Category: Hili Dialogue

Saturday: Hili dialogue

February 14, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, February 14, 2026: it’s shabbos for Jewish cats and Valentine’s Day for all Americans, but it’s also celebrated in many countries. Here’s a Valentine’s Day card from 1906:

Chordboard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A valentine from your cat (via CinEmma):

There’s a Valentine’s Day Google Doodle. Click to see what you get:

. . . and a quote from Shakespeare, spoken by Ophelia in Hamlet (Act IV, Scene 5):

“To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes,
And dupp’d the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.”

It’s also Frederick Douglass Day (he is thought to have been born on this day in 1818), Library Lovers Day, National Cream-Filled Chocolates Day, Race Relations Day, and National Organ Donor Day (have you put that on your driver’s license/).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 14 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Oy! The Environmental Protection Agency has rejected the scientific evidence that gave it the authority to combat climate change.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday made a critical announcement. It repealed the scientific determination that gives the government the authority to combat climate change.

That 2009 determination is called the endangerment finding, and most people have never heard of it. But it has played an enormous role in environmental regulations affecting cars, power plants and more.

By scrapping the finding, the Trump administration is essentially disputing the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. The vast majority of scientists say the Earth is rapidly and dangerously warming, which is fueling more powerful storms, killing coral reefs, melting glaciers and causing countless other destructive impacts.

What is the endangerment finding?

The finding simply states that carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases threaten human health, both now and in the future. These gases are released by the combustion of fossil fuels, such as when a car engine burns gasoline or a power plant burns coal.

The Clean Air Act of 1970 required the E.P.A. to regulate air pollutants that harm human health. For example, it directed the agency to limit smog and soot, which are linked to asthma and other health problems.

But the landmark environmental law didn’t explicitly say whether the agency should regulate greenhouse gases. The endangerment finding said that it should, since these gases trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, resulting in a range of risks to people’s health.

Why does the Trump administration want to repeal the findings?

President Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax” and has joked that rising seas would create “a little more beachfront property.”

Since Mr. Trump took office, the administration has maintained that climate change is not a problem that the government should solve. To the contrary, the president and his cabinet have argued that the United States should produce and burn more fossil fuels.

They also have sought to relieve the coal, oil and gas industries of pollution limits that cost them money. Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, has claimed that Democratic administrations used the endangerment finding to justify “trillions of dollars” in regulations on polluting industries, and argued reversing those will aid the U.S. economy.

The E.P.A. already is erasing dozens of Biden-era regulations that sought to limit the pollution spewing from automobile tailpipes, power plant smokestacks, oil and gas wells and other sources.

Here we have a case of the administration rejecting pretty established science just so they can be allowed to pollute. Press Secretary Karoline “Mad Dog” Leavitt says we should be happy as it reduces new car prices, but that seems lame compared to overheating the world.

*You may recall that Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense War, had threatened to prosecute Senator Mark Kelly and several other veterans for making a commercial saying that soldiers didn’t have to obey illegal orders (below). Well, a federal judge ruled, properly, that such theats of punishment were violations of free speech.

A federal judge ordered the Defense Department to halt pending disciplinary proceedings against Sen. Mark Kelly, saying in a ruling Thursday that the retired Navy captain’s right to free speech was under attack by the Trump administration.

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon barred Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from enforcing a censure against Kelly over comments that the Arizona Democrat made in a social media video reminding service members that they can refuse illegal orders. The judge also ordered a halt to disciplinary proceedings that Hegseth had ordered, which could have reduced Kelly’s rank and cut his military retirement benefits.

“This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees,” Leon wrote in a 29-page opinion.

Hegseth said in a brief post on X that the ruling would be appealed immediately. “Sedition is sedition, ‘Captain,’” Hegseth said in a reference to Kelly, who serves on the Senate Armed Forces and Intelligence committees.

. . .The injunction came two days after a federal grand jury in D.C. declined to indict Kelly and five other Democratic lawmakers over the social media video last year that drew President Donald Trump’s ire.

Members of the military, the lawmakers said in the video, could refuse to follow illegal orders amid the administration’s controversial uses of the armed forces to patrol Democratic-run cities and conduct strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.

Although active-duty members of the military can be punished for comments seen as insubordinate, those restrictions on speech have never been applied by the federal courts to retired service members such as Kelly, Leon said.

“Sedition comprises attempts to overthrow the government by inciting people to disobey national laws. This is the exact opposite of that: telling people not to obey unlawful orders. The point, of course, is that the government wants to engage in dubious military activities, like blowing up “drug ships.” If a soldier disobeys on the grounds that an order is unlawful, well, that can be adjudicated by either the federal or military courts. Hegseth’s dumb threats won’t stand.  And besides, a grand jury wouldn’t buttress Pete the Warrior’s attempts to discipline retired military.  It’s just one crazy thing after another, isn’t it?

Here’s the ad in question:

*As expected, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani has reneged on his campaign promise to provide rental vouchers for the impecunious.

Expanding a New York City program to help struggling tenants pay rent seemed like an obvious campaign promise for Zohran Mamdani, who staked his insurgent candidacy last year on making life more affordable in the five boroughs.

Now, confronting a grim fiscal picture in his second month as mayor, Mr. Mamdani no longer intends to back the growth of the $1 billion-plus initiative known as CityFHEPS, despite a plan passed by the City Council and upheld in court.

The reversal marks the clearest example yet of the clash between the ideology of his democratic socialist campaign and the tough realities of managing a sprawling, costly bureaucracy.

During a recent news conference, as the mayor lamented a looming budget deficit that on Wednesday he pegged at $7 billion over two years, he suggested the program’s full expansion may be too expensive.

Now, his administration is negotiating with housing advocates on how to settle a lawsuit that sought to ensure that growth in the program took place. His lawyers recently requested that the case be adjourned while they worked to find a solution with the City Council and the Legal Aid Society, which brought the suit.

About 65,000 households, representing 140,000 people, use the vouchers, according to city data. If the program were to be fully expanded, some 47,000 households would become newly eligible annually, potentially adding $17 billion in costs to the city over five years, according to a rough estimate from city budget officials in January 2024. (Proponents of the voucher program, though, say that City Hall greatly overstated its potential cost to the city.)

Mamdani knew about the city’s fiscal woes before he took office, but he still made those promises.  And it’s not just that “all candidates make promises they can’t keep,” either. For Mamdani’s promises are what got him elected: free childcare, public transportation, subsidized grocery stores, and so on. Those are the only reasons I thought that New York’s Jews would vote for an antisemite. But it was free stuff that got Mamdani elected. Don’t expect to see these promises actually be met.

*Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian territories, has a long history of antisemitism and Israel hatred that France has demanded her resignation (the U.S. has sanctioned her for a while, barring her from entering the country). She was accused of saying in Qatar that Israel was the common enemy of humanity, but this wasn’t correct: She said that “those who control large amounts of capital, algorithms, and weapons.  . . we as humanity have a common enemy.” She argued later that she was referring to “the system” (what system?), but it’s clear what she meant. Here is what ChatGPT says about her history of antisemitism. Take it with a grain of salt, at least the first accusation, but see below, too.

  • “Common Enemy of Humanity” Accusation: In February 2026, Albanese allegedly described Israel as a “common enemy” of humanity during a forum in Doha. She later clarified her remarks on X (formerly Twitter), stating that the “common enemy” refers to the global systems—including financial capital and weapons—that enable genocide, rather than the nation itself.
  • Genocide Allegations: In her October 2024 report, “Genocide as Colonial Erasure,” she argued there are “reasonable grounds to believe” Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. She has characterized Israel’s military operations as a systematic effort to erase the Palestinian presence from their land.
  • Economy of Genocide: In July 2025, she called for a global boycott and full arms embargo against what she termed Israel’s “economy of genocide,” naming dozens of international companies she claims profit from the occupation.
  • October 7 Attack Context: She has faced severe criticism from France and Germany for stating that the victims of the October 7 Hamas attacks were “not killed because of their Judaism” but in response to “Israel’s oppression”.
  • Criticism of Israeli Society: She has described Israeli society as “genocidal” for what she perceives as a majority support for the war in Gaza and has stated that Israelis risk “losing their humanity” by participating in the occupation.

UN Watch gives more:

UN Watch, the Geneva-based non-governmental organization that monitors the United Nations, today welcomed France’s announcement that it will call for the immediate resignation of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, during the high-level opening of the UN Human Rights Council session on February 23.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, responding to a question from Member of the National Assembly Caroline Yadan during a session in the French parliament, condemned Albanese’s recent remarks made at a conference in Doha on February 7, where she characterized Israel as the “enemy of humanity” in the presence of a Hamas representative and the Iranian Foreign Minister. Barrot described her statements as “outrageous and reprehensible,” adding that they targeted “Israel as a people and as a nation, which is absolutely unacceptable.”

Barrot cited Albanese’s history of inflammatory rhetoric, including her justifying the October 7 Hamas massacre—the worst antisemitic attack since the Holocaust—invoking tropes about “the Jewish lobby,” and comparing Israel to the Third Reich.

“She presents herself as a UN independent expert, yet she is neither an expert nor independent—she is a political activist who stirs up hate,” Barrot stated. He affirmed that France will demand her resignation “with firmness” at the upcoming UNHRC session.

UN Watch commended French MP Caroline Yadan for spearheading a letter signed by 50 lawmakers demanding action against Albanese, who has repeatedly portrayed Israel as the “incarnation of evil” and an “enemy of humanity.” The initiative underscores growing international concern over Albanese’s inflammatory conduct, which undermines the credibility of the United Nations and betrays the principles of impartiality required of UN mandate holders.

Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, praised France’s stance: “France’s bold call for Francesca Albanese’s resignation is a crucial step toward restoring integrity to the UN human rights system. For too long, Albanese has abused her position to spew Goebbels-like demonology against Israel, inciting hatred and legitimizing terrorism under the guise of human rights advocacy. She has disgraced the world body and betrayed the very people she claims to defend.”

Albanese has to go.  Her job is to help the people of Palestine, but that doesn’t mean she should act like a member of Hamas or damn Israel. If she accuses Israel of genocide but doesn’t accuse her own remit—Palestine—of the same thing (and she doesn’t), then she’s not doing her job. Her entire history bespeaks Jew hatred, and one of the handful of good things that the Trump administration has done was to sanction her.  Not only can’t she come to the U.S. (where of course the UN is located), but her assets in the US (and I think she has some) have been frozen, and no American can do business with her.

*I reported yesterday that Harvard took the unprecedented step of suggesting capping the percentage of As in all its undergraduate courses at 20%.  The faculty will vote on this in April.  Of course the students are outraged, but one of them, Isaac Mansell, supports what Harvard did in a Free Press article, “I’m a Harvard Student. It’s too easy to get an A.” You’ll be appalled, as I was, at the extent of grade inflation at Harvard.

I am a senior at Harvard. Last week, a faculty committee released a proposal to combat grade inflation at my school. The proposal would do two things: First, it would cap the number of A grades issued to undergraduates at 20 percent for every class. Second, Harvard would cease using grade point average (GPA) to rank students for academic honors and prizes and instead turn to average percentile rank—a measure of how students perform relative to their classmates. If passed by a full faculty vote later this spring, the proposal would take effect in the 2026–27 academic year.

How do the students feel about this proposal? You will perhaps not be surprised to hear they are up in arms. While faculty, according to the campus paper, lent cautious support to the initiative, an overwhelming 84.9 percent of my peers “definitely” disagree with limiting A grades to 20 percent, according to a Harvard Undergraduate Association survey.

I’m among the minority who support the proposal. Let me explain why.

Grade inflation at Harvard is out of control. In 1964, the Sophia Freund Prize at Harvard was endowed as the highest academic honor the university could bestow, and was “awarded annually to the highest ranking undergraduate.” Note the singular.

For decades, the prize was intended to go to one student each year. That changed in 2011, when it was awarded to three undergraduates. By 2020, an entire 20-strong Cambridge polycule could plausibly have been classified as “the highest ranking undergraduate.” By 2025, 55 seniors, or 2.8 percent of the graduating class, received the award.

Harvard is widely considered one of the best universities in the world. And yet, it is far too easy to get perfect grades. According to a report released last October by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, more than 60 percent of grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates are A’s. Twenty years ago, it was just 25 percent.

. . .And there is a natural consequence of grade compression: It erases distinction.

At Harvard, A’s are supposed to mean something specific. According to the faculty’s rubric, an A- is meant to signal “full mastery,” while an A is meant to denote “extraordinary distinction.” But in practice, since A’s are doled out so freely, that distinction has collapsed. The majority of grades now occupy the same narrow band at the “extraordinary” end of the scale. If two-thirds of students are extraordinarily distinguished, from whom exactly are they distinct?

It is in this blissful environment that Harvard’s grading-reform proposal landed. You don’t have to have a PhD to understand why the vast majority of students oppose it. Simply put, people like free stuff. But I do not believe that this proposal is an attack on students. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of an arithmetic system that has had numerous

Mansell argues that grade inflation will reduce the value of a Harvard degree, but I doubt it. The name itself opens doors; it surely has for me.  I agree with the new faculty proposal, though Luana assures me she thinks it will fail.  If it does, well, you can still put the media grade for each course (which will be A or A-) on a student’s transcript.

*Finally, a horrific statistic sent to me by Anna Krylov.  What is happening to sex these days? From the NY Post:

They’re phoning it in.

More than one-third of American college students say they’ve scrolled on their phone during sex.

The shocking stat was uncovered during a survey of 100,000 US students aged 18 and over conducted through the social media apps YikYak and Sidechat.

As much as 35%, or roughly 35,000 of those surveyed, admit to whipping out their device to send a quick text or watch a TikTok video while doing the deed — proof of just how screen-addicted Gen Z Americans have become.

There’s more, but you can read the salacious and disturbing details. I guess the new rules for sex go beyond asking “can I take off your pants?” or “can I unhook your bra?”; they will include: “Could you please put your phone on the other side of the room?”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a question:

Hili: Who invented the vicious circle?
Andrzej: I suspect the ancestors of the Sumerians or the Etruscans.
Hili: I was expecting a different answer.
In Polish:

Hili: Kto wynalazł błędne koło?
Ja: Podejrzewam przodków Sumerów albo Etrusków.
Hili, Spodziewałam się innej odpowiedzi.

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

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices. Can you find the two errors on this menu? (Click to enlarge.) No, it’s not “Frenchy toast,”: that is supposed to be funny.

From Cats that Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Masih: Iranians at a memorial service shout “Death to Khamenei!”

More from Iran, reposted by J. K. Rowling (yes, she posts about a lot more than gender issues):

From Malcolm, a bobcat catting:

From Luana, a list of scary AI incidents (expand it):

One from my feed; cat curling!

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

 

And two posts from Dr. Cobb. Listen to these eider ducks!

A comforter in Europe is often called an 'eiderdown', because they were traditionally made with the warm, dense down of an eider duck.The eider is a sea duck that occupies the cold reaches of the near-Arctic, places like Finland & Canada.Their calls sound like Wisconsin moms at a potluck. 😉

— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2025-06-07T16:46:00.604Z

Beatrix wants Spring to come (as do we all):

#onthisday Beatrix living in a box looking for signs of spring

— Chris and his farmily of forever friends (@caenhillcc.bsky.social) 2026-02-11T20:34:53.500Z

Friday: Hili dialogue

February 13, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, February 13, 2026. Yep, you got that right: it’s Friday the 13th, and you’d best stay in bed. You can nibble on cheese, though, as it’s National Cheddar Day. English cheddar is better than American, and my favorite is an English farmhouse cheddar like Keen’s, preferably aged to the point where a bit of mold is growing on it. Here’s how that kind of cheese is made:

It’s also Galentine’s Day, celebrating female friendship, Kiss Day, National Crab Rangoon Day, National Italian Food Day, National Tortellini Day, and Skeptics Day International. And tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, so be sure to get some flowers or See’s chocolates for your squeeze.

There’s an Olympics Google Doodle today featuring ice skating. Click on it to see the skating medals count (Men’s figure skating is today):

Here is the overall medals count; the host country is winning (from NBC):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 13 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The ruckus is over in Minnesota: the Trump administration announced that it’s ending its efforts in Minnesota to find and detail immigrants.

Minnesota officials said the nearly six-week surge of immigration enforcement in the state would leave deep economic and psychological scars that last long after the drawdown of federal agents, which President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, announced on Thursday.

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the announcement and would now turn his attention to the state’s economic recovery. “They left us with deep damage, generational trauma,” he said. “They left us with economic ruin, in some cases.”

Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis praised city residents for challenging the conduct of federal agents, who killed two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, during the crackdown, and protecting immigrants in the city.

“They thought they could break us, but a love for our neighbors and a resolve to endure can outlast an occupation,” he said in a statement, adding that it was time for a “great comeback” for Minneapolis families and businesses that suffered under the ICE crackdown.

Elliott Payne, president of the Minneapolis City Council, said he doubted whether the announcement by Mr. Homan could be trusted.

“I’m going to continue patrolling,” Mr. Payne said, referring to the practice of keeping watch for immigration agents, blowing whistles to warn residents and recording their operations. “I’m going to continue to ask my community to patrol and keep eyes on them,” he added.

I’m not sure whether this means that there will be a complete halt to find immigrants who are either here illegally or have committed crimes in addition to that, but it will surely quell the uproar for a bit. However, one shouldn’t forget the remaining major scandals many involving Somalis (either citizens or immigrants) that cost taxpayers a lot of money. It is for that reason that Walz decided not to run for governor again.

*Yesterday Attorney General Pam Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee, and it was a heated exchange.  I’ve never seen a Cabinet member get so nasty in a Congressional hearing.

Attorney General Pam Bondi combatively defended her leadership at the Justice Department to House lawmakers on Wednesday amid sharp criticism that she botched the release of the Epstein files and has wielded the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency to heed President Donald Trump’s calls to prosecute his political foes.

In exchange after exchange, Bondi lobbed brash insults when Democratic lawmakers questioned her decisions and repeatedly portrayed the expansive Justice Department as unfairly maligned by Democrats and those who dislike Trump.

In her opening remarks before the House Judiciary Committee, Bondi — highlighting her allegiance to the president — thanked Trump for his investment in fighting violent crime and said the Justice Department is working to advance the president’s priorities. The attorney general blamed the Biden administration for politicizing the department and, echoing claims from conservative activists, said it is fighting against “liberal activist judges” working to stymie the president’s agenda.

“America has never seen this level of coordinated judicial opposition to a presidential administration,” Bondi said.

The attorney general did not buckle in her defense of the department and frequently attempted to shift attention to its efforts to reduce violent crime, a topic that earned her praise from Republicans.

Bondi came armed with scripted insults for Democrats.

“I’m not going to get in the gutter with these people,” Bondi said repeatedly in response to pointed questions. She lashed out when the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin, directed her to respond to the panel’s inquiries.

“You don’t tell me anything, you washed-up loser lawyer,” she said. “You’re not even a lawyer.”

Good Lord, that is lacking in respect! You can hear Bondi say that in the video below. But the committee was nasty, too:

Raskin, a lawmaker from Maryland, denounced Bondi for her handling of the Epstein files, the department’s response to deadly shootings by federal personnel in Minneapolis and her oversight of cases involving people whom Trump has publicly called to prosecute.

“Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza, and you deliver every time,” Raskin said. “You replace real prosecutors with counterfeit stooges. Nothing in American history comes close to this complete corruption of the justice function and contamination of federal law enforcement.”

Bondi did miss a chance to have bridged the rifts a bit: when a Representative asked her to turn around and face the Epstein sex-trafficking survivors who were standing up—survivors who haven’t been able to talk to the Administration—and apologize to them. Bondi wouldn’t even turn around. She had nothing to lose, and something to gain, by apologizing.   In the end, Bondi, the personification of the word “insouciance,” accomplished nothing save defend the administration in an impolite way.  It was an interesting show, though.

Get a load of he here:

*The House of Representatives, which has a narrow Republican majority, actually voted yesterday to repudiate the tariffs Trump has placed on Canada. That’s a first! However, even if the Senate does the same thing, Trump can simply veto the move, and he won’t be overriden.

The GOP-led House passed a resolution Wednesday designed to roll back President Trump’s tariffs on Canada, as a half-dozen Republicans joined Democrats in rebuking the administration’s signature economic policy.

The House voted 219-211 to approve a Democratic resolution that would invalidate the emergency declaration that underpins Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Six Republicans broke ranks with their party in voting for the measure, another setback for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), who couldn’t keep his conference united in support of the president.

Passage of the antitariff resolution sends it to the Senate, which must vote on the issue again despite approving a similar one on a narrow, bipartisan basis last year. If it passes the Senate—where it can advance on a simple majority vote, not the 60 usually required—the measure would move to Trump, who would almost certainly veto it.

The Republicans who voted with most Democrats to end the tariffs were Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Kevin Kiley of California, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Dan Newhouse of Washington, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Jeff Hurd of Colorado. One Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, a centrist, sided with most Republicans.

Immediately after the vote, Trump said that Republicans who broke rank will face electoral backlash.

“Any Republican, in the House or the Senate, that votes against TARIFFS will seriously suffer the consequences come Election time, and that includes Primaries!” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.

Of course Trump, who never forgets, will take retribution.  To overturn the inevitable veto if the bill passes the Senate, it would take two-thirds of both Senators and Representatives to vote again on repudiating tariffs, and that ain’t gonna happen.  The Republicans who voted with the Democrats will, in the end, suffer for having espoused their principles.

*Several readers quailed when I said the other day that I thought having voters show identification was reasonable. But Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Dispatch, defends the policy in an op-ed called “Voter ID is reasonable. It’s also popular.” There are in facts good reasons to require it, he says.

President Trump says that “Republicans” should “nationalize the election” or at least take over voting in up to 15 places where he says voting is corrupt. His evidence of fraudulent voting is that he lost in such places in 2020, and since it is axiomatic that he won everywhere, the reported results are proof of the fraud.

This is all delusional, narcissistic nonsense. But at this point, if you still claim it’s an open question whether Trump actually lost the 2020 election (he did), you’re immune to the facts or just lying—either about not having made up your mind or about what actually happened. So, I don’t see much point in relitigating an issue that was literally litigated in more than 60 courtrooms.

But Republicans’ inability simply to tell the truth about Trump’s lies makes talking about elections and election integrity infuriatingly difficult. One tactic is to assert that Trump didn’t say what he plainly said. “What I assume he meant by it is that we ought to pass—Congress ought to pass the SAVE Act, which I’m co-sponsor of,” is how Sen. Josh Hawley responded to questions about Trump’s remarks.

Before later correcting himself, Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy insisted the president never said he wanted to “nationalize” the elections. “Those are your words, not his,” he told reporters.

But Democrats are wrong to suggest that all of the difficulty is generated by Trump’s lies and the Republicans’ inability to reject them.

Here are Goldberg’s reasons to favor IDs:

. . . .Now there are reasonable objections to proof-of-citizenship requirements in the SAVE Act, but the framing of both the question and the answer is flawed.

Americans—including large majorities of Democrats—have favored voter ID for decades. Since long before anyone dreamed Donald Trump would run for president, never mind get elected, the idea has been wildly popular. In 2006, 80 percent of Americans favored showing proof of ID when voting. The lowest support over the last two decades, according to Pew, was in 2012 when a mere 77 percent of Americans, including 61 percent of Democrats, favored voter ID. Last August, Pew found that 95 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Democrats favored having to provide government-issued ID when voting.

Two things have bothered me about Democratic opposition to voter ID. First is the claim that millions upon millions of Americans lack adequate ID. While it’s true that the SAVE Act’s provisions for providing proof of citizenship creates novel challenges—lots of people don’t have their birth certificates, and many forms of ID don’t specify citizenship—Democrats were making this argument years before the citizenship issue ripened. (To be clear, evidence of noncitizens voting in significant numbers is scant to nonexistent.)

Regardless, if the problem is that huge numbers of “marginalized” people don’t have sufficient  ID to vote, that also means they don’t have good enough ID for all manner of things. Indeed, I can think of few things more likely to marginalize someone than not having ID. You can’t get a credit card, buy or rent a home, apply for welfare benefits, travel by plane, or open a bank account without identification. That’s some serious marginalization.

Second, if you want people to trust the integrity of elections and the sanctity of “our democracy,” waxing indignant over the idea of presenting ID when democratic majorities favor it is an odd choice. It arouses the suspicion that there’s a reason for opposing such measures. Mostly thanks to Democratic initiatives, America has made it wildly easier to vote over the last three decades. Why is it so preposterous that new safeguards be put in place amid all of the mail-in and early voting?

My theory is that at some deep level there is a dysfunctional bipartisan consensus that lax voting rules benefit Democrats. That’s why Republicans want to tighten the rules and Democrats favor loosening them.

I think the second reason is the best: the sight of Democrats arguing strenuously against IDs is not good optics. Giving IDs also helps shut up people who argue, as did Trump, that elections have been crooked (granted, Trump can argue about voting machines, absentee ballots, and other stuff, but every bit helps).  Really, it resembles Democrats seeming to favor completely open borders.

*From the UPI’s “Odd News” section, a big YUCK!  A huge “fatball”—a conglomeration of fat, oil, and grease (not to mention human waste), has been found under a Sydney, Australia wastewater plant, and is thought to be the source of huge “greaseballs” that wash up on Australian beaches.

Australia’s Sydney Water confirmed there is a massive fatberg estimated to be “the size of four buses” in a difficult-to-reach position under a wastewater plant.

The supersized fatberg — a collection of fats, oils and greases — under the Malabar wastewater treatment plant is now believed to be the source of black balls that have periodically been washing up on Sydney-area beaches since 2024.

The balls were originally thought to be tar from a possible oil spill, but an analysis at the University of New South Wales discovered they contained human feces.

Sydney Water managing director Darren Cleary said officials are now aware of a giant-sized fatberg in the tunnels underneath the Malabar plant.

“We don’t know exactly how big the fatberg is,” Cleary told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “The size of four buses, that would be the maximum potential extent of it. It may be that, it may be slightly smaller. We don’t exactly know.”

He said the blockage is located in an “inaccessible dead zone.”

“There’s a component of that tunnel which we can’t safely access,” Cleary said.

He said the balls that have been washing up on beaches are likely caused by water flows in the tunnels skimming across the surface of the fatberg and breaking off small pieces.

Here’s a short ABC video about the fatballs and greaseballs:

 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s messing with Andrzej:

Hili: You did something you had never done before.
Andrzej: What was that?
Hili: You didn’t listen to what I was saying to you.
Andrzej: And what were you saying?
Hili: Nothing important.

In Polish:

Hili: Zrobiłeś coś, czego nie robiłeś nigdy wcześniej.
Ja: Co takiego?
Hili: Nie słuchałeś co do ciebie mówię.
Ja: A co mówiłaś?
Hili: Nic ważnego.

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

From This Cat is Guilty.  I hope the steak is rare!

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From CinEmma:

From the New Yorker via Masih; the medical workers of Iran strike back at the regime, which had targeted doctors and nurses for helping wounded protestors:

The point of this tweet is clear given that it’s from Maya Forstater:

Larry the Cat speaks for the American people:

From Simon, who says, “Please let this be true”:

From Bryan; this is “slopestyle” skiing, and it’s pretty amazing:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she got to Auschwitz. She was eight years old, and would have been 91 today had she lived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-02-13T11:04:52.188Z

. . and two from Dr. Cobb.  First, an Olympic d*g. Matthew says “It’s from 2022, but still , ,., , , ”  He just wants a medal!

🥇🥇🥇

— George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T13:06:41.752Z

Yes, Darwin was not all sweetness and light; he seemed to be quite dysthymic:

happy birthday Charles Darwin!He was a happy soul…

— janemick (@janemick.bsky.social) 2026-02-12T11:58:47.141Z

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue (and Darwin Day)

February 12, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, February 12, 2026, and it is, of course INTERNATIONAL DARWIN DAY, the day Charles Darwin was born in 1809 (he lived to be 73). It was Daniel Dennett who said that natural selection was “the single best idea anyone ever had” in Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea), and surely it is at least among the best.  Below is a famous photo of 59-year-old Darwin in 1868 taken by Julia Margaret Cameron, and below that are three photos of one of our readers aping (excuse the pun) Charles Darwin.

If you want to see the complete set of known pictures of Darwin, John van Wyhe has the collection at Darwin online. (Note that the oft-used photo of Darwin whispering with his finger over his mouth is a fake.

Below the Darwin photo I’ve added an audio/video presentation by John showing various photos of the Great Man.

Here’s a 9½-minute audio/video made by John van Whye about Darwin photos; lots of them here:

Reader Norm Gilinsky used to dress up as Darwin and give public lectures on evolution as the man. Here are three photos Norm sent, saying, “One of the pictures shows what I looked like at the time before the artist added makeup, and another shows what I looked like as makeup was being applied. The others show me all made up. I gave a lecture in Darwin’s character annually between 1983 and about 1990. I was about 30 years old at the time.

Not bad, eh?:

It’s also Lincoln’s Birthday (he and Darwin were born on the same day in 1809!), Fat Thursday (before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent), Hug Day, Plum Pudding Day, NAACP Day, and Paul Bunyan Day (the mythological lumberjack is said to have been born on this day in 1834, and I like to say that there’s as much evidence for a historical Jesus as there is for Paul Bunyan).

The new Google Olympic Doodle celebrates slopestyle, a new event. Click on the screenshot below to read about it (via a bot!):

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

Da Nooz:

*For security reasons, the Federal Aviation Administration had originally stopped all flights in and out of El Paso, Texas for ten days. Apparently a drone was involved. The airport is now open again.Here’s the latest:

The abrupt closure of El Paso’s airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation.

The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would be shut down for 10 days, an extraordinary pause that was quickly lifted Wednesday morning at the direction of the White House.

Top administration officials quickly claimed that the closure was in response to a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels that required a military response, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declaring in a social media post that “the threat has been neutralized.”

But that assertion was undercut by multiple people familiar with the situation, who said that the F.A.A.’s extreme move came after immigration officials earlier this week used an anti-drone laser shared by the Pentagon without coordination with the F.A.A. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

C.B.P. officials thought they were firing on a cartel drone, the people said, but it turned out to be a party balloon. Defense Department officials were present during the incident, one person said.

The Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The F.A.A. declined to comment.

The military has been developing high-energy laser technology to intercept and destroy drones, which the Trump administration has said are being used by Mexican cartels to track Border Patrol agents and smuggle drugs into the United States.

The airspace closure provoked a significant backlash from local officials and sharp questions by lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including some Republicans, who expressed skepticism about the administration’s version of the events.

Who’s running this railroad? It seems that a main problem of this Administration is failure to coordinate between various agencies. In this case the fault appears to lie with Customs and Border Protection, who shot down a damn party baloon with a laser a few days ago.

*In a Washington Post op-ed, Adam Omary, identied as “a psychologist and research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity,” asserts that “The autism epidemic is a myth.”, with the subtitle, “Most new cases reflect mild or no significant impairment. Moderate and severe cases have declined” (article archived here).

For years, public health debate has often fixated on a supposed rise in the prevalence of autism. Various culprits have been named, including the well-investigated but unsubstantiated claim that vaccines cause autism. More recently, additional risk factors have been proposed — many by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — including maternal Tylenol use, food dyes and additives, chemical manufacturing agents and other possible stressors affecting perinatal development. Concerns about autism have been spotlighted within the larger Make America Healthy Again movement, motivated by a well-founded alarm over the nation’s devastatingly high burden of chronic disease and psychiatric illness. But there is a bigger problem with the autism epidemic: It doesn’t exist.

Autism diagnoses have indeed risen dramatically in recent decades. However, diagnostic criteria can change even when the underlying health phenomenon remains unchanged. The most recently released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on autism, published last April, revealed a five-fold increase in the prevalence of autism between 2000 and 2022, from 67 to 322 cases per 10,000 children. But a large-scale study published in December, drawing on CDC data from 24,669 8-year-olds across the country, found that this dramatic rise may be entirely driven by children with mild or no significant functional impairment.Between 2000 and 2016, there was a 464 percent increase in diagnoses among children with no significant functional impairment whatsoever. In fact, during the same time period, there was a 20 percent decrease in the prevalence of moderate or severe autism,from 15 to 12 cases per 10,000 children.

There is often a lag of several years before such epidemiological datasets are released, and years more for researchers to perform statistical analyses, publish the findings and enter public policy discussions. We do not yet have data more recent than 2016 breaking down symptoms by severity level while controlling for other psychological factors such as intellectual disability. However, it is likely that the 74 percent increase in cases reported between 2016 and 2022 will reflect a continuation of the previous problem of overrepresentation of children withmild symptoms and no significant functional impairment.

Despite that, some advocates support the narrative that autism is on the rise, because an ever-expanding “spectrum” that produces more diagnoses draws more attention and research funding — even if children’s underlying psychology remains unchanged.

Some of the CDC’s data documenting the supposed rise in the characteristics ofautism, meanwhile, comes not from gold-standard in-person psychiatric assessments but from parent-reported surveys such as the Social Responsiveness Scale. The SRS includes statements such as “Would rather be alone than with others,” “Has difficulty making friends,” and “Is regarded by other children as odd or weird,” which parents rate from “Not true” to “Almost always true.” In my own doctoral research on adolescent mental health, I included the SRS to account for the extent to which other psychological outcomes were explained by social difficulties. However, I was always careful to use hedging language — these are behavioral traits known to be associated with autism, not diagnostic markers. Unfortunately, many studies use high scores on the SRS as a substitute for clinical assessment of autism — accounting, for example, for at least 12 percentof “suspected cases” in the 2022 CDC data.

. . . We should be concerned about the rising number of quirky children “on the spectrum,” but not because they are being exposed to neurotoxins that older generations were insulated from, nor because a growing number of children face clinically–significant social impairment. Rather, as Abigail Shrier argues in her 2024 book “Bad Therapy,” the more pressing concern may be a cultural and institutional drift toward overdiagnosis across child psychiatry. Like the rise in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depression diagnoses among young people, the surge in autism labels may reflect shifting norms, looser diagnostic criteria and excess therapeutic attention directed toward ordinary struggles. If autism were truly increasing because of a new environmental insult, we would expect to see increases across all levels of severity. But that is not the case.

I recommend Abigail Shrier’s book, which is even better than her first one.  It will convince you that children are being inundated, to their detriment, with a “neurodivergence” narrative, so that the normal problems of childhood have now become genuine psychological difficulties that need professional treatment.

*Mass shootings are largely an American phenomenon, but a bad one occurred in British Columbia, Canada on Tuesday: At first the shooter, who apparently committed suicide, was identified as a female, but Luana guessed that it would likely be a trans-identified man—based on the extreme rarity of female mass shootings (I can’t think of single one, though there may have been a couple). It turns out Luana was right, but of course that doesn’t mitigate the tragedy.  The perp has now been identified (see Torygraph article below.)

At least nine people have been killed and more than two dozen injured in shootings at a school and home in British Columbia, Canadian authorities said. Nina Krieger, minister of public safety for the province, described the shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School as “one of the worst mass shootings in our province’s and country’s history.”

Police received a report of an active shooter at the school about 1:20 p.m. on Tuesday, Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement.

Upon entering the school, police found six people dead inside. A seventh died while being transported to a hospital. A person believed to be the shooter was also found dead with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said.

Two additional victims were found dead in a home in an incident that is believed to be connected, police said.

. . .Details about the victims and suspected shooter have not been disclosed, and authorities have asked for patience while they carry out the early stages of the investigation. Emergency responders, major crime units and victim services teams have been deployed to support the investigation, the RCMP said.

“We are not in a place now to be able to understand why, and what may have motivated this tragedy,” North District RCMP superintendent Ken Floyd told reporters. He said the shooter was the person described in an alert sent out to the community earlier in the day. The alert described the suspect as a “female in a dress with brown hair,” according to media reports.

In a news conference, British Columbia Premier David Eby called the event an “unimaginable tragedy.” He said that some injuries from the school shooting were “profoundly serious” and some “more minor.” Two people were airlifted with life-threatening injuries, and about 25 others are being treated for non-life-threatening injuries, police said.

. . . Mass shootings are rare in Canada, and the nation’s deadliest, in April 2020, prompted the government to restrict access to weapons. In that incident, Gabriel Wortman killed 22 people in a 13-hour rampage in Nova Scotia before being shot dead by police. Two weeks later, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a ban on more than 1,500 “military-style assault weapons,” making it illegal to fire, transport, sell, import or bequeath the weapons.

(Updated): Canadian police confirmed ten deaths and at least 35 injuries following a mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia. The shooter, who also killed himself, was identified by a close family member as Jesse Strang, a transgender person identifying with ‘she/her’ pronouns.

From The Torygraph:

A school shooter who killed eight people during a rampage in a remote part of Canada has been identified as a transgender teenager.

Jesse Van Rootselaar, who was born male but identified as female, shot and killed his mother and brother at home on Tuesday before killing five students and one teacher at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia.

Van Rootselaar opened fire on police when they arrived and “rounds were fired in their direction”, said Dwayne McDonald, deputy commissioner of the British Columbia Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Van Rootselaar, who police had earlier described as a “gunperson” wearing a dress, died at the school. He was not a student at the time of the shooting.

*In its continuing anti-vax campaign, the FDA has simply refused to even review a new flu vaccine from Moderna.

The vaccine maker Moderna said on Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration had notified the company that the agency would not review its mRNA flu vaccine, the latest sign of federal health policy that has become hostile to vaccine development.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, the agency’s top vaccine regulator, rejected the company’s application for approval over a concern that Moderna’s clinical trial had compared its experimental vaccine against a product the agency did not consider the best on the market. People in the comparison group received Fluarix Quadrivalent, a flu vaccine sold by GSK.

Moderna had spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars testing its flu vaccine, enrolling 41,000 people and aimed at a market of adults ages 50 and older. The company concluded that its shot was superior to GSK’s product.

Dr. Stephen Hoge, the company’s president, said in an interview on Tuesday that the new flu vaccine was designed to be better tailored for a single nation than the ones that tended to be used by an entire hemisphere. He also said the F.D.A. had earlier indicated support for the company’s study plan.

“This refusal to start a review is all confusing, to say the least,” Dr. Hoge said, adding: “It is surprising, and we’re trying to understand what has changed.”

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the F.D.A., said the agency did not comment on communications with individual applicants for drug approval.

Moderna said it had received what is known as a “refuse to file” letter from the agency, meaning that the company tried to submit an application for approval, but was dismissed. Such cursory rejections are unusual; the agency tends to complete a thorough review before denying approval.

. . .This latest move by the F.D.A. reflects expansion of a new policy under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has repeatedly criticized the mRNA technology used most successfully against Covid and made by both Moderna and Pfizer. Recognized with a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023, the technology instructs the body to produce a fragment of a virus that then sets off the body’s immune response.

But Mr. Kennedy has scuttled the use of mRNA in vaccines and canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for research using the technology, claiming it is not safe or effective. During his first year as health secretary, he has quashed several projects involving the technology, including an effort by Moderna to develop a shot against bird flu.

I admit to confusion about this. The “control” vaccine was not “tailored to a single nation” (the US?), so is the rejection by the FDA based on just a comparison of relative general effiacy, or is it really because RFK, Jr. doesn’t like mRNA vaccines?  Stay tuned.

*Lordy be! Harvard has put a stringent cap on “A” grades at 20% per course, though not all faculty approve. From The Crimson:

Faculty voiced cautious support for a proposal that would cap undergraduate A grades at roughly 20 percent and introduce an internal ranking system, saying the policy would curb longstanding grade inflation at the College.

But the proposal has also prompted concerns among some professors, who warned that the cap could impose an unrealistic standard for distinction, threaten faculty autonomy, and foster unhealthy competition.

A faculty committee released the proposal last week as part of a broader effort to rein in grade inflation. The recommendations, which will come to a full faculty vote later this spring, would limit A grades to 20 percent per course, with flexibility for up to four additional As per class, and introduce a percentile-based ranking system to determine internal honors and awards.

In interviews and statements, more than a dozen faculty welcomed the attempt to impose a systematic check on grade inflation.

Although professors already dropped the share of A grades they awarded from 60.2 percent to 53.4 percent last fall, several said the new proposal would address a structure problem by shielding individual instructors from pressure, or backlash, for grading more stringently.

“Grading is a collective action problem. When some instructors raise their grades, that puts pressure on other instructors to raise their grades too, and the pressure for higher grades snowballs over time, making it hard for any course to hold the line,” Economics professor David I. Laibson ’88 wrote in a statement.

Some faculty initially worried that the cap could discourage students from enrolling in demanding courses.

Molecular and Cellular Biology professor Sean R. Eddy, who teaches an undergraduate course that averaged nearly 12 hours of work a week in 2024, said he feared the policy would deter students from taking classes like his.

After reviewing the committee’s report, however, Eddy said he was reassured by its framing of A grades as markers of “extraordinary distinction” rather than mastery alone.

. . . . Other professors cautioned that the proposal could pose a danger to faculty autonomy. Government professor Steven Levitsky said he disliked what he described as the inflexibility of the recommendations, arguing that they infringed on faculty authority in the classroom.

If everybody does this at once, as Harvard dictates, then there is no motivation for students to gravitate to “easy” courses, since of course every professor will give 20% As.  This is a great move to curb grade inflation, and they could give the median grade for any course on the transcripts, though I don’t know if anybody does that.

But of course there is an op-ed in the Crimson by two Harvard undergrads objecting to the grade cap as making grades a “relative” distinction rather than an absolute one. That it does, but Harvard students are smart to begin with, and if everybody got As, as they almost do now, there is a need for relative distinctions. Good for Mother Harvard! (I never got a grade there, as I vowed never to get a grade again after I left college, and I placed out of any required courses when I took the grad entrance exams at Harvard. But I still took 2-3 courses per semester for the first two years, doing all the required work but not getting a grad; I simply audited them with the teacher’s permission and they are not even on my record.)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej prognostates Armageddon:

Hili: Do you also see the end of the world coming?
Andrzej: Yes, though I have more trouble than most choosing the precise date.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy też przewidujesz koniec świata?
Ja: Tak, tylko mam większe niż inni problemy z wyznaczeniem konkretnej daty.

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

From Stacy:

From Grandiloquent Word of the Day via Stash Krod:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Masih; a group of blinded Iranian women, shot for protesting:

A tweet from Carole Hooven after the shooting in Canada:

From Luana, an unfair comparison.  Chicago, for example, strives for viewpoint diversity as opposed to other kinds of diversity; and when you see the word you can usually place “racial” in front of it automatically:

From Bryan, an entire thread of competing explanations:

From Malcolm, an illusion. I can no longer tell AI pictures from real ones, so I’ll just show it and let you decide:

One from my feed: a lovely hovering kestrel:

From Islamicat, the Twitter site where cats are seen as jihadists (h/t Muffy):

One I retweeted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

A Dutch Jewish girl and her mother were both gassed as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. The girl was nearly three years old, and would be 86 today had she lived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-02-12T11:47:08.126Z

. . . and one from Dr. Cobb, showing the humor of an Olympic curler and gold medalist:

Isabella Wranå won gold for curling, but should've for this video

— Razzball (@razzball.bsky.social) 2026-02-11T01:09:50.259Z

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

February 11, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“uroe bonggol” in Acehense): Wednesday, February 11, 2026, and National Latte Day, the drink I have every morning to get me going. Here’s a photo of the one I’m drinking now, all homeofficemade, with a sprinkle of cinnamon on top, The picture on the mug is that of Hili drinking from a cup on which is pictured Hili drinking from a cup.

It’s also International Day of Women and Girls in Science, National Peppermint Patty Day, Promise Day (today you reinforce your relationships by making promises), and National Make a Friend Day.

Today’s Olympic Google Doodle celebrates ice hockey, and if you click on it below, you can see how the different shots are made:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 11 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Luana has been telling me this for a long time, but it was only yesterday that the NYT posted about the three American states that represent the greatest educational successes in America.  Perhaps the NYT didn’t want to write about them because, contrary to the narrative, they’re all southern red states: Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. But as recounted by Nicholas Kristof in the NYT, the educational achievement in these states has been remarkable:

A ray of hope is emerging in American education.

Not among Democrats or Republicans, each diverted by culture wars. Not in the education reform movement, largely abandoned by the philanthropists who once propelled it. Not in most schools across the country, still struggling with chronic absenteeism and a decade of faltering test scores.

Rather, hope emerges in the most unlikely of places: three states here in the Deep South that long represented America’s educational basement. These states — Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi — have histories of child poverty, racism and dismal educational outcomes, and they continue to spend less than most other states on public schools.

Yet, consider:

  • Louisiana ranks No. 1 in the country in recovery from pandemic losses in reading, while Alabama ranks No. 1 in math recovery.

  • The state with the lowest chronic absenteeism in schools is Alabama, according to a tracker with data from 40 states.

  • Once an educational laughingstock, Mississippi now ranks ninth in the country in fourth-grade reading levels — and after adjusting for demographics such as poverty and race, Mississippi ranks No. 1, while Louisiana ranks No. 2, according to calculations by the Urban Institute. Using the same demographic adjustment, Mississippi also ranks No. 1 in America in both fourth-grade and eighth-grade math.

  • Black fourth graders in Mississippi are on average better readers than those in Massachusetts, which is often thought to have the best public school system in the country (and one that spends twice as much per pupil).

I wrote about Mississippi’s educational successes in 2023, but many of my fellow liberals then scoffed at the notion of learning from a state so tainted. Skeptics, mostly on the left, have made many critiques of the gains, including that they fade in upper grades, that the states are cheating, that this is all a temporary blip and that any progress is simply a result of holding back weak readers.

The critiques have been effectively rebutted — for starters, they can’t explain the continuing gains in Mississippi or the magnitude of the gains. Just as striking, the Mississippi gains increasingly are being replicated in Alabama and Louisiana, as they follow similar approaches. That’s enormously encouraging, for it suggests that other states can also lift student trajectories if they are willing to learn from Southern red states they may be more accustomed to looking down on.

So I traveled through Mississippi and Alabama with the photographer Lynsey Addario to understand the lessons to be learned. Perhaps the most important is an insistence on metrics, accountability and mastery of reading by the end of third grade. And while reading gets the attention, just as important is getting kids to attend school regularly.

. . . In classrooms and offices, teachers and administrators frequently mentioned the motivating power of report cards — not the letter grades given out by schools, but those they receive. Alabama gives its schools report cards, based in part on student performance and attendance, with grades that are widely noted in local communities, and these are one more reason to track down missing children.

. . . In Mississippi, where the four-year high school graduation rate is now 89 percent, the State Department of Education each year must approve a “dropout prevention plan” from each school district. The state education department “office of accountability” publishes lists that shame the 10 school districts with the lowest graduation rates.

. . . The gains in these states suggest that that critique is wrong. Mississippi and Alabama haven’t fixed child poverty, trauma and deeply troubled communities — but they have figured out how to get kids to read by the end of third grade.

In retrospect, I’m afraid that in some parts of the country — particularly blue states — we succumbed to the idea of lowering standards in hopes of improving equity. With warm and fuzzy hopes of reducing race gaps, for example, Oregon reduced graduation requirements and San Francisco for a time stopped teaching algebra to eighth graders. Some schools embraced “equitable grading” practices such as refusing to give zeros, ending penalties for turning in assignments late and allowing repeated retakes of tests.

These strike me as examples of what President George W. Bush called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Our liberal leniency went off the rails in other ways, including grade inflation and a general coddling of students: Recent cohorts of high school students have simultaneously had rising G.P.A.s and falling A.C.T. scores, and at Harvard, 60 percent of grades in the last academic year were A’s. Colleges have accepted dubious claims of disability so that students can, for example, get extra time for tests. The Atlantic reports that 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability.

I have given more extensive excerpts than usual here because I think the article and its conclusions are important: emphasize reading, emphasize regular school attendance (important!), grade the schools, and avoid lowering standards and weakening the emphasis on merit. Sadly, Kristof says that both Republicans and Democrats have ignored these lessons.

*Ghislaine Maxwell, serving 20 years for child sex trafficking in the Epstein case, was questioned (virtually) by a House Oversight Committee yesterday, but pleaded the Fifth (refused to talk) unless she was given clemency from President Trump.

Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein who is serving a federal prison sentence on sex-trafficking charges, refused on Monday to answer questions during a deposition before the House Oversight Committee.

Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the committee’s Republican chairman, said that Ms. Maxwell, who appeared virtually from a prison in Texas, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to every question asked.

“It was very disappointing,” Mr. Comer said. “We had many questions to ask about the crimes she and Epstein committed, as well as questions about potential co-conspirators.”

He also said that Ms. Maxwell’s lawyer, David Oscar Markus, told lawmakers in his opening statement that Ms. Maxwell “would answer questions if she were granted clemency” by President Trump.

Democrats in the deposition condemned that stance.

“She is campaigning over and over again to get that pardon from President Trump, and this president has not ruled it out,” said Representative Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia. “And so that is why she is continuing to not cooperate with our investigation.”

In a copy of his statement posted on social media, Mr. Markus said that “Ms. Maxwell is prepared to speak fully and honestly if

Maxwell has put the Administration—and everyone who wants the truth about EpsteinGate—between a rock and a hard place. Trump doesn’t want to give clemency to a pedophile and sex trafficker, but it’s also clear that Maxwell could spill the beans on lots of people, and everybody wants to see who’s guilty.  She’s already been moved, without explanation, from a regular prison to a minimum-security prison.  I don’t know what the answer is: should you free one pedophile to indict several more? If they decide to do that, could Maxwell provide enough evidence, besides hearsay, to convict several people who participated in the abuse and sex-trafficking scandal.  Give you own opinion below.

*Guess which historical figure has now been canceled. According to Andrew Doyle (aka “Titania McGrath”) writing in the Washington Post, Samuel Pepys is “Another ludicrous canceling of  a name from the past” (h/t Wayne). Pepys, of course, is most famous for the informative diary he kept for about a decade, a valuable source of information about the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London and, of course, his numerous extramarital affairs, often described in juicy detail. It’s apparently the last fact that has gotten people to start removing his name from things, including a house at the place he went to school:.

Samuel Pepys was, famously, an extraordinary diarist, offering a vivid first-hand account of life in Restoration England from 1660 to 1669. He was an eyewitness to the Great Fire of London in 1666 and recorded fascinating details of the ravages of the bubonic plague. His diaries were also intensely personal, with entries that echo familiarly across the centuries, whether recounting his rivalries and triumphs in his job as a naval administrator, his frustrations (can’t find a coach in the rain!), his delight in friends or boredom with dull sermons.

But anyone expecting infallibility will be disappointed. These diaries are not objective accounts of historical events, but history filtered through a singular and unmistakably human temperament. This quality explains their flaws, but also their enduring fascination. It also accounts for frequent discomfort over Pepys’s diaries, because they are the work of someone with apparently little sexual restraint. They were routinely censored by those transcribing from his shorthand in the 19th century. An unexpurgated version, including licentious episodes that he had disguised by using French and sometimes Spanish, wasn’t published until 1970.

This squeamishness over the diaries has never gone away. Recently, Hinchingbrooke School in Cambridgeshire — where Pepys was an alumnus — decided that one of its pastoral houses should no longer bear his name. This is just the latest example of an institution rewriting or minimizing aspects of its own history to fulfill the moral expectations of the present day.

Up until now, Hinchingbrooke School has been proud to advertise its association with the great writer. They have yet to name a replacement for Pepys House, but they may struggle to find a figure of unimpeachable virtue. And if moral purity really is to be the standard, they might want to reconsider the name of Cromwell House, given that Oliver Cromwell was responsible for the massacre of thousands of Catholics in the 17th century during his Irish campaign. But I suppose I shouldn’t give them ideas.

The shaming of the dead is one of the most asinine pastimes of today’s culture warriors. We have seen their shrill demands enacted in the renaming of streets and buildings, the removal of statues and the “decolonization” of curriculums. At the University of Liverpool, a student housing block named after the prime minister William Gladstone was rebranded in 2020 because of his father’s slaveholding in the Caribbean. Yet Gladstone himself became an advocate of emancipation, calling slavery “by far the foulest crime that taints the history of mankind”; apparently speeches early in his political career and the sins of his father were enough to see him condemned.

In the United States, countless episodes of colleges and institutions removing now-disapproved of names include Princeton University’s scrubbing of President Woodrow Wilson’s name from its public policy school in 2020. His racist views, repugnant today, were unexceptional in his time.

Indeed, not to mention the geneticists like Ronald Fisher in the U.K. who advocated a form of class-based eugenics, though he never had any influence in British eugenics because there wasn’t any.  The last bit is pure Doyle, of course, a contrarian who’s recently written one book on free speech and another on “the new Puritans“, criticizing social justice warriors. But regardless of that, to go after Pepys is ludicrous. If you canceled everyone who had a wide-ranging sex life, extramarital or not, many of history’s great figures would disappear from the scene.

*The BBC has reported on a mushroom in China that has a specific hallucinatory effect on people who eat it when it’s not fully cooked: it makes people see tiny little people!  This is the first psychedelic substance I know of that produces specific and similiar qualia on different people (h/t Susan). The syndrome, found in several different Asian countries, is called having “Lilliputian hallucinations.”

Only recently described by science, the mysterious mushrooms are found in different parts of the world, but they give people the same exact visions.

Every year, doctors at a hospital in the Yunnan Province of China brace themselves for an influx of people with an unusual complaint. The patients come with a strikingly odd symptom: visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture.

The hospital treats hundreds of these cases every year. All share a common culprit: Lanmaoa asiatica, a type of mushroom that forms symbiotic relationships with pine trees in nearby forests and is a locally popular food, known for its savory, umami-packed flavor. In Yunnan, L. asiatica is sold in markets, it appears on restaurant menus and is served at home during peak mushroom season between June and August.

One must be careful to cook it thoroughly, though, otherwise the hallucinations will set in.

“At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, ‘Don’t eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,'” says Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica. “It seems like very common knowledge in the culture there.”

But outside of Yunnan and a couple of other places, the strange mushroom is largely an enigma.

Domnauer is on a quest to solve the decades-old mysteries about this fungi species and identify the unknown compound responsible for its unusually similar hallucinations – as well as what it can potentially teach us about the human brain.

Domnauer first heard of L. asiatica as an undergraduate from his mycology professor.

“It sounded so bizarre that there could be a mushroom out there causing fairytale-like visions reported across cultures and time,” Domnauer says. “I was perplexed and driven by curiosity to find out more.”

Understanding this mushroom will be no easy feat, Domnauer says, but as with studies of other psychedelic compounds, the scientific research it produces could end up touching on the biggest questions of consciousness and the relationship between mind and reality.

It could also provide important clues about what causes spontaneous lilliputian hallucinations in people even when they’re not consuming L. asiatica. The condition is rare, and as of 2021, only 226 non-mushroom-related cases had been reported since lilliputian hallucinations were first described in 1909. But for those relatively few people, the outcome can be serious: a third of those patients who came down with non-mushroom-related cases did not fully recover.

This is totally bizarre, but also fascinating. Once they identify the compound or the brain region that causes hallucinations to specifically see tiny people, scientists might be able to figure out how the brain causes these consistent delusions. That it’s part of the brain is supported by a similar condition in people who haven’t eaten mushrooms. I wondered immediately if, say, the mushrooms would have the same effect on mice, but making them see tiny mice. At first I thought that experiment that would be impossible, but my friend Peggy Mason, a neuroscientist who worked on mice and rats, said that it’s potentially testable. She suggested that you first train mice to tell us whether they are seeing pictures of tiny mice as opposed, for example, to tiny elephants. You would do this by showing them pictures of each one, and rewarding them with a treat when they go to a correct port (there would be two) associated with elephants or mice. Then you give them the mushrooms and see if the mice, seeing hallucinatory tiny mice, would preferentially go to the port associated with seeing a mouse (the ports don’t have pictures themselves, but mice learn ports based on color, location, etc.).  Peggy wanted me to add that she didn’t think the experiment would work!

*Finally, Ginger K. pointed out that I was mentioned in a Grammarphobia post explaining the meaning of the word “osculate,” which, as you know, I regularly use to describe some people’s behavior towards religion.

Q: Here’s the title of a post on a blog I follow: “More osculation of religion by the NYT and Free Press.” I’m not aware of this figurative use of “osculation,” but it could be ignorance on my part.

A: “Osculation” is being used here to mean “kissing,” the original sense of the English noun and its Latin ancestor. However, the noun is now used humorously in its kissing sense, or used as a mathematical term for the point at which a pair of curves or surfaces touch.

The evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne, a religious skeptic, is using “osculation” satirically on his website Why Evolution Is True to say The New York Times and The Free Press are kissing up to religion by taking it seriously.

English borrowed the noun “osculation” and the verb “osculate” from Latin in the mid-17th century. Both terms ultimately come from osculum, Latin for a “kiss” (literally, a “little mouth,” the diminutive of os, or “mouth”).

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “osculation” as “the action of kissing; a kiss.” The earliest OED citation is from The New World of English Words (1658), by Edward Phillips: “Osculation, a kissing or imbracing.” Phillips was a nephew of Milton and educated by him.

As for the verb, the OED defines it as “to kiss (a person or thing), to salute with contact of the lips.” It labels the usage “now archaic or humorous.” The dictionary’s first example is from a dictionary of difficult words:

Well, that’s a mere scintilla of fame, but I’ll take it.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is once again peckish, like Winnie-the-Pooh:

Hili: At last you pulled yourself away from the computer.
Andrzej: So what?
Hili: It’s time for a little something.

In Polish:

Hili: Nareszcie oderwałeś się od komputera.
Ja: I co z tego?
Hili: Czas na małe co nieco.

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

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Jesus of the Day, a Joe Pesci cat:

Masih on a child “protestor” who was killed:

From Muffy, Islamicat fakes victimhood.  (That account is a hoot.)

A dad joke from Simon, who’s a dad:

From Malcolm; scene at a Chinese festival (sound up):

One from my feed; a good and faithful cat:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she got to Auschwitz. She was ten years old and would be 92 today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-02-11T11:20:50.665Z

Two from Dr Cobb. First, the Grasshopper that Ate New York:

I love this one, which Matthew calls “fate.”  It is true that whales probably evolved from ancient terrestrial artiodactyls, possibly like Indohyus.

— Chris DeLeon ⓥ DevPods.gg gamedev collabs (@chrisdeleon.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T03:27:32.297Z

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

February 10, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, February 10, 2026, and Teddy Day.  If you have one, send me a photo and a bit of information about it. If we get ten, I’ll post them. But in the meantime, here’s mine: Toasty, a bear I got him day I was born and has been with me since (he’s in my office now). He’s battered and has lost a lot of fur, but, like me, he persists nevertheless. (My mother sewed his head back on and replaced the eyes several times.)

It’s also International Cribbage Day, “Have a Brownie” Day (why the scare quotes? Are we supposed to just pretend we had a brownie?), National Cream Cheese Brownie Day, National Flannel Day.

There is again a dearth of things that I’d like to write about, though readers are welcome to send me pieces they think would interest me (note that there’s no guarantee that I’ll write about them, but I do welcome submissions). Bear with me (like Toasty); I do my best.

There is another Google Doodle marking the Olympics today, this time highlighting ski jumping; it goes to a site telling you how the jumpers remain airborne. Click to read:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 10 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Congressional talks on immigration appear to have stalled as Democrats have taken a hard position and apparently won’t budge, while Republicans haven’t offered a response. This may lead to a partial government shutdown.

As a Friday deadline to fund the Department of Homeland Security approaches, Democrats and Republicans appeared no closer on Sunday to a deal to keep the department running.

“If I had to say now, I probably would expect there is a shutdown,” said Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”

In the wake of federal immigration officers’ killings of two American citizens in Minnesota last month, Democrats have demanded a host of new restrictions on immigration enforcement operations as a condition for a new spending bill.

They include barring immigration officers from wearing masks, requiring them to show visible identification and mandating the use of judicial warrants when they enter private property to make arrests.

“Dramatic changes are necessary to the manner in which the Department of Homeland Security officers are conducting themselves before any funding bill should move forward,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Republican leaders have rejected those proposals as an unrealistic wish list, calling the new restrictions overly burdensome to an immigration crackdown that they generally support.

“They are threatening the safety and security of our agents so that they can’t do their job,” Senator Bill Hagerty, Republican of Tennessee, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “This is something we need to look at carefully. The request that we should put ICE agents in harm’s way is absolutely intolerable.”

Mr. Jeffries said Democrats had not heard a response to their proposals from the White House or Republican leaders in Congress. “The ball is in the court right now of the Republicans,” he said.

We discussed this not long ago, and a couple of readers suggested that masks might be okay to prevent doxxing, but badges with numbers should be prominently on display.  That might be a good compromise, as ICE agents have been doxxed, endangering themselves and their families.  But there should be body cameras given the history of ICE apprehensions. You can see the list of Democratic demands here.

*Now that Hong Kong is under the rule and law of the People’s Republic of China, suppression of dissent has intensified. The latest disturbing evidence of this is the sentencing of Hong Kong democracy advocate Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison.  Lai is 78 (and a British national), so this is a life sentence. Because there is no extradition to mainland China despite the PRC running the islands, Lau will serve his sentence in Hong Kong, where he’s being held now.  The charges: publishing seditious materials and collusion. It’s grossly unfair, as he is a political prisoner.

Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong pro-democracy media mogul who spent decades as a defiant thorn in Beijing’s side, was sentenced on Monday to 20 years in prison, the harshest penalty ever handed down for a national security offense in the semiautonomous territory.

The landmark ruling completes a yearslong effort by Beijing to dismantle the influence of a man it blamed for masterminding Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.

Mr. Lai, 78, smiled and waved at the public gallery after his sentencing. His wife, Teresa Lai, sat emotionless with her arms folded, and weeping could be heard in the back of the gallery.

His daughter, Claire Lai, said the sentence was “heartbreakingly cruel.” She added: “If this sentence is carried out, he will die a martyr behind bars.”

In December, Mr. Lai was found guilty of “conspiracy to collude with foreign forces” that stemmed from meetings he had held with politicians in the United States. He was also convicted of conspiracy to publish seditious material in Apple Daily, the now-shuttered Chinese-language pro-democracy newspaper he founded in 1995.

For decades, China has branded Mr. Lai a traitor seeking to undermine the Communist Party rule over Hong Kong and China. They have accused him of being the “black hand” behind the antigovernment protests that engulfed Hong Kong in 2019. Mr. Lai had taken part in some of the demonstrations and supported them through Apple Daily.

Even in a hyper-capitalistic city filled with self-made millionaires, Mr. Lai’s rags to riches story stood out. He fled a poverty stricken China as a stowaway when he was a boy and worked his way up the city’s garment factories. That led to the launching of his own brand of casual wear in 1981, which earned him his first fortune.

Western governments have joined Mr. Lai’s family in calling for the release of Mr. Lai, a British citizen, describing his trial as politically motivated.

Lau, who has health problems, has already been in solitary confinement for well over five years. And President Trump has promised to get him out, saying it would be “easy” to get Lau released ()and presumably moved to the US). It’s time for Trump to make good on his promises; perhaps that will require a prisoner exchange.

*The new article by Ann Bauer in The Free Press, “Mob rule comes for my yoga studio,” is one of many examples where “progressives” try to force themselves into spaces where they don’t belong. Bauer and her family moved from Boston to Minneapolis in 2014 and encountered this:

Yoga was one thing I’d managed to keep separate from politics. But when I returned, after they dropped Covid restrictions in 2022, the rules had changed.

“I know I’m not supposed to talk politics,” said one instructor after another, “but this is too important.” Then they would launch into a speech on Palestine or trans athletes or immigration, and welcome input. I could feel the sanctity of this place sliding away, just as it had at coffee shops, barbecues, business meetings, and libraries. Eventually, I’d have to lie or leave.

Instead, I spoke to leadership at CorePower, first the local studio managers and then the regional one. I asked them to abide by the policy of no politics in the studio and, in a nearly choreographed way, they shrugged and smiled their namaste smiles and gave me that side-eye that said I know what side you’re on and why you’re asking, and told me in kindergarten teacher voices that there was nothing they could do. These were unprecedented times. Excitement was high. People’s higher selves were in control.

Finally, I had my own reckoning with a teacher at the studio, who grilled me about my political leanings and didn’t like what she heard. It became one more obstacle in my life. She taught a ton of classes at my studio and refused to speak to me after. She couldn’t keep me from registering but she could make it unpleasant. Soon, when I entered, her colleagues at the desk would also turn stony and stop talking, disgustedly waving me through.

My husband, son, and I left a few months later, selling two houses and much of what we owned. We’d found a marvelous opportunity to start a new publishing platform in Kentucky. We were moving toward something. But we were also escaping Minnesota and thousands of things like CorePower that made life hard. We were just done, and desperate to get out.

Our new city is purple, leaning to the moderate side of blue. We live in multifamily housing and go to an office. I have a new yoga studio, coffee shop, and library. We’ve had only a handful of political conversations with the people we’ve met here over the months, and if we disagree, we do so pleasantly and without accusation. It is a wonder to live like this. We’re grateful, every single day.

It’s a tragedy the yoga studio I used to love has been ruined by shouted ideology and shunning, just like nearly every public space in the Twin Cities. But I have to admit I had a moment of pleasure, watching that scene, thinking Thank God. Thank God we got out.

But even a liberal can justifiably object to being propagandized with Lefist stuff when they just want to do yoga, and really, businesses and yoga studios should maintain institutional neutrality. All yoga-ites should be treated the same so long as they behave themselves. It seems to me, though I don’t have data, that this kind of personal propagandizing and virtue signaling comes more often from the Left than the Right. Democrats should stop doing this to a captive audience, like those who patronize businesses. It only turns people off on the Left, which means fewer Democrats when it comes to elections.

*If you’re contemplating sending your kid to college, the Washington Post has a long list of colleges with free tuition (article archived here). I had no idea there were any colleges that gave free tuition to all students (without an income threshold), but the paper has 87 pages of colleges offering free tuition—some without income requirements.  The first page is below:

The cost of higher education can be intimidating.

Americans are increasingly questioning whether college is worth the price, as student loan debt tops $1.6 trillion and the average tuition has doubled in the past 30 years. At the same time, new federal caps on how much parents can borrow for college could place higher education further out of reach for some families.

Against that backdrop, a growing number of schools are making college more affordable by providing free tuition to undergraduate students from low- and middle-income families. The movement dates back 20 years but has gained momentum in the past decade, largely fueled by state policies.

We set out to catalogue free tuition programs and found nearly 1,000 — in 45 states, at two-year colleges, four-year universities, vocational schools and elite private campuses. You can look up schools using the tool below. And if your school offers free tuition but is not on the list, let us know by filling out this submission form.

The University of Chicago offers free tuition to students coming from families making less than $125,000 per year “with typical assets” (whatever that means). Further, AI tells me this: “Furthermore, [University of Chicago] students from families with incomes under $60,000 (with typical assets) receive free tuition, fees, and standard room and board. This policy is part of their need-based, “no-loan” financial aid approach to increase accessibility.

And just to show you that not everything is horrible in the world, information.net has published a graphic (with links) to the Most Beautiful News of the Year 2025. Here’s the list (click to enlarge), and let’s look at the second one. (Links are at the original site, but click below to go there):

Trachoma is a dreadful and highly infectious disease caused by a bacterium, and a major cause of blindness. Once you’re blind from it there’s no cure, so this really is good news. The link at the second square gives the details:

The number of people requiring interventions against trachoma, the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness, has fallen below 100 million for the first time since global records began. There were 1.5 billion people estimated to be at risk in 2002, dropping to 97.1 million as of November 2025: a 94% reduction (as recently as 2011, 314 million people were estimated to be at risk and to require interventions).

This milestone reflects decades of sustained efforts by national health ministries, local communities, and international partners implementing the World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed SAFE strategy (Surgery to treat trachomatous trichiasis, the blinding stage of trachoma; Antibiotics to clear infection; and Facial cleanliness and Environmental improvement to reduce transmission and sustain progress).

“The reduction of the population requiring interventions against trachoma to below 100 million is testament to strong country leadership and consistent implementation of the SAFE strategy,” said Dr Daniel Ngamije Madandi, Director of the Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases Department at WHO. “Progress across all trachoma-endemic WHO regions shows that SAFE is both effective and adaptable across contexts. WHO remains committed to supporting countries through the provision of technical assistance to achieve the global elimination of trachoma as a public health problem by 2030.”

Following the recent validation of Egypt and Fiji as having eliminated trachoma as a public health problem, the total number of countries validated by WHO now stands at 27 – including at least one country in every trachoma-endemic WHO region.

Global progress for trachoma has been supported by a diverse range of stakeholders, including implementing non-governmental organizations, academic institutions and donors, many of which collaborate through the International Coalition for Trachoma Control (ICTC), as well as the donation of more than 1.1 billion doses of azithromycin by Pfizer Inc. through the International Trachoma Initiative (ITI). These partnerships have enabled health ministries to distribute valuable donated medicines efficiently and effectively, while strengthening community health systems.

We may not eliminate it, but humans have wiped out two diseases completely. Can you name them?

One more:

Once hunted almost to extinction, the group of humpback whales currently migrating down Australia’s east coast has bounced back — and then some.

In a preliminary report to the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, marine scientists estimate there were more than 50,000 eastern Australian humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) in 2024.

That’s around 20,000 more individuals than the estimated pre-whaling population of the early 1900s.

So if you’re down about the state of the world, remember that, as a whole, things are better than they were 150 years ago, and a big part of that is human well-being: medical and economic issues in particular.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej speaks truth to felinity:

Hili: Did you see any positive news today?
Andrzej: No, the media do their best to avoid it, because it results in financial losses.

In Polish:

Hili: Widziałeś dziś jakieś pozytywne wiadomości?
Ja: Nie, wszystkie media starają się ich unikać, bo to przynosi straty.

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

From The Language Nerds: get it?

 

From This Cat is Guilty:

From Stacy:

From Masih, a very sad tweet about a murdered protestor and his dog. Do watch until the end, and have the sound on:

From Luana; Fetterman breaks ranks again. I can’t see any problem with showing an ID at the polls to verify that you are who you say you are when you get a ballot:

From Larry the Cat via Simon, who’s a Brit:

Some science from Emma’s husband via her:

One from my feed; look at those happy penguins!

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was only three years old, and would have been 85 today had she lived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T11:23:59.658Z

. . . and two from Dr. Cobb. First, a sheep’s brain on drugs:

And more Larry, who has a big anniversary coming up (he is 19 now: a Senior Cat):

Dominic Dyer: @number10cat.bsky.social Larry the Cat will have been in Downing Street 15 years next week, he is the most stable thing about British politics these days

— Laura Phillips (@lauraphillips.bsky.social) 2026-02-06T22:49:39.037Z

Monday: Hili dialogue

February 9, 2026 • 6:15 am

Welcome to Monday, February 9, 2026, and National Bagel and Lox Day, one of the few ways I’ll eat fish. I don’t know who got the idea to put salmon on a bagel with cream cheese, but the idea was, as the kids say, “genius”.  Below is a a photo from the Wikipedia “Bagel and cream cheese” page. First, some history:

In American Jewish cuisine, cream cheese toppings (colloquially called “schmear“) of bagels have particular names. For example, a bagel covered with spread cream cheese is sometimes called a “whole schmear” bagel. A “slab” is a bagel topped with an unspread slab of cream cheese. A “lox and a schmear” is a bagel with cream cheese and lox or smoked salmon.  Tomato, red onion, capers and chopped hard-boiled egg are often added.  These terms are used at some delicatessens in New York City, particularly at Jewish delicatessens and older, more traditional delicatessens.

The lox and schmear likely originated in New York City around the time of the turn of the 20th century, when street vendors in the city sold salt-cured belly lox from pushcarts. A high amount of salt in the fish necessitated the addition of bread and cheese to offset the lox’s saltiness.It was reported by U.S. newspapers in the early 1940s that bagels and lox were sold by delicatessens in New York City as a “Sunday morning treat”, and in the early 1950s, bagels and cream cheese combination were very popular in the United States, having permeated American culture.

Jewish cuisine is pretty dire as ethnic cuisines go, but a bagel with lox and a schmear is surely its glory and apotheosis:

Helen Cook, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

And the ducks will arrive in March—if we get any ducks this year.

It’s also Chocolate Day, National Poop Day (the day when the digested food from watching the Super Bowl is excreted), Oatmeal Monday, and Pizza Pie Day.

There’s a Google Doodle honoring ice skating in the Olympics (they change the sport every day or so). Click below to go to the AI site explaining figure skating:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 9 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Sports: The Seattle Seahawks crushed the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 60 (or LX, as they say), with the final score 29-13.  I watched about five minutes and read the Italian novel The Leopard instead, as I wanted to finish it last night. It was superb and I recommend it very highly. All the news about the Super Bowl appears to be Bad Bunny’s halftime show, and I still don’t know who Bad Bunny is, clearly showing that I am ignorant of modern music.

*The NYT reveals that the Epstein files show a closer connection between Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein than we thought: Epstein’s companion and fellow predator Ghislaine Maxwell was closely connected with Clinton as he founded his Global Initiative, and Epstein may even have funded it (article archived here).

Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, played a substantial role in supporting the creation of the Clinton Global Initiative, one of President Bill Clinton’s signature post-White House endeavors, new documents released by the Justice Department show.

Ms. Maxwell took part in budget discussions related to the first Clinton Global Initiative conference; talked through challenges about it with both Clinton aides and Publicis Groupe, the company that produced the inaugural event; and arranged to wire $1 million to pay Publicis for its work on “the Clinton project,” according to emails in the massive cache of documents collected as part of the government’s investigations of Mr. Epstein.

The source of the money is unclear, including whether Mr. Epstein provided the funds. However, the emails show that he was aware of the payment.

“Ask him to tell you why i million now and where will it be going,” Mr. Epstein wrote to Ms. Maxwell a few days after she received the wiring instructions from Publicis.

Ms. Maxwell’s involvement in the launch of the Clinton Global Initiative took place in 2004, before Mr. Epstein’s 2006 indictment and 2008 guilty plea for solicitation of prostitution with a minor, and long before Ms. Maxwell, a daughter of the media baron Robert Maxwell, was sentenced in 2022 to two decades in prison for conspiring with Mr. Epstein to sexually exploit underage girls.

The emails support an assertion Ms. Maxwell made last year in an interview with the Justice Department that she played a key role in helping set up the global conference.

Mr. Clinton has said he stopped speaking with Mr. Epstein sometime before his 2006 indictment. In a statement, Angel Ureña, a spokesman for the Clintons, said the former president had “called for the full release of the Epstein files” and “has nothing to hide.”

Again, there’s no evidence so far that Clinton participated in any of Epstein’s illicit activities, and this was all before Epstein had been convicted for the first time. Nevertheless, there are allegations that Clinton visited Epstein’s private island, and the ex-President (and Hillary) also refused to testify before Congress, though I think they’ve since agreed to do so. What can I say?—news is scant and papers are touting associations like this that may well turn out to be nothing.

*Iran has sentenced its imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to an additional long stretch in prison—because she went on a hunger strike. It is, of course, Narges Mohammadi, imprisoned several times for criticizing the theocratic government, and awarded the Prize in  2023.

Iran has sentenced the Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi to more than seven more years in prison after she began a hunger strike, her supporters said Sunday, as Tehran cracks down on all dissent following nationwide protests and the deaths of thousands at the hands of security forces.

The new convictions against Mohammadi come as Iran tries to negotiate with the US over its nuclear programme to avert a military strike threatened by Donald Trump. Iran’s top diplomat said on Sunday that Tehran’s strength came from its ability to “say no to the great powers”, striking a maximalist position just after negotiations in Oman with the US.

Mohammadi’s supporters cited her lawyer, Mostafa Nili, who had spoken to her. Nili confirmed the sentence on X, saying it had been handed down on Saturday by a court in the city of Mashhad.

“She has been sentenced to six years in prison for ‘gathering and collusion’ and one and a half years for propaganda and two-year travel ban,” he wrote. Mohammadi had received another two years of internal exile to the city of Khosf, about 740km (460 miles) south-east of the capital, Tehran, the lawyer added.

Iran did not immediately acknowledge the sentence.

Supporters say Mohammadi has been on a hunger strike since 2 Februrary. She had been arrested in December at a memorial ceremony honouring Khosrow Alikordi, a 46-year-old Iranian lawyer and human rights advocate who had been based in Mashhad. Footage from the demonstration showed her shouting, demanding justice for Alikordi and others.

Supporters had warned for months before her December arrest that Mohammadi, 53, was at risk of being put back into prison after she received a furlough in December 2024 over medical concerns. While that was to be only three weeks, her time out of prison lengthened, possibly as activists and western powers pushed Iran to keep her free. She remained out even during the 12-day war in June between Iran and Israel.

Mohammadi has had multiple heart attacks, convulsions, and surgery for what might have been bone cancer. But she has a Nobel Prize, and is serving time as a political prisoner.  Iran should let her go, preferably overseas where she can get decent medical care. I don’t know if, were she released, she would want to stay in Iran, but she will likely die in prison if they don’t let her go soon.

*There’s a news hiatus because of the Superbowl, which gives me a chance to catch up on non-“news” article, like this one in The Dispatch, “Why I don’t regret majoring in the humanities.” by Sharla Moody  (archived here). I read it because I’ve recently been pondering the differences between sciences and humanities, and have defended the latter even though I am (or was) a scientist.

I majored in English, which baffled many of my friends and, I think, worried my parents. Sometimes, when I’m confronted by the salaries of first-year software engineers and the technical training that such salaries require, I worry I made a mistake.

But I remember, too, the first time I read Paradise Lost and felt that there might be more to the world than I knew. I had always considered myself a bookworm, but it wasn’t until I enrolled in my major that I learned that reading the right books, and reading them with other people, was a different experience altogether. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about the problem of evil, or wondered about the existence of fate, before reading Paradise Lost. But reading John Milton gave these questions force and meaning to a degree that nothing prior had. If angels made by God to live in heaven couldn’t resist temptation, what hope was there for me to try to live according to my own values? In other classes, I learned statistical modeling and facts about recent American foreign policy. But nothing gave my life more urgency than the questions that I found in literature. Studying the humanities, for me, was like replacing a too-dim lightbulb. Suddenly I became aware of what was, and always had been, around me. There is so much to the world that I didn’t (and still don’t) know, and before I began studying the humanities, I had no idea that there was so much I was ignorant of.

Much has been made recently about the decline in reading among young people, especially those enrolled at elite universities known for rigorous humanities programs. Professors fret over declining enrollments. While smaller liberal arts colleges shutter, state flagships cut programs, and elite schools reduce Ph.D. admissions and consolidate departments.

While some of this is the result of decades of academic overproduction, practical degree programs absorbing the time of students, and yes, the Internet-phones-AI tripartite, the crisis of the humanities also comes from a lack of clear understanding of what the humanities are for. So argues Humanistic Judgment: Ten Experiments in Reading, a new book published by Yale University Press. Edited by Benjamin Barasch, David Bromwich, and Bryan Garsten—the latter two are Yale professors—the essay collection examines the current state of the humanities.

In recent decades, Bromwich argues in his introduction to the book, the academy has become less focused on understanding the goal of humanistic study as the cultivation of judgment or the development of self-knowledge or even inquiry into the nature of reality and humanity and the world, but rather focused on understanding texts through the lenses of cultural and political debates.. . .

. . .Humanistic study in the Western tradition has long been taught in seminar-style dialogues, taking after Socrates. Scholars commonly refer to works as “in conversation with one another.” At the center of the liberal arts lies this precept that education cannot be a solitary project. In reading and conversing and debating, the student of the humanities is, ideally, always exposed to one who experiences a text, or a painting, or the world differently. Just as reading might expose one’s ignorance, so too might the classroom. But this humility, in turn, should always lead to a desire to understand reality more deeply. In this vein, Barasch, in his contribution to the essay collection, discusses the work of journalist James Agee, writing, “Agee’s radical humanism is a craving for reality, a desire to live in the world as it is, and as he is. In becoming real to himself he discovers again and again the separateness, and thus the reality, of others.”

The sciences, social sciences, and technical fields are noble, good pursuits. But we do a disservice to young people when we discourage them from pursuing the liberal arts and treat education as the mere acquisition of skills and knowledge. To withstand the challenges posed by scientism and politics and AI and declines in reading, the humanities need positive accounts of their value. They have an excellent one in Humanistic Judgment. 

I don’t like the “scientism” bit nor the implication that the humanities helps us “understand reality more deeply” unless that means “subjective reality” or “the fact that different people have different viewpoints.” But, as I said in my Quillette piece, the arts (I’m excluding quasi-scientific humanities fields like economics and sociology), the value of the humanities is to apprehend the diversity of viewpoints of others, and to expand our understanding of how other people view the world.

*I was pulling for Lindsay Vonn to get an Olympic medal in downhill skiing. It was less than two weeks ago that she tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee, a ligament that stabilizes the knee. You’d think that that would end her plans to ski, but this is one tough woman, and although she’s 41, she was bent not just on competing, but on winning. All that came to a grim end when she crashed painfully in yesterday’s competition. The latest report is that she broke her left leg and underwent surgery to stabilize it.

Lindsey Vonn’s pursuit of a downhill medal in her fifth Olympic Games ended violently Sunday morning here with a gruesome crash that left her screaming in pain and being airlifted from the mountain.

Vonn was the 13th of a scheduled 36 athletes to take to the course under baby blue skies at this stunning resort town in the Dolomites. She was just 10 days removed from a crash that tore the ACL in her left knee, and her comeback for these Olympics had already been made possible by a replacement of her right knee.

But with teammate Breezy Johnson, who won gold in the event, waiting at the bottom, Vonn — who was third fastest in Saturday’s final training run — barely got to evaluate herself against the competition before disaster struck. Thirteen seconds into a run that would have taken more than a minute and a half, she clipped the fourth gate with her right arm.

The contact sent Vonn spinning, with snow flying around her. Her head and shoulder violently drove into the surface of the course before she flipped again, her legs splayed.

Various broadcasts captured audio of Vonn crying, “Oh my God!” The crash occurred at noon local time, and it took just nine minutes for a helicopter to arrive to begin the process of flying her from the mountain.

“Certainly hoping she is okay after that terrible crash,” the public address announcer belted to a once buoyant crowd that had grown essentially silent.

. . . In a World Cup career that extends back more than two decades — and includes 84 victories and three Olympic medals, including gold in the downhill in 2010 — Vonn has been injured countless times. Never, though, in this kind of spotlight.

Her comeback bid that began last season — after the knee replacement allowed her to ski without pain for the first time she could remember — had been enormously successful. She won two World Cup downhill races this season, was the leader in the standings and had not finished out of the top three in five downhill starts. This comeback wasn’t a lark. This comeback was legit.

It’s sad, but you have to give her credit; she knew the danger and skied anyway.  And after a knee replacement some time ago!  She’ll be ok financially, and she had her medals.  I doubt she’ll be back at 45 for the next Olympics, but you have to give her kudos for courage and diligence.  Here’s a video of her accident (click on “Watch on YouTube” or here.

*The next movie I’d like to see is “The Testament of Ann Lee“, starring Amanda Seyfried in the title role. It’s about the woman who founded the Shakers in England and their migration to America; it’s also a musical. It’s been highly rated, and there’s buzz about Oscars for both the movie and Seyfried. David French gives his approving take in the NYT, characterizing it as “A movie about American that broke my heart” (the article is archived here).

I couldn’t stop blinking back tears, and I couldn’t understand why.

I’d just walked out of a movie called “The Testament of Ann Lee.” Lee was the founder of the American Shakers, a tiny utopian Christian sect that started in England in the mid-18th century. Lee brought a small band of followers to the United States shortly before the Revolution.

The Shakers were known for their ecstatic worship (hence the name), their egalitarianism and pacifism, their absolute commitment to celibacy and their furniture. Shakers committed themselves to excellence in all things, and their craftsmanship was impeccable.

I’m not exactly the target audience for a film about chair-making religious extremists. I’m more the kind of moviegoer who’s drawn to Will Ferrell or light sabers or dragons. Also orcs. I find great meaning in superhero movies. But my wife and son were going, and I wanted to hang out with them.

So I went, a bit skeptically, hoping that perhaps I might get to see a new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of “The Odyssey.” But then the movie started, and it broke my heart.

. . .In Ann Lee’s case, her radical faith, which mirrored Christ’s and the Apostle Paul’s commitment to singleness and celibacy, also manifested itself in radical love, both for people inside her community and outside it.

In essence, Lee and her followers turned to God and said — as so many believers have — I will do anything for you. And they heard God’s ancient answer to that declaration: Love thy neighbor. And your neighbor includes the enslaved Black man, and the white indentured servant who possessed so few rights, and the Native American who was slowly but surely being driven from his land.

Hours after the movie, I finally realized why I had tears in my eyes. In the final scene, you see Lee’s plain wooden casket sitting alone under a painting of a beautiful tree.

In that moment, you could clearly see the gap between American hope and American reality. And I was reminded once again of one of George Washington’s favorite Bible verses, Micah 4:4 — “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.” In his writings, Washington referred to it almost 50 times.

. . .And so it is with this nation we love. In 250 years, the already of American liberty has expanded. We are a better and more decent nation than the one Ann Lee encountered. But as we see state brutality and state violence spill out across our streets, we know that we are not yet fulfilling the promise of the declaration.

Ann Lee died in 1784. When she was reportedly reinterred in the 1820s, she was found to have a fractured skull. It’s 2026 now, and we still see beatings in the streets. There are still too many caskets under the tree of liberty. But the tree is still alive, and it continues to grow. May we all sit securely in its shade one day.

It looks like the movie broke his heart because it reminded him of Trump’s America. That is a stretch at best. I will see the movie, but won’t go to it looking for analogies between 18th century America and today’s America. I will go to learn a bit about history (the Shakers were celibate, so could grow only through converts) and to admire the artistry.

Here’s the official trailer:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the two downstairs cats affirm their pledge:

Szaron: Between us, veganism is not my option.
Hili: Not mine either.

In Polish:

Szaron: Między nami mówiąc, weganizm nie jest moją opcją.
Hili: Moją też nie.

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

From Jesus of the Day:

From The Language Nerds:

From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

From Masih; the mothers of murdered protestors console each other:

From Bryan, a long (8-min) clip of Peter Boghossian practicing “street epistemology”.  Peter is damned by progressives, but as you see he’s really good at practicing the Socratic method on ignorant youth (and oy! is this youth ignorant!):

From Luana: apparently antivaxers are not limited to the U.S., and these data are genuine.

From Simon; Jock the Chartwell cat:

From Gerald Steinberg, President of NGO Monitor. I stopped donations to MSF years ago.

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb. First: Earth and Moon:

This is Earth and the Moon, photographed by a spacecraft in Mars orbit.

— Paul Byrne (@theplanetaryguy.bsky.social) 2026-02-08T02:21:22.677Z

From Matthew, a hilarious Instagram video (sound up) featuring a British t.v. presenter pretending to ask for kitschy items in a British store. Click on screenshot to watch, or go here to see the original. Ms. Welby cracks herself up.

I LOVE the Edwardian fox with a ruff and human hands who plays the cello:

Sunday: Hili dialogue

February 8, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, February 8, 2026, and National Pork Rind Appreciation Day. And today the Big Game kicks off at 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time, because of course it’s Super Bowl Sunday, with the Seattle Seahawks playing the New England Patriots And Bad Bunny, whoever he is, will perform at halftime.

It’s also Boy Scouts Day (scouting came to America on this day in 1909), National Molasses Bar Day, National Potato Lover’s Day (again they misplaced the apostrophe, implying that we’re celebrating only one person who loves potatoes), Opera Day, and Super Chicken Wing Day (thighs have more meat).

In honor of Opera Day, here’s another famous aria: “Vissi d’arte” from Puccini’s Tosca. This is a lovely rendition by Kiri Te Kanawa:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 8 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The latest hamhanded move by the Trump administration is posting a political video, set to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, showing Trump as a triumphant lion and his opponents as other animals, with the worst part being the depiction of the Obamas as apes (see below). The video was deleted after about 12 hours, and Trump won’t apologize for it.

President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, but he insisted he had nothing to apologize for even after he deleted the video following an outcry.

The clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and was among a flurry of links posted by Mr. Trump late Thursday night. It was the latest in a pattern by Mr. Trump of promoting offensive imagery and slurs about Black Americans and others.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday, Mr. Trump said he only saw the beginning of the video. “I just looked at the first part, it was about voter fraud in some place, Georgia,” Mr. Trump said. “I didn’t see the whole thing.”

He then tried to deflect blame, suggesting he had given the link to someone else to post. “I gave it to the people, generally they’d look at the whole thing but I guess somebody didn’t,” he told reporters.

Still, Mr. Trump offered no contrition when pressed. “No, I didn’t make a mistake,” he said.

The White House response to the video over the course of the day — from defiance to retreat to doubling down — was a remarkable glimpse into an administration trying to control the damage in the face of widespread outrage, including from the president’s own party.

The clip was in line with Mr. Trump’s history of making degrading remarks about people of color, women and immigrants, and he has for years singled out the Obamas. Across Mr. Trump’s administration, racist images and slogans have become common on government websites and accounts, with the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security Department all having promoted posts that echo white supremacist messaging.

But the latest video struck a nerve that appeared to take the White House by surprise. The depiction of Mr. and Mrs. Obama as apes perpetuates a racist trope, historically used by slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize Black people and justify lynchings.

At first, the president’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, brushed off criticism of the video and made no attempt to distance the president from it.

“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Ms. Leavitt said on Friday morning. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

Finally, after outrage mounted, including among Republicans (the Senate’s only black Republican, Tim Scott, also objected), they pulled the video. But really, a rational and aware president would have apologized for this profusely. If Trump wants to maintain any credibility among his own party, he should start behaving himself. The fact that he seems not to realize the odious history of these monkey tropes is disturbing.

Here’s the full video, though I thought the Obama bit came at the end:

*After struggling for something to say about the voluminous Epstein files, Andrew Sullivan wrote a column called, “Notes on Epstein,” with the subtitle, “On an American elite that’s self-dealing, self-obsessed, and long past good and evil.” Well, that a bit hyperbolic, but Epstein did deal largely with the elite. Some quotes:

I’ve been struggling to write about the Epstein case — and the eponymous “files” — because, to be honest, I’ve been struggling to figure out what to think about them. I’m not a big conspiracy buff; my thoughts are far too complicated to say anything simple; and, well, sometimes life is too short to comb through acres of skeevy emails by many of the rich and powerful people I’ve spent the last 30 years desperately trying to avoid.

But here goes!

The following, it seems to me, is what really matters: an email from an Epstein friend in 2014 (long, long after Epstein’s conviction for sex with a minor):

Thank you for a fun night …

Your littlest girl was a little naughty.

No proof of an actual crime here but, in the broader context of what we know about Epstein, the mind reels at the way so many in our elite were able to ignore the abuse of minors happening in the wings. Money, glamor, and connections easily trumped any moral qualms. I guess if Catholic Cardinals can look the other way, so can Larry Summers and Brad Karp.

There’s something darker here too. The abuse of minors turned into a joke — long after Epstein’s first conviction:

Redacted: Where are you?
Jeffrey: Paris with Woody Allen
Redacted: For les pedophile convention?
Jeffrey: I think pedophilee is the plural
Redacted: lol

Lovely. Then there’s the quite obvious inference from the entire dump: these people really do look after themselves first, don’t they? This is elite network heaven, the trading of favors, the mutual backslapping, with private planes and desert islands as lubricant: catnip for populists. I don’t see a vast pedophile conspiracy in these files. I see a status-seeking parvenu with a sex addiction to underage and barely legal girls, collecting the rich and powerful as a kind of insurance for his compulsive vice.

. . . When historians review this, they’ll see the historical context: our post-Cold War Gilded Age. So much money held by so few. That’s what keeps these people buzzing around Epstein, one senses: proximity to the new mega-rich. You wonder if the sense of utter impunity they all express would be possible in an era other than our own.

. . . Which brings me to the courageous anti-anti-Semite, Keir Starmer. Trump will survive all this, but Keir very well may not. The reason he made Peter Mandelson ambassador to the US is precisely because “Mandy” is a slimy, amoral, networking sleaze — and Keir thought that was a good match for Trump. Too good, it turned out. I watched Prime Ministers’ Questions on Wednesday and could feel the tides turning. Keir knew Mandy had kept in touch with Epstein long after his conviction and appointed him anyway. He says now he just didn’t know the extent of the bond. That’s almost certainly not good enough.

So far, the only people who have actually suffered serious consequences from this are Ghislaine Maxwell, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (former prince), Peter Mandelson — who now may face criminal charges for leaking classified material — and Keir Starmer, who might be forced to leave office entirely. All Brits. Quite a contrast with the American elite, no? If only there was a smidgen of similar accountability here.

At least Sullivan called Starmer an “anti-anti-Semite.” In the UK, Mandelson’s missteps are reason enough for the PM to resign. Pity he is Labour, which of course has been ridden with antisemitism. It’s the British liberals who seem to dislike the Jews. And yes, nothing any Trump appointee could do would be enough to get the President to resign. That is inconceivable.

*The U.S. Olympic team was booed as it marched in Milan’s opening ceremonies, as was VP Vance as he appeared on the big screen.

In a gleefully kitschy Opening Ceremony that featured ancient Romans, dancing espresso pots and a number by Mariah Carey, Italy threw open its arms to welcome the entire world to the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.

Well, nearly the entire world.

In an unmistakable sign of Europe’s rapidly dimming view on America, the U.S. delegation entered the San Siro stadium here on Friday night to a chorus of boos and disapproving whistles from the international crowd of more than 65,000. The jeering only intensified when Vice President JD Vance appeared on the big screen during Team USA’s arrival.

The only other team to receive similar treatment was Israel.

Olympic organizers had braced for the possibility of anti-American sentiment inside the stadium. Small protests had already cropped up on the streets of Milan against the planned presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the city. Asked before the Games on how the Americans might be received, IOC president Kirsty Coventry said she hoped that the occasion would be “seen by everyone as an opportunity to be respectful.”

Even the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee recognized that its athletes might not be the most popular guests at the party—and made sure to warn them about the potentially frosty reception.

“We have done a ton of Games-readiness preparation with the athletes to ensure they feel comfortable and are not walking into an environment that is uncertain,” USOPC chief executive Sarah Hirshland said.

It’s okay for Europeans to boo Vance, as he’s part of a disastrous Administration, but it’s not fair to boo the American team. It not only violates the spirit of comity that’s supposed to pervade the Olympics, but it’s bigotry, pure and simple. At least half of Americans—and probably most of the American athletes—can’t stand Trump, and it’s mean to boo them. When I travel, I am tired of explaining, after I say I’m American, that I detest the Administration. Do Brits apologize for having a bad Prime Minister?

Europeans should lay off the U.S. athletes, who, with the exception of a faux anti-Trump urination in the snow (no, men can’t write like that with pee), haven’t made political gestures.

This is from American skier Gus Kenworthy’s Instagram page.   (No, it’s impossible to write in the snow like this when urinating.  Every guy has tried such writing, and we know this is bogus). Ten to one he used a squeeze bottle with yellow liquid and pretended that he peed:

*The first set of talks between Iran and the U.S. are over, and they’ve pretty much failed, with both sides standing firm on their initial positions.

Tehran stuck to its refusal to end enrichment of nuclear fuel in talks Friday between senior U.S. and Iranian officials, but both sides signaled a willingness to keep working toward a diplomatic solution that could head off an American strike.

According to Iranian state media, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told his U.S. counterparts that Tehran wouldn’t agree to end enrichment or move it offshore, rejecting a core U.S. requirement.

Araghchi, however, said it had been a good start, and he and Oman’s foreign minister said the parties aimed to meet again.

“We likewise had very good talks on Iran,” President Trump told reporters Friday. “Iran looks like it wants to make a deal very badly.”

The two sides didn’t meet face to face but instead held alternating discussions with Omani diplomats. Neither moved much from their initial position, people familiar with the discussions said.

Regional officials and many analysts had low expectations going into the talks, given Iran’s unwillingness to end nuclear enrichment and the U.S. insistence on including Iran’s ballistic missile program and support for regional militias in the negotiations.

Trump has signaled that he wants regime change in Iran, but he doesn’t seem to realize that he won’t get that through diplomacy, for Iran will never agree to give up its desire to make nuclear weapons. Trump must either decide to attack or he’ll decide to let the Iranian regime keep killing protestors. That is the choice he has.

*UPI’s “Odd News” reports that the world’s longest wild snake has been found in Indonesia:

 Guinness World Records confirmed a massive reticulated python [Malayopython reticulatus] discovered in the Maros region of Indonesia is officially the longest wild snake to be formally measured.

The record-keeping organization said it reviewed evidence confirming the female snake measures 23 feet and 8 inches in length.

The snake is currently in the care of conservationist Budi Purwanto, licensed snake handler Diaz Nugraha and natural history photographer Radu Frentiu.

Nugraha and Frentiu said they went out in search of the impressively long snake after hearing of rumored sightings. They dubbed the serpent Ibu Baron, or “The Baroness.”

Reticulated pythons typically grow to an adult length ranging from 9 feet, 10 inches to 19 feet, 2 inches.

Here’s a video and that’s one gynormous snake! I’m glad they didn’t kill it, but why is it so still in the video?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is spooked, but Szaron calms her down:

Hili: Either I’m imagining things, or something’s there.
Szaron: We live in a world of illusions.

In Polish:

Hili: Albo mi się zdaje, albo coś tam jest.
Szaron: Żyjemy w świecie złudzeń.

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

From Cats that Have Had Enough of Your Shit; a thieving moggy:

From Now That’s Wild:

From The Language Nerda:

Merilee sent a hilarious video from Carcass Acres. The woman is a hoot!  (You may have to go to the original site to see it.) The animal names are great: Chicken Elizabeth Nugget and Debbi from Accounting!

From Masih, who rebukes Mehdi Hasan and Zohran Mamdani while showing the photo of an Iranian protestor who was flogged by the authorities. I can’t embed this, so click on the screenshot to see the whole tweet:

From Larry: a circus cat:

Speaking of Mamdani, here he is touting Islam (and adding “peace be upon him in Arabic after mentioning Muhamad); tweet provided by Luana:

From Malcolm, lovely life goals:

One from my feed; are we sure the pup isn’t just scratching his belly?

I haven’t checked this, but it may well be true:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, a pheasant who thinks he’s stuck but he isn’t:

He’s been stuck like this for ages. My dude. Just reverse. Truly, achingly vacant.

— Dr Laura Eastlake (@victorianmasc.bsky.social) 2026-02-06T16:03:31.143Z

Matthew calls this “fabulous and apt”:

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

— Omg. WTF is Happening? (@lalahaenzy.com) 2026-02-05T11:50:02.422Z