that it’s an “intellectual monoculture” (true). Nevertheless. . .

However, it would be dishonest to pretend that the federal government just woke up one day and decided to target this university out of nowhere. That needs to be acknowledged, even if the Trump administration’s actions are still egregiously unconstitutional and present a real threat to academic freedom on all campuses.

The administration’s attack on academic freedom will not end with Harvard. Noem has already said that this should “serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions.”

Fans of the Trump administration’s actions shrug at the stakes here. But they should remember that rights are indivisible: If the government can coerce the richest school in America without due process, it can crush a community college—or a civil-liberties nonprofit—without batting an eyelid.

This is the primary reason, if Harvard loses, the precedent that loss will set won’t stay in Cambridge. Republicans who cheer today should take a moment’s pause from their schadenfreude and recognize that they might lament tomorrow, when a different president decides that, say, Hillsdale College or a Southern Baptist seminary is “too extremist” to keep its tax-exempt status.

More than two decades of protecting free speech on college campuses has taught me many things, and one of them is that the sword is always double-edged. That’s why we need to fight its improper use, no matter which way it’s slicing.

Lukianoff is right, even though he fully realizes Harvard’s problems.  The University must not cave in to the government—as Columbia did.

*This is old-ish news but still ironic.  In an unprecedented move, Harvard revoked the tenure of a full professor of business, whose research—get this—was about people cheat and lie.  It was discovered that she manipulated data in her own papers, and that’s all she wrote. Literally.

Harvard Business School has revoked the tenure of Francesca Gino, once a star faculty member, after a lengthy university investigation that concluded she engaged in multiple instances of research misconduct. 

The penalty, confirmed by Harvard spokeswoman Sarah Kennedy-O’Reilly, is a rare termination in academia and ends Gino’s relationship with the school.

Tenure can be terminated only for cause or under extraordinary circumstances, according to the American Association of University Professors, an organization founded in 1915 that develops standards for higher education. Gino, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, is no longer listed on the Harvard Business School website.

Gino’s behavioral science studies examined topics like why people lie and cheat, and what factors, such as guilt, can influence behavior. She received tenure in 2014.

Harvard began to look into her work in 2021, after the trio of behavioral scientists behind the blog named Data Colada—Leif Nelson, Uri Simonsohn and Joe Simmons—scrutinized some of Gino’s work and flagged what they called irregularities in the data.

In June 2023, after completing its own probe and concluding that four papers Gino co-authored contained manipulated data, the university placed her on administrative leave and later began a review of her tenure. The probe had recommended she be fired.

Around the same time, the Data Colada bloggers published their criticisms of the four papers in a series of posts.

Three papers have since been retracted. The fourth had been retracted at the time it was reviewed by the Harvard investigation committee.

Gino sued the university and the bloggers in August 2023. She said Harvard’s investigation—led by three professors tapped by the school dean—was flawed as well as biased against her because of her gender, and that the Data Colada blog posts falsely accused her of fraud.

Gino’s defamation claims were dismissed in court, but her lawsuit against Harvard is still going on. Data Colada is a good organization.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is patrolling her beat:

Hili: Who has knocked over the bench?
A: Probably the wind.
Hili: Naughty wind.
In Polish:
Hili: Kto tę ławkę przewrócił?
Ja: Pewnie wiatr.
Hili: Niegrzeczny wiatr.

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

From Barry:

From Meanwhile in Canada:

From Things with Faces, a cat with a demon on its coat (maybe it’s an AI image?):

From Malcolm: a chill cat:

From Luana; Khelif is discovered to be a biological male, as suspected. Will they take away his Olympic gold medal in women’s boxing?

And Human Rights Watch is apparently not for women’s rights:

From my feed; a jerk interrupting people at their meals:

A sore loser in chess. The NYT story says this:

Chess world champion Gukesh Dommaraju beat Magnus Carlsen in a classical match for the first time, causing the world No. 1 to slam the table in frustration at the Norway Chess 2025 event.

The pieces toppled over as Carlsen, widely regarded as one of chess’ greatest players, punched the table after realising defeat to the 19-year-old.

Carlsen had led much of the game but lost momentum after sacrificing his knight in a blunder. Dommaraju, the reigning world champion, looked in shock afterwards, calling the win “lucky” and said “99 out of 100 times I would lose,” according to Chess.com.

Carlsen shouted “oh my God” before apologising to the Indian teenager, who left the table to compose himself after the momentous win. As he walked out of the room, Carlsen then patted Dommaraju on the back.

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish man lasted less than a month after arrival in Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-03T09:56:07.724Z

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, the eerie sounds of loons going wild:

VOLUME UP- these loons are absolutely bananas tonight

— Lauren in Saint Paul (@comobelladonna.bsky.social) 2025-06-01T03:23:21.818Z

And a hammerheaded fly. We have them in Drosophila, too, and the males use them when fighting head-to-head as a way of gauging body size.

WHERE MY FLY FREAKS AT!?🪰👀The Amazon is home to some WEIRD & WHACKY flies, such as this male Paragorgopis sp. 🌳Apart from looking like a hammerhead shark, we almost know nothing else about this genus of flies! There is still SO much to learn about the invertebrate world and it excites me so much!🤩

— Nick Volpe (@nvolpe.bsky.social) 2025-06-02T01:21:13.281Z

A psychedelic bubble

June 2, 2025 • 12:00 pm

Here’s an amazing video sent to me by reader Bryan Lepore. I didn’t quite understand what it showed, and he explained:

I think it is simply this:

1. Create a soap bubble from a soap solution that is sitting in a speaker/woofer.

2. Shine a light on the bubble. Here, you can see a ring of dots—that is simply a strip of LEDs in a ring. I have a light strip like this, and it produces unexpected results compared to an incandescent light.

3. Activate the speaker with different frequencies. This vibrates the bubble and the reflected image of the LED light strip.

… does that make sense?

Yep, sure does.

Once again, Covid in humans: from a lab leak or a wet market?

June 2, 2025 • 10:00 am

The argument continues about whether the virus causing covid originated in a wet market in Wuhan or as an accidental release from The Wuhan institute of Virology.  While several U.S. government agencies have agreed that the evidence is tilted towards a lab-leak origin, in my view the evidence is not dispositive on either side.

Matt Ridley, however, has been a hard-core advocate of the lab-leak theory, and even co-wrote a book with Alina Chan that, at the time, presented both sides and, as Ridley says below, he “remained unsure what happened at that stage.”

No longer. Since 2021, Ridley has promoted the lab-leak theory, which he does in a Torygraph article shown below (click on headline below to get the archived version). Apparently Ridley teamed up with another collaborator, P. Anton van der Merwe, and wrote a scientific paper laying out his evidence for a lab-leak origin of covid. I’ve put the paper’s title below, but you can read it at the same Torygraph site. The scientific argument was published in the newspaper rather than in a scientific journal because the journal rejected it. (No explanation is given.)

In the intro before he shows the paper (surely a first for the Torygraph), Ridley explains how this came about:

In 2024 I was approached by a single member of the editorial board of a respected biological journal with a request that I team up with a British biologist with relevant expertise and compose an academic paper setting out the case for the lab leak hypothesis: he hoped the journal would consider it. With the help of Anton van der Merwe of Oxford University, and advice from Alina Chan, I drafted such a paper. The paper was rejected; I suspect that it was another case of not wanting to rock the scientific boat.
Now I am posting this paper online for all to read. It was composed several months ago so one or two small new items may be missing, but nothing in it has proved wrong. It is written not in my normal style but in dry, scientific prose, with each statement backed up by a source, in the shape of nearly 100 end-note references, so that readers can check for themselves that we have represented the sources faithfully. It deserves to be available to people to read.
So the paper was commissioned, but the reviewers’ comments that led to rejection aren’t shown. Here’s the paper itself:

Here is some of the evidence Ridley and van der Merwe adduce:

  • Attempts to find evidence for a wet-market leak have been unsuccessful. The cases found around the wet market could simply reflect sampling bias, as the Chinese concentrated on looking for infected people in that area.
  • The Chinese have not been forthcoming with their data, and in fact locked one site with a catalogue of the sequenced but unpublished viruses they were working on
  • If a person got infected with a bat virus from Yunnan (one theory), that person would have infected others on his/her journey to Wuhan, but there is no such trail of infection
  • The Wuhan institute was doing “gain of function” experiments to increase the infectivity of SARS viruses (not the progenitor of the covid virus), but these did involve making viruses more transmissible.
  • There were plans to put “furin cleavage sites” into SARS viruses, sites that make it easier for the viruses spike protein to get into cells. The virus causing covid has such a site—12 nucleotides long— which Ridley and van der Merwe insist was inserted into the virus progenitor by humans. As Ridley notes:

When the pandemic began in January 2020, Shi Zhengli of the WIV published two articles, one co-authored with Shibo Jiang, yet in both of them failed to mention the furin cleavage site, by far the most remarkable feature of the new virus’s genome. This may have been an oversight, but by contrast, it was the furin cleavage site that immediately alarmed several western virologists on first seeing the genome of the virus and led to the drafting of the Proximal Origin paper. Messages released during a congressional investigation reveal that the authors of the paper were not themselves convinced that a laboratory origin could be ruled out, either during or after the writing of the paper

  • The containment of viruses at Wuhan for the SARS experiments was Level 2, which American scientists think was far too lax for such potentially dangerous experiments (this itself, of course, is not great evidence for a lab leak).

Here’s Ridley and van der Merwe’s conclusion:

In only one city in the world were sarbecoviruses subject to gain-of-function experiments on a large scale involving human airway cells and humanised mice at inappropriate safety levels: Wuhan. At only one time in history was research to create novel sarbecoviruses with enhanced infectivity through furin cleavage under consideration: 2018 onwards. The surprising failure to find better evidence for a natural spillover, and the lack of transparency from the Chinese scientists, is therefore best explained by positing a laboratory accident involving a live virus experiment as the cause of the Covid pandemic and attempts to cover it up.

This is a Bayesian conclusion, arguing that the total weight of the evidence supports a lab-leak prior. And it sure sounds conclusive, but I’m wondering why the paper was rejected (they don’t say what journal they submitted it to).

Further, a number of virologists I respect either adhere to the alternative wet-market theory or remain agnostic.  When I asked a colleague some questions about this, he/she said this:

All the **data** (including new stuff) points to a natural origin. It might have been a leak, but all the evidence that has been obtained points in the direction of a spillover in the wet market. Not everyone who disagrees with the prevailing view of something is Galileo.

And then I asked “What about the furin cleaveage site?” This was something that Nobel laureate David Baltimore considered almost conclusive evidence for the lab-leak theory, but walked it back a bit:

The virologist David Baltimore commented that “these features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2,” later clarifying that “you can’t distinguish between the two origins from just looking at the sequence” ().

h/t: Christopher for the Torygraph archive.

Spot the flies!

June 2, 2025 • 9:00 am

Reader Gregory sent us what may be the hardest “spot-the” photo ever.  There are two flies in this photo, but I’ll let Gregory describe the scene:

While kayak camping on the Kansas River this weekend, we were entertained by the energetic searching of a spider wasp (Hymenoptera: Pompilidae) seeking a spider to paralyze and oviposit on. However, following the spider were small flies, which turn out to be satellite flies, a subfamily of Sarcophagidae (flesh flies). The larvae of the flies are kleptoparasites and feed on prey captured by solitary wasps like the spider wasp. So the adult female flies were following the spider wasp to lay their eggs on the paralyzed spider and use it for their young.
There are two flies in the photo.

Good luck. If you find them, just say so in the comments but don’t tell people where they are! As I said, this will take some searching, so I suggest you enlarge the photo.   The reveal will be at 11 a.m. Chicago time.

Readers’ wildlife photographs

June 2, 2025 • 8:15 am

Math professor and Hero of Intellectual Freedom Abby Thompson of UC Davis has sent us some tidepool photos, along with a few birds. Her captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The first picture is of a pair of foolish birds from my back porch, followed by some Northern California tidepool pictures from late April and May.   The tides the last week of May were among the lowest of the year, occurring at a very unfortunate time of day (near dawn) for those who prefer a leisurely morning, like me.    As usual I got help from people on inaturalist for some of the IDs.

I don’t understand how mourning doves ever manage to reproduce. Here’s a pair pondering building a nest on the extremely wobbly fan hanging from the trellis over our porch. I’ve also seen them trying to nest on the peak of the roof and on a very narrow garden railing.  They give new meaning to the word birdbrain.    I strung up a nice, spacious, secure basket for them right near the fan, which they totally ignored.   They eventually gave up on the fan; they’ve probably found a nice spot smack in the middle of a parking lot somewhere.

On to the tidepools:

Thorlaksonius subcarinatus: This is a species of amphipod, which (I feel like I keep saying this) is tiny, just a bright orange speck. Amphipods are like isopods (the roly-polys in your garden) except they’re flattened vertically instead of horizontally.  The Thorlaksonius part is for sure, the species seems likely correct:

Liparis florae (tidepool snailfish).  About 2” long.  The second picture is a close-up of its weird eye:

Rostanga pulchra (nudibranch). This species eats a bright orange sponge, on which it becomes practically invisible:

(Family) Sabellidae (feather duster worm) It’s not possible even to determine genus from this photo:

Phidiana hiltoni (nudibranch):

I took a picture of the brown-and-white-striped worm (Tubulanus sexlineatus) and only noticed afterward that the photo includes both a nudibranch (Coryphella trilineata) to the right of the worm and a sea spider (Pycnogonum stearnsi) to the left. Tidepools are crowded places:

A little jellyfish, Polyorchis haplus (I think). This one was stranded on the sand, but when plopped into a small pool it started zipping around. The red spots are eyespots:

Acanthodoris nanaimoensis (nudibranch). I don’t see this species very often, and it’s a knock-out:

 

Camera info:  Mostly Olympus TG-7 in microscope mode, pictures taken from above the water.

Monday: Hili dialogue

June 2, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the first full “work” week of June: it’s Monday, June 2, 2025, and National Rotisserie Chicken Day. The best deal, of course, is at Costco, where you get a four-pound bird for five bucks!:

It’s also I Love My Dentist Day (xoxo to Dr. Baer), National Rocky Road Day, and the Jewish holiday of Shavuot.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 2 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

This just in: eight people were torched in an attack while supporting the Israeli hostages still in Gaza. In a demonstration on Boulder, Colorado, an apparently pro-Palestinian suspect firebombed the demonstrators and used a makeshift flamethrower to burn them. Eight people were injured, Another day, another attack on Jews. More on this in tomorrow’s Nooz.

*Here’s a morally fraught question: “Do patients without a terminal illness have the right to die?”  (archived here).  The intro to the story involves Paula Ritchie, a 52-year-old Canadian woman in intractable and untreatable pain after a concussion two years ago.  Canada has recently passed a Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program intended for people like her.

The pain was worse than anything she had ever felt, and Paula had always been in pain. Over the years, she had collected varied and sometimes competing diagnoses: fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pain, chronic migraine. Also bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, substance-use disorder (marijuana). Paula told a friend that a veterinarian would put a dog down for feeling better than she did.

In the months after the concussion, she took Percocet, for joint pain, and Lyrica, for nerve pain, and Ativan, for anxiety. She took pills for vertigo and insomnia, and she tried a drug called Lamotrigine: an anti-epileptic that is also used as a mood stabilizer. When that didn’t work, she spent money that she didn’t really have on chiropractors and acupuncturists and reiki energy healers. Everything just made her dizzier, and nothing touched the pain.

She tried to suffocate herself using plastic bags, but failed.

Some of the coverage was about a recent expansion to the legislation. While MAID was initially restricted to patients with terminal conditions, the law in Canada was amended, in 2021, to include people who were suffering but who weren’t actually dying: people like Paula, who might have years or decades of life ahead of them.

Wonnacott [a doctor who is Paula’s MAID assessor] already believed that Paula met most of the criteria for MAID, on the basis of her neurological disorder and lingering symptoms. Still, he wondered if there was anything he could do to make her life better, or at least good enough that she wouldn’t want to die. In particular, Wonnacott wanted to know if Paula would consider seeing a neuropsychiatrist, a specialist who worked at the intersection of chronic pain and brain injury.

“I cannot get through a day,” Paula said. “It’s physical torture.” She wanted to know at what point she was allowed to refuse more treatment.

Why the bill was amended to include people like Paula:

The early paradigmatic cases were people in their 70s and 80s with terminal cancer: educated, affluent men and women who didn’t want to die slowly, perhaps in pain, perhaps slipping in and out of consciousness for hours or days. In one poll, an overwhelming 86 percent of Canadians were found to support MAID’s legalization.

But clinicians who agreed to assess dying patients were visited by other kinds of patients too: people with chronic pain or spinal-cord injuries or slow-moving, early-stage neurological disorders, like Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis — people who were suffering terribly but who weren’t dying of their conditions in any immediate way. MAID assessors would have to tell these patients that they didn’t qualify.

At the same time, Canadian newspapers were publishing stories about people who were denied MAID and then went on to take their own lives, alone or fearful. One was Cecilia Bernadette Chmura, a 59-year-old with chronic pain who killed herself with a handful of hoarded pills, crushed in a coffee grinder, and whose husband was taken into custody after her death. Her husband had insisted that his wife die in her own bed, in his arms, instead of alone in a motel room, as she initially suggested to protect him from prosecution. (He was not charged.)

Paula qualified, and a doctor gave her a lethal injection. It’s a heartbreaking story, but the legislation is good.

She imagined that when Wonnacott reached for the syringe, she would flinch. But Paula was calm and still as the drugs went in. “I don’t feel anything,” she whispered.

“You will.”

“Oh, wow,” she said. “This is horrible. I’m just so sorry.” Paula coughed as if she might vomit. Deep, guttural hacks. After a few moments, her body relaxed. A wet tissue fell from her hands. Her skin slowly turned a pale white.

Wonnacott pressed his stethoscope to Paula’s chest. “It’s over.”

I agree that, with the assent of doctors and psychiatrists, people should have the right to get assisted suicide if they just can’t bear living any more, and if they’ve tried all available remedies. But the article details many people who disagree with this—some of them religious.   Some ministers whom Paula asked to sit with her while she died simply refused. How callous!  In the future, when people realize that MAID for such people is the merciful thing to do, this will become widespread.

*The WaPo reports how Trump is starting to dismantle cases of discrimination based on characteristics like race, and sex:

For decades, the federal government has used data analysis to ferret out race and sex discrimination, winning court cases and reaching settlements in housing, education, policing and across American life. Now the Trump administration is working to unwind those same cases.

In recent weeks, the Justice Department backed out of an agreement with an Atlanta bank accused of systematically discouraging Black and Latino home buyers from applying for loans. The Education Department terminated an agreement with a South Dakota school district where Native American students were disciplined at higher rates than their White peers. And federal prosecutors have dropped several racial discrimination reform agreements involving state and local police departments — including that of Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered by an officer in 2020.

The Justice Department now is reviewing its entire docket and has already dismissed or terminated “many” cases that were “legally unsupportable” and a product of “weaponization” under the Biden administration, said Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“We will fully enforce civil rights laws in a way that satisfies the ends of justice, not politicization,” she said in a statement to The Washington Post.

The review includes cases and reform agreements forged after years-long investigations that the administration says lacked justification. Civil rights experts estimate that dozens of discrimination cases involving banks, landlords, private employers and school districts could face similar action.

“What we’re seeing is an attempt by the Trump administration to really dismantle a lot of the core tools that we use to ensure equality in the country,” said Amalea Smirniotopoulos, senior policy counsel and co-manager of the Equal Protection Initiative at the Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that has long advocated for the civil rights of Black Americans and other minorities.

. . .At the center of this effort is “disparate impact analysis,” which holds that neutral policies can have discriminatory outcomes even if there was no intent to discriminate. The legal standard stems from Griggs v. Duke Power, the landmark 1971 Supreme Court decision that became a staple of civil rights litigation. In that case, attorneys relied on statistical evidence to show how standardized testing prevented Black employees in North Carolina from advancing at the energy company.

The legal theory has been consistently recognized by the Supreme Court, written into federal regulations and enshrined into employment law by Congress. But President Donald Trump declared it unconstitutional in April, issuing an executive order that kicked off an intense review of civil rights regulations, enforcement actions and settled cases.

At first the Griggs decision would seem insupportable given that colleges are allowed to discriminate against applicants if their test scores are too low.  Isn’t that a neutral policy that leads to a discriminatory outcome? And, in fact, the Griggs case did involve a test. However, I can see its point if the “neutral” measure really has nothing to do with the qualifications for actually doing a job.  Still, I’m a bit confused why the Court urges colleges to use neutral (race free) measures to discriminate, but prevents it in the private sector.

*The Wall Street Journal notes that Harvard has become a training school for Chinese Communists.

U.S. schools—and one prestigious institution in particular—have long offered up-and-coming Chinese officials a place to study governance, a practice that the Trump administration could end with a new effort to keep out what it says are Chinese students with Communist Party ties.

For decades, the party has sent thousands of mid-career and senior bureaucrats to pursue executive training and postgraduate studies on U.S. campuses, with Harvard University a coveted destination described by some in China as the top “party school” outside the country.

Alumni of such programs include a former vice president and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s top negotiator in trade talks with the first Trump administration.

In an effort announced Wednesday by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. authorities will tighten criteria for visa applications from China and “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”

The statement didn’t say how the Trump administration would assess Communist Party ties or what degree of connection would result in revocation of visas. In China, party membership is widely seen as helpful for career advancement—in government and the private sector—and is typically a prerequisite for officials seeking high office.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Thursday that the U.S. move “seriously damaged the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese students.”

Again I’m in a quandary here. I have no beef with us training Chinese students, and I know how hard it is to identify them as members of the Communist Party. On the other hand, Chinese Communists are basically our enemy. On the third hand, even members of the Party might stay in the U.S., benefitting us, or benefit China in ways that could still benefit us. Readers can (and should) weigh in here.

*As I reported before, Iran has (duh!) continued to secretly enrich uranium to build a bomb, all the while duping morons (e.g., Biden, Trump, and basically all the world) into agreeing that the enriched uranium was for “peaceful purposes.” Now we know the real reason: they’re making bombs!

Iran has continued to produce highly enriched uranium at a pace of roughly one nuclear weapon’s worth a month over the past three months despite talks between Washington and Tehran on a new nuclear deal, the United Nations atomic agency said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a confidential report circulated to member states that Iran had grown its stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium to 408.6 kilograms from 274.8 kilograms in early February, an increase of around 50%. The Wall Street Journal viewed a copy of the report.

That means Iran has enough highly enriched uranium for roughly 10 nuclear weapons, based on IAEA measures of the minimum fissile material required, up from at least six at the time of the last report.

U.S. officials say it could take Iran less than two weeks to convert this highly enriched uranium into enough weapons-grade 90% fissile material for a nuclear weapon.

Iran says its nuclear work is purely peaceful. The U.S. says that Tehran hasn’t decided to build a nuclear bomb but that it would need only a few months to assemble one.

Yet even now Trump is still bargaining with Iran to cease its bomb-making activities, and says that we’re “close to a deal.”

US President Donald Trump on Friday reiterated his belief that Washington was “fairly close” to reaching a nuclear deal with Iran.

“I think we have a chance of making a deal with Iran,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

“They don’t want to be blown up. They would rather make a deal, and I think that could happen in the not-too-distant future,” he continued, adding that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.

That’s a laugh!  He’s been bamboozled just like every other recent administration.  We should stop bargaining and collaborate with Israel to bomb their nuclear facilities, or at least give them a credible thread and a final warning.  If there’s no deal, Iran becomes a nuclear state and Israel is doomed.

*And from the reliable AP “oddities section,” we learn that Brazilians have a craze for lifelike “reborn” dolls. It’s insane!

Videos featuring emotional moments with hyper-realistic baby dolls have sparked both online fascination and political debate in Brazil, with lawmakers even bringing the lifelike dolls into legislatures.

Influencers have staged situations such as birth simulations and strolls in shopping malls with the hand-crafted baby figures, known as “reborn” dolls, creating videos that have gone viral.

In Rio de Janeiro, the city council has passed a bill honoring those who make the lifelike dolls, pending Mayor Eduardo Paes’ signature. Meanwhile, legislators elsewhere across the country have debated fines for those seeking medical help for such dolls, following a video allegedly showing a woman taking one to a hospital.

Here’s a video about them. Oy! These are the updated, AI version of Cabbage Patch dolls:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is doing entomology:

Andrzej: What are you looking at so intently?
Hili: Some little thing is climbing to the top of a blade of grass.
In Polish:
Ja: Czemu się tak przyglądasz?
Hili: Mały wspina się na sam szczyt źdźbła trawy.
And a picture of both Szaron and Baby Kulka:

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

From CinEmma:

From Things With Faces: a ghoulish brew:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy. I think they mean “Angus.”

Masis is still quiet. Here’s something Martina Navratilova tweeted; more women cheated out of medals:

From Malcolm. Look at those reaction times!

From Luana:

Two from my feed.  This is an intriguing one:

A Narnia entrance:

One I inserted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First: AI videos:

AI reality: if it’s online we can’t believe our eyes or our earsThis isn’t the future, this is now thanks to Gemini / Google’s Veo 3

— Katherine T. Tyson (@katherinettyson.bsky.social) 2025-06-01T12:48:36.228Z

Matthew says, “Look at the wings.”  Yep, they’re homologous to our hands.

Fliegender Flughund #travelphotography#indonesia flying fox #NaturePhotography

— Mathias 🕊️🦋 (@swaninga.bsky.social) 2025-05-26T17:20:13.544Z