Welcome to the Cruelest Day (and the first day back from the Memorial Day Holiday for most Americans: it is Tuesday, May 27, 2025, and National Grape Day. The grape we’re honoring today is Pedro Ximénez, which, as I noted the other day, when dried before pressing makes the finest sweet sherry (try the Lustau version). If you don’t like sweet wines, well, it’s your loss. . . .

It’s also Cellophane Tape Day (patented on this day in 1930),  and National Grape Popsicle Day.  Here’s an early package of the most famous brand, Scotch Tape. “Seals instantly without water” tells you how they were sealing stuff before.

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

Da Nooz:

*Here’s the “President”‘s message on Truth Social for Memorial Day.  What a stupid, juvenile, and retributive thing to say on a solemn day (the NYT calls his behavior yesterday ridden with “self valorization”):

*Once again Russia launched a massive drone and missile attack on Ukraine, just after Trump had rebuked Putin for Russia’s attack two days ago.

Russia launched its largest-ever drone-and-missile assault on Ukraine overnight into Monday, according to Ukrainian officials, defying President Trump’s calls for an end to the bombardment.

I wish Trump (and Vance) would lay off Zelensky. He didn’t start the war, and if the Russians want to negotiate, they should declare and observe a cease-fire.  But I still believe that, in the end, Ukraine will lose: not just a lot of Ukrainian lives sacrificed to defend their country, but will also have to give away (at the least) a big chunk of eastern Ukraine. The NYT notes that despite Trump’s criticism of Putin, he won’t join the sanctions imposed on Russia by the EU, nor will he give additional arms to Ukraine:

Mr. Trump has long said he enjoys a “good relationship” with Mr. Putin, and it was not the first time he expressed shock that the Russian president was unleashing attacks on Ukrainian civilians. A month ago Mr. Trump wrote “Vladimir, STOP” as a barrage of missiles and drones hit Ukraine, including crowded playgrounds. But Mr. Trump has never linked the attacks with his own decision, reaffirmed last week, to refuse to join the Europeans in new financial sanctions on Russia, or to offer new arms and help to the Ukrainians.

The result is a strategic void in which Mr. Trump complains about Russian’s continued killing but so far has been unwilling to make Mr. Putin pay even a modest price.

*The NYT describes how thousands of people, most of them Venezuelans, have given up trying to get into the U.S. and are returning, often in dangerous ways, to their home countries.

There is no clear figure for how many people have decided to leave the United States or given up on reaching it, and migration at the southern border had dropped sharply even before Mr. Trump took office for a second time.

But in one indication that some migrants are starting to return to South America, more than 10,000 people — virtually all from Venezuela — have taken boats from Panama to Colombia since January, according to Panamanian officials, who say that more are setting out each week.

That is a tiny number compared with the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who entered the United States and Mexico in recent years, but the busy new boat route toward South America is a sign, according to migrants, officials and rights groups, that the Trump administration’s harsh tactics are having an effect.

“The world is hearing our message that America’s borders are closed to lawbreakers,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement. “Migrants are now even turning back before they reach our borders.”

For those in the United States, she said, “it’s an easy choice: Leave voluntarily and receive $1,000,” referring to the government’s offer for “voluntary self deportation.”

While the administration may claim success, experts say, many migrants face so many barriers to heading home that even if they are willing, it is extremely challenging to turn back.

“They’re stuck, wherever they are,” said Juan Cruz, who served as Mr. Trump’s top Latin America adviser during his first term, noting that many migrants are impoverished and indebted and lack travel documents. Venezuelans, he added, also face a government hostile to those who left for the United States.

This is a tough situation, but the government made it clear that it will not accept undocumented immigrants. I heard Kristi Noem on t.v. saying that if they return to their home countries, they “have a chance to come back” to the U.S., but I don’t think that chance is very large!

*With the U.S. negotiating with Hamas, Trump has suggested a cease-fire deal, but it was roundly rejected by Israel.

Responding to a Lebanese report that a new outline for a hostage and ceasefire proposal had been agreed upon in principle by Israel, a senior Israeli official said Monday the deal has been rejected.

“The proposal received by Israel cannot be accepted by any responsible government,” the official told the media, without giving any further details.

“Hamas is setting impossible conditions that mean a complete failure to meet the war goals, and an inability to release the hostages,” he said.

The main organization representing the families of hostages also rejected the reported deal, saying it would not include the return of all of the captives and a final end to the war.

A flurry of reports cited sources saying that a new ceasefire deal was in the offing, similar to previous agreements, under which fighting in the Gaza Strip would halt for a period of time during which Israeli hostages would be released and humanitarian aid to the enclave boosted.

The Lebanese outlet Al-Mayadeen, which is affiliated with the Hezbollah terror group, reported that Israel had agreed in principle to a draft proposal that called for a ceasefire of about 70 days during which 10 living hostages would be released in two phases, modifying the so-called Witkoff outline, which laid out a shorter ceasefire for the release of about 10 living hostages.

But the Israeli official described the proposal as one that “does not indicate a real desire to bridge the gaps between the parties” and said it was “very far” from the one originally proposed by Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

“There is no genuine willingness on Hamas’s part to move forward with a deal. Israel remains committed to the Witkoff framework,” he said.

This is a no-go, even for the families of the still-living hostages (the IDF thinks there are between 24 and 27 living hostages). Letting them go in dribs and drabs is not acceptable, and I’m also glad that the hostage-family-representing organization demands a “final end to the war,” which I take to mean a surrender by Hamas.  Not mentioned in this article is Hamas’s inevitable demand for the return of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, but for sure there would have been one.

*With the Democratic party so riven that people are even floating the idea of running Kamala Harris for President in 2028, the Party is now arguing about. . .  language. But if that sounds picayune, remember that Democratic wokeness was likely an important factor in the last election. The Washington Post reports:

Maybe it’s using the word “oligarchs” instead of rich people. Or referring to “people experiencing food insecurity” rather than Americans going hungry. Or “equity” in place of “equality,” or “justice-involved populations” instead of prisoners.

As Democrats wrestle with who to be in the era of President Donald Trump, a growing group of party members — especially centrists — is reviving the argument that Democrats need to rethink the words they use to talk with the voters whose trust they need to regain.

They contend that liberal candidates too often use language from elite, highly educated circles that suggests the speakers consider themselves smart and virtuous, while casting implied judgment on those who speak more plainly — hardly a formula for winning people over, they say.

The latest debate is, in part, also a proxy for the bigger battle over what the Democrats’ identity should be in the aftermath of November’s devastating losses — especially as the party searches for ways to reverse its overwhelming rejection by rural and White working-class voters.

“Some words are just too Ivy League-tested terms,” said Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona). “I’m going to piss some people off by saying this, but ‘social equity’ — why do we say that? Why don’t we say, ‘We want you to have an even chance’?”

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear — who like Gallego is considered a potential 2028 Democratic presidential hopeful — made a similar point.

“I believe that over time, and probably for well-meaning reasons, Democrats have begun to speak like professors and started using advocacy-speak that was meant to reduce stigma, but also removed the meaning and emotion behind words,” Beshear said, citing such examples as using “substance abuse disorder” to refer to addiction.

But of course “equity” is not at all the same thing as “equality”, and is an “even chance” the same as “equal opportunity”? Yes, given that the election showed a tendency towards populism, it’s not a good thing for Democratic politicians to sound like college professors.  The same goes for “sex spectrum”; I think people have about had the “there-are-not-two-sexes-in-humans” argument up the ying-yang, as evidenced by the very lame performance of Agustín Fuentes’s new book, Sex is a Spectrum. James Carville has been saying this for some time, and the old curmudgeon is right!

*Feminist Susan Brownmiller had died at 90.  She became famous for popularizing the view that rape was an act not of sex, but of power. From the NYT:

I mourn her loss for we were, for a while, email friends, and discussed the idea of Thornhill and Palmer that rape was an evolutionary adaptation rather than a “spandrel.”  She even bought me a vial of Cuba Gold Eau de Toilette when she learned that I smoked Cuban cigars (I no longer smoke, but I still use the cologne, which is excellent and a bargain). Sadly, we lost touch because I could not agree with her that rape was 100% about power and 0% about sex, as I thought it involved a mixture of both.  I still think it does, but nevertheless, Brownmiller made a big advance in emphasizing the power and male-domination character of rape and discussing its history.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili thinks that humans should sleep, like cats and hominin ancestors, when the sun is down:

Hili: How did people live without electricity?

A: LIke cats in those times.

Hili: Jak ludzie żyli bez elektryczności?

Ja: Tak jak koty w tamtych czasach.

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

From CinEmma:

From Jesus of the Day, how you can go wrong with bad grammar:

From Seth. a cartoon by Dennis Goris:

Masih is back, and decrying America’s negotiations with Iran:

To those who say “America First,” let me be clear:
For Islamist terrorists, America is First too.
Their war begins by attacking American values, poisoning our youth, and infiltrating university campuses.

Millions of Iranians know the truth: the Islamic Republic CANNOT be… pic.twitter.com/09tRhfd6MP

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

From Luana; more violation of women’s spaces:

The entire four-person “women’s” team in a video-game competition is composed of biological men. (Though women are apparently allowed to watch and smile and clap when the men do something good.) https://t.co/KaZEJJ6ZfR

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) May 26, 2025

From Barry, a cat and a d*g play Debussy. Barry notes, “Some impressive technique here.”

can’t think of a better, more productive use of time tbh

— Amy Hoy (@amyhoy.bsky.social) 2025-05-25T23:28:18.605Z

From Malcolm, a cat enjoying the sun:

Oh to be an orange kitty sunbathing in the sun pic.twitter.com/pLDahVLoHS

— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) May 14, 2025

Two from my feed. This first moggy is pretty, but I’ve seen prettier:

Oh to be an orange kitty sunbathing in the sun pic.twitter.com/pLDahVLoHS

— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) May 14, 2025

Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree. . . :

Sound of a kookaburra bird
pic.twitter.com/5KQ89wgeLB

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) May 25, 2025

One that I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A 50-year-old French woman was gassed upon arriving at Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-27T09:56:08.522Z

Two posts from Professor Cobb, slowly recovering. The video is below the post:

he definitely cries during this

— onion person (@junlper.beer) 2025-05-25T19:16:59.998Z

I’d love to watch this one, but it’s too long. If you do, put in the comments the place where he cries:

Here’s a paper showing strong natural selection, though I haven’t read it yet:

🚨New paper alert!🚨We show that hummingbird beaks have changed in shape & size since around WWII, driven by the rise of commercialized feeders! 🧵📄 Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb….#ornithology #evolution #GlobalChangeBiology

— Nicolas Alexandre (@nicmalexandre.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T13:20:01.895Z

Welcome to Sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, May 25, 2025 and National Wine Day. I love sweet wines if they’re made well, and I invite you to review this 2023 post on what I think is the world’s greatest value for sweet wine.  Lustau also makes another terrific wine if you like dry sherry: its finos, especially FIno Jarana ?Solera, only about $16/bottle. Eschew cocktails: a Lustau fino is the best way to start a meal, getting that saliva flowing.

It’s also Towel Day, celebrating Douglas Adams and his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the running of the Indianapolis 500 race.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 25 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The UN is meeting in June to consider whether Palestine (including Gaza, Judea, and Samaria) should be considered a state.

An international conference meant to resurrect the idea of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict will take place from June 17 to 20 at the United Nations headquarters in New York, a UN spokeswoman said Friday.

The conference stems from a resolution approved in December by the UN General Assembly, and it will be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia. A diplomat in Paris close to preparations for the conference said it should pave the way for more countries to recognize a full-blown Palestinian state.

Nearly 150 countries recognize the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority as the State of Palestine, which has observer status at the United Nations but is not a full member as the UN Security Council has not voted to admit it.

In May 2024, Ireland, Norway and Spain took the step of recognizing a Palestinian state, infuriating Israel. Other European governments, including France, have not.

French President Emmanuel Macron said in April that Paris could recognize a Palestinian state in the coming months, possibly at the June conference. The French president’s statement drew a furious response from Israel, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling it a “huge prize for terror.”

Macron said at the time that he wished to organize the New York conference to encourage not just recognition of a Palestinian state, “but also a recognition of Israel from states that currently do not.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) greets French President Emmanuel Macron before a meeting in Jerusalem on October 24, 2023. (Christophe Ena/Pool/AFP)

The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 during US President Donald Trump’s first term. However, many Arab countries have yet to join the agreement, including Saudi Arabia and Israeli neighbors Syria and Lebanon, though Trump has recently indicated that Syria and Saudi Arabia could join the Accords in due course.

I’m flabbergasted that countries are urging the establishment of a Palestinian state at this point.  Do they think that this is going to solve the hatred of Palestinians towards Israel and Jews, or end terror attacks on Israel? Remember that Palestinians have rejected reasonable offers of their own state at least five times since 1937.  What they want far more than their own state is for the state of Israel to go away. Importantly, who is going to govern this state, which presumably would include Judea and Samaria, technically parts of Israel under control of Palestinians? Hamas will not allow the Palestinian Authority to be in charge, for Hamas hates them. And the PA is itself an organization that promotes terrorism and the elimination of Israel.  No, now is not the time for such a state; as people who are rational recognize, this cannot occur until Hamas and other terrorist organizations are gone the Palestinians acquire a group of leaders whose mission is to create a prosperous and peaceful state, not one that wants to wipe out Israel and kill Jews. And this is not possible now. What are France, Ireland, Norway, and Spain thinking?

*This may seem like piling on, but Matthew brought this article in Defector (by Sabrine Imbler) to my attention: “Colossal Biosciences can’t have it both ways.” (See yesterday’s article about how Colossal admitted that it really hadn’t “de-exincted” the dire wolf.)

On April 7, the New Yorker and Time ran nearly identical stories that might be better described as press releases for the de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences. The two stories differed slightly: The New Yorker‘s headline proclaimed “The Dire Wolf Is Back,” whereas Time‘s announced “The Return of the Dire Wolf.” While the New Yorker led with a photo of a cub, Time led with a photo of a fully grown wolf. But the effect of these stories was the same, both creating the impression that the dire wolf is indeed back after 10,000 years of extinction.

What these stories seemed less interested in was the fact that the dire wolf was, in fact, not at all back, nor will it return anytime soon. Colossal is a company that runs on PR stunts, and the latest hoopla instigated a wave of criticism from scientists seeking to set the record straight: The “dire wolf” on the cover of these glossy magazines was not a dire wolf, meaning an individual of the extinct canine species Aenocyon dirus. Instead, the “dire wolf” was a modern wolf with 20 genetic edits, none of which involved the splicing of actual dire wolf DNA. “It’s not a dire wolf. It’s misleading to call it that,” Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo, told Chemical and Engineering News. “I can’t explain how pissed off it made me, because they’re still saying this stuff, and they know it to not be true.”

This week, Michael Le Page at New Scientistpublished a more recent interview with Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief scientist, who appeared to concede to critics’ points that the company had not actually de-extincted a dire wolf. “It’s not possible to bring something back that is identical to a species that used to be alive. Our animals are grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned,” Shapiro told New Scientist. “And we’ve said that from the very beginning. Colloquially, they’re calling them dire wolves and that makes people angry.”

I don’t disagree with Shapiro’s first point: It is not currently possible to bring back something that is identical to an extinct species. But I disagree wholeheartedly with her second. Has Colossal said, from the beginning, that de-extinction is impossible, and that the dire wolf is not a real dire wolf? Of course it hasn’t. Le Page, to counter, cites Colossal’s April 7 press release: “Colossal Announces World’s First De-Extinction: Birth of Dire Wolves.”

This whole strategy—making enormous claims to guarantee wall-to-wall coverage in the press, only to later quietly correct such claims in an interview with a single publication—is not just dishonest, but also patronizing. Shapiro’s defense of Colossal’s “colloquial” usage of dire wolves is not intellectually serious, as Colossal relies on the obfuscation of how, exactly, they are defining dire wolves in order to garner press coverage. Shapiro’s inclusion of herself among the “we” that has been saying this from the beginning versus her exclusion of herself from the “they” that is calling them dire wolves is frustrating, too. She is Colossal’s chief scientist, one of their major talking heads, and an expert whose body of real scientific work lends credence to Colossal’s entire undertaking.

One of my Facebook friends said it was great that Shapiro walked back Colossal’s overblown claims. After all, he said, it’s good that scientists correct themselves. The problem with this statement is that Colossal and Shapiro knew from the outset that their claims were misleading. It wasn’t that science somehow corrected their claims; it was that scientists weren’t buying those claims, and Colossal realized that eventually they’d be shown up as fools.  And yet, as you can see from the “de-extinction” section of their website, they persist in talking out of both sides of their mouth. [See next story to see Colossal waffling once again!]

*After Harvard was ordered by the administration to stop accepting international students (and to get rid of the ones it has), the University successfully got a hold on that order from a federal court. Yesterday the NYT discussed which American colleges and universities have the most foreign students (they usually pay full tuition). I don’t see much order here except that there are a lot of school heavy on STEMM (as expected), and the schools tend to be prestigious.

The share of international students studying at these colleges and across the United States has been growing for the past two decades as rising incomes in countries like China and India have produced more families looking to educate their children in America.

Domestic forces have played a role, too: Public research universities in particular have turned to international students, who commonly pay full price for tuition, to help compensate for declines in state funding for education.

“We have all this debate about trade deficits with China right now,” said Gaurav Khanna, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied these shifts in higher education. “That’s a deficit in goods. But when you think of services — like higher ed services — we have a big surplus.”

And here’s a survey of 193 colleges and universities since 2000 showing the rising proportion of graduate + undergraduate students who are foreigners:

One more quote:

It seems to me misguided to want foreign students because they pay full fare and subsidize American students.  The reason we should accept them is that we can only enrich the American university by expanding the pool of talent it garners and serves, and because it is a sort of duty that we have to allow people to get educated here and then take their education back to where they came from.

*Speaking of these schools, Andrew Sullivan’s column this week is relevant: “Trump declares war on Harvard.” An excerpt, first giving the brickbats and then the roses:

Harvard in recent years has betrayed that liberal calling, of course, effectively sacrificing the idea of a liberal university in favor of an illiberal machine for systematic discrimination and neo-Marxist indoctrination. This is not true of all of it, of course. For a defense of the freedoms Harvard still maintains, and the excellence of a lot of the scholarship it still produces, check out Steven Pinker’s op-ed today. But it proudly selects students and faculty by race, sex, and ideology — and seems to have largely ignored the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. And when a public university breaks civil rights laws, suppresses free debate, allows intimidation of Jews, and chills dissent within, it should be held to account.

So let me say upfront, I have no problem with suing Harvard for its discrimination, and penalizing it for allowing the physical and psychological intimidation of Jewish students — or indeed of any students not wedded to the maxims of critical theory. I don’t have a problem raising taxes on university endowments either. They have a lot of money and charge exorbitant fees. But there is a clear line between demanding a university abide by the law and pay its taxes and dictating what it can teach, how it conducts its own affairs, and whom it can hire. Harvard is as right to resist King Donald I in this respect as Magdalen was in defying King James II.

. . . . Stripping Harvard of hundreds of millions of dollars for scientific research in order to punish queer theorists in the English Department is capricious, idiotic, and malevolent. But the blunt withdrawal of certification so that Harvard has to lose a quarter of its student body immediately, along with an even greater percentage of its tuition income, is clearly an attempt to destroy the place. It’s spite and vengeance.

This is not about ending wokeness; it’s about extending wokeness to correct what DHS calls, in classic woke terminology, “an unsafe campus environment.” It’s not about expanding free speech; it’s about more surveillance, restriction, and sanctions on free expression, as the case of Rümeysa Öztürk proves. The DHS secretary — who graduated from South Dakota State University at the age of 41, and who has no idea what habeas corpus is — wants Harvard to provide “any and all video footage, in the possession of Harvard University, of any protest activity involving a nonimmigrant student on a Harvard University campus in the last five years.”

Not violence, not criminal action, just “protest activity.” What is this, the Soviet Union? We already know Rubio is surveilling and targeting foreign students purely for their speech in a blatant assault on the First Amendment. And this assault on Harvard is merely an extension of the administration’s attempt to control and censor political debate.

In all this destruction, the damage this administration is doing to this country’s investment in scientific and medical research is profound, irreparable, and moronic. Targeting smart foreign students the US should be eager to attract is another act of egregious self-harm. Forcing a quarter of a university’s students to leave the country almost at once is malice, not policy. The persecution of foreign students — I was once one of them — makes no sense, except as cheap jingoism, xenophobia, and the crudest nativism.

I’ve lamented Harvard’s steep decline, illiberalism, intolerance, and racism. I find its leftist faculty terrifyingly illiberal and its liberal faculty, for the most part, spineless cowards. (There are effectively almost no conservative faculty left.) But when an administration is pursuing policies not for reform but destruction, when it is focused on targeting every institution in society that does not echo its own ideology, when it is motivated by revenge and malice and not the common good, and when it is run by know-nothing demagogues like Noem, I will rally behind Harvard as doggedly as Magdalen’s 17th century dons fought back against King James. This is the West.

Ius suum cuique!

That last bit means “to each his due.” But let nobody think that Sullivan has a scintilla of love for Trump. He may approve of some of the things that Trump ordered (like using the biological definition of sexes), but he knows what autocracy, stupidity, and mendacity is when he sees it.

*And from the AP’s reliable oddities section, we learn that an American news anchor kept on delivering the news as her water broke.

Local news co-anchor Olivia Jaquith went ahead with a three-hour morning newscast even after her labor contractions began and her water broke, keeping viewers updated about the coming birth of her first baby.

“We do have some breaking news this morning — literally,” co-anchor Julia Dunn said at the top of the CBS6 Albany broadcast Wednesday morning. “Olivia’s water has broke, and she is anchoring the news now in active labor.”

“Early labor, early labor,” replied Jaquith, who was two days past her due date.

Jaquith stayed on air as Dunn kept recording on Facebook Live.

“I’m happy to be here, and I’ll stay on the desk for as long as I possibly can,” Jaquith said. “But if I disappear, that’s what’s going on.”

Jaquith had the option of going home, but she told the Times-Union that she decided to pass the time at her job rather than “nervously waiting around at the hospital.”

“Having the entire morning team alongside me cracking jokes helped me get through contractions much easier,” she said in a text to the newspaper.

The birth of her baby boy, Quincy, was announced Thursday.

Here’s Olivia on the air while she goes into labor:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej mansplains to Hili:

Hili: What is female intuition?

A: An art of drawing conclusions from everyday observations. Women are gatherers.

Hili: Co to jest kobieca intuicja?

Ja: Sztuka wyciągania wniosków z codziennych obserwacji. Kobiety są zbieraczkami.

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

From Things With Faces, a ballerina tree.  I hope this real but I smell the mendacity of AI:

From The Dodo Pet, a brave sheepdog:

From Now That’s Wild:

Masih is still quiet, but here’s J. K. Rowling using the biological definition of “woman” in her ongoing fight with India Willoughby:

A woman is an adult human whose body is organised to produce large gametes. One easy way to tell if you’re a woman is to ask yourself: have I ever produced sperm? If, as in your case, the answer is ‘yes’, you are a surgically altered man enacting a male idea of femaleness. pic.twitter.com/b5hqQZsJnk

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 24, 2025

From Luana, bizarre foreign legal strictures:

It is so grotesque when European countries cannot deport foreign rapists and murderers due to alleged “human rights” enforced by undemocratic EU courts, that even our left-wing Danish Prime Minister can see this.

“It is simply not a human right to come to Denmark and kill”. pic.twitter.com/WhyjOR1ZE9

— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) May 24, 2025

From Malcolm. Notice that the second (“experienced”) guy really does bring down the wall:

New employee vs experienced employeepic.twitter.com/pEQkFcwfKl

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 7, 2025

Two from my feed.  I have a poem for this first one:  Capybara has no fear/But why that’s so just isn’t clear.

Capybara is the boss in the swamp 😆 pic.twitter.com/jLGTTL0mGe

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) May 23, 2025

A quick check on a joey:

How do they keep their pouches clean? pic.twitter.com/sRUJckF4Vl

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) May 24, 2025

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was fifteen years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-25T09:20:23.048Z

Two posts from Matthew. He calls this “turtles all the way down.” The Sagrada Familia is a masterpiece; a must-see in Barcelona.

#WorldTurtleDayGaudi placed 2 great turtles at the base of columns on facade of his spectacular Sagrada Familia in #Barcelona – a sea turtle + this land based one.They symbolize the stability of the cosmos and are said to emphasize the permanence and unchangeable nature of time.

— Becky Wallower (@bwallower.bsky.social) 2025-05-23T13:12:07.453Z

And Matthew adds to this one, “How could he be sure?”

— Hillary Monahan (@hillarymonahan.bsky.social) 2025-05-23T17:52:54.298Z

Welcome to CaturSaturday and the sabbath for Jewish cats: it’s May 24, 2025 and National Escargot Day.  I don’t like ’em, but ducks do! In South Africa, they release Indian runner ducks in the vineyards to eat the snails that impede the growth of the grapevines. Look and this herd of “pencil ducks”:

It’s also National Cocktail Day, National Chocolate Covered Raisins Day (we used to call them “rabbit turds” when we’d eat them at the movies), and National Cheesesteak Day. Here’s the restaurant editor of Bon Appetit trying 19 cheesesteaks in Philadelphia (the home of this sandwich) in 24 hours, and sussing out the best one, which happens to be from Angelo’s Pizzeria.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 24 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Re Friday morning’s post about Harvard, things have moved swiftly. A federal judge in Boston blocked the administration from implementing its plan to prevent Harvard from accepting more foreign students as well as booting out the ones it already has. (Article archived here.)

Harvard University sued the Trump administration on Friday, less than 24 hours after the Department of Homeland Security said it would block international students from attending the nation’s oldest university and one of its most prestigious.

Later Friday morning, at the university’s request, a federal judge in Boston moved swiftly to block implementation of the federal government’s order.

The judge, Allison D. Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order against the federal edict, agreeing that Harvard had shown that its implementation would cause “immediate and irreparable injury” to the university.

The administration action, and Harvard’s response, signified a dramatic escalation of the battle between the administration and Harvard. And the university’s forceful and almost immediate response served as evidence that stopping the flow of international students to Harvard, which draws some of the world’s top scholars, would destabilize Harvard’s very existence.

In a letter to the Harvard community delivered Friday morning, Dr. Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, wrote, “We condemn this unlawful and unwarranted action,” adding that it “imperils the futures of thousands of students and scholars across Harvard and serves as a warning to countless others at colleges and universities throughout the country who have come to America to pursue their education and fulfill their dreams.”

The lawsuit, which accused the Trump administration of a “campaign of retribution” against the university followed an announcement on Thursday that Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification had been revoked, halting the university’s ability to enroll international students.

The lawsuit was the second time in a matter of weeks the university had sued the federal government.

In the new lawsuit, the university accused the Trump administration of exerting “clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.”

This was pretty much predictable given the rapid and immediate damage that implementation of the government’s order would cause, not to mention the chaos in the lives of foreign students.  I am counting on the courts to rectify Trump’s obviously illegal moves, but the Supreme Court, as far as I know, has not definitely overturned any of them.

*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s snarky news summary at the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: Fit to serve.”

→ What’s the latest, Mr. President? And returning from a huge trip to the Middle East, President Trump, as far as regards Middle East policy goals on a 20-year time horizon and a reimagining of the JCPOA, had this to say on Truth Social:

→ We do not need an immigrant competition show: The Department of Homeland Security wants to develop a reality show titled The American, where immigrants compete through a variety of challenges “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship.” This is real. And the challenges will be incredible: finding the rotisserie chicken aisle at Costco; binge-watching Yellowstone without peeing the longest; seeing how fast you can get diabetes. DHS has been working with writer and producer Rob Worsoff (supervising producer of The Millionaire Matchmaker, co-exec producer of Duck Dynasty), who, in his 35-page show proposal, said that the show will aim to “celebrate what it means to be American and have a national conversation about what it means to be American, through the eyes of the people who want it most.” It’s a Hunger Games. It’s a Squid Game. But it’s real people, trying to escape gang wars and starvation. By singing a Luke Combs song in front of a studio audience and then doing an obstacle course after eating a Big Mac. I hate myself because I know I’ll watch this.

→ This is technically still illegal: Trump’s Department of Justice opened a civil rights investigation into Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, alleging he hired city employees solely because of their race, after the mayor gave a speech saying he hires solely based on race. Here’s Mayor Johnson: “Detractors . . . will push back on me and say, ‘The only thing the mayor talks about is the hiring of black people.’ No, what I’m saying is, when you hire our people, we always look out for everybody else. We are the most generous people on the planet. I don’t know too many cultures that have play cousins. That’s how generous we are.” He then lists all the city leaders who are black and all the reasons the black race is superior for these roles. Anyway, typical MAGA craziness going after a normal American mayor who is simply doing diversity.

*I can’t help but be amused at this because North Korea, though an odious regime and perhaps the world’s most oppressive country, is also hamhanded.  So, in attempt to modernize its antiquated navy, Kim Jong-Un got a new warship built and launched. It sank.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s dream of modernizing his country’s outdated naval fleet suffered a major setback after a much-touted warship crashed into the water after a botched exit from the dock.

Kim, who witnessed the mishap unfold at a Wednesday launch event, lambasted officials for their “absolute carelessness, irresponsibility and unscientific empiricism” in causing the “serious accident,” North Korea’s state media reported. The 41-year-old dictator equated the gaffe to a criminal act.

The unnamed 5,000-ton destroyer had been docked at a shipyard in Chongjin, a northeastern port city. As it was pushed sideways toward the water, the ship didn’t move in parallel. Its hull got crushed and its bow got stranded on the shipway, state media said.

Citing satellite imagery of the shipyard, South Korea’s military said the destroyer lay on its side in the water. North Korean state media didn’t publish images from the launch event or mention any injuries.

The warship represents one of Kim’s crown jewels in his push to upgrade North Korea’s naval fleet. Much of the country’s ships are from the Soviet era—and pale in comparison to the nuclear-powered submarines, warships and vessels possessed by the U.S. and South Korea.

Atop a country with serious food shortages, a down economy and widespread human-rights abuse, Kim has leaned heavily on military breakthroughs to boost morale and demonstrate the nation’s strength. Officials responsible for the warship blunder were censured for the fault. Kim vowed a turnaround by next month.

The accident, Kim was quoted as saying, “brought the dignity and self-respect of our state to a collapse.”

. . . . In recent months, Kim had showered extra attention on his country’s naval operations, visiting shipyards and touting breakthroughs. He oversaw a successful rollout in late April of another warship from the “Choe Hyon” class, named after a general who served under Kim’s grandfather and country founder Kim Il Sung.

Desiring for the North to become a maritime power, Kim Jong Un, in a lengthy speech, linked naval advances to his nation’s sovereignty, since the country has seas off its eastern and western coasts. A fleet of elite warships, he declared, guarantees peace and development.

Jong-Un’s words presage, to anyone who follows North Korea, that whoever designed that ship is destined for a quick end. . . or a lifetime stint in one of the country’s many horrible prison camps. Here’s a news clip about the accident:

*First Trump levies tariffs on many countries, and then Wal-Mart, reluctantly, raises some of its prices. That will hurt consumers, but it also angered Trump, who pressured the company to put back its prices. When is he going to learn the lesson that everyone knows; it you start a trade war by raising tariffs, consumer prices will rise?  Nevertheless, Trump is threatening a steep increase in tariffs on, of all places, the EU. And Europe doesn’t even smuggle fentanyl into the U.S.!:

President Donald Trump on Friday threatened a 50% tariff on goods from the European Union, citing a lack of progress in current trade negotiations.

“Their powerful Trade Barriers, Vat Taxes, ridiculous Corporate Penalties, Non-Monetary Trade Barriers, Monetary Manipulations, unfair and unjustified lawsuits against Americans Companies, and more, have led to a Trade Deficit with the U.S. of more than $250,000,000 a year, a number which is totally unacceptable,” he wrote in a Truth Social post Friday morning.

“Our discussions with them are going nowhere!” Trump wrote.

“Therefore, I am recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025.”

Olof Gill, a spokesperson for the European Commission, declined to comment immediately, saying he was waiting until after a call between Maroš Šefčovič, European Commissioner for Trade, and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. Gill did not specify when the call is taking place. Reuters reported it’s set to occur at 11 a.m. ET on Friday. A USTR spokesperson didn’t respond to a CNN request for comment.

Shortly after Trump’s Truth Social post on Friday morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a Fox News interview that the “EU proposals have not been of the same quality that we’ve seen from our other important trading partners.”

“I’m not going to negotiate on TV, but I would hope that this would light a fire under the EU,” Bessent said, adding that the “EU has a collective action problem.”

The three major European stock market indexes fell sharply after Trump’s post: The benchmark STOXX 600 index was down 1.7%. Germany’s DAX fell 2.4% and France’s CAC index slid 2.2%. London’s FTSE index was 1% down. US stocks also slid, with the Dow opening lower by 480 points, or 1.15%. Stocks came off their lows after Bessent said in a Bloomberg TV interview on Friday that he expects US trade representatives to meet in person with Chinese officials again to continue trade negotiations following a temporary pause in higher tariff rates.

The stock falls are predictable, as are the price rises that will follow any increase. Are they going to raise the price of French, German, and Spanish wine, for crying out loud?

*Reader John sent a link about how a clever Cooper’s Hawk (Astur cooperii) figured out how to hunt using traffic lights.

The story starts with Vladimir Dinets, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the study’s author, and an intersection in West Orange, New Jersey, near his home. As a zoologist, he had long been interested in animals’ perspective on and understanding of urban environments—and in birds’ relationship with cars, in particular. Scientists have previously observed ravens patrol American highways waiting for roadkill and songbirds using cars to hide from predators.

Dinets was on the lookout for these interesting interactions when a young Cooper’s hawk migrated into his neighborhood and started doing something brilliant.

The intersection wasn’t particularly busy, even during rush hour, Dinets wrote in a guest editorial for Frontiers in Ethology. But sometimes, a pedestrian would cross the street, causing cars to pile up all the way to a small, bushy tree down the block. The pedestrian “walk” signal would also make a sound that indicated it was time to walk.

One morning, Dinets saw the hawk emerge from the tree, fly very low above the line of cars, cross the street between the cars, and then dive to get something near one of the houses.

Then the same thing happened again. And again.

It turns out that the family that lived in that house near the bushy tree liked to have dinner in their front yard. In response, birds—like sparrows and doves—would flock there to claim the leftover crumbs.

That made for easy pickings for the hawk, who would swoop down into the yard to catch said sparrows and doves. But, curiously, the hawk only did this when cars were lined up along the block all the way to the tree.

Dinets eventually figured out that the line of cars provided cover for the hawk, and that the hawk had learned to recognize the sound of the pedestrian “walk” signal. As soon as a pedestrian pressed the button, the hawk would fly from wherever it had been hanging out and into the small, bushy tree. It would then wait for cars to pile up before using the line of cars as cover to sneak up on its prey.

The hawk had, apparently, learned to use the pedestrian signal as a cue to start heading over to the house crowded with defenseless birds, according to Dinets.

“That meant that the hawk understood the connection between the sound and the eventual car queue length,” Dinets explained. The hawk also apparently had a good mental map of the neighborhood.

The family moved away and the light stopped working, so the story, for now, is over. This should have been documented and published in a bird journal, but I doubt that it is, and I can’t find any video.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is preening:

Hili: Do you see what I see?

A: No, you see me and I see you.

Hili: So what you are seeing is more beautiful.

Hili: Czy ty widzisz to, co ja widzę?

Ja: Nie, ty widzisz mnie, a ja widzę ciebie.

Hili: Czyli to, co ty widzisz jest piękniejsze.

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

From Things with Faces, a sad banana:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Annie:

Masih is quiet against, so let’s have JKR agreeing with a man who gives primacy to biology over imagination:

Everything he says 👇 https://t.co/TcE8H6ol9Y

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 22, 2025

From Luana, more of the kind of injustice that JKR, Luana, and I dislike:

Two males took home medals at a “women’s+” longsword competition in Oklahoma last week, seizing both first and third place.

Beatrice Lostracco and Fox Graves were just two of the men competing against women at the Spring Fechten tournament.https://t.co/JuV9Gn6bFw

— REDUXX (@ReduxxMag) May 21, 2025

From Barry. For some reason I find this hilarious:

From Bryan, some nice jazz:

Scatman Crothers was born on this day in 1910.
Scatman played drums with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, played Scat Cat in the Aristocats, he shined in The Shining, and voiced Hong Kong Phooey. This performance of All of Me with Redd Foxx on Sanford and Son is brilliant. pic.twitter.com/1lshT5GvGK

— The Sting (@TheStingisBack) May 23, 2025

From Malcolm, a polite cat:

such a polite gentleman pic.twitter.com/O35pDxa2mM

— The Cats 𝕏 (@TheCatsX) May 9, 2025

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. He was but one year old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-24T09:44:59.061Z

Two posts from Matthew. He adds the comment “revolting indeed” to fake, AI-generation of Auschwitz victims. Why would anyone do this?

This is revolting.www.facebook.com/auschwitzmem…

— The Fake History Hunter (@fakehistoryhunter.net) 2025-05-23T14:24:28.799Z

Wh. . . and someone had a good eye for pareidolia:

Maybe it's called a corpse flower because that's a dead ballerina stuffed in a bucket.

— Hillary Monahan (@hillarymonahan.bsky.social) 2025-05-23T05:24:55.462Z

Welcome to the tail end o’ the week: Friday, May 23, 2025: World Turtle Day.  Here are some turtles from Botany Pond in July, 2018; I believe they are red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans) sunning on a duckling ramp.  I doubt whether we will have turtles in the pond this year.

It’s also the Declaration of the Báb (part of the  Bahái faith), and National Taffy Day. Here’s how one place makes saltwater taffy, which has salt and water but is not appreciably different from other taffy. It is not a “salty treat”, as the video avers; it’s just sold near the beach, along boardwarks.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 23 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries: Norm died, and I loved him in “Cheers”:

 George Wendt, an actor with an Everyman charm who played the affable, beer-loving barfly Norm on the hit 1980s TV comedy “Cheers” and later crafted a stage career that took him to Broadway in “Art,” “Hairspray” and “Elf,” has died. He was 76.

Wendt’s family said he died early Tuesday morning, peacefully in his sleep while at home, according to the publicity firm The Agency Group.

“George was a doting family man, a well-loved friend and confidant to all of those lucky enough to have known him,” the family said in a statement. “He will be missed forever.” The family has requested privacy during this time.

Despite a long career of roles onstage and on TV, it was as gentle and henpecked Norm Peterson on “Cheers” that he was most associated, earning six straight Emmy Award nominations for best supporting actor in a comedy series from 1984-89.

Six straight Emmy nominations!  I guess he didn’t win any, but he was great. Here’s a montage and a memoriam (the show ran for eleven years and was one of my favorites, especially the fractious relationship between Sam and Diane):

*The House of Representatives passed the bill that would fund Trump’s domestic agenda, but it was a squeaker, passing by a single vote. And it still needs to be passed by the Senate, which has a 53-47 Republican majority.

The Republican-led House passed President Trump’s sprawling tax-and-spending bill early Thursday, after party leaders made a series of last-minute changes that united their warring wings.

The vote was 215 to 214, with one lawmaker voting present. The measure now goes to the Senate, where a similar tug of war could play out.

The passage of Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” marked a major win for Trump and for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), who again found the formula that steered a course between hard-liners, who wanted deeper spending cuts, and moderates, who worried that the bill would hurt their districts’ hospitals and clean-energy projects.

Thursday morning’s vote was a significant step toward extending Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts and cementing other conservative priorities while trimming spending on Medicaid and food aid. It again showed the president’s power to unite fractious House Republicans, whose narrow majority meant that any handful of dissidents could have sunk the bill.

“This bill is our opportunity to deliver on the promises we made,” said Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R., Texas). “At its core, the one big, beautiful bill is about more than dollars and cents. It’s about liberty and empowering the American people.”

Reps. Warren Davidson of Ohio and Thomas Massie of Kentucky were the only two Republicans to vote against the measure, arguing that it didn’t do enough to rein in deficit spending. All Democrats were opposed.

Rep. Andy Harris (R., Md.) voted present, saying he wanted to move the legislation along but had concerns about deficits and Medicaid. Reps. Andrew Garbarino (R., N.Y.) and David Schweikert (R., Ariz.) missed the vote. Schweikert said that the vote concluded as he reached the House floor and that he supports the bill. A Garbarino spokesperson said he inadvertently missed the vote and supports the bill.

The bill tightens the work requirements for Medicare, which will cause roughly 14 million people to lose their health benefits, cuts taxes (mostly for higher earners, but also for seniors), doubles the maximum child tax credit, reduces the amount of student loans subsidized by the government, and, among other things, exempts qualified tipping income from taxation—up to $160,000 (does anybody earn that much in tips?) PBS adds this:

A fresh analysis from the Congressional Budget Office said the tax provisions would increase the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion over the decade, while the changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other services would tally $1 trillion in reduced spending. The lowest-income households in the U.S. would see their resources drop, while the highest ones would see a boost, the CBO said.

Here’s the Washington Post‘s bar graph about how the present bill would affect the national debt. Red bars increase it, green ones decrease it:

There are likely to be substantive changes as the bill moves to the Senate, but don’t ask me what’s likely. What’s clear is that Trump has won this one.

*Some good news from the Supreme Court: in a 4-4 tie, they let stand an Oklahoma ruling forbidding the use of public money to fund religious charter schools (article archived here). This does not, however, mean that this practice is banned throughout America, which would be peachy:

*The Free Press reports that Harvard delayed for months the investigation of a videotaped harassment of a Jewish student: “Attacking Jews at Harvard doesn’t just go unpunished. It gets rewarded.”

In the year and a half since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, there have been so many alarming incidents on college campuses aimed at Jews. Many stick out for their grotesque imagery, for their outrageous slanders, and for their Soviet-style tactics. But the incident that I remember most vividly is the one that took place at Harvard University less than two weeks after Hamas invaded Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 more.

No one was physically injured that day. But the fact remained that the incident was wildly beyond the pale: a group of Harvard students surrounding another student, an Israeli named Yoav Segev, repeatedly screaming “Shame!” in his face, blocking his path, and forcing him to leave a part of campus that he was entitled to be in just as much as they were.

Video of the confrontation quickly went viral. You can watch it here.

Check the video. This is exactly what happened to me when I was photographing a singer in the encampment last year. I wasn’t causing trouble, I was just recording video because I liked his voice. But I was, as I called it, “keffiyehed”, surrounding by people holding up keffiyehs and who wouldn’t let me out of the fabric circle (they’d move every time I tried to get out and accuse me of bumping them. It was scary, but I couldn’t report it because I couldn’t identify the protestors and of course Chicago does all it can to avoid punishing them. I finally got out, but was badly shaken.  The Jewish student at Harvard, however, could identify the assaulters, but Harvard didn’t do much to discipline them.

The incident might have just disappeared from the news, like so many other videos of post-October 7 antisemitism on campus, if not for another shocking fact. The two aggressors who were the easiest to identify, because they were not wearing masks or hoodies and did not have keffiyehs around their faces, were not just Harvard students. They were also Harvard employees.

Ibrahim Bharmal was a Harvard Law School student and an editor at the Harvard Law Review. He was also a law-school teaching fellow in a civil procedure class. Elom Tettey-Tamaklo was a student at Harvard Divinity School. He was also a residential Harvard proctor, someone who advised first-year Harvard College students and lived in their dorm.

The Free Press concludes this:

An investigation by The Free Press into the October 18 confrontation caught on video and the resulting criminal case reveals that Harvard and its police department played a very significant role in delaying the case and thereby influencing its course and outcome. In doing so, Harvard and its police department, whose chief resigned this month in the wake of a nearly unanimous no-confidence vote against him, worked at cross-purposes with the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, district attorney’s office—and with the pursuit of justice itself.

None of this might even have been an issue if Harvard had dealt with the incident immediately and decisively.

The outcome? The assaulters got a slap on the wrist:

Last month, a day before Harvard released its antisemitism report and about 18 months after the video went viral, the case ended with a whimper, not a bang. A judge ordered Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo, charged with misdemeanor assault and battery, to perform 80 hours of community service and to complete an in-person anger-management class as part of a pretrial diversion program. They will also take a negotiation class at—where else?—Harvard.

Now, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo are set to graduate next week, at which point Harvard’s ability to take disciplinary action against them will no longer just be controversial. It will be moot. Segev’s lawyers told The Free Press that Garber and other Harvard officials haven’t responded to their questions about whether Harvard has finished a disciplinary process for Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo.

So it goes. . .

*I really do dislike AI, at least for replacing academia, though it is useful for other stuff. Here’s a headline I love: “Fictional fiction: a newspaper’s summer book list recommends nonexistent books. Blame AI.”

The recommended reading list contained some works of fiction. It also contained some works that were, in fact, actually fictional.

The content distributor King Features says it has fired a writer who used artificial intelligence to produce a story on summer reading suggestions that contained books that didn’t exist.

The list appeared in “Heat Index: Your Guide to the Best of Summer,” a special section distributed in Sunday’s Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer last week.

More than half of the books listed were fake, according to the piece’s author, Marco Buscaglia, who admitted to using AI for help in his research but didn’t double-check what it produced. “A really stupid error on my part,” Buscaglia wrote on his Facebook page.

Among the summer reading suggestions was “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir, described as “a science-driven thriller following a programmer who discovers an AI system has developed consciousness” and been secretly influencing world events. “Nightshade Market,” by Min Jin Lee, was said to be a “riveting tale set in Seoul’s underground economy.”

AD

Both authors are real, but the books aren’t. “I have not written and will not be writing a novel called ‘Nightshade Market,’” Lee posted on X.

Cue the Schadenfreude. 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili glories in the local flowers:

Hili: It’s the end of the lilac.

A: But the roses are just beginning.

Hili: Bez się już kończy.

Ja: Za to róże zaczynają.

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

From Stephen; how scientific publishing works:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Divy:

Masih is back posting again! Read the whole thing and watch. Look at those scary morality cops!

Hey Western feminists! watch this.
Imagine you’re driving your car or sitting on the subway, and suddenly you’re surrounded by police officers because your hair is not covered.

The regime says sending videos to me — Masih Alinejad — could lead to 10 years in prison.

So why do… pic.twitter.com/goup4t2OZC

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) May 22, 2025

From Reese on Facebook:

From Malcolm: A wonderful guy rescuing a bobcat in a steel-jaw trap. Those traps are hideous and should be outlawed!

Nerves of stainless steelpic.twitter.com/uIXpHKyv80

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 7, 2025

From Luana; read the article:

In every line you sense the writer’s gritted teeth as they strain to avoid using a single pronoun for cross-dressing paedophile and convicted sex offender, ‘Katie Birtles’.https://t.co/efDzh8O4CK

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 22, 2025

One from my feed.  I don’t think this would work very well:

spoon of shame 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/FFvO3vX1pm

— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) May 21, 2025

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish lad was gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz. He was only two. Had he lived, he'd be 84 today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-23T10:18:43.685Z

Two posts from Matthew: I was right!!!! (see here and an upcoming post.

Scientist admits sky is indeed bluewww.newscientist.com/article/2481…

— Casey terHorst (@ecoevolab.bsky.social) 2025-05-22T17:13:15.661Z

And this is unbelievable.  I don’t believe the courts will let it stand:

The Trump administration on Thursday halted Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the college to fall in line with President Trump’s demands. nyti.ms/4k8w2qB

— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2025-05-22T18:19:41.882Z

Posting will be light today, as I must spend much of the day supervising the cleaning of algae out of Botany Pond to ensure that Esther and her brood aren’t disturbed. This may also mean that tomorrow’s Hili dialogue will be truncated. Bear with me; I do my best. I’m quite nervous about this whole business.

Welcome to Thursday, May 22, 2025, and World Goth Day. Are there any goths still left that look like this? (photo from 2010). They are shopping at a Goth clothing store:

It’s also Sherlock Holmes Day (Arthur Conan Doyle was born on this day in 1859), International Day for Biological Diversity, National Vanilla Pudding Day, World Paloma Day (it’s a tequila-based cocktail) and Harvey Milk Day, who was born on this day in 1930, and shot. along with Mayor George Moscone, in 1978.  He has become an icon for gay rights. A photo:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 22 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The GOP appears ready to TRY to push Trump’s tax bill, which cuts things like Medicare and food stamps, through the Senate.  I say “try to” because Republicans in both the House and Senate aren’t on board with the heavy cuts in this measure:

*Count on the WSJ op-ed site to report this one accurately (op-eds there are generally right-wing but today it’s one of the few American MSM sites to tell the truth about the food situation in Gaza).

Israel restored the flow of aid to Gaza on Monday with full knowledge that much of it will be stolen by Hamas. Some of the supplies will then be sold back to the people, financing Hamas’s war effort and the patronage that sustains its rule.

Israel facilitated the entry of 25,000 aid trucks during the cease-fire ending March 18. It was confident that Gaza had supplies for five to seven months, but after Hamas pilfered aid, shortages have already become imminent, only three months on.

What was the world to do—pressure Hamas to fork over what it has stolen or pressure Israel to let in more for Hamas to steal? The answer has always been the latter, even though it prolongs the war. Everyone knows Hamas would gladly let Gazans starve to score a win over Israel. President Trump doesn’t want that any more than President Biden did.

Mr. Biden promised on Oct. 18, 2023, that aid would stop if Hamas stole it, but he never kept his word. Mr. Trump backed the aid blockage in March but lately made clear that time is up.

The Journal reported in April, after a month without new aid, “A Depleted Hamas Is So Low on Cash That It Can’t Pay Its Fighters.” But now Israel is letting in a basic amount of aid as a bridge, it says, until a new mechanism can bring more to civilians but deprive Hamas.

That’s the goal of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a U.S. initiative that Israel hopes to get off the ground within days. Led by Jake Wood, a founder of the Team Rubicon disaster-response group, the foundation will open distribution centers in areas of Gaza with IDF perimeter control rather than send trucks all across vulnerable territory. Private U.S. security contractors will handle the distribution from border crossings to Secure Distribution Sites, and a GHF spokesman says civilian teams will then distribute the aid directly to Gazans.

It should be in everyone’s interest to deny Hamas the aid, but readers won’t be shocked to learn that the United Nations and a complex of human-rights and aid groups have protested bitterly. They—and Hamas—are being sidelined by the new initiative.

Canada, the U.K. and France threatened Israel on Monday with “concrete actions” unless it halts military operations and facilitates more aid, which “must include engaging with the UN.” Hamas officially thanked the trio, knowing well how U.N. methods keep it in business.

I’m glad that there is a way to distribute food without it getting into the hands of Hamas. But of course that’s theoretical, and Hamas is very clever. I have little doubt that they’ll find a way to monopolize the food. All they have to do is note which civilians get the food and then threaten them.  Again, my solution is for the US to pressure Hamas through Qatar (which funnels a lot of money to Hama$) to surrender and give up the hostages.  After that, well, I still have no solution, but it is NOT a viable solution to leave Hamas in control of Gaza.

*Well, Trump has gotten his luxury jet from Qatar (a country that supports terrorism) to use as Air Force One (article archived here).  It’s ridiculous!

The United States has accepted a 747 jetliner as a gift from the government of Qatar, and the Air Force has now been asked to figure out a way to rapidly upgrade it so it can be put into use as a new Air Force One for President Trump, a Defense Department spokesman confirmed Wednesday.

“The secretary of defense has accepted a Boeing 747 from Qatar in accordance with all federal rules and regulations,” Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement on Wednesday. “The Department of Defense will work to ensure proper security measures and functional-mission requirements are considered for an aircraft used to transport the president of the United States.”

The plane, which industry executives estimated is worth about $200 million, will require extensive work before it can be considered secure enough to carry Mr. Trump, Pentagon officials have acknowledged in recent days.

“Any civilian aircraft will take significant modifications to do so,” Troy Meink, the Air Force secretary, said on Tuesday during Senate testimony. “We’re off looking at that right now what it’s going to take for that particular aircraft.”

. . . . “If President Trump insists on converting this plane to a hardened Air Force One before 2029, I worry about the pressures you may be under to cut corners on operational security,” Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, said as Mr. Meink was testifying.

The gift also has drawn questions from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who worry that Qatar may be trying to improperly influence Mr. Trump, or that the plane itself might have listening devices.

The WaPo adds this in another article:

Republicans are haggling over the details of how much to cut Medicaid and food stamps while also trying to give bigger tax breaks to the richest Americans. Meanwhile, the rating agency Moody’s has downgraded the United States’ perfect economic score for the first time, because of how much this bill could run up the national debt. Dana Milbank, James Hohmann and Natasha Sarin talk about whether the Republicans can get this legislation over the finish line and why America is suffering from “boy-who-called-wolf energy” when it comes to the federal debt.

Now they have to disassemble the whole plane  to look for listening devices, and that’s on top of all the security changes needed to make it into Air Force One.  I never understood why the present Air Force One (I think there are two of them) was insufficient, and always suspected that Trump just needed it to show who’s boss.

*The Free Press suggests, based on an interview with the father of Hadi Matar, the man who nearly killed Salman Rushdie, that Matar had help or training from Hezbollah. 

With Matar found guilty and behind bars, you might think most of the big questions about this case have been answered. But the story of Matar, and the issue of what motivated him to stab the British-American novelist and Booker Prize winner 15 times onstage at a literary festival in western New York in August 2022, is not over.

He faces a second trial on federal charges that he provided material support to the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah. If found guilty, he could spend life in prison. The question of what motivated Matar, of Fairview, New Jersey, has broader ramifications. Was this attempted assassination the work of a lone wolf or was he coordinating with a foreign terror group?

That was the question at the heart of a joint investigation by The Free Press and the Center for Peace Communications. Our team retraced the 27-year-old’s travels to south Lebanon and his family home in the town of Yaroun, a Hezbollah stronghold on the border with Israel.

Villagers and religious leaders there provided us a dramatically different picture of Matar from the one initially painted by the Western media and U.S. law enforcement—that of a disillusioned twentysomething who hid in his mother’s basement and worked in a local clothing store. A New Yorker article, citing the owner of the boxing club Matar frequented, called him “the definition of a lone wolf” and a New York Post story referred to him as “a lone-wolf Islamic fanatic.”

. . .We were told that Matar and his father were closely associated with Hezbollah’s operatives and its affiliated mosques and religious centers in Yaroun. And Yaroun residents and religious leaders said Matar had been schooled on the importance of implementing the 1989 fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death, issued by Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, on the charge the writer blasphemed the prophet Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses.

“I know personally how close Hadi’s father and the Matar family, in general, are to Hezbollah—its political and military structure,” a Shiite religious leader in Yaroun, Sheikh Maytham Issa, told us. “I’m firmly convinced that Hadi carried out the attack on Salman Rushdie under the influence of Hezbollah’s ideology.”

Well, if the penultimate paragraph is true, then yes, it may have been promoted by terrorists from Hezbollah. But if that was the case, why was the attack so hamhanded? The guy had knives, not a gun, and could have been stopped easily if there were more security around?  We may never know what happened, but it looks as if, given the federal charges, we have a chance of knowing, and that Matar may spend the rest of his life in prison. Since he seems to me a danger of society, I have no compunction about that, though of course theoretically he could reform in prison. But how would you know that such a “reformation” was genuine?

*Finally, according to the reliably engaging AP “oddities section”, we learn that one of the men who helped steal the solid gold toilet in Blenheim Palace (birthplace of Winston Churchill) has been given a sentence that doesn’t include jail!

 A man who tried to help a burglar cash in from the theft of a golden toilet valued at 4.74 million pounds ($6.4 million) was spared jail on Monday after a British judge said he had been taken advantage of by the thieves.

Frederick Doe, 37, also known as Frederick Sines, was given a suspended sentence at Oxford Crown Court for his role in helping to sell the 18-carat gold fully functioning toilet which was taken in 2019 from Blenheim Palace — the country mansion where British wartime leader Winston Churchill was born.

“Those responsible for this audacious heist, five individuals could be seen on CCTV, were clearly intent on disposing of their ill-gotten gains quickly,” Judge Ian Pringle told Doe. “You foolishly agreed to assist.”

The toilet was part of a satirical art installation, titled “America,” by Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan, whose work of a banana duct-taped to a wall was sold in 2024 for $6.2 million at auction in New York.

The toilet weighed just over 215 pounds (98 kilograms). The value of the gold at the time was 2.8 million pounds and it was insured for 4.74 million pounds.

The piece that poked fun at excessive wealth had previously been on display at The Guggenheim Museum, in New York, which had offered the work to U.S. President Donald Trump during his first term in office after he had asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting.

The theft of the toilet — which has never been recovered and is believed to have been cut up and sold — caused considerable damage to the 18th-century property, a UNESCO World Heritage site filled with valuable art and furniture that draws thousands of visitors each year.

Of the group who smashed a window to get into the palace before dawn on Sept. 14, 2019, only two have been charged and convicted

Here’s a tweet showing the golden throne:

Moment £4.8million golden toilet is carried out of Blenheim Palace by raiders in shocking CCTV shown to jury https://t.co/igtyFaQX5d

— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) February 25, 2025

I am not clear why Mr. Doe got off without jail with such a major heist, as I thought that all accomplices to such a theft were pretty much equally guilty. And what a shame that the toilet was broken up.  Will there ever be another one and, more important, if there is, would I be allowed to use it?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has developed self-serving scientific ambitions:

Hili: How do you apply for a grant?

A: Why do you ask?

Hili: I’m planning to study the place of cats in the social awareness of humans.

Hili: Jak się składa podania o granty?

Ja: Dlaczego pytasz?

Hili: Planuję badania nad miejscem kotów w świadomości społecznej ludzi.

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

From Cats that Have had Enough of Your Shit:

From Things With Faces, a happy d*g and a smiling sea lion:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

Masih is still recovering, but pinned an old 2021 tweet that shows her as a hijab-clad child:

In Iran I was told if I don’t wear hijab, I get kicked out from school, I get jailed, lashes, beaten up, and kicked out from my country. In the West I’m told, sharing my story will cause Islamophobia.
I’m a woman from Middle East and I am scared of Islamic ideology. Let us talk. pic.twitter.com/SKQFh93M51

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 28, 2021

From Luana, a victory for women’s sports, though I’m not sure I’d call Thomas guilty of “fraudulent conduct.”

Lia Thomas loses her legal battle and will not have the chance to qualify for the Olympics, marking a major victory for women’s sports and facing the heaviest penalty in sports history for fraudulent conduct pic.twitter.com/eJ9R7p4FjH

— Alexandra denman (@Alexandr4Denman) May 19, 2025

From Bryan, a rare video in which Jim Morrison of The Doors plays a student rejected by Florida State University:

A very young Jim Morrison (age 19) in a promo video for Florida State University, 1962. In the span of the next 9 years, Morrison co-founded The Doors, released 6 albums, performed hundreds of concerts, and was dead by 27 in 1971. pic.twitter.com/u731Z1DRZG

— History Defined (@historydefined) May 20, 2025

From Barry: More soup for you!

They're talking about "water based" cooking now. Cooking things in water instead of oils. It's soup. They're making soup.

— Elle (@elleisanisland.bsky.social) 2025-05-19T18:21:57.119Z

From Malcolm.  This cannot be real but is cool nonetheless:

If only there was a metro for cats.

[🎞️ AI]pic.twitter.com/HIXBcyFand

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 28, 2025

One that I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

An Italian Jewish girl, born on this day 88 years ago, never got the chance to age because she was "selected" for gassing at age 6.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-22T09:15:46.310Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb, who is still abed with his nasty respiratory infection. He had to cancel a trip to Milan, poor lad! He says, though that he’s feeling better but has “some way to go”. Here’s a funny one:

I laughed.

— Esther Schindler (@estherschindler.bsky.social) 2025-05-20T22:00:20.000Z

A lovely moose:

Strike A Pose… Early morning. Mariah The Moose (Mama of Maverick and Marcus), showing me her best side, while foraging for snacks. So beautiful. 🫎📸🇨🇦#AlgonquinPark #Moose #Mammals#Wildlife #Nature #WildlifePhotography #Photography #OntarioParks #Canada

— Remy Michaels (@remyscameraeye.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T04:14:33.185Z

What person loves ducks more than one who will feed them in the pouring rain? You tell me:

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, May 20, 2025, and World Bee Day.  Here’s a short video of what it’s like inside a honeybee hive:

It’s also National Rescue Dog Day, Dinosaur Day, Flower Day, National Quiche Lorraine Day, and Pick Strawberries Day.  As Wikipedia says of that toothsome quiche, made with eggs, cream, and bacon or ham, “It was little known outside the French region of Lorraine until the mid-20th century.”

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

Da Nooz:

*Trump finally had a talk, via phone, with Vladimir Putin about the war in Ukraine.’

UPDATE: Trump finally dropped his demand that Russia declare a cease-fire, gave up on brokering peace (it was supposed to come on “Day 1”) and apparently is washing his hands of the war, letting Russia and Ukraine work it out themselves through direct negotiation.

Now, Mr. Trump appears to be prepared to step back and urge Russia and Ukraine to make a deal directly with each other. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine expressed concern about that, saying on Monday after he held two calls with Mr. Trump that “the negotiation process must involve both American and European representatives at the appropriate level.”

*******

President Donald Trump is holding a highly anticipated phone call Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss ending the war in Ukraine as the White House describes the U.S. leader as “weary and frustrated with both sides” of the conflict and his vice president said the talks are at an “impasse.”

The call comes after one of Russia’s largest drone assaults on Ukraine — nearly 400 launched over the weekend — and a flurry of diplomacy, as Ukrainian and European officials sought to convince the Trump administration of the need for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire and to ramp up pressure on Russia to take serious steps toward peace.

Trump has framed the peace agreement as a negotiation primarily between Moscow and Washington, raising concerns that the two leaders could agree on a deal that suits Russia but fails to protect Ukrainian security and independence, setting the scene for another Russian invasion in the future.

On Friday, Russia and Ukraine held their first direct talks since the early weeks of the war, but aside from a prisoner swap, they agreed only to continue negotiating over a possible ceasefire. Trump endorsed the talks but then diminished their importance before they began, declaring that nothing would be resolved until he and Putin spoke directly.

Speaking before the phone call from Air Force Two, Vice President JD Vance told reporters that “we want to see outcomes.”

“We realize there’s a bit of an impasse here, and I think the president’s going to say to President Putin, look, are you serious? Are you real about this?”

Serious about what? What Putin is serious about is getting as much of Ukraine as he can. He is entitled to none of it, and he should give Crimea back, too, which is “occupied territory”.  For some reason Trump thinks he and his team have the ability, right, and smarts to settle all the world’s problems.  I’d feel more confident about his peacemaking if I didn’t think he was wonky.  Truth be told, though, I see no solution that doesn’t involve Ukraine losing some of it’s land, and it’s just not fair.

*CNN has an explanation of Biden’s metastatic prostate cancer and gives survival statistics, although individuals vary widely. Older men in the audience, like me, might want to read this.

“Metastatic” means the cancer cells have spread beyond the original location (the prostate gland) into other areas — most commonly bones and lymph nodes. Biden’s cancer has specifically spread to his bones, placing him among the 5% to 7% of prostate cancer cases in the United States that are metastatic at initial diagnosis. While this percentage seems small, it represents a significant number given that over 300,000 men in the US and approximately 1.5 million worldwide are diagnosed with prostate cancer every year.

Early-stage prostate cancer carries an excellent prognosis, with nearly a 100% five-year survival rate. However, when prostate cancer is metastatic at diagnosis, the five-year survival rate drops sharply to around 37%. Importantly, these survival rates are statistical averages, and individual outcomes vary considerably based on overall health, age, cancer aggressiveness, and how well a patient responds to treatment.

For Biden — and all prostate cancer patients — this diagnosis marks the beginning of a highly personalized journey. It remains impossible right now to accurately answer the question, “How long do I have?” Which of course is the question everyone wants answered.

Prostate cancer severity is graded using a Gleason score, which ranges from 6 to 10. Lower scores (6–7) indicate slower-growing, less aggressive cancer cells, while higher scores (8–10) represent aggressive cancers more likely to spread quickly.

Biden’s Gleason score of 9 signifies a highly aggressive prostate cancer that usually requires immediate and comprehensive treatment.

In my clinic, the moment of diagnosing advanced prostate cancer is always difficult, evoking fear, uncertainty and many questions. At that moment, I ask the patient to take a deep breath, slow down and work together as we build a care team.

. . . .metastatic prostate cancer treatment shifts from cure to managing symptoms, controlling disease progression and maintaining quality of life. Common treatments for metastatic prostate cancer include:

• Hormone therapy (androgen deprivation therapy, ADT): Blocks testosterone, essential for prostate cancer cell growth.
• Chemotherapy: Drugs to slow cancer growth, particularly when hormone therapy alone is insufficient.
• Radiation therapy: Targets metastatic lesions, reducing pain and symptoms, especially in bones.
• Immunotherapy and precision medicine: Treatments leveraging the immune system to attack cancer cells or therapies targeting specific genetic markers.
• Supportive care: Symptom relief and quality-of-life enhancement.

Poor Joe! He’s had his share of troubles, and all of these therapies will have side effects. But he may well have dementia as well, which could either complicate the treatment or, perhaps, make him less anxious about it.

*Tyler Cowan, a professor of economics at George Mason university, proclaims at the Free Press, “Everyone using AI to cheat at school. That’s a good thing.” Whaaaa? Here’s why he likes it:

Unlike many people who believe this spells the end of quality American education, I think this crisis is ultimately good news. And not just because I believe American education was already in a profound crisis—the result of ideological capture, political monoculture, and extreme conformism—long before the LLMs.

These models are such great cheating aids because they are also such great teachers. Often they are better than the human teachers we put before our kids, and they are far cheaper at that. They will not unionize or attend pro-Hamas protests. But in the meantime, the doomers are right about at least one thing: It will feel very painful.

The first problem the LLMs expose is that our evaluation systems are broken, inefficient at sorting, and also unfair. If one student gets an A and the other a B, do we know that reflects anything other than a differential willingness to use LLMs? We never will, yet decisions for fellowships, graduate school admissions, and jobs all will be made on this basis. It stinks.

This isn’t just a modest problem. It is an out-of-control one and it will only get worse.

The second problem is that the current proposed solutions will make things worse. For instance, I commonly hear the following as potential remedies: Enforce anti-AI rules through the honor code; grade based only on proctored, closed-book, in-class exams; and give oral exams.

But if the current AI can cheat effectively for you, the current AI can also write better than you. In other words, our universities are not teaching our citizens sufficiently valuable skills; rather we are teaching them that which can be cloned at low cost. The AIs are already very good at those tasks, and they will only get better at a rapid pace.

. . . Lately I have been using the o3 model from OpenAI to give my PhD students comments on their papers and dissertations. I am sufficiently modest to notice that it gives keener, smarter, and more thorough suggestions than I do. One student submitted a dissertation on the economics of pyramid-, tomb-, and monument-building in ancient Egypt, a topic about which I know virtually zero. The o3 model had plenty of suggestions. How about: “Table 6.5’s interaction term ‘% north × no-export’ is significant in model 3 but not 4. Explain why adding period FE erodes significance; maybe too few clusters? Provide wild-bootstrap p-values.” Of course I would have noticed that point as well.

. . . The ostensible mission of college—learning—will become ever more optional. Many students will seize the opportunity to study with their AI models, liberated from the onerous demands of having to write all those “A quality” papers themselves . A few “rebels” will do their classwork on their own, but everyone else will wonder what exactly they are planning on doing with the writing skills they develop.

I can barely see the AI model used in grading, but I’m not sure how that would be done, and would like to have tried it with my own exams, which were almost all short-answer tests looking for thoughtfulness. You’d have to somehow ask the program to look for certain responses and give certain credit to each facet of a response.

But as for cheating and that being okay, well, it’s not okay for me.  Learning becoming optional? Is that supposed to be good?  There is a certain amount of learning in each field that is not optional (and here I’m talking about science), and that learning is the foundation on which careers in science can be built. To say the AI models are “great cheating aids because they are also such great teachers” neglects the fact that many students don’t want to study the AI answers but simply want to regurgitate them and spend the rest of the time having fun.

*And if it’s a good thing to use AI, why are professors giving zeroes to those accused of using AI. The NYT reports that students are now having to prove that they didn’t use it.

A few weeks into her sophomore year of college, Leigh Burrell got a notification that made her stomach drop.

She had received a zero on an assignment worth 15 percent of her final grade in a required writing course. In a brief note, her professor explained that he believed she had outsourced the composition of her paper — a mock cover letter — to an A.I. chatbot.

“My heart just freaking stops,” said Ms. Burrell, 23, a computer science major at the University of Houston-Downtown.

But Ms. Burrell’s submission was not, in fact, the instantaneous output of a chatbot. According to Google Docs editing history that was reviewed by The New York Times, she had drafted and revised the assignment over the course of two days. It was flagged anyway by a service offered by the plagiarism-detection company Turnitin that aims to identify text generated by artificial intelligence.

Panicked, Ms. Burrell appealed the decision. Her grade was restored after she sent a 15-page PDF of time-stamped screenshots and notes from her writing process to the chair of her English department.

Still, the episode made her painfully aware of the hazards of being a student — even an honest one — in an academic landscape distorted by A.I. cheating.

Generative A.I. tools including ChatGPT are reshaping education for the students who use them to cut corners. According to a Pew Research survey conducted last year, 26 percent of teenagers said they had used ChatGPT for schoolwork, double the rate of the previous year. Student use of A.I. chatbots to compose essays and solve coding problems has sent teachers scrambling for solutions.

But the specter of A.I. misuse, and the imperfect systems used to root it out, may also be affecting students who are following the rules. In interviews, high school, college and graduate students described persistent anxiety about being accused of using A.I. on work they had completed themselves — and facing potentially devastating academic consequences.

In response, many students have imposed methods of self-surveillance that they say feel more like self-preservation. Some record their screens for hours at a time as they do their schoolwork. Others make a point of composing class papers using only word processors that track their keystrokes closely enough to produce a detailed edit history.

But if AI is good enough to replace assignments and grading, why are professors still demanding students do their own work?  I just had a long discussion with a colleague who pretty much agrees with Cowan (except for exams), and I couldn’t convince him/her that a small discussion course with interactive professors using Socratic methods is a better way of learning than from AI.  She argues that the human element is not needed in teaching, and colleges as we know them are on the way out.

I ask readers to weigh in here. Of course Chatbots will get better and better, but I can’t ever see them replacing very good professors.  (My colleague thinks that universities are doomed!)

*You may have learned that Israel PM Netanyahu has ordered the resumption of humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday defended his decision to allow limited humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip, saying that pressure on Israel had been “approaching a red line.” The step was necessary in order to press ahead with the expanded military offensive against Hamas, he said, and had to begin despite the fact that IDF-secured distribution centers designed to keep the assistance out of the hands of the terror group were not yet ready.

However, right-wing politicians and groups assailed Netanyahu’s abrupt decision to resume aid to all parts of Gaza, which went against repeated pledges by top officials. There was criticism — but also support — from within Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, while the far-right flank of his coalition was divided on the issue.

Though dozens of trucks carrying supplies were said to be ready to enter the Palestinian coastal enclave, it was not immediately clear how many would go in.

President Isaac Herzog praised the development, saying it would enable Israel to continue its military campaign in Gaza while maintaining “our humanity.” Meanwhile, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who last month promised not to stay in the government “for a single minute” if any aid was brought to Gaza, backed down from the threat, claiming that the supplies would not reach Hamas. The theft of aid deliveries by the Palestinian terror group had been a key argument of his against renewing supplies.

In a video statement released on his personal Telegram channel, Netanyahu said that Israel’s allies had voiced concern about “images of hunger.”

I’m not sure whether there will ever be IDF-secured distribution centers, and if they don’t come to be (i.e., if the UN doesn’t approve), Hamas will of course take the lion’s share of the food. But please explain to me, dear readers, why Israel is held responsible by the world for feeding its enemy (including Hamas) while we have no demands that Russia, for example, provide food for Ukraine. Has there ever been another war in which the world demanded that the winning side feed the losing side? I wish this damn war were over with Hamas giving up militarily and politically, going into exile, and surrendering all the hostages. But the world is blaming Israel for its attempted surgical removal of Hamas (given that the terrorists’ strategy is to maximize the casualties among Gazan civilians by embedding itself in schools, homes, and hospitals). Sorry, but I blame Hamas for the devastation in Gaza, and the best way to prevent civilian casualties if for Hamas to realize it’s lose, surrender, give up the hostages, and then perhaps flee.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili realizes that lilies of the valley are toxic, and she wants the mice she chases not to be poisoned!

Hili: I hope mice are not nibbling on the roots of the lily of the valley.

A: Why?

Hili: Apparently it’s very unhealthy.

Hili: Mam nadzieję, że myszy nie podgryzają korzonków konwalii.

Ja: Czemu?

Hili: Podobno bardzo niezdrowe.

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

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Alison:

From Stacy:

Masih must still be recovering. Here’s JKR answering a critic in her inimitable way:

Joseph, dear, you haven’t done your research. I’ve talked freely about taking legal action against no fewer than five people on X (death threats, assertions that I support Nazism and one count of accusing me of supporting paedophilia). All faced real life legal action. pic.twitter.com/eKkeTMBcZg

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 18, 2025

From Malcolm, a cat fish (embedded ’cause Twitter is glitching):

From Malgorzata: Jew hatred translated into possibly dangerous action at the Giro d’Italia bicycle race.  The tweet appears to be incorrect (h/t Greg) in that these are indeed pro-Palestinian protesters (apparently protesting the presence of an Israeli team in the race) but they assaulted a French and a Dutch Cyclist, and one loon has been arrested. See here and here for more information.

ITALY: Pro-Palestinian activists attempted to knock down Israeli cyclists during the Giro d’Italia cycling race in Naples, an act that could have caused a pile-up or even resulted in the athletes’ deaths.

These pro-Palestinians are becoming increasingly aggressive and dangerous! pic.twitter.com/PsAXJnJ8RI

— Dr. Maalouf ‏ (@realMaalouf) May 16, 2025

Two from my feed. First, one from Phil Plait. Be sure to watch the linked video in the article:

She got hit by a meteorite. Then things got weird.badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/a-woman-hi…🔭🧪

— Phil Plait (@philplait.bsky.social) 2025-05-19T16:28:40.136Z

A chill cat:

I aspire to be at his level of unbothered. pic.twitter.com/saXODDAL1M

— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) May 19, 2025

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A Dutch Jewish girl was gassed upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was eight. Had she lived, she'd be 89 today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-20T09:49:08.702Z

Two tweets from Doctor Cobb. First, what passes for “art” today:

This is probably the first time anyone here has used the hashtags #art, #sculpture, and #deadwhale inhe same post. "It was created using molds from real whales and its smell comes from buckets of rotting fish hidden nearby to add to the illusion."www.cnn.com/2024/11/12/c…

— joeymaier 🌊 (@joeymaier.bsky.social) 2024-11-12T13:17:57.485Z

And a bad joke:

Two nuns are driving through Transylvania in the dead of night. Suddenly a vampire lands on the hood of their car. He's pounding on the glass!One nun says to the other, "Show him your cross!"The other nods firmly. She sticks her head out the window and yells, "Get the fuck off the windshield!"

— John Wiswell (@wiswell.bsky.social) 2024-11-09T18:50:04.231Z