Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Well, I might as well reveal part of my very long list of “best music”. This time I’ll post my choice of the best “songs about aging or dying” for Baby Boomers. These aren’t necessarily all good (I’m not a fan of Mellencamp, for instance), but they’re all notable. And yes, I realize that “Long May You Run” is really about Neil Young’s car (a 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse he called Mortimer Hearseburg), but it’s still appropriate. Further, some of the songs are about lost love, but all refer to the sadness of passing time.
Father and Son Cat Stevens
Touch of Gray The Grateful Dead
When I’m Sixty-Four The Beatles
Boys of Summer Don Henley
Cherry Bomb John Mellencamp
Long May You Run Stills-Young Band
All Summer Long The Beach Boys
Caroline No The Beach Boys
Nick of Time Bonnie Raitt
When We Was Fab George Harrison
All those Years Ago George Harrison
Rockin’ Chair The Band
Taxi Harry Chapin
Cat’s in the Cradle Harry Chapin
Old Friends (Bookends) Simon and Garfunkel
Don’t Fear the Reaper Blue Öyster Cult
Wasted on the Way Crosby Stills & Nash
I welcome readers’ suggestions, and I’ll put up five of the songs that I think are particularly good and underappreciated:
“Boys of Summer” (1984). For some reason this song absolutely brings back my own teenage years, and quite vividly:
“All Those Years Ago” (1981). Nobody seems to remember this song by George Harrison, but it’s not only great, but a moving tribute to his late fellow Beatle, John Lennon. It’s clear that despite their tiffs, Harrison really loved Lennon.
“Taxi” by Harry Chapin (1972). I’m sure this song is long forgotten, but it’s among the very best ones on the list. The “soprano” part is sung by “Big John” Wallace, Chapin’s bassist; everybody thought that the original record used a female voice. You can end the song at 7:31; it just repeats with the lyrics shown.
“Nick of Time” by Bonnie Raitt (1989). I love this song; the tune is excellent, with a good hook, and the words are wonderful:
I am SO tired of people demonizing J. K. Rowling for being a transphobe and a bigot without ever having paid attention to what’s she said and written. In fact, she’s sympathetic to trans people, but, like me, thinks that trans rights on occasion clash with the rights of biological women, and in those cases the rights of natal women can take precedence (this occurs in sports, prisons, and a few other circumstances). And, like Rowling, I have been somewhat demonized by taking a stand identical to hers (I was, for example, recently branded “anti-trans” by the head of our department’s DEI Committee, clearly by people who have ignored what I’ve written, too).
But I kvetch. This Substack post by Katie Pinns tries to un-demonize Rowling by actually showing us what she wrote. Now you know that won’t change the minds of those like Emma Watson who have parted ways with Rowling on no good grounds: gender ideologues are impervious to the facts. But at least Pinns has Rowling’s statements down in black and white, and I’ve added one important link. Click screenshot to read:
I’ll give some quotes from Pinns (indented) who in turn quotes Rowling (doubly indented). There are several pages worth, so check for yourself if you think I’m cherry-picking.
Few public figures attract as much noise as J.K. Rowling. For many people, the controversy around her name has become so thick with slogans, screenshots, and second‑hand outrage that her actual words have been buried under the reaction to them. People repeat that she “hates trans people,” or that women’s crisis centres are “transphobic,” without ever checking what she has actually said.
So this piece goes back to the source. Not the discourse. Not the memes. Her words.
Rowling’s central point is simple: sex is real, and it matters. She has said:
“If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased… It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
This is the foundation of her position. She argues that biological sex shapes women’s lives, especially in relation to male violence, discrimination, and safeguarding. She also says explicitly that recognising sex does not erase or demean trans people.
Her concern is that if society stops acknowledging sex, women lose the language they need to describe their experiences. That’s not a fringe view; it’s the basis of decades of women’s rights advocacy.
Rowling has repeatedly said she supports trans people’s right to live free from discrimination:
“I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans.”
She also describes feeling “kinship” with trans people because both women and trans people are vulnerable to male violence. Her objection is not to trans people themselves, but to the idea that acknowledging sex is inherently hateful.
And, as Pinns notes, Rowling makes these pronouncements not to “erase” or demonize trans people, but to prompt a discussion about clashes of “rights” as well as whether there’s a need for affirmative care, including surgery, on people below an age of consent. As Pinns says, “Much of the public anger directed at her is based on claims she never made. Her insistence on correcting the record is part of why she continues to speak.”
There are more quotes from Rowling, and you can read her longer explanations of her views at places like this one. She has of course been subject to a multitude of threats of violence, but she’s stood her ground, responding with humor and not a small amount of snark, which makes her enemies even madder. Here’s a quote from her sober and revealing essay linked in the first sentence of this paragraph:
Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.
Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.
The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.
The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.
The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.
. . . .Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.
I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.
I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.
Finally, I’ll quote Pinns again:
Much of the backlash against Rowling spills over onto women’s crisis centres, rape support services, and safeguarding charities that maintain female-only spaces. These organisations often base their policies on:
– the reality of male violence
– the needs of traumatised women
– legal exemptions that allow single-sex services
– safeguarding obligations
Rowling’s position aligns with these long-standing principles. Calling such services “transphobic” erases the reasons they exist.
Despite the headlines, Rowling has not said that trans people shouldn’t exist, shouldn’t have rights, or are a threat. She has not argued against healthcare for trans adults. She has not advocated discrimination.
As the West starts to realize that it’s unfair for biological men, however they identify, to enter some women’s spaces, or to compete in women’s sports, or that there are dangers in “affirmative care” doled out to adolescents who aren’t of age, I’m hoping that Rowling will no longer be immediately dismissed by ideologues, but that her arguments will be taken seriously and answered.
Even the title of this New Yorker article is dumb: “faith in atheism” is an oxymoron, for a lack of belief in gods is not a “faith” in any meaningful sense. But of course the New Yorker is uber-progressive,”which means it’s soft on religion. And this article, recounting Christopher Beha’s journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back to a watery theism, is a typical NYer article: long on history and intellectual references, but short on substance. In the end I think it can be shortedned to simply this:
“Atheism in all its forms is a kind of faith, but it doesn’t ground your life by giving it meaning.. This is why I became a theist.”
So far as I can determine, that is all, though the article is tricked out with all kinds of agonized assertions as the author finds he cannot “ground his life” on a lack of belief in God. But whoever said they could? But it plays well with the progressive New Yorker crowd (same as the NY Times crowd) in being soft on religion and hard on atheism. The new generation of intellectuals need God, for to them, as to Beha, only a divine being can give meaning to one’s life.
Christopher Beha, a former editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of a new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, with the subtitle Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. The NYer piece is taken from that book
You can read his article for free as it’s been archived. Click below if you want a lame justification for theism:
Beha, considering nonbelief after he gave it up in college, decided that there were two forms of atheism: a scientific form and a “romantic” form. Quotes from his article are indented below, though bold headings are mine,
Scientific atheism
Among other things, this reading taught me that atheists do hold beliefs, not just about morals and ethics but about how the world actually is and how humans fit into it. Of course, not all atheists hold the same beliefs—just as not all theists do—but I found that modern atheist belief tends to cluster into two broad traditions.
The most prevalent atheist world view goes by many names—empiricism, positivism, physicalism, naturalism—but the term that best captures the fullness of its present‑day iteration, as I see it, is scientific materialism. Roughly speaking, this view holds that the material world is all that exists, that humans can know this world through sense perception, that the methods of science allow us to convert the raw data of these perceptions into general principles, and that these principles can be both tested and put to practical use by making predictions about future events.
As world views go, scientific materialism has a lot to say for it. It tells us that humans are capable, without any supernatural aid, of coming to understand, and ultimately to master, all of reality. It tells us that the store of human knowledge is constantly increasing and continuously improving our material conditions. To this end, it points to the astonishing human progress that has occurred in the time of science’s reign. And it encourages us to enjoy the fruits of this progress as much as possible, since our life here on earth is the only one we’ll get.
Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it. But my reading showed me that this world view has its shortcomings. The most basic is perhaps inherent to any world view at all: it rests on a set of principles which often can’t be proven, even by the standards of proof the world view embraces. The general principle that all real knowledge is derived from sense perception of material facts cannot itself be derived from the perception of facts in the world, and thus can’t really be sanctioned by scientific materialism’s own methods. Indeed, no general principle can be. The very legitimacy of deriving general principles from the particulars of experience can never be established from experience without already having the principle in hand.
Of course I don’t give a rat’s patootie if we can’t establish from first principles that we can understand the world through our senses. The answer to that blockheaded objection is that yes, that’s right, but only the scientific method construed broadly (i.e. empirical work with testing or replication) actually WORKS. If you want to establish where typhoid comes from, and then prevent it or cure it, then you must use a secular, empirical method: science.
Now Beha admits that this world view does “work”. But then he says it has problems. Fur one thing, it doesn’t give you meaning, nor, he adds, does it explain consciousness:
If by “works” one means that it can be put to good use, this is unquestionably so. But, if we mean that it captures within its frame all the notable features of our experience, that’s a different matter. In fact, what materialism can’t adequately capture is experience itself. Consciousness is not material, not publicly available through sense perception, not subject to the kind of observation that scientific materialism takes as the hallmark of knowledge. By the standards of the materialist world view, it simply doesn’t exist. For me, this limitation proved fatal. I spent far too much time within the confines of my mind to accept a world view that told me whatever was going on in there wasn’t real.
Here the man is deeply confused. Of course subjective experience is “real” to the subject, but it’s very hard (“the hard problem”) to figure out how it arises in the brain. And denying that consciousness arises through materialistic processes in the brain (and elsewhere) is just wrong. We know it’s wrong, for we can affect consciousness by material interventions like anesthesia and psychological tricks, so the phenomenon must, unless it comes from God, be “material” in origin. Here Beha seems perilously close to Douthat saying that because science can’t explain consciousness, there must be a god.
Romantic atheism
Luckily, I’d by then come into contact with the other great family of modern atheist belief, which I eventually came to call romantic idealism. This is the atheism of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and their existentialist descendants, which begins in precisely the place where scientific materialism leaves off, with the will of the subjective, conscious agent. At its most extreme, romantic idealism treats each of us as willing our own world into being, creating the reality in which we live. Even when it does not go quite this far, it treats our subjective experience as the proper subject of knowledge, in fact the only thing we can ever be said to know.
Romantic idealism arose in the post‑Enlightenment era, and it grew in opposition to the principles of Enlightenment rationality as much as it did to religious authority. Although atheism is often associated with hyperrationality, this form of it is unapologetically irrational. In place of reason, observation, and scientific study, it valorizes emotion, imagination, and artistic creativity. The ethics of romantic idealism are an ethics of authenticity: the greatest good is not maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain but living in a way that is true to our subjective reality. The movement rejects religious belief not for being empirically false but for being a ready‑made and inherited response to existential problems that we must work out for ourselves. The appeal of this world view—particularly for a young person engaged in just such a working out—should be obvious, and I soon found myself in thrall to it.
Like scientific materialism, romantic idealism does not have a solid foundation in any provable universal truth. But it revels in this condition: it is the lack of any such foundation that makes it possible for each of us to construct our own truth. This relativism carries clear dangers. Since the time of Locke, empiricism has been closely linked with political liberalism, whereas romantic idealism is associated with rather darker political forces. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the founders of Romanticism, was a great inspiration for the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He argued that liberalism’s supposed universal rights were covers for bourgeois self-interest. This argument was later developed at great length by Nietzsche, one of several thinkers in this tradition who inspired the rise of fascism.
But romantic atheism also fails to give us “meaning,” and Beha desperately wants and needs meaning!
A more basic problem with romantic idealism occurs on the personal level: building meaning from scratch turns out to be an incredibly difficult task. The romantic-idealist approach is fraught with fear and trembling, a fact it doesn’t deny. It is not a route to happiness; indeed, it seems to hold the goal of happiness in contempt.
Once again we see Beha desperately looking for a world view that gives his life meaning—and happiness. That much is clear from not only the above, but from other stuff.
Beha wants “meaning”, and that meaning must come from faith (Some quotes)
Anyway, I wasn’t really looking for practical guidance. To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.
. . .After nearly twenty years of searching unsuccessfully for a livable atheist world view, I began, in my mid-thirties, to entertain the possibility that atheism itself might be part of the problem. There were many steps from here to my eventual return to robust belief, but I started with the notion that for me the authentic life might be one of faith—one that recognized the existence of both the external material world and the internal ideational world and sought to reconcile them, and one that accepted an absolute foundation to things and attempted to understand, in some provisional and imperfect way, the nature of this foundation and what it wanted from me.
I’m not sure how “faith”—Beha is curiously reticent to tell us what he actually believes—is supposed to provide us with an “absolute foundation”, unless you become a traditional theist who thinks that God interacts with you personally and that it is this God that gives your life meaning. But he won’t say that in clear, explicit terms. One hallmark of the new “liberal” religion is that it’s both fuzzy and slippery.
Beha goes on to argue that “liberals” (aka people who don’t buy Trump) adhere to both forms of atheism, but, in the end, to ground not just life but also society requires theism, for theism is our only source of “rights”:
Meanwhile, the failure of these traditions to respond adequately to the challenge is bound up with the problem identified by their earliest proponents: they have a very hard time articulating their foundational justification. When liberalism runs smoothly, it does a remarkable job delivering the goods it promises. For most people, this is a sufficient achievement to quiet any worries about its philosophical underpinnings. But when many people within liberal societies do not feel that the system is working, when the practical case for liberalism comes into question, secular liberals don’t have much else to go on.
. . .Locke had the empiricist’s healthy suspicion that we could never have metaphysical certainty about what the Creator’s will was, which meant that no person should impose his answer to that question on another. It is for these reasons that faith must be treated as a matter of personal conscience, but also more generally that a regime grounded in a social contract must be one that respects individual freedoms. Our status as creatures of God confers on us certain rights that can’t be handed over as part of the social contract, rights that are at once natural and inalienable.
“Our status as creatures of God”? How does he know there is a God? Is it because science can’t explain emotions and other subjective experiences—that we don’t understand consciousness? In the end, Beha apparently thinks there’s a God because it makes him feel better, and gives his life meaning.
Well, good for him! But there are plenty of us who derive “meaning” as a result of doing what we find fulfilling and joyful (see this interesting post and thread). I, for one, never pondered the question “what must I do to give my life meaning?” That meaning arose, as for many of us, as post facto rationalization of doing what we found to be fulfilling.
At any rate, this is a curiously anodyne essay, absolutely personal and not generalizable to the rest of humanity. It is the story of a journey, but one that ends with embracing a god for which there’s no evidence. Excuse me if I can’t follow that path.
*************
Beha, clearly flogging his newfound theism, has a guest essay in the Feb. 11 NYT, “My conversion to skeptical belief” (archived here), which emphasizes that his beliefs are inextricably intertwined with doubt, and so he repeats what many believers have said before. An example:
In the face of this I attempt — with varying degrees of success at varying times — to take a page from Montaigne’s book and embrace skeptical belief. I’m well aware that religion has often served as precisely that “one great truth” that people are punished for refusing to accept. But it has also served as an expression of the fundamental mystery at the heart of reality and the radical limitations of human understanding. It is a way of living with skepticism.
What does this mean in practice? Embracing skeptical belief does not mean believing things without “really” believing them. It means understanding your beliefs as limited, contingent and fallible, recognizing that they can’t be proved correct, that someone else’s refusal to come around to them does not indicate stupidity or obstinacy or bad faith.
Similarly, a skeptical believer recognizes doubt as an essential component of belief, rather than its opposite. To a skeptical believer, the great mark of sincerity is the extent to which you attempt to live out your beliefs in your own life despite your own doubts, not the extent to which you silence those doubts or the doubts of others.
. . . To push ahead of someone on the train, to refuse a dollar to the woman selling candy with a baby on her back, to make a snarky remark at the register about my misunderstood coffee order, all while I have ashes on my head, would announce to anyone who cared to notice the disjunction between my supposed beliefs and my life in the world.
What I try instead to do on this day is simply meet each choice I face with my fallible and limited beliefs, and respond to that choice in the way those beliefs actually commend.
Of course the worldview of humanism could yield the same results, except you needn’t ground your acts and beliefs in a Sky Daddy. Why must actions be somehow grounded in the supernatural instead of in a philosophy that you should be kind and helpful to your fellow humans?
Ecologist Susan Harrison has stepped up to the plate with some bird photos (and a herd of mammals), ensuring that we have wildlife photos today. But this is the last batch I have; will you help us tomorrow and thereafter?
Sisan’s text and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
Some winter birds, and one herd of ungulates, in California and Oregon
It’s been a quiet winter for me aside from a previously WEIT-recorded trip to Belize, and so it’s taken a few months to accumulate a handful of photos that seemed at least a little bit striking – either because of the sheer beauty of the animal or because of the behavior it was displaying.
The first three photos are from an Ashland, Oregon streamside. It was especially intriguing to see a pair, or perhaps adult and offspring, of American Dippers (Cinclus mexicanus) eating very large tubular items that turned out to be nymphal October Caddisflies (Dicosmoecus gilvipes). This insect is an key menu item for fish at a food-sparse time of year, and thus is well known to Western US anglers, but it was new to me.
American Dippers:
Near the Dippers were the showiest bird in town, the male Wood Duck (Aix sponsa), and the bird with the biggest voice despite its tiny size, the Pacific Wren (Troglodytes pacificus).
Wood Duck:
Pacific Wren:
The next three photos were from a winter raptor-watching trip to the Klamath Basin of southern Oregon and northeastern California. Watch closely for the non-birds 😊
Black Skimmers are most unusual birds that hunt in large flocks by dangling their huge lower mandible into the water while flying at high speed. They mostly inhabit much warmer climes, and I was surprised to learn of this flock in the southern San Francisco Bay. Per AllAboutBirds, they have been described as looking “unworldly… aerial beagles hot on the scent of aerial rabbits.”:
Welcome to the Sabbath for non-Jewish cats: It’s Sunday, February 15, 2026, and National Hippo Day. As you see from Wikipedia, there are two species:
The hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius;/ˌhɪpəˈpɒtəməs/; pl.: hippopotamuses), often shortened to hippo (pl.: hippos), further qualified as the common hippopotamus, Nile hippopotamus and river hippopotamus, is a large semiaquatic mammal native to sub-Saharan Africa. It is one of only two extant species in the familyHippopotamidae, the other being the pygmy hippopotamus (Choeropsis liberiensis or Hexaprotodon liberiensis). Its name comes from the Ancient Greek for “river horse” (ἱπποπόταμος).
Pygmy hippos are rare forest animals, hard to study and threatened by habitat loss. Here’s a short video:
Here’s a baby pygmy hippo from Thailand. It’s adorable!
Funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapsed early Saturday morning, beginning a shutdown that was not expected to bring most of the department’s work to a halt yet could disrupt travelers, immigration enforcement and disaster relief if it is prolonged.
Department officials have said that its essential missions and functions would continue. During last fall’s government shutdown, more than 90 percent of the department’s employees were required to keep working.
But department officials have warned that many employees would be working without pay, posing a financial strain as their bills come due. During previous shutdowns, for instance, the Transportation Security Administration saw a spike in resignations because they were required to report to work without being paid. Work force shortages caused some screening delays at airports in Houston during last fall’s record-long shutdown.
The shutdown is the result of a partisan divide in Congress over new guardrails on federal immigration enforcement. Democrats have pushed for a range of new restrictions on immigration agents, such as mandating that officers remove masks during enforcement operations and that they obtain warrants from judges to make arrests in homes. Many of their demands have met resistance from Republicans.
The shutdown will not affect the administration’s deportation campaign. Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told lawmakers on Thursday that immigration enforcement would mostly be unaffected, in large part because of the billions in funding Congress approved for the agency last summer as part of its major tax bill. Still, Mr. Lyons said that a shutdown would affect personnel issues, such as pay and retention.
. . .It is unclear how long the shutdown could last. Members of Congress left Washington for a weeklong recess on Thursday. Republican leaders in Congress have said that negotiations would continue, and that members should be ready to return to Washington if an agreement is reached.
The Department of Homeland Security is vast and includes many agencies, such as the T.S.A., Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency and Customs and Border Protection.
Remember, though, that this conflict is not so much about eliminating ICE as making them behave better. The Democrats want them to wear bodycams (good), masks (controversial), clear identification (good), as well as tightening the rules for getting warrants (good), and ending roving patrols (not so good). Much of that I agree with, but Republicans won’t budge an inch—nor will the Democrats. The result is that ICE will keep on doing what it’s doing, and the Democrats will be blamed for shutting down important parts of the government. The other departments like TSA and FEMA will function for a while, but sickouts and retirements may hurt them if the shutdown lasts too long. I predict it wil lbe settled within ten days after Congress reconvenes.
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column in The Free Press, called this week “TGIF: MAGA-Coded“:
→ Quote of the year: “And I said, ‘I’m not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.’ ” —Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaking to podcaster Theo Von (of course).
If a better one comes along, I’ll eat my hat. But I’m calling it now. Quote of the year, and I love him for it.
→ No need to find evidence: The war between Hamas and Israel was brutal. But Hamas and its supporters have been obsessed with arguing that it was not a war at all, but a genocide. Is there evidence? Well, it doesn’t matter. Al Jazeera has published a new story to explain why there might not be physical evidence: “Israel Used Weapons in Gaza That Made Thousands of Palestinians Evaporate.” Ah. Of course. Those Jewish space lasers that evaporate anyone they’re aimed at! Naturally.
Meanwhile, Gabrielle Sivia Weiniger, a journalist for The Times UK who focuses on the Middle East, apologized Monday night for posting an AI-generated image that showed Israel’s President Isaac Herzog posing for a picture with Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and others. What a find, right? Oh, it was fake. “I mistakenly posted a photo of president Herzog, without checking the source and I am sorry for that,” she wrote. Journalists are officially falling for the dumbest AI slop, so long as it helps the narrative.
Here’s that fake photo. OY!!!
(From Jerusalem Post) An AI-generated picture faking President Isaac Herzog posing with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, and others, posted by a journalist for The Times on X/Twitter, February 9, 2026. (photo credit: SCREENSHOT/X/VIA SECTION 27A OF THE COPYRIGHT ACT)
→ Why are the yoga ladies so angry?!: Yoga moms held a protest at the Minneapolis studio they patronize over the fact that it took down an anti-ICE sign from the window (which they heard about via gossip). The video of the protest is incredible: “Give us answers, let’s go. . . let’s hear it—why are you being silent?” one woman says from behind the camera, as a crowd gathers around two young staffers. The crowd is lean, sinewy, with perfect yoga posture and expensive compression leggings. I can tell it’s a great studio. They are holding their rolled-up yoga mats, and they know how to use them. They don’t screw around in there; they are pulsing in five, six, seven, eight, and then they are making weeknight sheet pan dinners for their families afterward. Look at those back muscles. I would do whatever this crowd says.
I love this. I love all of these ladies and their righteous indignation as they scream at some woman who probably gets paid minimum wage to check them in and spray their mats with disinfectant. Is the yoga studio the biggest political enemy I would choose? No. But is this a nice activity for them? Absolutely yes. (Read our great story about this.)
Here’s a video:
→ Please pretend to be sorry: A Kentucky judge reduced the sentence of a 24-year-old man convicted of robbery, kidnapping, and sexual assault on account of America, in general, being racist. The best part, though, is that before cutting his prison time in half from what the jury recommended, she tried to prompt the guy into showing how sorry he is for what he did.
The judge: “If you come in here and you show the court—”
The convict: “I don’t have sympathy for you, the victim, the victim’s family.” Hmm.
She tries to coax him: “If you were to come in here, and instead of being hurt and angry, which is what this court hears, right? As a 20-year-old African American male that has been, you know, experienced this society, etc., and you would show that, yes, okay, this is the situation. This is who I am. I don’t want to be this person anymore. I don’t want to be in jail forever.”
The convict wasn’t having it: “That’s what y’all trying to make me say.”
Looks like someone forgot how to “yes, and.” I’m surprised his prison sentence wasn’t a three-week beginner course at Upright Citizens Brigade Improv. Make your scene partner look good! Don’t deny their reality!
No matter; his jail time was cut in half. Certainly he has learned from his mistakes.
*Russian dissident and human rights activist Alexei Navalny, you may recall, was poisoned in 2020, and fell deathly ill on a flight within Russia. Recovering in Germany after a long while, he vountarily decided to return to Russia to continue his work, whereupon he was arrested and sentenced to 2½ years in a labor camp. Soon thereafter, his sentence was extended to 19 years. He fell ill and died in 2024, and his body was returned to his mother. Now, according to a recent toxological report, it was determined that Navalny was killed by toxin from a poison frog. Poisoned twice!
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was almost certainly killed by a poison derived from a rare frog toxin in an Arctic prison colony two years ago, several European governments said Saturday.
A joint toxicological investigation concluded that Navalny, who died while serving a sentence on what his supporters and Western governments said were trumped-up charges, was most likely poisoned with epibatidine—a highly potent toxin derived from South American poison dart frogs. The substance doesn’t occur naturally in Russia.
“Navalny died in prison, meaning the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison,” the governments of the U.K., France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands said in a joint statement.
The Kremlin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Navalny, the most prominent domestic critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, appeared in good health and high spirits in video footage recorded days before his death at the notoriously harsh penal colony known as “Polar Wolf.” Officials said the symptoms he reportedly experienced—paralysis, acute pain and respiratory failure—are consistent with epibatidine poisoning.
Biological samples from his body were obtained by Navalny’s family and associates and shared with authorities in the participating countries for independent analysis.
“Vladimir Putin is a murderer,” Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, wrote on X. “He must be held accountable for all his crimes.”
Navalny had been held in solitary confinement after a trial widely condemned by Western governments and human rights groups as politically motivated. For more than a decade, he exposed alleged corruption and embezzlement among senior Russian officials.
He survived a previous poisoning attempt in 2020, when he was airlifted to Germany and treated in Berlin with the assistance of the German government. German authorities and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons later confirmed that he had been poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era military nerve agent.
Putin has to go. Say what you will about America, we don’t—nor would we be so dumb as to poison anti-government prisoners. Nor do people go to jail for simply criticizing the government. Poisoning Navalny TWICE is simply too much. Will we increase sanctions on Russia? Probably not this time.
*In his Weekly Dish column called “The President of the 0.000001 percent,” (subtitled “Time to end the new Gilded Age, the way we did the last one” , Andrew Sullivan ponders the possibility of eating the “Epstein class” of the rich and entitled. He’s not optimistic.
What’s going on now in Washington is on a wholly new scale — an open, shameless exercise by those in power to benefit personally and massively from the leverage that comes with public office. In the words of Ann Coulter: “This is the most corrupt presidency in U.S. history. I mean, it is so blatant it’s right in front of our eyes.”
Worse than the “Biden Crime Family?” Yes. Andy McCarthy notes that the total amount of dirty money accrued by the Bidens over the years was claimed to be around $27 million. And the GOP nearly launched an impeachment over it! But the Trump family? Start with $2.5 billion in bribes from the United Arab Emirates — funneled into a company called World Liberty Financial. Add a $400 million 747 airplane from Qatar, and we’re talking real money.
How did the Trumps pull this off? The incomprehensible bullshit called crypto currency (i.e. WLF) induces a coma in most voters; and the ethical conflicts are “resolved” by having the failsons of Trump, Howard Lutnick, and Steve Witkoff “run” the businesses while their dads direct government policy. Here’s nepo-baby Zach Witkoff at a crypto conference in Dubai last year announcing the deal with WLF, sitting next to the heir-spare Eric Trump:
We really need to take a page out of His Highness’s and the Emirates’ book. They are just an amazing example of how you can lead with innovation while also maintaining your family values.
Ah yes, those famous Trump family values: money, power, rape. And once the money landed in the Trump crypto accounts, of course, government policy changed. Trump gave the UAE rare and advanced AI chips, brought the UAE into the US Stargate AI project — along with an ownership slice of TikTok — and pardoned the sleazy billionaire felon, Changpeng Zhao, who had helped seal the deal with WLF. Not just corruption, but possibly at the expense of our national security, if those UAE chips make it to the CCP.
This is the real Epstein class: utterly amoral networkers and nepotists with no loyalties to anything but their absurd bank balances and party invitations. And this is their administration. From the dime-store Versailles that Trump is constructing on the rubble of the East Wing, to the Gaza wasteland where Jared Kushner is now preparing to cash in after the slaughter, this is a kleptocracy notable for its callousness as well as its insatiable money-lust.
. . . . This is a moment for a sane, non-fake populist on either the right or left to seize. You don’t need a gimmick like a 5 percent billionaire tax. But you can reverse Trump’s tax cuts for the rich to fund childcare and Obamacare subsidies; and you can lower prices instantly if you commit to repealing the tariffs. These seemingly “left” moves are actually conservative in a way, since they are designed to rescue capitalism from this statist, crony version, and to provide ballast for the middle class — the essential component for a liberal democracy to thrive.
And if the Dems win in November, we can also have hearings. Bring in the corrupt nepo-babies for a grilling; expose their privilege and ill-gotten gains; and make the case for an economy built on markets not access, excellence not parentage, and an economy built on middle-class values for middle-class protection.
We don’t have to resign ourselves to this level of corruption and inequality. We really don’t. If this new Gilded Age has any silver lining, it may be that it becomes a prompt for the very kind of reforms the old one did.
Well, it looks as if Sullivan has become a Democrat, at least in name. But he’s right about all this, and when Ann Coulter criticizes a sitting Republican President, you know they’ve lost America. As for me, well, I’ve never understood crypto currency either, but it sure seems that the UAE has tried to bribe Trump, and succeeded, at least in terms of making him richer.
*Palmerston, the the Chief Mouser of the Foreign Office (and a nemesis of Larry the #10 Cat), has died in Bermuda. (h/t Pyers and Matthew).
Palmerston, a rescue cat who became the chief mouser of the Foreign Office, has died in Bermuda.
The cat, adopted from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, retired in 2020 after four years of service in Whitehall.
In February 2025, a post on a popular social media account in Palmerston’s name said he had come out of retirement in order to start work “as feline relations consultant (semi-retired) to the new governor of Bermuda”.
Announcing his death, a post on Palmerston’s X account read: “Palmerston, Diplocat extraordinaire, passed away peacefully on 12 February. “Palmy” was a special member of the government house team in Bermuda, and a much-loved family member, it added.
On his retirement in 2020, a letter to Sir Simon McDonald, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, read that the cat would like to spend more time “away from the limelight” after enjoying “working from home” during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I have found life away from the frontline relaxed, quieter, and easier,” the letter signed in Palmerston’s name read. “My 105,000 Twitter followers show that even those with four legs and fur have an important part to play in the UK’s global effort,” Palmerston’s letter said.
Poor Palmerston! He was only 11 or 12 years old—in the prime of cat life. But I doubt that Larry will miss him, as they didn’t really like each other:
Larry the Downing Street cat spots the Foreign & Commonwealth Office pet Palmerston and doesn’t look like he’s in a welcoming mood outside Number 10 😾 pic.twitter.com/DHkAgBf0Ys
But on Larry’s website (there were animated balloons yesterday for his 15th anniversary at Downing Street), the #10 cat has a generous tribute to Palmerston:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej and Hili have a chinwag and a selfie:
Hili: I need to write a report on the condition of the world. Andrzej: Many have had ambitions like that.
Hili: I would rather follow in the footsteps of Herodotus.
In Polish:
Hili: Muszę napisać raport o stanie świata.
Ja Wielu miało takie ambicje.
Hili: Raczej pójdę śladami Herodota.
“This is Borujerd, and this is the moment when the security forces, after shooting a citizen with a pellet gun and causing him to fall to the ground, surrounded him like a pack of hyenas and brutally beat his wounded body.”
The person who sent the video says: “After the savage beating, they took this injured young man away with them, and I have no information about what happened to him afterward.”
These are documents of crime that the world must see and understand: with a regime like ISIS, there can be no negotiation — they must be eliminated.
They are absolutely brutal, kicking and beating a defenseless protestor.
ویدیوی دریافتی تلخ از بروجرد:
«اینجا بروجرد است و این لحظهایست که ماموران پس از اینکه با اسلحه ساچمهای به یک شهروند شلیک کرده بودن و او به زمین افتاده بود، اینچنین مثل گله کفتار دورهاش کردند و بدن مجروحش را مورد ضرب و جرج قرار دادند.»
فرستنده ویدیو میگوید: «این جوان مجروح… pic.twitter.com/2qayRU044U
What’s funny is how activists like Carr pretend not to understand that conservatives argue SEX is a scientific fact—because it is—and largely dismiss the concept of “gender” because it’s regularly used, as Carr is doing here, to obfuscate basic biological realities.
From Williams Garcia. But see the one below that, from 2000:
It’s especially stark when you compare it with 1949-50. But even if you compare it to the undergraduate course offerings in Fall 2000, it’s a huge difference. That was just a quarter-century ago. Here is every course offered by the Harvard History Department in Fall 2000.…
One from my feed. I love it! Notice the elephants trumpeting when they stop the trucks (sound up). It’s a toll, Jake!
Wild elephants in Thailand set up roadblocks to steal sugarcane from passing trucks. One notorious male nicknamed “Fatty” walks into traffic and forces drivers to stop. He reaches his trunk into the trailers, grabs handfuls of sugarcane, then lets them pass. This highway robbery… pic.twitter.com/sYZE9Rjnub
Two from Professor Cobb. First, Valentine’s Day for water snakes:
Celebrates Valentine’s Day with snakes mating? Why not? Snakes are awesome This was a pretty incredible thing to come across on a spring walk#herps 🌿 🧪
In this Free Press article, Steve Pinker and Marian Tupy (the latter identified as “the founder and editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and co-author of Superabundance”) once again recount the undoubtable progress that humanity has made over the past six or seven centuries. The progress described here will be familiar to you if you’ve read Pinker’s two big books, Better Angels and Enlightenment Now: the progress has been in health, longevity, reduced poverty, better nutrition, less chance of violent death, and almost all indices of “well being”.
Click to read (if you have a subscription):
I’m not sure why Pinker is constantly attacked by people for touting progress, as the data are irrefutable, but I guess there’s a subgroup of “progressive” historians (and perhaps conservative ones) who like to aver that we’ve made little progress since the Middle Ages. Indeed, perhaps we’ve even regressed, and we’d be better off living in the Middle Ages. This Whiggish view is usually espoused by the religious, who say that the waning of religion has impoverished modern life. Perhaps leftish people don’t like the notion that we’re making progress (e.g., some say we’re worse off in racial relations now than during Jim Crow days), while rightish ones don’t like the palpable loss of faith of people in the West.
A few quotes:
Last month at Yale, the influential political blogger Curtis Yarvin, in a debate against Free Press contributor Jed Rubenfeld, argued that America ought to “end the democratic experiment”—and establish a monarchy. Yarvin has noted that Donald Trump is “biologically suited” to be America’s monarch. The ideas may sound extreme, but they have been influential. J.D. Vance describes Yarvin as “a friend,” and has cited his work. And Yarvin is part of a family of movements, known as the Dark Enlightenment, Techno-authoritarianism, and Neo-Reaction (NRx)—that reject the entire family of enlightenment values.
Meanwhile, theocracy is making a comeback, in movements known as theoconservatism, Christian Nationalism, and National Conservatism. The “National Conservatism Statement of Principles,” for example, declares that “where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” The list of signatories is a lookbook of influential conservatives, including Charlie Kirk, Peter Thiel, and Trump administration insiders Michael Anton and Russell Vought—as well as our fellow Free Press contributors Christopher Rufo and Rod Dreher.
The latter, a friend of the vice president, has said elsewhere that the West will not “recover until and unless we become re-enchanted and seek a form of Christianity, and indeed of Judaism, that is more mystical, that valorizes this direct perception of the Holy Spirit, of holiness, and of transcendence.”
. . . Of course, humanity has already tried monarchy and theocracy—during the Middle Ages—and sure enough, some of the new reactionaries are saying that those times were not so bad after all. Dreher writes admiringly: “In the mind of medieval Christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. . . . Men construed reality in a way that empowered them to harmonize everything conceptually and find meaning amid the chaos.”
Other influential conservatives go further in justifying medieval hierarchies. On his eponymous show, Tucker Carlson recently declared: “Feudalism is so much better than what we have now. Because at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.”
One of the themes of this article is how religion has in fact been an impediment in progress, and this seems to be the strongest attack on religion I’ve seen yet from Pinker (I haven’t read Tupy before). Perhaps Steve is preparing for his debate with Ross Douthat later this month (stay tuned), which will be about God. Doubthat’s new book is Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious.
Here’s the money quote about progress, which I’ve put in bold:
It’s said that the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory, and the historical amnesia of the romanticizers of medieval Christendom is near-complete. Among the blessings of modernity is an Everest of data about life in the past, painstakingly collected by economic historians from original sources over many decades. This quantitative scholarship circumvents fruitless back-and-forth about whether the Dark Ages were really all that dark: We can go to the numbers.
I won’t go through the numbers, as you probably know them, but they’re impressive. Here are just a few facts:
Some numbers can shake us out of this spoiled complacency. (For sources, see our respective books Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know and Enlightenment Now.) In 1800, the European life expectancy was 33 years; today, it is 79 years—which means that we have been granted not just extra life, but an extra life. Much of that gift came from leaps in prosperity that spared the lives of children. Before the turn of the 20th century, a third to a half of European children perished before their 5th birthday. Today that fate befalls three-tenths of one percent. Even the poorest countries today lose a fraction of the children that Europe did until recently. If being spared the agony of losing a child is not “meaningful,” what is?
Do people really want to go back to medieval times if they lose, on average, 46 years of life?
But the other theme of the piece is morality. In short, religious morality impedes human well-being by not giving people an impetus to help humanity, but rather telling them to live by this or that religious dictum that will please their God. I agree with the harm to behavior done by religion, but have taken issue with Pinker and Tupy’s idea not that morality can be humanistic, which it can be, but that humanistic morality is objective rather than subjective. And they seem certain about this:
Our moral purpose, then, is to use knowledge and sympathy to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing: health, freedom, peace, knowledge, beauty, social connection.
. . .The Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason and well-being left us with a coherent fabric of arguments against the brutality and injustice that had been ubiquitous in human history. These arguments became the foundation of civilized society.
A partial list: Kant’s categorical imperative and his practical prescriptions for peace. The American Founders’ analyses of tyranny, democracy, and fundamental rights. Bentham’s cases against cruelty to animals and the persecution of homosexuals. Astell’s brief against the oppression of women. Voltaire’s arguments against religious persecution. Montesquieu’s case against slavery. Beccaria’s arguments against judicial torture. Rousseau’s case against harsh treatment of children.
In contrast to the Enlightenment’s exaltation of universal well-being, the morality of holy scriptures was dubious at best.
Crucially, these moral conclusions were based on reasons.As Plato pointed out 2,300 years ago, morality can’t be grounded in divine edicts. If a commandment itself has no moral justification, why should we obey it? If it does, why not just appeal to the justification itself?
Such justification is not hard to find. All of us claim a basic right to our own well-being. If we were not alive, healthy, nourished, educated, and embedded in a community, we could not deliberate about morality (or anything else) in the first place. And because we are embedded in a community, where people can affect each other’s well-being, we can’t stop at this basic claim. None of us can coherently demand these conditions for ourselves without granting them to others. I can’t say “I’m allowed to hurt you, but you’re not allowed to hurt me, because I’m me and you’re not,” and expect to be taken seriously.
Now I agree that society will run better if people conduct themselves in a manner that won’t injure other people. But to say that morality is objective, that the moral act is the one that increases “well-being”, is to buy into the fallacies that beset Sam Harris’s identical theory broached in his book The Moral Landscape. While increasing well-being does jibe with our usual notions of what’s moral, there are problems. I’ve described some of these in a previous post called “The absence of objective morality“, asserting that, in the end, no morality is objective; all forms of morality are based on subjective preferences. I’ll quote myself here:
It’s clear that empirical observation can inform moral statements. If you think that it’s okay to kick a dog because it doesn’t mind it, well, just try kicking a dog. But in the end, saying whether it’s right or wrong to do things depends on one’s preferences. True, most people agree on their preferences, and their concept of morality by and large agrees with Sam’s consequentialist view that what is the “right” thing to do is what maximizes “well being”. But that is only one criterion for “rightness”, and others, like deontologists such as Kant, don’t agree with that utilitarian concept. And of course people disagree violently about things like abortion—and many other moral issues.
One problem with Sam’s theory, or any utilitarian theory of morality, is how to judge “well being”. There are different forms of well being, even in a given moral situation, and how do you weigh them off against one another? There is no common currency of well being, though we know that some things, like torturing or killing someone without reason, clearly does not increase well being of either that person or of society. Yet there is no objective way to weigh one form of well being against another. Abortion is one such situation: one weighs the well being of the fetus, which will develop into a sentient human, against that of the mother, who presumably doesn’t want to have the baby.
But to me, the real killer of objective morality is the issue of animal rights—an issue that I don’t see as resolvable, at least in a utilitarian way. Is it moral to do experiments on primates to test human vaccines and drugs? If so, how many monkeys can you put in captivity and torture before it becomes wrong? Is it wrong to keep lab animals captive just to answer a scientific question with no conceivable bearing on human welfare, but is just a matter of curiosity? Is it moral to eat meat? Answering questions about animal rights involves, if you’re a Harris-ian utilitarian, being able to assess the well being of animals, something that seems impossible. We do not know what it is like to be a bat. We have no idea whether any creatures value their own lives, and which creatures feel pain (some surely do).
But in the end, trying to find a truly factual answer to the statement, “Is it immoral for humans to eat meat?” or “is abortion wrong?”, or “is capital punishment wrong?” seems a futile effort. You can say that eating meat contributes to deforestation and global warming, and that’s true, but that doesn’t answer the question, for you have to then decide whether those effects are “immoral”. Even deciding whether to be a “well being” utilitarian is a choice. You might instead be a deontologist, adhering to a rule-based and not consequence-based morality.
You can make a rule that “anybody eating meat is acting immorally,” but on what do you base that statement? If you respond that “animals feel pain and it’s wrong to kill them,” someone might respond that “yes, but I get a lot of pleasure from eating meat.” How can you objectively weigh these positions? You can say that culinary enjoyment is a lower goal than animal welfare, but again, that’s a subjective judgment.
By saying I don’t accept the idea of moral claims representing “facts”, I’m not trying to promote nihilism. We need a moral code if, for nothing else, to act as a form of social glue and as a social contract. Without it, society would degenerate into a lawless and criminal enterprise—indeed, the idea of crime and punishment would vanish. All I’m arguing is that such claims rest at bottom on preference alone. It’s generally a good thing that evolution has bequeathed most of us with a similar set of moral preferences. I hasten to add, though, that what feelings evolution has instilled in us aren’t necessarily ones we should incorporate into morality, as some of them (widespread xenophobia, for instance) are outmoded in modern society. Others, like caring for one’s children, are good things to do.
In the end, I agree with Hume that there’s no way to derive an “ought” from an “is”. “Oughts” have their own sources, while “is”s may represent in part our evolutionarily evolved behaviors derived from living in small groups of hunter-gatherers. But that doesn’t make them evolutionary “oughts.”
To abortion, meat-eating, and animal rights we can now add “assisted dying.” I favor it because I think it reduces suffering, but others say that it will actually increase net suffering by killing off people who could eventually be happy, or create societies in which people are sacrificed at will. And don’t forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If, as the authors claim, “None of us can coherently demand these conditions [of well being] for ourselves without granting them to others” then we open up a whole can of worms, especially involving war. In the end, saying that “well being” is a guide to objective morality begs the question of ethics: we are supposed to do X because it is more moral, and that’s because it increases “well being”. But why is increasing well being always more moral? If it’s by definition, then that really is begging the question.
I’m clearly not a philosopher, but I don’t see “increasing well being” as an objective guide to what’s moral. It is a preference, based on the subjective choice that a society with more “well being” is the one we should prefer. That is usually true, I think, but not always, and runs into substantial difficulties when you try to do the moral calculus in given situations.
Otherwise, I look forward to Steve’s debate with Douthat in two weeks, which should be great fun, even if nobody changes their minds about God.
Okay, so as this website slowly circles the drain, we’re still going to have cats on Caturday, and three items to boot.
First on deck is Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street; he just turned 19, and served 15 of those years in the service of the Prime Minister. He’s in remarkably good shape for such an old cat, and here’s a two-minute video, in his own words, recounting how a careless photographer nearly tripped over him. Fortunately, Larry skittered away, perhaps losing half a life or so:
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From Bored Panda we have another large selection of cat memes. I’ll choose a few for your delectation. Click the screenshot to read; the intro says this:
Last year, the estimated expenses of owning a cat were between $830 and $3,000. Clearly, no expense is spared for cat owners when it comes to their beloved fluffballs.
Bored Panda loves cats too. That’s why we are blessing you with a collection of wholesome and cute cat memes, courtesy of the “happycat318” Instagram page. Check out the times kitties cracked up their owners with some diabolical shenanigans!
More info: Instagram [the happycat 218 Instagram Page], the source of all the memes:
. . . And this is a true cat lover:
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A persistent moggy described by the UPI; click on screenshot to read:
The tail:
A cat escaped from his owners’ camper during a stop at a gas station in Spain and reappeared months later less than a mile from their home in France.
Patrick and Evelyne Sire, who live in Olonzac, in the Hérault region of France, said their cat, Filou apparently jumped out of an open window in their camper during an Aug. 9, 2025, stop at a gas station in Maçanet de la Selva, Spain, located near the French border about 155 miles from home.
Patrick Sire said Filou’s absence wasn’t noticed until the next morning.
Sire said he returned to the gas station twice in the ensuing days and weeks, but no one in the area had seen any signs of the missing feline.
The couple said they started to give up hope as the months passed, but they received a call Jan. 9 from a resident in Homps, less than a mile from their home, reporting Filou had been found.
The woman said she had been feeding the cat outdoors since December, and noticed he was very thin and appeared to be coughing. She took the feline to a local veterinarian, where a microchip scan identified him as Filou.
“Filou traveled all that way to get to us. But how did he do it? Did he follow the highway? Did he go through towns? Did he follow the rivers?” Patrick Sire told France3 News. “We’ll never know.”
Here’s a video in French, which shows the GPS cat and his staff. If you know a bit of French you can probably understand it, but if not you can still see how happy the staff is!:
