Greg Lukianoff on the erosion of free speech in Europe

January 16, 2026 • 10:15 am

I’m not sure that the readers here, though savvier than those on most Internet sites, fully realize how dire the free-speech situation is in Europe. Germany, France, and, especially the UK are rife with “hate speech” laws that would not be be passed in the U.S. because they violate the First Amendment.  And yet there are still calls in America to limit free speech.  One example includes those people who argue that we should ban statements like “Globalize the intifada” because, somewhere down the line, such statements may contribute to someone’s harming of Jews.  But of course all hate speech is of that nature: it may, by demonizing a group or even questioning their principles, lead some loon to go after people (it’s usually minorities at issue, but no group is immune, nor is any religion).

In the post below on his site The Eternally Radical Idea, Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), calls attention to the growing suppression of speech in Europe, giving lots of examples. He does this to warn Americans that we cannot allow ourselves go down that route, and to remind us why “hate speech” banned in Europe should never be banned in America.

I remind you that Lukianoff is a liberal and an atheist, so when he defends the promulgation of religious and conservative ideas that most of us find odious, he’s only adhering to the First Amendment. FIRE, because it promotes free speech, is sometimes demonized by blockheads as a “right-wing organization”. It’s far from it. Promoting freedom of speech is a liberal, humanistic, and democratic idea.

The article is long, but I recommend reading it (it’s free if you click on the link below) to buttress your commitment to free speech and to learn how Europe is convincing itself to punish people who wouldn’t be punished in America. I’ll give extensive quotes in case you’re too busy to read. (But if that’s the situation, you need to chill!)

Lukianoff begins by giving kudos to Kristen Waggoner, president of the conservative religious group Alliance Defending Freedom. Despite their political differences, Waggoner and Lukianoff share a commitment to free speech, and Waggoner won (as did Lukianoff last year) the Richard D. McLellan Prize for Advancing Free Speech and Expression.  Although Lukianoff and Waggoner differ on many isssues, her acceptance speech apparently prompted Greg to write this article.

In what follows, my own headings and comments are flush left, while quotes from the article (or other sources) are indented.

Why America should not crack down on ‘hate speech” and maintain our present construal of free speech

Here’s the thing: censors always think their motives are pure. From inquisitors to commissars to modern “hate speech” units, they all believe they’re preventing some existential harm. That has never made it okay to strip people of their basic rights, and it doesn’t change the fact that this is precisely what they’re doing.

In the United States, we (still) recognize that. In the EU and the UK, they increasingly do not. And that’s more dangerous to how we treat speech in the US than the abuses that happen in places like China or Iran, because we aren’t likely to turn into China or Iran. But we may turn into the UK, or Germany, or Finland, where they purport to maintain their belief in free expression but have rationalized it into a corner where it can do very little good. So while we’re never shocked at horrifying censorship in China or Russia, we should continue to be shocked by the retreat from liberalism that we’re seeing in the Anglosphere and in Europe. We also need to be vocal in opposing it, because it really could happen here.

If the forces arrayed on the left have their way, we will look a lot more like the UK. And if the forces on the right have their way, we will look a lot more like Hungary. Either way, we won’t be recognizably American.

. . . .Equal citizens in a free society have a right to:

  • Object to immigration policy.
  • Quote their religious texts on sexuality.
  • Say “there are two sexes.”
  • Insult a rapist or abuser in a private text or message without becoming the one the state prosecutes.
  • Quote the Bible.

If you can be arrested, prosecuted, fined, or professionally shattered for any of that, you are not living under free speech in the sense the First Amendment enshrines.

The Supreme Court has a blunt way of putting this: Speech on matters of public concern is “at the heart of the First Amendment’s protection,” because speech about public affairs is “the essence of self-government.” In other words, we don’t protect speech because it’s polite. We protect it because we are supposed to be citizens — voters — whose judgments matter. And voters can’t do their job if the state trains them to speak in euphemism, or only in whispers, or not at all.

And if we, in the United States, start to lose faith in that — if we decide that the European model is more “civilized,” that being spared offensive opinions is more important than retaining equal rights — then the strongest bulwark for free expression left in the world will have fallen.

A decent way to measure whether you’re actually free is to ask what you’re allowed to say about the subjects that matter most: rape, child rape scandals, violent crime, immigration policy, religious doctrine, war, and even basic claims about sex and the human body. If you have to watch your language on questions that cut to the very heart — because the wrong phrasing can bring the police, a prosecutor, or a professional tribunal — then you’re not a free and equal citizen in the ordinary sense. You’re a subject being managed.

And, once again (we can’t hear this too often), we learn why free speech was instituted by the Founders:

Here’s another radical idea: you are an equal citizen, not a subject. You get to hear ideas, weigh evidence, change your mind, or not, without the government protecting you from other people’s thoughts. If your rights end where someone’s feelings begin, you don’t have free speech of any kind. China is just as willing to let you say things that don’t offend anyone; it’s just more honest about whose feelings are really determining when the cops show up at your door.

Probably the most important point to make here is that, if you have even one example of someone being arrested, getting a visit from the cops, or being charged for taking an unpopular position on one of the biggest political hot-button issues in a society — immigration, crime, religious fundamentalism, religious expression — they will not trust what they hear in the media, or even what they hear in society, as being genuine or authentic.

This leads to a genuine epistemic crisis, where people cannot tell what their countrymen honestly think, or what the world actually looks like in terms of public opinion and perception — and that is a disaster. People in control, or at the top of society, can be such fools in thinking that if they could just better control the opinions people express, popular opinion will go right along assuming the preferred ruling class’ position is correct. But that relies on a model in which people are even stupider than ruling class people often assume they are.

What happens instead is people conclude that no one is saying what they really think, and that the media, politicians, and even their fellow citizens cannot be counted on to show what they really think — because if there’s even the slightest risk of being arrested or punished for it, who would?

That’s what a chilling effect is, and it is poison to any society — particularly a democratic one, or at least nominally democratic one.

Lukianoff concludes that Europe, with its bans on hate speech, is going down the wrong road, for those bans chill you from speaking up, and, by quashing what we know about other people’s views, put democracy in a vise.  I agree. The examples that he gives are telling.

What’s happening in Europe.

Professor and philosopher Peter Singer talks about the “expanding circle”: the way moral concern spreads over time to include more groups — slaves, women, racial minorities, LGBTQ people, and so on. That’s real, and often good.

But there’s a dark twist. In much of Europe and the UK, we’ve now used that expanding circle logic to shrink the circle of free speech. We say, “To show compassion for vulnerable groups, we must criminalize speech that offends them. It’s not really censorship if we do it to protect people.”

From the UK:

If you want to see what speech policing looks like in a country that still considers itself a liberal democracy, look at the UK.

Between the Communications Act of 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act of 1988, British police have broad power to arrest people for messages that are “grossly offensive,” “annoying,” or likely to cause “distress” or “anxiety.” Recent statistics show more than 12,000 arrests in 2023 for online speech — over 30 people a day. (For a sense of scope, If the US were to arrest people at the same rate per capita, it would be 60,000 a year.)

Behind that number are real people in real handcuffs.

A 51-year-old army veteran named Darren Brady shared a meme that arranged pride flags into a swastika to make a heavy-handed point about authoritarian tendencies in parts of the LGBT movement. Hampshire Police turned up at his house, arrested him, and, in a bodycam clip, an officer calmly explains that someone has “been caused … anxiety” by his post, and that’s why he’s being taken away. He was offered a “hate awareness” course in lieu of prosecution — ideological homework as punishment. Only after national outrage did the police back down and scrap the course.

Catholic commentator Caroline Farrow was making dinner for her kids when Surrey officers came through her front door in 2022, arrested her on suspicion of “malicious communications” and harassment over a feud with a trans activist, and seized phones and laptops — including her children’s devices. She was taken into custody, questioned for hours, then released without charge.

Here’s one of the most surreal cases I’ve seen: a 34-year-old mother of four, Elizabeth Kinney, who says she was beaten badly enough by a man to require hospital treatment. In private text messages to a friend afterwards, she called him a “faggot.” The friend reported her, and prosecutors charged her under the Malicious Communications Act. She pled guilty and was convicted of a homophobic offense, receiving an enhanced community order, unpaid work, and rehabilitation days. As of the last reporting, no one had been charged for the assault.

Note that being able to call someone a “faggot” is legal in America, yet also outs the person who says it.  One could argue, I suppose, that letting people use names like that could, in the future, promote violence against gays. But that’s not a good enough reason to prevent this kind of name-calling, odious as it is.  Lukianoff also argues against the tendency in the UK to “avoid recording or analyzing ethnicity in organized child-abuse cases,” for such recording could presumably promote demonisation of ethnic groups.  But he claims this is misguided, since suppressing that information not only fails to deter predators in a group, but conveys information that could be essential to the safety of young girls. Frankly, I don’t see why recording ethnicity (which also occurs in the U.S.) should be formally or informally banned, as it’s useful not only for “grooming gangs”, but for compiling statistics important to society. I believe John McWhorter recently discussed how Americans tend to drastically overestimate the number of African-American shot by white police officers. One example:

This media fixation on identity politics, alongside pre-existing misperceptions, ultimately skews the public’s sense of reality. The number of unarmed black men killed by police in the Washington Post’s own database in 2019 was between 13 and, using a very broad definition of “unarmed”, 27. Yet nearly half of “very liberal” Americans think the number is between 1,000 and 10,000. There were over twice as many unarmed whites killed by police as blacks but, as John McWhorter, author of the new book Woke Racism notes, this never makes the news because it doesn’t fit the narrative of white racial violence against African-Americans.

By withholding information from the public so as note to pollute a favored narrative, the press promotes misinformation that exacerbates racial tensions.

From Germany:

Germany, because it may have learned some of the wrong lessons from its history, has long had strict speech laws — among them, bans on Nazi symbols and Holocaust denial. But the logic has spread.

In Berlin, police raided the apartment of American novelist and political satirist C.J. Hopkins in November, seizing his computer and interrogating him on suspicion of spreading pro-Nazi propaganda. The basis for the accusation was a book critical of COVID-19 policies, its cover using a swastika-and-facemask image as political satire.

That’s it. That’s the “Nazi material.” Never mind that its use is to make an unflattering comparison between modern health policy and national socialism. Nobody who can read is going to look at the book cover and say, “Well, I was just in favor of mandatory masking, but now that I see this book cover, maybe death camps are a good idea.” Hopkins had already been prosecuted in 2023 for tweeting the image of the book cover.

Another case that deserves more international attention involves a group of nine young men who gang-raped a 15-year-old girl in Hamburg. They were convicted but because they were underage, all but one avoided jail time. Later, a woman in Hamburg sent furious WhatsApp messages to one of the perpetrators, calling him things like a “disgusting rapist pig.” The convicted rapist complained and the woman who sent the messages was prosecuted for insult and defamation, convicted, and ordered to spend a weekend in jail.

Yet another German case: politician Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, from the right-wing AfD, posted about gang rapes involving Afghan men and suggested that welcoming more Afghan refugees risked more such crimes. She referenced real statistics about Afghan suspects. Courts convicted her of Volksverhetzung, “incitement to hatred,” and an appeals court upheld the conviction, saying her post violated the “human dignity” of Afghans by presenting them as dangerous sex criminals.

From Finland (!):

Kristen’s speech in November started with a case from Finland, and once you know the facts, it’s hard to shake.

Päivi Räsänen is not some anonymous troll. She’s a physician, a mother, a grandmother, a long-serving member of Parliament, and a former interior minister. She’s also a conservative Lutheran.

In 2019, she posted a tweet criticizing her church leadership for officially supporting Helsinki Pride. Attached was a photo of Romans 1:24-27 — the standard “traditionalist” passage condemning same-sex relations. Years before, in 2004, she had written a short church pamphlet explaining the Lutheran view of sex and marriage. She also did a radio debate along the same lines.

For that, Finland’s Prosecutor General charged her with “agitation against a minority group” — essentially “hate speech” — under a section of the criminal code that sits next to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola was charged too, for publishing her pamphlet.

Police interrogated Räsänen for hours about her beliefs. Prosecutors pored over her pamphlet and sermons line by line, asking which parts of the Bible she intends to believe. She faced the possibility of fines and a criminal record.

She won. In 2022, a district court acquitted her unanimously. In 2023, the Court of Appeal acquitted her unanimously again.

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn’t, but before we finish, I want to point out that being visited by police and interrogated, even if you’re not convicted are jailed, are still things that will chill your speech.  Räsänen’s ordeal, in fact, continues:

Instead, prosecutors appealed again. In 2025, the Supreme Court of Finland agreed to hear the case. The state is still arguing that quoting Romans 1 and defending historic Christian doctrine about sexuality can be a criminal offense.

Switzerland (!):

It is not an especially controversial idea that sex can be usually determined by examining skeletal remains, even if there are exceptions. Not so in Switzerland, where Emanuel Brünisholz, a musical instrument repairman, was sentenced to ten days in jail for an anti-trans Facebook comment. In a 2022 reply to a member of the Swiss National Council (sort of their House of Representatives), Brünisholz wrote: “If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you’ll only find men and women based on their skeletons. Everything else is a mental illness promoted through the curriculum.”

Brünisholz was arrested in 2023 and convicted in December 2024, where he was fined 500 Swiss francs. After exhausting his appeals, he refused to pay on principle, announcing in September of 2025 that he would be serving his alternative punishment — ten days in jail — last month.

I’ve discussed the Swiss case before. If you have a whole skeleton, biological sex can be determined with 96%-98% accuracy, which falls to 90% if you have a skull with lower jaw. The diagnosis is not complete, of course, but if you look at skeletons 200 years old, the guy is pretty much right—the exceptions whose sex can’t be determined are rare. Note as well that there were no drug or surgical interventions back then that would modify skeletons, and even today this is something that should be investigated only in trans people, as LGBQ people undergo no modification of their bones.

The point is that jailing somebody for saying this is heinous, even if the guy were wrong about bones. (I’m not dealing with the “mental illness” comment, which, though odious, should not be illegal.) Because if he were wrong about skeltons, the proper remedy is counterspeech and criticism, not fines and jail time.

Wikipedia gives a long list of other countries with hate-speech laws—laws that can get you prosecuted, fined, or jailed for criticizing religion, ethnicity, gender identity, and even class.  Note that the “United States” entry says this:

The United States does not have hate speech laws, because the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.There are categories of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment, such as speech that calls for imminent violence upon a person or group.

Let’s keep it that way.

Reader’s wildlife photos

January 16, 2026 • 8:15 am

Well, folks, we’re plumb out of readers’ contributions, and it makes me weep bitterly that we get so few contributions.  If you have good photos, you know what to do.

Fortunately, I am able to plunder the photos of Scott Ritchie from Cairns, Australia, whose Facebook page is here. (Thanks to Scott for his kind permission to repost.) I’m adding the second installment of Scott’s favorite photos of 2025; his first installment is here. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are some of my favourite pics from 2025. It was a big year, with trips to Florida, Costa Rica, Western Australia and Victoria/NSW. And I had a publication in Australia Birdlife showcasing the lovely Rainbow Bee-eaters at a local cemetery https://www.calameo.com/read/004107895fe9d41dc697d….
I hope you enjoy them.  Have a happy New Year all!

 

Latin America is a home of hummingbirds. Hear a Green-breasted Mango [Anthracothorax prevostii] feeds on a torch ginger. I just love the bright colors that do remind me of a mango:

Another lovely hummer, the fiery throated hummingbird [Panterpe insignis]:

Not all hummingbirds are colorful. But I just love the pose of this Long-billed Hermit [Phaethornis longirostris] as it came in to feed the torch ginger:

Costa Rica has many colorful songbirds. People think tanagers and warblers. This bird is a Golden-browed Chlorophonia [Chlorophonia callophrys],  You gotta love bird names:

This Ornate Hawk-eagle [Spizaetus ornatus] caused quite a stir among the twitchers at our lodge. You can see why, it’s quite an amazing bird:

Another truly magnificent bird was the King Vulture [Sarcoramphus papa], coming into land and feed on your corpse:

Back to far north Queensland. I got this Gray Plover [Pluvialis squatarola] in flight as he shook himself off after a refreshing bath: [JAC: Do enlarge this one!]

Double-eyed Fig-parrots [Cyclopsitta diophthalma] are one of my favorite birds. And green ants are one of my most despised insects. I think the fig parrot would agree:

Here’s a stampede of Chestnut-breasted Mannikins [Lonchura castaneothorax]. I call this a WTF moment, as a bird in the middle got caught a bit off guard:

A Great Egret [Ardea alba], enjoying a prawn for breakie. Cairns Esplanade:

We get many shorebirds to the Cairns Esplanade foreshore in our summer. Before they head back to Russia, China, Japan, even Alaska, they color up into their breeding plumage, and hope to attract a mate. These two Bar-tailed Godwits [Limosa lapponica] are coloring up very nicely:

“Will you play ball with me?” Nordmann’s Greenshank [Tringa guttifer], a.k.a. Nordy, is a very rare bird that has visited Cairns for six years running. He’s the only one of his kind here. I often wonder if he’s a bit lonely:

Friday: Hili dialogue

January 16, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the end of the a frigid week in Chicago: it’s Friday, January 16, 2026, and National Fig Newton Day. Called “fig rolls” in the UK, the most famous U.S. version is from Nabisco, which has trademarked the name. Here’s some Fig Newton Trivia from Wikipedia:

In the 1939 promotional short Mickey’s Surprise Party, produced by Walt Disney for Nabisco’s exhibit at that year’s World’s Fair, Mickey Mouse proclaims the Fig Newton to be his favorite cookie.

And here’s the cartoon (“produced for the National Biscuit Company”).  The Fig Newton bit appears at 4:52, saving the day after Minnie burns her homemade cookies, which are accidentally mixed with popcorn.

It’s also International Hot and Spicy Food Day, National Quinoa Day, and Religious Freedom Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*If Trump continues to go after Greenland, he’ll be called a Nazi even more often, as he seems to be seeking Lebensraum.  And yes, Trump appears to be serious about acquiring Greenland. But the Greenlanders and Denmark aren’t having it. (Article is archived here.)n First from the NYT:

But if President Trump gets his way and, as he has insisted, takes over Greenland “whether they like it or not,” it would be bigger than any of those [California, the Louisana Purchase and other territories acquired by conquest or purchase], according to the National Archives, the U.S. census and the C.I.A. World Factbook. At 836,000 square miles, Greenland is bigger than France, Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany — combined. It would be the largest territory the United States ever added, if the United States were to acquire it.

Mr. Trump has based his fixation on Greenland, which has been part of the Danish Kingdom for more than 300 years, on reasons of “national security,” citing threats from Russia and China. But he made a past remark about Greenland’s size, and scholars say the territorial grandeur itself is at least part of what appeals to him.

“Trump’s a real estate guy,” David Silbey, a historian at Cornell University, said in an email, “and the idea of grabbing that much land seems to me his particular guiding force: THE MOST LAND EVER.”

He added that Mr. Trump “likes to pick on targets that are too weak to fight back, which certainly describes Denmark,” he added.

This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is meeting to discuss the future of Greenland with Danish and Greenlandic officials, both of whom say that the island, the world’s largest, is not for sale.

But that has not deterred Mr. Trump and his team so far.

In an interview last week with The New York Times, Mr. Trump said the best way for the United States to handle Greenland would be to own it because ownership is “psychologically needed for success.”

But, from the WaPo:

Denmark’s foreign minister said there had been a “frank but also constructive” conversation with the Trump administration during a high-stakes White House meeting about the fate of Greenland on Wednesday, but that the two sides had come to no agreement about President Donald Trump’s demands to “own” the Arctic territor

“We still have a fundamental disagreement,” said Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the top Danish diplomat, speaking alongside his Greenlandic counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, outside the Danish Embassy in Washington. “We didn’t manage to change the American position.”

The White House meeting, which was hosted by Vice President JD Vance, did see the two sides agree to form a “high-level working group” to discuss Trump’s concerns about Greenland, Rasmussen said. The White House and State Department did not immediately provide their own readout of the meeting, which was also attended by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Trump told reporters after the meeting that he had not yet been briefed on the talks, but said that the United States had a good relationship with Denmark and he thought something would work out. “The problem is there’s not a thing that Denmark can do about it if Russia or China wants to occupy Greenland, but there’s everything we can do,” he said in the Oval Office.

This is the craziest thing that Trump’s tried to do, and that’s saying a lot. We already have a base in northern Greenland, and perhaps they’d let us build another one. But the hubris of trying to take over what is essentially part of Denmark, the EU, and NATO is breathtaking. It sound like some nutty idea that Trump had in the middle of the night, but he’s trying to make it come true. I’m betting he won’t.

*David Plouffe argues in today’s NYT that “To win everywhere, Democrats must change everything” (op-ed archived here).

. . . to win races in politically unforgiving, even hostile, territory will require the party to overhaul its broken brand and stale agenda by elevating new faces and new leaders who promise to chart a course enough voters believe in.

Why? Because to have any hope of fixing the root problems that plague our democracy and our economy, Democrats need a majority that lasts, like the New Deal coalition. At least three, maybe more, Supreme Court justices could retire over the coming decade. Without sustained Democratic political power and control during that period, a conservative 8-to-1 court is not out of the question.

That possibility should focus the mind. Right now, Democrats have no credible path to sustained control of the Senate and the White House. After the adjustments to the Electoral College map that look likely to come with the next census, the Democratic presidential nominee could win all states won by Kamala Harris plus the blue wall of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still fall short of the 270 electoral votes needed to win. An already unforgiving map gets more so, equally so in the Senate.

His solutions? (condensed):

The existential question now is: How do Democrats get back to playing and winning in more places?

First, make our unpopular president and his vassals own everything — higher energy and health care costs, higher food bills, war. The Republicans in Congress stood by meekly as Mr. Trump took a wrecking ball to our economy. They deserve the blame for it.

That is Task 1. As important as it is, it’s far easier than Task 2. James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it’s faced.” Democrats must face, honestly, where we are and how we are perceived.

That starts with offering a fresh agenda that voters believe can make a difference in their lives, not the same stuff they heard from Democratic candidates in recent years.

Each candidate is different. That said, the ideas below should find a home almost anywhere.

Here’s a list (bolding is theirs):

A plan to bring down costs. ‘

A plan to create the jobs America needs.

A plan for A.I.  [Plouffe thinks it will play a big role in the next elections]

A plan for reform.

Hold your own leaders to account.

You can see all the details in the archived account. That’s a lot of plans, and yes, if most of that stuff can be conveyed to the people (Plouffe uses Mamdani as an example), the Dems’ chances will improve. But as you know, Mamdani was short on details, and can you imagine a Democratic candidate trying to explain to Americans how they would reduce any pernicious effects of A. I.? Well, as someone said, “All this is as plausible as anything else.” There is no shortage of people telling the Democratic Party what to do, but is anyone listening?

*The WSJ reports that the protests in Iran may have quieted down, which of course will impede Trump from carrying out his threat to attack with the aim of toppling the regime.

A fierce crackdown by Iranian security forces that has killed thousands of people protesting against the country’s autocratic leaders has forced demonstrators off the streets in some cities, with residents reporting an eerie quiet after days of escalating violence.

Iran’s government has blocked the internet and deployed large numbers of police and troops in an effort to quell the biggest threat to the regime since a 1979 revolution that established theocratic rule overseen by Shiite clergy. Iranians said they were afraid to leave their homes.

President Trump on Wednesday said Iran had stopped killing people, after days of threatening to take action against the regime if it killed protesters. Asked if military action was off the table, he said, “We’re going to watch it and see what the process is, but we were given a very good statement by people that are aware of what’s going on.”

The number of new protests verified by Human Rights Activists in Iran dropped to zero for the first time on Tuesday and continued at zero on Wednesday, the rights group said. It acknowledged that this could be because of the severe communications restrictions, which include disruptions to phone service.

The group said it confirmed the deaths of more than 2,600 people and more than 18,000 arrests. European and Middle Eastern officials also said they were seeing a drop in protest activity.

“The reason is very clear: The regime has created a bloodbath. They brought down the iron fist without precedent,” said Ali Vaez, an Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group. “That creates a chilling effect among protesters.”

Iran signaled Wednesday it was preparing to conduct swift trials and the execution of antigovernment protesters. In a video released by Iranian state television, Iran’s judiciary chief said on Wednesday the courts should act quickly against protesters.

The quiet is likely temporary, analysts said, since the underlying anger against the state remains high and the government has few ways to resolve the economic problems at the root of widespread discontent.

“Even if the first round is done, the next round is around the corner, because the regime is unable and incapable of addressing legitimate grievances,” Vaez said.

Some rumors say that cops with rifles are stationed on every street corner in Tehran, ready to shoot anybody who even vaguely looks like a protestor. We can’t expect people to keep protesting if they’re going to be shot willy nilly.  I am torn about this, as I do want the regime gone, but not necessarily with American military intervention. On the other hand, nonmilitary intervention doesn’t seem to be working. I fully expected an American attack, but without one, things will go back to the way they were, though I’m hoping, as the piece says above, that “the quiet is likely temporary.” For the moment it looks like the score is Regime 1, Protestors 0.

*More Trump-o-centric news: the “President’ has threatened to quash the protests in Minnesota not only by sending in more troops, but by invoking the Insurrection Act.

 President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened to invoke an 1807 law and deploy troops to quell persistent protests against the federal officers sent to Minneapolis to enforce his administration’s massive immigration crackdown.

The threat comes a day after a man was shot and wounded by an immigration officer who had been attacked with a shovel and broom handle. That shooting further heightened the fear and anger that has radiated across the city since an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Renee Good in the head.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, a rarely used federal law, to deploy the U.S. military or federalize the National Guard for domestic law enforcement, over the objections of state governors.

“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State,” Trump said in social media post.

Presidents have indeed invoked the law more than two dozen times, most recently in 1992 by President George H.W. Bush to end unrest in Los Angeles. In that instance, local authorities had asked for the assistance.

The Insurrection Act is old (from 1807), and says this:

The Insurrection Act authorizes the president to deploy military forces inside the United States to suppress rebellion or domestic violence or to enforce the law in certain situations. The statute implements Congress’s authority under the Constitution to “provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” It is the primary exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, under which federal military forces are generally barred from participating in civilian law enforcement activities.’

Normally the military, including the National Guard, is not empowered to enforce civil laws, but the Act allows them to. And the Act allows them to do this even against the wishes of the state.  ICE, however, is not the military, so once again we see Trump trying to use the military to quash civilian dissent, calling it an “insurrection”. It’s been used about 30 times, most notably to enforce civil rights laws in the Sixties. But if it’s used now to supplement ICE with the military (who of course aren’t trained in law enforcement), it will only exacerbate tensions. It may quell protests, but at a steep price.

The NYT is all about the ICE attack, the shooting, and immigration. Here’s this morning’s front page:

*And things are so bad that I’m adding the last Nooz post as the equivalent of the “there’s good news tonight” segment of NBC’s Evening News. Here’s the good news from the UPI:

 Police responded to a retirement home in Washington on a report of a goat attempting to break into the facility.

The Auburn Police Department said on social media that officers arrived at Wesley Homes to find “a goat was attempting to gain entry into the building.”

The officers “safely ‘detained’ the suspect until a friend of the owner arrived to pick her up,” the post said.

The goat, named Ruby, posed for a photo with the officers before being taken home.

“Charges were dropped due to extreme adorableness,” police wrote.

Here’s Ruby the perp and the cops:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili invokes the “a pessimist is never disappointed” trope:

Hili: You’re doing fine.
Andrzej: Why do you think so?
Hili: Because you’re a pessimist, and every time you’re wrong, it’s something to celebrate.

In Polish:

Hili: Tobie jest dobrze.
Ja: Dlaczego tak sądzisz?
Hili: Jesteś pesymistą, więc ile razy okazuje się, że byłeś w błędzie masz powód do radości.

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

 

From Meanwhile in Canada:

From Cats, Coffee, & Chaos:

From Give Me a Sign:

This tweet from Masih suggests why the protersts may have cooled in Iran (sound up):

From Luana; progressives try to defund all immigration enforcement:

From Malcolm; fixing pipe leaks without digging them up. Pretty cool:

One from my feed. How did they do this?

The Number Ten Cat argues that he did not trip a photographer:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two posts from Dr. Cobb: Here they are talking about autocratic tephritids and not Drosophila (Drosophila are not the “fruit fly” that worries California):

I don’t think we should have ceded control quite so quickly and without so much as a fight.

— Paul Brislen (@brislen.nz) 2026-01-10T02:52:23.109Z

This tweeter wrote an article criticizing panpsychism, the intellectually depauperate theory that everything has a form of consciousness. Both Matthew and I think the “theory” (for which there’s no evidence) is bogus.

Wrote a new essay: open.substack.com/pub/walterve…

— Dr. Walter Veit (@walterveit.bsky.social) 2026-01-14T08:11:15.922Z

This is why Democrats are in trouble

January 15, 2026 • 9:30 am

Here we have a five-minute video that, I think, goes some way towards understanding why the Democrats lost the last Presidential election and have dropped in public approval to the lowest point in several decades. The graph below, which appears in The Liberal Patriot’s post “Why is Democratic Favorability at a 25-year Low?“, shows that both parties have fallen in ratings since 2000,, but as of mid-2025 Democrats have done worse than Republicans. (Note that the latest data might not correspond to this.) But there’s enough unfavorability of “our” party that Democratic strategist David Plouffe argues in today’s NYT that “To win everywhere, Democrats must change everything” (op-ed archived here).

UPDATE: Some more recent data:

Now I’m no political pundit, but I’m not the only person to suggest that the wokeness of the Democratic party as espoused by its more vocal “progressive” wing is hurting the party as a whole. The implicit call for open borders, the explicit claim that biological sex is simply the way one identifies rather than a physical reality (a stand that conflates gender and reality), and the Kendi-an viewpoint criticized in John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism—all of this seems to me to turn off centrist voters or the more sensible Republicans who aren’t firm MAGA-its.

The video below, which I found on YouTube after someone sent me a clip, instantiates the kind of view that alienates reasonable people.  Here we have Dr. Nisha Verma refusing to admit that men cannot get pregnant. She is clearly conflating gender (sex-identification) with biological sex, which involves the ability to produce either large, immobile gametes (females) or small mobile ones (males).  Only biological women can get pregnant, for they have the reproductive apparatus evolved to produce eggs and carry fetuses. (Note that removing that apparatus, as during a hysterectomy, does not suddenly change a female into a male).

This is part of a Senate hearing on the safety of abortion medication.  AcademyHealth gives Dr. Verma’s credentials this way:

Dr. Nisha Verma is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and complex family planning subspecialist. She currently serves as Senior Advisor for Reproductive Health Policy & Advocacy at ACOG. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Emory University School of Medicine and provides clinical care in Georgia and Maryland. She has testified in front of Congress on the harms of abortion restrictions and currently has a research grant to explore the impact of Georgia’s six-week abortion ban on people with high-risk pregnancies in the state. Dr. Verma has traveled the country training physicians on building evidence-based skills for effective conversations about abortion and has spearheaded ACOG efforts to support physicians and their institutions post-Dobbs.

Take five minutes to hear Verma’s masterpiece of equivocation as Hawley drills into her asking if men can get pregnant. Verma refuses to answer the question with a straightforward “no,” because she doesn’t want to get into trouble by denying that trans-identified women (also known as “trans men”) count as what most people think of as “men”, and thus some “men” can get pregnant.  It’s painful to watch Verma squirm and wriggle, all because she wants to equate “identity” with biological reality. Hawley even gives her an opening, referring not just to “men,” but biological men. If you use the biological construal, then of course “men” cannot get pregnant. But Verna still won’t even answer that unambiguous question, accusing Hawley of trying to be “polarizing”. Perhaps he is, but he is on the right side in this exchange.

This question is a byproduct of Hawley trying to emphasize the dangers of medications designed to produce abortion (“abortifacients” like mifepristone and misoprostol).  These are generally quite safe, which is why they’re widely prescribed. And, as someone who’s pro-choice, I have no problem with these drugs, and probably agree with Verma on this issue.  Hawley is trying, however, to attack her credibility by trying to pin her down on the biological definition of “woman.” She comes off looking ideological rather than “science based.”

Verma would have been much better off had she answered this way:

“If one adheres to the biological definition of ‘woman’ and ‘man,” involving reproductive systems, then no, men cannot get pregnant. Some people believe, however, that biological women who identify as men, called ‘trans men’ or ‘trans-identified women’, also count as ‘men.’ If you have that construal, which is really gender-based and not biology-based, then yes, some people who identify as ‘men’ can get pregnant.”

But she can’t answer that way because even saying this palpable truth is enough to get you deemed a “transphobe” by “progressives”. (I speak here from personal experience.)

I’ll add that self-identification equates to biological reality only when sex is involved. As Rebecca Tuvel found to her dismay, progressives won’t allow you to identify as a member of a race or ethnic group different from your natal group. Nor can you do it with age, or height, or anything else. I am still mysified why equating self-identity with biological reality is possible only when sex is at issue, not age, race, or species.

But I digress. Listen to Verma embarrassing herself below. This is what happens when you equate sex with gender, and I urge fellow scientists not to conflate the terms this way, for the public will not be fooled.

Here are the YouTube notes:

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO): “Can men get pregnant?”

Dr. Nisha Verma: “I’m not really sure what the goal of the question is.”
Hawley: “The goal is just to establish a biological reality. You said just a moment ago that science and evidence should control, not politics. So, let’s test that. Can men get pregnant?”
Dr. Verma: “I take care of people with many identities…I’m also someone here to represent the complex experiences of my patients. I don’t think polarized language or questions serve that goal…
” Hawley: “It is not polarizing to say that there is a scientific difference between men and women…It is not polarizing to say that women are a biological reality and should be treated and protected as such.”

Full Senate hearing here: https://www.c-span.org/event/senate-c…

After I wrote this, I asked Emma Hilton if she’d seen the video and of course she had tweeted about it.  Emma’s a bit more charitable than I, but is clear-eyed about Verma’s moment in the spotlight.  Coincidentally, both of us confected what Verma should have said. I still have no idea if Verma really believes what she says, or is playing to the progressive public.

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 15, 2026 • 8:16 am

We’re saved again, for one day, as reader Rodney Graetz from Canberra has sent in some lovely photos from a remote corner of Australia. Rodney’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. The three borrowed images are, I’m told, in the public domain.

Here is a series of landscape photos from a tourist boat journey along the Kimberley coastline from Darwin (Northern Territory) to Broome (Western Australia).  The distance, as the crow flies, was 1110 km (690 mi) but by hugging the coastline, the unrecorded distance was likely doubled.  We made land visits on 10 of the 12-day journey:

Our starting point, the Darwin coastline, is lapped by the Timor Sea.  It is shallow and muddy, in contrast to our Broome destination.  Like Broome, Darwin was targeted and bombed by the Japanese in February 1942.  Today, among the lush Darwin city coastline gardens, is a simple memorial honouring the 91 crew of the USS Peary, the United States Navy’s greatest loss in Australian waters.

Departing Darwin, we slowly merged with the mighty Indian Ocean whose colour and cloud streets suggested warmth, productivity and excitement.  We travelled in early June, too early to encounter the estimated 40,000 Humpback Whales travelling up from the Antarctic (June – November) to calve, nurse and then mate in these warm and safe waters  Next time!

At last, an edge of the NW corner of the Australian continent, revealing a flat and layered landscape.  The cliffs are massive, and the rock type is obviously hard because there is little sandy beach.

The Edge close up, and as predicted.  Note the tiny figures in the lower left corner.  The massive rocks are a hard Paleoproterozoic sandstone aged 1-1.9 billion years.  They are ever varied and spectacular:

Being drone-deficient, I’ve borrowed this image to illustrate this monsoonal landscape functioning.  During ‘The Wet’ (Nov–Mar), sufficient rainfall accumulates on the background plateau for a flow to eventually reach the edge and fall as spectacular waterfalls early in ‘The Dry’ ( Mar-Nov).

Downstream from the waterfalls, slow moving water combined with the incursion of plants, result in species-rich landscapes, such as this small idyllic wetland:

‘Salties’, aka Saltwater crocodile, were common neighbours at our landings.  Maneaters?  Yes, but only of the deserving at a rate of fewer than one person per year.  The ‘gaping’ is not a threat display but thermoregulation, of cooling.  Looking past the teeth, they are handsomely ornamented and coloured animals.  In the water, they are sleek!:

For geographic and celestial reasons, the tidal ranges along this coast are among the highest globally (± 10 metres).  A consequence of this, and a rocky, indented coastline, is the creation of Horizontal Waterfalls, where six times a day, huge volumes of water are forced through constricting narrows, as shown here.  Spectacular and hazardous:

The edge of a vast inshore reef (400 km², 154 sq mi) rapidly shedding water as the tide drops about 10 metres.  It is a visual and turbulent spectacle – the reef appears to rise up – and shed streams of water containing stranded fish eagerly sought by waiting birds, fish and sharks.  This one image could not capture the turbulence and action.  Details are here and an overview here:

Contemplative natural beauty of the coast was commonplace, such as here, Raft Point.  With the Dawn behind us, the red rocks and lush vegetation (including iconic Boab trees) are in contrast with the ocean, and on its horizon, small red rocky islands urge a visit:

Nearby Steep Island is another view that repays contemplation.  Why is it so?:

Journey’s end and Broome colouring contrasts with that of the previous days.  Here the rock and sands are red with an aquamarine ocean.  Tidal variation remains high.  The biological focal point is the adjacent Roebuck Bay, the background in this image:

To avoid lethal winters, some 100, 000 migratory birds fly from the Pacific low latitude coastal areas of China etc. to Australia along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway.  Roebuck Bay, a primary destination, is nationally protected as one RAMSAR wetland.  Bird lovers closely watch their comings and goings:

Finally, in the 1940s, both Darwin and Broome experienced the destructive impacts of war.  Now, in both locations, the stark remnants of those impacts remain submerged, slowly disappearing, accelerated by the living world.  That is a good thing:

Thursday: Hili dialogue

January 15, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, January 15, 2026 and National Bagel Day, celebrating a contribution of Jewish cuisine, such as it is, to world culture. Everybody eats bagels now, save those counting their carbs.  Below is one of the few places in the world you can still get them as they should be: small and chewy.  The city: Montreal.  I believe Steve Pinker, a Canadian who grew up there, used to patronize this place, whose motto is simply, “The best bagels in the world.” The bagels are first boiled in water with a bit of honey, and then baked in a wood-fired oven. I can attest to their quality.

It’s also National Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice Day, Wikipedia Day, National Booch Day, celebrating the drink kombucha, and National Strawberry Ice Cream Day.

What’s kombucha? Let’s look on Wikipedia given that it’s Wikipedia Day:

Kombucha (also tea mushroom, tea fungus, or Manchurian mushroom when referring to the culture; Latin name Medusomyces gisevii) is a fermented, effervescent and sweetened black tea drink. Sometimes the beverage is called kombucha tea to distinguish it from the culture of bacteria and yeast. Juice, spices, fruit, or other flavorings are often added. Commercial kombucha contains small amounts of alcohol.

Kombucha is believed to have originated in China, where the drink is traditional. While it is named after the Japanese term for kelp tea in English, the two drinks have no relation.

Here it is, but it looks scary. Has anyone had it?

Mgarten at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 15 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The U.S. is naming a committee of Palestinians to run Gaza, but Hamas still hasn’t laid down its arms. (Article archived here.)

The United States is close to naming a panel of Palestinian technocrats to oversee daily life in the devastated Gaza Strip, where many are desperate to rebuild after two years of war.

A former Palestinian deputy minister for planning, Ali Shaath, has been chosen to lead the committee, according to four officials and six others briefed on the decision. They discussed it on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Several people briefed on the plans say the announcement could come as soon as Wednesday, when Palestinian officials from Hamas and other factions gather in Egypt for talks.

American officials say they hope that establishing the committee will help erode Hamas’s grip on Gaza, which the group seized full control of in 2007.

The cease-fire plan that was backed by President Trump and that went into effect in October called for the committee to be apolitical, engaged largely in providing public services, and that the staff be independent Palestinian experts.

But it is far from clear whether it can succeed.

Officials have so far said little publicly about who will join the committee, how exactly it will administer Gaza and who might finance its operations.

Analysts say that the announcement of its composition might be aimed at injecting some momentum into Mr. Trump’s broader plans for Gaza, which have appeared to hit a roadblock.

While the truce between Israel and Hamas has largely held, the Palestinian militia has not laid down its arms, and U.S. efforts to persuade countries to send peacekeepers to Gaza have found few takers.

Announcing the committee could reflect “a desire to show progress, given that progress on other fronts has been tough,” said Michael Koplow, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, a research group based in New York.

“It seems to me that a lot of this is just to show that they’re doing something,” he added.

Yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like.  And fixing Gaza technically still leave Hamas in de facto control of policing and military action. For you can be sure that the new “technocratic” government won’t be allowed to do anything that Hamas thinks will impede its mission. We are a long way from peace, and even farther from a two-state solution.  Hamas has not met the most important terms of the cease-fire agreement: that they disarm and disband. And I don’t see how they will do so unless countries like Qatar apply more pressure to the group.

*As the turmoil escalates in Minnesota, with protestors showing up in droves to harass and jeer ICE agents, (the Free Press has an article about how well organized the protestors are), a number of federal prosecutors in D.C. and Minnesota have quit their jobs rather than investigate the background of Renée Good’s wife. They also quit because the government is impeding investigations by Minnesota authorities, and, further, because an important part of the Department of Justice was also cut out of the investigation.

Multiple senior prosecutors in Washington and Minnesota are leaving their jobs amid turmoil over the Trump administration’s handling of the shooting death of a Minneapolis woman.

The departures include at least five prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis, including the office’s second-in-command, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post and people familiar with the matter.

The Minnesota resignations followed demands by Justice Department leaders to investigate the widow of Renée Good, the 37-year-old woman killed last week by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot into her car, according to two people familiar with the resignations who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for retaliation. Good’s wife was protesting ICE officers in the moments before the shooting. Prosecutors also were dismayed over the decision by federal officials to exclude state and local authorities from the investigation, one of the people said.

Five senior prosecutors in the criminal section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division also said they are leaving, according to four people familiar with the personnel moves who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.

The departures strip both the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section and U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota of their most experienced prosecutors. The moves are widely seen as a major vote of no-confidence by career prosecutors at a moment when the department is under extreme scrutiny.

The criminal section of the Civil Rights Division is the sole office that handles criminal violations of the nation’s civil rights laws. For years, the Justice Department has relied on the section to prosecute major cases of alleged police brutality and hate crimes. The departures followed the administration’s highly unusual decision to not include the Civil Rights Division in the initial investigation of the shooting.

BUT. . .

The Civil Rights Division prosecutors informed their colleagues of their resignations Monday. People familiar with the section, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said the lawyers who are leaving did not attribute their decisions to the Minnesota investigation.

The department has been offering voluntary early retirement packages to certain sections, and some of the departing civil rights prosecutors qualified for that option. Some indicated to their colleagues before the Minnesota shooting that they were considering the retirement packages.

Now the Minnesota affair may indeed have induced these agents to retire early, but they are smart enough to keep their mouths shut about it in this climate of Trump-ian retribution.  But it makes no sense not to use every agency that could be involved to participate in the investigation, or to share data. What is there to lose? It looks as if the Administration doesn’t want the law to look to closely to what happened to Renée Good.

*At the Free Press, conservative historian Niall Ferguson discusses what he sees as “The myth of revolution in Iran“, and in fact argues that’s what going on in Iran now is not a revolution but a counterrevolution. The difference? The latter, says Ferguson, usually involves replacing one autocracy with another, as it did in Iran in 1979. Ferguson is deeply sympathetic with the protestors, but thinks they are misguided.

There is a difference between a revolution and a counterrevolution. It is a recurrent mistake of the American media to conflate the two. That is because the success of 1776—the 250th anniversary of which we celebrate this year—predisposes us to sympathize with revolutions. I can think of no better explanation for the naivete of much liberal commentary on subsequent revolutions: France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, Nicaragua in 1979, Egypt in 2011 and, most relevant to today, Iran in 1979.

. . .I am sure Sadjadpour and Goldstone are right about the basic reason for the widespread dissatisfaction with the regime. An inflation rate of 50 percent—and 70 percent for food—would make any kind of government unpopular. They are right, too, that ordinary Iranians are disgusted by the corruption and hypocrisy of today’s political elite. (Take a look at the Rich Kids of Tehran on Instagram for some choice examples.) The 1979 revolution, like the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the Maoist revolution in China, began with austere dogma but swiftly descended into graft.

Yet the people in the streets of Iran today do not aspire to build Utopia; they just want the old Iran back—an idealized, nostalgia-tinged version, no doubt, but above all a country of stability, not ideology. Hence the chant: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon; my life for Iran.” Aside from the failure of its economic policy, nothing has alienated people more than the catastrophic blowback from the regime’s ideologically driven policy of funding terrorist proxies to wage war on Israel.

. . . . Four questions need to be asked by anyone hoping for a counterrevolution to succeed:

  1. Is there a leadership crisis or vacuum as the original leaders of the revolution die off?
  2. Does the old regime have a credible candidate to restore?
  3. Can foreign powers provide assistance without discrediting domestic opposition?
  4. Can the forces of repression be divided or somehow outgunned?

I am not sure that in Iran today the answer is “yes” to any of those questions.

. . . . In Iran today, you would need a significant portion of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to see better opportunities for profit from a post-Islamic regime than from the status quo. And we do not seem to be there yet.

At some point after Supreme Leader Khamenei dies—as the haggard old murderer eventually must—I expect we shall see Iran take a Bonapartist turn. From the ranks of the IRGC, there will emerge the successor to General Qasem Soleimani, who might have played the Napoleonic role if the United States had not killed him in 2020.

I passionately wish it could be otherwise. The images of the slaughter in Iran—of the corpses in body bags strewn contemptuously on the ground—are agonizing to contemplate. For the people of Iran, I have little doubt, it would be far preferable if the genial Mr. Pahlavi could resume his father’s Peacock Throne with the support of the United States and its allies. If President Trump can do anything at all to impede, if not destroy, the Islamic Republic’s massacre machine, I wish Godspeed to those who receive the orders to strike.

But happy restorations are very rare in history. Repression is so much more common—and so effective—that it rarely makes the front page.

Ferguson cites many examples from history to support his thesis, and who am I to question a historian? But what bothers me is that many of the protestors are calling for the restoration of leadership by Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah of Iran.  He’s the only credible leader they can think of. Ferguson suggests not only will he not have the support of the Revolutionary Guards, but also that he could also become a dictator if he resumes power.  We simply don’t know. All we know is that the present regime in Iran is horribly oppressive and needs to be somehow replaced. One of my friends predicts that the U.S. will attack Iran withing 72 hours.

*Speaking of Iran, Trump is still weighing his options there, which are many. He seems to have decided on a course of action, but some interventions are quite risky (Benny Morris also points this out in Quillette.) From the WaPo first:

President Donald Trump signaled he would assist anti-government protesters in Iran as the White House convened top officials on Tuesday to weigh military options.

The president indicated that the time for negotiations with Tehran had passed, saying in a social media post Tuesday morning that he had “cancelled all meetings” with Iranian officials. But some political allies are warning against the dangers of entanglement in another overseas conflict and the domestic costs of abandoning the “America First” foreign policy Trump campaigned on.

. . .The arguments against a strike include the danger of an accident or failure as the U.S. military and spy services attempt more high-risk operations, as well as the possibility that the fall of the Iranian government could lead to a more militant regime or another failed state in the Middle East, according to former officials and people close to the White House who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive private conversations.

At the same time, the people said, skeptics of a strike are hoping to avoid the open acrimony leading up to the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites in June, which stoked divisions in Trump’s base over the wisdom of intervention in a Middle Eastern conflict and the meaning of his “America First” slogan.

The National Security Council met Tuesday without Trump to prepare options for the president, a person familiar with the meeting said. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials are presenting options to Trump without preference, the person said.

The president has repeatedly threatened that the United States could use military force if the government in Tehran keeps killing demonstrators. Other options could include increased economic pressure on the government, cyberattacks and stepped-up support for the protest movement.

From historian Benny Morris:

Recent reports from Washington indicate that Trump and his advisors are weighing “very strong options,” in Trump’s words, for intervention and now that the death toll among the demonstrators is rising, it is difficult to see how Trump can back down, after his repeated public threats to intervene. Clearly, America is not going to put boots on the ground. And air strikes—using carrier-based aircraft or units operating out of Incirlik, Turkey—against Basij or IRGC bases or Iranian government institutions is not a very attractive course of action, either, since it would require a massive, protracted operation. The US Air Force would need to first clear a path through Iran’s air defences, which have presumably been reconstituted since Israel demolished them last June, in the first days of its twelve-day offensive, before it targeted sites in Tehran and in the interior of the country.

At the moment, it appears, the US has insufficient forces in the Middle East to launch a major aerial offensive against Iran. One readily available alternative might be a massive one-off cruise missile strike, which might make Tehran back down, send the IRGC back to barracks, and begin negotiations with the protesters—though what exactly the government could offer them short of abdicating power is unclear. The government has no money and at this point, the protesters will not be easily bought off anyway.

Nothing here really looks like a feasible intervention by the U.S. that would actually topple the regime.  Surely economic pressure, cyberattacks,or “stepped-up support for the protest movement (what kind of support?) don’t look propitious. We’ll have to wait and see, but it looks as if “peacemaker” Trump, longing for his Nobel Prize, will certainly do something.

*And some persiflage from UPI’s “odd news” section: a record for one person keeping a soccer ball in the air: more than 28 hours! (there were breaks every three hours):

A Swedish soccer enthusiast broke a Guinness World Record when he juggled a ball — using only his knees, chest, head and feet — for 28 hours, 21 minutes and 2 seconds.

Daniel Yaakob took on the record for the longest marathon controlling a football (male) at the Rydshallen sports complex in Linköping, Sweden.

Yaakob, who was allowed a 15-minute break every three hours, beat the record set by Briton Dan Magness at 26 hours in June 2010.

Soccer juggling is also sometimes known as kick-ups or keepie-uppies.

“I want to inspire others to push their limits, promote consistency and focus, and show how social media can be used to spotlight positive challenges and achievements,” Yaakob told Guinness World Records. “This record is the perfect combination of my passion for football, content creation and personal growth.”

Here’s their weekly 2-ninute summary of odd news. The Altadena bear was evicted, but seems to have found a home underneath yet another house. And. . . loose monkeys of uncertain origin.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is getting woke:

Szaron: You’re using your white privilege.
Hili: Spare me that fashionable nonsense.

In Polish:

Szaron: Wykorzystujesz swój przywilej białości.
Hili: Zachowaj te modne bzdury dla siebie.

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

From a reader:

From Give Me a Sign:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Masih; estimates of the dead in Iran are as high as 12,000, and that could still be low:

From the Number Ten Cat, who somebody apparently tripped over. Translation from the Polish: “Larry, don’t do this to me anymore!  photo: Damian Burzykowski”

Emma Hilton posted a threadreader in which the Paint the Roses Read podcast breaks down the Supreme Court judges’ stands on trans issues based on Tuesday’s question session.

From Simon, who says “Best work fast!”

One from my feed; a cat counts sheep:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

One from Dr. Cobb, as there’s a video. The “decoy spider” is something I talked about in my evolution lecture on mimicry. Have a look at the linked article.  And note that one of the spiders has eight fake legs!

Nature can be wickedly cunning.

— John Shirley (@johnshirley2024.bsky.social) 2026-01-06T02:03:11.988Z

From the article:

Researchers believe the “decoy spider” serves a dual purpose. It may mimic a larger predator that birds, lizards, and other enemies would prefer to avoid, while also creating a diversion, drawing an attack away from the smaller, real spider.

A video about the orb-weaving spiders:

What about Minnesota? Another discussion.

January 14, 2026 • 10:52 am

I’m still afflicted with Weltschmerz, but also heartened that readers had a lot to say in yesterday’s discussion, so I’m glad that when I’m low, my presence isn’t needed on every post (I did read all the comments).

Today I want to kick-start another discussion if I can, this time about what’s going on in Minnesota. I’m referring not to the welfare-fraud scandal that brought down governor Tim Walz, but the big fight between ICE agents and local residents, spurred not just by Trump sending more lawmen into the state, but by the killing of Renée Good by an ICE agent.  This has led to big and ongoing protests in which Minnesotans gather in big crowds whenever ICE shows up, trying to prevent them from apprehending suspects.  These are not peaceful on either side: ICE agents fire pepper spray and tear gas, while some demonstrators physically assault lawmen and block the cars of ICE agents. (To see how well the citizens are organized, read Olivia Reingold’s piece “I joined ICE watch” at the Free Press.)

Since I am not and haven’t been there, I’m not sure whether the protestors are trying to incite violence as part of their protests, hoping, as did Martin Luther King, Jr. did in the Sixties, that brutality on the party of the law will promote one’s cause.  The difference is that King’s cause was to get rights for black people, while the cause of the protestors seems to be to keep Trump from using heavyhanded tactics to deport undocumented immigrants.  This difference is why, I think, we don’t see many black people speaking out about the demonstrations.

I have still not decided whether Good’s killing was illegal: a deliberate act of manslaughter or even murder.  Because someone was killed, though, and there is some question that bullets were fired gratuitously, I think there needs to be an investigation of the officer and, if things look illegal, a trial. We need to preserve our system of law and accountability. But I am not willing to pronounce the officer guilty, as so many are doing (my Facebook page is full of those pronouncements). That would take a trial. All I can say is that, since we haven’t yet had a trial or an investigation the incident looks like an unfortunate concatenation of a woman who should not have been doing what she did (blocking ICE access with her car, and refuse refusing orders to exit her car), and an ICE officer who may have been overly retributive because he had been through a similar experience (dragged by a car for many yards) in recent weeks.

So, please discuss this issue. What do you think should be done about the officer who killed Good? Does Good herself bear any responsibility for what happened? Are the protestors completely peaceful, or are they hoping to provoke violence? Are they trying to keep officers from enforcing the law? (My view is that all undocumented immigrants deserve a hearing before an immigration judge before they are deported, but also that that ICE is being heavy-handed in law enforcement. Further, in the end there should be a procedure to expel people who entered the country illegally, giving priority to those with a criminal record.) Sometimes it seems to me that the protestors all want open borders and no deportations, which is not in line with what most Americans want.

I have written too much already, and am still rethinking the events in Minnesota, but I thank Ceiling Cat that I don’t have to adjudicate them.

By the way, the Minnesota state legislature has just brought up Tim Walz on four articles of impeachment, all involving the corruption scandal in his state. He’s already said he won’t be running again.