Category: Hili Dialogue

Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 18, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats (remember that the Sabbath was made for cats, not cats for the Sabbath). It’s Sunday, May 18, 2025, and Mother Whistler Day, celebrating something to do with James McNeil’s Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother, painted in 1871.  I’ve seen it at Paris’s  Musée d’Orsay, a not-to-be-missed stop on a visit to that city. Its formal name is “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1”.

Here’s a photo of Mrs. Whistler, also in the public domain:

From Wikipedia:

The sensibilities of a Victorian era viewing audience would not accept what was a portrait exhibited as an “arrangement”, hence the addition of the explanatory title Portrait of the Painter’s mother. From this, the work acquired its enduring nickname of simply Whistler’s Mother. After Thomas Carlyle viewed the painting, he agreed to sit for a similar composition, this one titled Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2. Thus the previous painting became, by default, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1.

Here’s Carlye’s portrait, also in the public domain:

It’s also National Cheese Souffflé Day and World AIDS Vaccine Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The horse Journalism, which finished second in the Kentucky Derby, won the Preakness, sadly having blown a chance to win the Triple Crown.

Once trailing by as many as five lengths, Journalism was still far behind Gosger at the top of the homestretch as it squeezed between Clever Again and Goal Oriented — the horses so close they and their jockeys rubbed together — before finally finding open ground. From there, with jockey Umberto Rispoli urging him on, Journalism ran down Gosger at the post, needing all of the course’s 1 3/16th miles to author a stunning comeback victory at the 150th Preakness at Baltimore’s Pimlico Race Course.

Here’s the race:

*I keep saying that if anything can curb the spate of unlawful Executive Orders spewing from Trump, it would be the Supreme Court, as Chief Justice Roberts want the court to keep some gravitas rather than being a rubber stamp for a loony President. And now it may be happening with the Alien Enemies Act, an old law that Trump’s using to deport people accused of being members of Venezuelan gangs. The court sent it back to the appeals court, which

The Trump administration will not be allowed to deport a group of Venezuelan detainees accused of being members of a violent gang under a rarely invoked wartime law while the matter is litigated in the courts, the Supreme Court said on Friday.

The justices sent the case back to a federal appeals court, directing it to examine claims by the migrants that they could not be legally deported under the Alien Enemies Act, the centuries-old wartime law invoked by the Trump administration. The justices said the appeals court should also examine what kind of notice the government should be required to provide that would allow migrants the opportunity to challenge their deportations.

The court said its order would remain in place until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled and the Supreme Court considered any appeal from that ruling.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote a dissent, arguing that the justices had no authority to hear the dispute at this stage. He was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

The ruling deals a sharp blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to deploy the wartime law to pursue swift, sweeping deportations of Venezuelan migrants accused of being members of the gang, Tren de Aragua.

It also suggests that a majority of the justices may be skeptical of whether the migrants have been afforded enough due process protections by the administration before being deported, potentially to a prison for terrorists in El Salvador.

Yep, due process is needed. So far, though, the Supreme Court hasn’t itself issued a final ruling on any of Trump’s executive orders—it keeps sending them back to lower courts for clarification. At some point the Supremes, though, are going to have to make a decision, as there will be appeals.

*NBC News reports that Trump is working on a plan to move a million Gazans to Libya. That is half the population of Gaza, and, surprisingly, the Libyans appear ready to approve of it, for they gain the release of money previously frozen by the U.S. But these are early days:

The Trump administration is working on a plan to permanently relocate up to 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya, five people with knowledge of the effort told NBC News.

The plan is under serious enough consideration that the administration has discussed it with Libya’s leadership, two people with direct knowledge of the plans and a former U.S. official said.

In exchange for the resettling of Palestinians, the administration would potentially release to Libya billions of dollars of funds that the U.S. froze more than a decade ago, those three people said.

No final agreement has been reached, and Israel has been kept informed of the administration’s discussions, the same three sources said.

The State Department and the National Security Council did not respond to multiple requests for comment before this article was published. After publication, a spokesperson told NBC News, “these reports are untrue.”

“The situation on the ground is untenable for such a plan. Such a plan was not discussed and makes no sense,” the spokesperson said.

Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, said that Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that has run Gaza, was not aware of any discussions about moving Palestinians to Libya.

“Palestinians are very rooted in their homeland, very strongly committed to the homeland and they are ready to fight up to the end and to sacrifice anything to defend their land, their homeland, their families, and the future of their children,” Naim said in response to questions from NBC News. “[Palestinians] are exclusively the only party who have the right to decide for the Palestinians, including Gaza and Gazans, what to do and what not to do.”

The last paragraph, however, may not be true, for a recent poll shows that nearly half of surveyed Gazans would, with help, be willing to move to another country. So far, though no countries have been willing to take them (in fact, no countries), but Libya might. That still leaves 1.3 million Gazans, and presumably most of the remaining Hamas members, still living in the territory, but I don’t blame the citizens of that ruined strip of land wanting to start life anew—and not ruled by terrorist thugs.

*Speaking of that, the Wall Street Journal reports that many Gazans are getting sick of Hamas and are even, at the risk of their lives, demonstrating against them.

. . . .few expected Hamas to be wrestling with the most visible internal challenge to its authority since it seized control of the Gaza strip in 2007: the people it professes to represent.

Hamas has ruled harshly, often jailing and killing its critics or threatening them into silence. Yet a simmering, continuing resistance has added to the pressure on Hamas, especially in northern Gaza, where the town of Beit Lahiya is the epicenter of anti-Hamas protests that began in March.

After the demonstrations erupted in the town, they quickly spread to other parts of the Gaza Strip. Chanting “Hamas out,” large crowds, often at great risk, have demanded an end to the war and Hamas to cede control of the enclave. Since then, smaller but boisterous protests have taken place, where fear of Hamas has seemingly evaporated.

On social media, influencers—many of them Palestinians based in Egypt, Turkey, Europe and the U.S.—are urging Gazans to rise against Hamas and amplifying the protests globally. They are filling a void created by militant threats against journalists in Gaza, forcing many reporters to self censor their coverage of opposition to Hamas, said the Committee to Protect Journalists on Thursday.

“I consider myself the voice of the protests,” said Hamza al-Masri, a Turkey-based influencer, who has more than 1.2 million followers across several platforms. “Hamas has terrorized people in Gaza.”

What is unfolding in Beit Lahiya and on social media opens a window into how Hamas misinterpreted the shift in sentiments of many Gazans. It also represents an unprecedented collective defiance against the militants.

“The general feeling among Palestinians all over Gaza, not just Beit Lahiya, is that Hamas doesn’t care about their lives or suffering,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of political science at Al-Azhar University—Gaza who now lives in Cairo. “The general feeling is that Hamas cares more about its own survival.”

Well, it took them nearly twenty years to realize that!  When they dig tunnels at the expense of the populace, set up terror centers in schools, hospitals, and even humanitarian zones, you’d think the locals would cotton on faster, especially when they see all the money Hamas spends on its crusade to destroy Israel. But better late than never, and I hope the disaffection spreads. And I hope even more that they overthrow the ruling thugs and that, after it’s done, they would realize that to leave in peace, they need a government dedicated to improving the lives of its own people, not to ending the lives of people to the north.

*At the Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan compares Pope Leo XIV to Trump, and guess who wins? Read “The Pope, the President, and America.”

. . . . . And it’s Leo’s American identity that distinguishes him in the global imagination, and in the history of the last two millennia. Which means, as David French has noted, that two Americans now bestride the entire globe in universal recognition and influence: this Pope and this President. And it’s the contrast between their personalities and values — not their politics — that makes the pairing so poignant at this moment in history. They represent two Americas — both genuine, but very different.

Leo is a classic American immigrant mix: Creole/French/Italian. His father was part of the Normandy invasion, Leo grew up on the South Side of Chicago, he went to Villanova when Rollie Massimino was basketball coach, and his two brothers made fun of him at home for being such a goody two-shoes. The brothers are classic: one, John, a mild-mannered, well-spoken former school principal, the other a ridiculously familiar Florida Man called Lou. How much more American can you get?

Leo himself seems so profoundly Midwestern to me, in all the best ways. Quiet in affect, careful in speech — and not that exciting. I’ve now listened to a few of his public interviews and speeches and I have to say they are terribly dull, full of words drained of freshness. I’m not saying his intellect is pedestrian; it obviously isn’t. But he is constantly avoiding the making of waves; he’d rather re-tweet than tweet; his description of selecting a bishop — a process he was in charge of — is all about a bishop’s ability to listen, to be humbly in dialogue, and to be fully engaged in the messy world as a still, small — but potent — voice of calm. He seems to know who he is, with no particular need to impress.

Trump, of course, is a near-mirror American image: from Queens, not Chicago, all inflammation all the time, a deeply insecure human with no discernible equanimity at all. Where Leo has been saturated in the tenets of Catholicism, Trump’s core moral values are entirely pagan. Power over others, for Trump, is a good to be sought at all times and costs. Great wealth is the clearest sign of an admirable person. Greed is healthy. The weak and the poor and the homeless are pathetic. It’s better to be a liar than a sucker. Revenge is the real point of life, and forgiveness dependent on the total submission and humiliation of the other.

If he were just this, of course, Trump wouldn’t be president. He also represents a gloriously American vulgarity — a brash, restless, money-grubbing carnival barker. He loves fast food, Coke Zero, and WWE. He swindles and charms. His energy is prodigious, his worldliness fathomless. And he can be terribly funny. Who wouldn’t laugh at the following brag in his Riyadh speech this week: “We renamed the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America. That was very popular … other than perhaps with Mexico.” This shameless hucksterism has never ascended to the presidency in quite this way before — but it is deeply, authentically American nonetheless. I can’t help but be fond of it, even as Trump’s core character still appalls.

. . . And it is what America has always represented at its best. It may feel dark right now, but we need to remember the American values that Pope Leo reflects have not disappeared, even though they are now in the shadows. I see good, quiet people all around me, modest people like Bob Prevost, who do good every day. We Americans are not just about money and power and fame, and never have been. We are also about faith and dignity, modesty and hard work, common sense and mercy. The very person of this mild-mannered Chicagoan will remind the world that this too is true. And that at some point, the current depravity will end.

I almost didn’t post this because it always irritates me to see a man as rational as Sullivan devoting a large portion of his life to superstition, but I do agree with the last paragraph: “the current depravity will end.” It doesn’t feel that way, right now; and if I wanted to depress myself I could say that the problem is far more than Trump alone: it’s half of America who voted for him. Leo (even if he’s the avatar of superstition) is in the better half, and I hope the better half triumphs.

*Chicago and Da Pope. Yep, our city is adopting Leo XIV, who of course hails from here, as one of the city’s icons, as Chicago-ish as hot dogs and Da Bearsh.

In the breathless day since Pope Leo XIV’s election as the first American pontiff, the memes, doctored images and tongue-in-cheek references have piled up deeper than Chicago’s pizza and more loaded than its hot dog, seemingly irresistible to comics and commoners alike.

Stained-glass windows depicting a dunking Michael Jordan? A change in canon law to make ketchup-topped frankfurters a sin? Cameos in “The Bear”? All of it apparently as tempting as the forbidden fruit.

“You just saw a billion jokes,” says Chad Nackers, who was raised Catholic and now presides as editor-in-chief of The Onion, the satirical site that heralded Robert Prevost’s elevation with an image of the smiling pontiff encased in a poppyseed-dotted bun.

“Conclave Selects First Chicago-Style Pope,” read the headline.

“It’s just kind of ripe for humor,” Nackers says.

“DA POPE!” blared the front of the Chicago Sun-Times on Friday, one of countless spins on the city’s unique accent, immortalized in “Saturday Night Live” sketches. No matter how Pope Leo XIV actually appears, in this realm of humor, he’s a mustachioed everyman who swaps his Ts for Ds and his zucchetto for a Bears cap.

With the Second City in the spotlight, more Chicago tropes were trotted out than even the famed namesake improv troupe could dream up. The popemobile traded for the Dodge Monaco made famous in “The Blues Brothers”? Check. Twists on city-set shows and movies like “Chicago Hope,” er, “Chicago Pope”? Yup. Dreams of Portillo’s Italian beef sandwiches and the Chicago liqueur Malört taking the place of the bread and wine of communion? Yes, chef. Over and over again.

In sports-loving Chicago, city teams were spun in a swell of papal humor. Initial belief that the pope’s baseball loyalties were with the Cubs led content creator Caitlin Hendricks to muse that Leo ironically hates the Cardinals. As it turns out, though, it appears the man in white roots for the White Sox.

Yep, but this is the best one—a real cover:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,

Hili: My shadow is bigger than your tree.
A: THat’s not true but I understand your ambition.
In Polish:
Hili: Ja daję więcej cienia niż to twoje drzewo.
Ja: To nie jest prawda, ale rozumiem twoje ambicje.
And a picture of Baby Kulka.

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

From Stacy, another weird medieval scene:

From Jesus of the Day, and it may be real!

From My Cat is An Asshole:

Masih must be recovering, as she’s back posting again, and showing that she’s winning:

Simon sent a great screenshot of a post:

From Malcolm; kindness:

J. K. Rowling mocks the UN:

I found this one while doomscrolling:

A lovely aurora from the ISS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrosome

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A French Jewish girl was gassed upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was four. Had she lived, she'd be 87 today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-18T09:46:33.461Z

One tweet only from Dr. Cobb. Tetragonurus is a squaretail fish (the small one), and a pyrosome is a colonial tunicate.

Tetragonurus with its emotional support pyrosome from @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 455 #designingthefuture2 #MarineLife

— Lisa (@tuexplorer1.bsky.social) 2025-05-09T12:57:15.380Z

Saturday: Hili dialogue

May 17, 2025 • 6:45 am

Save for John Avise’s collection of dragonfly photos for tomorrow, we’re out of readers’ wildlife. This is sad, as the feature has been going since this site started in 2009 (I can’t believe it’s been that long!).  If you have wildlife photos and don’t want the feature to disappear, please send ’em in. There will be no photos today.

Welcome to Jewish cat shabbos: CaturSaturday, May 17, 2025, and National Walnut Day. Here’s a short video about how commercial walnuts are harvested: They shake ’em off the trees!

It’s also Armed Force Day, World Whisky Day, National Mushroom Hunting Day, National Cherry Cobbler Day, National Pinot Grigio Day, and they’re running the second race of the Triple Crown today: the Preakness.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 17 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*To become an American citizen, applicants have to answer questions about America’s history and laws, which is okay (I hear that most native Americans can’t answer them). But now, in this Age of Trump, they’re thinking of turning this vetting into, yes, a reality television show. It’s not a done deal yet, but it’s tacky, and of course the pressure of being on t.v. could throw some people:

The Department of Homeland Security is considering taking part in a television program that would have immigrants go through a series of challenges to get American citizenship, officials said on Friday.

The challenges would be based on various American traditions and customs, said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the agency. She said the department was still reviewing the idea, which she spoke about several weeks ago with a producer named Rob Worsoff.

“The pitch generally was a celebration of being an American and what a privilege it is to be able to be a citizen of the United States of America,” she said. “It’s important to revive civic duty.”

She said the agency was happy to review “out-of-the-box pitches,” particularly those that celebrate “what it means to be an American.”

The project was reported earlier by The Daily Mail.

Mr. Worsoff told The Wall Street Journal that the show was not intended to be punitive.

“This isn’t ‘The Hunger Games’ for immigrants,” Mr. Worsoff said, adding, “This is not, ‘Hey, if you lose, we are shipping you out on a boat out of the country.’”

Ms. McLaughlin said the pitch had not yet reached the level of Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary. She said on social media on Thursday that the department “receives hundreds of television show pitches a year,” including for documentaries about border operations and white-collar investigations. “Each proposal undergoes a thorough vetting process prior to denial or approval,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “This pitch has not received approval or denial by staff.”

The department has worked with filmmakers in the past on programming.

In 2017, during the first Trump administration, the agency allowed documentary filmmakers extensive access to operations conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for a program called “Immigration Nation.”

I cannot imagine the American public being intensely interested in such a show. Granted, they would learn some history and law, but people would find it boring. I find it embarrassing and schlocky, and imagine answering those questions on t.v. I am betting they won’t go through with it.  “I’ll take Canceled Amendments for $200.”

*Israel previously announced that it would launch a large offensive against Hamas after Trump finished his trip to the Middle East. But the IDF couldn’t wait, and a big offensive has just begun. (h/t Malgorzata)

Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip on Friday killed at least 74 people, Hamas-run authorities said, as US President Donald Trump wrapped up a Middle East visit that skipped Israel and offered little prospect for a ceasefire and hostage deal.

Vowing to take care of Gaza, Trump said “a lot of people are starving in Gaza… There’s a lot of bad things going on.”

Strikes overnight into Friday morning hit the outskirts of Deir al-Balah and the city of Khan Younis, and sent people fleeing from the Jabaliya refugee camp and the town of Beit Lahiya.

The death toll figure, which is not independently verified, does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas, including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.

The Saudi Al-Hadath news channel reported that Israeli tanks advanced in the area of Beit Lahiya.

The IDF said Friday afternoon that it had carried out airstrikes on over 150 “terror targets” in the Gaza Strip over the past day.

The targets included anti-tank missile launch posts, cells of operatives, and buildings used by terror groups to carry out attacks on forces, the army said.

The WaPo adds this:

The strikes in Gaza on Friday were preparatory actions leading to a larger operation and were meant to send a message to Hamas that the campaign will begin soon if there is not an agreement to release hostages, the Associated Press reported, citing an unnamed Israeli official.

The problem with the food, which I do worry about, it that yes, Gaza has enough food for all its people for some time, but Hamas is guarding it in warehouses.  True, no food is coming in, but Israel has offered to distribute food to people so it could ensure that the food goes to civilians, not to Hamas, but the UN won’t let Israel do that for reasons that are completely unclear to me.  But, at any rate, it’s not true that Israel refuses to distribute food, and remember that there is no obligation to distribute food to an enemy country (we didn’t in WWII), so Israel is going beyond the call of duty by offering to do so.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/dozens-said-killed-in-heavy-israeli-strikes-across-gaza-trump-people-are-starving/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2025-05-16&utm_medium=email

*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly and snarky news column in the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: The emir of America.”

→ Biden and Kamala continue their bickering: A top adviser to Kamala’s presidential run told authors of a forthcoming book that Biden screwed the campaign over, and that if he had only dropped out earlier, Kamala would have soared. Which makes no sense, because she became slightly less popular as she campaigned. It seems like if Biden would’ve quit just a couple months earlier, Doug Emhoff might have been in the East Wing today switching out the drapes and getting ready for SoulCycle in Georgetown. The new book details Biden’s aging, and the lengths people went to cover it up includes that his team planned for Biden to be in a wheelchair soon after the election. I need everyone involved in this to step away from public life. But they refuse. Last week, Joe and Dr. Jill Biden went on The View. The ladies asked him about the criticisms of his age, and he went on for a few minutes until Dr. Jill, our villain, swooped in to say how very hard he worked.

The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us, and they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day. I mean, he’d get up, he put in a full day, and then at night he would, I’d be in bed, you know, reading my book, and he was still on the phone, reading his briefings, working with staff. I mean, it was nonstop.

He put in a full day like a grown-up, she says, as Joe stares ahead, confused. Why is Joe all dressed up there at The View table anyway? Dr. Jill, just let him rest, good Lord.

→ The new Statue of Liberty: Donald Trump is being gifted a jumbo jet by the Qataris. The administration says it’s being given to the Defense Department and then will go to Trump’s “presidential library foundation,” which I’m sure will be very real and very full of big books. Facing criticism, Trump reposted someone on Truth Social saying the plane is a gift from a foreign government, like the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France. Just like that. But does the Statue of Liberty have a minibar full of Diet Coke?

My favorite exchange on this whole thing was on Fox News, between Brian Kilmeade and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Kilmeade: “Do you worry that if [the Qataris] give us something like this, they want something in return?”

Leavitt: “Absolutely not, because they know President Trump, and they know he only works with the interests of the American public in mind.”

To be clear, I only work with the interests of TGIF in mind. So if someone wants to gift a briefcase of diamonds or a big private plane, TGIF might be interested in promoting your concrete company. Incentives: aligned! You’re welcome, TG readers.

Attesting to the legality of the gift from Qatar was United States attorney general and top blonde Pam Bondi, whose former job was working as a lobbyist for Qatar.

→ UC Berkeley votes against Hindu Heritage Month: The UC Berkeley student senate voted against Hindu Heritage Month, citing “Hindu nationalism,” despite the university’s observing several other heritage months. Hindus are not allowed heritage time! Stop asking for heritage awareness, Hindus. You must sit in shame next to the Irish Pride group and the campus Israel club (it is an awkward combo in there, I gotta warn you). Certain heritages’ self-awareness needs to be suppressed, and UC Berkeley is adding Hindu to that list. The failed resolution had recognized contributions to the Berkeley community by people of Hindu heritage, and called on students to “support their Hindu peers on campus.” No. Stop asking. As your debutante arbiter of who is white, and what to do with edge cases, I’ll be clear: Greeks and Italians are ethnic and may celebrate, though not for a whole month, just a heritage week. Basically a food festival and that’s it. But Hindus are white. I can’t explain why but it’s true.

*A new paper in Science once again shows the value of genetic differences between human populations in reconstructing the history of human migration. Who says population differences are of no biological significance?. Click below to read it, or find the pdf here (h/t Matthew):

The upshot is really summarized in the abstract, and the four lineages giving rise to modern South American populations is shown in the figure below. The size of the circle in each area is an index of the inhabitants’ genetic diversity, which itself is an index of population size (bigger circles = more people in the past).

Here’s the summary:

From our origins in Africa, humans have migrated and settled across the world. Perhaps none of these migrations has been the subject of as much debate as the expansion into and throughout the Americas. Gusareva et al. used 1537 whole-genome sequenced samples from 139 populations in South America and Northeast Eurasia to shed light on the population history of Native Americans. Collected as a part of the GenomeAsia 100K consortium, analysis of these data showed that there are four main ancestral lineages that contributed to modern South Americans. These lineages diverged from each other between 10,000 and 14,000 years ago, and this analysis reveals more details of the population history dynamics in these groups.

Note how, in general, the South American circles are smaller, reflecting the fact that only a limited number of individuals went on each southward foray, reducing the genetic diversity.  Note that they used over 1500 whole genome sequences to get these data, and that the lineages diverged over 10,000 years ago. What I always find amazing is that humans crossed the Bering land bridge about 17,000 years ago, and only a few thousand years later they’d already crossed North America, Central America, and made it to South America. That’s some fast traveling, and one wonders why. (I presume competition, but we don’t know.)

They also were unable to find the part of NE Asia where the immigrants originated, but they surely had to pass through Siberia.

Click picture to enlarge:

(From paper): Genetic ancestry and nucleotide diversity. Colors represent genetic ancestries estimated by whole-genome sequencing data of contemporary human populations. Countries having no data remained empty. Circle size indicates the average nucleotide diversity of each population.

*The man who tried to stab Salman Rushdie to death has been sentenced, and although it was the maximum sentence under the charges, it seems light to me:

 The man convicted of stabbing Salman Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in 2022, leaving the prizewinning author blind in one eye, was sentenced Friday to serve 25 years in prison.

A jury found Hadi Matar, 27, guilty of attempted murder and assault in February.

Rushdie did not return to court to the western New York courtroom for his assailant’s sentencing but submitted a victim impact statement. During the trial, the 77-year-old author was the key witness, describing how he believed he was dying when a masked attacker plunged a knife into his head and body more than a dozen times as he was being introduced at the Chautauqua Institution to speak about writer safety.

Before being sentenced, Matar stood and made a statement about freedom of speech in which he called Rushdie a hypocrite.

“Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people,” said Matar, clad in white-striped jail clothing and wearing handcuffs. “He wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.”

Matar received the maximum 25-year sentence for the attempted murder of Rushdie and seven years for wounding a man who was on stage with him. The sentences must run concurrently because both victims were injured in the same event, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said.

Rushdie, stabbed 15 times, lost one of his eyes and the use of one hand, and if you want to read his ruminations about the attack, I highly recommend Rushdie’s account Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, which I’ve mentioned before. Since Rushdie never met the guy who stabbed him, it’s not just his thoughts about the murder, which are quite eloquent, but the gruesome details of his long healing. At the end he confects a dialogue between himself and Matar in an attempt to  suss out Matar’s motivations.  It’s all because Rusdie wrote a book that offended some Muslims; I bet Matar didn’t even read it.

Here’s an 8.5-minute BBC video giving details of the trial; it includes a short interview with Rushdie:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s looking for books in all the wrong places.

Hili: What are you looking for?
Andrzej: A good book.
Hili: You are not going to find it here.
In Polish:
Hili: Czego szukasz?
Ja: Jakiejś dobrej książki.
Hili: Tu nie znajdziesz.

And a picture of Szaron stalking:

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

Masih must be feeling better, as she’s reposting old posts. Here’s one about hijabs. There are English subtitles

From Luana. Seriously, a headline this straight (and indicting Palestinian terrorism) is very rare in the NYT!

From Simon:

Unpopular Pete Hegseth Forced To Drink Lunch Alone

— The Onion (@theonion.com) 2025-04-22T16:00:02.314Z

From Malcolm.  I may have posted this before (I can’t recall), but I love it.

From my feed; these are pretty amazing and, I’m sure, expensive:

One from the Auschwitz Memorial that I reposted”

This Czech Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was 13.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-17T09:39:30.280Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb, who’s recovering rapidly. The first one he captions, “More nightmarish visions from the good old US of A. It’s heinous:

The state of Georgia is using the body of a brain-dead woman as an incubator. Because she was 9 weeks pregnant when she died, and their abortion ban is from about 6 weeks, they are sustaining her on life support, without input from her family, until 32 weeks of gestation. A true dystopian nightmare.

— Arghavan Salles, MD, PhD (@arghavansallesmd.medsky.social) 2025-05-15T18:46:36.731Z

Here’s natural (well, really artificial) selection for antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Note that the environment gets more challenging towards the center.

A fabulous video – I used to show this to my first year students as am example of natural selection in action.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-04-13T15:24:22.352Z

Friday: Hili dialogue

May 16, 2025 • 6:45 am

It’s Friday! It’s Friday! Gotta get down on Friday! Yep, it’s Friday. May 16, 2025, and National Barbecue Day.  Below is a stupendous barbecued beef rib with all the trimmings from one of my favorite places: Black’s in Lockhart, Texas. It was part of my first trip after the pandemic: a 2021 BBQ Tour of Texas. You can see Potato salad, beans, raw onions, jalapeño corn muffin, and sweet tea on the side (not visible).  Or get the brisket, but GO!

 

It’s also Biographer’s Day (which biographer?), National Pizza Party Day, Endangered Species Day, Love a Tree Day, National Chartreuse Day (the green version is one of my favorite liqueurs, and National Coquilles St. Jacques Day.

There’s a Google Doodle today, which takes you (click on screenshot) to another lunar game. I think Google is getting all astrology-y:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*It looks like what I thought would be a no-brainer Supreme Court case: the birthright of citizenship, which Trump opposes, has run into some trouble. The Justices seem divided! 

The Supreme Court appeared divided after hearingarguments Thursday about the power of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions, including rulings that have blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting the guarantee of birthright citizenship nationwide.

Several liberal justices argued that Trump’s order denying automatic citizenship for U.S.-born babies is blatantly at odds with more than a hundred years of Supreme Court precedent. The court only indirectly considered the citizenship issue as it was more directly being asked to weigh the scope of nationwide injunctions. The arguments on Thursday — lasting a little more than two hours —largely focused on that issue.

The Trump administration asked the justices to scale back nationwide injunctions to apply only to the pregnant women, immigrant advocacy groups or states that challenged the ban — which opponents say conflicts with the Constitution, past court rulings and the nation’s history. More than 300 lawsuits have been filed challenging Trump’s actions, and courts in many cases have at least temporarily blocked many of his initiatives.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices that relief should be granted to people who sued, not other people, which he said “results in all these problems.” Justice Clarence Thomas, who asked the first question, said the country “survived until the 1960s” without nationwide injunctions.Justice Elena Kagan, a former solicitor general, questioned the practical effects of limiting nationwide injunctions, asking how else courts could address unconstitutional issues.

In the end the Court has to decide this one; injunctions by federal courts that apply nationwide won’t hold until the Big Court weighs in.  Either you’re a US citizen or not, and you can’t be a citizen in, say, Oregon but not Alabama. And the idea that relief applies only to those who sue is palpably stupid. It’s time for Roberts & Co. to bite the bullet. Are they afraid of striking down Trump’s orders?

*On her Broadview site, Lisa Selin Davis, who identifies as a liberal, tells us “There is a way to save PBS [Public Broadcasting System] and NPR [National Public Radio.”  And that’s to get rid of government funding and get all the money from the real public: individuals (h/t Enrico).

While I agree that Trump is depraved, I disagree that federally defunding NPR and PBS exemplifies it. Rather, I see this move as anything from reasonable to necessary. Mostly, I see it an opportunity.

Trust in the media remains at an all-time low. Many liberals understand the problem with highly biased news outlets, and regularly decry the slant of Fox or Breitbart, which baldly sell the intermeshing of editorial and news. But few of us would admit that NPR and PBS are also slanted—just in a complementary direction to our own views. (Well, not my views, but those of the people around me, aghast that someone would steal the Pride flag from in front of a brownstone, while preventing a woman from posting on the neighborhood listserv when her Israeli flag was stolen. My view is that if you’re gonna be upset about flag theft, you gotta be upset about both of those instances equally.)

Groups that comb the media for bias tend to rate NPR and PBS as left-ish, not full blown propaganda. But former NPR employee Uri Berliner wrote in The Free Press that the organization had “lost America’s trust” by representing “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”

NPR’s coverage of social and health issues has dutifully reflected the left-leaning worldviews such billionaires and their advocacy groups support. They took Dr. Rachel Levine at face value when saying that “Transgender Health Care Is An Equity Issue, Not A Political One.” A sampling of headlines: “Shifting Federal Policies Threaten Health Coverage For Trans Americans;” “New research finds trans teens have high satisfaction with gender care.” “How school systems, educators and parents can support transgender children.”

What reporters at NPR should have been doing was questioning whether the psychological and medical interventions of “gender-affirming care” added up to healthcare. They should have asked, and educated others about, what “trans” means, and where the idea of gender identity came from. They should have scrutinized the research they reported as showing interventions were successful, and not just reported the research with conclusions that affirmed their own worldviews. They should have examined the differences between adult transsexuals and young people seeking transition, and taken the idea of rapid-onset gender dysphoria seriously, rather than ignoring it. They should have explained that, no, this is not an equity issue—it’s an issue of science and of medical ethics, and it’s a cultural issue, related to how we understand, or don’t, gender… whatever the hell that word means.

Some of the bias:

· NPR refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story, calling it a waste of time and a distraction, despite that it was highly relevant to the presidential election.

· NPR repeatedly insisted COVID-19 did not originate in a lab and refused to explore the theory.

· The FBI, CIA, and Department of Energy have all since deemed the lab-leak theory the likely cause.

· NPR ran a Valentine’s Day feature around “queer animals,” in which it suggested the make-believe clownfish in “Finding Nemo” would’ve been better off as a female, that “banana slugs are hermaphrodites,” and that “some deer are nonbinary.”

· Research shows that “congressional Republicans faced 85% negative coverage, compared to 54% positive coverage of congressional Democrats,” on PBS’s flagship news program.

· Over a six-month period, PBS News Hour used versions of the term “far-right” 162 times, but “far-left” only 6 times.

. . . .  I’d say it’s a little more complicated when it comes to PBS, which relies more heavily on federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting than NPR does. I don’t think Masterpiece Theater and Antiques Roadshow are suffering from ultra-biased leftism, even if PBS NewsHour is. And I think Sesame Street was one of the greatest things that ever happened in television history (and I highly recommend this documentary about it). But I still don’t see a reason for all of America to subsidize such programming. Trump’s declaration is correct about this: “No media outlet has a Constitutional right to taxpayer subsidized operations, and it’s highly inappropriate for taxpayers to be forced to subsidize biased, partisan content.”

Like most Americans, I’d rather defund CPB than I would the police—and that’s not because I’ve turned right-wing. It’s because I ended up learning a lot more about race, gender, Covid, George Floyd, and many other things than my incredibly slanted liberal media gave me. Some of that knowledge came from consuming an omnivorous media diet, including certain outlets I was told would forever stain my soul if I consulted them. Mostly, I learned more because I found individuals whose reporting and analysis I could trust—the Substack model of journalism. But that’s not what I want, nor do I think most people have the time to figure out whom to trust. They want to trust a news outlet, not an newsperson.

After saying that the priorities of these venues should change, she avers that that’s nearly impossible, and so suggests this:

So here’s another version, although one that takes a similar route. If PBS and NPR want to stay open, they’re going to need to rely more on a different kind of public funding—by individual members of the public, not the money we give the government through taxes. That means they shouldn’t just appeal to a small band of educated elites who want to bask in the glow of their own certainty. They should undergo a massive ideological overhaul to more accurately reflect the views and tastes of America.

I agree. I used to listen to NPR a lot, as it’s one of the few stations I can get on my car radio, but lately I learn almost nothing by listening, and am angered that the station’s coverage is so slanted. It takes about 15 minutes of listening before you see where it’s coming from.  Now, only 10% of NPR’s total budget comes from the taxpayers, and 15% for PBS, but why not get rid of taxpayer funding altogether? If you want slanted media, that’s fine. But I’d really like a PUBLIC station that discusses all sides of the issues instead of the MSNBC of the airwaves.

*Several major league baseball players, including Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, formerly placed on a list ineligible to be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame, have been reinstated again. Rose was banned for repeatedly betting on baseball, though not against his team (the Cincinnati Reds) when he was a player, and lying about it. He may have bet on the Reds, however, when he became manager.  Jackson was expelled for supposedly accepting bribes to throw the 1919 World Series when he played for the Chicago White Sox (this is the “Black Sox Scandal”).  Rose admitted guilt, but never admitting betting on (or against) his team; he holds several all-time records. From Wikipedia:

Rose was a switch hitter and is MLB’s all-time leader in hits (4,256), games played (3,562), at-bats (14,053), singles (3,215), and outs (10,328).[1] He won three World Series championships, three batting titles, one Most Valuable Player Award, two Gold Glove Awards, and the Rookie of the Year Award. He made 17 All-Star appearances in an unequaled five positions (second baseman, left fielder, right fielder, third baseman, and first baseman). He won two Gold Glove Awards when he was an outfielder, in 1969 and 1970. He also has the third longest hit streak in MLB history at 44, and remains the last player to hit safely in 40 or more consecutive games.

The NYT asked 12 living Hall of Famers if they thought Pete Rose should get in, even though he’s dead (article archived here).  By my count, four said “yes,” one said “no,” and the other seven either had no opinion or said it should be left up to those who vote. In my view, Rose shouldn’t get in for betting on baseball, for betting on (or against) his team, for besmirching the reputation of baseball (though players like Ty Cobb have done that, too), and because one reason he’s now eligible is because Trump raised a ruckus with the Commissioner of Baseball. Pressure from anybody shouldn’t count, only performance; but Rose’s betting and lying was part of his performance.

*Martha Nussbaum, a highly regarded professor of law and philosophy at my University, has given Judith Butler what the kids call “a sick burn” in a New Republic piece called, “The professor of parody: the hip defeatism of Judith Butler” (h/t Bryan). As I recall, she’s gone after Butler in print before. A few excerpts:

Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible.

These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways. Such feminists therefore find comfort in the idea that the subversive use of words is still available to feminist intellectuals. Deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our resistance by the reworking of verbal categories, and thus, at the margins, of the selves who are constituted by them.

One American feminist has shaped these developments more than any other. Judith Butler seems to many young scholars to define what feminism is now. Trained as a philosopher, she is frequently seen (more by people in literature than by philosophers) as a major thinker about gender, power, and the body. As we wonder what has become of old-style feminist politics and the material realities to which it was committed, it seems necessary to reckon with Butler’s work and influence, and to scrutinize the arguments that have led so many to adopt a stance that looks very much like quietism and retreat.

. . .It is difficult to come to grips with Butler’s ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions. In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler’s work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.

AD

A further problem lies in Butler’s casual mode of allusion. The ideas of these thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated (if you are not familiar with the Althusserian concept of “interpellation,” you are lost for chapters) or to explain to the initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. Of course, much academic writing is allusive in some way: it presupposes prior knowledge of certain doctrines and positions. But in both the continental and the Anglo-American philosophical traditions, academic writers for a specialist audience standardly acknowledge that the figures they mention are complicated, and the object of many different interpretations. They therefore typically assume the responsibility of advancing a definite interpretation among the contested ones, and of showing by argument why they have interpreted the figure as they have, and why their own interpretation is better than others.

This is a very long article, and dissects many of Butlers’ views, concentrating on her idea that sex is not a biological reality but a social construct mirroring the power of those who make the constructs. If you want to see what a fraud Butler is, read the article, which ends this way:

Finally there is despair at the heart of the cheerful Butlerian enterprise. The big hope, the hope for a world of real justice, where laws and institutions protect the equality and the dignity of all citizens, has been banished, even perhaps mocked as sexually tedious. Judith Butler’s hip quietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of realizing justice in America. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism demands more and women deserve better.

*I didn’t realize until today that Chicago’s Field Museum has its own specimen of Archaeopteryx, a transitional form between dinosaurs and birds, and one of the world’s most famous fossils (there are 12 body specimens and some bits and bobs). It was perhaps the earliest transitional form discovered (1861, only two years after publication of The Origin), though its status as evidence for transitions between major forms wasn’t touted until later.

Here’s Wikipedia’s dope on the Chicago specimen, which is the subject of a brand-new paper (below):

The existence of a fourteenth specimen (the Chicago specimen) was first informally announced in 2024 by the Field Museum in Chicago, US. One of two specimens in an institution outside Europe, the specimen was originally identified in a private collection in Switzerland, and had been acquired by these collectors in 1990, prior to Germany’s 2015 ban on exporting Archaeopteryx specimens. The specimen was acquired by the Field Museum in 2022, and went on public display in 2024 following two years of preparation.  In 2025, the paleornithologist Jingmai O’Connor and colleagues officially published a study describing this fourteenth Archaeopteryx specimen.

From Reuters:

The new study, examining the Chicago fossil using UV light to make out soft tissues and CT scans to discern minute details still embedded in the rock, shows that 164 years later there is more to learn about this celebrated creature that took flight 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period.

The researchers identified anatomical traits indicating that while Archaeopteryx was capable of flight, it probably spent a lot of time on the ground and may have been able to climb trees.
The scientists identified for the first time in an Archaeopteryx fossil the presence of specialized feathers called tertials on both wings. These innermost flight feathers of the wing are attached to the elongated humerus bone in the upper arm. Birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs, which lacked tertials. The discovery of them in Archaeopteryx, according to the researchers, suggests that tertials, present in many birds today, evolved specifically for flight.

Feathered dinosaurs lacking tertials would have had a gap between the feathered surface of their upper arms and the body.

“To generate lift, the aerodynamic surface must be continuous with the body. So in order for flight using feathered wings to evolve, dinosaurs had to fill this gap – as we see in Archaeopteryx,” said Field Museum paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor, lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, opens new tab.

“Although we have studied Archaeopteryx for over 160 years, so much basic information is still controversial. Is it a bird? Could it fly? The presence of tertials supports the interpretation that the answer to both these questions is ‘yes,'” O’Connor added.

It’s still not clear that tertial feathers are a strong indicator of flight, though they do provide lift. But that can also be used for gliding, or hopping up in the air to get prey. I have to get down to the Field Museum to see this specimen; I think it’s one of the few in the world—and the only one in America—that you can see with your own eyes.

Here’s the paper in Nature (I won’t summarize it):

And a short video that shows the specimen, which took two years to prepare:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cats are enjoying the good weather (she’s down by the Vistula River):

Hili: I have a dream.
A: What dream?
Hili: That May would last all year round.
In Polish:
Hili: Mam marzenie.
Ja: Jakie?
Hili: Żeby maj był przez cały rok.

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

From Another Science Humor Group:

From Animal Antics:

From Things With Faces, a goofy ice cream bar:

Masih is quiet as she’s still recovering from surgery. Have a tweet reposted by JKR; the original Torygraph article is archived here. And get a load of this excerpt:

The NHS is treating nursery-age children who believe they are transgender after watering down its own guidance, The Telegraph can reveal.

The health service was previously set to introduce a minimum age of seven for children to be seen by its specialist gender clinics, claiming anything less was “just too young”.

The limit was removed after the proposals were put out to consultation, with new guidance due to be published showing that children of any age are eligible.

However, a source close to the consultation process said NHS England had “caved to the pressure” of trans activists to remove the limits.

The children are not given powerful drugs such as puberty blockers at the clinics, but are offered counselling and therapy along with their family.

The tweet:

From Luana: another post I can’t embed (what’s going on with “X”?). But here’s a screenshot AI is doing grading now!

More mockery from Simon:

— George Conway 👊🇺🇸🔥 (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2025-05-14T20:03:54.847Z

From Jay; a prank AND a marriage proposal!

Two from my site (I’m having trouble embedding):

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I reposted:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was nine (I think they got the birthdate wrong; should be 16 May.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-16T09:53:19.042Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. I never saw anything in baseball like this one:

THAT BALL WENT THROUGH HIS GLOVE

— Codify Baseball (@codifybaseball.bsky.social) 2025-05-14T13:36:22.392Z

And a baby rattler:

Carefully avoided an adorable baby rattlesnake on the trail at the Santa Rosa Plateau today. #iNaturalist #herps

— Flower Prof (@flowerprof.bsky.social) 2025-04-12T01:17:08.232Z

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue

May 15, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, May 15, 2025, and International Conscientious Objectors Day. I was one of these, and applied for I-O status in 1970. My draft number in 1971 was 3!. I vowed to go to jail rather than fight in Vietnam, which I saw as a useless and unjust war in which the U.S. was not defending itself.  Fortunately, I got a 2-S (CO) status without evan an examination (I had a history of antiwar work). So, I did my CO work in a NYC hospital for 13 months until I found I had been “drafted” illegally (they drafted COs from the class of 1971 but no soldiers, which violated the draft law). With the help of the ACLU, I initiated a class action suit (Coyne et al. v Nixon et al,) and we won in NY federal court. We were released (the class was, as I recall, about 2500 COs all told), but of course not compensated, as we were allowed to earn no more than a GI ( about $6000 per year) but had to pay for our own food and housing.  Then I was free to go to graduate school, but that is another story, and a long one. . . .

It’s also Bring Flowers to Someone Day, National Apértif Day (always a dry sherry), National Chocolate Chip Day, and Peace Officers Memorial Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 15 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Republicans are getting antsy about Trump accepting an expensive plane from the terrorist-supporting state of Qatar to use as Air Force One for the next four years.

Republican lawmakers on Tuesday expressed national-security concerns over the proposed $400 million plane that the Qatari royal family wants to give to the U.S. for use as Air Force One, offering rare GOP resistance to a venture backed by President Trump.

Many of the Republicans who expressed doubts serve on congressional committees that oversee the nation’s armed services and intelligence agencies. They said that the White House would be subject to a battery of questions regarding security if the transfer goes forward. They noted that scrubbing the plane for foreign surveillance technology would be a costly and laborious process and questioned whether the Qatari plane would have necessary capabilities—like being able to refuel midair—or carry the advanced technology needed for an airborne command center.

Several suggested that President Trump and the White House might rethink the offer.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) stressed Tuesday afternoon that nothing was official yet and predicted there would be “plenty of scrutiny” around the arrangement should it move forward. “There are lots of issues around that that I think will attract very serious questions if and when it happens,” Thune said.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) stressed Tuesday afternoon that nothing was official yet and predicted there would be “plenty of scrutiny” around the arrangement should it move forward. “There are lots of issues around that that I think will attract very serious questions if and when it happens,” Thune said.

Trump also has faced some criticism over the deal from conservative commentators: Ben Shapiro characterized the idea as “skeezy,” and influencer Laura Loomer took aim at Qatar via social media saying “we cannot accept a $400 million ‘gift’ from jihadists in suits.”

The objections voiced by GOP lawmakers also are noteworthy given that Trump is currently on an overseas trip to the Middle East. He is set to be in Qatar for a state visit on Wednesday, and the blowback at home about the gift threatens to overshadow the trip.

And it looks as if the plane will sort of belong to Trump after his term is over, as it reverts to the Trump Presidential Library. What will happen then? Will it no longer fly? Will it be used to ferry documents and books back and forth? No, this is very bad optics, and you know it’s bad when even Republicans criticize it. And to prevent eavesdropping, they’d have to take the whole damn plane apart to see if the Qataris have put listening devices in it. It’s not like they’re even a friendly state, though they pretend to be.

*Here’s Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Pretty clear, no?

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

That looks like Trump’s “birthright ban” for children of immigrants is palpably unconstitutional. But yet. . . . .

Shortly after the Supreme Court announced in April that it would consider the nationwide freeze on President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, he gleefully spoke to reporters in the Oval Office.

Mr. Trump said that he was “so happy” the justices would take up the citizenship issue because it had been “so misunderstood.” The 14th Amendment, he said — long held to grant citizenship to anyone born in the United States — is actually “about slavery.”

“That’s not about tourists coming in and touching a piece of sand and then all of the sudden there’s citizenship,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “That is all about slavery.”

For more than a century, most scholars and the courts have agreed that though the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution after the Civil War, it was not, in fact, all about slavery. Instead, courts have held that the amendment extended citizenship not just to the children of former slaves but also to babies born within the borders of the United States.

. . . The story of how the theory [that it was about slavery] moved from the far edges of academia to the Oval Office and, on Thursday, to the Supreme Court, offers insight into how Mr. Trump has popularized legal theories once considered unthinkable to justify his immigration policies.

“They have been pushing it for decades,” said John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and a top lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. “It was thought to be a wacky idea that only political philosophers would buy. They’ve finally got a president who agrees.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

So far, courts have agreed. Judges in Washington State, Massachusetts and Maryland quickly instituted nationwide pauses on Mr. Trump’s policy.

Attorney General Andrea Campbell of Massachusetts spoke out in February against Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. Massachusetts joined Maryland and Washington State in instituting nationwide pauses on the policy.Credit…David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

In oral arguments this week, the justices will primarily consider whether federal judges have the power to order these temporary pauses, known as nationwide injunctions. But the question of birthright citizenship will form the backdrop.

If the Supreme Court can’t rule on the Constitution like this, but merely throws the case back to federal judges, it’s a total abnegation of their task: to rule on the constitutionality of law. Individual states can’t make conflicting criteria for citizenship. Trump was wrong, and I’m betting he loses this one.

*The IDF has been trying to get Muhammad Sinwar, the younger brother of now-extinct Yahya Sinwar, who was the military head of Hamas. Muhammad is a top Hamas official, if not the top Hamas official, and has eluded numerous attempts to kill him:

Like his elder brother, Muhammad Sinwar has long been wanted by the Israeli authorities. He is said to have been targeted in six assassination attempts by 2021.

In 2014, the Israeli military believed that it had killed the younger Mr. Sinwar, only to discover that he had survived. In late 2023, the Israeli military said on social media that it had searched his office in a raid on a Hamas military post and training compound in Gaza, “where military doctrine documents were located.”

But both Sinwar brothers continued to elude Israel, until Yahya, then the political leader of Hamas, was killed by the Israeli military in October.

In a 2022 interview with Al Jazeera, it was reported that Muhammad was so elusive that he would not be recognized by most people in Gaza, and had even missed his father’s funeral to maintain secrecy about his whereabouts.

He is believed to have spent much of the war underground in an effort to escape Israeli airstrikes. But in recent months, he had been seen aboveground in Khan Younis, including at Nasser Hospital, according to a Middle Eastern intelligence official.

The Jerusalem Post and BBC both report that the IDF struck a meeting in a hospital in Khan Younis, a meeting reportedly involving top Hamas officials.

The IDF on Tuesday attempted to assassinate Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar in a strike on the European Hospital in Khan Yunis in Gaza, sources told The Jerusalem Post. 

The military may have used a bunker buster bomb in their attempted attack against Sinwar, defense sources told the Post.

Following the initial attack, the IDF reportedly struck the area where Sinwar was allegedly located a second time, with the objective of preventing the evacuation of casualties, Israeli public broadcaster KAN reported.

Israel reportedly did not update the US prior to the assassination attempt, a source familiar with the details told Ynet. According to the report, the strike was the result of a “sudden opportunity,” leading to no time to inform the Americans or consider the timing of US President Donald Trump’s speech in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

“We will not allow the Hamas terrorist organization to use hospitals and humanitarian facilities in Gaza as shelters and terrorist headquarters,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said. “We will pursue them and their leaders and strike them everywhere.”

It’s not yet clear if they got Sinwar, and it’s won’t be believable until the IDF reports it (they haven’t).  And even if they did, it’s not at all sure that Hamas will be appreciably weakened with his death, for if he does go to the Virgins in the Sky, another leader may step forward to replace him. But it’s now seems clear that Hamas is losing, and will be clearer when the IDF conducts its promised intensified warfare after Trump leaves the Middle East.

*It’s hard to find any news that’s not about Trump, but here’s some, and good news. Deaths due to overdoses fell very sharply last year, the sharpest decline ever.

There were 30,000 fewer U.S. drug overdose deaths in 2024 than the year before — the largest one-year decline ever recorded.

An estimated 80,000 people died from overdoses last year, according to provisional Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released Wednesday. That’s down 27% from the 110,000 in 2023.

The CDC has been collecting comparable data for 45 years. The previous largest one-year drop was 4% in 2018, according to the agency’s National Center for Health Statistics.

All but two states saw declines last year, with Nevada and South Dakota experiencing small increases. Some of the biggest drops were in Ohio, West Virginia and other states that have been hard-hit in the nation’s decades-long overdose epidemic.

Experts say more research needs to be done to understand what drove the reduction, but they mention several possible factors. Among the most cited:

— Increased availability of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone.

— Expanded addiction treatment.

— Shifts in how people use drugs.

— The growing impact of billions of dollars in opioid lawsuit settlement money.

— The number of at-risk Americans is shrinking, after waves of deaths in older adults and a shift in teens and younger adults away from the drugs that cause most deaths.

Still, overdose deaths are still higher than they were during the pandemic, and death rates have fluctuated before. Still, we now have Naloxone, which every first responder should be carrying:

Experts note that there have been past moments when U.S. overdose deaths seemed to have plateaued or even started to go down, only to rise again. That happened in 2018.

But there are reasons to be optimistic.

Naloxone has become more widely available, in part because of the introduction of over-the-counter versions that don’t require prescriptions.

Meanwhile, drug manufacturers, distributors, pharmacy chains and other businesses have settled lawsuits with state and local governments over the painkillers that were a main driver of overdose deaths in the past. The deals over the last decade or so have promised about $50 billion over time, with most of it required to be used to fight addiction.

If you want to see how serious the opioid crisis is, how addictive they are, and how some pharma companies tried to make them more addictive, read Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe: It’s really about one family’s nefarious deeds pushing opioids, but I found it a fantastic read. And the Sacklers still didn’t suffer much for all they did.

*Finally, Matthew brought my attention to a Guardian article about a duck being caught by a Swiss speed camera, and it was likely a repeat offender. Yes, ducks can fly quickly, and this was a mallard drake.

A radar image of a speed offender caught in central Switzerland last month has revealed that the culprit was not only a duck but probably a repeat offender, local authorities have said.

Police in the town of Köniz, near Bern, were astounded when they went through radar images snapped on 13 April to discover that a mallard was among those caught in the speed trap, the municipality said on its Facebook page at the weekend.

The duck was caught going 52km/h (32mph) in a 30-km/h zone, the post said.

That’s reckless flying!

The story, first reported by the Berner Zeitung newspaper on Monday, got even stranger.

It turned out that a similar-looking duck was captured flying in the same spot at exactly the same speed, on exactly the same date seven years earlier, the Facebook post said.

The municipality said it had considered whether the whole thing might not be a belated April Fool’s joke or a “fake” picture.

But the police inspectorate said it was impossible to doctor images or manipulate the radar system.

The computers are calibrated and tested each year by Switzerland’s federal institute of metrology, and the photos taken are sealed, the municipality said.

Lock him up!  Here’s the photo, credited to: Gemeinde Köniz/Facebook:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the boys have a botanical exchange:

Hili: The grass grows quickly after rain.
A: I don’t blame it.
In Polish:
Hili: Trawa po deszczu szybko rośnie.
Ja: Ja jej się nie dziwię.
And a picture of Szaron.

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

From Now That’s Wild:

From Meow:

From Jesus of the Day:

Masih is still recovering from her operation, but here’s a tweet retweeted by JKR. I can’t embed it but you can go to it by clicking on the screenshot, and you can read the letter here. The BBC is accused of being homophobic!

Simon says this is “hilarious if true”, but I simply can’t believe it.  Readers–help!

You can’t make this up

— Adam Parkhomenko (@adamparkhomenko.bsky.social) 2025-05-13T16:18:26.272Z

From Malcolm: I can’t embed this but you can see the original by clicking on the screenshot. (Note that “only” should be before “once”.)

Shermer gives all the excuses why this is okay:

From my feed.  Turkey loves its cats, and this vending machine apparently dispenses cat food when it hears a meow. Now seagulls are trying to game the system.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

A Polish dressmaker died in the camps barely a month after arriving. She was 22.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-15T09:56:14.034Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb, who is recovering from both a chest infection and respiratory virus. But he’s getting better! First, a little crab stole some food from the big one. Sound up to hear the Spanish:

Libidoclaea granaria 🦀 from @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 741 #ChileMargin2024 #MarineLife

— Lisa (@tuexplorer1.bsky.social) 2025-05-14T03:12:03.111Z

Matthew says this about the tweet, which starts a thread: “I briefly felt well enough last night to pen this Wodehousian thread (inspired by listening to a lot of BBC Jeeves dramatisations, which is only vaguely droll if you know the Jeeves books and also UK WW2 literature 

What did Bertie Wooster get up to in WW2? He was 24 when he employed Jeeves (20 years older?) who later said he had “dabbled to a certain extent” in WW1. That must have been in 1920ish. In 1939 he would have been in his early 40s, slightly liverish, but still a game old bird. 1/n

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-05-13T20:46:14.308Z

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

May 14, 2025 • 6:45 am

(Written at about 5 a.m.) We lost another duckling yesterday, and we’re down to five. I suspect it was a bird predator as crows were mobbing something nearby in the morning. I am absolutely heartbroken.

UPDATE from above.. I just fed the ducks/ducklings at 6 a.m. and the missing duckling has reappeared! In all my years of tending these birds, I have never seen a duckling disappear and then reappear. They are always around their mother, but the straggler was not to be seen for hours yesterday afternoon, and after a close inspection of the pond, I could not find it. I have no idea where it went, but I am SO happy that we have six again! I would name the straggler “Lazarus” if I knew which one it was.  I gave them extra mealworms as a treat.

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Hari Punuk” in Indonesian): Wednesday, May 14, 2025, and National Buttermilk Biscuit Day, perhaps the greatest indigenous breadstuff ever created in America. There is nothing to match a good biscuit, and below shows some I consumed at the Loveless Motel and Cafe outside Nashville on March 26, 2012. It’s no longer a motel but still famous for its food—especially biscuits.

The sign (note “Hot biscuits and country ham” at the top, always worth stopping for:

Carol Faye Ellison, the “Biscuit Lady”, now deceased but replaced by another excellent biscuit maker (I believe the white-haired lady is the owner, but I’m not sure:

The biscuits with homemade jam. They come before breakfast, so it’s too easy to fill up on these wonderful things:

And the full Monty: biscuits, country ham with red-eye gravy (left), grits, and fried eggs. This is what the gods eat for breakfast. Anybody saying they don’t like grits will kindly keep their sentiments to themselves.

It’s National Brioche Day and International Dylan Thomas Day, celebrating “the anniversary of the first reading of Under Milk Wood, which took place on May 14, 1953, at the 92Y Poetry Center in New York City.

Thomas is one of my favorite poets. When I was in Wales, I visited his home and writing shed in Laugharne, as well as his grave. Here are both. The shed is apparently how it was left when he died in 1953.

Dylan Thomas

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

Da Nooz:

*Trump is cozying up to yet another terrorist/dictator in the Middle East, this time the new ruler of Syria, who was a member of Al-Qaeda but then formed his own terrorist group that overthrew al-Assad. That new government is now bent on destroying all minorities in the country, including the Druze and Christians (the IDF is actually in Syria trying to protect them). But Trump wants to help these new rulers:

President Trump announced on Tuesday that he would end sanctions on Syria, saying at the start of his four-day tour of the Middle East that he had decided to do so after consulting with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and the President of Turkey.

Mr. Trump’s announcement drew rousing applause from the crowd at an investment forum in Riyadh, where he spoke before some of the world’s business elite and members of the Saudi royal family. “There is a new government that will hopefully succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace,” he said, referring to the rebel alliance that ousted the dictator Bashar al-Assad in December. “That’s what we want to see in Syria.”

Mr. Trump intends to meet with Syria’s president, Ahmed al-Shara, on Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, according to a White House official and a regional official with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s plans. The lifting of sanctions on Mr. al-Shara’s newly formed government would allow for international aid and investment that would help the country recover from a devastating 13-year civil war.

The sanctions announcement was a surprise at the start of the first major international trip of Mr. Trump’s second term. The tour is expected to focus mostly on signing wide-ranging business deals with some of the region’s wealthiest economies, although some of the agreements his administration hailed were in the works before he took office.

“The United States is the hottest country, with the exception of your country,” he told the crowd, name-checking Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler.

Ending sanctions on Syria (especially with Turkey’s approval) constitutes tacit approval of a terrorist government. President al-Shara may now be wearing a suit instead of a military uniform, but he’s still a terrorist inside, and, as far as I can see, no substantial improvement over al-Assad. Why is Trump helping him? I think that our “President” fancies himself The World’s Great Peacemaker, which is a recipe for disaster.

*I suspect that this new HHS report on pediatric gender medicine will be dismissed because of its source, it was commissioned by the Trump administration. However, the summary in the City Journal was written by Colin Wright, whom I consider reliable, and of course he has read the report (you can also read the same summary on his website, which is a useful but brief account of what the HHS found)

One of President Trump’s first executive orders was the provocatively titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The order directed federally funded insurance programs to end coverage of pediatric sex-trait modification and barred hospitals receiving federal funds from performing such interventions. It also instructed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to conduct a review of the evidence and ethical considerations surrounding pediatric gender medicine.

That review, “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” was released earlier this month. It is already being described as America’s Cass Review, the landmark gender-medicine review published last year in the United Kingdom.

This report is long overdue. While European health authorities in countries like Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the U.K. have moved away from the “gender-affirming” model and toward cautious psychological support for gender-dysphoric children, American institutions have only become more entrenched in the model despite growing evidence of the harm and weak benefits.

The HHS report breaks this trend, providing a comprehensive and sober reevaluation of the science, ethics, and clinical practices in pediatric gender medicine. At more than 400 pages, with chapters on history, terminology, evidence, ethics, and clinical realities, it is the most thorough and ambitious document of its kind in the United States.

The report’s central findings are clear and direct: gender-affirming interventions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries are supported only by low- or very low-quality evidence, while the potential for irreversible harm is substantial. Risks include sterility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone-density and brain development, psychiatric comorbidities, and surgical complications. The report rejects claims that gender transition reduces suicidality, finding no high-quality evidence to support this oft-repeated assertion. In line with international reviews, it concludes that psychotherapy should be the first-line treatment for youth with gender dysphoria.

Some of the report’s most powerful contributions are found in areas not typically emphasized in such documents. The chapter on terminology is especially significant. Unlike most U.S.-based clinical guidelines, which adopt ideologically loaded terms like “assigned sex at birth,” the HHS report rejects euphemistic language and insists on terminological clarity. It calls out the concept of “gender identity” as scientifically ill-defined, noting that it lacks a stable, observable referent and is inconsistently used even within affirming literature. The report also critiques the classification of children into “cis” and “trans” categories, arguing that this framing falsely reifies identity claims into diagnostic categories and forecloses open exploration. It rightly points out that describing a child as “trans” presupposes the correctness of the gender-identity claim and biases all subsequent treatment decisions.

. . .Despite this omission, the HHS report is a landmark document. It does what no American medical body has had the courage to do: assess the state of pediatric gender medicine without ideological blinders. It does not bend to euphemism or advocacy language. It does not inflate poor-quality studies to preserve consensus. It does not equate policy with science. Instead, it re-centers the debate on the core question: What does the evidence actually say?

For too long, American medicine has been governed by slogans: “trans kids know who they are,” “affirmation saves lives,” “trust the experts.” The HHS report is a long-overdue invitation to move past slogans and return to science. Let’s hope the medical community has the courage to accept it.

We’ve discussed the medical conclusions before, and in general they’re correct, and have been adopted by most of Europe. Now I haven’t read the report, but you have the link above so you can determine whether it’s “transphobic,” for it will surely be characterized that way buy gender activists no matter what it says. Colin goes on to describe the other results, including a harsh treatment of  WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health—a misguided and harmful organization if ever there was one. If this really is the Cass Review for America, as Colin says, then it’s a good thing, for it will slow down the unnecessary medicalization of gender-dysphoric kids. Yes, some of them will need hormone treatment, and maybe even surgery, but remember that over 85% of gender-dysphoric cases resolve on their own without surgery or hormones, usually with kids becoming gay.

*The government is ratcheting up pressure on Harvard University after the school outright refused to sign on to the President’s attempt to force changes on the University. And it’s doing so by withholding money, though less than last time.

The Trump administration is cutting another $450 million in grants to Harvard in its escalating pressure campaign against the nation’s most prominent university.

The announcement follows the cancellation of about $2.2 billion last month and a pledge last week by Education Secretary Linda McMahon to stop providing Harvard with any new federal grants.

“Harvard University has repeatedly failed to confront the pervasive race discrimination and anti-Semitic harassment plaguing its campus,” the administration wrote in a letter Tuesday signed by members of the government’s antisemitism task force, which has been leading the charge against elite universities.

The letter singled out the Harvard Law Review for alleged race discrimination when evaluating articles for inclusion in its journal.

A Harvard spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Harvard has been locked in a battle with the Trump administration since late March when the government said it was reviewing nearly $9 billion in federal funding over antisemitism concerns.

The government demanded oversight of Harvard’s admissions, faculty hiring and governance to address what it said was the school’s failure to stop the harassment of Jewish students on campus.

Harvard filed a federal lawsuit last month arguing that the government has violated the university’s constitutional rights as well as due process. The administration has responded by threatening Harvard’s tax-exempt status and its ability to enroll international students. It has also said it will review Harvard’s reporting of foreign gifts.

I’m guessing that Harvard will win that lawsuit, though it may take some time. And I’m betting that if they try to remove Harvard’s tax exemption (a selective move since virtually all American colleges and universities, public and private, are exempt from federal taxation), that will also be declared unconstitutional.

*Sean “Diddy” Combs, rapper and music producer, is in big trouble, facing 78 people of both sexes who have filed sexual assault lawsuits against him as well as a sex-trafficking trial that began yesterday. If even a small fraction of the allegations are correct, he’ll be spending the rest of his life in prison (he’s 55).  Testimonies so far have been in line with what his accusers have said.

When Cassie Ventura filed her November 2023 lawsuit against her former boyfriend Sean Combs, her story of exploitation and abuse became a road map, charting a course for dozens of people to come forward with their own allegations of sexual assault against one of the most powerful music producers in the world. Though Ventura reached a settlement the day after her complaint was filed, her lawsuit marked the beginning of what would become a #MeToo music reckoning of sprawling proportions.

Several striking patterns emerge in the 78 sexual assault lawsuits filed against Combs as of May 1, four of which have been settled, dropped or dismissed. Like Ventura’s, many suits involve young artists or aspiring entertainers who believed Combs could make or break their careers. According to their lawsuits, many also found themselves assaulted after being lured into his world — allegedly humiliated, abused, beaten or threatened in settings that include lavish parties, hotel rooms and Combs’s famous Bad Boy Records in New York.

And many — including Ventura — recount being offered what they believed to be drugs or a spiked drink before losing consciousness.

In other ways, some of the subsequent lawsuits diverge from Ventura’s. There are almost as many male as female accusers. About one-fifth of the plaintiffs allege they were minors when they were assaulted. And whereas Ventura came out publicly with her accusations, dozens of other plaintiffs have pseudonymously filed lawsuits as Jane and John Does, many claiming they fear retribution.

Combs has denied all allegations against him. Here are the most prominent patterns we noticed in the sexual assault lawsuits.

Here’s a bar graph from The Washington Post, and you can see the takeaways simply from the categories:

It always amazes me how people with such wealth and clout resort to palpably illegal behaviors, like spiking drinks and forcing minors into sex. My only explanation was that Combs saw himself as invicible. With all those people involved, did he not consider that all it took was a handful of them to put him in the dock?

*From the AP’s reliable “oddities” section, we learn that many Alaskans celebrate Mother’s Day by visiting, yes, muskoxen (Ovibos moschatus). It’s a tradition, Jake!

It is one of Alaska’s favorite Mother’s Day traditions, getting up close and personal with animals that have survived the ice age.

All moms get a daisy and free admission Sunday at the Musk Ox Farm in Palmer, about an hour’s drive north of Anchorage. Once inside they will have the chance to view 75 members of the musk ox herd, including three young calves just getting their feet under them. Also a draw is an old bull named Trebek, named after the late “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek, a benefactor of the facility.

“Who doesn’t want to celebrate Mother’s Day with a musk ox mom and the most adorable calf you’re ever going to find in your life?” said Mark Austin, the farm’s executive director.

Mother’s Day is the traditional start of the summer season for the farm, which traces its roots back to 1964 and at several locations before moving in 1986 to Palmer.

“When we opened the doors here, we started doing Mother’s Day as a grand opening every year,” Austin said.

He called it a natural decision, celebrating mothers with cute, newborn baby musk oxen on the grounds. So far this year, three baby musk oxen have been born and are on display, and more could be on the way.

Mother’s Day is the busiest day of the year, attracting more than 1,500 visitors. It is a tradition that now stretches over three generations.

“It’s a huge, just kind of rite of passage for a lot of people,” Austin said. “If we ever talked about not doing it, there’d be a riot.”

Musk oxen are ice age survivors.

“They were running around with saber-toothed tigers and mastodons, and they’re the ones that lived,” Austin said. The herd members all have diverse personalities, he added, and they are crafty, smart and inquisitive.

Of course you’ll want to see a video taken on Mother’s Day. And yes, the babies are adorable.  These are some hairy critters!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is spending time ordering her pangs of conscience, though I don’t know if its from the worst on down or from the smallest up.

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m putting in order my pangs of conscience.
In Polish:
Ja: Co ty tu robisz?
Hili: Porządkuję wyrzuty sumienia.

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

From Meow:

From reader Pliny the in Between’s Far Corner Cafe:

From Jesus of the Day, an early cat painting:

Masih is still recovering so I’ll demonize myself by showing a tweet from JKR, which I couldn’t resist because it features a CAT. I can’t embed it for some reason, but click on the screenshot to go to the original. It’s funny, too.

From Luana, none must have prizes:

From Simon: something I didn’t know (or didn’t remember):

Let’s break this down—because the gaslighting is wild:📌Oct 2022 – Biden signs EO to cut drug prices📌Jan 2025 – Trump takes office and kills Biden’s EO to cut drug prices📌May 2025 – Trump signs his own EO to lower drug pricesTrump canceled Biden’s plan then brought it back w/his name on it.

— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) 2025-05-13T03:51:45.060Z

Two from my feed:

You go, bro (or girl)!:

 

One that I reposted from the Auschwitz memorial:

A Jewish girl from Ukraine was gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz. She was about 14.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-14T09:47:43.530Z

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, spot the predators:

Give yourself points if you can find the little predators lurking among these bicolored frostweed aphids (Uroleucon verbesinae). I'm quite pleased with how this photo from today turned out. Might make a good print.

— Alex Wild (@alexwild.bsky.social) 2025-05-13T00:55:28.072Z

Matthew says that this animal is new to him. I’ve heard of it!

Meet the thin-spined porcupine! This nocturnal rodent, also known as the bristle-spined rat, is found only in parts of northern and central Brazil. Unlike many other porcupines, this one's quills are more like bristles than spines!Photo: ultimosrefugios, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNautralist

— American Museum of Natural History (@amnh.org) 2025-05-12T14:52:46.896Z

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

May 13, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, May 13, 2025 and National Apple Pie Day, celebrating the culinary equivalent of America! But they’re not limited to America: here’s a “Dutch apple pie with a lattice top layer (appeltaart)” (Credit: No machine-readable author provided. Pv assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons):

It’s also Tulip Day, Frog Jumping Day (celebrating Mark Twain’s 1865 story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County), National Fruit Cocktail Day,World Cocktail Day, and International Hummus Day. Here’s a lovely hummus meal I had in Jerusalem two years ago, complete with pita, falafal, and tomatoes with raw onion (not visible).  This place put whole chickpeas on top of the hummus paste.

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

Da Nooz:

*Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage held by Hamas (actually he’s a dual citizen of Israel and the US), has been freed after direct US/Hamas negotiations (article archived here):

Hamas released Edan Alexander, the last living American hostage it held in Gaza, on Monday evening, after mediators brokered a deal between the group and the United States that largely circumvented the Israeli government. Hamas and the Israeli military confirmed the handover.

Mr. Alexander’s release came on the eve of a visit by President Trump to the Middle East, and was portrayed by Hamas officials as an attempt to secure U.S. support for a wider deal to end the war.

Mr. Alexander, 21, was among roughly 250 people seized and taken to Gaza during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that ignited the war in Gaza. A dual Israeli American national serving in the Israeli Army, he was captured from a military post that morning. He grew up in New Jersey and moved to Israel after high school to join the military.

Unlike most other hostages, Mr. Alexander was released without a formally announced cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, highlighting the failure of efforts to secure a broader truce between the two sides. Hamas still holds at least 20 living hostages — along with some 40 dead bodies, including those of several Americans — but it is reluctant to release more of them unless Israel agrees to hold negotiations to end the war. Israel wants the right to continue the war after any future truce, leading to an impasse in the talks.]

. . .Still, Mr. Cohen [“Yehuda Cohen, whose son Nimrod is still held in Gaza”] saw hope in how Mr. Trump was willing to work around Mr. Netanyahu. “He’s losing patience,” Mr. Cohen said of Mr. Trump. “We hope that it’s a new start of a new hostage deal, forcing Netanyahu to end the war, get all the hostages.”

Mr. Trump helped to fuel such hopes by announcing on social media on Sunday that Mr. Alexander’s release could be “the first of those final steps necessary to end this brutal conflict.”

The only way that Hamas will release all the hostages is if it’s allowed to retain power in Gaza, which would be intolerable to many Israelis. But on the other hand, Israelis naturally want the hostages released. Such is the dilemma of the Jewish state. Netanyahu has said that after Trump leaves the Middle East, the assault on Hamas will begin again, more serious this time.  And then what? Nobody knows.

Here’s a news report that shows part of the family reunion:

*This is weird: the romantic partner of Theranos grifter Elizabeth Holmes (she’s serving about a decade in prison for wire fraud) has raised millions of dollars for an AI-related biotech testing startup (h/t Killian).  From NPR:

The partner of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has raised millions of dollars for an artificial intelligence startup hoping to introduce a product that can be used in medical testing and other settings, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the endeavor who could not speak publicly because the company has not yet officially launched. The company is called Haemanthus, which is Greek for “blood flower.”

Holmes, a former Silicon Valley star, is serving an 11-year sentence in federal prison for misleading investors about her blood-testing startup Theranos, once heralded as a breakthrough in laboratory science before its core technology proved faulty.

Since being imprisoned at a federal facility in Bryan, Texas, Holmes has been providing advice to her partner, Billy Evans, on the startup, according to the sources. The precise nature of Holmes’ supporting Evans on the venture is unclear.

About a dozen people are part of the startup. Some of those working on the company formerly worked with Evans at Luminar Technologies, which develops sensors for autonomous vehicles, according to the company’s patent and Delaware incorporation paperwork. Evans has raised money mostly among friends, family and other supporters so far, according to one of the sources.

Evans is called her “partner” as it’s not sure whether they are legally married, though one would expect that the public records would answer that. More:

. . . . Holmes’ support for her partner’s foray into biotech is striking, given she is serving a federal prison sentence for fraud in that same field.

Over the course of her nearly four-month criminal trial, Holmes insisted she did not commit any crimes, despite evidence presented by the government and witness testimony suggesting she purposely deceived investors and tried to cover it up, not long after she was plastered on the covers of magazines and drew comparisons to Steve Jobs.

From prison, Holmes continues to fight. On Thursday, a federal appeals court upheld her conviction.

Holmes, the mother of two, named one of her children Invicta, Latin for “invincible.”

In addition to Holmes’ fraud conviction, a separate investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission led to her being banned from serving as an officer or director of any public company for a decade as part of a March 2018 settlement. The prohibition does not affect her ability to help run a private company, but a source familiar with Haemanthus said she is not planning to take a formal role helping Evans run the company.

Still, she is plotting a post-prison return to the healthcare industry.

Would you invest any money in this new company? Apparently a lot of people have, and it’s bloody weird. Almost as weird as Holmes “plotting a post-prison return to the healthcare industry.” She’ll be about 48 when she gets out, as she’s not entitled to much time off for good behavior.

*The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) reports that a professor at the University of Washington who was punished for putting the “wrong” land acknowledgment on his syllabus is suing his University. From FIRE’s media report: (I’ve bolded his “land acknowledgement”:

A federal appeals court in San Francisco is set to hear oral arguments later this week in the case of a Washington professor who refused to adhere to his university’s requirement that he include specific “land acknowledgment” language in a course syllabus.

On Thursday, May 15, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear oral arguments in the lawsuit brought by Professor Stuart Reges against the University of Washington. University administrators punished Reges after he included a land acknowledgement statement on his syllabus that differed from the university’s approved language. His statement? “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.”

The university told him to remove the statement and launched a year-long investigation with the threat of termination, claiming that Reges disrupted the learning environment. While Reges faced a setback when the district court initially ruled in favor of the university, he appealed in May 2024 and the fight goes on.

Josh Bleisch, one of the attorneys representing Reges, is available to discuss the upcoming arguments and the case. Reges is represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a national free speech group.

“We’re going to bat for Reges to send a simple message: faculty aren’t mouthpieces for their administrations,” said Bleisch. “The value of land acknowledgements may be up for debate, but faculty rights are not. We look forward to defending Reges’ rights in court.”

A longer FIRE report from 2022 (this has been going on for a while) is here, and I’ll give two more bits:

Colleges increasingly promote land acknowledgment statements that recognize indigenous ties to the land on which a college sits. On a list of syllabus “best practices,” UW’s computer science department encourages professors to include such a statement and suggests using language developed by the university’s diversity office “to acknowledge that our campus sits on occupied land.” The fact that the statement could be adapted seemed clear — until Reges wrote one that administrators did not like.

“University administrators turned me into a pariah on campus because I included a land acknowledgment that wasn’t sufficiently progressive for them,” said Reges. “Land acknowledgments are performative acts of conformity that should be resisted, even if it lands you in court. I am pleased that FIRE joined with me to fight back against University of Washington’s illegal viewpoint discrimination.”

. . . As a public institution bound by the First Amendment, UW must uphold its professors’ right to free speech and cannot discriminate against them based on viewpoint. UW is free to encourage its faculty to include land acknowledgment statements in their syllabi, and even to suggest examples, but it may not mandate that they either use only approved statements or remain silent on the issue under threat of discipline.

I think FIRE is right; this is a free-speech issue as well as an academic freedom one. If you are encouraged to put land acknowledgments on your syllabus, they cannot specify what you must say. And although I don’t know from the “labor theory of property,” Reges may well be right.  I don’t think he’s allowed to lie on his syllabus, but it doesn’t look as if he did.  I really dislike land acknowledgments because they’re purely performative. They are there to make the issuer look progressive and moral, but they accomplish exactly nothing. And that is what “woke” means.

*Those crazy tariffs between the U.S. and China, tariffs that threatened to promote an American recession, appear to have disappeared as quickly as they came. They’ve been slashed deeply, and the markets have responded favorably.

The U.S. and China agreed to slash punishingly high tariffs on each other’s goods, a major thaw in trade relations that resets the tone between the world’s two largest economies from outright conflict to constructive engagement.

After two days of weekend talks in Geneva:

President Trump’s “reciprocal” tariff on China will fall to 10% from 125%.

A separate 20% tariff the president imposed over what he described as China’s role in the fentanyl trade will remain.

Beijing will cut its retaliatory levies on U.S. goods to 10% from 125%.

The U.S. said reductions will last 90 days while talks continue.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said meetings over a fuller deal would likely start in the next few weeks, but it would be implausible for reciprocal tariffs on China to fall below 10%.

President Trump said the trade talks achieved a “total reset” with China, calling it a very good deal, and said he might speak to Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the end of the week.

The agreement lowered tariff levels far more than Wall Street expected, with one analyst, Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, calling the deal a “best-case scenario” for investors.

U.S. stocks surged, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite climbing more than 4%. The Dow industrials jumped above where it closed on April 2, before Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs sent markets into a tailspin.

From 125% to 10%: that’s a steep cut on both sides.  Now the best tariff is no tariff, but 10% on each side is at least acceptable, and won’t raise the price of consumer goods all that much.  I’m not sure whether this is Trump’s decision or that of his advisors, but it’s a relief. The only dark cloud for me is that I hoped that those who voted for Trump would become more centrist when they see how he tanked the economy for no good reason.

*Finally, Trump has signed an EO that will order a change–a lowering–of drug prices, and that can only be good. Americans pay way too much for drugs compared to residents of comparable countries, and it simply gouges the consumer while enriching drug companies.

President Donald Trump on Monday signed a sweeping executive order setting a 30-day deadline for drugmakers to electively lower the cost of prescription drugs in the U.S. or face new limits down the road over what the government will pay.

The order calls on the health department, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to broker new price tags for drugs over the next month. If deals are not reached, Kennedy will be tasked with developing a new rule that ties the price the U.S. pays for medications to lower prices paid by other countries.

“We’re going to equalize,” Trump said during a Monday morning press conference. “We’re all going to pay the same. We’re going to pay what Europe pays.”

It’s unclear what — if any — impact the Republican president’s executive order will have on millions of Americans who have private health insurance. The federal government has the most power to shape the price it pays for drugs covered by Medicare and Medicaid.

Trump’s promised new — but uncertain — savings on drug prices, just hours after the Republican-led House released its new plan to trim $880 billion from Medicaid.

Taxpayers spend hundreds of billions of dollars on prescription drugs, injectables, transfusions and other medications every year through Medicare, which covers nearly 70 million older Americans. Medicaid, which provides nearly-free health care for almost 80 million poor and disabled people in the U.S. also spends tens of billions of dollars each year for drugs.

And of course the gazillionaires have their usual comeback:

The nation’s pharmaceutical lobby, which represents the top U.S. drugmakers, immediately pushed back against Trump’s order, calling it a “bad deal” for American patients. Drugmakers have long argued that any threats to their profits could impact the research they do to develop new drugs.

“Importing foreign prices from socialist countries would be a bad deal for American patients and workers,” Stephen J. Ubl, the president and CEO of PhRMA, said in a statement. “It would mean less treatments and cures and would jeopardize the hundreds of billions our member companies are planning to invest in America.”

This is from a US government report issued in 2020.

Insulin prices have increased dramatically over the past decade in the United States. This report presents results from international price comparisons of insulins using a price index approach. The average gross manufacturer price for a standard unit of insulin in 2018 was more than ten times the price in a sample of 32 foreign countries:$98.70 in the U.S., compared with $8.81 in the 32 non-U.S. OECD countries for which we have prescription drug data. The U.S. prices for the mix of insulin used in the U.S. were 8.1 times prices paid in all non-U.S. OECD countries combined.

Nearly 146 million people in America have either Medicare or Medicaid, and those are the oldest and poorest people.  That is more than half of American adults (people over 18). Many of the drugs that are overpriced, like insulin do not need further research and development—at least not big bucks’ worth. I’m pretty sure, though I don’t know with certainty, that a lot of the overpriced drugs are not new ones that needed a lot of money to develop. But of course Big Pharma could say, “Well, we need to overcharge because it gives us a constant stream of money to develop new drugs.”  I don’t believe that.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains the latest dialogue: “Hili says that everything is OK, she feels well and comfortable, but maybe somewhere else it would be better still and she is thinking about where there is a place she would feel even better.”

Hili: What now?
A: I don’t understand.
Hili: I have it good here and I wonder where to go to have it even better.
In Polish:
Hili: Co dalej?
Ja: Nie rozumiem.
Hili: Tu jest mi dobrze i zastanawiam się gdzie pójść, żeby mi było jeszcze lepiej.
And a picture of Baby Kulka.

 

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

From Cats, Coffee, and Chaos:

From David:

From Things With Faces: an evil chicken thigh:

Masih has been ill! We wish her a quick recovery; Iran needs her!

Have a look at her future studies:

From Malcolm. LOOK AT THIS TREE!

From Barry, who notes, “There are purrs, meows, and chirps. . . but what in tarnation is this?

From Luana; this is just plain WEIRD!:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted

This Polish Jew, a watchmaker, lived but a week after entering the camp at Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-05-13T10:02:51.522Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb, who’s still abed and ailing but improving slowly. First, this is the first post of a thread. Read the whole thing; you won’t be sorry:

OK, this is wild.In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them.It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*. What the HELL?1/

— Mike Sowden (@mikeachim.bsky.social) 2025-05-12T15:20:06.024Z

To see the land slip, look to the right at 11 seconds in:

This is mind-blowing! I have never seen footage of the slip that occurs during an earthquake! Here you see the slip that occurred during the Myanmar earthquake. 🤯www.youtube.com/watch?v=77ub…

— Douwe van Hinsbergen (@vanhinsbergen.bsky.social) 2025-05-12T09:37:07.202Z

Monday: Hili dialogue

May 12, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the top o’ the week: Monday, May 12, 2025, and National Nutty Fudge Day. I prefer mine without nuts. Here’s some fruity fudge, which looks pretty good:

Siona Watson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also International Nurses Day, National Odometer Day, and Limerick Day.  Here’s one I wrote as a postdoc to answer a professor in molecular genetics who asserted that natural selection was unimportant and that development explained the appearance of animals:

“The giraffe,” said John Kiger last fall,
“Causes me no amazement at all;
“Why, the gene for the neck
“Is repeated, by heck
“And that’s why the damn thing’s so tall!”

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 12 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT goes after Colossal Bioscience’s wonky “de-extinction program” (as I did) in a piece called “There’s no ‘undo’ button for extinct species.” (Article archived here. h/t Enrico) A lot of the criticisms were given in my earlier Boston Globe piece.  I bolded one sentence.

De-extinction is a distinctly modern fantasy: the extremely appealing idea that we can, with just some pipettes and computers, undo the destruction we continue to cause the natural world. So it’s fitting that the first animal whose creation Colossal announced was a dire wolf — an animal that exists, in the public imagination, primarily as a fantasy. Colossal’s advisers include the “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin and two stars of the HBO adaptation, and a press photo showed the animals sitting on the show’s Iron Throne. Many commenters were shocked not by the advancing science of genetic engineering but rather by the revelation that dire wolves were once real animals.

. . . Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi began life as gray-wolf cells that were edited, grown into embryos and implanted in the wombs of surrogate dog mothers. The edits, which consisted of 20 modifications on 14 genes — a small fraction of the 19,000 genes that make up a gray-wolf genome — were based on comparisons between gray-wolf genomes and those reconstructed from dire-wolf DNA found in ancient tooth and bone fragments. (Gray wolves and dire wolves share superficially similar skeletons, which once led scientists to conclude they were closely related, but they’re actually quite distinct, with evolutionary lineages that diverged millions of years ago.) The resulting animals were larger and fluffier and lighter in color than other gray wolves. The company’s chief science officer, Beth Shapiro, says this is enough to make them dire wolves, if you subscribe to the “morphological species concept,” which defines a species by its appearance. “Species concepts are human classification systems,” she told New Scientist, “and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right.”

A lot of people disagreed. Calling the pups dire wolves, wrote the evolutionary biologist Rich Grenyer, is “like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short Frenchman to wear his hat.” The scientists who specialize in canids for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a group that monitors biodiversity and maintains lists of threatened and endangered species, responded to Colossal’s announcement with a news release of its own, declaring that “the three animals produced by Colossal are not dire wolves.” For one thing, they said, there is no way to know if these wolves are good physical proxies for animals no one has seen for 12,000 years. For another, pure physicality ignores the ecology and behavior and culture of the original dire wolf — the very things that made it one.

I LOVE Grenyer’s comment; I wish I was that clever. At any rate, the tenor of the piece is that “de-extinction” is a false promise.

Even if Colossal had managed to reproduce the dire-wolf genome, that would be very different from reproducing a world in which a vanished creature might thrive. It’s also different from reproducing all the ways in which those creatures once affected their environment. Shapiro has referred to Colossal’s work as “functional de-extinction” — a concept borrowed from the rewilding movement — which argues for bringing back the animal activities that maintained an ecosystem, if not the exact animals that once performed them. It’s also a play on the ecological term “functional extinction,” which designates species that are still, technically, present in the world but in such starkly diminished numbers they no longer eat or pollinate or otherwise have a meaningful impact on their ecosystems. It’s a term that’s getting more and more play, given that the average size of global wildlife populations declined by 73 percent from 1970 to 2020.

. . . .Extinction is not a phenomenon of the mythic past. It’s an active and ongoing crisis, one that’s making our world less resilient and more impoverished. The potential victims, as the scientists at the International Union for Conservation of Nature noted, include many canids, the real-life extended family of dire wolves, now facing a raft of threats: “habitat loss and degradation, human-wildlife conflict, invasive species, disease and the overall disruption of natural processes.” By providing the appearance of an escape clause, so-called de-extinction could undermine not just the few protections that endangered species have but also the idea that we need to make any changes at all.

The day Colossal released its promo video, Doug Burgum, the Trump administration’s secretary of the interior, wrote a long post on X celebrating the news as the first step in ending protections for endangered species. In the future, populations would never really be at risk of disappearance, no matter how diminished their presence. And if they did vanish? Well, we would just bring a few of them back, Burgum told Department of Interior employees during a town hall: “Pick your favorite species,” he said, “and call up Colossal.”

I found that last quote, too.  Watch for the appearance of those woolly mammoths in three years!!!

*And another NYT article from Enrico is about who should set the rules for protests at Columbia University (archived here).

In the spring of 2024, pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Columbia University found a formidable ally in the university senate, a body that was given authority over campus protest policy in the aftermath of violent police interventions decades earlier.

Now, the powerful senate finds itself under a microscope. University administrators and trustees, eager to reclaim authority and answer criticism from the Trump administration, have ordered a review of the senate, a move that could fundamentally alter Columbia and redefine control of student protests and disciplinary action.

Some trustees and administrators have blamed the senate for delaying and obstructing discipline of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who broke university rules, and some appear to have accused the 111-member elected body of antisemitism. Senators hotly rebut those charges and say that the senate is standing up for Columbia’s rules and proud tradition of protest against outside pressure.

. . .While a Trump administration task force has demanded that Columbia make a series of changes to get the $400 million back, the decision to review, and perhaps overhaul, the senate goes beyond those demands. It highlights the broad ideological divide between the left-leaning faculty members who dominate the senate and want to protect it and the trustees, who are mostly wealthy businesspeople and lawyers with a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that the university functions.

If the Senate punished Columbia students for encamping, or invading a building, I don’t know about it. A bit more:

The trustees wanted to strictly limit when, where and how protests could take place — setting “time, place and manner” restrictions — but were worried that the senate, which is in charge of disciplining protesters who break rules, would not enforce it.

Yep!

. . .At another point, two deans who had negotiated with the demonstrators on behalf of the administration joked about how the senate was almost as pro-Palestinian in outlook as Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD, the student movement that established a tent encampment on campus last spring.

“Senate sounds like CUAD,” the dean of Columbia College, Josef Sorett, wrote in a May 5, 2024, text message to Jelani Cobb, the journalism school dean, a few days after protesters occupied a campus building, Hamilton Hall. “It’s a spinoff,” Mr. Cobb replied.

Mr. Cobb said on Tuesday that the texts were a joking exchange and did not reflect the deans’ view of the senate.

If you believe that, I have some land in Florida to sell you.  I won’t say the Senate is antisemitic, but I’ll note that they’re Israel-haters. They are largely progressive humanities people, and you know what that means, BUT. . . read the next entry:

*SURPRISE! Columbia suspended 65 pro-Palestinian students who took over part of the campus library last week.

Columbia University suspended 65 students involved in a pro-Palestinian protest Wednesday that took over part of the school’s main library.

The students won’t be able to take their final exams or enter campus except to access their dorms. Seniors won’t be able to participate in graduation ceremonies, a school official said.

Columbia barred 33 other people from campus, including students from other colleges and alumni who took part in the protest.

“When rules are violated and when our academic community is purposefully disrupted, that is a considered choice—one with real consequences,” a Columbia spokesperson said.

The disciplinary actions come as Columbia is negotiating with the Trump administration over its federal funding and autonomy. The government has presented Columbia with a proposal for a consent decree, a form of federal oversight that would give a judge responsibility for ensuring Columbia complies with the agreement.

I hate to say this, but I don’t think they wouldn’t have done that without the threat of Trump. And for sure the invasion of the library, which involved pushing security guard and vandalism, was against university regulations.

The school’s response to the protest contrasted with its approach last year, when chaotic and sometimes violent pro-Palestinian protests and encampments led the school to move classes online and cancel its main graduation ceremony. Now, for the first time in more than 50 years, the school employs campus police with expanded authority to arrest students.

I’d prefer that the school did this on its own rather than have its hand forced by our “President.” But seriously, breaking into a library and pushing guards, and then vandalizing the library during finals, no, that is not free speech.  I just hope that the school doesn’t drop the charges.

Here’s a Global News video of the assault, demonstration vandalism, and arrests. Note most of the protestors have covered their faces in the usual cowardice. Remember, these are the students who want to turn America into Palestine:

*Pizza Assault! Judges in cases adjudicating Trump’s recent policies have been intimidated by, yes, unordered pizzas. And I can imagine that that would be unsettling:

Federal judges say unsolicited pizza deliveries to jurists’ homes that began in February may number in the hundreds across at least seven states, prompting increased security concerns and a demand from a Senate leader for a Justice Department investigation.

Many of the deliveries have gone to judges presiding over lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s policies. The U.S. Marshals Service has been tracking the deliveries, and judges have been sharing details about their experiences in hopes of finding out more about what they call an ongoing attempt at intimidating the judiciary.

Some of the pizza deliveries have gone to judges’ relatives. In recent weeks, orders have been placed in the name of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’s son, Daniel Anderl, who was fatally shot at the family home in New Jersey in 2020 by an attorney who posed as a delivery person.

In an interview with The Washington Post, U.S. Circuit Judge J. Michelle Childs, who serves in Washington, said she has received seven anonymous pizza deliveries at her home in the past few months — one shortly after she took part in a ruling against the Trump administration in a lawsuit over the firing of an independent government watchdog.

“It’s unsettling because I’d like to go to work every day, even with the hardest case, just feeling like there’s no sense of intimidation,” said Childs, president of the Federal Judges Association.

“It’s really an unnecessary and an unfortunate threat to our security when we’re trying to be judicial officers in a very neutral position with respect to our cases,” she said. “You need a strong judiciary for the system to work. This is infringing on democracy generally.”

Childs and Salas said that they and other judges have discussed the deliveries with the marshals, relaying information to them each time a pizza arrives at the door. Childs serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Salas serves on the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.

I never order food to be delivered, but don’t you have to leave a credit card number when you order? What numbskull thought up this stunt?  And what law is being violated here? I’m sure there is one, probably falling under the rubric of “intimidation.” Perhaps “intimidation through pizza.”

*This can’t be legal: Trump may accept a jet from the corrupt country of Qatar to use as Air Force One!

President Donald Trump reportedly is set to accept a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet as a gift from the ruling family of Qatar during his trip to the Middle East this coming week, and U.S. officials say it could be converted into a potential presidential aircraft.

ABC News reported that Trump will use the plane as a new version of Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office in January 2029, when ownership will be transferred to the foundation overseeing his yet-to-be-built presidential library.

The gift is expected to be announced when Trump visits Qatar as part of a trip that also includes stops in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the first extended foreign travel of his second term. The Qatari government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Administration officials, anticipating questions about the president accepting such a large gift from a foreign government, have prepared an analysis arguing that doing so would be legal, according to ABC. The Constitution’s Emoluments Clause bars anyone holding government office from accepting any present, emolument, office or title from any “King, Prince, or foreign State,” without congressional consent.

. . . . One expert on government ethics, Kathleen Clark of the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, accused Trump of being “committed to exploiting the federal government’s power, not on behalf of policy goals, but for amassing personal wealth.”

Air Force One is a modified Boeing 747. Two exist and the president flies on both, which are more than 30 years old. Boeing Inc. has the contract to produce updated versions, but delivery has been delayed while the company has lost billions of dollars on the project. Delivery has been pushed to some time in 2027 for the first plane and in 2028 — Trump’s final full year in office — for the second.

Qatar, as you know, is the home of most immensely wealthy Hamas officials, and supplies plenty of dosh to the terrorist organization. For us to accept a gift from such a state is an arrant travesty, and, I hope, illegal. What does Trump flying around in a Qatari jet symbolize?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is exercising self help:

A: What are you thinking about?
Hili: Where to look for happiness.
In Polish:
Ja: Nad czym myślisz?
Hili: Gdzie szukać szczęścia.
And a picture of Baby Kulka:

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

From reader Wayne:

From reader David Jorling, and this must be Lamarckian evolution!

From reader Stacy, the new Chicago pope:

This is a story you should know about. The BBC gives the full story.

From Luana: a thread by Lee Jussim about some replies to Nate Silver’s dissing of the Bluesky site. The thread is worth reading, as is one reply:

From Simon, who says, “As imaginary as the true value of cryptocurrency.”

Brilliant!

— Peggy Stuart (@peggystuart.bsky.social) 2025-05-09T20:42:12.618Z

From Malcolm; a parrot and AI talk on the phone. It’s hilarious.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

12 May 1928 | A Dutch Jewish boy, Max van den Berg, was born in Rotterdam.In August 1942 he was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber.

— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-05-12T02:00:40.816Z

Two tweets from Matthew. First, some ducklings:

I went to the park to film some water textures with a fancy ultra slomo camera, but got distracted by ducks, so here is some very wholesome content of ducklings having a great time chasing lil bugs in extreme 900fps slow motion:

— Rob Sheridan (@rob-sheridan.com) 2025-05-08T02:02:43.757Z

Colossal’s patent is for the final, gene-edited animal, so I don’t think that’s a violation of research ethics, but I doubt anybody is going to infringe on their patent anyway. The toys are clearly AI generated bya a prankster.

Colossal Biosciences is trying to win patents on the "Woolly mammoth" and the "dire wolf."www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/16/1…

— Antonio Regalado (@antonioregalado.bsky.social) 2025-04-16T12:46:46.386Z