More on Colossal’s futile efforts to “de-extinct” ancient giant birds

May 20, 2026 • 10:15 am

After announcing that it would “de-extinct’ the Woolly Mammoth, and that it had in fact “de-extincted” the Dire Wolf, the company Colossal Biosciences is now making big noises about its effort to bring back extinct big birds: the giant moas of New Zealand (driven extinct by humans around 1300 AD) and the dodo of Mauritius (also killed off by humans in 1662). These are big birds (dodos weighed from 20-40 pounds, moas, of which there were nine species, from 55 to 600 pounds), and this fact alone makes it hard to de-extinct them.

But, as with the “woolly mammoth”, the concept of bringing back extinct species is impossible given our current technology, and saying that you can is grossly misleading.  And that’s for several reasons (the indented bits below are mine):

1.) You need the DNA of the extinct species if you’re going to create a simulacrum of it by injecting bits of the extinct animal’s DNA into the genome of a modern relative.

2.) You need to know what the DNA segments you have actually do in the animal, and how sequences differing between it and the donor genome can produce an animal with some traits of the original species. Where are the “big genes” in a mammoth, for example?

3.) Species are not “de-extincted”: what happens is that a living relative is genetically engineered by putting in a few bits of ancient DNA to create a “partial hybrid” that superficially resembles the ancient species. This involves finding and inserting a few bits of ancient DNA that you think will make the donor species look more like the extinct one. For example, I think fewer than 20 genes were engineered into a gray wolf genome to make the “dire wolf”. These included both dire wolf genes and mutant genes of modern dogs inserted into a gray wolf genome. The tweaked embryo was then implanted in a domestic dog. It’s important that you (and the press) realize that the ancient species is not brought back; what we get is a modern species that looks a bit like the ancient species. (See my post on the “dire-ish wolf” here.)

4.) There are problems with rearing the “tweaked” (I won’t call it “de-extincted”) species.  We cannot artificially inseminate elephants with elephant genomes that have been engineered for hairiness and bigger tusk. We don’t have the ability to do this (though we might in the future), the embryos might not develop properly, and the mother is unlikely to take care of them. This is why Colossal has spoken of using “artificial uteruses” to rear the tweaked “mammothy” elephant.

5.) For giant birds like the dodo and moa, you need to be able to rear the tweaked species—presumably adjusted to be larger than its surrogate relative—in big eggs. Because those eggs don’t exist, they have to be made somehow. This week Colossal announced the creation of 3-D printed eggshells that could be used to contain a chicken embryo that develops to term.  But of course hatching is one thing, and rearing is another. What mother will rear a tweaked “dodolike” bird.  The closest relative of the dodo is the Nicobar pigeon, a bird considerably smaller than the dodo (the pigeon weighs about a pound). The closest living relative of the moas is the tinamou, which weighs about as much as a big chicken: five pounds max.  Rearing such birds to maturity is a serious problem, even if they were full dodos or moas rather than tweaked pigeons or tinamous.

6.) Colossal has announced that a crucial part of “de-extinction” is “rewilding”: releasing the tweaked animals back into nature to restore their niche.  This is one of the most questionable parts of the whole enterprise.  The tweaked hairy elephant, for example, should be released on the tundra (and in groups of individuals, which is yet another problem, as you need to engineer more than one hybrid). That tundra doesn’t exist in the form it did in the past, and, of course, the tweaked hairy elephant has to have all genes necessary to seek out and use the food that a real woolly mammoth would eat, as well as genes for preferring as a mate others of its kind. It has to be able to survive extreme cold. We don’t know what genes these are! All we have are DNA sequences.

An example of the problems is Colossal’s announcement that it had “de-extincted” the Dire Wolf. It hadn’t: it engineered a gray wolf with about 20 inserted genes taken from both wolves and domestic dogs, producing a whitish wolf that seems a bit larger than gray wolves.  Three of these creatures were made. Not only were they not released in the wild, but they are sequestered in a secret and tightly-controlled fenced area that is off limits to all but selected journalists.

All the brouhaha, then, is misleading. We don’t get extinct species back, we may not even get “tweaked” species back, and they are very unlikely to ever see the wild again. I discussed many of these problem in an op-ed last year in The Boston Globe (archived here). See also the New Scientist article below.

Because Colossal has misled the public—they originally said they’d de-extincted the dire wolf, then retracted that claim, then reinstated it, saying that if it looks like a dire wolf, it is a dire wolf—each time they accomplish something they tout it as a huge advance towards real de-extinction. After all, they have to keep their rich investors and the public happy.

The latest Colossal announcement, which came through the mail, is that of their developing an artificial chicken eggshell. The problem is (see below the fold) that this has already been done by others some time ago. A further problem, of course, is that this is only a minor issue in the problem of putting dodo-like or moa-like embryo in an artificial egg. Here’s Colossal’s announcement, and note the emphasis on “de-extinction”:

BREAKTHROUGH: De-Extinction Just Got Its Egg
Step inside the beginnings of life as Colossal Biosciences hatches live chicks from our new artificial egg.
This huge advancement is foundational to our de-extinction of the South Island giant moa, whose eggs were around 80x the volume of a chicken’s. No living bird could possibly hatch one. So we built an artificial egg that will.
Watch a real chick embryo develop inside the artificial egg. Get a full breakdown of every feature. And see how this breakthrough is opening new doors for avian biotech research and bird conservation.
You’ll want to see the ending.
Meet the Colossal artificial egg. Nature spent millions of years perfecting the original. We just made our own, and hatched some beautiful and healthy chicks.
Here’s how it works:
🥚 Egg-shaped frame: a lattice shell that gives the whole system its structure and protection.
🌬️ Colossal membrane: the secret weapon. A bioengineered, gas-permeable layer that matches a real shell’s oxygen transfer, so O₂ flows in and CO₂ flows out exactly the way nature does it.
👁️ See-through build: the largely transparent design that lets us watch development in real time. This is critical for research and for de-extinction, where visually confirming milestones and the gene-edited traits we’ve put back is everything.
📏 Modular scale: the platform will stretch to fit eggs of any size, including the South Island giant moa egg, roughly 80x the volume of a chicken egg.
Extinction doesn’t have to be the end. And this is just the beginning.
Avian de-extinction is getting wild.

Here’s a breathy, chest-thumping video, accompanied by triumphant music, making it seem that the problem of de-extinction is on the way to being licked:

This is an achievement, of course, but to me it’s not a substantial step towards getting back moas and dodos. as it’s not that new.

And of course the press has picked it up, but this time they are careful to quote Colossal’s many critics as well as its chief propagandist, Ben Lamm. The Times of London talks about the eggshell as a step in resurrecting moas, using emus as surrogate moms. Click headline below to read:

Excerpts from The Times piece:

Colossal Biosciences, a Texan biotechnology firm, has developed a shell-less system it says is capable of supporting a bird embryo from early development through to the point of hatching.

So far the device has been used to produce baby chickens. The end goal, the company says, is to deploy a much larger version to resurrect the moa, whose eggs were about 80 times the volume of a farmyard hen’s.

. . . . So far the device has been used to produce baby chickens. The end goal, the company says, is to deploy a much larger version to resurrect the moa, whose eggs were about 80 times the volume of a farmyard hen’s.

. . .Eventually, the hope is that emu cells can be edited, introducing genetic changes that would make any resulting animal more moa-like. The hurdle then would be where to grow an embryo. According to Colossal, the eggs of the South Island giant moa were roughly eight times the volume of an emu’s. No living bird would be large enough to play mother to it.

This is where the artificial egg would come in. Colossal says the device could be scaled up, allowing embryos of much larger birds to develop in a controlled chamber. It claims this could remove the need for a living surrogate mother and make it possible to incubate embryos at sizes no modern bird can manage.

But they quote critics!

. . .Critics say such claims need careful handling. To recreate a mammoth, for instance, Colossal plans to alter the genetic code of an Asian elephant.

Even if that succeeds, sceptics argue the result would not truly be a mammoth, but an elephant engineered to have some mammoth-like traits, such as shaggy hair and extra fat reserves.

The same issues apply to the moa. The project, which is being backed by Sir Peter Jackson, the film director behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy, plans to compare ancient DNA from the extinct species with living relatives such as emus and tinamous to work out which genetic features helped make a moa a moa.

Well, there’s the rub! But Ben Lamm is always around to give the necessary donation-promoting optimism:

Ben Lamm, chief executive of Colossal, said: “Restoring species like the South Island giant moa isn’t just about reconstructing ancient genomes and editing [primordial germ cells, which eventually become sperm or eggs] — it requires building an entirely new incubation system where no surrogate exists.”

He added: “It’s a major milestone for Colossal and a foundational technology for our de-extinction toolkit.”

Again, I’m not saying that the artificial egg is not of any value. I’m just saying that insuperable problems remain with bringing back moas (or dodos).

Here’s a tweet that Matthew sent me, which called my attention to a New Scientist article that, mirabile dictu, strongly criticizes the de-extinction program as a whole:

Colossal says its "artificial egg" will help it bring back the moa, which had larger eggs than any living birds 🧪But it's really just an artificial eggshell, and even clingfilm will work – sort of – as an artificial eggshell. Plus there's the yolk problem…www.newscientist.com/article/2527…

— Michael Le Page (@mjflepage.bsky.social) 2026-05-19T12:19:10.242Z

The article at New Scientist can be found by clicking on the screenshot below, or finding it archived here:

A few Q&As from the piece:

Is this the first-ever artificial bird egg?

Colossal does use the term “artificial egg” in its press release, but it is really just an artificial eggshell. Either way, it isn’t a first – in fact, it’s possible to remove chicken eggs from their shells and hatch them from anything from plastic cups to cling film. However, the survival rate is usually low because, without an eggshell, the developing chicks may not get enough oxygen. A number of teams around the world have been working on more sophisticated so-called ex-ovo approaches.

How much better is it than cling film?

Colossal claims its silicone membrane is better than existing ex-ovo methods because it allows oxygen through at the same rate as a chicken eggshell and doesn’t require additional oxygen. However, it hasn’t released any experimental results to back this up. “I would love to see what the numbers are on efficiency,” says Ben Novak of non-profit wildlife conservation group Revive & Restore. “How many of these chicks hatch versus how many don’t?”

Colossal doesn’t publish much of the data that would enable scientists to see exactly what it did, which genes it used, and what the results are. Three more issues:

Does this mean we could create a giant artificial moa egg?

Even if Colossal’s approach does work well for chicken eggs, it won’t necessarily work for larger eggs. Larger eggs might need shells with different properties because of their lower surface-area-to-volume ratio, but this could probably be solved by tweaking the permeability of the membrane. Making a big egg also requires more than just a big eggshell. Moa eggs were up to 24 centimetres long and 18 cm wide, so they contained a lot more egg white and yolk than the eggs of living birds. Adding more egg white should be relatively straightforward. Chickens have been successfully hatched in the egg white from turkeys, says Novak, which suggests it won’t matter much what animal’s egg white is used.

How much better is it than cling film?

Colossal claims its silicone membrane is better than existing ex-ovo methods because it allows oxygen through at the same rate as a chicken eggshell and doesn’t require additional oxygen. However, it hasn’t released any experimental results to back this up. “I would love to see what the numbers are on efficiency,” says Ben Novak of non-profit wildlife conservation group Revive & Restore. “How many of these chicks hatch versus how many don’t?”

What about the extra yolk required?

That’s more of a problem. Each egg yolk is a single cell, meaning ostrich yolks are the largest single cells found on the planet. To make a yolk larger would require penetrating the cell membrane and injecting more yolk, says Novak, which would likely cause the cell to burst. So it might be necessary to somehow enlarge the cell membrane so it can hold the extra yolk. Which is probably doable, given enough time, effort and money.

And the $64,000 question (and answer):

If all the problems with making really big eggs are solved, could we then bring back the moa?

Absolutely not. The big problem is that DNA breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces over time, and all nine species of moa went extinct around 600 years ago. It’s never going to be possible to get a complete, working copy of a moa genome and produce a living animal genetically identical to any of the extinct species. Even the human genome wasn’t completed until 2023.

. . . . Is this what Colossal aims to do with the moa?  [i.e., tweaking existing species with a few gene edits]

Colossal hasn’t revealed its plans, but based on what it did with grey wolves and “woolly mice”, its aim will likely be to tweak a few genes in the emu to create something a bit like the moa in appearance, even if that means making genetic changes not present in the moa genome. Five of the 20 gene edits made to the grey wolves were changes not found in the dire wolf genome, for instance. Nic Rawlence at the University of Otago in New Zealand doesn’t think Colossal is close to achieving even this for the moa. “The development of a genetically engineered emu and calling it a moa for no good conservation or ecological reason, but rather an ecotourism venture, is still a long way off,” says Rawlence. Nor is the idea of bringing back the moa universally welcomed, he says. “There is widespread Māori and public opposition in Aotearoa New Zealand.”

Grok agrees with all this when I asked it the question below:

From Grok:

Question I asked it: Will Colossal be able to bring the moa and the dodo, that is, “de-extinct” them?
Grok’s answer:
No, not in the sense of resurrecting the exact extinct species—but Colossal Biosciences could plausibly create moa-like and dodo-like engineered proxy birds (genetically modified versions of living relatives) within the next 5–15 years, assuming continued progress. True de-extinction (reviving genetically identical copies of the original species) is not possible with current or foreseeable technology.

There’s more at New Scientist, but you can read it at the link or the archived link. I hope I’ve shown that Colossal is engaged in misleading the public (and I can’t help but think it knows this, since it de-emphasizes the “tweaking” part), and that you’ve learned some of the problems with its “de-extinction” claims.

Below the fold I’ve put Grok’s answer to my question about whether previous workers had reared chicken eggs using artificial “shells” previously. The answer is “yes,” though Colossal’s expensive shell is more sophisticated. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of Grok’s answers, but of course it tells you how to investigate them.

h/t Pyers.

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Continue reading “More on Colossal’s futile efforts to “de-extinct” ancient giant birds” →

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ shahada pants

May 20, 2026 • 9:30 am

Today’s strip is an oldie called “idea”, and came with the following note from the author:

There’s an old strip up at J&M, page

It’s Draw Mohammed Day, and I’m away, so here’s an oldie from 2013. Remember: “There is no god, and Mohammed is his prophet.”

Help J&M to keep going by becoming a patron of Jesus & Mo:

or buy a book: – The latest J&M collection of J&M strips, which has a foreword by Jerry Coyne, is available here.

Peace and blessings,

Author J&M

Give the author a few bucks a month or so if you like the strip! Meanwhile, here’s “Idea”.

“Shahada pants,” also called “harem pants“, are baggy trousers once worn by Muslim women, and then became popular for women in the 20th century (these are also M. C. Hammer’s baggy trousers). It’s not clear why Mo is wearing what looks like a Speedo, unless he is going to don shahada pants:

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 20, 2026 • 8:15 am

Pratyaydipta Rudra is back with part 2 of his duck photo series (part 1 is here), which of course features DUCKS. Pratyay’s IDs and comments are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

Here is the second part of the series of photos that I took while spending time with a group of breeding Wood Ducks (Aix sponsa).

A couple of males doing their things:

A duckling floating by:

Mother showing kiddo how to search for food on/under the floating logs:

The duckling tries some on its ownL

A few more ducklings join in:

Like mother like baby. Part 1: The sweet call!:

 Like mother like baby. Part 2: The wing flaps!:

A couple of ducklings resting on the rock:

There were four in total. I think at this time they were aware of me taking photos and got slightly alert:

Duckling swimming in…

 Checking the “mirror”? Not an ugly duckling for sure:

Father was close by floating on the reflective water of the pond:

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

May 20, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“ਹੰਪ ਡੇ” in Punjabi): it’s Wednesday, May 20, 2026 and National Pick Strawberries Day. Here’s the world’s heaviest strawberry as certified by Guinness. It was grown in Israel and weighed over ten ounces:

Ariel Chahi (Israel) has grown a supersized strawberry that weighed 289 g (10.19 oz) on 12 February 2021. The fruit, which has been confirmed as the world’s heaviest strawberry, was 18 cm long, 4 cm thick and 34 cm in circumference.

Click to see the video (and turn on audio):

It’s also Flower Day, International Red Sneakers Day, National Quiche Lorraine Day, National Rescue Dog Day, World Flour Day, and World Bee Day. Here is what’s regarded as The World’s Cutest Bee, Australia’s “teddy bear bee”, Ambigilla bombiformus. It’s very stocky and fuzzy.

aussiegall from sydney, Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 20 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Five people died in a shooting in a mosque in San Diego; with two of the dead being teenage boys who attacked with guns, killed a security guard, and then committed suicide.

The frantic mother’s call came in at 9:42 a.m. on Monday: Her son was missing.

That wasn’t all, she told the San Diego police. Several guns were gone, and so was her car, and her 17-year-old might have a friend with him.

The police were alarmed and began a desperate hunt for the two teenagers. They were somewhere in California’s second largest city, a sprawling community of 1.4 million people nestled amid palms and purple jacarandas.

A license plate reader seemed to show them near a mall, and officers rushed there. Then, they converged on the high school one of the teenagers attended. Those turned out to be the wrong places.

The teens’ target was a mosque, the police said. They shot and killed three people there, including a security guard who worked for the mosque and whose actions, police said, likely saved lives. And then the teens killed themselves, the police said.

The grounds of the Islamic Center of San Diego, the largest mosque in San Diego County, include a school.

“I’ll tell you what got me,” Chief Scott Wahl of the San Diego Police Department said at a news conference. “Watching kids come running out, just thankful to be alive.”

The shooting came amid increased threats and acts of violence against religious institutions in America, fueled by the wars in the Middle East. In March, a man attacked a synagogue outside Detroit with a truck before he died in a confrontation with security guards. The growing threats have prompted increased security at mosques, synagogues and churches across America.

There’s evidence, too, that this is a hate crime, though specific motives haven’t yet been identified:

Investigators recovered anti-Islamic writing in the car where the suspects were found dead, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the matter who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to share details publicly. The words “hate speech” were written on one of the guns used in the attack.

Chief Wahl said investigators had not uncovered any threats toward a specific place. Still, “there was definitely hate rhetoric involved,” Chief Wahl said.

Finally, TRT World (and several other sources) reports that the Mayor of San Diego, Todd Gloria, was heckled, accused of responsibility for the attack:

Before Gloria delivered a public statement, a woman in the audience shouted at him and blamed him for the attack, saying it was a “direct result” of his leadership.

“You emboldened Zionist propaganda. And you’ll keep doing it as long as it lines with your f*cking pockets,” the woman said.

The security guard who was killed, Amin Abdullah, acted heroically, by all accounts saving a lot of lives in the mosque. It’s tragic that he was the father of eight children.

Last night on the NBC news they said it was clearly a “hate crime”, as there were manifestos, bottles labeled with an SS symbol, and various anti-Islam and anti-Semitic writings.  I was taken aback by the “anti-Semitic” part, as that implies that the “hate” was general, not just limited to Muslims, and may have denoted mental illness or rage on the part of both shooters. .  I haven’t heard more about this, but you probably won’t from the NYT or WaPo. The Anti-Defamation League does mention it:

A review by the ADL Center on Extremism of the killers’ respective manifestos reveals adherence to several ideologies, most prominently white supremacist accelerationism and inceldom, as well as virulent Islamophobia and antisemitism. Their writings, which have been shared on gore sites like WatchPeopleDie (WPD), also illustrate general misanthropy and an immersion in online nihilistic violent extremist (NVE) ecosystems.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal makes the dire prediction: “War is coming”; that is: Israel is about to resume attacking Iran:

t’s Tuesday, May 19, and for the past few days, the skies above Jerusalem have been echoing with the sound of fighter jets. The Air Force is on high alert, preparing for potential action as diplomatic avenues with Tehran close. According to Reuters, Iran’s latest counterproposal is a nonstarter that simply mirrors previously rejected terms. Sources speaking to Axios confirmed that Tehran still refuses to halt uranium enrichment or surrender its stockpile, leading the Trump administration to officially dismiss the offer as “insufficient.”

This impasse was echoed by IRGC-affiliated media, which noted deep-seated disagreements and affirmed that Iran will not trade nuclear concessions to end the conflict. Meanwhile, the United States stands firm on its baseline requirements: Iran must hand over its HEU, dismantle its nuclear infrastructure and accept a 20-year freeze on uranium enrichment.

Also yesterday, Donald Trump revealed he had called off a military strike against Iran that was slated for the following day. According to Trump, the pause was requested by Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Emirati President Mohamed bin Zayed, who urged a two-to-three-day suspension to allow ongoing negotiations to play out. Sources familiar with the matter told Axios that these Gulf leaders warned Washington they would “pay the price” if the U.S. proceeded, expressing deep concerns that Iran would retaliate by targeting their vital energy and oil infrastructure. Though I would take this claim with a grain of salt, the report may have been an attempt to confuse or threaten Iran, or perhaps artificially disassociate the Gulf countries from retaliation.

While Trump noted that the regional leaders remain optimistic about securing a mutually acceptable deal to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he emphasized that the U.S. military remains primed for a “full, large-scale assault” on short notice if talks collapse.

Meanwhile, Tehran is moving to institutionalize unilateral control over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s newly formed Persian Gulf Strait Authority recently declared itself the sole legal manager of the waterway, warning that unauthorized transit is illegal and leaving 1,500 vessels backed up awaiting permission. IRGC-affiliated media are now targeting critical global digital infrastructure. Outlets now suggest that Iran’s “absolute sovereignty” allows it to impose fees and oversight on the major subsea fiber-optic cables running through the strait—including the networks connecting Asia, Europe and the Gulf. Crucially, state media warned that “deliberate actions” resulting in simultaneous damage to these cables could be used to inflict massive financial and communications disruptions worldwide.

Right before the last operation began, I actually bought a custom T-shirt that read: “I don’t know when the Iran strike will be.” It was the only way to preempt the endless barrage of questions I faced every time I walked out the door. Today, I find myself able to reuse what I thought would be a single-use shirt. I don’t know the precise timeline, but just like last time—it is coming.

Trump keeps delaying and delaying. At some point, unless he simply gives up on the war, he’s going to either accept Iran’s terms (which will of course allow it to make nuclear weapons), or resume the attack. (See the next item.)

*On the other hand, the WaPo reports that Trump called off a strike on Iran planned for yesterday to give more time for Iran to confect a peace proposal.

President Donald Trump said Monday that he had tentatively called off plans for the United States military to attack Iran after the heads of three countries in the Middle East asked him to give negotiations more time.

In a Truth Social post Monday, Trump said Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan had asked him to “hold off” on a planned military strike on Iran — originally scheduled for Tuesday — in light of “serious negotiations” on a peace deal.

“Based on my respect for the above mentioned Leaders,” Trump wrote, he had instructed U.S. military leaders “that we will NOT be doing the scheduled attack of Iran tomorrow.”

Trump told reporters at a White House event a few hours after his post that the leaders had asked him to hold off on an attack for “two or three days — a short period of time.”

The move was the latest sudden turn by Trump in the 11 weeks since the U.S. and Israel launched their attack on Iran on Feb. 28. In recent days, he had threatened renewed attacks. On Sunday, he wrote on Truth Social that Iran needed to move fast “or there won’t be anything left” and that “the Clock is Ticking.”

In his latest post, Trump insisted, however, that the U.S. military is prepared to launch a “full, large scale assault of Iran, on a moment’s notice” if negotiations sour and that any deal has to include no new weapons for Iran.

“We’ve had periods of time where we … thought [we were] pretty close to making a deal and it didn’t work out,” he told reporters Monday afternoon. “But this is a little bit different.”

I have never seen a leader act like this in wartime. This repeated delaying doesn’t seem to be the actions of a President who fervently wants peace. Rather, it seems to be the actions of a mercurial President who is buffeted by whatever is the latest pronouncement that he hears.

*Four years ago Tyler Cowan, says the Free Press newsletter, “wrote an influential essay arguing that wokeness had peaked. At the time, it was a controversial claim. . . We asked Tyler to revisit his claim four years on. ” And so we have “Wokeness has peaked. What followed is worse.” Cowan means “direct action,” which includes violence:

So what has been happening? The forces behind wokeism no longer command so much public attention and respect when they argue about terms and pronouns. Instead, left-adjacent movements have arisen with a contrasting emphasis on action, and often action of a terrible sort. California is considering, for instance, an unworkable tax on billionaires in the state, one that even most left-leaning Democratic politicians do not support. It might nevertheless pass through via referendum.

Or, to take another example, Senator Bernie Sanders wants to halt the progress of AI, using the law if necessary, and in the meantime he and others from the progressive left are undercutting the construction of new data centers.

The ideology of “third worldism” is on the rise, and it takes the form of antisemitic demonstrations and concrete violent attacks on individual Jews or groups of Jews who appear in predictable locations, such as going to and from synagogues, or in Jewish neighborhoods. Such attacks have risen steadily.

. . .What’s more, it is possible we are entering an era with a new culture of assassinations. There have been assassinations of Charlie Kirk, of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and several attempts on the life of President Trump. It can be debated how many of these killers had direct connections to the political left, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that left-wing rhetoric about democracy destruction helped make such actions conceivable.

The social energies of the American left have moved away from the realm of speech and into plans for concrete action, whether in politics, through attempted wealth confiscations, or through organizing violence. In retrospect, wokeism, for all its problems, was a relatively harmless way of distracting activists and keeping them busy with wars over words—a less-bad allocation of social energies than what we are now seeing. So while I would not say I long for the return of high wokeism, I recognize it has been replaced by a left-adjacent movement that is worse.

To be clear, while this column is focused on the political left, the political right also has undergone an extremely problematic evolution, and I do not mean to let them off the hook. Increasingly open and blatant antisemitism on the right is but one manifestation of this phenomenon.

So perhaps wokeism was never the fundamental problem in the first place; rather, our own negativity was. Wokeism cloaked that negativity in wars of words, and because conservatives and classical liberals did not lose those wars of words, they felt a kind of temporary victory. But the victory was Pyrrhic. The negativity remains, and now it may end up channeled in yet more dangerous directions.

So I will give one cheer to the woke, if only because I fear what is going to follow.

Here are two plots from the More in Common US Newsletter Substack site.  The first shows that most Americans are concerned that political violence is becoming more of a problem.

While this one shows that the approbation for political violence is too high (20% is too high!), but positively correlated, as spected, with the time people spend on social media, which is surely also negatively correlated with age:

*Based on a paper in PLOS ONE (click title below to read it), the NYT has a piece called “Neanderthal dentistry, and the scientist glad not to have experienced it.” The dentistry at issue is a prehistoric root canal done with stone tools! The NYT has an interview with an anthropologist:

A decade ago in southern Siberia’s Chagyrskaya Cave, archaeologists unearthed a 59,000-year-old Neanderthal molar with a curious, deep hole. A study published this month in the journal PLOS One proposed that the molar’s owner had suffered a severe toothache, prompting the patient, or a brave peer, to attempt an intervention.

The tooth’s hollow had been scooped out by a stone drill rather than by natural decay or wear, researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences concluded. They replicated the bore marks in three modern human molars with fine-pointed drills fashioned from jasper, a tough quartz found in the area around the cave and used to make other tools discovered at the site.

The findings indicated that the prehistoric patient underwent a deliberate Stone Age root canal, a discovery that pushes back the earliest evidence of intentional dentistry by more than 40,000 years.

Treating the cavity was an act of neurological and mechanical sophistication, requiring the ancient hominins to diagnose the source of pain, select the appropriate stone tool and employ remarkable dexterity to scrape down to the pulp, the tooth’s inner tissue.

Enduring such a torturous, anesthesia-free root canal required staggering willpower. Yet the tooth shows continued wear after the drilling took place, meaning the patient survived and kept using the molar.

There follows a short interview with John Olsen, “an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.” Read these two Q&As and tell me that it doesn’t make you shiver:

The study proposes that a dental instrument made of jasper was likely used to ream the tooth. How would that have worked?

We have two different artifact types that could have been used. One is called a drill by archaeologists, because it presumably had that function in life. The other, a beak, is generally considered a simpler tool, made of a stone flake that comes to a sharp point.

Both would have been held between the thumb and the forefinger in a pinch grip, then twisted and rotated continuously against the surface of the infected tooth.

Recreating the procedure on modern human teeth showed the process would have taken around 35 to 50 minutes of continuous, high-pressure drilling to penetrate the dentin and expose the pulp chamber.

These days, the living pulp, which contains nerves and blood vessels, is completely removed from inside the tooth, then the empty pulp chamber and root canals are cleaned and filled to seal them and prevent future infections. Typically, the post-procedure discomfort fades within three to five days.

Going back 60,000 years or even 2,000 years, there were really no other alternatives other than trying to get as much of that rotted material out of the tooth as possible.

The “dentist” then probably filled the cavity with something that would seal it: perhaps beeswax or pitch. And presumably another solution—pulling out the tooth—wasn’t possible as the Neanderthals lacked forceps.  It still amazes me that the Neanderthals knew what to do: kill the nerve and fill the hole: primitive periodontology. And it worked, as there was evidence for wear on the tooth after it was drilled. But oy, the pain!

The paper:

The tooth at issue with its caption from PLOS ONE:

Fig 2. Chagyrskaya 64 molar tooth and its macro-features. 1 General view of the tooth in five projections; a–c. Macro-photographs of the crown’s occlusal surface features: a. superior view of the concavity; b. stepped groove on the concavity’s wall;

From the abstract:

 The tooth exhibits a large human-generated concavity on the occlusal surface, created during the lifetime of the individual. Traceological and microtomographic analyses of the observed modifications, combined with experimental verification, reveal that the concavity in Chagyrskaya 64 is indicative of the earliest documented instance of caries treatment involving the drilling/rotating with a lithic perforator, ca. 59 ka. Evidence of two distinct types of manipulations requiring different tools, in addition to the drilling/rotating technique, necessitating complex finger movements, indicates that the Chagyrskaya Cave Neanderthals possessed the cognitive capacity to intuit the source of pain, comprehend the feasibility of its elimination, and deliberately select the most efficacious dental intervention.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron affirms Hili’s skepticism:

Hili: Wherever you look, there are doubts.
Szaron: That’s because it’s in your nature.

In Polish:

Hili: Gdzie nie spojrzeć tam wątpliwości.
Szaron: To dlatego, że masz taki charakter.

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

From Dancing Cats:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs or Notices:

From CinEmma:

Here’s Masih chewing out Barak Obama’s “deal” that allowed Iran to proceed with enriching uranium.

From Luana. This is exactly what “affirmative care” should not be: surgery on an underage girl with mental health problems:

From Ricky Gervais, rightfully proud at the reception of his “After Life” series. I still think it was magnificent, although many people seem to find it lame.

x

Emma tackles the classics:

Captain Ella recites a poem. First, the translation from the Arabic:

A poem by Nizar Qabbani stopped me in my tracks…

Oh lady of South Lebanon,
They did not love it, but rather loved the war within it,
And made it open to coffins.

And the South that I know:
Fairuz, coffee, and the sound of shepherds at sunset

One from my feed. “Bird brains” my tuches!

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz. He was four years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-20T10:40:54.275Z

. . and one from Dr. Cobb, ripped from the depths of Wikipedia:

— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2026-05-19T05:31:45.596Z

A federal judge takes apart Nicholas Kristof’s controversial accusations against Israel

May 19, 2026 • 9:45 am

If you’re getting weary of the endless but necessary attacks on Nicholas Kristof for his misleading and almost antisemitic column about Israel’s “policy” of sexually assaulting Palestinian prisoners, Roy K. Altman has written in the Free Press the definitive critique of Kristof’s column—that is, until investigations by Israel reveal more information.

Wikipedia identifies Altman as “a Venezuelan-American lawyer and jurist who serves as a United States district judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida” and also identifies him as Jewish.

You can read Altman’s column by clicking below—if you subscribe to the Free Press.

The “miscarriage of journalism” is, overall, the promulgation of “fake news” by Kristof: accusations that are improperly vetted (if at all), which come from questionable sources, and which are contradicted by existing Israeli policy and behavior. Altman’s thesis is that this kind of journalism subverts the “marketplace of opinions” that, it’s been said, is necessary for the American public to judge what is true. Excerpts from Altman and others are indented; prose that is flush left is mine:

. . . we entrust our fellow Americans with the power to make these choices because we believe that a virtuous people will be equipped to make the right choices—principally because we assume that our citizens will be prepared to discern truth from fiction. And we feel comfortable in that assumption because we’ve devised a system of laws—based on evidence, burdens of proof, and a time-tested set of rules—to help us assess the veracity of contested claims. In this way, the jury system isn’t simply a means of ensuring fair trials. Rather, it’s a way of training free citizens to make difficult decisions for themselves.

Today, this whole system is being undermined by the proliferation of false information—especially on the internet. But it’s one thing to have our geopolitical and ideological enemies—whether China, Russia, or the Muslim Brotherhood—pushing unverified claims about our closest allies into our cell phones. It’s another thing entirely for The New York Times, a supposed “paper of record,” and one of its Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists to offer a story that—in its disregard of basic evidence-gathering norms, its unwillingness to investigate the opposing side’s position, and its inversion of common sense—violates the fundamental rules of fairness and due process that have, for centuries, served as the bulwark of our democracy.

In his explosive essay, Kristof accused Israel of using sexual violence against detained Palestinian prisoners as a kind of “standard operating procedure.” Kristof’s claim is thus not merely that a few rogue Israeli prison guards sometimes behave illegally—as happens in all Western democracies, including our own. It is, instead, that the Israeli government has implemented a systemic policy of deploying sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners on a massive scale.

Altman also faults the timing of the column, which came out the evening before the Civil Commission’s issued its 298-page report on sexual violence against Israelis on October 7, 2023. The Israeli Foreign Ministry says that the Commission offered this report to the paper but the paper wasn’t interested.  The paper denies this, so for the time being we have a “he said/she said” situation. Regardless, Altman avers that the “psychological doctrine of primacy” argues that “a fact finder is often most persuaded by the story he hears first”, implying that Kristof, regardless of the deficiencies of his piece, should at least have held off publishing it until the Civil Commission’s report came out.  We won’t go further into this issue, as Altman finds three major faults with the column:

On the merits, Kristof’s article violates three central precepts of our legal system: It disregards basic rules of evidence gathering; it refuses to investigate the opposing side’s views; and it ignores logic and common sense.

Within this list of three there are buried two other sub-lists, which makes the piece a bit confusing. But Altman’s claims and his accusations of Kristof are pretty clear.  I’ll number the main claims as 1, 2, and 3, with sub-lists given letters as well as numbers.

1.) The column is unfair by making uncheckable claims.  

Let’s start with fairness. One of the fundamental rules of our justice system is that a man should be permitted to confront his accuser. Whether in civil or criminal cases, we have for hundreds of years rejected the English Star Chamber’s technique of allowing anonymous witnesses to advance salacious claims in secret. This principle is so essential to any basic system of fairness that it appears repeatedly throughout our laws—from the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause and its guarantee of public trials to our hearsay rules, which preclude out-of-court statements the accused never had an opportunity to cross-examine. But Kristof’s article relies mostly on anonymous sources whose credibility—much less their political or ideological affiliations—cannot be tested and thus cannot be known.

Here we have four sub-points that expand on this claim:

Kristof justifies his reliance on anonymity by suggesting that his sources would face retribution, either from Israeli authorities or from their own communities, if they came forward. But there are at least four major problems with this excuse.

1a. There is no evidence of retribution against prisoners who claimed to be sexually assaulted, and some claims changed over time:

Kristof provides no evidence of any similar retribution against one of the men he spoke with who has publicly accused Israeli guards of sexual assault. For months now, Sami al-Sai has repeatedly and publicly claimed, including to major news outlets like NPR and the Times, that he was sexually assaulted while in Israeli detention. There are real problems with al-Sai’s claims. For one thing, soon after his detention, he filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court, arguing that he was wrongly detained and asking for his immediate release. In that petition, he complained about the quality of the food he was given and said that he was treated badly,but he notably never mentioned any of the sex allegations he’s now advancing.

. . . But the point here is that, far from suffering any retribution for complaining about his detention, al-Sai was later freed, and Kristof never suggests that he’s since been subject to any form of punishment.

1b. Israel has in place an often-used system for registering and adjudicating prisoner’s complains about mistreatment

Two,any cursory review of Israeli legal databases would reveal that Israeli prisons allow Palestinian prisoners to file complaints about the conditions of their confinement—and that these complaints do get filed. Indeed, since 2023, Israel has received 182 such complaints filed by Israel Prison Service detainees from the Gaza Strip. . . But the point is that Kristof offers not a single shred of evidence that any of the Palestinian prisoners who filed complaints has ever been subjected to retribution—much less that this speculation about retribution has ever been a feature of the Israeli prison system.

1c. Kristof’s insistence on anonymity makes his allegations uncheckable. 

Kristof’s reliance on anonymity ensures that no one—most especially the Israelis—can ever prove him wrong. That’s because he not only tells us very little about the accusers, he tells us nothing about the offenses. No locations. No dates. No perpetrators. Israeli prisons, like many of our own, are often videotaped, and those recordings are reviewed not just by prison guards but by prison officials and lawyers. If Kristof had conducted anything resembling a fair analysis, we would have expected him to have asked to review some of this footage. But there’s no indication that he ever did. Nor can anyone else do so now because Kristof gave us no details to check against his claims.

1d. The accused has a right to the details of accusations, which gives them a chance to defend themselves. “The accused” here include onot just IDF soldiers and prison officials, but Israel itself, which is threatening to sue the paper.

Four, we should acknowledge that it’s always hard for victims of sexual assault to advance their claims publicly. But any system committed to basic fairness recognizes that the accuser’s preference for anonymity must bend to the accused’s right to confront the claims against him. And that’s not just because we want to allow the accused to test the reliability of the accuser’s claims. It’s also because we presume that the mere act of declaring something publicly itself evinces some degree of credibility.

Kristof fails to mention, for example, that Euro-Med, one of his principal sources, is  an organization with known ties to Hamas and has made false claims about Israel before, including the blood libel that Israel harvests organs of prisoners.

On to the second major point:

********

2.) Kristof failed to investigate “the opposing side’s position”, including systemic aspects of Israeli law that would make widespread abuse improbable.  Again Altman breaks this down into a sublist of three items:

2a. Kristof doesn’t mention Israeli laws prohibiting sexual abuse of prisoners. 

First, in advancing his claim that Israel permits or encourages sexual abuse of detainees as a matter of state policy, Kristof fails even to mention that sexual offenses are strictly prohibited under Israel’s penal code. Indeed, the Israeli legal system imposes enhanced penalties when sexual offenses, including by security personnel, are motivated by race, skin color, or national origin. And Israeli military forces are bound by a host of additional directives, which further protect prisoners from state-sponsored violence, including sexual violence.

Altman implies that Kristof was trying to hide this fact.  Well, yes, probably, but shouldn’t we know that this conduct is against the law? What’s worse is that Kristof also fails to mention that similar Palestinian prisoners’ allegations of abuse have led to serious prison sentences for over a dozen Israeli abusers.

2b. Kristof fails to mention that there’s a special unit of Israeli police designed to investigate claims of prison misconduct. 

Kristof likewise fails to disclose that there’s an elite unit in Israel’s police force, called Lahav 433, tasked with investigating misconduct by the Israeli Prison Service. Now, it’s entirely possible that Israel created this unit inside what’s known as the “Israeli FBI” and filled it with elite servicemembers who do nothing but sit in an office all day, twiddling their thumbs and happily allowing misconduct to go unchecked. The far more plausible inference, I submit, is that Israel didn’t create this elite investigative unit simply to do nothing. But the point is that we don’t know—and cannot know—the answers to any of these questions from Kristof’s “opinion” piece because he never bothered to mention this unit, never thought to interview its members, and never investigated the extent to which it actually enforces Israeli law.

Well, the existence of such a unit doesn’t prove that there wasn’t misconduct, but it does show that there were quite a few deterrents to misconduct.

2c.  A quote from a former Prime Minister of Israel was presented, but a later clarification of that quote by the PM was ignored. Perhaps worse than the two omissions above is Kristof’s shoddy (indeed, slimy) treatment of a comment by a former Israeli Prime Minister. Here’s what Kristof said.

To try to make sense of what I found, I called up Ehud Olmert, who was Israel’s prime minister from 2006 to 2009. Olmert told me he didn’t know much about sexual violence against Palestinians but was not surprised by the accounts I had heard.

“Do I believe it happens?” he asked. “Definitely.”

“There are war crimes committed every day in the territories,” he added.

Of all people to ask! Olmert had been convicted of corruption and bribery as Israel’s finance minister and served 16 months of a 27-month prison sentence. Kristof doesn’t mention this, and Kristof might have added, post facto, this clarification by Olmert:

Olmert clarified, in a statement to The New York Times and obtained by The Free Press, that “Mr. Kristof’s article includes claims of extraordinary gravity: that Israeli authorities have directed the rape of children, that dogs have been used as instruments of sexual assault, that systematic sexual torture is state policy. I did not validate these claims.”

Surely this should have been an addendum to Kristof’s piece. It wasn’t, The NYT hasn’t responded directly to this clarification save to say that Olmert’s statement was tape-recorded and presented accurately “in context”. But when when Olmert later denied that he was not validating claims of sexual abuse, that was no deemed worthy of a mention or correction by the NYT.

********

3.) The “dog rape” claims is pure blood libel, in line with previous anti-Israel claims. (And there’s no evidence for it. Indeed, many have deemed the “trained dog rape scenario” to be impossible (I’m not ruling it out with complete certainty, and it will surely need investigating. But I do find it stupid.)

Which brings us to Kristof’s final departure from our fundamental precepts: his lack of common sense. The most salacious claim in Kristof’s piece is the allegation that Israel is now systematically training dogs to rape Arab Muslim men. This claim used to live only on the fringes of the wildest internet conspiracy theories. In 2010, there was a spate of shark attacks in the Red Sea, situated between Israel and Egypt. For whatever reason, most (if not all) of these attacks occurred on the Egyptian side of the border. I happened to be in Israel that summer and heard an Egyptian minister wondering whether the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, was systematically training sharks to eat only Arab flesh. My father and I, hearing this over the radio in a cab, laughed at the absurdity of the claim.

What we’ve seen over the last few years is that wild and illogical conspiracy theories that used to reside only on the internet and in the anti-Israel Arab street now circulate in the mainstream media, brought there by irresponsible journalists who flout evidentiary standards, ignore basic notions of fairness, and disregard common sense and the truth. What kind of a society will we be if we don’t reverse this disturbing erosion in our ability to tell truth from falsehood?

Altman’s claims add up to a serious indictment of Kristof’s column, which, though presented as an op-ed piece, could easily have run as a news piece, but the paper was apparently too lazy to check its claims. To me, the most serious accusations are twofold: the failure of Kristof to document the accusations so they could be checked, even making the complainers anonymous; and also Kristof’s failure to mention the anti-Israel jostpru of some of the individuals and organizations (especially Euro-Med) making the claims.  It is a one-sided column, even for Kristof, who in the past hasn’t done due diligence in checking claims.

The more I think about this, the more I think Kristof should be fired, as the op-ed is a serious lapse in standards, even for an op-ed. If op-ed editor James Bennet could be fired (as he was) for allowing Senator Tom Cotton to write an op-ed arguing that the military might be used to quell post-George Floyd riots, surely Kristof should also be forced to resign. After all, Cotton was just giving an opinion that didn’t rest on facts, while Kristof made many allegations that he didn’t bother to either qualify or investigate.

But of course Kristof is a golden boy for the NYT, and the his column buttresses the NYT’s well known stance against Israel. The NYT is standing behind his column (it has no public editor), and don’t expect it to fact-check his claims. That will be up to Israel.

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 19, 2026 • 8:15 am

This is the last full batch of photos I have save a few singletons and doubletons. But I ain’t too proud to beg. . .

Today we have some lovely photos by Ephraim Heller on, of all things, herring. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) spend most of the year dispersed across the open North Pacific, but each spring they converge on Sitka Sound to spawn. The 2026 spawning biomass was estimated at roughly 233,000 tons of mature herring. This attracts commercial fishermen, fishing birds, Steller sea lions, gray whales, humpback whales, and. . . me. My last post featured humpback whales.

Today’s post features the mayhem taking place off the coast of Sitka on the opening day of commercial herring season. The fishing boats employ purse netting, a form of seine netting, in which a school of fish are surrounded by a net which is pulled tight around them. As the net closes and the herring are forced to the surface, a buffet is created for glaucous-winged gulls (Larus glaucescens) and bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus).

A commercial fishing boat hauling in a seine net filled with Pacific herring:

The herring are forced to the surface by the seine:

Glaucous-winged gulls at the buffet:

It was impressive to watch the gulls catch a herring, quickly reposition the squirming fish in their bills, and swallow them in flight in a matter of seconds:

Such speed seems necessary because kleptoparasites abound:

Now for the bald eagles:

Air traffic control is kept busy:

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

May 19, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, May 19, 2026 and once again it’s Malcom X Day (he was born on this day in 1925, and was assassinated at 39).  May 15 was also Malcolm X Day, but today is the biggest one as some cities give people the day off. In fact, according to Wikipedia “As of present, only the cities of Berkeley and Oakland in California observe the holiday, with city offices and schools closed.”

Here’s a 4-minute video made by CBS News, which includes his famous statement about gaining freedom “by any means necessary,” a phrase that figures largely at the end of Spike Lee’s biopic about Malcolm When asked by Mike Wallace if he wasn’t afraid of being attacked, he responds, “Oh yes. . . I am probably a dead man already.” Seven months later, he was.

There’s a good 60 Minutes report on Malcolm and his death here.

It’s also Dinosaur Day and National Devil’s Food Cake Day. Why is the cake named that?  Wikipedia says this:

The origin of the name may reference the angel food cake, a light, airy sponge cake, which was popular in the late 19th century as the first recipes for devil’s food cake were being published.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 19 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*As America turns 250 years old, the Trump administration is pushing very hard on a narrative that this is a Christian national founded on Christianity. This was clear from a Christian-themed prayer event held Sunday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (article archived here).

A crowd of thousands transformed a block of the National Mall into an evangelical-style worship service Sunday at an event backed by President Donald Trump and funded with millions of taxpayer dollars.

In an eight-hour lineup, speakers including top government officials framed America as a country founded to be explicitly Christian — and in danger if its population turns from their version of that religious faith.

Sitting, standing, dancing and praising with hands raised toward a blazing sun, attendees appeared riveted as speakers took the stage during “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving.” Many said they were thrilled to see an event that tied the nation and its government so overtly to Christianity.

“We welcome Jesus into this place!” worship leader Andy Frank said at the start of the event, belting from a stage with ivory-colored pillars that evoked the neoclassical architecture of the capital’s federal buildings.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking by video, said civilizations before Christianity saw history as a “wheel to nowhere,” and that “our faith” of Christianity has always been the “soul of our nation.”

Trump, who is not known for quoting the Bible, read a passage from Scripture in which God promises to heal the ancient Israelites if they agree to pray and humble themselves before God.

Until Trump’s second term in office, it had been virtually unheard of in modern times for U.S. government officials to publicly tie the nation to a specific set of religious beliefs. Trump’s cabinet members have changed that norm.

On Sunday, aside from a couple of small groups of protesters outside the event, attendees at the jubilee seemed unfazed by or grateful for the government imprimatur on their faith system.

“It’s about time and sorely needed,” said Richard Nuccitelli, 87, a real estate agent from New Fairfield, Connecticut, who traveled to D.C. with four friends from his Bible study group. The Constitution, he said, doesn’t work without a “moral and Christian population.”

That is complete bullpucky.  Does Israel not work because its population is not Christian?  Do the Scandinavian countries not work because they are not “Christian” in any meaningful sense, comprising a populace that is largely atheistic?  Talking about the Constitution, what is the very First Amendment in it? One that guarantees, among other things, freedom of religion.  Many of the founders, like Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Madison, were either non-Christian deists or atheists.  It’s very sad that every atheist, Jew, Hindu, and Muslim are disenfranchised from the new Trump-approved narrative.  And I suspect that Trump is really an atheist, too: the only God he believe in is the one he sees in the mirror.

*In a NYT/Siena poll (figures here), Trump appears to have low approval on almost everything, including his overall rating as President (37% approval, 59% disapproval). The article is archived here.

Most voters think President Trump made the wrong decision to go to war with Iran, a New York Times/Siena poll found, leaving the Republican Party on rocky political footing heading into the midterm elections as his approval rating sinks and economic concerns rise.

Majorities of voters said that the war was not worth the costs and held deeply pessimistic views about the economy.

Mr. Trump’s approval rating — a key historical predictor of how a president’s party will fare in an election — has sunk to a second-term low in Times/Siena polls of 37 percent amid the deeply unpopular Middle East conflict.

Nearly two-thirds of voters said that going to war had been the wrong decision, including almost three-quarters of politically crucial independents. Less than a quarter of all voters thought the conflict had been worth the costs.

Republicans broadly approved of Mr. Trump’s job performance and the war. But most other voters showed serious skepticism of his leadership on other top issues, including the economy and the cost of living. Sixty-four percent of all voters disapproved of his handling of the economy, long a strength for him, and majorities expressed negative views of how he was managing the cost of living, immigration and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Independent voters in particular have become unhappier with Mr. Trump. Sixty-nine percent disapproved of his job performance, up from 62 percent in a January Times/Siena poll. Forty-seven percent of independents said his policies had hurt them, up from 41 percent in fall 2025.

Overall, 44 percent of voters said Mr. Trump’s policies had hurt them personally, up from 36 percent last fall.

Here’s an overall (national) view of Trump (from the NYT; credits at bottom):

If you look at the linked page with all the states, you’ll see that 7% of Democrats approve of Trump’s performance compared to 82% of Republicans. For disapproval, the relative figures are 92% and 15%. For independent voters, 26% approve and 62% disapprove: not a hearty endorsement.

The NYT also gives the overall view on the economy over time; the ratings today aren’t much different from those in 2023, when Biden was President.

Overall, given the next item, while Trump might not be re-elected if he ran again, that in fact won’t happen. What Republicans should worry about are the midterms, but see the next piece and remember that whoever runs Congress, Trump still has veto power over new bills.

*It’s usual for a President’s administration to lose seats in both the House and the Senate during the midterm elections, which take place this November. Right now the balance is precarious in the House:

House of Representatives: Republicans 220, Democrats 215

Senate: Republicans 53, Democrats 45, Independents 2 (both caucusing with Democrats).

But redistricting is starting to favor the GOP, especially after the recent Supreme Court decision to prohibit race-based gerrymandering.

From the AP:

apnews.com/…/redistricting-house-congress-gerrymander-voting-rights-f78310aed323bfeec3430f236f7b6e03Republicans have opened up an advantage in a national redistricting battle among states after court rulings that weakened federal Voting Rights Act protections for minorities and invalidated a key Democratic redistricting effort.

A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a Black-majority congressional district in Louisiana as an illegal racial gerrymander has provided grounds for Republicans in several Southern states to try to eliminate House districts with large minority populations that have elected Democrats.

Meanwhile, a Virginia Supreme Court ruling invalidated a voter-approved congressional map that Democrats had been counting on to deliver as many as four additional U.S. House seats. The court said Democratic lawmakers had violated the state constitution when placing the proposal on the ballot.

Legislative voting districts typically are redrawn based on census data after the start of each decade. But an unusual spate of mid-decade redistricting broke out after President Donald Trump urged Texas Republicans last year to reshape U.S. House districts to give the party an edge in the midterm elections. Democrats in California countered with their own political gerrymandering. More states followed.

But Republicans, egged on the the Supreme Court’s decision banning race-based redistricting, are fighting hard to retain control of the House.

And it’s going on in South Carolina right now:

An effort to reshape South Carolina’s congressional districts is getting its first full airing Monday in the state House, as lawmakers launch what could become a lengthy and potentially testy discussion on whether to accede to President Donald Trump’s desires for a U.S. House map that could yield a clean sweep for Republicans.

Tense debates already have played out in Tennessee, Alabama and Louisiana as Republicans push aggressively to leverage a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that weakened Voting Rights Act protections for minority districts. The ruling has opened the way for Republicans to redraw districts with large Black populations that have elected Democrats.

In South Carolina, that means targeting a seat long held by U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, the only Democrat among the state’s seven House representatives.

I asked Grok what the consensus view was about who would constitute the House majority after the midterms, and of course it was undecided:

Expert ratings (Cook Political Report, Inside Elections, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, etc.) and models generally show:

  • Baseline/”solid-to-likely” projections before allocating tossups: Democrats around 207–227 seats; Republicans around 202–217 seats.

  • Tossup/competitive seats: Typically 10–20 (highly variable by rater). These will largely decide the majority.

  • Consensus-style view (e.g., 270toWin aggregating ratings): Roughly 207 D / 209 R baseline + ~19 competitive.

It looks like the Dems have a slight edge at this point, but it’s by no means certain.

*In a post called “Roaring lion plan revealed” at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal, along with other venues, hint that the fighting between Iran and Israel may be about to resume (Trump has also warned Israel that “the clock is ticking”.

t’s Monday, May 18, and both the Israeli government and the IDF are hinting, through statements and actions, that they are preparing for the renewal of American strikes in Iran. Tehran has just submitted its latest diplomatic proposal: a commitment of highly questionable value to refrain from producing nuclear weapons. Conspicuously absent from the document is any mention of halting uranium enrichment or opening of the Strait of Hormuz.

Diplomacy appears to be faltering, but before the next Lion-themed operation, it is worth assessing the success of the last campaign.

Yesterday, Maj. Gen. (res.) Tamir Hayman, executive director of the Institute for National Security Studies and a former head of the Military Intelligence Directorate, published an article with several previously unknown details about the course of the war. Along with the revelations, Hayman gives an assessment: “Despite tactical achievements, the campaign’s two main centers of gravity—the Iranian regime and the nuclear project—remain without fundamental change.”

According to Hayman, Operation Rising Lion in June 2025 “did not pave the way for a permanent solution, and Iran demonstrated a rapid and dangerous recovery capability.” In the nuclear arena, the Iranians rehabilitated the Fordow nuclear facility and accelerated the construction of “Pickaxe Mountain,” which is (allegedly) immune to airstrikes. In the missile domain, they reached a production rate of about 125 ballistic missiles per month and had accumulated a large stockpile of about 2,500 by the start of Roaring Lion. Tehran also led a rapid rehabilitation of Hezbollah by doubling its budget and renewing supply routes through Syria, despite the fall of the Assad regime.

Hayman notes a significant disconnect between the political and military echelons at the outbreak of the war. Israel’s political ambition was the overthrow of the Iranian regime, whereas the IDF’s stated military objective was limited to the attrition of its capabilities. Despite this gap, the first stage of the campaign—spanning from the initial decapitation strikes against senior leadership to the eventual cancellation of the Kurdish incursion—focused heavily on the political aspiration of regime change. The decisive factor of this phase was meant to be an incursion by Kurdish fighters, designed to inflame interethnic tensions, destabilize the government and pave the way for a new, moderate leadership. This maneuver was also intended to serve as the keystone for a broader series of covert operations with similar objectives.

However, the plan was derailed when the Kurdish operation was canceled, likely due to pressure from Turkish and Arab allies. As Hayman puts it, “Once the covert operations were removed from the equation, the primary mechanism for destabilizing the regime’s stability was eliminated.”

Following the high-level assassinations, the campaign’s second phase pivoted to degrading Iranian capabilities. A central objective here was “the destruction of the nuclear project through an innovative and unique approach”—likely requiring a widespread ground maneuver. However, Iran had anticipated the decapitation strikes and proactively decentralized its military command structure before the war. Field officers were granted preauthorization to launch ballistic missiles and close the Strait of Hormuz without waiting for top-down orders. Furthermore, a governing vacuum was averted when Mojtaba Khamenei was appointed supreme leader at the behest of the IRGC.

This decentralized authority allowed Iran to successfully close the Strait of Hormuz, securing global leverage that altered American priorities and redirected attention toward the energy markets. Meanwhile, the campaign exposed the limitations of airpower; by Hayman’s assessment, most of Iran’s nuclear and missile assets survived by being housed in deep-underground bunkers. Consequently, the ultimate “crown jewel” of the military campaign—the destruction of the nuclear program—was not fully realized before the first ceasefire took effect.

This is all depressing: not just the failures to achieve these objectives, but the sidelining of regime change in Iran, which is necessary to secure the freedom of its people. However, Trump gave Iran yet another extension to come up with a reasonable peace plan.

*Men don’t excel in all strength and endurance sports: an exception is the ultramarathon. And a big one—250 miles long—was just won by a 34-year-old woman named Rachel Entrekin, who beat the women’s course record by seven hours and the men’s record by several hours. This shows that either ultramarathons should be run with bot sexes together, or, if women have an average advantage, with winners in two categories.

Then the 250-mile race started. Entrekin, a two-time women’s champion in the event, found herself running again with the elite males, and she began wondering: “Why not you?”

Then she pulled away, crushing the course record by seven hours, beating every man and woman in the field and providing another example of how multi-day races have erased gender lines.

Now, at 34, Entrekin’s the king of Cocodona, too, or maybe something more than that.

“One of my pacers has determined that I must be from another planet,” Entrekin said in an interview, still buzzing from her historic win.

Entrekin began running in 2009, as a student at the University of Alabama, before starting a career in physical therapy. She eventually started competing in half marathons, then full ones, before hitting longer ultramarathons in the Southeast and descending into what she called “insanity.” When she moved to Washington state and looked up at the vistas, she found her calling.

“I love running up mountains,” she told the “For the Long Run” podcast in February.

Today, Entrekin is fully sponsored and has won or placed in about 100 ultras, regularly beating men. At Cocodona, that meant finishing in 56 hours, nine minutes and 48 seconds. Kilian Korth, the men’s winner, finished 78 minutes behind her.

Here’s a video of Entrenkin after the race:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is anxious again:

Hili: How not to be afraid when everything scares you?
Andrzej: And what are you afraid of now?
Hili: The headlines in the papers.

In Polish:

Hili: Jak się nie bać, kiedy wszystko przeraża?
Ja: A czego się teraz boisz?
Hili: Tytułów gazet.

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

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices. With EVIDENCE! (I can’t even count the errors in this one.)

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From The Dodo Pet:

Masih calls out Keir Starmer for celebrating the anniversary of the Islamic Republic, and the UK for failing to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization.

From Luana; little kids spew religious hatred during last week’s anti-immigration march in London.  It’s free speech, but it’s no more palatable than “from the River to the sea,” or “globalize the intifada.”

From Barry, and yes, this is a real picture. I think both animals survived.

Photographer Martin Le-May was walking through a London park with his wife, hoping to show her a green woodpecker for the first time, when he snapped this incredible photo: a weasel riding a flying woodpecker.

— ContempraInn 🌹 (@contemprainn.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T09:03:21.846Z

From the Number Ten Cat, with pride:

One from my feed, and it’s adorable (there’s music):

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Dr. Cobb. Sound up on this first one!

Trying to explain to your wife how you went out for a beer with your friends on Saturday night and came home on Sunday afternoon.

— Paul Bronks (@slendersherbet.bsky.social) 2026-05-17T18:11:52.901Z

A lovely roadrunner. I once had such an encounter while camping in Death Valley. I fed it lettuce.

RoadrunnerPalooza continues… I had a nice encounter with a juvenile yesterday morning. Note nictitating membrane covering its eye.

— Mike Henry (@onlyveesaz.bsky.social) 2026-05-12T13:34:46.913Z