Monday: Hili dialogue

February 2, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the first Monday in February: February 2, 2026, and it’s National Tater Tot Day, celebrating the commerical nubs of grated and deep-fried potato. They’re good, though I almost never have them. Some of the history:

Tater tots were developed in 1953 when American frozen food company Ore-Ida founders F. Nephi Grigg, Golden Grigg, and Ross Erin Butler Sr. were trying to devise a recipe to use leftover slivers of cut potatoes that would otherwise be thrown away. They chopped up the slivers, added flour and seasoning, then pushed the mash through holes and sliced off pieces of the extruded mixture.

The product was first offered commercially in stores in 1956. Originally, sales were slow; the family speculated the product was priced too low, so it had no perceived value. When the price was raised, people began buying it. By 1960 Ore-Ida captured 25% of the frozen potato market.

The Tots can also be made into a casserole with ground beef and other stuff; I’ve always wanted to try it but haven’t (it’s popular in the Midwest). Here’s what it looks like, and you can find a recipe here. It uses just a few common ingredients, and takes only 5 minutes to prepare (and 40 minutes to cook). Somebody make one!

THMoore, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also California Kiwi Fruit Day (a friend calls them “gorilla balls”), Crêpe Day, Heavenly Hash Day (a dessert), Hedgehog Day, Marmot Day, World Wetlands Day and World Ukulele Day.

Here’s the best song I know that incorporates a ukulele. The song was, of course written by George Harrison, who loved the ukulele, and here Macca plays an instrument that belonged to the late Harrison. One of the YouTube comments says this:

Paul is playing a 1920’s Gibson Tenor Ukulele that was gifted to him by George. George Harrison had a very impressive ukulele collection, including two of George Formby’s banjo ukuleles.

Look at all the great musicians! This is a live performance from the Concert for George, performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall on November 29, 2002: the first anniversary of Harrison’s death.

And of course it’s Groundhog Day, based on a belief that goes back to Germany in the Middle Ages. I’ll post the result below after they haul out the hapless rodent in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania:

From Cats, Coffee & Chaos 2.0

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

Da Nooz:

*The NYT describes how the federal courts are dismantling the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, and in a big way: there are many cases with similar outcomes.

The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to arrest and detain as many people as possible during its immigration crackdown. But in recent weeks, a deluge of court cases has led federal judges to release hundreds of immigrant detainees back into the country, and threatens to overwhelm the court system.

In case after case, federal judges have found that the Trump administration has been ignoring longstanding legal interpretations that mandate the release of many people who are taken into immigration custody if they post a bond.

The surge in such cases has dominated the court dockets in some districts, overwhelming government lawyers who have to defend the detentions. And the wave of people who have been set free has upended the Trump administration’s effort to keep detained immigrants locked up indefinitely, even if they do not pose a public safety threat.

Lawyers representing detainees have been filing rafts of what are known as habeas corpus petitions — court filings that compel the government to justify holding someone in custody. In the vast majority of cases, judges are siding with the detainees and ordering their immediate release, or ordering immigration judges to hold bond hearings, according to 10 lawyers interviewed by The New York Times, who said their practices had filed dozens of habeas petitions over the last couple of months.

Jessie Calmes, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta, said that she had filed at least 40 petitions since November. Every one had been granted, she said.

“A lot of these people have been here more than 10 years and have U.S.-citizen kids,” she said. “They’re people who were picked up on the way to work, at their job site or for a traffic violation.”

The surge in habeas petitions has strained federal courts in some states, including Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, with hundreds of new cases a month in some court districts, according to a person with knowledge of the

And the explanation:

The wave of habeas petitions traces to a key change the Trump administration made in how immigration detention decisions are made.

For decades, immigration judges — who are separate from the federal courts and overseen by the Justice Department rather than the judiciary — granted bond to immigrants in detention who were not public safety threats or flight risks, allowing them to live and work in the community while pursuing their cases.

But last year the Trump administration moved to make virtually everyone who is in the country unlawfully subject to mandatory detention. When the policy change was affirmed by the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, it took discretion away from immigration judges.

Well, I’m glad that everyone gets adjudicated now instead of just snatched up and deported. But what puzzles me is that immigration justices are said to be overseen by the Department of Justice, but Trump’s policy change has been affirmed by that very department.  So why are the judges taking precedence here when, one would think, they should be judging cases by the policy created by the DOJ. Regardless, it’s clear people want deportation policy applied most strongly to undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes beyond entering the U.S. illegally.

*I’m still betting on (and still ambivalent about) the likelihood that the U.S. will attack Iran in a week. But remember—I am not pundit. The NYT’s Bret Stephens is, however, and in his latest column he ponders the question, “Can we let Iran get away with mass murder?”

So far, a U.S.-based Iranian human rights group says it has verified the killing of more than 5,500 protesters and is still reviewing 17,000 additional cases. Many thousands more were injured, and independent reports indicate that tens of thousands of Iranians have been arrested or arbitrarily detained. An Iranian doctor in the city of Isfahan told The Times of having seen “young people whose brains were smashed with live bullets, and a mom who was shot in the neck, her two small children were crying in the car, a child whose bladder, hip and rectum was crushed with a bullet.”

That’s just one eyewitness report among many. Meanwhile, the head of Iran’s judiciary promises punishment “without the slightest leniency.” His name is Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei. Will the world let him get his way?

ran could always become more pliant, if only to play for time. But the odds are growing that the president will order some sort of attack once sufficient U.S. forces are in the region, which could happen as early as this week. That, in turn, makes it more likely that Israel will become involved — either because it will respond to Iranian retaliatory missile strikes or because it will seek to pre-empt them by hitting first. Whichever way, this will not be a Venezuela-style sub-three-hour war.

Is the military option wise? The argument against it is that it’s unlikely to achieve much.

. . .And something else: Do we really want to live in a world in which people like Mohseni-Ejei, the judicial leader, can terrorize people with utter impunity? Have decades of vowing “Never again” — this Tuesday marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — taught us nothing more than to offer pro forma condemnations when thousands of protesters are gunned down by modern-day Einsatzgruppen?

I know that, for now, thoughtful Americans are much more alarmed by the thuggish killing in Minneapolis on Saturday of Alex Pretti and by the smears to which he’s been posthumously subjected by senior members of the administration. I also know that the president who is so grotesquely at fault for inflaming the situation in Minnesota makes an unlikely champion of protesters in Iran.

But if Pretti’s death is a tragedy, what do we say or do in the face of the murder of thousands of Iranians? Are they, as Stalin might have said, just another statistic?

I think Stephens’s answer to his title question is “no.”

*And we have to look at the National Review which reports a pathbreaking settlement in favor of a young person who “detransitioned.”

A woman who received a double mastectomy at the age of 16 under the guise of transgender-related healthcare was just awarded $2 million in the first successful medical-malpractice lawsuit brought by a destransitioner.

Fox Varian sued her New York-based psychologist and plastic surgeon for facilitating her gender-transition double mastectomy in 2019, independent reporter Benjamin Ryan who attended Varian’s recent trial, said. Although a host of detransitioners have sued doctors who rush to “affirm” gender confusion with life-altering surgeries, Varian’s is the first known successful lawsuit.

Claire Deacon, Varian’s mother, was led by her daughter’s psychologist to believe that breast removal was the only way to heal Varian’s gender dysphoria, she told the jury. At first Deacon told Varian’s psychologist Kenneth Einhorn that top surgery was “never gonna happen” if she could help it.’

“This man was just so emphatic, and pushing and pushing, that I felt like there was no good decision,” she said, according to an Epoch Times report. “I think it was a scare tactic: I don’t believe it was malice, I think he believed what he was saying … but he was very, very wrong.”

The idea of her 16-year-old daughter receiving a mastectomy made her “physically ill,” Deacon said. But Deacon was led to believe by Einhorn that Varian would be unhappy unless she was affirmed in her gender dysphoria. It was the “the hardest, most difficult, gut-wrenching” decision, Deacon told the jury.

Defendants Einhorn and plastic surgeon Simon Chin implied that Varian wanted the medical procedure, and was even at risk of suicide should she not receive a mastectomy. Chin’s attorney called Deacon’s consent a “critical fact” of the case, and asked jurors what might have happened to a potentially suicidal Varian had Chin refused the surgery.

Varian’s legal team argued that the matter in question was not if the surgery should have been performed on her because she was a minor, but if the doctors correctly assumed Varian had gender dysphoria. Defendants did not notify Varian of “the risks, hazards, and alternatives” before surgery, her legal team claimed.

We will see a lot more of these cases, since “affirmative care” is not “objective care”, but a form of rah-rah pushing of those with gender dysphoria to get hormones and then surgery.  Especially when this is performed on kids under 18 or so, one can persuasively argue that such children cannot make rational decisions; nor do doctors always apprise patients of the risks of transitioning.  This verdict alone is going to put a big chill on the “affirmative care” movement for children with gender dysphoria: $2 million is a lot of dosh.

UPDATE: There’s an article about the case in this morning’s Free Press, “A legal first that could change gender medicine” by Benjamin Ryan (article archived here). An excerpt:

I spoke about the trial with three prominent pediatric gender-care psychologists who have been critical of the field: Amy Tishelman, Laura Edwards-Leeper, and Erica Anderson, the latter of whom served as an expert witness for the plaintiff. All three said that pediatric gender medicine is facing a long-overdue legal reckoning.

Varian’s case, Edwards-Leeper said, “should be a wake-up call to American medical and mental health organizations to stop ignoring the growing body of research showing how the patient population has changed and revealing serious flaws in current practices. If we do not course correct immediately, I predict we will see either continued lawsuits and detransition tragedies or increasing bans on care, both of which will hurt the gender-distressed youth the field is trying to help.”

“They had every opportunity to slow this down, to do the work, to follow the standards, to say not yet, to ask questions, to explore,” Deutsch said during his closing argument of Einhorn and Chin’s care of Varian. “And instead, they did nothing. They abandoned all of the guardrails, and then tried to sell to you that no guardrails exist. And a vulnerable child paid the price.”

*The documentary “Melania” about Trump’s wife has been universally panned by critics. And it still isn’t recouping its cost, but the AP reports that it’s actually doing quite well for a documentary:

Promoted by President Donald Trump as “a must watch,” the Melania Trump documentary “Melania” debuted with a better-than-expected $7 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.

The release of “Melania” was unlike any seen before. Amazon MGM Studios paid $40 million for the rights, plus some $35 million to market it, making it the most expensive documentary ever. Directed by Brett Ratner, who had been exiled from Hollywood since 2017, the film about the first lady debuted in 1,778 theaters in the midst of Trump’s turbulent second term.

While the result would be a flop for most films with such high costs, “Melania” was a success by documentary standards. It’s the best opening weekend for a documentary, outside of concert films, in 14 years. Going into the weekend, estimates ranged from $3 million to $5 million.

But there was little to compare “Melania” to, given that presidential families typically eschew in-office memoir or documentary releases to avoid the appearance of capitalizing on the White House. The film chronicles Melania Trump over 20 days last January, leading up to Trump’s second inauguration.

The No. 1 movie of the weekend was Sam Raimi’s “Send Help,” a critically acclaimed survival thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien. The Walt Disney Co. release debuted with $20 million. The film, with a $40 million budget, was an in-between kind of release for Raimi, whose hits have typically ranged from low-budget cult (“Army of Darkness”) to big-budget blockbuster (2002’s “Spider-Man”).

. . .But most of the curiosity was on how “Melania” would perform. A week earlier, the White House hosted a black-tie preview attended by Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy, Apple chief executive Tim Cook and former boxer Mike Tyson.

. . . . “Melania” didn’t screen in advance for critics, but reviews that rolled out Friday, once the film was in theaters, weren’t good. Xan Brooks of The Guardian compared the film to a “medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.” Owen Gleiberman of Variety called it a “cheese ball informercial of staggering inertia.” Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “To say that ‘Melania’ is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies.”

But among those who bought tickets over the weekend, the response was far more positive. “Melania” landed an “A” CinemaScore. Audiences were overwhelmingly 55 and older (72% of ticket buyers), female (72%) and white (75%). As expected, the movie played best in the South, with top states including Florida and Texas.

Here are the critics’ and public’s ratings of the movie on Rotten Tomatoes. I have never seen such a huge disparity, nor a critics’ rating that low! The Popcornmeter must reflect a dogpiling of Republicans on the site, as well as those “old, white females”:

*Michael Shermer has an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post, “I’ve reported on UFO sightings for decades—and come to this conclusion.” What is the conclusion?

I have been following and writing about UFO phenomena and the people who believe they represent alien visitation since the 1990s, and until recently the topic was always largely treated by the public and media as fringe and beneath serious consideration. That began to change in 2017, when The New York Times published a front-page story about the Pentagon having established the secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to learn what was really going on with all these sightings, many of which happened over military facilities.

Since then there have been Congressional hearings involving, not tinfoil-hat-wearing kooks, but — for example — former Navy pilots David Fravor and Ryan Graves and government intelligence employees Luis Elizondo and David Grusch, who told Congress and millions of online viewers that the U.S. government was covering up evidence of alien visitation. The UAP acronym, gradually adopted by the Pentagon around 2020, signifies the subject’s transformation into the official conversation.

All of this was packaged into a documentary released last year by the noted filmmaker Dan Farah, “The Age of Disclosure,” which has been widely reviewed in mainstream media and discussed not only on popular podcasts with UFO enthusiasts but at the highest levels of government, including by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

. . .In my own classification system, I put reported UFO and UAP [“unidentified anomalous phenomena”] sightings in three categories: 1. ordinary terrestrial (balloons, camera/lens effects, visual illusions, etc.), 2. extraordinary terrestrial (Russian or Chinese spy planes or drones capable of feats unheard of in the U.S.) and 3. extraordinary extraterrestrial (alien presence).

I strongly suspect that all UAP sightings fall into the first category, but other commentators suggest the second, noting that they could represent Russian or Chinese assets using technology as yet unknown to American scientists, capable of speeds and turns that seemingly defy all their physics and aerodynamics.

That hypothesis is highly unlikely. It is simply not possible that some nation, corporation or lone individual — no matter how smart and creative — could have created an aircraft of any sort that would be centuries ahead of the West’s present technologies. It would be as if the United States were flying biplanes while the Russians or Chinese were flying Stealth fighter jets, or we were still experimenting with captured German V-2 rockets while they were testing SpaceX-level rocketry. Impossible. We would know about all the steps leading to such technological wizardry.

Finally, could UAPs really be space aliens? It’s not impossible, but it is highly improbable. While intelligent life is probably out there somewhere, the distances between the stars are so vast that it is extremely unlikely that any have come here, and what little evidence is offered by UAP believers comes in the form of highly questionable grainy photographs, blurry videos and stories about strange lights in the night sky.

What I think is actually going on is a deep, religious-like impulse to believe that there is a godlike, omnipotent intelligence out there who 1. knows we’re here, 2. is monitoring us and is concerned for our well-being and 3. will save us if we’re good. Researchers have found, for example, an inverse relationship between religiosity, meaning and belief in aliens; that is, those who report low levels of religious belief but high desire for meaning show greater belief in extraterrestrials. They also found that people who self-identified as either atheist or agnostic were more likely to report believing in ETIs than those who reported being religious (primarily Christian).

From this research, and my own on the existential function served by belief in aliens, I have come to the conclusion that aliens are sky gods for skeptics, deities for atheists and a secular alternative to replace the rapidly declining religiosity in the West — particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, where, not coincidentally, most UAP sightings are made.

It’s a religion, Jake!  That’s what I concluded a while back from the fervor of adherents, who refuse to listen to any evidence against their faith. Where are the crashed spacecraft and pickled bodies that the adherents claim are somewhere in the U.S.?

*The Wall Street Journal has a list and description of “20 songs that defined America“: basically a song for each decade since the 1840s. I’ll list the last 8 (songs that arose since 1956), and make a few comments:

First, the criteria:

In the 19th century, a song that sold 2,000-5,000 copies of sheet music could be considered a hit; a blockbuster moved 10,000-20,000. By the 1890s, the industry’s scale exploded, with top songs selling more than 100,000 copies, and rare megahits supposedly reaching the million mark (their publishers at the time may have been inflating numbers, according to the Library of Congress).

When radio—then record players, then TV, then MTV, then streaming services—emerged, tallies were taken differently, and success was measured accordingly. But almost since its founding, America has had hit songs that often defined an era.

Here’s a look at 20 such songs, the artist that made them famous, and what they reveal about their times.

12.)  Hound Dog (Elvis Presley, 1956)
13.)  I Want to Hold your Hand (The Beatles, 1963)
14.)  Stayin’ Alive (The Bee Gees, 1977)
15.) Billie Jean (Michael Jackson, 1983)
16.) Friends in Low Places (Garth Brooks 1990)
17.)  Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana, 1991)
18.) Porcelain (Moby, 1999)
19.) Hey Ya! (Outcast 2003)
20.)  Uptown Funk (Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars, 2014)

It’s not a bad list, though I’d put Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (released 1954) in place of “Hound Dog,” since I think the Haley song was really the first popular rock and roll song. I still remember the first time I heard it, when I was a kid in Greece, and I recognized that something new had arrived. Songs after the Nirvana record I can’t comment, as that’s where my experience stops. As for why “I Want to Hold Your Hand” defines the era, the paper says this:

What it says about America: Amid protest and upheaval, America embraced catharsis and connection in its pop music. “You can make the case that the same girls who were flocking to these stadiums, 10 years later were marching in the streets for women’s liberation,” says Fink. With Beatlemania, argues Fink, “huge masses of women got used to smashing through police barricades.”

Well, I don’t agree that the song is a harbinger of feminism—that’s stretching it. It was simply the first really popular song of the best rock group that ever existed. And there’s a good argument for adding to the list Sam Cooke’s “A change is gonna come“, as there are really no soul songs, much less songs that limn the civil rights movement of the Sixties, an epochal change in America.  Pity that the song came out in 1964, in the same decade as the Beatles’ song. Here it is anyway, because I love it:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili casts a cold eye on postmodernism:

Hili: What is this postmodernism?
Andrzej: It’s a synonym for post-rationality.’

In Polish:

Hili: Co to jest ta ponowoczesność?
Ja: To synonim postracjonalności.

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

From The Language Nerds, a gorgeous sign. Find the mallard!

From Give Me a Sign:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Masih. This protestor was killed by the Iranian regime not long after being arrested:

From Malcom; imagine what a poorer world it would be without owls!

From Luana,

Artsy.net explains:

The Brooklyn-based artist had installed the piece outside of the college’s Davis Museum, which was hosting a concurrent exhibition of his work. Sleepwalker was immobilized in the frosty landscape, but students saw a threat and created a petition for its removal from the lawn. Their claims that the sculpture produced apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts about sexual assault on the all-women’s campus—well-founded or not—in many ways presaged the debates still raging today about free speech and abuse.

From Simon.  The public doesn’t agree with this tweet, though:

One from my feed: shadows of elephants.

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Matthew. There are a lot more images and manuscript pages at this remarkable site documenting sixteenth-century Mexico:

One of the most extraordinary documents ever created by humans. The 12 volume manuscript "General History of the Things of New Spain", created in 1577 by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a group of Nahua elders, authors, and artists, it describes the culture of indigenous Mexico.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-02-01T16:30:32.356Z

A remarkable fossil—of an insect!

I usually stick to echinoderms, but this insect was so stunning.This is a Cretaceous aged Neuropterid insect, Hemerobidae sp.#FossilFriday

— David Clark (@clarkeocrinus.bsky.social) 2026-01-30T15:53:40.272Z

Another critique of Agustín Fuentes’s claim of a sex spectrum in humans and other species

February 1, 2026 • 11:20 am

Although the view that sex is a spectrum, and that there are more than two biological sexes in humans and other species, is still prevalent among the woke, others are realizing that sex in humans (and nearly every other species of plant and animal) is indeed a binary, with a tiny fraction of exceptions in humans. These include individuals with “differences in sex determination” (DSD) and almost nonexistent hermaphrodites. Estimates of exceptions in our species range from 0.02% to 0.005%.

The rise of the “sex is a spectrum” notion is due solely to the rise of gender activism and to people who identify as nonbinary or transgender.  But gender is not the same thing as biological sex: the former is a subjective way of feeling, while the latter is an objective fact of biology based on a binary of gamete types.

I personally don’t care if someone identifies as a member of a nonstandard gender, but I do care when people like Steve Novella, who should know better, argue that biological sex is not a binary but a spectrum. In fact, there are far more people born with more or fewer than 20 fingers and toes than are born as true intersexes, yet we do not say that “digit number in humans is a spectrum.”

It’s a shame that many of those who claim that sex is a spectrum are biologists who recognize the sex binary and its many consequences, like sexual selection. The misguided folks include the three main scientific societies studying evolution, who issued a statement that biological sex was a spectrum, and further that this was a consensus view. (Their original statement is archived here.) The societies then took down their claim when other biologists pointed out its inanity (see here, here, and here). And it’s not only biologists who recognize the ideology behind the claim that sex is a spectrum; the public does, too.  NBC News reported this in 2023 (note the conflation of sex and gender):

A new national poll from PRRI finds Americans’ views on gender identity, pronoun use and teaching about same-sex relationships in school deeply divided by party affiliation, age and religion.

Overall, 65% of all Americans believe there are only two gender identities, while 34% disagree and say there are many gender identities.

But inside those numbers are sharp differences. Fully 90% of Republicans say there are just two genders, versus 66% of independents and 44% of Democrats who believe the same

Sadly, if you’re on the side of truth in this debate, at least as far as the number of sexes go, you’re on the side of Republicans. So it goes. Further, Americans and sports organizations themselves are increasingly adopting the views that trans-identified men (“transwomen,” as they’re sometimes called) should not compete in sports against biological women. This is from a 2025 Gallup poll.

Sixty-nine percent of U.S. adults continue to believe that transgender athletes should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth sex, and 66% of Americans say a person’s birth sex rather than gender identity should be listed on government documents such as passports or driver’s licenses.

Thus, although wokeness is like a barbed porcupine quill: easy to go inside you but hard to remove, I’m pretty confident that the claim of a biological sex spectrum will eventually decline even more. But there are still some ideologues who twist and misrepresent the facts to argue that there are more than two sexes. (The argument centers on humans, of course.)  One of these is Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes, who has written several papers and a recent book arguing for the human sex spectrum. I’ve pushed back on his arguments many times (see here), and wrote a short review of his book Sex is a Spectrum, a book that should be read with a beaker of Pepto-Bismol by your side. There’s another and better critical review of Fuentes’s book by Tomas Bogardus, here,  which Bogardus has turned into his own new book, The Nature of the Sexes: Why Biology Matters.

This post is just to highlight another critical review of Fuentes’s book and his views on sex, one written by Alexander Riley and appearing at Compact. You can get to a paywalled version by clicking on the title below, but a reader sent me a transcript, and I’ll quote briefly from that below.

A few quotes (indented). I don’t know how readers can access the whole review without subscribing:

Fuentes, an anthropologist who has extensively studied macaques, begins with a primer on the evolution of sexual reproduction in life on the planet. To show how “interesting” sex is, he offers the example of the bluehead wrasse, a fish species in which females can turn into males in given ecologies. The example, he says, is “not that weird” in biology.

But the reality is that species like this one most definitely are weird, not only in the animal kingdom, but even among fish, who are among the most sexually fluid animals. Among fish, the number of species that are sexually fluid in this way is perhaps around 500 … unless you know that there are approximately 34,000 known fish species. In other words, even in the most sexually fluid animals, transition between male and female by one individual can happen in only 1.5 percent of the total species. What Fuentes describes as “not that weird” is certainly highly unusual. [JAC: note that switching from male to female or vice versa does not negate the sex binary.]

This sleight of hand is typical of Fuentes’s handling of evidence. He attacks a classic argument in evolutionary biology that differences in male and female gametes (sperm an eggs, respectively) explain many other differences between the two sexes. In short, because eggs are much costlier to make than sperm, females have evolved to invest more energy in the reproductive chances of each gamete compared to males. This bare fact of the gamete difference means, according to the Bateman-Trivers principle, males and females typically develop different mating strategies and have different physical and behavioral profiles.

The distortion below is typical of ideologues who promote Fausto-Sterling’s data even when they know it’s incorrect:

Fuentes notes that what he calls “3G human males and females,” that is, those individuals who are unambiguously male or female in their genitalia, their gonads (the gland/organ that produces either male or female gametes), and genes, do not make up 100 percent of human individuals. He goes on to suggest that at least 1 percent of humans, and perhaps more, do not fit the 3G categories. This is a claim unsupported by the facts. The citation he links to this claim is an article by biology and gender studies professor Anne Fausto-Sterling. The claim made by Fausto-Sterling about the percentage of those who are intersex has been thoroughly debunked. She includes a number of conditions in her category of intersex (or non-3G) that are widely recognized as not legitimately so classified. One such condition (Late Onset Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, or LOCAH, a hormonal disorder) makes up fully 90 percent of Fausto-Sterling’s “intersex” category. Individuals with LOCAH are easily classed as either male or female according to Fuentes’ 3Gs, and nearly all of them are able to participate in reproduction as normal for their sex. The percentage of those who are actually outside 3G male or female classes is likely around 0.02% percent, which means that 9,998 out of every 10,000 humans are in those two groups.

What’s below shows that trans-identified men do not become equivalent to biological women when they undergo medical transition:

Transwomen are much more likely to exhibit behaviors of sexual violence and aggression than women. A 2011 study showed clearly that even male-to-female transsexuals who had undergone full surgical transition, and who therefore had undergone hormone therapy to try to approximate female hormonal biology, still showed rates of violent crime and sexual aggression comparable to biological males. They were almost twenty times more likely to be convicted of a violent offense than the typical female subject. This is reason enough to keep individuals who have male hormonal biology out of spaces in which they interact closely with semi-clad girls and women.

And Riley’s conclusion:

The fact that Fuentes can make such ill-founded claims without fearing serious pushback is an indication of how captured academic culture is by the ideology behind this book. A healthy academic culture would not so easily acquiesce to political rhetoric masquerading as science.

Yes, anthropology has been captured—especially cultural anthropology—and, as I said, even some biologists have gone to the Dark Side. I have nothing but contempt and pity for those who know that there are two sexes but twist and mangle the facts to conform to the woke contention that the sexes can be made interchangeable. But I should add the usual caveat that, except for a few exceptions like sports and prisons, transgender people whould be given the same rights as everyone else.

Another sign of people rejecting the “sex is a spectrum” claim is that Fuentes’s book didn’t sell well. Despite coming out less than a year ago. it’s now #301,447 on Amazon’s sales list, and has only 25 customer ratings, totaling 3.8 out of 5 stars. It didn’t exactly fly off the shelves.

Here are two Amazon reviews by savvy readers (note: none of the reviews on Amazon are by me):

 

An excellent book: “Empire of the Summer Moon”

February 1, 2026 • 9:30 am

I never would have selected this book on my own, but fortunately a reader suggested it, and I’m very glad. The book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S. C. Gwynne III, is a history of the Native Americans of the Great Plains extending from about 1830 to the beginning of the 20th century. This is the period when all the tribes (the book calls them “Indians”, not “Native Americans”)—and there were many tribes and sub-tribes—came into conflict with Mexicans and with Americans moving West, and we know how that ends.

The history centers on the Comanches, the dominant tribe on the plains, though there was never one hierarchical tribe but a series of sub-tribes that were loosely affiliated as a “nation” and would sometimes join forces or fragment. Gwynne did a great deal of historical research using primary documents, and the result is a informative but mesmerizing tale, one that is hard to put down.

The Comanches were nomads, ranging widely over the Great Plains from Colorado to Texas.  Their “villages” were only temporary, and would be moved (by women, who did the heavy lifting) from place to place during wars or buffalo hunts.  And those were really their two primary activities: killing members of other tribes and killing buffalo, which were then so numerous then that their herds could extend to the horizon.  An important part of Comanche culture was the horse; Comanches were nearly always mounted in war or on the hunt, with horses descended from those brought to the Americas by the Spanish.  As you can see from the photo of a Comanche warrior below, the horses were small, descended from wild mustangs caught and “broken” with great skill.  Comanches also specialized in stealing horses from other tribes and from settlers and the American military. Horses were their riches.

Comanche horsemanship was superb, largely accounting for their success against other tribes and against settlers. They were able, for instance, to ride sideways on the horse’s flank, not visible to enemies on the other side, and shoot arrows (with tremendous accuracy) from below the horse’s neck. Until they managed to get firearms from the settlers and soldiers, they used arrows and lances, and that is how they brought down buffalo.  (The butchering, of course, was done by the women.)

I won’t go into detail about the lives and wars of the Comanche, except to say that the book imparts three lessons about Native Americans on the plains:

First, they did not “own” land or even occupy it. As I said, they were nomadic, and many other Native American tribes, including Apaches, Cherokees, Kickapoos, and Arapaho, roamed the same territory.  This bears on the present-day conflict about repatriating artifacts and human remains to tribes that claim them.  For artifacts or bones found on the Great Plains (and elsewhere, of course) cannot be ascribed to a given tribe without DNA analysis, which is almost never done, or if there are distinctive signs from the artifacts identifying them as belonging to a given group. Since this is rarely possible, it becomes a crapshoot about what to do about repatriating Native American artifacts, most of which now have to be returned to a tribe that claims them before scientists or anthropologists get to study them. Read the books and writings of Elizabeth Weiss to learn more about this conflict.

Second, war was a way of life for the Comanche; they were always at war with one tribe or another—even well before white settlers moved West. The view that all was peaceful among Native Americans until white settlers invaded “Indian” land and displaced the residents is grossly mistaken. Young men were trained for war beginning at five or six, and the youths were skillful with the horse and the bow.  Comanche life without war was unthinkable, and the men prided themselves, and rose in rank in their groups, largely through skill in warfare.  In the end, the Comanches were diminished not because of lack of skill in fighting, but because they were outnumbered by settlers and the Army, because the Army had superior weapons, especially cannons, and because the settlers killed off their main means of subsistence: the buffalo.  The number of Comanche is estimated to have fallen from about 40,000 in 1832 to only 1,171 in 1910.  The book describes many treaties between the Comanche and the U.S. government or its agents, but these treaties were almost always broken by one side or another—or both.

Third, their life was very hard.  They subsisted almost entirely on buffalo, had to weather the brutal cold of the Plains in tipis or on horseback, often went without food or water, and of course almost never bathed. (This was tough on the women, who became covered with blood and guts when skinning buffalo.) But they prided themselves on their toughness and bravery. (women often fought alongside the men). These features were mixed with an almost unimaginable degree of cruelty towards their enemies.  Enemies who were not killed outright were tortured, and in horrible ways: scalping, cutting, and roasting to death slowly.  These acts were considered normal and not immoral, though the white settlers (who were often tortured as captives) saw them as brutal and primitive. But the Comanche were capable of great kindness as well, especially towards other members of their tribe and occasionally towards white women and children who survived battle with the tribes and were “kidnapped’ by them, many becoming, in effect, Comanches themselves.

This brings us to the centerpiece of the story: the abduction of an American woman, Cynthia Ann Parker, in a battle in 1836. She was eight years old. Parker became integrated into the tribe, learned their language (eventually forgetting much of her English) and married a Comanche chief, Peta Nocona. Among their three children was Quanah Parker, who showed tremendous skill, wisdom, and courage as a warrior, and rose through the ranks (despite being half white) to become a chief himself. The story of Quanah is the story of the decline and fall of the Comanches, limned with many battles and culminating in their surrender to American soldiers and sedentary occupation of land on a reservation, where of course they were unhappy. Quanah demonstrated his leadership skills even on the reservation and, through judicious rental of reservation land to settlers for grazing cattle, became wealthy and renowned among both whites and Native Americans. Here’s a photo of Quanah in his native clothing:

Daniel P. Sink of Vernon Texas, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Gwynne skillfully  weaves together the story of Quanah and greater historical events, so in the end you understand not just the history of the extirpation of Native Americans, but the life of Comanches and the personalities of Quanah and his mother, Cynthia Parker. Parker herself was captured by the Texas Rangers when she was 33 and lived the rest of her life with settlers, including members of her extended family. She was never happy, and tried to escape back to the Comanches several times, but never succeeded.  She had several children, including Quanah, but was separated from her sons and left with only one daughter, Topsannah (“Prairie Flower”).  Cynthia died at 40, heartbroken.  Here’s a photo of her with Topsannah. Despite arduous efforts of settlers to assimilate Cynthia back as an American, she was always a Comanche at heart. The expression on her face tells the tale.

Here’s Quanah in 1889. As you see, he adopted many of the settlers’ ways, including their clothing, But he never cut his braids:

Charles Milton Bell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve run on too long, but I give this book an enthusiastic recommendation and thank the reader who recommended it. Although it may strike you as something you might not like, do give it a try. (Click on the picture below to go to the publisher.) You may know about the sad history of the extirpation of Native Americans, but this book tells you, more than anything I’ve read, how at least some of them lived their lives as free men and women.

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 1, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today we have part 2 of Paul Handford’s hummingbird photos (part 1 is here).  Paul’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The Rufous hummer, Selasphorus rufus, was a common frequenter of our yard, boldly visiting the feeders.  It has the distinction of being the northernmost breeding species of any member of the family (61°N, in southern Alaska).  Given that they winter on the Gulf Coast and the southern Pacific slopes of Mexico, this means that, in terms of body-length, at least some Rufous hummers make the longest of all avian migrations!

The females closely resemble those of the congeneric Calliope hummer, differing in having longer tails and rufous, rather than buff flanks:

The males are mainly strongly rufous, and with a brilliant ‘metallic’ scarlet throat.  Again, this is a colour produced by interference produced by the structural characteristics of the feathers rather than by pigment.  As such, the brilliance shows when it is viewed directly;  from the side, it appears dark, even black:

Sunday: Hili dialogue

February 1, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, February 1, 2026, and we’re into a new month, one likely filled with more snow, slush and freezing temperatures. You can see what’s in store from this illumination of February from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, produced between 1412 and 1416.  This page is attributed to Paul Limbourg, or the “Rustic painter”, and the Wikipedia caption is this: 

An enclosure surrounds a farm comprising a sheep pen and, on the right, four beehives and a dovecote. Inside the house, a woman and a couple of young man and young woman warm themselves in front of the fire. Outside, a man chops down a tree with an axe, bundles of sticks at his feet, while another gets ready to go inside while blowing on his hands to warm them. Further away, a third drives a donkey, loaded with wood, towards the neighbouring village.

Limbourg brothers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Car Insurance Day, G.I. Joe Day, National Baked Alaska Day, International Furmint Day (celebrating a grape and wine), National Dark Chocolate Day, and World Leprosy Day (it’s now called Hansen’s Disease). And it’s World Hijab Day as well as World No Hijab Day (I prefer the latter).

The Jesus and Mo artist put up this 2007 flashback struo in honor of No Hijab Day. I love the last panel, which tells you why the covering is worn:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 1 Wikipedia page.

And there’s a Google Doodle today celebrating The Art of Beat Making in Hip Hop. You can see an animated video about it by clicking on the screenshot below, and the occasion is given at the site:

In celebration of Black History Month, today’s #GoogleDoodle music video celebrates the art of hip-hop beat making, highlighting how hip-hop producers have innovated techniques for mixing and looping sound. The Doodle is set to a track composed by guest artist, Illa J.

Da Nooz:

*In the face of political criticism (and possible defunding), ICE has expanded its criteria for arresting people without warrants.

Amid tensions over President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota and beyond, federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times.

The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.

The shift comes as the administration has deployed thousands of masked immigration agents into cities nationwide. A week before the memo, it came to light that Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of the agency, had issued guidance in May saying agents could enter homes with only an administrative warrant, not a judicial one. And the day before the memo, Mr. Trump said he would “de-escalate a little bit” in Minneapolis, after agents fatally shot two people in the crackdown there.

The memo, addressed to all ICE personnel and signed on Wednesday by Mr. Lyons, centers on a federal law that empowers agents to make warrantless arrests of people they believe are undocumented immigrants, if they are “likely to escape” before an arrest warrant can be obtained.

ICE has long interpreted that standard to mean situations in which agents believe someone is a “flight risk,” and unlikely to comply with future immigration obligations like appearing for hearings, according to the memo. But Mr. Lyons criticized that construction as “unreasoned” and “incorrect,” changing the agency’s interpretation of it to instead mean situations in which agents believe someone is unlikely to remain at the scene.

“An alien is ‘likely to escape’ if an immigration officer determines he or she is unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained,” Mr. Lyons wrote.

The Times shared a description of the memo’s contents with several former senior ICE officials from the Biden administration. Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior adviser at ICE, called the new definition “an extremely broad interpretation of the term ‘escape.’”

Well, all you need to do now as an ICE agent is have a suspicion that someone should be apprehended and a feeling that the person won’t hang around.  The first bit gives you license to detain almost anyone; the second, of course, can apply to nearly everyone save people working at a job (it takes a while to get a warrant).  This will only increase the public rancor against ICE, and seems a bad decision.

*The UN claims that it is in danger of financial collapse because several countries, including the U.S., haven’t paid their dues.

The United Nations said on Friday that it was facing imminent financial collapse and would run out of money by July if countries, namely the United States, did not pay their annual dues that amount to billions of dollars.

Senior U.N. officials said that if the cash ran out, the agency would be forced to shut down its landmark headquarters in New York by August. The U.N. Security Council, a 15-member body responsible for maintaining international peace and stability, convenes its meetings at U.N. headquarters.

It would also have to cancel the annual General Assembly gathering of world leaders held in September and shut the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which responds to global emergencies like conflicts and natural disasters, it said.

The U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, sent a letter to the ambassadors of all 196 member states on Thursday warning them of “imminent financial collapse,” saying the organization’s financial straits this time were different from those in any previous periods, according to a copy of the letter seen by The New York Times.

“The crisis is deepening, threatening program delivery and risking financial collapse,” Mr. Guterres wrote. “And the situation will further deteriorate in the near future. I cannot overstate the urgency of the situation we now face.”

. . . The United States is responsible for about 95 percent of the money owed to the United Nations, about $2.2 billion, according to a senior U.N. official who briefed reporters on the agency’s budget crisis. That amount is a combination of the U.S. annual dues for 2025, which has not been paid, and for 2026, the U.N. official said.

I am not a huge fan of the UN since it sided with Hamas and against Israel during the war on Gaza, and has, over the years, issued condemnation after condemnation of Israel. From AI:

Since October 7, 2023, the UN Security Council has adopted multiple resolutions focusing on humanitarian pauses, hostage release, and civilian protection in Gaza. While numerous UN bodies have heavily criticized and passed resolutions condemning Israeli actions, the UN General Assembly has not formally condemned Hamas for the Oct. 7 attack, with efforts to do so failing to meet required thresholds.

And in 2024 the UN condemned Israel 17 times, and the rest of the world only 6 times! The UN runs UNRWA, infested with Hamas terrorists and teaching Palestinian kids to hate Jews. Its secretary general as well as Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories, are palpable antisemites. UN Women was very slow to condemn Hamas’s attack on women and its sexual violence on women, waiting until December to do so.  The UN force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, is supposed to prevent Hezbollah from engaging in terrorist activities and keep it from running the country, and has failed miserably. UNIFIL doesn’t do squat except run away when there’s fighting.  As a whole, the major bodies of the organization, the Security Council and General Assembly, are not only biased but ineffectual.  While the UN does engage in humanitarian activities, I think the whole megillah needs to be restructured, and that the U.S. should not contribute to an organization that itself lauds or fails to stop terrorism. Indeed, members of UNRWA engage in terrorism. This is why we aren’t funding it, and I see no way to make the UN into the world peacekeeping organization it was meant to be.

*Last week the feds raided an elections center in Georgia, and for apparently no reason other than Trump is still peeved at losing the 2020 election there  (Georgia is a swing state) and called the state’s Secretary of State to beg for enough votes to win (remember?). They wouldn’t oblige him so now, more than five years later, Trump is still exacting revenge.

From the NYT:

On Wednesday, that obsession translated into action, when a team of F.B.I. agents, armed with a search warrant, descended on the Fulton County, Ga., elections hub outside Atlanta to seize ballots, voter rolls and scanner images — even though previous investigations have found no evidence to support his false claims of widespread fraud.

Curiously, the raid was accompanied by some Administration bigwigs, including erstwhile Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, now Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, who doesn’t work for the FBI. The Dispatch comments:

The only interesting thing about yesterday’s FBI search of an elections hub in Fulton County, Georgia, is that the feds got a warrant before carrying it out.

That should have been the least interesting thing about it, especially in context. The operation stank of irregularities that would have been extremely interesting under any other administration but are day-ending-in-Y normal for this one.

For instance, the federal prosecutor listed on the search warrant isn’t the local U.S. attorney in Atlanta, it’s a U.S. attorney from Missouri. We can only guess why, but the New York Times notes that Missouri prosecutors are tangled up with “Eagle Ed” Martin, a staunch “2020 was rigged” true believer and one of the most sinister henchmen in Donald Trump’s Justice Department.

The search was also curiously star-studded. Andrew Bailey, the highest-ranking official in the FBI apart from Director Kash Patel, was on scene to assist. Strangely, so was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, having reportedly “spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost, according to White House officials.” So that’s what she’s been doing instead of her job.

Three sources inside the Trump administration, two of them at the Justice Department, told Politico they don’t understand why an official tasked with sniffing out foreign threats to the United States is participating in domestic law enforcement. Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, observed that there are only two possibilities:

Either Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus—in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees “fully and currently informed” of relevant national security concerns—or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for the office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.

The 2020 election in Georgia was examined by Trump’s own campaign, members of his first administration, and state officials led by a Republican governor and Republican secretary of state. The closest anyone has come to identifying meaningful wrongdoing in Fulton County was human error that led to some absentee ballots being double-counted but didn’t affect the outcome.

One consultant to the president’s 2020 operation who looked into the possibility of fraud sounded flabbergasted when the Journal asked him about the FBI’s Fulton County raid. “That election is six years in the past,” he said. “There’s no undoing it. I can’t imagine there aren’t more important things to look at.”

Like an elephant, Trump never forgets—and he doesn’t forgive, either. And to think that I was once a supporter of Gabbard when she was a Democrat, and I’ll admit that I was even a bit sweet on her. She seemed savvy, was in the Army, surfed, was a Hindu, and had that cool skunk stripe in her hair. Now she’s proven herself just another flack for the Trump administration. What a letdown.

*I still think the U.S. is going to attack Iran soon, probably in conjunction with Israel, and is playing it cool to delude the regime. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the attack weaponry is in place, but nobody is sure what’s going to happen.

The U.S. military has assembled a formidable force in the Middle East within striking range of Iran. Now, President Trump must decide how to use it.

As warships and planes reach the region in growing numbers, administration officials said they are debating whether the main aim is to go after Iran’s nuclear program, hit its ballistic missile arsenal, bring about the collapse of the government—or some combination of the three.

Trump has asked aides for quick and decisive attack options that don’t risk a long-term war in the Middle East, officials said. The ideal option would be one that hits the regime hard enough that it has no choice but to accede to U.S. nuclear demands and lay off dissidents, they said.

There have been discussions about a punishing bombing campaign that could topple Iran’s government, the officials said. Trump and his team have also weighed leveraging the threat of military force to extract diplomatic concessions from Iran.

What Trump decides will determine the shape of any military action. “The kind of things you’d want to do and the force packages you would need are very different,” said retired Vice Adm. Robert Murrett, a former Navy intelligence officer.

A senior administration official said that while Trump has consistently said Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, he is being purposefully ambiguous to keep his strategic objectives and military thinking secret.

Speaking about the ships converging on the Middle East, Trump told reporters Friday in the Oval Office that “they have to float someplace. They might as well float near Iran.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday that Tehran was open to nuclear discussions but that the U.S. needed to stop issuing military threats.

The last sentence is bullpucky. Iran never has and never will stop trying to make nuclear weapons. The regime knows that all it would take is one or two such missiles to entirely destroy Israel, while Iran is big and could stand some retaliation.  The lesson that no administration has learned is this: DO NOT NEGOTIATE WITH IRAN ABOUT STOPPING THE PRODUCTION OF NUKES.  I’m still a bit ambivalent about us interfering in another country’s internal affairs, but given the huge carnage of civilians there and especially the fact that Iran is ground zero for empowering terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, I wouldn’t be sad if we attacked. The question is what kind of attack would topple the regime, and that’s coupled with worries about what would the Revolutionary Guard do.

*Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan’s latest column has a provocative title, “Can the iPhone save our democracy?”  It has to do with recording events, and of course he means the events in Minneapolis.

A video leaked this week of Greg Bovino, the former Minneapolis ICE honcho, that did the media rounds in the last 24 hours. He’s giving directions to his troops when he was in Los Angeles. It contained what you might expect:

This is our fucking city! … Arrest as many people who touch you as you want. Those are the general orders, all the way to the very top! It’s all about us now. It ain’t about them.

Then this:

“Professional, legal, ethical, moral.” We’re on camera. But other than that, it’s what we do.

What checks might there be on an ICE empowered “from the very top.” Bovino tells us: “You’re on camera. But other than that…” My italics.

The iPhone seems to be the only serious threat to ICE’s violence. We know they feel emboldened to do virtually anything to anybody and have been granted a rhetorical “absolute immunity.” We also know that the federal government will tell big, beautiful, massive lies to justify any and all ICE abuses — before any investigations.

So Renee Good was a “deranged lunatic,” Karoline Leavitt declared. Good didn’t just try to run over an ICE officer; she did run him over, and it was unclear if he would survive his injuries, said the president. She was engaged in “domestic terrorism,” according to Stephen Miller. Equally, Alex Pretti was another “would-be assassin” who walked up to ICE officers “brandishing” a gun, trying “to murder federal agents” who, fearing a “massacre,” fired solely in self-defense. He was an “insurrectionist” rightly “put down,” in the words of one MAGA congressman. Last night, Trump repeated his description of Pretti as an “insurrectionist” and “agitator.”

But we’re left with a small but real reassurance: the propagandists don’t get away with it. And the only reason — I repeat — the only reason is because citizens’ iPhones recorded the split-second incidents, with footage before and after the killings, and everyone on earth could watch them. In both the Good and the Pretti cases, the iPhone footage simply, methodically refuted the Big Lies.

. . . We’ve become worried — with very good reason — about the damage phones have done to our brains, our attention span, and our democracy. But without them, the Trump lies about Minneapolis might well have prevailed. Yes, the phone brings illiteracy, antisemitism, white supremacism, and woke moral panics. Without the iPhone, after all, we would not have had the summer of Floyd. But it also provides a dose of granular visual reality that can be hard to wish or propagandize away, as the Floyd video did.

. . . .what happened this past week in America was that, even with all those caveats, a big majority of sane Americans emerged out of the woodwork, looked at the videos, rejected tribalism, and said: Nah, ICE is lying. And ICE had to retreat.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,” is how Orwell describes the ultimate totalitarian triumph. Well, this past week, the Party failed. And reality won. More to the point, deeply divided Americans, thanks to the iPhone, can still see it. Which is, to be honest, something of

All I can do is make a comment that I don’t like to see in a comment thread after my posts: “+1”. Sometimes that’s all you can say here.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the editor is taking a snooze:

Andrzej: Siesta’s over, back to work.
Hili: Were you talking to me?

In Polish:

Ja: Koniec sjesty, wracamy do roboty.
Hili: Do mnie mówiłeś?

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From Bad Spelling or Grammar on signs and notices:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From CinEmma:

This post by Masih is non-embeddable, but click on the screenshot to see the video, and heed the warning: it’s grim and a bit gory.  But as she says, “Do not stop talking about Iran.”

From Luana, who says “Sarah Lawrence is a disgrace.”  And most of all its President! Here Ezra Klein gets disrupted at the college because he’s a Jew.

I wrote the President this email:

Dear President Judd,

I recently watched a video of Ezra Klein trying to speak at your school, with you sitting on stage and doing nothing to stop the attempted deplatforming of him. After the ruckus was over, you simply told him, “Welcome to Sarah Lawrence.”

If such disruptions are allowed to interrupt speakers at your school, it’s nothing to joke about—or be proud of.  At the University of Chicago, protestors are summarily removed from the audience and our President would be ashamed of what happened. It is against University policy to interrupt a speaker, as it’s an abrogation of free speech. I presume that your school doesn’t have such a policy, but if it doesn’t, it should.
Cordially,
Jerry Coyne
Professor Emeritus, Ecology & Evolution
The University of Chicago
From Simon, who says, “The only good dog is a sheep dog, but even some sheep dogs are overrated.”

It’s time to see this video again, as the children saved by Nicholas Winton have grown up and surprised him at a BBC taping. And I always tear up when I see it.

One from my feed; read the whole thing:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

. . . and two from Doctor Cobb.  I want to go to the Camel Festival!

I went to a camel festival in the Gobi Desert this morning, a celebration of nomadic life, and it was absolutely amazing

— Jonathan C Slaght (@jonathanslaght.com) 2026-01-31T13:18:17.699Z

Look at the size of this fish!

It's hard to grasp how large this grouper is until you see it in comparison to the ship's toilet on the left.This appears to be an Atlantic goliath grouper or 'itajara' (Epinephelus itajara). They can reach 800 lbs (350 kg) & 8 feet long (2.5 m)Let's talk about these gentle giants.

— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2026-01-30T16:24:55.914Z

Bill Maher is back with New Roolz

January 31, 2026 • 11:30 am

Bill Maher is back, and this week he has a particularly good comedy bit: “New Rule: Eyeroll Activism.” His topic is similar to Ricky Gervais’s scathing remarks at the 2020 Golden Globes in that both men excoriate Hollywood for its virtue signaling, with Maher beginning with the wearing of anti-ICE pins at the Golden Globes. And since Hollywood is identified with the Democratic Party, Maher claims that this virtue-signaling, in which celebrities weigh in on political issues they know little or nothing about—but thinking that their “star power” gives them extra credibility—is said to turn off the average viewer.  Maher argues that such “Golden Globe activism” actually works against liberals.

Here are the two money quotes. First, referring to ideological lapel pins:

“Get out of here with your virtue-signaling body ornaments. They are just crucifixes for liberals, because every time I see one I think, ‘Jesus Christ!'”

and to the signalers:

“I know it’s very important to you that you feel you’re making a difference, so let me assure you that are. You’re making independents vote Republican.”

The longer (23-minute) overtime segment with guests Marjorie Taylor Greene and MS Now host and former congressman Joe Scarborough, is not as funny, but Maher gets into it with Scarborough about attitudes towards America, and also shows a bit of the attitude that gets Maher labeled as an anti-vaxer.  He seems to be pretty ignorant of the science attesting to the safety and efficacy of vaccinations.

Caturday felid trifecta: Cats who were bad spies; cats who were good spies; Jeremy Irons on lions; and lagniappe.

January 31, 2026 • 10:00 am

We’re back with Caturday felids again, but I ask readers to help me out by sending me good cat-related news items when you see them. I may not use some, but I will look at all of them. Thanks.

Today we have three short items. The first, from History.com, describes a 1960 attempt by the CIA to turn cats into spies. In principle it was a good idea, but not so much in practice. Click the screenshot to read:

Here’s a description of “Operation Acoustic Kitty”:

The Acoustic Kitty was a sort of feline-android hybrid—a cyborg cat. A surgeon implanted a microphone in its ear and a radio transmitter at the base of its skull. The surgeon also wove an antenna into the cat’s fur, writes science journalist Emily Anthes in Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts.

CIA operatives hoped they could train the cat to sit near foreign officials. That way, the cat could secretly transmit their private conversations to CIA operatives.

“For its first official test, CIA staffers drove Acoustic Kitty to the park and tasked it with capturing the conversation of two men sitting on a bench,” Anthes writes. “Instead, the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi”—not the outcome they were expecting.

Oy! I bet the microphone contributed to its death.

“The problem was that cats are not especially trainable,” she writes. In a heavily redacted memo, the CIA concluded: “Our final examination of trained cats…convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.”

Here’s the conclusion, with credit given to the CIA:

There’s more: they tried to create spy insects:

With DARPA’s support, researchers at the University of California Berkeley successfully created a cyborg beetle whose movements they could remotely control. They reported their results in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience in October 2009.

“Berkeley scientists appear to have demonstrated an impressive degree of control over their insect’s flight; they report being able to use an implant for neural stimulation of the beetle’s brain to start, stop, and control the insect in flight,” reported Wired the month these findings came out. “They could even command turns by stimulating the basalar muscles.”

Well, to use the radio-controlled bugs as spies, they’d also have to equip them with microphones, which they didn’t, but they could be used for another purpose. The Wired article quotes the Berkeley researchers:

Eventually, the mind-controlled insects could be used to “serve as couriers to locations not easily accessible to humans or terrestrial robots,”
What about pigeons, for crying out loud? They were used in WW1? Anyway, this is your tax dollars at work.

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Here’s a post from Facebook (see also here) that I tried to check. It seems accurate in that it’s replicated elsewhere, including a newspaper (below), but information is scant. In this case, however, the cats detected spying, probably because cats have a broader hearing range than humans, especially at high frequencies, and their hearing is more sensitive than ours.

From Google News (I don’t know the newspaper). The incident is said to have taken place in 1964, but I lost the link to the article, which gave the quote below:

The article, titled “Cats Finger ‘Bugs'”, reports on the discovery of 30 hidden microphones in the Dutch Embassy in Moscow. The listening devices were reportedly found after two Siamese cats reacted to the imperceptible sound of a microphone being switched on.
The article:

And an AI response to my question about the incident:
  • Discovery: Two Siamese cats alerted the ambassador to the hidden microphones by scratching a wall.
  • Technology: The microphones were wireless, activated by electronic beams, and produced a sound inaudible to humans.
  • Diplomatic Response: Instead of protesting, embassy staff used the bugs to their advantage, staging dialogues that resulted in the Soviet authorities unknowingly fixing an embassy sewer issue.
  • Current Status: The newspaper reported that the microphones remained in place, and the diplomats had grown accustomed to their presence.

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Finally, in a 5-minute video, actor Jeremy Irons describes artistic depiction of lions, from ancient Egypt through ancient China, Greece, and Rome up to Rembrandt and beyond.  Six drawings of lions by Rembrandt survive, and below you can see that one of them is up for auction.

Panthera, the organization that hosted the video and is a great place to donate money if you want to save big cats, also describes an upcoming auction of the Rembrandt lion drawing:

On February 4, one of the most significant drawings by Rembrandt ever to reach auction will be sold at Sotheby’s, with 100% of proceeds protecting wild cats worldwide — art giving back to the animals that inspired it. While lions dominate culture, their real-world populations have declined by nearly 90%, and this historic auction directly supports Panthera’s work to reverse that trend.

Here’s Rembrandt’s drawing, of “Young Lion Resting” created between 1638 and 1642, and I hope it brings a lot of money for Panthera:

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Lagniappe: A short video of three bobcats having fun in someone’s swimming pool:

And riceball cats from Facebook: cats made out of rice:

h/t: Debra