Welcome to a cool Thursday, July 3, 2025.  (predicted high of in Chicago today is 83 degrees F or 28 degrees C),  It’s also National Fried Clam Day, best eaten at Woodman’s in Essex, MA. The ones below aren’t from Woodman’s I think, but they do show you this delectable dish (be sure to get them with bellies on!

It’s also National Eat Your Beans Day, National Chocolate Wafer Day (do Kit Kats count?), and Disobedience Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 3 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

Let’s stay away from politics a bit today and deal with trivial or more sensationalistic news. We’ll start, though, with the Big Beautiful (Budget) Bill, and then move on.

*The BBB looks as if it will pass in the House, though there’s still debate as of this morning (article archived here).

The House took its first step early Thursday toward a final vote on President Trump’s marquee domestic policy bill, after Republicans put down a revolt by conservative holdouts that had threatened to sink it.

After a day and night of paralysis on the House floor, and haggling and uncertainty in the Capitol, Speaker Mike Johnson scored a preliminary victory in his bid to overcome resistance within his party when the House voted to allow the bill to come up for debate. The 219-to-213 vote suggested he had won the backing of recalcitrant Republicans whose resistance had stalled the measure, though the House still had to take a final vote to approve it.

Facing tight margins in the House, he could afford only a handful of defections on the measure, which would slash taxes by a total of $4.5 trillion, increase funding for the military and border security, cut about $1 trillion from Medicaid and reduce food assistance for the poor. In the end, only Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate from Pennsylvania, joined Democrats in opposing the move to advance the bill after four other Republicans had initially voted against it and several others had withheld their votes.

Dysfunction reigned on the House floor into the wee hours of Thursday morning ahead of the vote, as a handful of Republicans opposed bringing up the measure and more withheld their votes altogether, sending Mr. Johnson grasping for a way to muscle through the sweeping legislation in the face of unified Democratic opposition.

Again, it looks as if it will pass the House, based on the vote on allowing debate. But there still may be surprises in store, so stay tuned. If it passes the House, the Senate and House versions of the budget must be reconciled before the bill can go to Trump’s desk.

*Sean “Diddy” Combs was convicted of three of the four charges levied against him in his “freak-off” trial, but acquitted of the most serious charges (sex trafficking and racketeering), which could have put him away for life (article archived here).

Sean Combs was acquitted on Wednesday of sex trafficking and racketeering charges, but convicted of transportation to engage in prostitution after an eight-week federal trial.

A jury in Manhattan found Mr. Combs, 55, not guilty of the most serious charges against him. Prosecutors had accused the famed producer of coercing two former girlfriends, Casandra Ventura and a woman who testified pseudonymously as “Jane,” into unwanted sex with male prostitutes, aided by a team of pliant employees.

Even with a partial conviction, the result is something of a victory for Mr. Combs, who was elated in court. He had faced a possible life sentence had he been convicted of other counts in the case. He could be sentenced up to a maximum of 20 years in prison on the two transportation for prostitution charges — 10 years for each count — but the final sentence will be up to a judge.

Here’s what else to know:

• Racketeering: Jurors said on Tuesday that there were “unpersuadable opinions on both sides” in regard to the racketeering count. Racketeering law was once intended to combat the Mafia but has become central in cases against R. Kelly, Young Thug, Wall Street executives, gang members and President Trump. Read more >

• Possible release: A defense lawyer immediately asked the judge to release Mr. Combs from jail to await sentencing now that he no longer faces sex-trafficking and racketeering charges. The judge said he would hear arguments on the question before ruling.

• The jury: The racially diverse panel of eight men and four women, ranging in age from 30 to 74, sent several notes to the judge during deliberations, both asking for evidence and expressing concern about one juror. Read more >

• Felony charges: Had he been convicted of sex trafficking, Mr. Combs would have faced a sentence of 15 years to life in prison. The charge of racketeering conspiracy also carries a potential life sentence. Read more >

• Prosecution’s case: Mr. Combs was portrayed as the head of a criminal enterprise who “used power, violence and fear to get what he wanted” in the government’s closing argument. A prosecutor said Mr. Combs used violence, financial control and threats to manipulate his girlfriends into physically taxing sex sessions with hired men, while he masturbated and filmed. Read more >

• Defense’s case: In its closing argument, Mr. Combs’s defense team told jurors that the government’s evidence contradicted its case. It acknowledged that Mr. Combs had engaged in domestic violence and drug use, but argued that the accusation that Mr. Combs was a sex trafficker or criminal ringleader was “badly exaggerated.” Read more >

Four takeaways from the case are here.  Combs fell to his knees and thanked his god that he wasn’t convicted of the most serious charges, but the judge denied him bail. He’s been in jail since last October, and sentencing will be on October 3. Again, he still could face up to 20 years in prison, though he’ll get less than that, and he’ll already have served a year. .

*Over at The Free Press, Tyler Cowan, a travel addict who’s on the move 160 days a year and has been to 100 countries, gives us five tips on “how to vacation right.”  Here are three of them:

a. Form trigage on the museums:

My suggestion is simple: Don’t fight the crowds. Go elsewhere, even in the same museum. If you go to the rooms [in the Musée d’Orsay] with paintings by Odilon Redon or Édouard Vuillard or the pointillists, your views are clear and unstressed. Maybe you prefer van Gogh, but c’est la vie. Get over it, pretend they all went up in flames, and learn something new. Looking at the less well-known Chavannes might be better yet.

b. Restaurants are mostly discovered. 

In most of Western Europe, your favorite, little-known French or Italian restaurant does not exist any more. I am not saying the restaurant is gone; rather, its obscurity disappeared some while ago. Everyone knows about it, and it attracts tourist interest, often through Instagram. You are not cool for going there or knowing about it. Rather, you are just another normie.

Being a normie is fine, as France and Italy still are full of delicious good food. But if you want to stay on the cutting edge, you need to go somewhere more exotic. Right now, Polish cities have excellent and innovative cuisine. Their best restaurants aren’t obscure in Poland, of course, but are largely undiscovered by online North American tourists. Another culinary favorite of mine is North Macedonia, a beautiful small country with first-rate breads, cheeses, and meats.

c. Go see immigrants. 

One of the biggest stories of our time is the transformation of Western Europe into nations with high percentages of foreign-born citizens, often from outside the West, often non-white, and often Muslims. In Germany, for instance, currently 18 to 20 percent of the population is foreign-born.

. . . In the last few years I have been to Molenbeek (Brussels), Frankfurt near the train station, banlieues in and near Paris, and the Rinkeby immigrant quarter in Stockholm. All are quite far removed from how we imagined Europe, say, 40 years ago. I would not visit these neighborhoods late at night, but for normal daytime activity they are safe. Supposedly Muslim terror plots are hatched in Molenbeek, but what you will witness there is a vibrant street life, lots of good restaurants, many women in veils, and also lone blonde women pushing around their babies in strollers, perhaps because they cannot afford the more expensive neighborhoods in Brussels. Life goes on.

You can pop in and out of these neighborhoods easily, and typically they are on the outskirts of cities you might want to see anyway.

You will learn a lot in even half a day or a few hours surrounding lunch. Why not?

I’m going to do this when I go to Berlin this fall, as I hear there are immigrant neighborhoods and I want to see them. I will be with German friends.

*Speaking of travel, Tamar Haspel of the WaPo asks the burning question, of why Italians, who eat tons of carbs and cheese, not as obese as Americans.

[Americans returning from Italy], though, often come home scratching their head about why Italians are so much thinner than Americans. And, when you go to Italy, or even read about going to Italy, it does make you wonder. They eat cookies for breakfast. Lunch and dinner are typically multicourse meals, with a pasta or risotto as a first course and a meat dish as a second. There are sometimes antipasti as well. Even schoolkids often get multicourse meals.

And the foods! Charcuterie! Cheese! Ravioli! Pizza! Focaccia! Gelato! On its face, it doesn’t seem like a recipe for avoiding weight gain. Yet, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the obesity rate among Italian adults was 17 percent in 2022. In the United States, it was 42 percent.

Why? Why, why, why?

Here is a list of possible reasons:

Two of them, in particular, are on vivid display in Italy. Two really important ones, which could easily account for the weight-gain gap: portion size and snacking.

Many years ago, U.S. de facto nutrition-expert-in-chief Marion Nestle told me that portion size in the U.S. could single-handedly account for all the excess calories Americans consume; when portion sizes double, we eat, on average, about a third more. Italian portions of just about everything are smaller, although it’s impossible to say just how much. (When I asked Nestle whether there was any rigorous assessment, she laughed in my face, to the extent you can do that by email.)

Snacking, though, may be an even bigger issue, and it is just as resistant to reliable data. But all the Italians I spoke with, including faculty members at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in northern Italy, agreed. Eating between meals (or after dinner) isn’t nearly as common in Italy.

*How about this one? Officials have given up their search for Louie the otter, who escaped from a Wisconsin zoo two months ago in a desperate attempt to return to the wild.

A Wisconsin zoo’s otter has chosen to be wild, according to his former home.

Louie, one of two river otters who escaped the NEW Zoo & Adventure Park in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on March 20, remains missing even after his companion otter Ophelia returned to the zoo. In a May 30 update to a Facebook post about Louie’s disappearance, the zoo announced its belief that Louie has chosen to live his life in the wilderness.

“Due to the length of time that Louie has been missing, we believe he has made the decision to be a wild otter,” the update read. “We accept this, although we would, of course, welcome him home if he decides to return.”

Since the otter’s escape, the zoo has received reports of Louie sightings, but the animal has never stayed in a spot long enough to be captured and has never been sighted in the same area multiple times. Repeated sightings in one place are necessary for zookeepers to know where to set humane traps for the otter, the post shared.

The zoo noted on social media that, based on these sightings, it knows Louie appears healthy and is surviving well on his own. Thus, the zoo believes the otter can take care of himself in the wild, the NEW Zoo’s post explained, so keepers are ending their active search for Louie.

“Louie was born in the wild and grew up long enough in the wild to learn and practice all the skills a river otter requires to survive. We expect that he’s doing just fine out there,” the post said.

The zoo is working to find another male otter to be a companion to Ophelia, who returned to the zoo “in perfect health” on April 2.

Here’s a video of Louie busting out of animal jail. Let’s hope he’s okay.

*Finally, Penn apologized to all the women who swam against the trans-identified male competitor Lia Thomas, and has promised to take steps to restore the medals women won as well as to make other changes to conform to the dictates of Title IX. This was of course under pressure from the Trump Administration, but I have no beef with that, since Penn wouldn’t otherwise do the right thing. Also see the first tweet below, and here are a few details from an ABC News report.

The University of Pennsylvania has resolved violations a Department of Education civil rights investigation found involving transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, the school and Trump administration announced Tuesday.

The agreement requires the university to follow Title IX as interpreted by the Department of Education and adopt Trump’s executive order defining sex as biological, the department said. The school will no longer allow transgender women in female sports and will provide sex-based locker rooms, the university said.

Under the agreement, the university will also restore individual Division I swimming records, titles or similar recognitions to female athletes and send a personalized letter of apology to each impacted female swimmer, according to the Education Department.

But read the tweet below; it gives more details.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s supervising the garden again.

Andrzej: What are you looking at?
Hili: The hedge. It needs trimming again.

 In Polish:

Ja: Na co patrzysz?
Hili: Na żywopłot, znowu trzeba go przyciąć.

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

On his public Facebook page, Andrzej remembers Malgorzata. The translation:

It’s been two weeks, the mallows bloomed. She liked the dark the most.

Here’s Rawan Osman, born in Syria and converted to Judaism. She explains that “anti-Zionism” compared to “antisemitism” is a distinction without a difference. And we all know that “Zionist” is simply a euphemism for “Jew.”

From Simon’s Cat Society:

And one I found somewhere in the corners of Facebook:

I got this from Luana and saw the details retweeted by J. K. Rowling. This is good news for those who espouse fairness for women’s athletes, so I’ll put up a screenshot of the whole long tweet:

From Simon, who says, “Dickens, Darwin,  Austin, Larry seems a decent sequence.”  But is that really Larry the Cat? I don’t think so because he doesn’t look like that (Larry has more white on his face). See below. 

Give the public what they want!www.bbc.co.uk/news/article…

— Larry the Cat (@number10cat.bsky.social) 2025-07-02T10:18:34.023Z

The real Larry:

From Malcolm. If only!

Tech support has arrived. pic.twitter.com/oUBm390ypx

— cats with jobs 🛠 (@CatWorkers) June 13, 2025

From my feed. I think these protesters were ones who tried to get to Gaza through Egypt, but the Egyptians stopped them. They are thus taking out their frustration on an entire planeload of people.

Islamists flying to Minnesota completely took over the flight and began harassing flight attendants who repeatedly asked them to sit.

The entire “free Palestine” movement should be on the no fly-list. pic.twitter.com/0L41yyyE6B

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) July 1, 2025

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch girl was murdered in Auschwitz. She died at about fifteen years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-07-03T10:49:02.821Z

Two posts from Professor Emeritus Cobb.  First, Amelia Earhart:

#OnThisDay, 2 July 1937, Amelia Earhart makes her last radio transmission as she and navigator Fred Noonan start a leg of their round the world flight. Contact was lost when they were over the Pacific and they were never found.#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #HistoryOfFlight 🗃️1/2

— Carve Her Name (@carvehername.bsky.social) 2025-07-02T08:30:07.000Z

About Swaggart’s death, Matthew said this, “De mortuis nil nisi bonum but in this case we’ll make an exception”.  That reminds me of Hitchens’s reaction to the death of Jerry Falwell.

He’s all yours, Satan

— Stone Cold Jane Austen (@abbyhiggs.bsky.social) 2025-07-01T15:48:02.065Z

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Quarta-feira de corcunda” in Brazilian Portuguese), Wednesday, July 2, 2025 and National Anisette Day, which, in its former incarnation, is said to have driven people mad but also supposedly inspired good poetry, comme ça:

A famous depiction by Degas: “L’Absinthe” (“The Absinthe Drinkers”), 1875-1876.

It’s also Freedom From Fear of Speaking Day and World UFO Day, explained this way:

World UFO Day is dedicated to the existence of unidentified flying objects. First celebrated in 2001, it was created by the World UFO Day Organization. The day is often celebrated on June 24 and July 2, although The World UFO Day Organization declared July 2 to be the official day. June 24 marks the anniversary of one of the first UFO sightings in the United States, when Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine high-speed crescent-shaped objects near Mt. Rainier in Washington, in 1947. July 2 marks the anniversary of the Roswell UFO incident, which also happened in 1947.

The Rosewell “flying saucer” was most likely a U.S. high-altitude surveillance balloon that crashed.  But the benighted are touting the existence of flying saucers even more loudly; someone has been trying to convince me of their existence for months. When I ask why this greatest story of all time has been hidden from the public, I never get a coherent answer.

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

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first, and today we mark the death of evangelist Jimmy Swaggart at 90. I used to watch television preachers, and he was the one I watched most often because he was mesmerizing and highly emotional (I didn’t believe any of his blather, of course: I just was amazed at his style). He was eventually brought down (but not silenced) after he was involved in two sex scandals:

Jimmy Swaggart, an itinerant Louisiana preacher who became one of the most popular and polarizing Christian televangelists of his generation before a sex scandal — etched in public memory by his tear-streaked televised confession — consigned him to relative obscurity, died July 1 at a hospital in Baton Rouge. He was 90.

His death was announced in a statement by Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. Mr. Swaggart had been hospitalized after going into cardiac arrest June 15.

Mr. Swaggart was one of a handful of televangelists who rose to global prominence in the second half of the 20th century, among them Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and Jerry Falwell.

At his peak, in the late 1980s, Mr. Swaggart reached millions of viewers in the United States and more than 100 other countries. His broadcasts generated revenue of $140 million a year with a signature combination of fire and brimstone, musical performances, and the relentless marketing of Swaggart-branded items, including Bible study manuals, T-shirts, records, tapes, mugs, plates, Roman coins and copies of Jesus’ crown of thorns. At its height, his Baton Rouge-based ministry operated the largest mail-order business in Louisiana.

. . .He preached, recorded and sold thousands of sermons. But the one that would come to define him was an emotional confession he delivered on Feb. 21, 1988, admitting to sins that he had long warned others against and begging forgiveness from his family, his followers and God.

“To the hundreds of millions that I have stood before in over a hundred countries of the world, … I have sinned against you, and I beg you to forgive me,” he said. “And most of all to my Lord and my savior, … I have sinned against you, my Lord.”

His forgiveness sermon is below (he sinned again three years later and eventually was booted out of his denomination). It starts with his weepy confession:

*On the heels of Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in the Democratic mayoral primary for NYC, River Page at the Free Press explains “How the Yuppies became socialists.” with the subheading, “Fifty years ago, the professional managerial class swung right. Today, in America’s biggest cities, they’re voting for leftists like Zohran Mamdani. Here’s why.”

Held at an upscale waterfront bar in upper Manhattan, the [Mamdani watch party] was hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which was handing out a postcard-sized pamphlet titled “TRANS RIGHTS – CLASS FIGHT,” which detailed the efforts of the DSA to pressure hospitals to facilitate gender transitions for children, among other efforts. I have read the pamphlet several times and am still not sure how “trans rights = class fight.” But I am sure which class I found myself in that night, as Andrew Cuomo conceded, and the young, fashionably dressed crowd cheered for their mayoral candidate, and the news reported that Mamdani had performed worst among the very poor and very rich, but won voters making between $75,000 and $150,000 per year.

I was among the young professional managerial class. When you hear about the laptop class—the people with AirPods, college degrees, and “good” jobs that require them to have three roommates in their thirties—this is them. They’re the most privileged class of workers ever produced by capitalism, and they want to end it. Voting for Mamdani won’t do that, but it at least shows you’re trying.

. . .Somewhat disturbed by the GOP’s alliance with the Christian right, the worldly and secular professionals spent the next several decades [after 1989] focusing almost solely on social issues, turning the Democratic Party, from Bill Clinton forward, into a socially progressive party that embraced the so-called “neoliberal” consensus on economic issues: deregulation, free trade, open markets and borders. It made sense. The transition from a manufacturing economy to a service-based one might have killed blue-collar factory jobs, but it created professional managerial class careers in finance, education, and tech, among other fields.

That is, until it didn’t. Job prospects for the professional managerial class began to sour in the wake of the Great Recession, and we entered into an era defined by what the political scientist Peter Turchin calls elite overproduction, or the “discomfiting hypothesis that societies go haywire when the number of wannabe elites outstrips the number of truly elite jobs,” as Reihan Salam pointed out in our pages this week. Even those lucky enough to get the elite jobs still find themselves in a precarious position. If the Great Recession, Covid-19, and the specter of an artificial intelligence-assisted “white collar bloodbath” has taught the professional class anything, it is that their credentials cannot save them. This insecurity, compounded by the outrageous cost of living in many large cities, has pushed the PMC’s anxieties to the breaking point. Add that to the triumph of identity politics in professional class institutions like universities, corporate C-suites, non-governmental organizations, and media—itself a byproduct of inter-elite competition as many have observed—and what you have is the modern left.

Therefore, it shouldn’t be any surprise that Mamdani-esque socialism is sprouting up in the places where the PMC is at its most precarious. There are, after all, college professors and lawyers in, say, Des Moines, Iowa. The difference is that they can buy a house and raise children on their six-figure salaries, while those in San Francisco and New York cannot. It’s no great exaggeration to say that the history of American leftism (of the DSA type Mamdani represents) since Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016 has been one of PMC revolt, largely concentrated in cities such as San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; D.C.; and New York, where having a low six-figure job does not easily—or even conceivably—translate into the former mainstays of a middle-class life, like homeownership and good public schools.

In other words, Mamdani is supported by “downwardly mobile yuppies” who think their prospects are grim in New York, and, as Page argues, “Socialism beats neoliberalism in the new Democratic Party, just as nationalism beats neoconservatism in the new Republican Party.”  Well, it’s a simile, but, as someone said about another untested theory, “All this is as good as anything else.”

*Well, as I predicted (anybody could have predicted that!). the Senate passed Trump’s Big Beautiful Budget Bill. But it was a squeaker: Vice-President Vance had to cast the tie-breaking vote, giving the final result 51 ayes and 50 nays.

The Senate passed President Trump’s signature tax and domestic policy bill on Tuesday, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tiebreaking vote after three Republicans broke ranks and joined Democrats in opposition. It goes back to the House, where deep cuts to Medicaid and the $3.3 trillion it would add to the national debt have unnerved some Republicans.

The three rank-breaking Republican Senators were Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

. . . House Republican leaders are still hoping to vote on Wednesday to approve the Senate’s version of their domestic policy bill, which would slash taxes and social safety net programs. Speaker Mike Johnson has acknowledged that the timeline could shift, especially as lawmakers who returned to their districts over the weekend are now grappling with canceled flights in the face of storms on the East Coast.

Some lawmakers from both parties have said that their return flights have been canceled, and they have vowed to make overnight road trips so they can make it to Washington for a potential vote.

The bill is under debate in the Rules Committee, a key procedural hurdle before the legislation can go to the floor. For hours, House Democrats have been offering hundreds of amendments to change the text. Those efforts are all but certain to fail, but Democrats are using the hearing to criticize the bill’s cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance and other government programs.

My prediction? (Who cares?) The bill will pass, but squabbling among House Republicans will result in amendments, none of them substantial. After reconciling the House and Senate bills, the final bill will go to Trump, who will sign it into law. Given its effect on the national debt and the huge allotment to keep immigrants out while cutting Medicaid, I’m not a fan of the BBBB.

*If you get Social Security, the new BBBB that just passed the Senate will give you a substantial tax break: a big deduction on benefits that used to be taxed (on a sliding scale) if you made more than $25,000.

Congress is nearing a decision on how close its tax-and-spending megabill can get to President Trump’s promise of “no tax on Social Security.”

Trump is still saying Social Security benefits won’t be taxed. The reality is that the tax break under discussion is a temporary bonus senior tax deduction whose size depends on which version of the bill makes it into law. The version that passed in the Senate on Tuesday includes a $6,000 per person deduction, compared with the House-passed $4,000 deduction.

The tax savings for a married couple with $100,000 of income could be about $1,600 a year under the Senate plan. It amounts to a bit less than half of the savings if there were no income tax on Social Security benefits. Under the House bill, they would save about $1,200.

Under the Senate proposal, 88% of people 65 and over wouldn’t pay income taxes on Social Security, the White House said Monday. Currently 64% don’t pay. Neither group includes Social Security recipients 64 and below, who wouldn’t get a tax break.

Some voters said they were disappointed the bill doesn’t eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits. Others, like Frank Reuter, an 86-year-old retired aerospace engineer in San Antonio, were forgiving, and pleased with the Senate’s proposed $6,000 deduction.

“That’s a pretty good deal for most of your seniors,” he said. “I know you start with your best shot and come down to reality.”

Well, given that the government doesn’t contribute to Social Security (it’s just your money held in trust and given back to you when you’re older), it’s a mitzvah that it’s not taxed for most people. In fact, it should be taxed as part of your post-retirement income if you make more than a certain amount. And it is, but there’s that bonus. I have no beef with that, because if you’re old and impecunious, you do deserve a break.  I’m just putting this up to let our older readers know that they may be getting a tax break.

*Finally, Attorney General Pam Bondi claims that the FBI has possession of “tens of thousands of videos of the late Jeffrey Epstein having sex with children or being in possession of child pornography. But so far nobody beyond Epstein appears to have been implicated.

It was a surprising statement from Attorney General Pam Bondi as the Trump administration promises to release more files from its sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein: The FBI, she said, was reviewing “tens of thousands of videos” of the wealthy financier “with children or child porn.”

The comment, made to reporters at the White House days after a similar remark to a stranger with a hidden camera, raised the stakes for President Donald Trump’s administration to prove it has in its possession previously unseen compelling evidence. That task is all the more pressing after an earlier document dump that Bondi hyped angered elements of Trump’s base by failing to deliver new bombshells and as administration officials who had promised to unlock supposed secrets of the so-called government “deep state” struggle to fulfill that pledge.

The Associated Press spoke with lawyers and law enforcement officials in criminal cases of Epstein and socialite former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell who said they hadn’t seen and didn’t know of a trove of recordings like what Bondi described. Indictments and detention memos do not reference the existence of videos of Epstein with children, and neither was charged with possession of child sex abuse material even though that offense would have been much easier to prove than the sex trafficking counts they faced.

AP correspondent Julie Walker reports mystery surrounds the Jeffrey Epstein files after the Attorney General claims there are ‘tens of thousands’ of videos.

One potential clue may lie in a little-noticed 2023 court filing — among hundreds of documents reviewed by the AP — in which Epstein’s estate was revealed to have located an unspecified number of videos and photos that it said might contain child sex abuse material. But even that remains shrouded in secrecy with lawyers involved in that civil case saying a protective order prevents them from discussing it.

The filing suggests a discovery of recordings after the criminal cases had concluded, but if that’s what Bondi was referencing, the Justice Department has not said.

Epstein’s crimes, high-profile connections and jailhouse suicide have made the case a magnet for conspiracy theorists and online sleuths seeking proof of a coverup. Elon Musk entered the frenzy during his acrimonious fallout with Trump when he said without evidence in a since-deleted social media post that the reason the Epstein files have yet to be released is that the Republican president is featured in them.

During a Fox News Channel interview in February, Bondi suggested an alleged Epstein “client list” was sitting on her desk. The Justice Department after that distributed binders marked “declassified” to far-right influencers at the White House, but it quickly became clear much of the information had long been in the public domain. No “client list” was disclosed, and there’s no evidence such a document exists.

Given Bondi’s previous flop, I’m not taking her word here too seriously. And, at any rate, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of people other than Epstein committing sex crimes, which would be the really newsworthy part.  Since Epstein killed himself in prison rather than face the certainty of life without parole, the matter seems moot anyway: a trove of videos for voyeurs.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants a nosh (as usual):

In Polish:

Ja; Nie ma co tu siedzieć i myśleć, wracamy do roboty.
Hili: Może najpierw coś zjemy?

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

From Things With Faces, a bottle tired of cleaning:

From The Love of Cats:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

Masih is still quiet, but JKR gets a bit of Schadenfreude:

Stephen Ireland, who targeted me with endless abuse on here because I oppose the chemical castration of children and the removal of protected spaces for women and girls, has just been sentenced to 30 years in jail for child rape. pic.twitter.com/0HHctRocB4

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 30, 2025

From Malcolm, who suspects that I wouldn’t want to try this Chinese treatment for insomnia:

In the city of Shenyang, China, a very unusual method is being used to treat insomnia: people are hanging from their necks with a belt and gently swinging for a few minutes.pic.twitter.com/j5Ku3T2g42

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 19, 2025

Cornell has been caught with its pants down; breaking the law (Title VII, to be exact) to engage in race-preferential hiring. You can read about Cornell’s sneaky hiring practices at this link or in the thread that follows this tweet.

DOCUMENTS: At Cornell, search committees that were hiring biomedical scientists had to pass four “checkpoints” to make sure their pools were “sufficiently diverse.”

“That certainly looks like a Title VII violation,” one legal expert told me when discussing the program.

🧵 pic.twitter.com/CWXpDBzqze

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) June 30, 2025

One from my feed, and it’s not just “dudes” (I hate that word) who will be impressed. It’s amazing!

dudes will see this and say hell yea pic.twitter.com/ArEEi2uNHF

— Dudes Posting Their W’s (@DudespostingWs) June 30, 2025

From Luana. I wrote the other data about the new field of Queer Archaeology, and perhaps this is an examples (not that there’s anything wrong with being gay):

In case you’ll die in a volcano eruption, remember to sit apart with your friends … or the archeologist will call you gay centuries later. pic.twitter.com/otKNtLo5sd

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) June 30, 2025

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Czech Jewish girl died in Auschwitz. She was fifteen.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-07-02T10:08:18.646Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a bird mystery solved:

There's news on the Nechisar nightjar (Caprimulgus solala), named for a single wing found in Ethiopia in 1990. DNA analysis – as yet unpublished – shows that it's a previously unreported thing among Old World nightjars… a hybrid! http://www.aba.org/has-the-nech… #ornithology #birds #nightjars

— Darren Naish (@tetzoo.bsky.social) 2025-07-01T10:51:48.353Z

And a cat-related XKCD cartoon:

Laser Dangerxkcd.com/3108/

— Randall Munroe (@xkcd.com) 2025-07-01T02:48:44.240Z

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, July 1, 2025, and National U.S. Postage Stamp Day.  Here’s one worth over a million bucks! It’s the “inverted Jenny“, an airmail stamp printed in 1919. One pane of 100 stamps were printed with the image upside-down image of a Curtiss Jenny airplane.  As Wikipedia notes:

The Inverted Jenny (also known as an Upside Down Jenny, Jenny Invert) is a 24 cent United States postage stamp first issued on May 10, 1918, in which the image of the Curtiss JN-4 airplane in the center of the design is printed upside-down; it is one of the most famous errors in American philately. Only one pane of 100 of the invert stamps was ever found, making this error one of the most prized in philately.

The job of designing and printing the new stamp was carried out in a great rush; engraving began only on May 4, and stamp printing on May 10 (a Friday), in sheets of 100 (contrary to the usual practice of printing 400 at a time and cutting into 100-stamp panes). Since the stamp was printed in two colors, each sheet had to be placed into the flat-bed printing press twice, an error-prone process that had resulted in invert errors in stamps of 1869 and 1901, and at least three misprinted sheets were found during the production process and destroyed. It is believed that only one misprinted pane of 100 stamps got through unnoticed.

. . . Aware of the potential for inverts, a number of collectors went to their local post offices to buy the new stamps and keep an eye out for errors. Collector William T. Robey was one of those; he had written to a friend on May 10 mentioning: “It might interest you to know that there are two parts to the design, one an insert into the other, like the Pan-American issues. I think it would pay to be on the lookout for inverts on account of this.” On May 14, Robey went to the post office to buy the new stamps, and as he wrote later, when the clerk brought out a sheet of inverts, “my heart stood still”. He paid for the sheet, and asked to see more, but the remainder of the sheets were normal.  The postal clerk who sold the sheet later said he did not realize the image was inverted because he had never seen an airplane before.

Robey, aware that the stamp would be worth more sold singly rather than as a sheet, broke up the sheet, and the fate of many of the stamps is obscure. But those that are sold fetch huge sums.

. . . . On 11 November 2023, another Inverted Jenny stamp was auctioned by Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries for a new record hammer price of $1,700,000, with an 18% buyer’s premium raising the total cost to $2,006,000.

Here’s the depiction of July from one of my favorite manuscripts:the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1412-1416). I have seen reproductions, but the original is kept safely out of public view, stored in a museum in a beautiful château, the Musée Condé. I went there hoping to see something of the original, but alas, there was only a reproduction.  Apparently July is a time for shearing sheep and reaping wheat. 

It’s also Canada Day (note to Canadians: all Americans save Trump love you),  International Chicken Wing Day, International Joke Day (see below for one), National Gingersnap Day, and National Creative Ice Cream Flavor Day.

The joke (traditionally Jews never write out the full name of “God” or “Yahweh”):

A man goes to see his Rabbi in a panic, and he gets there and blurts out, “Rabbi you’ll never guess what! My son has run away to become a Christian!”

The Rabbi responds, “Well you’ll never guess what! My son has also run away to become a Christian!”

So the man asks the Rabbi what to do and the Rabbi says that they should pray to G-d. So they pray and tell Him of their plight; and G-d replies, “You’ll never guess what happened to me!”

Readers are welcome to contribute jokes or mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 1 Wikipedia page. Note again that as I’m leaving for three weeks on Saturday, posting will be tapering off this week as I prepare for my trip north.

Oh, and a new Google Doodle (click below) shows you it’s gone to “AI MODE”!  You use it simply by typing a question mark into the Google search bar.

Da Nooz:

*The Big Beautiful Budget Bill has still not passed and appears to be languishing in the Senate. Trump has given the whole bill a deadline of July 4.

Senate Republicans were racing on Tuesday morning to lock down the votes to pass their sweeping tax and domestic policy bill, after an all-night session of voting and negotiating with holdouts left President Trump’s agenda hanging in the balance.

Debate on the package stretched into a third day as party leaders pressed to keep the legislation on track to meet Mr. Trump’s deadline of enactment by July 4. All day Monday and into the early hours of Tuesday morning, Republicans held firm against numerous Democratic efforts to challenge every element of the measure, particularly its cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition programs, as well as tax cuts for the wealthy.

But the bigger challenge for the G.O.P. was the nagging reservations in its own ranks over the bill, which polls have shown to be deeply unpopular with voters. Fiscal hawks upset that the measure would pile at least $3.3 trillion onto an already soaring national debt were pressing for bigger cuts to Medicaid to offset more of the cost. Moderate Republicans were agitating to scale back the bill’s cuts, fearing the impact on their constituents’ access to health care coverage and other government services.

The legislation would extend roughly $3.8 trillion in tax cuts enacted in 2017 that are slated to expire at the end of the year, and add new tax cuts Mr. Trump campaigned on, including for tips and overtime pay, while bolstering funds for national and border security. To cover part of the enormous cost, it would slash spending on Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance, as well as clean energy programs. And it would raise the federal debt limit by $5 trillion.

One would think that the tax cuts would make this bill popular, but the public also knows about the Medicaid cuts and, I hope, cares about what this will do to the national debt. I still predict it will pass the Senate, then the House, and then will go to Trump to become law. But I don’t like it.

*According to the WaPo, now the Republican Party is fracturing on the issue of Israel and the war (the Democratic Party fractured a long time ago about this).

. . . Stalwart support for Israel has been a cornerstone of GOP politics in recent decades. In 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech to Congress at the invitation of Republican leaders, lambastingthe Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran. In a news conference this February, Netanyahu told President Donald Trump,who withdrew the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal, that he was “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.”

But views on the right are shifting.In March, the Pew Research Center found that Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were more negative toward Israel than in 2022. Most of the shift came from Republicans under age 50. In 2022, 63 percent of Republicans under 50 had a positive view of Israel, and now they are roughly split, with 48 percent positive and 50 percent negative.

By comparison, the left’s generational divide on Israel is narrowing. The portion of older Democrats and Democratic-leaning respondents who view Israel negatively increased by 23 percentage points since 2022.

The GOP’s rift was evident in the aftermath of the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities this month.A poll conducted by Quinnipiac University last week found that while 7 percent of Republicans over age 50 thought the United States was too supportive of Israel, 31 percent of Republicans aged 18 to 49 agreed with the sentiment.

“These generations perceive a different Israel — less heroic or righteous, and more controversial,” said Amnon Cavari, an associate professor at Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at Reichman University in Israel. “What once were occasional news stories portraying Israeli strength in the face of threats have become a steady stream of reporting that questions Israel’s actions and America’s role in enabling them. Consequently, support for Israel is declining.”

Network exit polls in 2024 found that Trump won 43 percent of voters aged 18 to 29, a seven-point increase from 2020. The support suggests growing approval of his “America First” platform, which promotes a nationalist framework that prioritizes domestic interests over foreign policy. Despite Israel’s lockstep relationship with the United States, young Republicans who spoke to The Washington Post think it’s time for the U.S. to separate its priorities from Israel’s.

I’m not sure what Israel could do to regain the support of both Democrats and Republicans. The only thing I can think of would be a cease-fire. And that would mean that not all the hostages would be released, many Palestinian terrorists would be released for a few live hostages, Israel would have to withdraw from Gaza, and Hamas would remain in power.  That would simply re-create the terrorism that started the war in the first place, and Israel would be forever imperiled.  Do Americans care about whether Israel continues to exist? It would seem that many of them do not. They simply want the war to end, whatever it takes.

*Two big-name professors tell us in a WaPo op-ed “To save themselves, universities must cultivate civic friendship.” (Article archived here.) What’s civic friendship?  First, the authors:

Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. They are co-authors of “Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division.”

And their plan to fix universities:

As professors who have taught at institutions including Harvard and Princeton for many years, we have consistently encouraged universities to reject any demands or conditions that would compromise basic principles of academic freedom and freedom of thought, inquiry and speech. Nevertheless, as we have previously argued, elite universities themselves bear much of the responsibility for their current predicament. From fostering (or willfully looking past) campus intellectual climates poisoned by conformism, ideological homogeneity and groupthink to failing to take adequate action against harassment and other activities that undermine their core truth-seeking mission, universities have made themselves legitimate objects of scrutiny — and low-hanging fruit for an administration that is metaphorically out for blood.

We believe a fundamental reason for the decline of the pursuit of truth on campuses is the collapse in acknowledging the importance of civic friendship — which, following Aristotle, we understand to be the bond of mutual respect and willingness to cooperate for the sake of the common good, even across significant disagreements or divisions.

The cultivation and recovery of civic friendship must necessarily undergird any successful effort by universities to regain public legitimacy and the moral high ground. Here, we hope to provide some guidance for restoring campus cultures where faculty and students feel free to speak their minds and explore ideas, no matter how unpopular or controversial on or off campus they happen to be.

And then we get the usual. Granted, they’re right, and many schools, including mine, are trying this:

A university culture of civic friendship is one in which faculty and students recognize, and act consistently with the recognition, that reasonable people of goodwill can respectfully disagree about controversial — indeed, even the most important, life-defining, and identity-forming — questions. Does God exist? What constitutes living a good life? How should the Constitution be interpreted? How should policymakers go about addressing particular social concerns over which there is deep division in their communities?

When, for example, high percentages of faculty and students report that they regularly engage in self-censorship, or less than 3 percent of faculty on a campus say they hold conservative views, there are entrenched problems that demand the university leadership’s attention and redress. They require concrete efforts to increase viewpoint diversity, such as by ending discrimination on the basis of ideological commitments (whether explicit or unspoken) in admissions and hiring and doing better to reach out to those with underrepresented viewpoints and perspectives. They call for the principled defense of freedom of speech and the consistent enforcement of rules against speech-chilling behaviors such as harassment and the shouting-down of speakers, as well as any activities that disrupt core academic priorities such as teaching, studying, and research. And they demand a commitment by university leaders to ensuring that seminar rooms and lecture halls are not “safe spaces,” but rather Socratic Spaces, where students are made to wrestle with ideas that challenge their preconceived assumptions and deeply-held beliefs — indeed, ideas which may make them feel uncomfortable.

When, for example, high percentages of faculty and students report that they regularly engage in self-censorship, or less than 3 percent of faculty on a campus say they hold conservative views, there are entrenched problems that demand the university leadership’s attention and redress.

Yes, institutional neutrality, freedom of speech, viewpoint diversity (but not, in my view, hiring faculty based on their political views), and “time, place, and manner” restrictions on speech, as well as inculcation of the university community with the ability to engage with people having differing views. But all this has been said before; the authors simply give it the name of “civic respect.” Kudos, though, to the universities who are doing this (I’m dubious about the mandating of “viewpoint diversity,” though), including the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, founded with a $100 million donation from an anonymous benefactor.  But this editorial says nothing new.

*I don’t know how Anthony Guerrero, an active-duty U.S. Army officer, can get away with writing this kind of op-ed for the NYT, and he didn’t (he’s quitting the service). Guerrero’s piece is called “I’m not the kind of person to oppose a ban on transgender troops” (article archived here). Another title given is “I’m a conservative evangelical, I’m done with the Army.” An excerpt:

I enlisted in the United States Army in 2006 and have been an officer since 2013, serving in a variety of leadership positions. I am proud of my service and I care deeply about the Army. But this month I began the process of resigning in protest of President Trump’s executive order barring transgender people from the military.

The president issued the order in January and the Supreme Court last month allowed the administration to start enforcing it. The order may be legally sound, but it is neither moral nor ethical. I believe that it is my duty as an officer to dissent when faced with such an order.

I may not be the sort of person you would expect to oppose a ban on transgender troops. I am a conservative evangelical Christian and a Republican. Though I have deep compassion for people who feel they are in the wrong body, I do not think that transitioning — as opposed to learning to love and accept the body God gave you — is the right thing to do in that predicament. But my views are irrelevant to the issue of transgender troops.

This situation is different. The ban on transgender troops is blatantly discriminatory. It has nothing to do with the policy’s stated justification of military readiness. The Department of Defense, when imposing the ban in February, claimed that the “medical, surgical and mental health constraints” on transgender people “are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service.”

This is untrue, and the department should know it. A study from 2016 conducted by the RAND Corporation for the Department of Defense found that military policies in other countries that permit transgender people to serve openly have “no significant effect on cohesion, operational effectiveness or readiness.” The American Psychological Association noted in 2018 that “substantial psychological research” demonstrates that gender dysphoria does not itself prevent people from working at a high level, “including in military service.” Indeed, since 2016, when the Pentagon announced that transgender Americans could serve openly, transgender troops have been deployed to combat zones, provided vital support to combat operations and filled critical roles in the armed forces.

The executive order barring transgender troops is a legal command that provides cover for bigotry. It delivers hate in the guise of a national security issue, dressed up in medicalized language.

As I said, he took a huge risk publishing this, and at the end states he’s resigning from the Army, but even publishing this may subject him to punishment.

I have been speaking with my superior officers about my concerns since January. While they are allowing me to take the steps needed to resign, they have ordered me not to publish anything on this topic, arguing that doing so would be damaging to good order and discipline. Disobeying an order from a superior officer is punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice by dismissal, loss of pay and confinement. But this issue is too important to me. I cannot remain quiet while the Army that I love ignores lessons that it should have learned long ago.

I agree with all he says. If a transgender person meets the requirements for serving in the military, I cannot see any reason save bigotry to keep them out. If there needs to be sex-restricted spaces in the military (and I can’t really think of any save women’s locker rooms—if they exist), then they can be taken care of with a few tweaks.  But that is no justification for Trump’s executive order, which, as Guerrero says, is “neither moral nor ethical.”

*The National Review reports that the Administration has found Harvard guilty of creating an antisemitic climate that violated civil rights law, and is threatening to cut off all government funding to the University (article archived here).

Harvard University violated federal civil rights law by failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students, the Trump administration found after an investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The administration is now threatening to cut off all funding to the university if action is not taken to address the violation.

HHS’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) found Harvard to be in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race and ethnicity. The university has been a “willful participant in anti-Semitic harassment of Jewish students, faculty, and staff,” the agency wrote in a letter to Harvard president Alan Garber. “Failure to institute adequate changes immediately will result in the loss of all federal financial resources and continue to affect Harvard’s relationship with the federal government.”

The official finding and threat to cut off all funding represents a stark escalation in the administration’s ongoing war against Harvard, which has already resulted in significant funding cuts and a ban on the enrollment of foreign students. Harvard is currently suing the administration for making what is says are unconstitutional demands to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and increase ideological diversity on the faculty.

The Monday letter notes that a majority of Jewish students on campus reported experiencing discrimination, while a quarter of them felt physically unsafe. According to the notice, Jewish and Israeli students reported being assaulted, spat on, and having to conceal their Jewish identity from their classmates. One image circulated among the student body showed a dollar sign inside a Star of David. Additionally, anti-Israel stickers were placed around campus, including an Israeli flag with a swastika on it.

The letter also alleged that Harvard failed to respond to antisemitic protests: “The campus was wracked by demonstrations that flagrantly violated the University’s rules of conduct. The demonstrations included calls for genocide and murder, and denied Jewish and Israeli students access to campus spaces.” Students who participated in last year’s encampment received “received lax and inconsistent discipline.” OCR wrote, “By the end of the process, even accounting only for the students that were charged, only a fraction received some sort of discipline, and none were suspended.”

The Trump administration said Harvard did not dispute its finding “nor could it,” as “Harvard’s commitment to racial hierarchies—where individuals are sorted and judged according to their membership in an oppressed group identity and not individual merit—has enabled anti-Semitism to fester on Harvard’s campus and has led a once great institution to humiliation.”

Harvard has pushed back, issuing a report (based, as I saw, largely on individual, self-reported anecdotes), admitting it had a problem (even President Garber himself said he was a victim of antisemitism), and saying that it would fix it.  But this is is now going to be resolved in court, as Harvard has filed a lawsuit. I expect Harvard will win, given that most of the people penalized did nothing wrong, but if it doesn’t, there will be no more federal grants given to the University, and that will take it down many reputational notches.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili bemoans the lacking of meaningful discourse with Andrzej, who has other things on his mind:

Hili: We never say everything.
Andrzej: And that’s a good thing, because hell would be even worse than it already is.

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

From The Dodo Pet:

From Things With Faces; are these Trumps?

From Jesus of the Day:

Masih is very quiet lately given what’s going on in Iran. So we have our default tweeter, J. K. Rowling, retweeting about the perfidies of the Iranian theocracy:

This is Captain Behnam Zarei who was called to a post office in February 2024 as a woman had complained of another woman not wearing hijab. He protected her. He gave his name while being filmed. Now he’s dead. Friends say he’d been severely harassed by the regime after this… pic.twitter.com/f6XWv9Unrz

— Omid Djalili (@omid9) June 27, 2025

And on JKR’s more usual topic:

🚨FIVE trans-identified males competed in the Pro Disc Golf Women’s Championships last week, taking home nearly $5,000 in prize money intended for female players.

One of the men announced he was monitoring women who chose to drop out after he registered.https://t.co/X02hV9dSLk

— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) June 26, 2025

From Luana. I had no idea that Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic Primary in NYT, doesn’t seem to have any Palestinian ancestry, but this is what Wikipedia says:

Zohran Kwame Mamdani was born on October 18, 1991, in Kampala, Uganda. His father is Mahmood Mamdani, a former Indian expatriate in Uganda of Gujarati Shia Muslim descent who is a postcolonial studies professor at Columbia University. His mother is Mira Nair, an Indian-American filmmaker of Hindu Punjabi descent and a recipient of the Padma Bhushan award. His father gave him the middle name Kwame in honor of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana.

He doesn’t seem to have lived in Palestine, either. That makes this tweet quizzical, except that he is Muslim.

Zohran says that Palestine is “CENTRAL” to his identity.

I wonder why Ukraine, Tibet or Taiwan is not central to his identity.

Strange.

pic.twitter.com/8oYDUHTfSV

— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) June 29, 2025

From Malcolm, a bouquet of kittens. Better than flowers any day!

A bouquet of kittens 💐 pic.twitter.com/HojLTRjOlg

— The Cats 𝕏 (@TheCatsX) June 17, 2025

From my feed: Olga Korbut performing a fantastic but dangerous (and now banned) move on the uneven parallel bars:

The banned “Dead Loop” of Olga Korbut in the 1972 Olympics. It was the first and last time the trick was documented. pic.twitter.com/WjTbQt1uVI

— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) June 30, 2025

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish boy, dressed in a tux in this photo, was exterminated with cyanide gas upon arriving at Auschwitz. He was 12 years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-07-01T09:59:21.990Z

Two from Dr. Cobb. Find the snakes (scroll down the thread to see the answer):

Let's play everyone's favorite game:"Find That Copperhead!"There are TWO (2) Eastern copperheads (Agkistrodon contortrix) in this picture, doing their best to avoid being spotted or bothered.#StolenFromTheInternet

— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2025-06-29T16:24:28.048Z

And a scowling kitty (again looking human-ish):

Scowling at you since 1663, dear human reader. #caturday #catcontent

— Daniel Bellingradt (@dbellingradt.bsky.social) 2025-06-30T08:45:29.542Z

Welcome to the last day of June: Monday, June 30, 2025, which is my sister’s birthday (happy birthday, Sis!) and my half-birthday, since I was born on December 30. Here’s Mom, Susan, and I in our passport picture taken before we moved to Greece (kids had to be pictured with a parent). This would be about 1954 or 1955.  I just noticed how big my ears were in proportion to my head. I think I’ve grown into them now.

It’s also International Asteroid Day, National Meteor Day, and National Organization for Women Day NOW was founded on this day in 1966 by a group of women, and Wikipedia lists them:

The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 by 28 women at the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women in June (the successor to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women), and another 21 women and men who became founders at the October 1966 NOW Organizing Conference, for a total of 49 founders.  Both conferences were held in Washington, D.C.^[18] The 28 women who became founders in June were: Ada Allness, Mary Evelyn Benbow, Gene Boyer, Shirley Chisholm, Analoyce Clapp, Kathryn F. Clarenbach, Catherine Conroy, Caroline Davis, Mary Eastwood, Edith Finlayson, Betty Friedan, Dorothy Haener, Anna Roosevelt Halstead, Lorene Harrington, Aileen Hernandez, Mary Lou Hill, Esther Johnson, Nancy Knaak, Min Matheson, Helen Moreland, Pauli Murray, Ruth Murray, Inka O’Hanrahan, Pauline A. Parish, Eve Purvis, Edna Schwartz, Mary-Jane Ryan Snyder, Gretchen Squires, Betty Talkington and Caroline Ware.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 30 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Stymied by their inability to stop Trump’s Big Beautiful Budget Bill, Senate Democrate did the only thing they could to stall its progress: demand that the 940-page bill be read out aloud in the Senate chamber.

. . .Unable to stop the march toward passage of the 940-page bill, the Democrats as the minority party in Congress is using the tools at its disposal to delay and drag out the process.

Democrats forced a full reading of the text, which took some 16 hours. Then senators took over the debate, filling the chamber with speeches, while Republicans largely stood aside.

. . . Using a congressional process called budget reconciliation, the Republicans can rely on a simple majority vote in the Senate, rather than the typical 60-vote threshold needed to overcome objections.

Without the filibuster, Democrats have latched on to other tools to mount their objections.

One is the full reading of the bill text, which has been done in past situations. Democrats also intended to use their full 10 hours of available debate time, which was underway.

And then Democrats are prepared to propose dozens of amendments to the package, a process called vote-a-rama. But Republicans late Sunday postponed that expected overnight session to early Monday.

“Reckless and irresponsible,” said Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan. “A gift to the billionaire class,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Debate has been underway in the Senate late into [Friday] night, with Republicans wrestling President Donald Trump’s big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts over mounting Democratic opposition — and even some brake-pumping over the budget slashing by the president himself.

The outcome from the weekend of work in the Senate remains uncertain and highly volatile, and overnight voting has been pushed off until Monday. GOP leaders are rushing to meet Trump’s Fourth of July deadline to pass the package, but they barely secured enough support to muscle it past a procedural Saturday night hurdle in a tense scene. A handful of Republican holdouts revolted, and it took phone calls from Trump and a visit from Vice President JD Vance to keep it on track.

. . . All told, the Senate bill includes some $4 trillion in tax cuts, making permanent Trump’s 2017 rates, which would expire at the end of the year if Congress fails to act, while adding the new ones he campaigned on, including no taxes on tips.

The Senate package would roll back billions in green energy tax credits that Democrats warn will wipe out wind and solar investments nationwide, and impose $1.2 trillion in cuts, largely to Medicaid and food stamps, by imposing work requirements and making sign-up eligibility more stringent.

The Republicans spent all night with the vote-a-rama tactic, but according to the NYT, debate is still going on. Trump has given Congress until July 4 to pass the bill . . and then what?  And a GOP Senator, pressured by Trump, said he wasn’t going to run for re-election:

In a stark display of the political peril for Republicans around the bill, Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, one of the party’s most vulnerable incumbents, suddenly announced Sunday that he would not run for re-election next year after voting against bringing the bill to the floor. His opposition had drawn a harsh rebuke from Mr. Trump, who threatened to recruit a primary opponent to challenge him.

Later, in a scathing speech on the Senate floor, Mr. Tillis assailed the bill and Mr. Trump, saying the measure was a betrayal of the president’s promise to protect Medicaid and warning that his party was “about to make a mistake.”

Trump’s bullying has come to threatening to “primary” one of his own party’s Senator if that Senator doesn’t vote the Trump Way.  That’s a good way to impose your will on the country, but a bad way to foster democracy.

*We have another Trump-induced capitulation, and this is a big one in academia. The President of the University of Virginia resigned after Trump asked him to step down over a Federal civil rights investigation. President James E. Ryan, accused of heading a university that was too deep into DEI, voluntarily resigned, though he says he was going to leave next year anyway. (Article is archived here.)

The Trump administration on Friday secured perhaps the most significant victory in its pressure campaign on higher education, forcing the resignation of the University of Virginia’s president, James E. Ryan, over the college’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

The extraordinary wielding of federal power to oust the 58-year-old college president showed the unusual lengths the administration would go to pursue President Trump’s political agenda and shift the ideological tilt of academia, which he views as hostile to conservatives.

Mr. Ryan’s resignation also presents new challenges for other colleges negotiating with the government, including Harvard, whose officials have been repeatedly attacked by Mr. Trump and his allies. While the administration has stripped billions of dollars from universities in pursuit of Mr. Trump’s policy goals, Mr. Ryan’s departure marks the first time a university has been coerced into removing its leader.

The reaction to Mr. Ryan’s resignation was immediate and emotional on the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville. Faculty leadership held an emergency meeting to adopt a resolution opposing the change, and hundreds of students and faculty members gathered for an impromptu march to Carr’s Hill, the college president’s residence.

The DEI angle:

The New York Times reported on Thursday evening that the Justice Department had demanded Mr. Ryan’s resignation as a condition to settle a civil rights investigation into the school’s diversity practices.

In a letter sent on Thursday to the head of the board overseeing the university, Mr. Ryan said that he had planned to step down at the end of the next academic year. But “given the circumstances and today’s conversations,” he wrote, he had decided “with deep sadness” to tender his resignation now, according to one of the people familiar with the matter who was briefed on the letter’s contents.

. . . The Justice Department had targeted the University of Virginia for at least the past month. But 10 days ago, government lawyers tasked with enforcing federal laws issued a stern warning to the board overseeing the University of Virginia that the school needed to act quickly. The department informed the college of multiple complaints of race-based treatment on campus, and of the government’s conclusion that the use of race in admissions and other student benefits were “widespread practices throughout every component and facet of the institution.”

“Time is running short, and the department’s patience is wearing thin,” the letter, dated June 17, said.

More despotism. The administrations files a complaint against a university, and then tells the school that if its President doesn’t resign, all hell will break loose (i.e., Trump will pull a Harvard on U. Va., stripping it of funding). No wonder Ryan didn’t want to fight any more!

*According to David French at the NYT, Trump has made his worst nomination yet for a federal judge: Emil Bove. French calls the nomination “reckless.” (Article is archived here.)

On Wednesday, when the eyes of the nation were still fixed on the Middle East, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Trump’s nomination of Emil Bove to serve as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which covers cases from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Virgin Islands.

Emil Bove, however, would be a problem for a very long time. At 44 years old, he’s been nominated for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. That means he’d long outlast Trump in the halls of American power, and if past performance is any measure of future results, we should prepare for a judge who would do what he deems necessary to accomplish his political objectives — law and morality be damned.

. . . At the start of his second term, Trump named Bove the acting deputy attorney general, and Bove immediately made himself an instrument of Trump’s vengeance. He ordered F.B.I. officials to compile lists of agents who participated in investigations related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He fired Justice Department prosecutors who were hired to work on Jan. 6 cases without any evidence of wrongdoing.

He ordered prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to drop criminal charges against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, seemingly on the ground that prosecuting Adams could interfere with Trump’s immigration agenda, an action which triggered a revolt in the Southern District.

Danielle Sassoon, a former law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia who was then the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District, resigned, declaring that she did not see “any good faith basis” for Bove’s legal position. Another attorney with impeccable conservative credentials, Hagan Scotten, wrote perhaps the most scathing resignation letter I’ve ever read.

“No system of ordered liberty,” he wrote, “can allow the government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.”

*On his website, lawyer Jonathan Turley beefs about the proliferation of “hate speech” prosecutions in Germany and the attendant legal crackdown on what Americans would consider free speech. The result is no apparent decrease in hate speech but chilling of political speech in general (h/t Bill).

This month, the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) conducted a nationwide search for citizens accused of committing speech crimes.  The annual crackdown is part of Germany’s robust censorship and speech criminalization policies. As European Union censors seek to expand the reach of laws like the Digital Services Act (DSA), all Americans need see the existential threat to our most “Indispensable Right.”

We have discussed how Germany is extending its criminalization of speech to the Internet.  Germany imposed a legal regime that would allow fining social networks such as Facebook up to 500,000 euros ($522,000) for each day the platform leaves a “fake news” story up without deleting it. The country fined YouTube to force the company to remove views that the government considers disinformation on COVID-19.

Germany has also targeted Elon Musk with threatened prosecution if he does not reestablish censorship systems at X.

None of this, mind you, has put a dent in the ranks of actual fascists and haters. Neo-Nazis are holding massive rallies by adopting new symbols and coded words, while Germany arrested a man on a train because he had a Hitler ringtone on his phone.

Last year, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser was upset that civil libertarians were calling her anti-free speech, so she tried to shut down a publication for a satirical meme.

That “new world order” is based on an aggressive anti-free speech platform that has been enforced for years by the European Union. It is vividly evident in the latest crackdown in Germany.

According to the BKA, there were 10,732 crimes related to online hate speech committed last year—a record number and four times the crimes from 2021. It is an example of the insatiable appetite created by censorship as people seek to silence their critics or those with opposing views.

Stefan Niehoff,  a 64-year-old former Bundeswehr sergeant was convicted for posting satirical images involving Nazi imagery. While the criminal case was eventually dropped, he was fined because the judge failed to find his actions sufficiently satirical.

Not sufficiently satirical!  And yes, it’s chilled the speech of Germans:

According to a poll of German citizens. Only 18% of Germans feel free to express their opinions in public. 59% of Germans did not even feel free to express themselves in private among friends. And just 17% felt free to express themselves online.

When nearly one in five Germans is too cowed to express their opinions in public, and nearly 60% won’t even do it in private, we have a problem, Bonn.  But this suppression of hate speech is going on all over Europe (viz., the UK), not just Germany. It’s a worrying trend, as are the many punitive actions against Europeans for criticizing their government. These are democracies?

*Finally, from the AP’s reliable “oddities” page, we learn that a veterinary dentist (I didn’t know there were such people) saved the canine tooth of an Alaskan brown bear (aka grizzly) by making a giant titanium crown for it. This is after the dentist previously did a root canal on the tooth, but had to do more work after the tooth was re-injured.

An Alaska brown bear at the Lake Superior Zoo in northeastern Minnesota has a gleaming new silver-colored canine tooth in a first-of-its-kind procedure for a bear.

The 800-pound (360-kilogram) Tundra was put under sedation Monday and fitted with a new crown — the largest dental crown ever created, according to the zoo.

“He’s got a little glint in his smile now,” zoo marketing manager Caroline Routley said Wednesday.

The hour-long procedure was done by Dr. Grace Brown, a board-certified veterinary dentist who helped perform a root canal on the same tooth two years ago. When Tundra reinjured the tooth, the decision was made to give him a new, stronger crown. The titanium alloy crown, made by Creature Crowns of Post Falls, Idaho, was created for Tundra from a wax caste of the tooth.

Brown plans to publish a paper on the procedure in the Journal of Veterinary Dentistry later this year.

“This is the largest crown ever created in the world,” she said. “It has to be published.

Tundra is now 6 years old and, at his full height on his hind legs, stands about 8 feet (2.4 meters) tall. The sheer size of the bear required a member of the zoo’s trained armed response team to be present in the room — a gun within arm’s reach — in case the animal awoke during the procedure, Routley said. But the procedure went without a hitch, and Tundra is now back in his habitat, behaving and eating normally.

Below is a video showing the shiny new tooth. Tundra has a grill!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is finally being helpful:

Andrzej: Do you know where my glasses are?
Hili: In the kitchen, next to the kettle.

In Polish:

Ja: Czy wiesz gdzie sa moje okulary.
Hili: W kuchni,  koło czajnika.

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

From CinEmma:

From David:

From Now That’s Wild:

Masih is quiet today, but here’s JKR responding to a critic in her inimitable way:

When you tell a woman she must pretend a man is a woman, you’re asserting the right to control her speech and perception of reality, while also trivialising and devaluing her female-specific experience. You’re asking her to agree that ‘woman’ is a concept men can embody at will. https://t.co/G2xVwYPTJc

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 29, 2025

From Luana. If I ever get cancer, I’m going to have my chemotherapy early in the morning. We need to find out the reason for this disparity:

Super interesting – and now supported by evidence from a randomized trial

Blue: each day’s chemo-immunotherapy was started and completed before 3 pm

Red: each day’s therapy was started and completed after 3 pm

Those who received treatment early in the day had better survival https://t.co/oyaoDaC17j pic.twitter.com/TJ9IC6RxpV

— Samuel Hume (@DrSamuelBHume) June 28, 2025

Andrzej posted this on his public Facebook page.  Here’s the English translation with my notes in brackets. Malgorzata’s “collapse” was a heart attack she had on the London Underground; fortunately, Andrzej carried her out and got her to the hospital, where they restarted her heart.  She survived until her death on June 13 of this year.

The day before Malgorzata’s death, we sat as usual (plus minus) every hour and smoked a cigarette. Yes, a cigarette, because since her heart attack in 1995, we’ve always smoked one cigarette per episode, (friends laughed that we treat them like “weed”). [JAC: as in Poland, they’d go outside and share a single cigarette.] After her collapse, I couldn’t stop and ran from the apartment to the emergency stairs in our London apartment. After half a year she started following me, sitting next to me and saying “let me be pulled” [JAC: i.e., “let me have a puff”] and it stayed like that. After my three strokes and throat cancer, the story kept repeating itself in the same way.

So, the Monday before Tuesday, we were sitting on our porch steps, smoking a cigarette and Malgorzata said, “do you see the first lily?” ” . At the end of the garden, by the gate to the garden the first lily actually bloomed. There are a few more now.

From Malcolm: one minute of moggy cuddles:

We don’t deserve cats…🥹 pic.twitter.com/m16Df8ToUQ

— The Internet of Cats 🐈🐈‍⬛ (@KittiesInternet) June 19, 2025

From my feed: I’d like to know the trick as well:

Someone explain how this is done pic.twitter.com/kjCijZPs7v

— Dudes Posting Their W’s (@DudespostingWs) June 29, 2025

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A Belgian Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was thirteen.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-30T12:15:41.303Z

Two form Dr. Cobb. First, he’s correcting the drafts of his Crick biography again.  The text is 485 pages long, the rest is other stuff (photos, index, and so on):

Tfw you finish going through 575 pages of proofs for the fifth time and you think “finally nailed it, picked up all the misteaks”. Just like you thought the previous four times.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-06-29T16:00:42.462Z

. . . . and a gorgeous flatworm:

A Turbellarian flatworm! Loving the colour that just had to be seen in darkfield. 🦑 #plankton

— Elizabeth Beston (@elizabethbeston.bsky.social) 2025-06-28T18:24:17.683Z

Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, June 29, 2025, and National Waffle Iron Day.

It’s also National Almond Buttercrunch Day, National Camera Day, and Log Cabin Day..

When one thinks of log cabins, one thinks of Abe Lincoln, who actually wasn’t born in one, but there is a historic Lincoln-related site near Charleston, Illinois:

Abraham Lincoln never lived here and only occasionally visited, but he provided financial help to the household and, after [his father] Thomas died in 1851, Abraham owned and maintained the farm for his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln. The farmstead is operated by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.

UPDATE: Reader Elsie sent me this correction, so I clearly didn’t dig deep enough:

Abraham Lincoln was apparently born in a log cabin.  Here is what Wikipedia says:

In the late fall of 1808, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln settled on Sinking Spring Farm. Two months later on February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born there in a one-room log cabin. Today this site bears the address of 2995 Lincoln Farm Road, Hodgenville, Kentucky. A cabin, symbolic of the one in which Lincoln was born, is preserved within a 1911 neoclassical memorial building at the site. On the site is a Visitor Center and the First Lincoln Memorial.

Sadly, even the Charleston cabin met a grim fate:

In 1893, the original Thomas Lincoln log cabin was disassembled and shipped northward to serve as an exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. The original cabin was lost after the Exposition, and may have been used as firewood. However, the cabin had been photographed many times, and an exact replica was built from the photographs and from contemporary descriptions.

In 1907, Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage purchased the cabin for $25,000 ($740,000 in 2021) and intended to place it in a glass case to be preserved forever. [JAC: They don’t say where it is.]

The current Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site includes three houses on two sites:

• A reconstruction of the Thomas Lincoln log cabin, completed in 1934 as a project of the Civilian Conservation Corps. It is surrounded by a subsistence farmstead similar to the senior Lincoln’s actual farm, is the central feature of the main site. The farm includes heirloom crops and cattle breeds similar or identical to those used at the time.

FIREWOOD!

Here’s the reconstruction:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 29 Wikipedia page. And remember, posting will be light this week as I prepare for my Arctic journey.

Da Nooz:

*Trump’s “Big Beautiful Budget Bill” was narrowly passed by the Senate,(archived here), but it still has to pass the House before it goes to Trump’s desk, and several House Republicans are waffling on their support.

The GOP-controlled Senate voted late Saturday to advance President Trump’s tax-and-spending megabill despite two Republican defections, narrowly clearing one procedural hurdle and offering a stark preview of the difficulties party leaders face in passing the sprawling measure.

The initial vote on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was 51-49, with most Republicans in favor and all Democrats opposed, putting the Senate potentially on track to pass the bill by Monday after a day of debate and amendments. GOP Sens. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) and Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) broke with their party to vote against advancing the bill. The revised text of the 940-page Senate bill was released late Friday night and is likely to keep changing.

Trump wants the bill passed by the Senate and the House and on his desk by a self-imposed deadline of July 4.

Senators have been discussing the megabill for months, but the tense vote was the first real test of support. Republicans required more than three hours to wrangle all the votes to keep moving forward with the legislation, which carries the core of Trump’s agenda but also has provisions that irritate centrist and conservative GOP lawmakers.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska), who has called for protecting clean-energy tax credits, negotiated on the Senate floor with Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R., Idaho) before voting yes. The final holdouts were Sens. Rick Scott of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, who want deeper spending cuts.

Johnson, who had earlier voted against advancing the bill, switched his vote and joined the others in voting “yes” at about 11 p.m. ET.

He said afterward that GOP leaders and Trump will back Scott’s proposal to cut off new enrollment for the Medicaid expansion that was part of Obamacare, where the federal government pays 90% of the cost of health insurance for some adults. The idea has drawn opposition from GOP moderates, however, and may not pass.

If two Republican Senators had changed their minds, the bill would have died.  And note the strict bipartisan nature of the vote.  If five Republican House members change their minds, the bill is dead, but that seems unlikely, as I believe only two or three are waffling. The bill will pass.

*Speaking of the Big Beautiful Budget Bill, the NYT has an op-ed by Jacob S. Hacker and Patrick Sullivan laying out “Four of the worst parts.” (Archived here.)

1. It is epically regressive

To understand why the G.O.P. initiative is so upwardly skewed, it helps to think of it as combining the two most unpopular major bills since 1990 — both of which were pushed by Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans in 2017. Bill 1 (which passed) was the Trump tax cuts, which showered most of their largess on the superaffluent. Bill 2 (which failed) was Republicans’ Affordable Care Act “repeal and replace” drive, which would have slashed health care benefits received mostly by middle- and lower-income Americans.

The current bill is basically a mix tape of these 2017 tracks, with some bonus material thrown in, including the biggest retrenchment of SNAP, also known as food stamps, in its history, and big cuts to loans and Pell grants for nonaffluent college students. (In the Senate last week, the parliamentarian rejected the SNAP cuts.)

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When you combine those two epically unpopular bills you get an epically regressive result — the only such bill since at least the mid-1980s (when distributional analyses became available) that reduces disposable income among the bottom 20 percent by the same magnitude as it raises it among the top 20 percent (by on average 4 percent of after-tax income, according to our colleagues at the Budget Lab at Yale University).

2. The hyper-regressive tax cuts you haven’t heard enough about

You might think Americans know that the tax cuts in the Republican bill are targeted at the top. But that’s not what our survey found. Voters had heard a lot about Mr. Trump’s “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” ideas — provisions that Vice President JD Vance recently pointed to as proof of the party’s populist priorities.

But those tax cuts are a rounding error compared with the big-ticket tax cuts focused on the rich, about which voters have heard almost nothing.

3. A war on the I.R.S. could make the bill even more costly.

In parallel with targeted tax cuts for the rich, Republicans, led by Mr. Trump, have promised to gut the Internal Revenue Service. If they succeed, the deficits caused by the bill, as well as its tilt to the affluent, would dramatically increase.

The Budget Lab at Yale University estimates that if I.R.S. staffing is halved, as the president is seeking, the amount of unpaid taxes could increase by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years. If that number sounds familiar, it’s how much the Republican bill is already estimated to increase the national debt (not counting interest) over the same period.

4. It is another “skinny” attempt to repeal Obamacare.

Voters have heard about the regressive spending cuts in the bill — particularly those to Medicaid. But Republicans have cloaked those cuts in so much duplicitous rhetoric about “deserving” beneficiaries that what they’re actually doing remains murky.

What they are not doing is encouraging people to work to get benefits. Congress’s own budget scorekeeper says the Medicaid provisions of the bill will have no effect on employment. Based on past experience with the types of work rules in the bill, two of three Americans denied Medicaid because of these new administrative burdens will, in fact, be working or would have a qualified exemption, such as having a disability.

Meanwhile, the bill will reduce the number of Americans with health insurance by 11 million — and 16 million if you take into account the fact that Republicans refuse to extend expanded tax credits for private health insurance in the Obamacare marketplaces.

I have heard several of these (there is much more in the article), but I’m no financial pundit. Still, the increase in the national debt alone is enough to make me oppose this bill, combined with the apparent desire to punish the poor by making them work to get medicaid and deprive them of healthcare, which are heinous provisions.

*An op-ed in the WaPo by military experts Dan Caldwell and Jennifer Kavanagh argues that “The Iran strike shows that we don’t need bases in the Middle East.”

Look closely, and you’ll notice something peculiar: Many of the aircraft involved in the operation do not appear to have taken off from the large U.S. air bases in the Middle East — or, if they did, that fact has been carefully concealed. Whether this reflects a choice made to spare gulf state partners’ ties with Iran or because these states denied the United States permission to use bases on their territory, the implication is the same. When the president decided it was time for the United States to act against Iran, the 40,000 troops and billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware that Washington keeps parked in the Middle East were of limited use.

Worse, these forces ultimately proved to be a vulnerability when, 36 hours later, Iran retaliated by launching missiles at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar. While the incoming missiles were intercepted and no soldiers were harmed, most of the aircraft were moved out of al-Udeid, and ships stationed at the U.S. naval station in Bahrain were sent out to sea to keep them safe.

For the White House and the Pentagon, this reality should be a wake-up call. U.S. military forces in the Middle East bring more risks than benefits, and it’s time to get most of them out for good.

For decades, the United States has kept tens of thousands of military personnel in the Middle East, spread across bases in the Persian Gulf region and the Levant. The size of the U.S. military footprint has changed over time, swelling during the 1991 Gulf War and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. There has never been a serious attempt to draw down, however. U.S. soldiers, aircraft and warships have become a regional fixture.

Proponents of keeping these forces in the Middle East argue that their presence provides the United States significant benefits in suppressing regional crises and bolstering our allies’ security. But realizing these benefits requires that the United States has liberal permissions from host countries to use bases on their territory to conduct offensive operations.

. . .Sustaining U.S. forces in the Middle East is costly, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year during peacetime. Some of these costs would be incurred even if the same forces were located in the United States. But not all. U.S. personnel in the Middle East require more extensive defenses than do those based at home, including hardened facilities and advanced air defenses, to protect them from drone and missile attacks.

Indeed, the biggest downside to having 40,000 U.S. forces in the region is that they end up being vulnerable targets for state and non-state adversaries. This was true well before the events of the past week. Both the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut or the 1996 attack on Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia left Americans dead.

I think they have a point.  And here’s another advantage: we could cripple and then destroy Hamas if we threatened to pull the U.S.’s Al Udeid Air Base out of Qatar. As I’ve said, Qatar regards this base as crucial to protect its oil from incursions by countries like Saudi Arabia, and if we threatened to pull it out unless Qatar stopped housing Hamas officials and funneling money to their organization in Gaza, they might well fold. But we’d have to be serious about that threat, and willing to remove the base. I doubt this will ever happen, but Caldwell and Kavanaugh argue that we don’t really need that base, or others. Here’s a map from the Council of Foreign Relations showing all the bases or sites with a military presence; I bet you didn’t know we had so many!

*Another WSJ article describes how pro-Israeli hackers crippled Iran’s financial system and its pecuniary ties to the rest of the world. And it probably didn’t even involve Mossad!

While Israel and the U.S. were bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, another battlefield emerged behind the scenes: the financial infrastructure that keeps Tehran connected to the world.

Israeli authorities, and a pro-Israeli hacking group called Predatory Sparrow, targeted financial organizations that Iranians use to move money and sidestep the U.S.-led economic blockade, according to Israeli officials and other people familiar with the efforts. U.S. sanctions, imposed off-and-on for decades due to Tehran’s nuclear program and support for Islamist groups, have aimed to cut Iran off from the international financial system.

Predatory Sparrow, which operates anonymously and posts updates of its activities on X, said this past week that it crippled Iran’s state-owned Bank Sepah, which services Iran’s armed forces and helps them pay suppliers abroad, knocking out its online banking services and cash machines. Iranian state media acknowledged the damage.

The group also breached Nobitex, Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, popular with locals for transferring money overseas. The hackers extracted about $100 million in funds and forced the platform to shut down, according to the exchange.

Iran’s government pulled the plug on much of the country’s online activities to prevent further attacks and keep a lid on dissent. Non-Iranian websites were blocked. Citizens were warned against using foreign phones or messaging platforms that it claimed could collect audio and location data for Israeli spies. Government officials were banned from using laptops and smartwatches.

Predatory Sparrow said the two hacks were directed against the “financial lifelines” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most powerful faction of Iran’s military that also controls swaths of the economy. “Noble people of Iran! Withdraw your funds before it is too late,” it tweeted.

Both targeted companies remain hobbled. Nobitex said it faced serious challenges in restoring services and was aiming to relaunch trading this coming week. Some Bank Sepah users say online they still aren’t receiving deposits.

I love this sentence: “Noble people of Iran! Withdraw your funds before it is too late.” But the NBC evening news last night showed a big demonstration in Iran against both Israel and the U.S. I am worried that the bombing will turn Iranians who wanted regime change back towards the regime again. The Administration says it doesn’t want regime change, but in truth that’s the only thing that will guarantee a measure of peace in the Middle East.

*On top of his other narcissism, now we learn (or already knew) that Trump wants his visage carved on Mount Rushmore.

President Trump has made no secret of his fondness for Mount Rushmore and his desire to join its rock-star lineup.

During his first term, Mr. Trump told Kristi Noem — then a U.S. representative from South Dakota, now Mr. Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security — that his “dream” was to be on Mount Rushmore. She later gave Mr. Trump a model of Mount Rushmore with his face on it.

The idea has resurfaced since Mr. Trump returned to office. A congresswoman from Florida sponsored a bill in January to “direct the Secretary of the Interior to arrange for the carving of the figure of President Donald J. Trump on Mount Rushmore National Memorial.” It was referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources, which has yet to act on it.

In March, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in an interview with Lara Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, that “they definitely have room” for Mr. Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore.

Wait. Is this possible?

As with all things Trump, it can be hard to decipher the difference between everyday rhetoric and future action. But those in charge of the memorial are taking such overtures seriously.

The National Park Service, which oversees Mount Rushmore National Memorial, and which is currently led by Mr. Burgum, has cited two reasons that more faces cannot be added. First, it considers Mount Rushmore to be a completed work of art. Second, there is no room. “The carved portion of Mount Rushmore

As you probably know, the four Presidents on Mount Rushmore now are Jefferson, Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln.  And doubt that Trump can issue an Executive Order demanding that his scowling visage be carved up there. Anyway, there is no space, and the sculptor,  Gutzon Borglum, has been dead since 1941.

Here it is now. Where would you put Trump?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is once again frustrated by her ignorance.

Hili: Look, a plane.
Andrzej: I see it.
Hili: But we don’t know where it’s going.
Andrzej: Right, and we’re aware of our ignorance.

In Polish:

Hili: Patrz, samolot.
Ja: Widzę.
Hili: Ale my nie wiemy dokąd leci.
Ja: Tak i jesteśmy świadomi naszej ignorancji.

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

From Jesus of the Day:

From Things With Faces:

Anna Krylov sent me this from her Chemistry conference in Japan; it was apparently a slide in one of the talks. She couldn’t make the HxA conference but won its leadership award.  Cats!:

From Masih: Iranian terrorists, each now with 72 virgins:

What a photo. Today in Iran:
These were the top IRGC commanders, men who spent their whole lives crushing dissent, torturing the innocent, silencing voices, and ruling through fear.
They lived above the law…Untouchable. Unquestioned.
And now?
Just boxes. No legacy. No honor. pic.twitter.com/xaxvoVA3xV

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) June 28, 2025

Yes, it’s the demonized Rufo, but I believe this is accurate, showing absolute race-based hiring at Cornell, done knowing that it was illegal but trying to get around the rules.  They should be sued (enlarge and read the text):

According to a whistleblower, Cornell University DEI administrators rigged the search process for a professor of evolutionary biology by deliberately excluding white men from consideration and hand-picking their “hoped-for diversity hire.”

This is racial discrimination. pic.twitter.com/UVJxa9f5XT

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 26, 2025

From Malcolm; behavioral compensation for a partly maladaptive product of natural selection:

For obvious reasons, mating in hedgehogs is a delicate operation.

The female has to adopt a special body position with her spines flattened. On the bright side, newborn hoglets have no spikes.https://t.co/xnXXAVJVpa

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 19, 2025

Three from my feed. The first was the only thing I could find on my Bluesky feed that wasn’t either trite or “progressive”. I follow animal sites but there is a dearth of animals. But here are WOOD DUCKLINGS!

Ducklings! And lots of good summer stuff like milkweed, a muskrat and more!#birds 🌿 #mammals

— Get To Know Nature (@gettoknownature.bsky.social) 2025-06-28T13:12:30.289Z

Two from my X (Twitter) feed, which has a lot more good stuff. (I don’t follow anybody on X, either):

This is how a starfish walkspic.twitter.com/zX6dTEGRTX

— Potato (@MrLaalpotato) June 28, 2025

One I reposted form the Auschwitz Memorial:

A French Jewish boy was gassed immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. He was just six, and would be 89 today had he lived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-29T10:02:20.341Z

And one reposted by Dr. Cobb, which I couldn’t embed:

I am just back, and after a few hours of restive sleep have dragged myself to the office to produce a Hili.  So don’t expect much today as I am, as the Brits say, “knackered.”

Welcome to Friday, June 27, 2025, and National Indian Pudding Day, the finest indigenous American dessert, especially when served warm with vanilla ice cream. Good luck getting, it, though, as you have to make it yourself (laborious, see recipe here) or get it at the Union Oyster House in Boston. (I used to get it at Boston’s finest restaurant, Durgin-Park, but that closed (and broke my heart.)  Here’s a nice dish, though the portion seems small to me:

It’s also National Food Truck Day, National Ice Cream Cake Day, Helen Keller Day (she was born on this date in 1880) and National Cream Tea Day.  Here’s a short video of Helen Keller taken in 1954 (she died in 1968), with the caption, “Helen Keller explains That her Greatest Disappointment in life is that she can not speak normally.”

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Washington Post tells us that the Supreme Court is going to rule on several important cases this morning (article archived here):

1.) LOUISIANA VOTING MAP

What to know: In response to a lawsuit from civil rights groups, the Louisiana legislature redrew its congressional map to create a second majority-Black district out of six districts inthe state. The Supreme Court is being asked to decide whether the map violates the Constitution. The ruling could affect the balance of power in Congress, the landmark Voting Rights Act and how states consider race in drawing electoral maps.

Key takeaways: At oral argument March 24, several conservative justices expressed skepticism that the Voting Rights Act’s attempts to redress past discrimination can coexist with the Equal Protection Clause. . .

2.) NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS FOR BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

What to know: The Supreme Court added a special session late in the term to review a case involving President Donald Trump’s effort to ban automatic U.S. citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants and foreign visitors. Trump has asked the justices to lift or narrow three nationwide injunctions that have blocked his policy from taking effect while its legality is tested in court.

Key takeaways: At oral argument May 15, the justices expressed concern about the proliferation of nationwide injunctions in general, but several appeared sympathetic to states challenging Trump’s executive order and open to a middle ground that would permit judges to issue universal orders in limited circumstances.

3.) AGE VERIFICATION FOR ONLINE PORN

What to know: The case tests the constitutionality of a Texas law requiring people to prove they are over 18 to access online pornography.

Key takeaways: A majority of the justices seemed open to allowing age verification for these sites during oral argument on April 15.

4.) OPTING OUT OF BOOKS ON GENDER, SEXUALITY

What to know: The justices heard a challenge by a group of parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, who objected to rules barring them from taking their children out of lessons that used storybooks with LGBTQ+ characters and themes. The parents said the themes of the stories conflicted with their religious beliefs.

Key takeaways: At oral argument April 22, the justices appeared poised to side with the religiousparents in what would be a significant expansion of the long-standing practice of allowing opt-outs for reproductive-health classes.

5.) PREVENTIVE HEALTHCARE COVERAGE

What to know: A Christian-owned business and others are challenging a provision of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, that requires health plans to provide no-cost preventive care, such as cancer screenings, immunizations and contraception, to millions of Americans. The challengers say having to cover pre-exposure medications intended to prevent the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, encourages risky homosexual behavior thatconflicts with their religious beliefs.

Key takeaways: At oral argument April 21, the justices seemed skeptical that members of the expert committee that set the preventive-care mandates were not properly appointed.

*The AP discusses the bunker-buster bombs dropped by US B-2 bombers on Iranian uranium-enrichment sites. It turns out that they were designed to attack such sites.

The deep penetrating bombs that the U.S. dropped into two Iranian nuclear facilities were designed specifically for those sites and were the result of more than 15 years of intelligence and weapons design work, the Pentagon’s top leaders said Thursday.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a press briefing that they are confident the weapons struck exactly as planned.

. . .The bombs, called the GBU-57 A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, have their roots in a decades-old classified briefing “of what looked like a major construction project in the mountains of Iran,” Caine said.

That turned out to be the Fordo fuel enrichment plant, with construction believed to have started around 2006. It became operational in 2009, the same year Tehran publicly acknowledged its existence.

The classified briefing was shown in 2009 to a Defense Threat Reduction Agency officer, who with a colleague “lived and breathed” Fordo for the next 15 years, studying the geology, construction dig, the earth moved and “every piece of equipment going in and every piece of equipment going out,” Caine said.

. . . The 30,000-pound bomb is comprised of steel, explosive and a fuse programmed to a specific detonation time. The longer the fuse, the deeper the weapon will penetrate before exploding.

Over the years, the military tested and retested it hundreds of times on mock facilities, Caine said. Crews fine-tuned the bombs to detonate in the mock enrichment rooms, delaying detonation until they had reached a position to send a pressure blast through open tunnels to destroy equipment underground.

What they concluded: The U.S. didn’t have a bomb that could destroy those sites. So the Pentagon got to work, Caine said.

“We had so many Ph.D.s working on the mock program — doing modeling and simulation — that we were quietly and in a secret way the biggest users of supercomputer hours within the United States of America,” he said.

And some tactics:

Fordo had two main ventilation routes into the underground facility — and officials carefully eyed these entry points as a way to target the site.

Each route had three shafts — a main shaft and a smaller shaft on either side, which looked almost like a pitchfork in graphics provided by the Pentagon. In the days preceding the U.S. attack, Iran placed large concrete slabs on top of both ventilation routes to try to protect them, Caine said.

In response, the U.S. crafted an attack plan where six bunker-buster bombs would be used against each ventilation route, using the main shaft as a way down into the enrichment facility.

Seven B-2 stealth bombers were used, carrying two of the massive munitions apiece. The first bomb was used to eliminate the concrete slab, Caine said.

AD

The next four bombs were dropped down the main shaft and into the complex at a speed of more than 1,000 feet per second before exploding, he said. A sixth bomb was dropped as a backup, in case anything went wrong.

Well, we still don’t know the extent of the damage, but pictures of the holes created by the bombs show an amazingly accurate targeting. Do see the photos at the site given by DrBrydon in the second comment.

We’ll know (I hope) within a couple of months.  And there are rumors that Iran had removed its already-enriched uranium (not yet to bomb grade) from the site.

*Today’s TGIF at the Free Press is not by Nellie (she keeps going on vacaion! An infant is no excuse!), but by Will Rahm. But I will take a few items for your delectation. The column is called, “TGIF: The People’s Republic of Manhattan.” Here’s what Rahm says about himself:

My name is Will Rahn, and I’m a senior editor at The Free Press by benefit of my gilded journalistic lineage. Nellie Bowles is on vacation this week. So is her blood boy and TGIF workhorse Sean Fischer. So I have the unenviable task of writing this damn thing after a bunker busting week of a shock mayoral race and more movement in the Mideast than we’ve seen in decades. Thankfully, I have Suzy Weiss and Sascha Seinfeld here to save my bacon. Let’s do the news! 

→ Comrade Mayor: We’ll get to Iran in a moment, but we’re talking about New York City first because I live here and not Tehran. And it appears we New Yorkers are on the brink of electing a socialist in Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old state legislator who just became the presumptive Democratic nominee for mayor. His signature piece of legislation thus far in politics—there have been exactly three that he’s gotten passed—was an amendment to state liquor license laws that allow visitors to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria to have a drink on the premises.

Zohran—he has just one name now, like Madonna or Trump or Beyoncé—ran a brilliant campaign on a totally crackpot platform that includes arresting Bibi Netanyahu if he comes to New York. And free buses and rent freezes, which will be made possible because of reasons and plans. But if you put his ideas aside for a moment, you can see the campaign itself was pretty darn Trumpy.

Remember when Trump went on all those podcasts and got the Joe Rogan crowd to vote for him? Zohran did that at the local level. He was all over Instagram and TikTok, appearing with local microinfluencers. He was funny, smiling, optimistic. And the implicit promise of his campaign was that he’d drop a bunker buster on the political status quo. Remind you of anyone?

The Trump/Mamdani comparisons are unavoidable. . .

. . . . Moderate Democrats in the New York suburbs already are distancing themselves from Zohran, in large part because of his nutty anti-Israel stuff—read his message from October 8 and shudder—but he’s the only member of his party this decade who has shown the fingertip feel for politics we associate with the president. He’s running to Make New York Great Again,

Here’s Mamdani’s tweet from October 8.  It’s not reassuring; I think I should have called the title “TGIF: The Caliphate of Manhattan”:

My statement on the last 36 hours across Israel and Palestine: pic.twitter.com/ulF8D4UHOV

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) October 8, 2023

→ Real impeachment has never been tried: You may remember that Trump has already been impeached twice: once for January 6, and once for some convoluted Ukraine thing. And you may also recall that these impeachments didn’t stop Trump from winning the White House again in 2024, and with substantially more support than he had in 2016. I wouldn’t say he’s unimpeachable, but the man is certainly peach-proof.

And yet some House Democrats, to the immense chagrin of their more sober-minded colleagues, tried to impeach him again this week over the strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities that he ordered. The ringleader for the move was Texas Rep. Al Green, and it’s important to note here that he’s not the Reveremd Al Green, who wrote “Let’s Stay Together.” Rather, he’s the guy who was escorted out of Trump’s address to Congress earlier this year after he stood up and shook his cane at the president, which is an awesome old guy move that we don’t see enough of. It’s very “get off my lawn / why I oughta” energy.

Green’s impeachment resolution was swiftly defeated on Tuesday, with 128 House Democrats voting with Republicans to squash it. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries voted no. So did former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who I guess still works there.

→ Robots versus drunken frat boys: Grubhub is testing food delivery robots on dozens of college campuses, and so far the results appear underwhelming. The company is unleashing them on college campuses because they’re in a sense the perfect place to try these things out: not that many cars, massive clusters of hungover people willing to refinance their cars if it means they can get a breakfast burrito without having to put on pants. But the delivery companies didn’t anticipate the most fearsome foe of all: a drunk frat guy doing something on a dare.

“At Notre Dame, some complain that the robots clog the sidewalks,” TheWall Street Journal reports. “Students trip over them, especially when they’re drunk, and mischief makers sometimes sit on them.” In defense of Notre Dame undergraduates: It is very tempting to kick a robot. They are not our friends. They are coming for our jobs. Their little beeps and lights and the fact that they’re always scooting around give the impression of a teacher’s pet. . .

Rahn’s pieces are too long, and he’s not nearly as snarky nor as funny as Nellie.  There is simply no substitute for Nellie at writing the TGIFs.

*Bhutan, a place I’d dearly like to visit (but you can’t do so without paying a hefty daily fee and using a tour operator, is now getting rich on—wait for it—bitcoins.

The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is best known for its stunning landscapes and national happiness index. Lately it has earned a new reputation: crypto pioneer.

Bhutan now boasts a stash of bitcoins worth $1.3 billion, or roughly 40% of the country’s gross domestic product, according to cryptocurrency platform Arkham. It is the third-largest such stockpile held by governments, according to Arkham.

I don’t trust bitcoin and would never invest in it as it’s arcane and, I think, risky. But Bhutan doesn’t think so, and so far it’s been right.

*Finally, RFK Jr.’s panel on vaccines has decided not to recommend flu vaccines containing the mercury-based preservative thimoseral, touted as causing autism (arcticle is archived here).. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE FOR THAT, and the amount of thimoseral in flu vaccines is tiny (one source says the amount of thimoseral in a flu shot “is less than the amount of mercury in a 6-ounce can of chunk white albacore tuna; see http://www.pbs.org/now/science/mercuryinfish.html for details.” But you can ask for a flu shot without it, and kids less than 6 years old are given thimoseral-free flu shots as a precaution. But RFK Jr. has always touted the bogus connection with autism:

On Thursday, the new members of the C.D.C.’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, hand-selected by Mr. Kennedy after he fired all 17 members of the previous panel, decided it would no longer recommend annual flu shots that contain it. Thimerosal’s appearance on the committee’s agenda in the first place shocked public health leaders, who have long considered the matter settled.

But it was not a surprise to people who have followed Mr. Kennedy closely. Thimerosal started Mr. Kennedy down a path of questioning vaccine safety, and Thursday’s vote was the culmination of a long personal journey. It offers a window into how, as secretary, he is pursuing his own passions and installing old allies in positions of influence.

“He’s got a big passion for this subject, and he knows this probably better than anybody,” said Eric Gladen, who featured Mr. Kennedy in his 2014 film, “Trace Amounts,” which espoused a link between thimerosal and autism.

Critics say that in resurrecting an old controversy, Mr. Kennedy could brew mistrust rather than ease it. Numerous studies, including a 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine and a 2010 review of the medical literature, have rejected a link between the preservative and autism. Dr. Oz, who now runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, noted on his 2014 show that any link had been “ultimately discredited.”

. . . But the panel on Thursday did not hear from the C.D.C. The agency posted a document on the advisory committee’s website on Tuesday that concluded “the evidence does not support an association” between the preservative and autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders.

But the document was taken down the next day. A spokesman for Mr. Kennedy, Andrew Nixon, said that it had not gone through the proper vetting, but that committee members had been given copies of the document.

The panel voted 5 to 1 on Thursday to stop recommending flu vaccines that contain the preservative. It was unclear how manufacturers would respond, and how the recommendation might affect access to flu vaccines. Some flu vaccines are already available without thimerosal.

I’ve asked my doctor, but I suspect he’s with the CDC.  After all, I have an occasional can of tuna and don’t seem to have autism.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, we have a lovely picture of The Princess, who is once again musing:

Hili: The past lives in the present, and the present turns into the past.
Andrzej: And our thoughts are rarely original.

In Polish:

Hili Przeszłość jest w teraźniejszości, teraźniejszość zmienia się w przeszłość.
Ja: A nasze myśli rzadko są odkrywcze.

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

From Wholesome Memes:

From Jesus of the Day. Is this true?

From Now That’s Wild:

Masih shows a video of an Iranian woman who masks her identity (a wise move) to publicly criticize the theocracy:

“End this war now, a wounded Islamic republic will take revenge on us unarmed people in Iran ”
I’ve received this video from a woman inside Iran risking imprisonment or worse to tell the world who the people of fear the most.
Ask anyone in touch with Iran. The warning is clear. pic.twitter.com/rHfuPLTXZw

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) June 24, 2025

From Malcolm: the real size of the world’s countries after removing the Mercator distortion:

Actual size of countries on the world map, without the Mercator projection distortion. pic.twitter.com/VkeWAgyw9r

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 19, 2025

There are more tweets about earthquakes in this thread (from my feed), but this one is chilling:

The worst catastrophes on earth.

A thread 🧵

1. 23 year old petrified woman who was caught in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii in 79 A.D. pic.twitter.com/Zhq3pIhnPW

— Today In History (@historigins) June 26, 2025

One I posted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A Dutch Jewish girl was gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz, probably dead within two hours of the selection. She was ten.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-27T12:55:15.313Z

And one tweet from Matthew showing an important letter from Francis Crick:

A letter to Crick from his pal Georg Kreisel, on hearing about the existence of introns in eukaryotic genes, which Crick described in a Science article "Split genes and RNA splicing".

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-06-27T10:33:48.819Z

Today may be a truncated Hili dialogue as I’m leaving Brooklyn for Chicago. I will do what I can. Bear with me: I do my best.

Welcome to Thursday, June 26, 2025, and National Onion Day. Someone (perhaps it was Nora Ephron) once said that onions and Coca-Cola are similar in that they are really tasty and we’d pay any price to get them, but fortunately they are common and cheap.

Here’s how they grow the big onions they use in restaurants, including the famous “Blooming Onion” at Outback Steakhouse. I’ve never been there, but I would love such a battered and fried onion:

Here’s a blooming onion: Wikipedia has an article on it!

It’s also Forgiveness Day, National Chocolate Pudding Day, and National Coconut Day. (Don’t forget to put the lime in the coconut.)

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

Da Nooz:

*After yesterday’s U.S. assessment that the strike on Fordo and other strikes didn’t set back Iran’s nuclear program by that much, the government has changed its tune. Damage was more severe than first thought.

Classified intelligence about the damage to Iran’s nuclear program from U.S. strikes was at the center of a political tempest on Wednesday as spy chiefs pushed out new assessments and President Trump continued to defend his assertion that Iran’s key facilities had been “obliterated.”

The C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, said the strikes had “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear program, and the administration suggested that the initial report, by the Defense Intelligence Agency, was based on preliminary assessments and was already outdated.

The damage was also being assessed by other U.S. spy agencies. No information that has become public from those assessments has supported Mr. Trump’s description of the level of destruction from the U.S. attack, though they all confirmed that the damage had been substantial.

The D.I.A. report was based on information from little more than 24 hours after the American attacks on three of Iran’s nuclear sites.

It described the level of damage as ranging from moderate to severe, according to people briefed on or familiar with its contents.

The report said that if the D.I.A.’s assumption that Fordo, the deepest underground of the sites, sustained a moderate level of damage is correct, then the facility would be inoperable and Iran would not try to rebuild its enrichment capabilities there, one of those people said. If the assumption proved incorrect, the report said, Iran could build a quick version of a nuclear weapon in months.

. . .The National Security Agency, which focuses on intercepted phone and internet communications, has been examining what Iranians have been saying about the strikes and the fate of their uranium stockpiles. And officials said the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which studies satellite imagery, has been looking at movements around the nuclear sites in the days before the American strikes.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, posted on social media about new intelligence that showed that it would take years if Iran chose to rebuild the three sites the American attack hit.

Officials said her comment was also based on new U.S. intelligence collected since the D.I.A. report was written Sunday. The new intelligence relates to the existing facilities hit by the U.S. strikes, not whether Iran could use other secret facilities to advance its work on nuclear weapon capability.

Gabbard, who didn’t want to attack Iran, appears to have changed her tune. Pressure from Trump?

New intelligence confirms what @POTUS has stated numerous times: Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed. If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordow, Esfahan) entirely, which would likely take years to do.

The…

— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) June 25, 2025

Stay tuned; things will change again!

*From the Wall Street Journal on the same topic:

The head of the U.N. atomic energy agency said U.S. and Israeli strikes caused “enormous damage” to Iran’s nuclear sites and warned of a new crisis if Iran refused to allow his agency to inspect the facilities.

The extent of the damage done to Tehran’s nuclear capabilities has been at issue since the U.S. joined Israel in attacking them. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is due to hold a briefing at the Pentagon Thursday morning to address a U.S. intelligence report that said the strikes had merely delayed Iran’s nuclear efforts by a few months, President Trump said.

Trump said he doesn’t think a nuclear deal with Iran is necessary after the strikes and said he believed the cease-fire between Israel and Iran would hold. Of new nuclear talks, he said the U.S. would be asking the Iranians for the same thing before Israel launched its attack. “We want no nuclear,” the president said, adding: “We destroyed the nuclear.”

The president has pushed back on the leaked report on the extent of the damage, saying Iran’s nuclear sites were “obliterated.” Hegseth said Wednesday the FBI has started a probe into how the preliminary assessment became public.

What else to know:

The Defense Intelligence Agency, which produced the classified report, said it was “a preliminary, low-confidence assessment—not a final conclusion.”

. . . The U.S. is making a fresh push to negotiate an end to the fighting in Gaza, hoping to build on the momentum of a cease-fire between Israel and Iran.

“We want no nuclear. We destroyed the nuclear.” Oy! At least he didn’t say “Nuc-u-lar”!

*Speaking of Tulsi, she was ignored again by the administration as it’s sending a delegation to Congress, with Trump concerned about the “leaks” in assessing the damage to Iran (my bolding):

The White House plans to limit classified intelligence sharing with Congress after leaks to the press of an early assessment undermined President Donald Trump’s claim that U.S. airstrikes obliterated Iranian nuclear facilities, a senior Trump administration official said, setting the stage for a contentious classified briefing before senators Thursday.

Amid a political battle over what the intelligence shows, the White House is expected to send four of its top national security officials to brief lawmakers: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, administration officials said.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who testified in March that U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, will be notably absent.

“Ratcliffe will represent the intelligence community,” the senior Trump administration official said of Gabbard’s absence, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans not yet made public. “The media is turning this into something it’s not.”

Poor Tulsi. She’s the Director of National Intelligence but doesn’t even get to go to Congress! What’s worse is the administration’s decision to limit what it tells Congress about sensitive issues that are, after all, things that Congress has a right to know.

*This is a nice gesture, but I have no idea how it could be implemented. According to the Times of Israel, Israel has offered medical care to Iranians injured in the recent attacks on the country by Israel and the U.S. Note the sentence I’ve put in bold:

Here’s the post if you can read Farsi:

مردم عزیز ایران،
آتش بس به اجرا گذاشته شده است. اکنون ابعاد خسارت آشکار می شود. در این لحظه، رژیم بر درصات ارشد خود متمرکز است، نه بر مراقبت از شهروندانشان.
ما در کنار شما هستیم و تیمی از پزشکان متخصص، از جمله متخصصان قلب، دیابت، بیماری های ریوی، بیماری های عفونی، انکولوژی و… pic.twitter.com/Wkg5VoB6St

— Mossad Farsi (@MossadSpokesman) June 26, 2025

How in hell is Mossad going to give medical aid to Iranians? Is Mossad going to come to Israel? That won’t work. Nor can Iranians go to Israel for treatment? This seems like a performative offer on the part of Mossad.

*Invoking Title IX, the government says that California cannot allow trans-identified men to compete in women’s sports. But California is ignoring that, despite the governor’s agreement with the administration on this issue.

The Trump administration said Wednesday that California must change its policies allowing transgender girls to compete on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

The U.S. Department of Education said it determined California’s education department and governing body for high school sports are violating Title IX, a federal law banning sex discrimination in education. The federal government said California must agree to change its policies in 10 days or “risk imminent enforcement action.” The administration could otherwise refer the state to the U.S. Justice Department, the Education Department said.

California, though, said it has no plans to change its policies.

“The California Department of Education believes all students should have the opportunity to learn and play at school, and we have consistently applied existing law in support of students’ rights to do so,” agency spokesperson Liz Sanders said in a statement.

. . . The announcement comes weeks after a trans student athlete garnered national attention over her participation in the California high school state track and field championship. The student, AB Hernandez, placed first in the girls high jump and triple jump, and second in the long jump. The California Interscholastic Federation, which ran the meet, awarded gold and silver medals to both Hernandez and other competitors who would have placed had she not participated. It was the first time the federation made such a rule change.

. . . U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon invoked Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s remarks on his podcast in March questioning the fairness of trans girls competing in girls sports.

In this case the government is right and California, supporting a policy unfair to women, is wrong.  Saying that does not make one either transphobic or pro-Trump.  But fairness is fairness.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron pretend they are in in postwar Poland:

Andrzej: what are you waiting for here?

Hili: We are queuing for meat..

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

From Apollo Kitty Kat:

From Lynne:

From The Language Nerds:

From Masih; some Iranian propaganda:

This is how Iran’s regime claims ‘Victory’!

State TV and city billboards show Trump on his knees before Khamenei. The Islamic Republic calls it a triumph.

Reality check:

– Top IRGC commanders eliminated.
– Nuclear sites turned to dust.
– @khamenei_ir hid underground for 12… pic.twitter.com/iLh02MDPxr

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) June 25, 2025

From Luana; a message for “progressives” from Van Jones:

Van Jones is an interesting figure in progressivism. He has a knack for saying things that are unpopular to other progressives at just the right moment. Here he talks about Israel’s military campaign and the danger posed by a nuclear Iran.pic.twitter.com/TOEjeGnU84

— i/o (@avidseries) June 21, 2025

From Malcolm: a cat ready for holiday:

Ready for vacation pic.twitter.com/6SVjuo6f0f

— No Context Cats (@nocontextscats) June 1, 2025

One I found.  Jew haters pretend that “Zionist” is not the same thing as Jew, but it has in effect become a euphemism for “Jew” This thread by a Canadian physician (i give only the first post) explains why:

Many activists and academics have been trying to separate Judaism from Zionism.

Let’s take a moment to understand why they want to do this, and why it’s an intellectually dishonest position to take.

A long 🧵…

/1 pic.twitter.com/KYgj4kHCWh

— David Jacobs (@DrJacobsRad) June 8, 2025

Two from my feed. The first one is very sweet:

This man brushes a crow and stopped, but the bird gives the brush back as it wanted more. pic.twitter.com/GQlC0exX0O

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) June 25, 2025

The Democrats refuse to call out some odious views of the new Democratic candidate for Mayor of NYC.  Dems are just so happy to win that they ignore his anti-Semitism:

Zohran Mamdani wants to globalize Intifada. I lived through it, here’s what that means. @OutnumberedFNC @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/eT5ZZUQPew

— Noa Tishby (@noatishby) June 25, 2025

One I retweeted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A French Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was three years old. And she would be 85 today if they hadn't murdered her.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-26T11:49:30.842Z

One from Dr. Cobb:

Stahl died, but Meselson is still alive at 95. And their 1958 experiment showing how DNA replicates is indeed “the most beautiful experiment in biology,” as Horace Judson put it.

Just learned that Frank Stahl (of the Meselson and Stahl DNA replication experiment ("the most beautiful experiment in biology") died at the beginning of April, to no fanfare. Here's a lovely video of them reminiscing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-tn…

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-06-26T10:01:55.570Z