Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to the Sabbath for Jewish cats, in which shabbos goys are required to clean their litter boxes. It’s CaturSaturday, February 22, 2025, and National Margarita Day. Who has not had one of these frozen concoctions? Here’s a nice frozen version that would go down well with fresh chips and a spicy salsa dip:
Jon Sullivan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
BREAKING: Hamas handed over five living male hostages to Israel this morning, with one more set to be released later. Also, Hamas finally handed over the body of Shiri Bibas to Israel, after having given a Palestinian woman “by mistake”. Earlier Bibas’s two children, both dead, were returned to Israel, with the doctors saying both children had been strangled to death by hand. Finally, Trump fired General Charles Q. Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: America’s senior military officer. Five other senior Pentagon officers were fired, the firing said to “[reflect] the president’s insistence that the military’s leadership is too mired in diversity issues, has lost sight of its role as a combat force to defend the country and is out of step with his ‘America First’ movement.”
*The battle between Trump and Zelensky continues, with Trump acting, as usual in this mess, greedily and reprehensibly. He wants Ukraine’s mineral rights given to the U.S, apparent as one a condition of a peace!
The Trump administration is stepping up its push for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to hand mineral rights worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S., after Zelensky’s initial rejection of the demand fueled President Trump’s escalating broadsides against Ukraine’s leader.
The White House called Zelensky’s refusal to sign a deal it proposed and his criticism of Trump unacceptable, a day after Zelensky said Trump is living in a “disinformation” bubble and Trump countered by calling Zelensky a dictator.
“They need to tone it down and take a hard look and sign that deal,” Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz said Thursday of Ukraine’s leadership on Fox News.
The U.S. demands were first presented by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Kyiv last week.
A U.S. Republican lawmaker who met with Zelensky on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference last week described the Ukrainian leader’s account of the interaction with Bessent.
Bessent pushed the paper across the table, demanding that Zelensky sign it, the Ukrainian president told the lawmaker. Zelensky took a quick look and said he would discuss it with his team. Bessent then pushed the paper closer to Zelensky.
“You really need to sign this,” the Treasury secretary said. Zelensky said he was told “people back in Washington” would be very upset if he didn’t. The Ukrainian leader said he took the document but didn’t commit to signing.
Trump is acting like the Godfather: “Nice little country you got here; it would be a shame if anything happened to it.” Trump is furiously osculating Putin’s rump, and demonizing Zelensky at the same time. Isn’t this the opposite of the way things should be?
*Apparently, the four bodies of the hostages returned to Israel by Hamas on Thursday did not include Sheri Bibas, the mother of the two young children whose bodies were returned. Further, the children were not killed by IDF fire or bombings, as Hamas claimed, but were murdered by the terrorist group. Further, and this makes me ineffably sad, the two children were strangled to death by the bare hands of terrorists.
From the ToI:
The Israel Defense Forces said Friday that forensic examinations have revealed that Palestinian terrorists murdered children Ariel and Kfir Bibas “with their bare hands” weeks after their kidnapping on October 7, 2023.
“We can confirm that baby Kfir Bibas, just 10 months old, and his older brother Ariel, aged four, were both brutally murdered by terrorists while being held hostage in Gaza no later than November 2023. These two innocent children were taken hostage alive, along with their mother, Shiri, from their home on October 7, 2023,” IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a televised statement.
But Hagari said the evidence clearly showed that they were not killed in an airstrike as Hamas claimed.
“Contrary to Hamas’s lies, Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered in cold blood by terrorists,” he said. “The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys — they killed them with their bare hands. Afterward, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”
“This assessment is based on both forensic findings from the identification process and intelligence that supports these findings. We have shared these findings, intelligence and forensics with our partners around the world so they can verify it,” said Hagari.
Here’s Hagari’s statement. I have just heard that Sheri Bibas was murdered the same way as her children. Rumors say that the bodies were stoned by Hamas after they were dead to make it look as if they all died from an airstrike. Hagari below notes that the forensic conclusions have been shared with Israel’s allies throughout the world so they can be verified.
Early on Friday morning, the Israeli military announced that the body of Ms. Bibas — nominally returned, along with those of her sons, by Hamas to Israel on Thursday — appeared to be that of someone else. And an autopsy of the two boys, aged 4 and 8 months at the time of their abduction, revealed that terrorists killed them in Gaza “with their bare hands,” the military said.
A senior Hamas official, Mousa Abu Marzouq, said in a phone interview that the family was killed in an Israeli airstrike in November 2023, dismissing the accusation that a small militant group that held the hostages, the Mujahideen Brigades, had murdered them. But Mr. Abu Marzouq acknowledged that Ms. Bibas’s body may have been kept in Gaza by mistake, saying that Hamas members were now searching for her remains in a place where the family had been buried alongside Palestinians.
Neither side’s account could be independently verified. [I’m betting that Hagari’s statement, but not that of Hamas, can be verified.
Israelis remain deeply traumatized by the October assault, and the return of the Bibas boys, coupled with the uncertainty about their mother’s whereabouts and the disrespectful way that Hamas paraded their coffins on Thursday, revived the torment.
Responding to the military’s announcement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel returned to the language of vengeance that defined his speeches in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack.
“May God avenge their blood,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a recorded speech to the nation on Friday morning. “And we will also have our vengeance.”
The seething tenor of Mr. Netanyahu’s response was maintained across much of the Israeli political spectrum. Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, said in a broadcast interview that the Bibases’ treatment showed how “the majority of Gazans want to murder all of the Israelis.” (Polling last fall suggested that less than 40 percent of Gazan Palestinians supported the Oct. 7 attack, down from more than 70 percent early last year.)
. . . For some Israelis, the fate of the Bibas family underlined the need to restart the war to defeat Hamas once and for all. The current truce is set to elapse in early March unless Hamas and Israel can agree to an extension. “The only solution is the destruction of Hamas, and this must not be postponed,” said Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, in a post on social media.
Others in Israel differ, of course, but I still think Hamas needs to be defeated; it cannot be allowed to run Gaza. This is from Alison on FB:
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: War Games.”
→ Planes just falling out of the sky now: A Delta Air Lines plane crash-landed in Toronto, which NBC News managed to associate with Trumpo, even though the crash was technically not in America (yet). “This is going to, yet again, raise the concern about FAA staffing, air traffic control staffing. Now, this is a Canadian air traffic control tower and this is under Canadian authority once it crosses the border, and yet, as you know, there has been this talk about maybe staff cuts at the FAA as a part of President Trump’s effort to trim down the federal workforce.” The cause of the accident is still under investigation. So the American right doesn’t yet know whether to blame this on union workers making the plane badly or suspiciously tan pilots—is that an Italian with a man bun or a Latina with a bun bun? We need to know.
There’s an amazing essay in Palladium Magazine about how complex systems like modern air travel can’t survive our anti-competence culture, and I think there’s a lot of truth to it. For planes to fly around and basically never crash, you need a lot of extremely competent people working together competently. And for the last decade, the air traffic control worker tests have penalized anyone who indicates interest in science or math. It sounds conspiratorial but it’s true. We can say that being on time is “white supremacy culture” when the stakes are the anthropology department’s annual team dinner, but we can’t do that with air travel. Or we can. But then planes absolutely will fall out of the sky.
→ Julianne Moore’s controversial book about freckles: The new Department of Defense has apparently banned Julianne Moore’s children’s book Freckleface Strawberry from Pentagon-run schools. The ban followed a broad review by the Department of Defense Education Activity of school books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics.” So: freckles. Moore’s book follows a 7-year-old girl “who’s learning to love the skin she’s in.” She wrote the book for children “to remind them that we all struggle but are united by our humanity and our community.” Military professionals can still get to Freckleface Strawberry if they really need to, if it’s a freckle emergency. During the Defense Department’s review process, officials said that, of problematic books like Moore’s, “access will be limited to professional staff.” I, for one, am glad we’re bringing back freckle-shaming. It’s enough about them and their sunburns. Red hair is alarming. Freckles are a sign that no one put zinc oxide on your face, and therefore you’re unruly and anti-authority. I’ve never known a peaceful redhead. My case remains. Did you know they need more anesthesia during surgery? That’s real. Good ban, Trump. Get ’em.
→ We simply did not woke hard enough: As I do every week now, I ask the question: Are there still Democrats? Where are you? America is calling for your return. New polling from Gallup shows that a plurality of Democrats favor party moderation, a significant shift from 2021 following Biden’s victory.
But that is not what Dem intellectuals want. No. Liberal intellectuals are actually arguing the opposite. Still. Even now. Here is Rebecca Traister, an influential progressive writer, with a clarion call for action in New York magazine this week: “Democrats have lost recently not because of an excess of wokeness but because of a failure to get excessive enough.” That is a real quote. She believes that the wokeness was not woke enough. The rioters need to smash more windows. The people who misgender don’t get fired—they get the wall. There can be no change of course; Kamala ran too moderately. The polls are wrong. Taxpayers gave a brand-new, Stacey Abrams–linked eco-nonprofit just $2 billion dollars when it should have been $3 billion, you see (that $2 billion is real, by the way). We must simply woke more and harder.
In that essay, she calls my wife “a reactionary troll,” but in fact, Bar is tall and quite calm compared to some of the women I dated. Anyway, Rebecca, I know you hate me and everything I stand for, which is whatever Matt Yglesias tweeted that morning combined with whatever Derek Thompson tweeted last night. But I promise, the answer is not to woke harder. If you could just stop screaming at anyone who believes slightly different things, you might win something. As Jen Psaki put it last week: “Democrats just lost everything. They control nothing.” Rebecca—it’s okay. We know it’s sad that the canceling stuff didn’t work out and most Americans aren’t into making crimes legal.
This last piece burns my onions. Why are prominent Democrats doubling down, increasing their demonizing of those who voted for Trump? Yes, of course Trump is on balance hurting America, but the Democrats don’t have a chance in hell of gaining any power unless they become more moderate. It’s as if Dems are so angry at having lost the election to an unhinged narcissist that they’ve lost their cool—to the extent that they can’t figure out what to do now save curse Trump and his minions. I suspect this is making it worse for all Democrats.
*Andrew Sullivan is really peeved at the Trump Administration, perhaps so much so that he’ll declare himself a Democrat (there are few Republicans as moderate as Sullivan). His latest piece, about American foreign policy, is called “Requiem for the West“, with the subtitle, “Trump and Vance have put a stake in the heart of the free world.”
We only saw Donald Trump’s foreign policy darkly in his first term — constrained, as he was, by a handful of white-knuckled Republicans in the executive branch. Now we see it face to face. It’s a vision where international law disappears, great powers divide up the planet into spheres of influence, and the strong always control the weak. It’s Trump’s vision of domestic politics as well. And of life.
Control, plunder, gloat. This is the Trump way.
And to give the madman his due, something had to happen. Neoconservatism is long since dead — by suicide, of course, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the global position of the US after 1945, and then after 1989, is over and never coming back. There is simply no threat in the world that is equivalent to the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Maoist China. Islamism was never going to replace them.
And so a retrenchment of the US position was inevitable at some point: a more judicious approach to interventionism, a greater balance with the allies, a pivot toward Asia and away from Europe and the Middle East: responsible, realist re-positioning. In fact, failure to do so when our debt payments now exceed our military budget would be asking for trouble.
. . . . What we are witnessing now — as Washington’s support for Ukraine crumbles — is what happens when US promises run way ahead of its core interests and US public opinion, and we get caught funding an unending, unwinnable, unspeakably bloody war.
On this much, Trump is right. The Ukraine conflict is at a stalemate; the human toll is vast, unimaginable, and mounting every day; there’s no chance of repelling Russia from its current occupation — but there is some chance of driving a hard bargain to ensure a stable, new border and an independent rump Ukraine, with security guarantees against any future invasions from Russia.
And so I’ve always been in support of a tough peace negotiation that would have to reflect the facts on the ground. I was prepared for concessions from the West in the end, alongside some guarantees against future aggression. Even if it was realistic to understand that victory was impossible, we could still find a way to protect Ukraine’s fledgling democracy and remaining territory, keep the democracies aligned against Putin, and maintain the broad structure of the post-war settlement, alongside international law.
But that is not, it now seems obvious, the Trump position at all. What he is doing is not about making a tough peace deal with Russia, recalibrating NATO, or protecting Ukraine’s democracy. He is merely setting the terms of a new alliance and relationship with the criminal Russian dictatorship — directed against the European democracies.
Clearly, Sullivan concedes that some of Ukraine will have to be given to Russia to end the war. Everybody seems to think so, though I deeply regret that, because it’s a tacit admission that Russia can take whatever land it wants (granted, the cost was high). But I would love to see Ukraine in NATO. That may be a dealbreaker for Russia, and they’d continue the war, which they’d eventually win at a huge cost in lives and moneuy. But to see our administration on the side of despotism rather than freedom is a hard thing to bear. And I completely agree with Sullivan in his closing:
This is who Trump is. But it isn’t who Americans really are. I have faith that the West, now mortally wounded, can yet survive Trump and Putin, and re-emerge at some point. But it may be a dark, dark few years before the dawn’s early light breaks out again.
Indeed.
*And from the AP’s reliable oddities section, which also reports that the New York Yankees baseball team has finally dropped its ban on players having beards. But this piece is about Birkentocks, which I’ve always thought were the ugliest footwear in creation. The company tried to prevent other makers from selling copycat designs, and Birkenstock tried to defend its interest by claiming the sandals were art. They lost.
Birkenstocks: They are ubiquitous in summer, comfy and very German. Sometimes they look chic and sometimes shabby. But can these sandals be considered art?
That’s the question Germany’s Federal Court of Justice wrestled with Thursday, and it ruled they’re just comfy footwear.
Birkenstock, which is headquartered in Linz am Rhein, Germany, and says its tradition of shoemaking goes back to 1774, filed a lawsuit against three competitors who sold sandals that were very similar to its own.
The shoe manufacturer claimed its sandals “are copyright-protected works of applied art” that may not be imitated. Under German law, works of art enjoy stronger and longer-lasting intellectual property protections than consumer products.
The company asked for an injunction to stop its competitors from making copycat sandals and order them to recall and destroy those already on the market. The defendant companies were not identified in the court statement.
Before Germany’s highest court for civil trials weighed in Thursday, the case had been heard at two lower courts, which disagreed on the issue.
A regional court in Cologne initially recognized the shoes as works of applied art and granted the orders, but Cologne’s higher regional court overturned the orders on appeal, German news agency dpa reported.
The appeals court said it was unable to establish any artistic achievement in the wide-strapped, big-buckled sandals
The Federal Court of Justice sided with the appeals court and dismissed the case. In its ruling, it wrote that a product can’t be copyrighted if “technical requirements, rules or other constraints determine the design.”
“For the copyright protection of a work of applied art — as for all other types of work — the level of design must not be too low,” the court wrote. “For copyright protection, a level of design must be achieved that reveals individuality.”
I agree, but I also know that tastes differ and I’m not gonna kick your butt if you wear these monstrosities. For your delectation, here is not-art from Wikipedia:
From Malgorzata, who captioned this as “Innocent, starving Gaza civilians rejoice at the sight of murdered Israeli babies.”
This video shows how sick the “Palestinian” society really is.
These are Nazi civilians, including kids, having a big party cheering as 4 dead Jewish hostages, including 2 dead kids, are paraded through the square before being handed over to Israel
Two posts from Dr. Cobb, who’s heading for Asilomar, CA, the subject of his first post:
Criticisms of the 1975 Asilomar meeting on genetic engineering are quite valid, in terms of its lack of representation and so on. But remember the positive consequences – all insulin is now produced in engineered microbes, and careful medical use of the technology can be amazing:
Welcome to the end of the “work” week: it’s Friday, February 21, 2025, and it’s National Sticky Bun Day, a celebration of those oversized cinnamon rolls that I love so much. Ann Sather is the most famous place in Chicago to get them, and sometimes people would bring a dozen to the lab, but, if you ask me they’re a tad on the small side.
Finally, there is a Google Doodle today in which you can play a game against an opponent, a game involving the Moon and the lunar cycle. Click below to begin:
Hamas handed over on Thursday what it said were the remains of four Israelis abducted during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, including a woman and her two young children whose abduction was widely seen as emblematic of the viciousness of the Hamas assault.
Crowds of Palestinians gathered near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis to watch the theatrical handoff staged by Hamas: four coffins placed on a stage in front of a cartoonish, vampiric picture of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Triumphant music thumped in the background.
One casket bore a picture of Kfir Bibas, who was less than nine months old when he was kidnapped. A few yards away, another poster threatened that if Israel went back to war against Hamas, even more hostages would return in coffins.
Miles away, Israelis watched the scene unfold in horror and anguish, a sharp contrast to the catharsis evoked by the recent releases of hostages who had survived. Israel’s leaders had vowed to topple Hamas and bring home the roughly 250 hostages the militant group and its allies abducted in October 2023.
But some of those taken captive are now coming home dead.
Critics in Israel say Mr. Netanyahu shares at least part of the blame, arguing that he pressed on with his campaign against Hamas rather than agreeing earlier to a cease-fire that would have saved some lives.
And despite more than a year of devastating war, Hamas’s show of force at the exchange demonstrated that the group was still very much in charge in Gaza. Scores of gunmen — most clad in green Hamas headbands — patrolled the area around the exchange.
On Thursday, the coffins containing the hostages’ remains were the latest props.
Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, called the display “abhorrent and cruel,” adding that it “flies in the face of international law.”
I suspect that when all the hostages (or their remains) are back in Israeli or Thai hands, Israel will resume activities assuring that Hamas will not govern Gaza in the future.
Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and longest-serving Senate leader who played a pivotal role in obstructing major Democratic agenda items and stacking the federal courts with conservatives, said Thursday that he would not seek another term in 2026.
In a speech on the Senate floor that fell on his 83rd birthday, Mr. McConnell made official what had been widely expected since he announced last year that he would step down as Republican leader. He said that representing Kentucky was “the honor of a lifetime,” but that “I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last.”
When he stepped down as leader, Mr. McConnell had said he was committed to finishing out his seventh term in Congress. He had not announced his political plans, but it had become clear that he was nearing the end of his career. Mr. McConnell has suffered a series of health issues over the past year, including a back-to-back pair of falls recently that left him temporarily using a wheelchair to navigate the Capitol.
Mr. McConnell established himself as a master tactician in the Senate during 18 years as minority and majority leader, making shrewd use of the chamber’s rules to thwart his opponents and empower his allies, including President Trump. He blocked former President Barack Obama from filling a Supreme Court seat at the end of his tenure and then led a Republican effort to install deeply conservative jurists on the bench under the first Trump administration, culminating in the confirmation of three Supreme Court justices.
But he has a deeply fraught relationship with Mr. Trump, despite the key role he played in enacting Mr. Trump’s agenda and allowing him to return to power. In recent weeks, he has found himself increasingly isolated within his own party, particularly on the issues of national security and safeguarding democracy.
All told, he was not good for the Republic, but I did admire his recent votes against Trump’s nominees.
*Trump issued an early EO that people born in the U.S. but whose parents immigrated here illegally, were here on temporary work visas, or were on student and tourists visas, did not deserve “birthright citizenship.” Since birthright citizenship is in the Constitution, I agreed with the many people who said that Trump’s dictum was unconstitutional. And one federal judge agreed, blocking the order. Now a federal appellate judge has done the same, setting up a Supreme Court case that, if all be right with the world, Trump will lose:
A federal appeals court panel denied a Justice Department bid toreinstate President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at curbing birthright citizenship, edging the battle over the order’s constitutionality closer to a potential Supreme Court showdown.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit declined on Wednesday the administration’s emergency request to immediately lift a nationwide block on Trump’s executive order, rejecting its claim that the preliminary injunction was overly broad.It is the first time an appellate panel has weighed in on one of the several lawsuits challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship order.
Justice Department lawyers had argued that the court’s injunction — which blocked Trump’s order nationwide after a lawsuit from four Democratic-led states — was harmful because it stymied Trump’s effort to “address the ongoing crisis at the southern border” and implement an immigration policy designed to combat “significant threats to national security and public safety.”
The three-judge panel unanimously rejected the request, with Judges William C. Canby Jr. and Milan D. Smith Jr. writing in their order that the administration had not made a “strong showing” that it would succeed on the merits of its appeal.
In a six-page concurring opinion, Judge Danielle Forrest wrote that setting aside a court order on an emergency basis should be the exception rather than the rule, and that the injunction did not meet the bar. “A controversy, yes. Even an important controversy, yes. An emergency, not necessarily,” wrote Forrest, who was nominated to her seat by Trump in 2019.
In rejecting the emergency plea, the panel upheld a nationwide injunction ordered Feb. 6 by U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour in Seattle, who called Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional,” while paving the way for the case to be brought before the Supreme Court.
If you want to get rid of birthright citizenship, you’ll have to amend the Constitution, not issue executive orders. And that simply isn’t going to happen. Even Clarence Thomas won’t be able to find enough daylight to say that Trump’s order was lawful.
*Trump’s decision to settle the Ukraine war without the presence of Zelensky has just ticked off the Ukrainian leader, and rightly so. A sign of that animosity is that, following talks between Zelensky and Trump’s “Ukraine envoy” (what a snub!), there was going to be a press conference with the two. Now, however, it’s been canceled.
A news conference that was planned to follow talks between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Donald Trump’s Ukraine envoy was canceled Thursday as political tensions deepened between the two countries over how to end the almost three-year war with Russia.
The event was originally supposed to include comments to the media by Zelenskyy and retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, but it was changed at the last minute to a simple photo opportunity where the two posed for journalists. They did not deliver statements or field questions as expected. The change was requested by the U.S. side, Ukrainian presidential spokesman Serhii Nikiforov said.
Kellogg’s trip to Kyiv coincided with recent feuding between Trump and Zelenskyy that has bruised their personal relations and cast further doubt on the future of U.S. support for Ukraine’s war effort.
Dozens of journalists gathered at Ukraine’s presidential office in Kyiv after being invited to take photos and observe a news conference with Zelenskyy and Kellogg. As the meeting began, photographers and video journalists were allowed into a room where the two men shook hands before sitting across from each other at a table.
Journalists were then informed that there would be no news conference with remarks by the leaders or questions from reporters. Nikiforov gave no reason for the sudden change except to say that it was in accordance with U.S. wishes.
The U.S. delegation made no immediate comment. The White House did not immediately respond to questions about why the news conference was called off.
. . . Kellogg, one of the architects of a staunchly conservative policy book laying out an “America First” national security agenda, has long been Trump’s top adviser on defense issues.
What did they expect? Trump is talking to Putin while Zelensky gets fobbed off on some factotrum. Is he supposed to sit there twiddling his thumbs while the Russian dictator and American dictator President decide how to slice up his country. Trump’s “diplomacy” in this case is execrable, but he’s never seen a part of Putin’s buttocks that he wouldn’t osculate.
When the best golfers in the world line up a putt these days, many of them look completely deranged.
Their process for reading greens everywhere from Augusta National to St Andrews involves standing over the line of the putt, closing one eye and sticking a couple fingers in the air as if they’re trying to hail a cab to the clubhouse. Never in the centuries since a bunch of Scots started malleting balls toward a cup had anyone studied greens quite like this before.
But that hasn’t stopped professionals from adopting the unorthodox putting strategy known as AimPoint, a technique that has become as popular as it is polarizing. One PGA Tour veteran, 2009 U.S. Open champion Lucas Glover, recently inflamed the controversy when he called for AimPoint to be banned and cited it as a factor in golf’s pace-of-play debate. Others have criticized it for simply looking silly—or worse, violating the game’s unwritten rules when players stomp around too close to the hole.
Still, a growing number of top pros swear by it. They argue it makes the maddening art of reading a green more scientific and that the backlash against it is just uninformed.
“AimPoint has 1,000% helped me,” two-time major champion Collin Morikawa said. “I don’t think people understand how AimPoint works to really say this is right or wrong.”
I don’t even understand the description. What is the “biggest break”?
Here’s what you have to understand: First, you straddle the putt’s line at the point of the biggest break. Then you use your footing to discern the amount of tilt, at which point you assign a number—usually one, two or three—to the slope’s severity. Next, standing behind the ball with one eye closed and a pointer finger aimed at the center of the hole, you raise the number of fingers that corresponds to that slope. And that’s your line. So if you estimate the slope at 2% from right to left, you aim at the point outside your middle finger. Voilà.
Here’s an explanation and a demonstration, which sort of makes sense:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, it appeared that Hili made up with Baby Kulka! But the truce was short-lived. Malgorzata explains:
Kulka was eating from Hili’s bowl and Hili was not hissing. That’s why Andrzej thought that she finally accepted Kulka. But, as Hili said, it was just a temporary ceasefire. Half an hour later they were hissing at each other again and ready to fight. Andrzej took Kulka and deported her upstairs.
A: Finally you accepted Kulka.
Hili: It’s just a temporary ceasefire.
In Polish:
Ja: Nareszcie zaakceptowałaś Kulkę.
Hili: To tylko chwilowe zawieszenie broni.
And in snowy Berlin, a photo of Stupsi in the wild “Hatte ich Dir schon ein Bild von Stupsi geschickt, wie sie durch unseren Iglu läuft?” (translation: Did I already send you a photo of Stupsi walking through our ignloo?)
*******************
From Things With Faces, and the caption, “A forgotten potato at the bottom of the pantry turned into a Moose.”
A 16-minute discussion between Masih and Quillette editor Jonathan Kay. Masih explains how Western feminists “Iransplain” to her: “hijabs are part of your culture,” etc.
He promised he’d never comment on a woman’s appearance, but this time, @jonkay just couldn’t help himself. See my reaction. ✌️
To those in the West who say we’re not at war with the Islamic Republic, let me tell you: the Islamic Republic is at war with us.
The world has turned… pic.twitter.com/xZPQkYXa7G
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a very unusual fly larva:
This nearly decade-old observation was finally identified as fly larva of the genus Rhyncomya thanks to the publication of a new scientific paper and it's our Observation of the Day! Seen in South Africa by peterwebb.Read the discussion at: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations…
I may have posted this, but so what? It’s amazing! Look at all those mRNA molecules wiggling around. And they have to be fast because proteins have to be made fast:
67 years after Pardee, Jacob and Monod called this stuff “X” (pronounced “eeex” à la française), now we can actually see mRNA molecules wriggling about. Quite amazing. Source in linked post.
Welcome to Thursday, February 20, 2025 and National Cherry Pie Day, one of the Three Great Pies (pecan, blueberry, and cherry). Here is one of Malgorzata’s cherry pies from their own orchard.
In the previous post, I reported on the return of four dead Israeli hostages taken by Hamas. In return, Hamas got 1000 Palestinian prisoners back.
*Is there any improvement Trump won’t try to de-improve? I’m referring to the new “congestion pricing” to enter lower Manhattan, which by all accounts has been a big success. Trump doesn’t like it because, he says, it drives people away from the city, and of course it’s his city.
President Trump intends to revoke federal approval of New York City’s congestion pricing program, fulfilling a campaign promise to reverse the policy that tolls drivers who enter Manhattan’s busiest streets to finance repairs to mass transit.
In a letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul on Wednesday, the president’s transportation secretary outlined Mr. Trump’s objections to the program, the first of its kind in the United States, and said that federal officials would contact the state to “discuss the orderly cessation of toll operations.”
The letter did not indicate a specific date by which the federal government intended to end the program. The decision will almost certainly be challenged in court.
The letter from Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, cited the cost to working class motorists, the use of revenue from the tolls for transit upgrades rather than roads, and the scope of the plan compared to the federal legislation that authorized it as reasons for the decision.
The program started on Jan. 5 and charged most drivers $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street, an area that includes some of the city’s most famous destinations like Times Square and the Empire State Building.
The plan aimed to discourage drivers from entering the congestion zone. It also hoped to clear pollution from Manhattan’s core while helping to raise $15 billion for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs New York City’s transit system.
But Mr. Trump has said that he would end the tolls because he claimed that they were drawing visitors and businesses away from Manhattan. Observers have speculated that he would try to withdraw federal approval for the plan or threaten to withhold federal funding.
Now I haven’t been to Manhattan since this started, though I’ll be there in June, but this seems once again like revenge. “How dare you de-congest MY CITY? This is the worst thing that anybody’s done to a city in the history of the world!”
Europe is struggling to respond to a stunning about-face in U.S. foreign policy and President Trump’s broadsides against Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Trump late Tuesday essentially blamed Ukraine for the war, which started when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a large-scale invasion of his smaller neighbor three years ago. In a comment directed at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said: “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
He said Ukraine should hold elections before a peace deal can be reached, saying, without basis, that Zelensky had very little support among voters.
The comments—and Europe’s lack of reaction—follow a meeting Tuesday in Saudi Arabia between U.S. and Russian diplomats, who sketched out plans to negotiate over Ukraine. Zelensky said any talks that didn’t include his country were doomed.
And from the second:
President Trump stepped up attacks on Volodymyr Zelensky, calling the Ukrainian president a “Dictator without Elections” after Zelensky said Trump was repeating Russian propaganda points.
The comments marked a significant escalation in a feud that could complicate efforts to end the war. The exchange came one day after Trump accused Zelensky of starting the war in Ukraine, which began after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a large-scale invasion of the country three years ago.
Zelensky told reporters in Ukraine earlier Wednesday that Trump is “living in this disinformation space.” He added, “I want there to be more truth in Trump’s team.”
Trump responded with several accusations, saying Zelensky had misused U.S. aid and “done a terrible job” as president.
“Ignoramus” is about the mildest word I can apply to the American President here. If anybody is on the wrong side of history here, it’s Trump, who never seems to have met a despot he didn’t like. Well, the American people voted for him, and you didn’t have to be an expert to know that this is how the Orange Man rolls. I’d pin my hopes on the midterms, but even if both houses of Congress go Democrat (unlikely), it won’t affect much.
“He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle,’” Trump wrote in a social-media post on Wednesday. “A Dictator without Elections, Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”
Oy! Trump called Zelensky a dictator!
*And we might as well hear what the conservative National Review says about Trump/Putin/Zelenslky. Surprisingly, it’s not on Trump’s side (maybe I haven’t read it enough to see its political bent). From the article “The American betrayal of Ukraine begins“:
There’s still time for President Trump to turn it around. But so far in his second term, regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Trump has offered to Vladimir Putin that Ukraine will not retake all its annexed and occupied sovereign territory, that Ukraine will not join NATO, that there will be no U.S. troops on Ukrainian soil after the war, and that the U.S. will lift sanctions on Russia. And Trump might even throw in a withdrawal of the extra 20,000 U.S. troops that Joe Biden sent to NATO’s eastern flank after the invasion of Ukraine.
And in exchange, Putin offered . . . well, nothing, really.
Yesterday in Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the U.S. and Russian governments had agreed to four key principles, including an effort to “lay the groundwork for future cooperation on matters of mutual geopolitical interest and historic economic and investment opportunities which will emerge from a successful end to the conflict in Ukraine.”
What “mutual geopolitical interest” do we have with the regime that fired a missile into Kyiv’s main children’s hospital? (The intensive care, surgical, and oncology wards of Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital were severely damaged, and its toxicology department — where children receive dialysis — was destroyed. Reportedly, 27 civilians, including four children, were killed, and 117, including seven children, were injured.)
Russia has killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, and more than 6 million Ukrainian citizens live under the brutal hand of occupying Russian forces, and our government is talking about “historic economic and investment opportunities” with them?
What exactly does Russia have to offer us that we want so badly? Grain? Oil? Natural gas? We already have that stuff; there is more than we need, and plenty is available for export. I thought the Trump plan was to build us into an energy production superpower. Why is the man who presciently warned Germany that it was becoming completely dependent on Russia for its energy now so eager to make it easier for people to buy Russian energy supplies?
Rubio also said, “We’re going to appoint a high-level team from our end to help negotiate and walk — work through the end of the conflict in Ukraine in a way that’s enduring and acceptable to all the parties engaged.” What “end to the conflict” does he envision could be “enduring and acceptable to all the parties engaged”? How much stolen territory does he visualize Ukraine conceding to Putin?
Does Rubio envision Putin recognizing Ukraine as a legitimate and independent country? He has never done that. Down to the marrow in his bones, Putin sees Ukraine as part of Russia that can never be allowed to pursue its own separate path.
An apocryphal story goes that when Walter Cronkite described the Vietnam War on the air as a stalemate, Lyndon Johnson said “When we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost America.” This story is an anecdote without real evidence, but the sentiments were true. But how would you finish this sentence: “When you’ve lost the National Review, you’ve lost _______”?
*A NYT article intriguingly called “Can this fish make you cry?” (archived here), tells the sad tale of a deep-ocean anglerfish (Melanocetus sp.) that, for some reason, swam up toward the surface and died. These fish live in total darkness, luring prey with a bioluminescent appendage on its head, which it consumes with a huge mouth a wicked teeth.
It is easy to believe that the black seadevil anglerfish, with its gaping maw of razor-like teeth, a bioluminescent rod sticking out of its head and lidless eyes used to scan the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean, might make someone cry with fright.
It is perhaps less believable that such a creature, the kind so freakish it inspired a particularly scary scene in the children’s movie “Finding Nemo,” would move people to genuine, raw tears of emotional overwhelm.
On social media, a seadevil has done just that, becoming a folk hero in recent weeks after swimming great lengths from its typical home, some 200 to 2,000 meters deep in the ocean, to the surface. Some of the fish’s fans have turned the watery odyssey — which ended in death — into a poignant version of the hero’s journey.
“My first reaction was, ‘Oh my god, this fish is terrifying,’” said Hannah Backman, 29, who lives in Minneapolis and posted about the fish on TikTok. But, she said, she eventually succumbed to the poetry of a lone fish approaching the light: “This poor fish is just spending her literal last seconds trying to do something beautiful.”
“I did shed a few tears,” she added.
In late January, the seadevil made headlines when it was spotted near the surface by a group of researchers off the coast of Tenerife in the Spanish Canary Islands. It was a rare event and “a dream come true,” said one photographer with the group who was able to capture the fish on camera. The team observed the fish, which was already injured when it was spotted, for several hours. The seadevil ultimately died.
Why did the seadevil decamp for the surface? We do not know for certain, although scientists have speculated that it might have had to do with illness or an unusual current. Weepy fans of the fish on TikTok, however, have woven a beautiful, and probably fanciful, narrative for the fish: a story of a creature in its final days, desperate to experience a source of light not generated by its own body.
Here’s a video of the poor fish before it died:
*The Free Press reports how, after two Australian nurses threatened to kill any Israeli patients they had (and implied that killing had already been done), a coalition of 50 Muslim groups rushed to defend the miscreants. (There’s no evidence that any Israelis were actually killed.) First, the short video in a tweet:
There needs to be an investigation immediately into these two Australian medical professionals who are saying they will kill Israeli patients – and suggesting that they already have. They are expressing criminal intent towards Jewish people, this must be stopped.
Antisemitism is… pic.twitter.com/YCX3w9YVcY
tt was bad enough when two Australian nurses were caught on camera saying they wouldn’t treat Israeli patients and instead would “kill them.” But now 50 of Australia’s Muslim community groups have rushed to the nurses’ defense. If a couple of Aussie caregivers doing a throat-slitting gesture to a man from Israel was chilling, the fact that so many Muslim leaders are willing to stand up for them is outright terrifying.
This sordid story started a week ago with the release of a video showing two nurses at Bankstown Hospital in Sydney engaging in the most abhorrent Israelophobic chatter. They were talking with an Israeli TikToker, Max Veifer, after encountering him on a video chat site. He told them he was Israeli. One of the nurses drew his fingers across his throat to suggest Veifer deserved to die. He said he sends Israelis to Jahannam—the Muslim version of hell. The other nurse said she would never treat an Israeli. “I won’t treat them. I will kill them.”
The clip went viral and the nurses were suspended. Australian PM Anthony Albanese slammed their “antisemitic comments.” There was horror across Oz that these nurses seemed to have sacrificed the core moral principle of medicine—first do no harm—at the altar of their burning hatred for the Jewish state. Yet there’s a section of Aussie society that seems pretty blasé about the whole thing: self-appointed Muslim leaders.
A coalition of prominent Muslim groups has written an open letter criticizing the “selective outrage” over the nurses’ behavior. It says the nurses were just being “emotional and hyperbolic.” Nice try. We all get emotional at times but we don’t go around fantasizing about the deaths of people from the world’s only Jewish nation. Emotion is no excuse for violent-minded loathing for a whole national group.
. . . The letter says the nurses were raging against Israel, not Jews. They were expressing “frustration and anger” over Israel’s “violent and inhumane policies.” Apparently, the “hypocrites” who have called the nurses out—that would be most of Oz—are seeking to “weaponize accusations of antisemitism to silence dissent [on Israel].” This, the letter concludes, is “dishonest” and “dangerous.”
. . . Australia having nurses who passionately hate Israelis is deeply worrying. Australia having Muslim groups that are willing to defend those nurses is even more so. It exposes the depth of the moral rot under the ideology of multiculturalism. Israelophobia is an old hatred in new garb. It is the social malady that springs from our rejection of civilizational values. Tackling it is the great task of our time.
You can excuse any amount of hatred towards Jews now as hatred of “Israel” or “hatred of Zionism”, but given that the patients the nurses claimed to kill, or wanted to kill, were in fact Australian, it seems to me like good old-fashioned antisemitism.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s keeping a close watch for signs of Spring:
From Things With Faces: a wedding bouquet that looks like the Cookie Monster:
Masih is still very quiet so we’ll have a post from J.K.R.:
One day kids will learn about the time when intelligent liberals were too scared to say ‘women don’t have penises’ and they’ll roll around laughing. I’d find it quite funny myself if I could forget how much harm those people’s shameless cowardice and self-interest have enabled.
From Malgorzata. I don’t know who this Israeli woman is, but she’s passionate and also discussing aspects of the last hostage handover that weren’t reported by the media:
Hamas turned the latest exchange into a dark spectacle—boastful posters, stolen IDF gear, and ominous “gifts” for hostages to bring back. While much of the media ignored it, we won’t look away. pic.twitter.com/W9jnEpXqJo
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. A big beaver in Chicago, and not that far from me! What a chonk!
In lighter (heavier?) news, one particularly large beaver has been seen frequently along the Chicago River."Lori Heavyfoot, Southside Large Marge, Dam Ryan, Sufjan Beavens and Sigourney Beaver are some top contenders suggested by people on Reddit."blockclubchicago.org/2025/02/18/a…
Welcome to another Hump Day (“Kupros diena” in Lithuanian ): Wednesday, February 19, 2025, and National Chocolate Mint Day. The most famous species in this genus is the Frango Mint, made in Chicago and previously sold at Marshall Fields department store (now Macy’s). The mint-flavored chocolates have a checkered history, as you can see by reading the link. Chicagoans don’t like outside companies selling their mints! Here’s what they look like:
There’s a movie of the iconic flag-raising on Iwo Jima, though the photograph by Joe Rosenthal, taken during the raising, won the Pulitzer Prize for that year and was the model for the Marine Corps Memorial in Virginia along the Potomac River. Here’s the movie:
*It really bothers me that Trump decided to hold peace talks with Russia about its war with Ukraine—and leaving out Ukrainian President Zelensky. How much more arrogant and self-serving can you get? But he’s upset not only me, but also many European leaders who fear Trump’s têtê-á-têtê with his buddy Putin. (Article is archived here.)
For years, European leaders have fretted about reducing their dependence on a wayward United States. On Monday, at a hastily arranged meeting in Paris, the hand-wringing gave way to harried acceptance of a new world in which Europe’s most powerful ally has begun acting more like an adversary.
President Trump’s plan to negotiate a peace settlement in Ukraine with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, with neither the Ukrainians nor Europeans invited to take part, has forced dazed leaders in capitals like Berlin, London and Paris to confront a series of hard choices, painful trade-offs and costly new burdens.
Already on the table is the possibility that Britain, France, Germany, and other countries will deploy tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine as peacekeepers. European governments are affirming the need for major increases in their military budgets — if not to the 5 percent of gross domestic product demanded by Mr. Trump, then to levels not seen since the Cold War days of the early 1980s.
“Everybody’s hyped up at the moment, understandably,” said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London. “What is clear is that whatever happens, Europe will have to step up.”
That could put its leaders in a difficult spot. While public support for Ukraine remains strong across Europe, committing troops to potentially dangerous duty on Ukrainian soil could quickly become a domestic political liability. Estimates on the size of a peacekeeping force vary widely, but under any scenario, it would be an extremely expensive undertaking at a time of straitened budgets.
President Emmanuel Macron of France, who first floated the idea of a peacekeeping force last year — to widespread skepticism in Europe — has been weakened since his decision to call parliamentary elections last summer backfired and left him with a fragile government.
Germany may not have a new coalition government for weeks after its election on Feb. 23. On Monday, its chancellor, Olaf Scholz, dismissed talk of peacekeepers as “completely premature” and “highly inappropriate” while fighting was still raging.
I want America to be an ally with Europe, not with Russia, and Trump’s osculation of Putin scares the bejeezus out of me. And if the U.S. is so friendly to Putin, there’s no way that we would vote for Ukrainian membership in NATO, as the vote of NATO members has to be unanimous to allow that. I can imagine how steamed Zelensky is.
An advertisement that was set to run in some editions of The Washington Post on Tuesday calling for Elon Musk to be fired from his role in government was abruptly canceled, according to one of the advocacy groups that had ordered the ad.
Common Cause said it was told by the newspaper on Friday that the ad was being pulled. The full-page ad, known as a wraparound, would have covered the front and back pages of editions delivered to the White House, the Pentagon and Congress, and was planned in collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund.
A separate, full-page ad with the same themes would have been allowed to run inside the newspaper, but the two groups chose to cancel the internal ad as well. Both ads would have cost the groups $115,000.
“We asked why they wouldn’t run the wrap when we clearly met the guidelines if they were allowing the internal ad,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, the president and chief executive of Common Cause. “They said they were not at liberty to give us a reason.”
News of The Washington Post canceling the ad was earlier reported by The Hill.
Although it is unclear who made the decision to pull the ad or why, the move comes amid growing concern about the changing mission of the Washington Post newsroom under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. The newspaper’s decision last fall to end its longstanding tradition of presidential endorsements and Mr. Bezos’ front-row seat at Mr. Trump’s inauguration have led some to wonder whether the news organization has been accommodating a Trump administration.
But an ad is not an op-ed or an endorsement. It is an ad, for crying out loud, and I can see no reason for the cancelation save the Post‘s fear of angering Trump. I can understand journalistic neutrality in endorsements, but I can’t understand journalistic rejection of ads simply because they may anger the powers that be. Such is the feat that Trump’s blustering has inspired in even the MSM.
*Yet another underwater cable was cut in the Baltic Sea, almost certainly by Russia. This time NATO is responding.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization mounted its first coordinated response to the suspected sabotage campaign against critical infrastructure, after another underwater data cable was severed in the Baltic Sea.
NATO vessels raced to the site of a damaged fiber-optic cable in Swedish waters on Sunday morning, where a trio of ships carrying Russian cargo, including one recently sanctioned by the U.S., were nearby. All three vessels are now being investigated as part of a probe into suspected sabotage of the fiber optic cable, according to several European officials. One ship was detained Sunday.
The incident is the latest in a string of alleged underwater attacks in the region that prompted NATO to announce earlier this month the formation of a surveillance mission called Baltic Sentry. It includes regular naval patrols, as well as enhanced drone, satellite and electronic surveillance of Baltic areas that are crisscrossed by critical infrastructure such as data and power cables, along with gas pipelines and offshore wind farms.
Western officials have said they suspect Russia is fighting a shadow war against the West. Russia has denied it is behind such an effort.
“We have seen elements of a campaign to destabilize our societies. Through cyberattacks, assassination attempts, and sabotage—including possible sabotage of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said earlier this month.
Evidence gathered so far in the Baltic investigations hasn’t been conclusive enough to result in prosecutions or arrests, officials familiar with the investigations said.
. . . . . Latvia’s navy identified three vessels that were close to the damage site as potential culprits, the Latvian officials said.
A NATO flag flutters over a ship in Tallinn port, Estonia.Photo: ints kalnins/Reuters
One of the vessels, a bulk carrier called Vezhen, which is registered in Malta and had departed the Russian port Ust-Luga on Friday, was detained and boarded by Swedish police on Sunday, officials said.
If the Russians didn’t do this (and this was at least the second cable damaged), I’ll eat my hat, even if I don’t have a hat. Who else would damage these cables? There was a similar incident near Taiwan recently, and the Chinese are suspects in that one. In the meantime, Trump is cozying up to Putin over the Ukraine war. . . .
*Two Democratic Senators have surprised their colleagues by announcing their retirement. This isn’t great for the Senate, or for us Democrats in the midterms, as there are already 53 Republicans, 45 Democrats, and 2 Independents in the Senate. And it’s not a certainty that these Senators will be replaced by others from their party.
At the exact moment that Democrats and the anti-Trump resistance are crying, “All hands on deck!” a pair of Midwestern Democratic senators answered, “Nah, we’re out.”
Michigan’s Gary Peters, 66, recently announced he won’t seek reelection in 2026 because, in part, he wants to spend more time with his grandson, and Minnesota’s Tina Smith, also 66, on Thursday said in a post-announcement interview, “I know it’s sort of a bit trite for people in public life to say, ‘I’m going to retire so I can spend more time with my family.’ But I actually really like my family.”
Those are big wins for the Peters and Smith families and add a big new sense of uncertainty for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. It’s not that two surprise retirements doom Democrats’ hopes in the still far-off 2026 midterms. But those open seats aren’t necessarily going to be automatic Democratic wins, an ominous early indicator that the midterms may not be the relief that Trump opponents desperately want them to be. And with JD Vance as the tiebreaking vice president, Democrats need to pick up four seats to regain control of the chamber.
. . . For Democrats, this is the nightmare time. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are rearranging the U.S. government as they see fit. Other than Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, Senate Republicans are acquiescing even to Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks. Trump opponents’ best option for now is through the courts, filing lawsuits by the armload and getting as many injunctions as possible to halt Trump’s agenda wherever they can. It’s a holding action until the midterms, when — theoretically — congressional reinforcements arrive and Trump can be blocked through legislation.
The problem is those midterms may not offer Democrats that much relief.
Yes, the House is about as close as it can get; the GOP holds a 218-215 House majority, but at some point soon, Rep. Elise Stefanik is going to have to resign to become ambassador to the United Nations. (A New York special election will be held to fill the seat within about three months of her leaving.) On April 1, Florida will hold two special House elections for the districts formerly represented by Michael Waltz and Matt Gaetz. Between Stefanik’s imminent resignation and April 1, the House will have 217 Republicans and 215 Democrats.
While a bare-minimum GOP majority in the House makes it tougher for the majority to pass legislation, members in minority still can’t subpoena anything or call hearings, although they can summon witnesses at hearings called by the majority. In the minority, Texas Rep. Al Green’s plan to introduce articles of impeachment against Trump (here we go again!) looks like another futile, impotent Democratic gesture.
With the House so close, Democrats will have a good shot at winning a majority in 2026. But that would only partially hinder the Trump agenda, and that’s not even accounting for Trump’s maximalist interpretation of presidential powers. (His executive orders can be undone by a Democratic president, but who knows when one will take office.)
I can’t afford to worry about this now; I’m just trying to survive the next two/four years of madness, one day at a time.
*The Times of Israel reports that there will be two exchanges of hostages this week, four dead bodies on Thursday and six living hostages on Saturday. For the first time we will see coffins given back to Israel.
Israeli and Hamas officials say that a deal has been reached for the terror group to free six living hostages on Saturday.
In addition, four bodies will be transferred to Israel on Thursday.
Hamas leader in Gaza Khalil Al Hayya says that the six living hostages will include two Israelis, Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who have been held for over a decade.
Al Hayya says the release will be conditioned on Israel living up to its part of the first phase of the deal.
Initially three living hostages had been set to go free on Saturday.
The six are believed to be the final living hostages on the list of those to be released in the first phase of the deal. Fourteen of the 33 hostages on the original phase 1 list have yet to be freed; Hamas has said eight of them are dead, and Israel has said that this matches its own information. It is believed that another 24 living hostages would be released under phase 2 of the deal.
A senior Israeli official confirms the details to the Walla news site.
Israel has said it will confirm the identity of the bodies released once they have been definitively identified.
It’s not clear to me whether the dead in their coffins will be identified by Hamas, or whether Hamas will just turn over a list of the dead. In either case Israel will immediately take over the bodies for forensic identification (probably through DNA) and then informing the families. It’s also not clear whether Israel has agreed to release more Palestinian terrorists in return for dead hostages. That’s of course an awful deal, but Israel has done it before, and who am I to tell Israel how to exchange hostage for prisoners. All I can do is register my horror and disbelief at this kind of “deal.”
Update: The NYT says the bodies will include some from the Bibas family: a mother and her two infants. It doesn’t say how many. I was afraid of this, as the family has become iconic to Israelis. UPDATE 2: The BBC and other sources report that Hamas will be returning the three bodies of the Bibas family.
Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s chief negotiator, said in a speech on Tuesday that militants intend to hand over the remains of four Israeli hostages to Israel on Thursday in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Mr. Hayya said that members of the Bibas family — some of the most well-known hostages worldwide — would be among the four bodies handed over to Israel on Thursday, without saying how many. The three remaining members of the Bibas family in Gaza are Shiri Bibas and her two children.
The Israeli prime minister’s office confirmed that the bodies of four Israelis would be returned on Thursday, but officials didn’t respond to requests for comment about whether the Bibas family would be among them. The Israeli military had said until recently that there were grave concerns for the lives of Ms. Bibas and her children, though it had not confirmed their deaths.
For many Israelis, the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack: Shiri Bibas was corralled by gunmen and taken to Gaza with her two red-haired children, Ariel, 4, and the baby Kfir, who was just short of 9 months old at the time. Yarden Bibas, Shiri’s husband and the children’s father, was also abducted, bleeding heavily after an assailant struck his head with a hammer, relatives said. Mr. Bibas was released from captivity earlier in February.
Is the world going to feel less amiable towards Hamas when the remains of Shiri Bibas and her two children are handed over to Israel on Thursday? I wouldn’t bet on it. But I bet there will be absolutely no ceremony like the others: no speeches and no certificates. The Red Cross will help Hamas do a transfer completely out of sight.
Masih is quiet again, but Emma Hilton reposted this (you can find the upcoming Act here, and
The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act passed in the US House in 2023 and again in 2025. Will any of the @SenateDems vote YES when it comes before the Senate for a floor vote? Here’s why they should.https://t.co/P16QkafQFA
From Luana via Colin Wright. Maher doesn’t understand sex, either:
MAHER: “Now we’re back at ‘there’s only two sexes,’ which is ridiculous.”
Hey @billmaher, I’d be happy to come on your show to explain exactly why there are only two sexes and why it’s important for our laws to reflect this basic biological fact.pic.twitter.com/XeKbb1iD16
Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday: February 18, 2025, and it’s wicked cold in Chicago, with dirty snow caking the ground. It’s National Drink Wine Day, though, which will take the chill off.
Right now it is -2° F (-19° C) outside, but with the wind it feels like -24°F (-31°C). I froze my face on the way to work, but the ears and nose are intact.
*As you know, Trump pardoned many of the January 6 insurrectionists, including those with long sentences because they hurt people. Now these loons are arguing that the Trumpian pardons apply not just to what happened on that fateful day, but to other crimes as well:
There is Edward Kelley, who was pardoned for assaulting police at the U.S. Capitol, but who is now fighting another case. In November, a jury convicted him of conspiring to murder the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who investigated his Jan. 6 participation, with evidence showing he had a “kill list” of targets.
Kelley now argues that conviction should be tossed out, too.
The Tennessee man believes that President Trump’s blanket pardon covering “offenses related to events that occurred at or near” the Capitol on Jan. 6 extends beyond that day.
Other defendants are similarly arguing they should be absolved of other alleged crimes, such as illegal gun possession and child pornography, discovered during Jan. 6 investigations. At least one defendant has died in a post-pardon altercation with police.
Weeks after the pardon that freed hundreds of prison inmates and ended remaining cases winding through the courts, life is far from settled for a large contingent of the defendants.
Seriously? In what world does that apply? I can’t imagine that Trump’s pardons absolve these miscreants of all crimes, but of course they are miscreants, and they are also plotting revenge on those who put them in jail:
Federal agents and others have expressed fear of retaliation for investigating the Capitol riot. After Trump-appointed Justice Department leaders demanded a list of all agents involved, agents sued, arguing it would put them and their families at risk from “the now pardoned and at-large Jan. 6 convicted felons.”
The federal government temporarily agreed to not make the list public while a judge considers a longer-term ban. “If this information were released, I think there’s no question that it would put a number of FBI agents in significant and immediate danger,” U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, a Biden appointee, said during a recent court hearing.
Trump’s pardons were bad enough, but these bad actors now want to go after those who put them behind bars. Shoot me now.
Four top New York City officials are expected to resign in the coming days, after the outgoing U.S. attorney for Manhattan accused the mayor of trading cooperation with President Trump’s mass deportation agenda for a dismissal of his criminal indictment, according to three people with knowledge of their plans.
The four officials — Maria Torres-Springer, the first deputy mayor, and Meera Joshi, Anne Williams-Isom and Chauncey Parker, all also deputy mayors — oversee much of New York City government, and their departure is poised to blow a devastating hole in the already wounded administration of Mayor Eric Adams.
Mr. Adams, a Democrat, is resisting growing calls to resign. Gov. Kathy Hochul is also under increasing pressure to remove him from office.
The four officials who are expected to resign are all respected government veterans. Ms. Torres-Springer was elevated to the second most powerful job at City Hall in October in an effort to stabilize city government and restore confidence in his administration following the mayor’s federal indictment in September on five corruption counts.
The departure of Mr. Parker is particularly pointed because he is the deputy mayor for public safety who has been deeply involved in issues around the city’s role in the president’s deportation plans.
The intended resignations were first reported by WNBC.
What with the Governor thinking about asking Adams to resign, he’d have to sooner or later. I predict one week.
*Teacher’s associations are some of the wokest groups arounds, and it’s hard to prevent them from proselytizing students. Many, like the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the largest union in New England (117,000 members!) are also antisemitic, pushing lessons that demonize Israel and Jews. The Free Press gives examples in its article, “Welcome to Hamassachusetts.“It’s pretty antisemitic:
Inside the Massachusetts statehouse on Monday, State Representative Simon Cataldo displayed the image of a dollar bill folded into a Star of David in front of a packedaudience of teachers, activists, and staffers. They were there to attend a hearing on the state of antisemitism in Massachusetts public schools.
(All visuals courtesy of the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism)
“You’d agree that this is antisemitic imagery, correct?” Cataldo, who co-chairs the state’s Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, asked Max Page, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA)—the largest union in New England, representing 117,000 members.
“I’m not gonna evaluate that,” Page responds calmly.
Cataldo pressed him. “Is it antisemitic?”
Page continued to sit stoically, before breaking into a smile. “You’re trying to get away from the central point,” Page said, “which is that we provide imagery, we provide resources for our members to consider, in their own intelligent, professional way.”
There’s more:
Page was asked by the Massachusetts commission about a series of posters contained in the MTA materials, which appear to display an anti-Israel bias. These materials include a poster of a militant wearing a keffiyeh and holding an assault rifle, that reads, “What was taken by force can only be returned by force.”
The introduction of “Resources on Israel and Occupied Palestine” advises that its lessons are meant to “reflect diverse positions and are meant to aid pedagogy.” But many of the materials promote antisemitic viewpoints, said Robert Leikind, the regional director of the American Jewish Committee in New England. Leikind is also a member of the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism and was present at Monday’s hearing.
Leikind said “it’s astonishing” that an organization “deeply embedded in the educational community” could “defend the idea that it’s legitimate to present one-sided content.” The materials don’t “even make a modest attempt” to show that there are “other ways of looking at the issues,” he said. The resources have led AJC New England to declare, in a December 2024 report, that the MTA has “a Jewish problem.” “The net result is to perpetuate anti-Jewish tropes that malign Israel and its supporters,” the report said.
There’s more, but all we know is that there is a commission to evaluate this material, that the teacher’s union (as in many places) can’t wait to get this anti-Israel stuff into the classroom, and the matter isn’t resolved yet. One problem is that the parents often have no idea what unions are contemplating teaching the students.
*This column in the Washington Post by Shahi Hamid, “Why I still criticize Democrats more than Trump,” hits home for me, as I’m regularly accused of favoring Trump just because I see my brief as criticizing the Democratic Party—my party. And of course I haven’t gone easy on the Orange Man. An excerpt:
he comment sections of my recent columns have been awash with a familiar refrain: How dare you criticize Democrats when President Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy? The anger is palpable, particularly on left-leaning platforms such as Bluesky, where my attempts to understand — rather than simply condemn — certain Trump-adjacent ideas have sparked accusations of legitimizing fascism. But this reaction reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of both Trump’s presidency and the role of political commentary in our deeply polarized era.
Here’s the counterintuitive truth: I’m more critical of Democrats precisely because I expect more from them. When Trump disregards human rights abroad or undermines democratic norms at home, he’s not being hypocritical — he’s being exactly who he has always claimed to be. The man who called for a “Muslim ban” in 2015 and praised strongmen throughout his first term hasn’t suddenly changed his stripes in 2025.
In his Feb. 4 news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump advocated for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. That seemed clear enough. But because it was so clear, it seemed redundant to just condemn him. Instead, I interviewed Oubai Shahbandar, an Arab American defender of Trump who saw the president’s Gaza comments in a more positive light. I found this mystifying, but that seemed all the more reason to ask him why he thought what he thought. And then I could leave it to readers to come to their own conclusions.
This gets at a larger question. As much as moral condemnation might make us feel good, what does it accomplish? More than enough journalists and commentators are already documenting Trump’s abuses of power and holding him to account.
. . .As his comments on Gaza as well as his flurry of aggressive and legally suspect executive orders make clear, Trump is a threat, including to some of the values I hold most dear. The question isn’t who is worse — that answer is obvious — but, rather, who is better. Who can still be held accountable to their own stated ideals? And the answer there is also clear: Democrats. They claim to be the party of values — of fair competition, freedom, tolerance and pluralism.
Yet Democrats consistently fall short of the very ideals they profess to champion. Under the Biden administration, party leaders — including President Joe Biden himself — spoke of the “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza while refusing to do anything to stop it. Instead Biden said, chillingly, that “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel.” But it’s not just Gaza. The Democratic Party has long preached tolerance and inclusion while marginalizing pro-life Democrats, talking down to Black and brown voters, ignoring religious conservatives and dismissing the growing ranks of Americans who felt the party had become too radical on issues such as gender identity. On policy, what was once the working-class party chose to prioritize things such as college debt relief, which disproportionately benefits the wealthy.
I differ from Hamid in some of what he thinks Democrats should do, but one thing is for sure: we are not going to help the Democrats get back in power by spewing invective at Trump. One thing I’ve suggested, which I can’t do myself, is take Trump to court every time he violates the law. If he racks up a number of losses, then maybe Americans who voted him in will see that he’s going hog wild in disrespecting the law. And nobody can accuse the courts, especially the Supreme Court, of being biased in favor of Democrats, so a number of Trump losses will make him look bad—even to his supporters.
It is a challenge that has baffled dentists and other oral-care zealots for years, and spawned a whole category of tricks—from annoying children’s songs to brushing timers—aimed at getting people to spend more time on their teeth.
Designers at companies like Colgate and Procter & Gamble have been trying to close that gap by making a device that makes brushing feel like less of a chore—and compensates for poor effort and technique.
“We have an evergreen goal: how can we design a toothbrush that can clean well no matter how you brush?” he said. “We want the brushing experience to be meaningful and different.”
Jiménez, 60, has been at it for 23 years. If you’ve ever used a Colgate toothbrush, chances are he had a hand in designing it. He has 239 patents, most of them toothbrush-related.
Over the years, he’s observed some trends. Blue is the most popular toothbrush color. Some people don’t brush on weekends. Even though dental hygienists recommend smaller brush heads, Americans usually choose the biggest one. And they’re always after something new.
His latest project is based on a conclusion that young adults are looking for more minimalist designs and a more soothing experience.
But here is the REAL solution:
. . . . At P&G in Cincinnati, Ohio, researchers years ago concluded that the clearest path to the two-minute clean was an electric device that lets people know how long they’ve been brushing. One challenge was getting people to switch over from manual, so the latest model was designed in part to eliminate those barriers.
And that’s the remedy. All you have to do is shell out $43 for a Sonicare rechargeable toothbrush, and it tells you when to stop, as well as when to switch sides (you have eight areas to brush: top, botton, and right and left sides for each, as well as inside and out. Every 30 seconds, the brush pauses for a tick, so you pick, say, your top outside teeth, brush till the brief pause, then switch to the top inside teeth, and ditto with the bottom teeth (spare a few seconds to brush your tongue at the end). Voilá: two minutes total. The brush will last forever, and replacement off-brand heads are cheap. (Make sure you brush with the brush head angled at a 45-degree angle up toward the gum!). My hygienist recommended this, and since then I’ve been plaque-free. $43 is a low price to pay for healthy teeth!
Oh, and make sure you use Reach Unltraclean Dental Floss; simply the best; and it’s available ONLY on Amazon. Tell them that Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) sent you.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is trying to bring on Spring prematurely:
This poster is going up along the route of the London hate march today – and at several London universities – trying to give hate marchers an education they sorely need.
Hamas are not the victims here – they are the Nazis. If you march for anyone, march to free the hostages. pic.twitter.com/Af7HupJ7LT
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a lovely Torah duck!
A duck is part of the decoration around the initial-word panel marking the beginning of Torah portion Mishpatim (מִּשְׁפָּטִים) #ParashahPictures BL Add MS 15423; Torah; 1441 CE-1467 CE; Italy (Florence); f.49v
Matthew wrote a long piece in Nature that you can access through this post:
50 years ago next week the Asilomar meeting on genetic engineering took place. There’s a summit taking place on site on the future of biotechnology – http://www.spiritofasilomar.org. I wrote this, on two issues that were deliberately excluded from discussion last time:
Welcome to the beginning of the “work” week: February 17, 2025, and National Indian Pudding Day, the absolute best indigenous American dessert. I know of only one place you can now get it in the U.S.: the Union Oyster House in Boston. But here’s an uncredited photo and a good recipe from The View from Great Island. It must be served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. If you haven’t tried it, make a batch!
The Internal Revenue Service is preparing to give a team member working with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive taxpayer data, people familiar with the matter said.
The systems at the I.R.S. contain the private financial data tied to millions of Americans, including their tax returns, Social Security numbers, addresses, banking details and employment information.
“Waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said. “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.”
Mr. Fields added: “DOGE will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover as the American people deserve to know what their government has been spending their hard-earned tax dollars on.”
No, this is about what hard-working Americans tell the government about their financial situation.
*The WSJ gives five maps and charts and an explanation of why “Russia’s advance in Ukraine is slowing.” First, a headline map showing which parts of Ukraine Russia has taken over (including Crimea), with the dark red areas the gains since July 1 of 2024.
An excerpt:
The Russian army’s advance in Ukraine is slowing, just as President Trump is pressing for talks.
The slowdown comes at a critical time for both sides. Russia wants to trade gains on the battlefield—and the impression that further advances are inevitable—for a favorable deal in peace talks proposed by Trump. Ukraine, meanwhile, wants to show that it can still fend off its giant neighbor.
In the first month of 2025, Russia was taking on average nearly six days to occupy an area the size of Manhattan, according to data from DeepState, a Ukrainian group that monitors the front lines. That is more than twice as long as in November. Gains in February have slowed further.
. . . . The heavy losses for small geographical gains set up the brutal arm-wrestle that will most likely characterize Russia’s war in Ukraine this year: Can the Russians sustain or even accelerate their assaults and gain enough ground to force Ukraine, struggling with a lack of manpower, and its allies to seek an accommodation? Or will the offensives peter out in the face of Ukraine’s dogged resistance?
Russia’s gains accelerated last fall, particularly in areas to the west of the occupied regional capital of Donetsk. But they have slowed over winter, in part because a lack of foliage makes infantry easy to spot and target with aerial drones, but possibly because of growing exhaustion on the Russian side, analysts said.
It took the last half-year for Russian forces to seize Ukrainian territory equivalent to the land area of Rhode Island, at the cost of tens of thousands of troops. Recruitment is getting tougher, and Russia is having to increase payments to attract volunteers, including those from prisons.
In October last year, a senior U.S. defense official said that Russia had suffered some 600,000 casualties since the start of the war in February 2022, and that the accelerated advance was increasing losses. Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy, said Russia lost as many people last year as in the first two years of the war.
. . . After three years of war, Russia has burned through about half of its vast stocks of mostly Soviet-era tanks and armored vehicles—and many of the rest are older models in poor shape, according to an analysis by a group of open-source intelligence analysts who examine satellite images of Russian stores.
The huge losses show the cost of Russia’s advances, and how difficult they will be to sustain. With stocks of armored vehicles ebbing, Russia has used civilian vehicles and motorbikes in assaults, but mostly is relying on unprotected infantry, which have taken heavy casualties.
Trump doesn’t even seem to care; he’s ready to broker “peace” by giving more of Ukraine to Russia, without even consulting Zelensky, who had to insist that he be part of the negotiations. Nor does Trump want Ukraine to join NATO. Is it too much to insist that, as part of any deal that gives away part of Ukraine to Russia, Ukraine be allowed to join NATO? Only those who sympathize with Russia cry “Don’t let Ukraine join NATO!”
*Middle-school English Tim Donahue argues plaintively in the NYT, “Let students finish the whole book. It could change their lives.” (archived here). He tells us at the outset that students now spend over eight hours a day staring at a screen, and that’s not conducive to reading, even if you favor e-books. And, of course, attention spans are decreasing: “TL;DR” appears more and more often.
The study of English involves more than reading. It includes written expression and the cultivation of an authentic voice. But the comprehension of literature, on which the study of English is based, is rooted in the pleasure of reading. Sometimes there will be a beam of light that falls on a room of students collectively leaning into a story, with only the scuffing sounds of pages, and it’s as though all our heartbeats have slowed. But we have introduced so many antagonists to scrape against this stillness that reading seems to be impractical.
The test scores released at the end of last month by the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal disturbing trend lines for the future of literacy in our country. Thirty-three percent of eighth graders scored “below basic” on reading skills, meaning they were unable to determine the main idea of a text or identify differing sides of an argument. This was the worst result in the exam’s 32-year history. To make matters worse, or perhaps to explain how we got here, the assessment reported that in 2023 only 14 percent of students said they read for fun almost every day, a drop of 13 percentage points since 2012.
In its attempt to make English more relevant, the National Council of Teachers of English — devoted to the improvement of language arts instruction — announced in 2022 that it would widen its doors to the digital and mediated world. The aim was to retreat from the primacy of the written word and invite more ideas to be represented by images and multimedia. “It behooves our profession, as stewards of the communication arts, to confront and challenge the tacit and implicit ways in which print media is valorized above the full range of literacy competencies students should master,” the council said.
. . . reading, in particular, is an important exercise in inferiority, an insistence on listening to something without imposing your own design on it. It’s a grounding and an ascension. While we still have the institutions of school and class time as well as the books that line our walls, we need to challenge students with language and characters that may not come to them immediately but might with healthy discipline.
The notion that students can master a range of literary competencies is further diluting the already deluded approach to English class. To put the National Council of Teachers of English guidelines in action, teachers are substituting intertextuality and experiential learning for engaging with the actual text. What might have been a full read of “The Great Gatsby” is replaced by students reading the first three chapters, then listening to a TED Talk on the American dream, reading a Claude McKay poem, dressing up like flappers and then writing and delivering a PowerPoint presentation on the Prohibition. They’ll experience Chapters 4 through 8 only through plot summaries and return to their texts for the final chapter.
. . . .When a semester begins, I often give my students a wicked little essay by Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” She advises, “Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges, but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice.” Like this, a classroom allows students to travel along with dockworkers and tycoons, tyrants and liberators. And when they have turned the last page, Woolf invites the reader to “leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend; he must become the judge.”
Is it old-fashioned and curmudgeonly to want to hold a book in your hands. I can’t even read e-books because I like to make notes in the margins or go back and look at things. But worse than this is the habit of avoiding books altogether and looking for the “reading time: less than five minutes” on articles.
Teddy Roosevelt once said, “profanity is the parlance of the fool.” Democrats appear to be increasingly finding relief from both reality and sanity in profanity. Democratic members have been complaining that left-wing groups have been targeting them to be more aggressive and “fight harder” in the face of the fast-paced actions of President Donald Trump. Their response appears to be ratcheting up “rage rhetoric” with profanity and violent language. Last week, Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) captured the new norm by yelling at a rally that “I don’t swear in public very well, but we have to f**k Trump. Please don’t tell my children that I just did that.”
The key, it appears, is for her constituents to hear it. She is not alone. (Warning: profane language)
Here:
More:
Politicians and pundits have seemingly tried to outdo each other in proving their bona fides to the far left. MSNBC host and former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki pledged on Jon Stewart’s “The Weekly Show” podcast that she has “retired from the world of Democratic messaging” and ” speaking in a manner that was so academic and Ivory Tower.” She promised to drop “the disconnected academic Ivory Tower elite language that is too often used by Democrats, sometimes on cable television.” Instead, Psaki called on the left to “break some s–t.”
This is not a new trend. Law professors and legal pundits have long struggled to maintain a certain decorum and professionalism. However, during the Trump years, there was a similar race to the bottom as figures like Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe regularly engaging in name calling and profanity.
Just last week, a professor was restored to his teaching duties after being suspended for profane attacks on Trump. It is now considered required virtue signaling to use violent or profane language to show that you are no milquetoast moderate.
Many on the far left like former CNN anchor Don Lemon have turned the same profanity of members of the media who are not sufficiently aggressive and open in opposing Trump.
What is most striking about this race to the bottom is that it is a concession to the far left that writes off any effort to appeal to moderate and independent voters who supported Trump. The Democrats found their party captured by the most extreme elements of their base and alienated most of the country. Now, politicians and pundits are rushing to protect themselves by joining the mob.
In some cases, the effort is painfully awkward like Schumer’s effort to become a rabble-rousing populist. Even CNN has been unable to hold back:
I think it’s unseemly—just as unseemly as if I talked to my classes this way. Profanity will only drive more people away from the Left, and doesn’t add anything to the discourse. I have noticed that my Democratic friends seem to be more touchy and grumpy these days. I can’t recall if Republicans are like that after Biden won last time, but I doubt it. Profanity is the new way to be cool. But the real way to be cool is not to curse, but go to the courts.
*Alaskans seem almost unanimous in agreeing to use the indigenous name “Denali” for the mountain that used to be called “McKinley,” even tough that President never set foot in the state. But Trump is insistent in restoring the “colonial” name:
But in this snow-shrouded land where the sun appears for only a few hours daily in winter, he and others say there is no disputing that the name of that mountain — North America’s tallest — is the Indigenous word Denali. Never mind President Donald Trump’s announcement just hours after his inauguration that he was restoring the behemoth peak’s previous titleof Mount McKinley, in honor of a turn-of-the-century president who never set foot in Alaska.
Noel hasn’t heard a single resident express support. “We prefer it to stay Denali,” he said, “and we’re not going to change our name.”
What perplexes many here is why Trump chose to thrust a mountain thousands of miles from Washington into a culture war while disregarding Alaskans’ wishes, their legislature’s pleas and their Republican U.S. senators’ disapproval. As the weeks go by, affront has turned to worry as the implications of more executive orders from afar, particularly those freezing federal grants and imperiling the jobs of “parkies” who help drive the local tourism economy, begin to ripple across the permafrost.
“It was just another instance of someone from Washington putting their big nose in a place that it just doesn’t belong,” said Jeff Yanuchi, an organic farmer who spent years running dogsleds in Denali National Park and Preserve with his wife. The mountain, headded,“cannot be a political pawn. And that’s what they’re trying to make it.”
Others here are even less diplomatic, describing Trump’s move as “infantile,” “laughable” or, as 86-year-old Eliza Jones put it, “dumb.”
“We don’t know who McKinley is,” said Jones, who co-authored the first dictionary for Koyukon Athabascan, the Indigenous language she grew up speaking in a remote river village. “Denali has so much more meaning to it.”
Denali means “the tall one” or “the great one” in some Athabascan languages, and the summit was known as that for thousands of years. Then a prospector in Alaska who admired president-elect William McKinley and his support for the gold standard called it Mount McKinley in a newspaper article in 1897. The name took, and the federal government made it official in 1917, 16 years after McKinley’s assassination.
Denali it must be then. Trump’s boneheaded order reflects a combination of power and bigotry. Here’s a photo I took of the mountain in 2006 when I hopped on a bush plane ferrying two climbers to the mountain. The plane landed on a glacier well below the summit. I got to sit next to the pilot!
*And Valentine’s news: you can pay a minimal fee to have your ex’s name put on a loathsome animal. From the AP:
Animal shelters and zoos around the country are encouraging little cathartic avenues for revenge this holiday — and raising money for a cause — with a slew of darkly funny fundraisers for those missed by Cupid’s arrow.
Options include naming a feral cat after your old flame before it’s neutered — or giving rodents or cockroaches your love bug’s name before feeding them to bigger animals. The Minnesota Zoo’s campaign to name a bug after either a friend or a foe has attracted donors from across the world.
Teri Scott of Poulsbo, Washington, said she was bombarded on social media with the anti-love campaigns, including naming a hissing cockroach after an ex.
“We do this in good fun,” said Laura Atwood, the center’s executive director. The money raised helps the facility pay salaries and care for birds — the nonprofit rehabilitated 580 of them last year. Just over $18,000 had been raised by the time the campaign closed Wednesday. So many rats — more than 130 — were purchased for the campaign, the center ran out of supplies until another batch of frozen rodents arrived Wednesday,
“People are sometimes hurt by a relationship, and this just gives them a little cathartic way to maybe work something out,” Atwood said, adding that they don’t publicize last names.
The videos of raptors like Ghost, a snowy owl that swallows the rat whole, or a peregrine falcon named Breland, which keeps one talon on the rodent and pecks away at it until it’s gone, will be emailed to donors.
There’s also a cheaper option: People can pay $10 to name a mealworm after their ex before it’s fed to a crow or a magpie, and a video will be posted on social media.
I’m wondering whether there’s a difference between men and women in their tendency to get revenge this way? I have no idea.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is rebuking Andrzej again.
From Masih; the usual in Iran: students protesting, and one student killed:
Angry students in Tehran University are protesting on campus tonight and chanting:
“The blood of the innocent that spilled will never be erased”.
At the Munich Security Conference, I just received devastating news: another innocent student has been killed in Iran, igniting… pic.twitter.com/NSdAz4YwyH
Two posts from Professor Cobb. First, a collision between two galaxies, with a link to the original post (with explanation):
Time for, well, not a distraction so much as a palate cleanser: a truly phenomenal shot from Hubble of a galaxy that is rippling like a pond that had a rock tossed in it… because that's what happened! Kinda.And YES you want to grab the hi-res version.badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/incredible…🧪🔭
Amazing letter sent to schools by ex-Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in answer to questions as to what lessons Americans should learn from Watergate.
Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: Sunday, February 16, 2025, and National Almond Day. Here is a three-minute video with Fun Facts About Almonds:
It’s also a thin day for ccelebrating, only National Syrah Day. But it is an excellent wine, known as “Shiraz” in the Antipodes.
*The NYT has two stories (here and here) about how Manhattan prosecutors resigned rather than drop the corruption case against NYC mayor Eric Adams.
About two dozen lawyers in the Justice Department’s public integrity section conferred on Friday morning to wrestle with a demand from a Trump political appointee that many of them viewed as improper: One of them needed to sign the official request to dismiss corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams.
The acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove III, told the shellshocked staff of the section responsible for prosecuting public corruption cases that he needed a signature on court motions. The lawyers knew that those who had already refused had resigned, and they could also be forced out.
By Friday afternoon, a veteran prosecutor in the section, Ed Sullivan, agreed to submit the request in Manhattan federal court to shield his colleagues from being fired, or resigning en masse, according to three people briefed on the interaction, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
The filing landed in the court docket Friday evening, bearing the name of Mr. Sullivan and that of a criminal division supervisor as well as the signature of Mr. Bove.
On Thursday, six lawyers — the Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and five prosecutors in Washington — resigned rather than accede to Mr. Bove’s demands. On Friday, a seventh stepped down, writing in his resignation letter that only a “fool” or a “coward” would sign off on the dismissal.
But those close to the public integrity section prosecutors described Mr. Sullivan’s decision to put his name on the document as heroic. The reason for someone to sign it is to protect others, said one of the people with knowledge of Friday’s call.
Before being summoned for the tense meeting, lawyers in the section debated their bad options, but came to increasingly believe that someone should step forward to save the jobs of the others, people familiar with the discussions said.
Mr. Bove, speaking on a video call, demanded that the court motions be signed within an hour, according to people later briefed on the conversation, leaving participants with the impression that they might face disciplinary action if no one complied.
Lawyers in the section understand that the outcome is in many ways already determined: Judges have little discretion but to ultimately accept such a motion. Nevertheless, it appears increasingly likely that the trial judge may hold a hearing to question department officials about the decision. Such a hearing could be difficult and embarrassing for the department’s new leaders.
If there was a “tit for tat” deal, with Adams agreeing to enforce Trumpian policy for stuff like immigration in return for a judge dropping the charges against him, that would be disastrous for both Adams and Bove. My prediction: given the kerfuffle and increasing outcry, Adams will resign with a few weeks.
The paper gives a diagram of part of what happened:
Freed hostages Sagui Dekel-Chen, Sasha Troufanov and Iair Horn crossed back into Israel on Saturday morning after being paraded on a stage in southern Gaza in a propaganda-filled release ceremony by the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror groups that held them captive for 498 days.
Troufanov, who had been held by Islamic Jihad, was the first to emerge from a vehicle and be led onto the stage. Dekel-Chen and Horn, who had been held by Hamas, were then brought up, with both of them clad in black and cream sweatsuits, a shift from the previous hostage release where the men were dressed as prisoners or soldiers.
Dekel-Chen and Horn both looked thin and pale, and Horn appeared to be limping. But the three appeared to be in a better physical condition than the three severely emaciated hostages who were released last week in images that shocked Israel and sparked an outpouring of anger.
On stage all three men were made to give short speeches in Hebrew, urging the Israeli government to continue with the next phase of the hostage-ceasefire deal and to bring all the hostages home.
They were then handed over to members of the Red Cross, who transported them to IDF soldiers at a second location within the Gaza Strip. From there, they were transported to Israel for initial medical checks and to reunite with their families.
And Hamas got lots of terrorists released: 369 Palestinian prisoners, among whom were 36 serving life sentences for terrorism. Here’s who remains to be released in the first phase:
With six rounds of hostage-prisoner releases completed in the ongoing Gaza ceasefire deal as of Saturday, there are 14 Israeli hostages still supposed to be set free in the first phase.
Days into the truce, which began in January, family members of several hostages slated to be released from Gaza in the coming weeks expressed dread over their loved ones’ fates after Hamas conveyed information saying that eight of the 33 hostages on the original list are dead.
Following the release of the information, those families were informed by the military that Hamas’s information aligned with previous assessments and there were dire concerns about their fates.
Of the 33 hostages agreed to be released in phase 1 of the cease-fire, 14 remain. But Hamas has said (and the IDF agrees) that eight of the 14 are dead. Here are those that remain, and eight people in the photos below are dead. I’m betting that they include Shari Bibas (lower left) and her two children.
With six rounds of hostage-prisoner releases completed in the ongoing Gaza ceasefire deal as of Saturday, there are 14 Israeli hostages still supposed to be set free in the first phase.
Days into the truce, which began in January, family members of several hostages slated to be released from Gaza in the coming weeks expressed dread over their loved ones’ fates after Hamas conveyed information saying that eight of the 33 hostages on the original list are dead.
Following the release of the information, those families were informed by the military that Hamas’s information aligned with previous assessments and there were dire concerns about their fates.
If the exchange continues, Hamas will soon be handing back coffins instead of living hostages. One would hope that world opinion would move more towards Israel when they see that, but it’s probably too late; the world hates Israel.
*In his latest column, “Shock and Awe Month,” Andrew Sullivan assesses Trump’s first 30 days in office, and doesn’t like what he sees.
And front and center: a drug-fueled, sleep-addled billionaire, commandeering the Oval Office, offering half-baked political theories, threatening judges with impeachment, tweeting at the pace of an adderall-addicted gamer, and holding press conferences with a toddler on his shoulders, where he tells the world he cannot be trusted to tell the truth. I guess there are some people who find all this deeply impressive. I’m sorry to say that, despite agreeing with some of Trump’s policy planks, I don’t.
Which brings me back to “shock and awe.” You may recall those words were also once used by a previous administration, huffing its own fumes, bent on breaking norms and boldly declaring a new era. We know now, of course, how the Iraq War ended. And it’s beginning to look as if Trump 2.0 will have something like the same result.
Take DOGE. First off: is this what Trump really ran on? Slashing government spending is a Ryan/Romney type of Republicanism, not Trumpism. Trump, like Karl Rove, has never cared about deficits. “I’m the King of Debt,” he once bragged in a rare lapse into honesty. In his first term, Trump ran up the deficit with glee; and in the first 30 days of this term, his spending per day is $4 billion higher than Biden’s was a year ago. Go read Riedl for how Trump is set to bankrupt the US still further.
Speaking of which: next up are massive tax cuts for the wealthy — paid for by huge cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. Just what Trump’s new multiracial working-class coalition wants! In a Fox News poll, only 1 percent of Americans favored “tax reform” as a Trump priority. I doubt “tax cuts” would get even that.
More to the point, Musk is doing nothing serious to actually cut the deficit. Of course he isn’t: 90 percent of government spending is outside his remit. And where does this guy cut? A program, PEPFAR, that is a rare example of a hugely successful, cost-efficient program; and an entity, the CFPB, which was the only thing that empowered the little guy against big financial corporations after 2008. Populism reborn! Please.
Worse, Musk has cut and fired first, often illegally, and asked questions after — which leaves everything vulnerable to being reversed as soon as the courts weigh in. Has he uncovered rampant fraud, as he and Trump insist? None they’ve shown us. Is the goal to get a case to SCOTUS to affirm the executive’s control of the purse? Maybe. But meantime, many of the EOs are simply and easily being reversed by the courts.
. . . . Imagine what they might have done. Trump could have announced that Musk and his minions were going in to audit the federal government. Within a few months, they’d bring a report, outlining every insane piece of waste or DEI excess or fraud they could find. Trump would then urge Congress to vote on these reforms. Win, win, win. It’s a great idea to shake up the joint with an outsider! But nah. They are busy ensuring that any cuts they make are brutal, dumb, and destined to expire.
Immigration? As of now, we’ve seen no major change since Biden’s executive order restoring control. The border is extremely quiet. Deportations? The pace of arrests is up but still only around a third of the levels Trump promised. Give him time, of course, but so far: underwhelming. Foreign policy? A man who pledged to keep the US from getting into quagmires abroad now wants the US to take over — checks notes — Gaza, ethnically cleanse its inhabitants, and give it all to Jared and his friends to make money. He also wants to invade and occupy … Greenland! In talking to Russia, he has begun by blessing Putin’s conquered territories in Eastern Ukraine in advance — for nothing in return. What a negotiator!
He gives Trump low marks for inflation (it’s up) and higher marks for DEI (it’s down). Nor is he a fan of RFK. Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. His assessment of the first month: “It’s pathetic.” I pretty much agree with him.
A young man from an isolated Indigenous tribe who approached a riverine community in Brazil’s Amazon returned voluntarily to his people less than 24 hours later, Brazilian authorities said.
The encounter occurred around 7 p.m. local time Wednesday in Bela Rosa, a community along the Purus River in the southwestern Amazon. Footage obtained by The Associated Press shows him barefoot and wearing a small loincloth, seemingly calm and in good health as he carried two logs.
Locals believe the man was asking for fire. Smartphone video of the encounter showed one resident trying unsuccessfully to show the man how to use a lighter. Officials from Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, Funai, arrived soon after and took him to a nearby facility.
Funai said in a statement Friday that the young man returned to the forest on Thursday afternoon. It added that a team of health professionals was sent to assess if the young man had been exposed to any disease to which isolated Indigenous tribes have no immunity. They also said surveillance has been established to prevent people from reaching the isolated tribe’s location.
As a policy, Brazil does not actively seek contact with these groups but instead establishes protected and monitored areas, such as Mamoriá Grande, near where the encounter occurred.
It’s a pity that anthropologists can’t study such people; who knows what sociological wonders they’d find? But I agree that they need to be left alone, for they want to be left alone. Very few such people remain, and it’s a bit frustrating to know that they harbor a world of phenomena that we may never know about. So it goes.
When I describe a bottle as a good aperitif wine, I mean that it delivers on a specific set of criteria. For starters, it whets the appetite for whatever might follow. (The word aperitif derives from the Latin “to open,” after all.) For me, an aperitif wine isn’t styled to fully satisfy—and that’s no shortcoming. A wine of this kind is more like the trailer to the movie than the full film, compelling, even tantalizing, yet ultimately incomplete.
A great aperitif wine should be lively and fairly light-bodied with a brisk, refreshing acidity. Champagne typically fits this description; indeed, it’s the first wine that comes to my mind, most of the time, to open a meal. A Blanc de Blancs Champagne—a wine made entirely from white grapes—would be particularly good. Second place would be just about any other dry sparkling wine: a Crémant (the name for Champagne-method sparklers made in French wine regions that aren’t Champagne), or a good Cava from Spain.
Other wines on my aperitif shortlist include the kind that sommeliers frequently feature in the front pages of their wine lists: high-acid white wines like Sancerre, Chablis, Etna Bianco or Grüner Veltliner; even a very dry Riesling. I would shy away from a white wine with oak aging or one with flamboyant aromas, such as Gewürztraminer or dry Muscat. I’d also eschew a wine that’s high in alcohol, and I’ll even put a number on that: An aperitif wine should not exceed 13% ABV.
While I’d never say no to a rosé Champagne, I’m largely indifferent to the idea of opening with a pink wine. And I can’t think of many red wines I’d choose as an aperitif. It’s a matter of texture and flavor and, as often as not, the already cited, problematic oak. For me, red wines have too much muchness—though I have friends who drink red wines as aperitifs all the time, and some wine professionals I contacted told me they suggest red wines as aperitifs, too.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. Anybody with a sentient palate knows that the very best aperitif wine is a very dry sherry: a fino or a manzanilla. Even the cheaper ones, like La Ina or Tio Pepe are good, but for a treat try a good fino from Lustau—still not expensive. It really gets the saliva flowing before a good meal. Now some people consider the taste of a fino “medicinal” (they have to be drunk within a day after opening), and I feel sorry for such people. Nevertheless, if you’re in the market for sherry, whether it be dry, medium or sweet, Lustau is a name you can trust absolutely. Sherry remains one of the world’s great bargains in wine (yes, it’s a fortified wine, with fermentation stopped by adding alcohol).
From somewhere on the Internet. Trigger warning: men as pigs. But look carefully.
From Masih; Nahid Shirpisheh watched her son killed for protesting the Iranian theocracy. Then, apparently simply because relatives those murdered for political reasons pose a danger to the regime, they threw her in prison, too. She’s meeing a grim fate:
The Islamic Republic Killed Her Son, Now It’s Killing Her Too!
Nahid Shirpisheh, the mother of Pouya Bakhtiari, has attempted suicide in prison. For three weeks, her family was kept in the dark, only to learn that she attempted to take her own life last Tuesday and was then… pic.twitter.com/I1IH2zdDjE
It’s only February, but this will take some beating at the 2025 Batshit Take of the Year Awards.
“It’s women’s fault if trans-identified men commit sexual assault in previously women-only spaces, because by saying that’s a thing that happens, women put the idea in men’s heads.” pic.twitter.com/MEoDAmzBZX
Two posts from Matthew. A good way to investigate fraud, though if they find the “mystic’s” DNA in the blood, her lawyers are ready with an excuse:
Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchignoli, suggested that the presence of Cardia’s DNA did not rule out a supernatural phenomena.
“The DNA stain warrants further investigation,” Marchignoli told Corriere. “We are waiting to find out whether it’s a mixed or single profile.” She argued that while it was obvious there would be traces of Cardia’s DNA because she had “kissed and handled the statue”, it could have been mixed up with others, possibly even that of the Virgin Mary. “Who can say? Do you know the Madonna’s DNA?”
Italian ‘mystic’ may face trial after DNA match with bleeding Virgin Mary statue
