Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, April 8, 2025, and National Empanada Day. Here’s one I bought in Santiago, Chile in 2019:

It’s also Dog Farting Awareness Day (do they need a day for that?), International Romani Day, and Free Cone Day, when you can get a free scoop of Ben & Jerry’s between noon and 8 p.m.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 8 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Well, the markets are bouncing all around today, contrary to my prediction that they’d do another nosediver (however, I’m writing this at noon on Monday).  HOWEVER, Trump has exacerbated things by RAISINGTHE TARIFFS ON CHINA again.  Oy gewalt!

A false dawn on the tariff front fueled a brief midmorning rally Monday, with the S&P 500 surging some 7% from its low on the day, before the administration clarified that there will be no delay in implementing new levies.

The episode, which touched off wild swings throughout the trading day, highlights the increasing desperation on Wall Street as the trade-war rout of 2025 extends into a new week.

In afternoon trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.5%, about 215 points. The Nasdaq Composite turned fractionally higher and the S&P 500 was flat, with all three indexes rallying after 1 p.m. ET.

The earlier rally followed erroneous headlines that President Trump was considering a 90-day pause in tariffs. The initial reaction showed how much desire there is among investors to return to the well-trod territory of administrations that want to assist markets and stock declines that are quickly followed by sharp bouncebacks.

This time, some major investors are starting to sound off publicly about what they see as the dangers in the shift to large tariffs. So far, though, it’s clear that President Trump and his advisers aren’t humming the same tune.

Trump said Monday he plans to add an additional 50% tariff on China starting Wednesday if the country doesn’t withdraw its retaliatory tariff increase on the U.S. “Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated!” he wrote.

Stocks took their latest leg down in response. The S&P stood close to bear-market territory, defined as a 20%-plus decline from a recent peak. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell into a bear market last week.

Wall Street’s “fear gauge,” the VIX, leapt as investors braced for further volatility ahead, and global markets recoiled. The index has more than doubled in the last month.

I invested regularly throughout my career, doing “dollar-cost averaging,” in which I put in the same amount of money each month, and when the markets tanked, as they did several times during my career, I ignored it. That’s what younger people should do, and unless the markets completely tank, I’ll be okay even though I’m retired. But tariffs also mean inflation, and a lot of people have no money in the stock market. Trump’s actions these days defy sanity and rationality, and I have no idea what he thinks he’s doing.

*As I had hoped, one of Trump’s many unconstitutional and haywire decisions has finally reached the Supreme Court. Things have reached a pretty pass when a Democrat has to look to the Court to rectify crazy things done by a Republican President, but I think that, collectively, they have way more sense than Trump. The unconstitutional “birthright” decision hasn’t made it there yet, but Trump’s mistaken deportation of a man who may well be innocent may soon be adjudicated by the court. The thing is, Trump has asked the Supremes to block a federal judge’s order that the inadvertently deported man be returned to the U.S.  However, late yesterday a divided court voted that the guy can stay in El Salvador (the vote was 5-4), but said that potential deportees must receive due process in the U.S. and that they could refile their lawsuits in the the place where they were detained.  Ultimately, the legality of deporting citizens using the Alien Enemies Act wasn’t adjudicated.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to block a trial judge’s order directing the United States to return a Salvadoran migrant it had inadvertently deported.

Judge Paula Xinis of the Federal District Court in Maryland had said the administration committed a “grievous error” that “shocks the conscience” by sending the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to a notorious prison last month. She ordered the government to return him by 11:59 p.m. on Monday.

In the administration’s emergency application, D. John Sauer, the U.S. solicitor general, said Judge Xinis had exceeded her authority by engaging in “district-court diplomacy,” because it would require working with the government of El Salvador to secure his release.

“If this precedent stands,” he wrote, “other district courts could order the United States to successfully negotiate the return of other removed aliens anywhere in the world by close of business,” he wrote. “Under that logic, district courts would effectively have extraterritorial jurisdiction over the United States’ diplomatic relations with the whole world.”

He said it did not matter that an immigration judge had previously prohibited Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador.

“While the United States concedes that removal to El Salvador was an administrative error,” Mr. Sauer wrote, “that does not license district courts to seize control over foreign relations, treat the executive branch as a subordinate diplomat and demand that the United States let a member of a foreign terrorist organization into America tonight.”

From the WaPo:

Instead, the majority ruled that the five Venezuelan immigrants who challenged the policy did so in the wrong court, leaving open the possibility that those targeted for deportation could refile their case in Texas or other jurisdictions where they are detained.

A federal appellate court unanimously refused to block the judge’s ruling, but the Administration fought tooth and nail to keep a main out of the U.S. who has no known evidence against him. What’s next, the deportation of American citizens?

*India has arrested an American YouTube “influencer” for trying to make contact with an isolated tribe living on an island.

Indian police have arrested a 24-year-old American Youtuber who visited an off-limits island in the Indian ocean and left an offering of a Diet Coke can and a coconut in an attempt to make contact with an isolated tribe known for attacking intruders.

Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, from Scottsdale, Arizona, was arrested on March 31, two days after he set foot on the restricted territory of North Sentinel Island — part of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands — in a bid to meet people from the reclusive Sentinelese tribe, police said.

A local court last week sent Polyakov to a 14-day judicial custody and he is set to appear again in the court on April 17. The charges carry a possible sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine. Indian authorities said they had informed the U.S. Embassy about the case.

Visitors are banned from traveling within 3 miles (5 kilometres) of the island, whose population has been isolated from the rest of the world for thousands of years. The inhabitants use spears and bows and arrows to hunt the animals that roam the small, heavily forested island. Deeply suspicious of outsiders, they attack anyone who lands onto their beaches.

In 2018, an American missionary who landed illegally on the beach was killed by North Sentinel islanders who apparently shot him with arrows and then buried his body on the beach. In 2006, the Sentinelese had killed two fishermen who had accidentally landed on the shore.

Indian officials have limited contacts to rare “gift-giving” encounters, with small teams of officials and scientists leaving coconuts and bananas for the islanders. Indian ships also monitor the waters around the island, trying to ensure outsiders do not go near the Sentinelese, who have repeatedly made clear they want to be left alone.

Police said Polyakov was guided by GPS navigation during his journey and surveyed the island with binoculars before landing. He stayed on the beach for about an hour, blowing a whistle to attract the attention but got no response from the islanders.

. . .He later left a can of Diet Coke and a coconut as an offering, made a video on his camera, and collected some sand samples before returning to his boat.

On his return he was spotted by local fishermen, who informed the authorities and Polyakov was arrested in Port Blair, the capital of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an archipelago nearly 750 miles (1,207 kilometres) east of India’s mainland. A case was registered against him for violation of Indian laws that prohibit any outsider to interact with the islanders.

This guy is an idiot. Not only is he endangering himself, but also, by carrying possible microbes to a low-immunity population, endangering the locals. Much as we are fascinated by wanting to hear about “uncontacted” tribes, they do not want to be contacted. If Polyakov really does get five years in an Indian prison—and in general Indian prisons are places where you really don’t want to be—he will be a very sorry influencer.

*Religious groups are having mixed feelings about my op-ed in the Wall Street Journal recounting my entanglement with the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which led to not only my resignation from the honorary board, but also that of Steve Pinker and Richard Dawkins.  They are delighted to see that an atheist organization is acting quasi-religiously (odd, isn’t it, for them to think, “you’re as bad as we are?”), but are upset that it took a diehard atheist, me, to call them out. Here are two of several that I’ve seen.

First, from the World News Group (“Sound journalism, grounded in facts and Biblical truth”):

The outrage of these scientists is that the FFRF turns out to be a lot less committed to reality than they had thought. The foundation claimed to be building a big movement of atheists, scientists, and activists committed to secularism. After affirming abortion, assisted death, and other orthodoxies, the FFRF claims to be “an umbrella for those who are free from religion and are committed to the cherished principle of separation of state and church.”

It turns out that umbrella isn’t big enough for biological reality. Coyne, Dawkins, and Pinker are out. Coyne took to the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal in recent days to declare that “biology is not bigotry.” He went after the FFRF and its advisory board and especially after “transgender ideology” with outrage: “It insists on doctrines that are palpably untrue (“trans women are women”), engages in circular reasoning (“a woman is whoever she says she is”), and affirms mind/body dualism (“your self-concept is more real than your actual sex”).

Furthermore, “It also makes anathema of heresy and blasphemy (tarring of dissenters as ‘transphobes’), attempts to silence critics who raise valid counter arguments, seeks to proselytize children in schools and excommunicates critics.”

Make no mistake. Jerry Coyne insists that he is fully committed to atheism. His claim is that the FFRF has traded scientific atheism for ideological group-think. He also had the temerity to point out that the transgender revolution is incompatible with biological reality. When it comes to the gender ideologies and the new idols of the age, Coyne concludes that he is “proud to proclaim myself a heretic.” Sadly, when it comes to Christianity, Coyne is just as much a heretic, but with infinitely more at stake. We can only hope that his affirmation of biological reality will be extended to theological reality. For that we can hope … and pray.

Theological reality? No way! “Biblical truth” is almost an oxymoron, though a few historical bits of the Bible are true. And from the Albert Mohler site, devoted to pushing Southern Baptism. It’s okay up to the end, where they start denying evolution:

Listen to this. This is an anti-theologian, but he’s using theological language. “It also makes anathema of heresy and blasphemy, tarring of dissenters as transphobes, attempts to silence critics who raise valid counter-arguments, seeks to proselytize children in schools and excommunicates critics.” He mentions J. K. Rowling, for example. Now, I want to be clear, Jerry Coyne has not moved a millimeter towards Christianity.

He has not moved even slightly towards theism. But what he and some of his fellow very famous scientists in this group understood, is that many people who say they are all for science, they turn out to be all the more for, a very unscientific approach when it comes to something such as transgender identity, or even the larger LGBTQIA set of phenomena. And you’ll notice that Richard Dawkins has already been in trouble on this on the other side of the Atlantic. And by the way, if you do believe in biology, you’re going to be in trouble on this. As a matter of fact, if all you believe in is biology, you’re going to be in trouble on this.

I think it’s incredibly interesting that a newspaper, as influential as the Wall Street Journal, has decided just recently to run Coyne’s piece on this. And he goes right at so many of the, say, modern intellectual playthings of the age, and in particular, those that affirm the LGBTQ revolution. He goes on to say, “Biology is not bigotry,” an argument that is also used by many Christians. Of course, biology is not bigotry. He goes on and says this, “The FFRF has not only abandoned science, but suppressed discussion and argument about its decision.”

He says, “Given the organization’s embrace of quasi-religious and unscientific dogma, I’m proud to proclaim myself a heretic.” A heretic, in one of the, say, high churches of secularism. But he’s not any less secular than he ever was. He’s no less atheist than he ever was. He just understands that you can’t have male and female without, well, male and female, you mess that up.

And by the way, if you’re an evolutionary scientist, everything falls apart because you don’t have any forward motion. The mechanism of human reproduction is basically confused and taken away, and once you start talking out loud in this way, guess what? You get canceled. In the case of Jerry Coyne, his article disappeared.

No forward motion? What does that mean? There are plenty of things that don’t have forward motion but don’t fall apart, like, say, the Jungfrau or Mount Rushmore.  No, good Christian folx, I remain a diehard atheist until I get evidence convincing me otherwise.

*The Times of Israel reports that an orange species of butterfly has been given a new Hebrew common name after murdered Israeli hostage Ariel Bibas, apprently stranged to death by Hamas   (h/t: Bob Woolley)

he Hebrew name of a spotted orange butterfly has been changed to honor murdered hostage Ariel Bibas by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, the Bibas family announced Friday.

The academy last week officially informed the family, and on Thursday hand-delivered a letter addressed to Bibas’s father, Yarden — who was also taken hostage but released in February under a ceasefire deal — of the final decision to rename Melitaea ornata (eastern knapweed fritillary).

Using one of the biblical names of Jerusalem, Ariel, the name of the butterfly was replaced in Hebrew from Kitmit Yerushalayim (Orange Jerusalem) to Kitmit Ariel (Orange Ariel) in honor of the four-year-old.

The decision was made unanimously by the academy’s members in a full plenum session after first securing the permission of Yarden Bibas.

“We believe that of all the orange butterflies in our country, this butterfly deserves to be named Ariel, as it is one of the names of Jerusalem,” the letter to Yarden Bibas read.

The idea to rename an orange butterfly came from the head of the academy’s zoological committee, Dr. Liat Gidron, inspired by the eulogy delivered by Yarden  Bibas, who said that his son loved butterflies and the natural world. For decades, the committee has undertaken the task of giving Hebrew names to all animal life — and insects — that are native to Israel.

The Bibas family became a symbol of the tragedy of October 7, with the color orange coming to symbolize the effort to free them, inspired by the vivid orange hair of Ariel and his brother Kfir, who was kidnapped at the age of nine months.

Yarden, his wife Shiri, and their two children were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz — among the 251 hostages that Hamas-led terrorists took when they stormed southern Israel, sparking the war in Gaza.

Here’s a photo of the insect from Wikipedia;

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is mystified by a phenomenon that really is occurring in Dobrzyn:

Hili: Either I’m imagining it or a new house is being built over there.

Andrzej: The latter.

Hili: The fewer people in our town the more houses.

Hili: Albo mi się zdaje, albo tam znowu wybudowali nowy dom.

Ja: Masz rację.

Hili: Im mniej ludzi w tym naszym mieście, tym więcej domów.

Notice once again that Kukla has much more white on her face than does Hili.

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

From Cat Memes:

From Claire (I presume this cheese is from Lesbos):

From Things With Faces; whatever it is, it has a turban:

From Masih, a falsely charged human rights advocate:

They want to execute this brave woman!
Please be her voice before it’s too late!

Pakhshan Azizi, a courageous social worker who fought against ISIS in Syria and helped the wounded, was arrested and imprisoned upon returning to Iran. The corrupt judicial system has sentenced her… pic.twitter.com/GIeo1AmIUE

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 6, 2025

From Barry, who says, “A nice way to deal with anxiety.”   Note: Bridget eventually did find her way home.

Two tweets from Luana. Seriously, men almost surely have an advantage in billiards by virtue of longer arms and bodies, giving them a greater reach:

From Malcolm. Sound up on this one!

Otter sound like a puppy and a cat at the same time and i absolutely love it pic.twitter.com/wuWE28ijXm

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) March 27, 2025

From my feed; this sure looks like petting to me!

Okay now i have seen it all. I just watched an Alpaca pet a cat. pic.twitter.com/0wojmn6d32

— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) April 6, 2025

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

A three-year-old French Jewish girl gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz. She would have been 85 today had she survived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T10:29:10.470Z

Two from Dr. Cobb.  How did “Arthur” get in there?

Tfw you are reading your proofs, and you discover a gremlin has replaced the word “replication”, which 100% appeared in the last version of the manuscript, by “Arthur”.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T19:38:51.142Z

Matthew apparently thinks this is funny!

The minute I met my wife I knew I would make her mine. And within only six weeks I had her working in the family tin mine

— Sanjeev Kohli (@govindajeggy.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T18:29:45.917Z

Welcome to shabbos for goyische cats: Sunday, April 6, 2025, and National Carbonara Day, a wonderful pasta dish. Here’s a photo of Spaghetti alla carbonara, made with “fatty cured pork, hard cheese, eggs, salt, and black pepper.”  Not great for the arteries, but wonderful for the taste buds.

Posting may be a bit scant again because I’m writing this on Saturday before we take off for the Holocaust Museum.  The news will undoubtedly change by this morning. . .

It’s also Geologists Day, National Siamese Cat Day, National Açai Bowl Day (meh), National Caramel Popcorn Day, National Tartan Day, Fresh Tomato Day, and National Twinkie Day.

Many Siamese cats get really upset and meow loudly when their staff takes a shower. Here’s a video that demonstrates it well. TRIGGER WARNING: your cats may go nuts when they hear this:

Posting may be light today and I have to make reservations for my July trip to the Arctic. But enjoy this picture of Esther and Mordecai. It was chilly yesterday and also is today, and the weather will be cold in Chicago until the end of the week. But our pair of mallards is doing well, and she’ll soon be nesting. Here Esther sits on a rock while Mordecai, the faithful husband, watches over her:

And there’s a Google Doodle today, celebrating NCAA Women’s Basketball’s March Madness. Click on the photo to go to the page:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 6 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*At The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan excoriates Joe Biden and his family for not announcing early that he’d withdraw from last November’s election. The piece is called “The man who brought us here,” (subtitle: “How Joe Biden’s pride, insularity, and stubbornness led us into this nightmare”),  and it reveals details from a new book on the end of Biden’s presidency.

By April of last year, the health of the president had clearly declined. As with many older men in their eighties, this didn’t happen in a slow, predictable glide-path down — but in swift, turbulent declines. Suddenly he took a while to get out of his limo, and then would emerge “with a blank look in his face,” according to the new campaign book, Fight, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. By early summer, Biden was suddenly freezing up in public, staring motionless into the air. At a fundraiser in Los Angeles, Obama had to jump in to answer some questions, and then had to guide Biden off the stage by hand. We had already seen Joe wander weirdly off the set of MSNBC and during a Medal of Honor ceremony. His memory lapses mounted.

. . . Do we learn anything new in this book and another one, Uncharted, by Chris Whipple out next week? Not really. We know, in fact, that everything I guessed happened did actually happen. Among the unsurprising confirmations: Obama was so aloof he didn’t even watch the fateful June debate live; he and Pelosi then wanted an open primary and did all they could to get one. (“He goes. She goes” was their mantra.) Hillary Clinton defended Biden — not because she knew his health was fine, but because her health had once been questioned by the press too. Biden’s closest advisers were his wife and, yes, his son Hunter, and they routinely put their clan’s interests well before the country’s. His inner circle — Mike Donilon especially — were so blindly loyal and informationally siloed they couldn’t absorb what was staring them in the face.

The Democrats, even as late as July, could have found a fresh candidate capable of taking on what they said was a vital moment for democracy’s survival. We might have avoided our current abyss:

“It would have been very cheap. It would have been quick. A rocket ship for your career and no loss,” said one Democratic former governor. “If this had been a year earlier, twenty people would have gotten in,” said one governor who had kicked the tires on a 2024 bid.

Why didn’t they? That is a question that will reverberate through history. Wokeness was a factor. The only reason the embarrassingly mid Harris was made veep in the first place was to fill a slot Biden had already marked for a woman, and, in the wake of the Floyd murder, a black woman seemed the only option. Everyone, particularly Pelosi and Obama, knew Harris was a disaster about to happen, and her vice-presidency had the lowest approval ratings in history. Obama told friends directly that he thought she couldn’t win. The night after the epicdebate, Pelosi gritted her teeth: “Oh my God. It’s going to be her.”

So yes, identity before merit was a principle the Dems clung to even at the expense of marching off an electoral cliff. “If you want to break the Democratic coalition, try to skip over the first African-American vice president,” Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin argued at one point. “I watched the black-white stuff start on Thursday night [after the debate],” said another lawmaker. Donna Brazile assembled a team of black women operatives who called themselves “the colored girls” to ensure Harris became the nominee. Jim Clyburn was also a critical supporter: “I’m going all in with Kamala. I don’t want to look back and y’all ain’t there,” he told the DNC.

Sullivan dares to say what is true, but it’s stuff no liberal will repeat.  Harris was, in my view, unqualified and even embarrassing as a candidate, but she had the proper ethnicity. Sullivan goes on to indict Biden’s wife and family for supporting a man going downhill fast.  The result is depressing for all of us, and bad for America:

That is the kind of blind loyalty that can kill a presidency. But this time, it killed a lot more than that: a chance to keep Trump from power. By his words, Joe Biden told us that was the most important thing. By his actions, Biden told us that his own vanity was more important. By their actions, Donilon, Reed, Klain, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, and Dr Jill told us the same. The Democratic Party has a strange habit of never holding the architects of electoral failures accountable. That should end after this.

But in the end, the story of 2024 is painfully, excruciatingly human. Biden’s prickly pride and long-nurtured insecurity, the insularity of his too-loyal circle, and the entitlement that comes from decades of public life at the top all led to collective tragedy. We are now living in the wake of this man’s fallibility and stubbornness. It’s a story we all know well in our private capacities: the tale of trying to get grandpa to give up his car keys before he drives into a ditch and hurts someone.

Well, welcome to the ditch. And the casualties are mounting.

I remember when Democrats were expressing great JOY about Harris, assuring us she would win.  Those people were so glad to get any replacement for Biden that they overlooked Harris’s palpable and substantial flaws as a candidate. Now I don’t know if the Dems could have come up with a winning candidate had the process started earlier, but they could have found one that could at least have given an intelligible answer to questions.

*The Economist has a short but good piece: “Donald Trump is attacking what made American universities great“, which is archived here. (Subtitle: “More than Middle East Studies is in trouble” [h/t: Pyers].

Princeton was not among the ten universities listed for review by Mr Trump’s task force on antisemitism, the main reason the administration has given so far for its crackdown. But Mr Eisgruber has been unusual among college presidents in speaking up to defend higher education. In mid-March, in an essay in the Atlantic, he called the administration’s cancellation of $400m in grants to Columbia University “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s”. He is also chairman of the board of the Association of American Universities, which on March 31st issued a statement warning that “the withdrawal of research funding for reasons unrelated to research sets a dangerous and counter-productive precedent”.

Universities are so vulnerable to Mr Trump for a reason they, and America, are so strong. After the second world war, the government hit upon the idea that America could lead the world in innovation by sponsoring university research, an investment that has yielded countless breakthroughs and the best research universities in the world. The partnership was premised on the principles of academic freedom developed in the first half of the century and endorsed in 1957 by the Supreme Court, which found that “to impose any straitjacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation.”

Mr Trump sees no need to honour the terms of that partnership. Thus Harvard risks losing up to $9bn in federal grants and contracts because the administration accuses it of not protecting Jewish students and of “promoting divisive ideologies”. Hoping to head off Mr Trump, Harvard had taken such steps as pushing out two leaders of its Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, but he was not mollified. The administration has also suspended $175m in grants to the University of Pennsylvania because, three years ago, it allowed a transgender woman to compete on its women’s team, in compliance with intercollegiate regulations.

The administration does not appear to have the law on its side. By statute, the government is supposed to hold a hearing and then submit a written report to Congress of a legal violation before cutting off funds—and even then it can cut off money only to the specific noncompliant programme. But Mr Trump certainly has politics on his side. He knows how to pick his culture battles. Elite universities, which have become engines of inequality in American life, would not have been sympathetic targets even before their campuses were swept by identitarian politics and then protests over the war in Gaza. Now Harvard’s own president says he has been the victim of antisemitism on the job. Baiting Democrats into a defence of fancy colleges would further pigeonhole them as the party of the wealthy and credentialed. The failure of university presidents to speak up for one another—with such honourable exceptions as Mr Eisgruber—is making each more vulnerable.

Biology 101

But Mr Trump seems unlikely to stop with the Ivy League, and who knows how extreme his demands may become. His executive order of March 27th demanding an overhaul of the Smithsonian Institution may offer hints. Mr Trump singled out a sculpture exhibition for representing America, along with other societies, as having “used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement”. Which, of course, it did. Even more shocking, he condemned the exhibition for promoting the idea that race “is not a biological reality but a social construct”. To promote the idea that race is a biological reality is to nurture the feedstock of racism. It would be a dark day indeed if America’s great research universities were ever tasked with that project.

Well, given that this appears to be a violation of the law, one might hope that Trump would follow the rules, especially the part about cutting off only “specific noncompliant programs” (science, which is probably compliant, is the area that will suffer the most). But I have to add that if universities didn’t gouge the taxpayer by agreeing to getting huge amounts of overhead (taxpayer funds added to grants by the government to support “infrastructure”), there would not be such big threats as there would not be so much government money to withhold. But in the end this kind of carrot-and-stick approach is simply wrong. As Eisgruber said, ““the withdrawal of research funding for reasons unrelated to research sets a dangerous and counter-productive precedent”

*I have reached the pinnacle of success, having been cited by Dr. Phil, even though the article is in The Daily Fail. and the video mentioned cuts off before I’m mentioned.  Further, I was apparently cited wrongly. An excerpt (bolding is mine)

A transgender activist snapped at Dr. Phil after he presented statistics that suggested male athletes have an advantage over female ones.

Blossom, a transgender female, told Dr. Phil in an episode that aired on March 31 that he needed to take ‘several seats’ after she accused him of insinuating that transgender females were men.

‘Respectfully Dr. Phil, I’m gonna need you to have several seats. Let’s be clear, trans-women, again, are women,’ she snapped on Dr. Phil Primetime. ‘What you’re showing me are male statistics and trans-women are not males.

‘I would inquire you to do research on what you’re saying, because again it’s almost like you’re trying to call trans-women men and that is not what trans-women are.’

The heated moment came after Dr. Phil cited statistics claiming biological men have physical advantages over biological women in grip, quad and arm strengths, punch power, and more.

Dr. Phil, who does not hold a medical degree, cited Biologist Jerry Coyne’s blog as his source. Coyne has written books on evolution and often writes about politics and wildlife on his blog. 

DailyMail.com could not independently verify the statistics that Dr. Phil cites. [See below; I give the references.]

Phil, who has a PhD in psychology, also cited a Center on Sport Policy and Conduct study that showed that biological men outperform biological women by 10 to 60 percent, depending on the sport.

The study found that men had up to a 13 percent advantage in sports like rowing and swimming and up to a 34 percent advantage in activities such as weightlifting and serving a volleyball against biological women.

However, Blossom didn’t care, citing that transgender females are not male and cannot be compared to male statistics.

Indeed, Blossom is correct: comparing natal men with natal women says little beyond the conclusion that “men and women should not compete against each other, but should be in separate competitions.” But Dr. Phil’s concern is in the question that Blossom asks: “should trans-identified men (aka trans women) compete against biological women?” And we do have data on that–data that Dr. Phil apparently didn’t know (he compares men with women at 21:54 in the video below).

The article continues.

‘It sounds like conservative propaganda, and I think you have drunk the Kool-Aid and have gotten lost in the sauce,’ Blossom said.

‘Trans-women work just as hard as women to compete.’

She went on to say that some cis-gendered women are stronger and faster than transgender women.

‘It is a case-by-case basis,’ Blossom lamented.

‘I don’t know why you’re trying to group a group of trans-people into one ideology that is false,’ she said. ‘I think the statistics that you’ve shown me prove nothing when it comes to trans-women.

‘Get up there and show me specifically with trans-women and cis-women and then we can revisit this conversation.’

Here’s the video. Blossom shows up at 16:25, but they apparently cut off my name. That’s fine with me!

As I said, Dr. Phil neglects the fact that there are data on the athletic performance of trans-identified post-puberty men (aka transgender women) who have suppressed their testosterone levels (data I’ve cited, and there are more data here and here).  The suppression of testosterone in a post-puberty man does not come close to eliminating the athletic advantage of such men, even after 14 years. I am embarrassed that Dr. Phil used my name to support the wrong argument.  But Blossom should know the data, too, but she’d probably say, as she does above, that there are too few trans-identified males for it to constitute a problem for women’s sports.

*The IDF says that it has killed the Hamas operative who kidnapped the Bibas family on October 7, 2023, and likely was involved in the murder of Sheri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir.

The Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet on Friday said a terror operative who oversaw the kidnapping and likely was also involved in the murder of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, was killed in an airstrike in Gaza.

The military and security agency also announced the killings of a Hamas propagandist involved in the production of hostage videos and an official central to funneling money to the terror group’s armed wing.

The IDF and Shin Bet on Friday said Muhammad Hassan Muhammad Awad, a senior member of the Mujahideen Brigades, a relatively small terror group in the Strip, had been targeted and killed in an airstrike in northern Gaza earlier that day.

In a joint statement, the IDF and Shin Bet said that Awad had invaded Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, onslaught and led the abduction of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas.

The IDF said Awad was “likely involved in their murder” during the early weeks of the war.

According to assessments by Israeli officials issued after her body had been identified, Shiri Bibas was “brutally” murdered by her captors in November 2023, alongside her sons, who were killed with “bare hands.” The assessments after a forensic investigation were contrary to Hamas’s claims that the three were killed in an Israeli airstrike.

. . .The IDF and Shin Bet said Awad was also responsible for the abduction of US-Israeli nationals Gadi Haggai and Judih Weinstein, who were both killed amid the onslaught in Nir Oz, along with several Thai nationals taken hostage from the kibbutz, the military said.

An undated photo of Judih Weinstein and Gadi Haggai (Courtesy)

The terror group also confirmed Awad’s death, saying he was a senior military commander and head of its intelligence division. The IDF said he was considered close to the leadership of the Mujahideen Brigades.

“Additionally, as part of his role in the terror group, Awad was engaged in recruiting terror operatives in [the West Bank] and Israel [proper], through which they advanced and carried out attacks against Israelis,” the military said.

Even though Awad was a bad actor, a murderer and a kidnapper, I would have preferred that the IDF took him alive so he could spend the rest of his days in an Israeli jail. But there are three problems with that. First, he or his family would have been paid by the Palestinian Authority’s “pay for slay” program while he was incarcerated. Second, if he was captured, the chances are good that he would later be released in one of those swaps in which Israel trades a gazillion Palestinian terrorists for a handful of Jewish hostages. Finally, it probably would have been impossible to capture Awad directly since he was likely in a firefight with the ADF.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili expresses some political revulsion. When I asked Malgorzata why, she said that “wherever there is a Green Party, there is antisemitism.” Witness Greta Thunberg.

Hili: The greenery is starting to gladden the eye.

Andrzej: Just do not join the Green Party.

Hili: Zieleń zaczyna cieszyć wzrok.

Ja: Tylko nie zapisuj się do Partii Zielonych.

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

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy, KFC Gravy Lip Gloss (is it real?)

From Things With Faces, ebullient popcorn:

From the same site, a photo by Victoria Graziella labeled “I noticed a piece of broccoli on my plate that I thought looked like an opossum face so I used it to make a little food opossum.” Very clever, no?

From Merilee:

From Masih: the shirt of a man killed in anti-regime protests in Iran. The men they kill, the women they just blind.

Zaniyar Aboubakri 2001-2022

Zaniyar Aboubakri, a 22-year-old mechanic, was recently engaged and set to marry on November 16, 2022. He was killed 20 days earlier during #WomenLifeFreedom protests in Mahabad.#MemoriesLeftBehind pic.twitter.com/v3EY4w7H31

— Mahsa Piraei مهسا پیرایی (@mahsa_piraei) April 5, 2025

From Malcolm: a bunch of angry kittens. Sound up:

angy kitten 😹🥰 pic.twitter.com/2E2OLOm54P

— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) March 27, 2025

From Luana, a misguided man:

Men like USA Fencing Chair Damien Lehfeldt don’t care about women athletes, because even their own daughters can be sacrificed to the Trans Gods:
“One day, my daughter may compete against a transgender woman. She might win. She might lose. I hope (…) that she doesn’t care about… pic.twitter.com/tCup62041I

— La Plunking Otter (@PlunkingOtter) April 4, 2025

Two from my feed: First, a very talented d*g:

Man plays beach volleyball with his dog and the dog celebrates after winning pic.twitter.com/QGNoNTG5JO

— Dudes Posting Their W’s (@DudespostingWs) April 3, 2025

A fish gets a lease on life!

His fish friends back home are never going to believe him pic.twitter.com/ZwCu7ZzayF

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) April 4, 2025

A post from the Auschwitz memorial that I reposted:

5 April 1926 | Czech Jewish girl Eva Raimannová was born in Prague.In Theresienstadt Ghetto from 24 October 1942. Two days later she was deported to #Auschwitz with her parents Viktor & Gisela and her brother Josef.None of them survived.

— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T11:00:01.340Z

Two posts from Matthew.  If you get to Monterey, don’t miss the aquarium, which has a big tank of ctenophores like this:

Ctenophore in Monterey Aquarium. The shimmering colours are produced by the refraction of light on their “combs”, which move rapidly to guide the animal about. They look gorgeous, but they swallow each other…

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-02-27T15:27:39.060Z

Part of the galley proofs for Matthew’s upcoming bio of Francis Crick. The “reply guy” comprises the people who insist on asking “where is Rosalind Franklin?” whenever Crick is mentioned. Here’s how Matthw handled that in one place?

Proofs are in for CRICK. And because whenever I mention Crick a reply guy says ‘Rosalind Franklin’, here’s the first extract, from 1956, while Crick was in the USA:

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-04-03T18:32:25.567Z

Welcome to Thursday, April 3, 2025, and National Burrito Day. Here, in Bridgeport, not far from me, is Chicago’s biggest burrito: 2 feet long and about 7 pounds. (It’s also about $60.)  Bring the family!

It’s also Good People Day, World Party Day, National Chocolate Mousse Day, and Fish Fingers and Custard Day, celebrated today because. . . :

Fish Fingers and Custard Day commemorates the introduction of the Eleventh Doctor on the television series Doctor Who, as well as the memorable fish fingers and custard scene from the episode in which he arrives. The episode, which was released on April 3, 2010, is the first from Series 5 of the show, and is titled “The Eleventh Hour.” BBC declared the first Fish Fingers and Custard Day to take place on the second anniversary of the release of the episode. The following year, Birdseye even put the Doctor, who was played by Matt Smith, on their boxes. The day is marked by people eating fish fingers and custard and sharing photos and videos of them doing so.

Posting will be light today as I have breakfast with the University President (for all emeritus professors) and then a memorial service for a colleague who recently died.

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

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first: Actor Val Kilmer died on Tuesday night. He was only 65, one day shy of being ten years younger than I.  It was apparently the effects of throat cancer:

Mr. Kilmer’s “indelible cinematic mark spanned genres and generations,” said the official X account for the “Top Gun” franchise. “RIP Iceman.” The U.S. Naval Institute paid tribute to his portrayal of a Navy pilot in the movies. Director Francis Ford Coppola — who worked with Mr. Kilmer on the 2011 horror film “Twixt,” in which the actor played the writer Hall Baltimore — said Mr. Kilmer was “a wonderful person to work with” whose “talent only grew greater throughout his life.”

Once described by the legendary film critic Roger Ebert as “the most unsung leading man of his generation,” Mr. Kilmer also played the swordsman Madmartigan in “Willow” (1988), Elvis Presley in “True Romance” (1993) and Jim Morrison in the Oliver Stone film “The Doors” (1991).

The actor was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and had surgery that led to his recovery but reduced his ability to speak naturally.

Here’s pretty good remembrance video from Entertainment Tonight. It’s sad to see the effects of the cancer on his voice, but he was brave enough to appear in a “Top Gun” movie with a hole in his throa, speaking very hoarsely.

*More on this later: Trump is about to wreck people’s jobs and well being by imposing a 10% tariff on all imported goods and additional tariffs on goods from 60 other countries.  He had to declare a “national emergency” (which really is his own Presidency) to get this through:

Here’s a tariff map from the Washington Post. Only chowderheads would approve of this move, which is not good for anybody.

*Tuesday saw an election in Wisconsin for a judge on the state’s Supreme Court, and Elon Musk put a lot of money and effort into electing a conservative judge, even offering a million-dollar check for those who supported that judge. But no dice; the liberal judge won handily. And that has people wondering whether Musk’s escapades (he also donned a cheese hat) is really helping Trump or the Republicans. (For sure it seems that liberals hate Musk more than Trump.) From the WSJ  (article archived here):

After a costly Wisconsin loss, President Trump and Republicans have a big decision to make about Elon Musk: continue to leverage his fame on the national stage or try to politely ask him to stay backstage a bit more.

Musk’s deep financial and personal involvement in Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election proved to be a political liability for the GOP, boosting votes for Democrats more than Republicans compared with a similar election two years ago.

While the GOP may still be eager to tap into the fortune of the world’s richest man for campaign money—he was the largest 2024 election-cycle donor, contributing close to $300 million to help Trump and other Republicans—the party may be less excited to see him play frontman the way he did in Wisconsin.

In private, some Republicans and White House officials have expressed worry that Musk could continue to cost them in elections. His attacks on Social Security are spooking GOP lawmakers, and the image of him holding a chain saw over his head is also likely to be one Democratic ad makers will use in 2026.

“Federal employees are a whole lot more popular than Elon Musk,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who recently conducted a survey looking at feelings about federal workers and the role Musk is playing in downsizing the size and scope of the U.S. government. “The chain-saw approach that Elon Musk is using is simply not popular and that is very clear in the data.”

There is no question Musk is popular with Trump’s MAGA base, a group also heavily supportive of the role he is playing in slashing the federal government. During Musk’s appearance in Green Bay on Sunday evening one pastor asked to say a prayer for him as the audience fell silent to listen.

But he doesn’t appear to play well in general-election-type races like the one in Wisconsin, where liberal Judge Susan Crawford beat conservative Judge Brad Schimel by 10 percentage points.

There’s a bit of good news for Republicans from Florida, but it doesn’t outweigh the result in Wisconsin:

Republicans held on to two congressional seats Tuesday in Florida, albeit by smaller margins in what have been traditionally deeply red districts. But the Wisconsin race was the biggest contest on a day that was the first major electoral test of Trump’s second presidency.

This was the most expensive judicial election in American history, and it doesn’t make Musk look all that influential.  As the pollster said, “Federal employees are a whole lot more popular than Elon Musk.” It’s tough having a gazillionaire represent a party that is supposed to be catering to the welfare of the average American, and it doesn’t help when he takes jobs away from thousand of such Americans and then cuts million-dollar checks for people who vote his way.

*Douglas Murray has a new book out about his experiences in Israel during the year after the war started in 2023. It’s called On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the future of Civilization, and there’s an excerpt in the Free Press.  An excerpt from an excerpt:

Throughout this year of war, friends and family occasionally remarked that I had changed. Readers sometimes noticed it too, observing that I seemed to have lost some of my usual pessimism. I noticed it myself, and there was a reason for it. I was getting an answer to a question that had always troubled me.

Like most people of my background, I grew up with family stories of those who went away to war in 1914, and those who went to war again in 1939. On my father’s side alone, my grandmother lost her father at sea in World War I and her brother, also in the navy, in the 1940s. The fight against tyranny had been real. And all the generations who have come after have asked themselves: What would we do if our time came?

At one point in the early months of the conflict, I was in a street in Tel Aviv and a taxi driver recognized me. We started talking, and I learned that he was a veteran of the wars of 1967 and 1973. Then he said something that made my eyes prick: “I owe the younger generation an apology.” I was startled, but he continued. “I thought they had become weak,” he said. “I thought they just wanted to party in Tel Aviv or be on TikTok or Instagram. But I was wrong. They have stepped up. They are magnificent.”

Everything I saw in the wars around us confirmed this. I thought of all the heroes—all the young men and women who were just like the people I knew outside of Israel, but who were having to do things these people couldn’t imagine. Other young people, at institutions across the West, were judging the actions of their contemporaries in Israel. They were throwing slur after slur at them and reigniting every blood libel of the past in a modern guise. They should have looked at their contemporaries in Israel not as scapegoats but as an example. Whatever the years ahead hold for the West, I know that Canada, Britain, Europe, Australia, and America should be so lucky as to produce a generation of young people like the one Israel has.

During that year of war, I also realized that I had found the answer to a question I had mulled over for almost a quarter of a century. All my adult life I had heard the taunt of the jihadists: “We love death more than you love life.” I had heard it from al-Qaeda, from Hamas, from ISIS. From Europe to Afghanistan, several of my friends and colleagues had heard such war cries in their last moments. And it had always seemed to me almost impossible to counter. How could anyone overcome a movement—a people—who welcomed death, who gloried in death, who worshiped death? Was it not inevitable that against such a force, a feeble and sybaritic West could not possibly win?

That is what I feared for many years. Yet in the year after the October 7 attacks, what I saw was hope. Of all the Israeli soldiers I met, none took delight in their task. They could feel victorious on occasion, proud to have completed a mission and gotten their unit out alive. But from the south of Gaza to the south of Lebanon and the West Bank, none took pleasure in the task they had to do. They did it not because they loved death but exactly because they love life. They fought for life. For the survival of their families, their nation, and their people. Even the most secular of them knew that the lifestyle most of us take for granted must be protected. They know that you won’t have the ability to party, fall in love, grow a family, or live a meaningful life unless they are willing to fight for it.

Murray is an eloquent writer, and of course is a non-Jewish conservative, but I admire him for standing up for Israel when such a stand is guaranteed to bring great opprobrium to a British writer, as indeed it has.  But he’s on the right side of morality.

*Cory Booker, a Democratic Senator from New Jersey, wound up giving the longest speech in Senate history: a 25-hour jeremiad against President Trump. It was of course a bit of a stunt, but it did get attention, and attention might help push him to a Presidential candidacy in 2028. From the NYT (article archived here):

Senator Cory Booker’s staff members described a nagging fear as they worked for a week to fill 15 binders with enough material to cover what would soon become a history-making, 25-hour speech.

What if no one listened?

Their worry was short-lived. By 11 a.m. on Tuesday, 16 hours after Mr. Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, had begun railing against President Trump’s policies on the floor of the U.S. Senate, roughly 14,000 callers had left messages on his office hotline, aides said. Before he finally stopped speaking, the office had fielded 14,000 more.

For 25 hours and five minutes, Mr. Booker, who will turn 56 this month, did not sit or exit the Senate chambers to eat or use a bathroom. His speech broke, by nearly an hour, a record set 68 years ago by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a segregationist who at the time was trying to block civil rights legislation.

Americans noticed. The social-media-savvy senator streamed the speech live on his TikTok account, where it garnered more than 350 million “likes.” And more than 110,000 people were watching on YouTube when Mr. Booker ended his speech in much the same way he began: with an homage to a mentor, the civil rights pioneer John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who spent three decades in Congress.

“Let’s get in good trouble,” he said, borrowing Mr. Lewis’s famous call to action.

Many of those watching appeared to revel in Mr. Booker’s stamina and moxie.

“New respect for New Jersey,” a YouTube viewer wrote in a live chat message two hours before the senator stopped talking.

. . .Mr. Booker’s oratorical marathon covered plenty of turf, serious and less so. He detailed his concerns about cutting funding for education, health care and medical research and recounted moving stories about the effects the administration’s policies were having on his constituents. “This is a moral moment,” he said repeatedly.

But he also filled some of the time in other ways. He waxed poetic about M&M candies — first produced, he noted, in Newark. He resurfaced jocular grudges from his days playing football at Stanford University. And he tackled an abiding New York sports riddle.

“The Giants and the Jets play in New Jersey,” he said. “There’s only one football team in New York, and that’s the Bills.”

Here is the last 3½ minutes of his speech.  It’s a good ending, but I’m not going to watch the rest of it!

*The CDC recommends that all adults over 50 get shingles vaccine, and the gold standard now, which I’ve had, is two doses of Shingrix.  (I had a substandard vaccine before that.) The first shot made me a bit ill for a day, but, hearing what shingles is like from people who have had it, I was delighted to be vaccinated. Now, since the readers here are in the Boomer demographic, you have another reason to get your shingles shot:

 A vaccine to fight dementia? It turns out there may already be one – shots that prevent painful shingles also appear to protect aging brains.

A new study found shingles vaccination cut older adults’ risk of developing dementia over the next seven years by 20%.

The research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is part of growing understanding about how many factors influence brain health as we age – and what we can do about it.

“It’s a very robust finding,” said lead researcher Dr. Pascal Geldsetzer of Stanford University. And “women seem to benefit more,” important as they’re at higher risk of dementia.

The study tracked people in Wales who were around 80 when receiving the world’s first-generation shingles vaccine over a decade ago. Now, Americans 50 and older are urged to get a newer vaccine that’s proven more effective against shingles than its predecessor.

The new findings add another reason for people to consider rolling up their sleeves, said Dr. Maria Nagel of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, who studies viruses that infiltrate the nervous system.

Two, two—two preventions in one. You can read the Nature paper here, but be aware that it’s about neurotropic herpes viruses, which, of course, are the cause of shingles (and chickenpox). GET YOUR SHOTS NOW IF YOU’RE OF AGE!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej and Szaron are plumping for some good noms (beefsteak is Hili’s favorite food):

Hili: We have an important question.

A: What question?

Hili: Can you buy yourself two beefsteaks and give one to us?

Hili: Mamy do ciebie ważne pytanie.

Ja: Jakie?

Hili: Czy możesz sobie kupić dwa befsztyki i dać nam jeden?

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

From Cat Memes:

From Things With Faces, a mayonnaise goblin:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs; and WE MEAN IT! (Putting ketchup on dogs is a capital crime in Chicago.)

*Here’s Masih, interviewed on Meet the Press by Kristen Welker, ragging on the Biden administration for offering her only “witness protection,” but mostly on the Trump administration for negotiating with Iran (I don’t think we are doing that, though, are we?) But she’s right: there’s no point to negotiating with Iran over nukes: they will develop them come hell or high water! As Masih says, “I am a loud woman.”  I really admire her. And if Iran gets nukes, it’s bye-bye Israel.

I warned President Biden after surviving one kidnapping attempt and two assassination plots on U.S. soil. He ignored it and offering me witness protection while sending billions to the regime that kill Americans.

Now, I have a message for @realDonaldTrump.

Please watch.… pic.twitter.com/MVmfqZcadF

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 1, 2025

From Luana, a funny tweet:

pic.twitter.com/tXLckEFD3A

— Imtiaz Mahmood (@ImtiazMadmood) April 2, 2025

From Barry, “Downfall” à la Musk (it’s also on YouTube here):

For those who have asked for a YouTube link: youtu.be/v1UODyy-jng?…

— Brian White (@brianwhite.bsky.social) 2025-04-02T13:07:49.321Z

Two from my feed:

Don’t forget to water your bears

pic.twitter.com/6EmiYtRRli

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) April 1, 2025

The bears fattening up for hibernation (probably filmed last fall):

All-you-can-eat buffet at the Brooks Falls, Alaska

[📹Nat Hab Expedition Leader Court Whelan]pic.twitter.com/6NL0SOfhau

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 1, 2025

One from the Auschwitz Memorial that I reposted:

Two posts from Professor Cobb. First, a very weird custom:

— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-04-02T18:04:29.026Z

The issue of Nature with the Watson/Crick and two other DNA=structure papers. I was too young to read the journal then, but note how ugly it is, with a cover full of ads and nothing about DNA!

The cover of the issue of Nature that featured the three back-to-back articles on DNA structure from Watson, Crick, Wilkins, Stokes, Wilson, Franklin and Gosling.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-04-02T10:47:21.188Z

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, April 1, 2025. It is of course April Fools’ Day, but I won’t pull any stunts here.  Below you see the April page, showing the Château de Dourdan, from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, one of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts in history (1412-1415).  It’s Spring!

It’s also National Atheist’s Day (but which atheist?), National Sourdough Bread Day, International Fun at Work Day, National Soylent Green Day (it’s PEOPLE!), National Trombone Players Day, National One Cent Day (is Trump going to outlaw pennies?) and Boomer Bonus Day, explained this way:

Gaye Anderson of Merrillville, Indiana, noticed that as she and her friends aged, they were talking more about their health and how they felt like pieces of themselves were falling apart. Anderson expressed, “the last thing we wanted to do was keep going to lots of birthday parties and reminding ourselves how we kept getting older each year.” So, she came up with Boomer Bonus Day, a holiday to celebrate each year without the baggage of turning another year older. It was a way to celebrate without adding any years. April 1—the same date as April Fools’ Day—was chosen for the holiday “because the whole thing gets to be a joke: the body goes—but the mind still thinks it’s 21!”

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

Da Nooz:

*According to the NYT, the Trump Administration is betting that consumers will swallow the new tariffs and not be overly bothered by rising prices (article archived here).

President Trump’s sweeping tariffs are expected to raise the cost of cars, electronics, metals, lumber, pharmaceuticals and other products that American consumers and businesses buy from overseas.

But Mr. Trump and his advisers are betting that it can sell an inflation-weary public on a provocative idea: Cheap stuff is not the American dream.

“I couldn’t care less if they raise prices, because people are going to start buying American-made cars,” Mr. Trump said on NBC’s Meet the Press show on Sunday in response to fears of foreign car prices spiking.

The notion that there is more to life than low-cost imports is an acknowledgment that tariffs could impose additional costs on Americans. It is also a pitch that the burden will be worth it. Mr. Trump’s ability to convince consumers that it is acceptable to pay more to support domestic manufacturing and adhere to his “America First” agenda could determine whether the president’s second term is a success or a calamity.

But it is not an easy sell. The onslaught of tariffs has roiled markets and dampened consumer confidence. Auto tariffs that go into effect on Thursday will add a 25 percent tax on imports of cars and car parts, likely upending pricing in the sector. Mr. Trump has already imposed tariffs of 20 percent on Chinese goods and more are expected later this week, when the president announces his “reciprocal” tariffs on major trading partners, including those in Asia and Europe.

In confronting anxiety over the trade uncertainty, Mr. Trump and his top economic aides have resorted to asking Americans to think about the bigger picture. They espouse the view that Mr. Trump’s trade wars are necessary to correct decades of economic injustice and that paying a bit more should be a matter of national pride.

“We may have, short term, a little pain,” Mr. Trump said last month as he unveiled tariffs on Canada and Mexico. “People understand that.”

*In the Harvard Crimson, computer science professor Boaz Barak tells us, “To protect America’s universities, we need America’s public.” He claims there are three ways universities must reassure the public:

From investigations, funding cuts, to detaining students, the Trump administration is making good on Vice President J.D. Vance’s words that “universities are the enemy.”

The question is what universities should do about it.

While universities should defend themselves in the courts, in the long term, a successful case for the continued support of American universities will need to convince Republican policymakers, as well as the general public, of the following three points. First, American Universities are the engine of American prosperity. Second, Universities are not partisan actors. Third, Universities can police themselves.

Of course, to make this case, we also have to ensure that all three points are true.

The first point is an easy one to make. A recent viral tweet from University of California, Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel asserted that students and postdocs from his lab alone — largely funded by Federal grants — co-founded 12 companies with a combined market value of hundreds of billions of dollars. Economists Andrew Fieldhouse and Karel Mertens estimated that government-funded research and development accounted for about 20 percent of private sector productivity growth post World War II.

. . .The second point — that universities are not partisan actors — is more complicated. Over the last decade, the confidence of the American public, especially Republicans, in higher education has radically declined. It is no accident that the partisan skew of faculty nationwide grew in the same period. According to a Crimson survey, under 1.5 percent of surveyed Harvard faculty identify as conservative.

Universities must do better in their efforts to cultivate viewpoint diversity, from the faculty we hire and the speakers we invite to the content of our courses.

Yet, the perception that elite universities are some kind of Marxist indoctrination camp is widely off the mark.

Universities should assure the public and policymakers that their campuses are dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. Toward this end, we should not let the tail wag the dog and allow the actions of marginal programs to tarnish the name of the whole institution. If some programs or faculty are more focused on activism than scholarship, then perhaps the place for them is not a university but a non-profit organization.

Here’s one important to me:

Regarding the third point, the federal government has a legitimate say in how universities are managed, as per Title IX and Title VI of the Educational Amendments and Civil Rights Acts. These have been used before by administrations to force policy changes on universities, including the 2011 Dear Colleague letter of the Obama administration.

. . . . Universities should demonstrate that they can set and enforce clear time, place, and manner restrictions that enable students to express their positions without allowing them to disrupt university activities. If students feel they cannot make their point without causing disruptions, they should be prepared to face the consequences.

Amen.  “Universities can police themselves.” Hardly any of them are actually able to do this. And without that, chaos reigns and people get away with all kinds of stuff the public dislikes–and can’t understand why is persistence. So it goes.

*Bad news for cat lovers: bird flu is starting to show up in moggies. (h/t Barry):

According to the U.S. Agriculture Department, 126 domestic cats in the U.S. have been infected with bird flu since 2022. Around half of those cases were recorded this year, and many were exposed through food or milk.

“We see continued reports of cats with bird flu infection from across the country, and it’s kept increasing in the past months,” said Suresh Kuchipudi, professor of infectious diseases and microbiology at University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health.

In cats, bird flu tends to be swift and lethal. Although the overall risk to indoor cats is low, Kuchipudi and other experts who study or diagnose the infections say the threat is mounting. With bird flu spreading rampantly among poultry and cattle, there is a constant opportunity for the virus to enter the raw food supply. And while there’s no evidence yet that cats can transmit bird flu to people, the potential increases as more cats get sick.

. . .Most pet food is heated to a high enough temperature to kill pathogens before it’s packaged, but bird flu can linger in raw food if it’s sourced from infected poultry — for instance, from chickens that were culled due to an outbreak.

“The animals that were depopulated could potentially have ended up in the food chain for pets,” said Laura Goodman, an assistant professor at Cornell University’s Baker Institute for Animal Health. “It’s not uncommon for substandard meat to end up in the pet food chain.”

In the last four months, at least three pet food manufacturers have recalled batches containing raw poultry. The Food and Drug Administration in January warned manufacturers using uncooked meat to reassess their food safety plans in light of the recent cat illnesses and deaths.

Other cats have been exposed to bird flu on dairy farms, likely from drinking raw milk from infected cows. And in some instances, outdoor cats have picked up the virus directly from dead birds.

The lesson: do NOT feed your cat commercial cat food made with raw meat, or give them raw milk.  Although cats don’t lay eggs, we don’t want them dying en masse. Fortunately, I don’t think it’s easily transmitted from one cat to another, at least indoors.

*If there’s anything I’m willing to bet substantial money on, it’s that Trump will not be a Republican candidate for President in 3.5 years. It’s arrantly unconstitutional, and I am not so far gone that I think he’s going to use the U.S. military to force him either running or even cancelling the election. And the Supreme Court will not have it, conservative as they are. Yet some people are still wailing about this.

President Donald Trump has suggested that “methods” exist by which he could attempt to serve a third term in the White House, an act that is barred by the 22nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“I’m not joking,” Trump said, in a Sunday interview with NBC News, when asked to clarify speculative comments on the possibility.

Constitutional scholars say any third run for the presidency would violate both the spirit and the letter of the amendment, which was passed after World War II as a protection against “elective monarchy.” Here’s what to know.

What does the 22nd Amendment say? [for crying out loud, are we stupid?]

The 22nd Amendment explicitly prohibits any president from seeking more than two terms, either in consecutive or nonconsecutive sequence. It states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

Trump has twice been elected to the presidential office, in 2016 and 2024.

The amendment was passed by Congress in 1947 and became part of the Constitution in 1951, when it was fully ratified by the states.

In interaction with the 12th Amendment, which was ratified in 1804, the 22nd Amendment also has potential legal implications for who can seek the office of vice president. According to the 12th Amendment, “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President.”

How could Trump seek a third term?

The most legally straightforward way to avoid the 22nd Amendment’s limitations would be to repeal it, a painstaking and likely lengthy process that would require the passage of another amendment. Proposed amendments must be passed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, then ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states.

Despite thousands of proposed changes, the states have repealed an amendment only once — the 18th, which established Prohibition.

Ain’t gonna happen. If you think otherwise, email me and we’ll make an official bet! I’m sure nobody will be willing to bet me! What we have to worry about is not Trump running again, but Vance running in 2028. And that will happen if the Democrats don’t up their game.

*The Times of Israel reports that Iran is threatening the U.S. if Trump continues to grumble about it and make threats about bombing it:

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Monday the US would receive a strong blow if it acts on President Donald Trump’s threat to bomb unless Tehran reaches a new nuclear deal with Washington.

Trump reiterated his threat on Sunday that Iran would be bombed if it does not accept his offer for talks outlined in a letter sent to Iran’s leadership in early March, giving Tehran a two-month window to make a decision.

Switzerland’s ambassador, who represents US interests and acts as an intermediary between Washington and Tehran, was summoned on Monday by the Iranian foreign ministry, which expressed Tehran’s determination to respond “decisively and immediately” to any threat.

And how, exactly, are they going to do that? They don’t have the bomb yet (though they will if somebody doesn’t prevent them), and Iran’s attempt to destroy Israel with missiles was a miserable failure.

“The enmity from the US and Israel has always been there. They threaten to attack us, which we don’t think is very probable, but if they commit any mischief they will surely receive a strong reciprocal blow,” Khamenei said.

“And if they are thinking of causing sedition inside the country as in past years, the Iranian people themselves will deal with them,” he added.

Iranian authorities blame the West for the recent unrest, including 2022-2023 protests over the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained for allegedly flouting hijab rules, and nationwide protests in 2019 over fuel price rises.

On Monday, regime mouthpiece The Tehran Times reported that the Iranian military had “readied missiles with the capability to strike US-related positions” amid the threats and noted that some of these missiles were in underground facilities built to withstand airstrikes.

These are idle threats. But they won’t be when Iran gets nukes, which it surely will. That’s why it’s important to prevent them one way or the other (and, so far, negotiations haven’t worked).  Finally, the uprisings over the death of the Mahsa Amini were due to the Iranian people—particularly the women—getting fed up with the theocracy. Westerners, including feminists, aren’t particularly concerned with what’s going on in Iran, and the regime has only itself to blame for inciting protests by erasing women’s rights.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pulling Andrzej’s chain:

Hili: Are you using artificial intelligence?

A: No, I’m still using my own.

Hili: Be careful, young people will laugh at you.

Hili: Czy korzystasz z sztucznej inteligencji?

Ja: Nie, nadal używam naturalnej.

Hili: Uważaj, bo młodzi ludzie będą się z ciebie śmiali.

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

One in my honor from reader Pliny the in Between’s Far Corner Cafe, who adds “(that’s an Israeli time machine in the background…) “.  The cartoon is called “Time Travels,” and click it to enlarge:

From I Love Cats:

From Things With Faces: a carton of eggs that’s grim, as well it should be!

From Masih, yet another Iranian women blinded for political protesting. She has a GoFundMe site:

Mersedeh needs our help. She’s fighting for her vision and stability after enduring so much. Please consider donating and sharing her story. Every little bit counts. https://t.co/4TPvOkW72x

Please share my Gofoundme 🙏🏾

— MersedeH_eye (@mersedeh_eye) March 26, 2025

I may have posted this before, but it’s an animal-rescue story with a happy ending. From Jez:

“So I’m driving down the road this morning and the cars in front of me are driving over a black thing in the road. It’s going between their tires so I’m guessing it’s a box. It’s a kitten just sitting upright shaking like a leaf. And some asshole had spread glue on its paws and… pic.twitter.com/b4bJXkHSbY

— 𝕏 Dogs (@_XDogs) January 14, 2025

From Malcolm; a cat is freaked out by seeing a faux dinosaur (well, a descendant of a real one):

Appropriate reaction upon seeing a dinosaur pic.twitter.com/Ruansfta0h

— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) March 23, 2025

Two from my feed. First, a playful pachyderm:

Kids are kids in every living creature. pic.twitter.com/gerYXlCkJq

— The Figen (@TheFigen_) March 30, 2025

. . . and a chonky bumblebee:

What an absolute unit of a bumblebee pic.twitter.com/3Pq1P9XnRZ

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) March 30, 2025

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted.

This Belgian Jewish boy was gassed to death (undoubtedly with his mother) upon arriving at Auschwitz. Had he not died, he would be 86 years old today. But he was three when they killed him.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-01T10:22:13.136Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a fisher (Pekania pennanti), a north American mustelid):

OTD '22: Daytime fisher capture. #trailcam 🦊

— Chris Whittier (@chriswhittier.bsky.social) 2025-03-29T19:37:10.436Z

Lovely tracking footage:

HUGE IN FLIGHT BIRD FOOTAGE VICTORY: Belted kingfisher in close proximity(under 50 feet!), in flight, AND video of it sticking the landing.You don't get much better than this! #birds

— Brett "Solidarity 2025" Banditelli (@banditelli.org) 2025-03-11T03:06:48.731Z