Welcome to a Hump Day (“ཧམ་པ་ཉིན་མོ། ” in Tibetan ): Wednesday, January 29, 2025, and National Corn Chip Day. These are useless unless served with a good salsa before a Mexican meal, or, better yet, as a basis for nachos, which are good:

You need to learn this about nachos, which are a recent culinary innovation:

Nachos originated in the city of Piedras Negras, Coahuila in Mexico, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas in the United States.  Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya created nachos in 1943 at the restaurant the Victory Club when Mamie Finan and a group of U.S. military officers’ wives, whose husbands were stationed at the nearby U.S. Army base Fort Duncan, traveled across the border to eat at the Victory Club. When Anaya was unable to find the cook, he went to the kitchen and spotted freshly fried pieces of corn tortillas. In a moment of culinary inspiration, Anaya cut fried tortillas into triangles, added shredded cheese, sliced pickled jalapeño peppers, quickly heated them, and served them. After tasting the snack, Finan asked what it was called. Anaya responded, “Well, I guess we can just call them Nacho’s Special.” In Spanish, “Nacho” is a common nickname for Ignacio.

Here is Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya, the inventor of nachos.  We should be so lucky to leave a legacy like his!:

He was honored by a Google Doodle in 2019 on what would have been his 129th birthday. Here’s the nacho Doodle:

But. . . .  eating nachos means you’re engaging not only in cultural appropriation, but colonialism! Igancio made nachos at the behest of white women.

It is also Chinese New Year, the beginning of The Year of the Snake. There’s a Google Doodle about this; click below to see where it goes (there’s a game).

It’s also National Carnation Day, Curmudgeons Day (perhaps an extension of Coynezaa?), Freethinkers Day (Thomas Paine was born on this day in 1737), National Puzzle Day, and Seeing Eye Dog Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 29 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Times of Israel reports that some families of hostages have been told that their loved ones may come home in a coffin.

Family members of several hostages who are set to be released from Gaza in the coming weeks expressed dread over their loved ones’ fates on Tuesday after Hamas conveyed information saying that eight of those 33 hostages are dead.

Following the release of the information those families were informed by the military that Hamas’s information aligned with previous military assessments and there were dire concerns about their fates.

Hamas provided a list  — reportedly only numbers, without names — reporting how many of the hostages from among the 33 to be released in the first phase of the ongoing ceasefire are alive. Hamas was required to provide information about the hostages’ status as part of its obligations under the deal with Israel signed earlier this month.

The hostages’ family members confirmed that Gal Hirsh, the government point man on hostages, had reached out to them in recent days and said that while the terror group’s information was incomplete, it lined up with the assessment of Israel’s intelligence services.

“It’s not exactly data. It’s Hamas saying [the number of] ‘alive,’ ‘released,’ and ‘dead,’” specified Yizhar Lifshitz, whose father Oded Lifshitz, 84, is on the list of the initial 33 to be released.

. . .So far, seven hostages have been freed as part of the current deal, which mandates the release of 33 so-called “humanitarian hostages” during its first 42-day phase, with fighting stopped in the Strip.

As those hostages — women, children, elderly people, and sick people — are gradually released, Israel is to release some 1,904 Palestinian security prisoners, including more than a hundred serving life sentences for terror attacks

The three-phase deal’s later phases are to see negotiations with the stated goal of reaching a “sustainable calm” in the enclave, alongside the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza, the release of more Palestinian security prisoners, and an Israeli withdrawal from the Strip.

Here are the 33 hostages supposed to be released in Phase 1 of the ceasefire (their names are at the link above. Hamas says eight of them are dead, which jibes with the IDF’s own information, and I guess IDF just informed some families that they should be prepared to receive a coffin rather than a living being:

This is not good optics, and I suspect that the dead will be returned last, and under cover of night without the disgusting ceremonies attending the return of living hostages, who were given diplomas, certificates, and so on.  When the national news starts showing Israeli families weeping over these coffins, I would hope that the world would have some sympathy for what the hostages and their families went through, but as we know, sympathy for Israel lasts as long as a snowflake on a hot sidewalk.

All four of the IDF women released the other day were either injured by bullets or sexually assaulted, but the IDF is properly leaving it up to the hostages whether to divulge what happened to them. And remember, every (living) hostage returned means Israel has to releast 30 Palestinian prisoners, unless the hostage is an IDF member, in which case the number rises to fifty. I haven’t been able to find out if they’ve bargained to releast terrorists in exchange for dead hostages.

*Trump has frozen nearly all government grants and loans, and, as far as I can see, that may include science grants from agencies like the NIH, NSF, or DOE. Our University has already been informed to start cutting back on federal grants already being used, not cutting salaries but curtailing expenditure on materials and procedures.  This is not good, and I wonder if Trump knew that this would bring scientific and medical research to a standstill (article archived here). The article is unsure about science funding:

• Federal aid pause: The White House budget office ordered a pause in grants, loans and other federal financial assistance, a sweeping move it said was necessary to bring a vast number of programs in line with President Trump’s priorities. Several states are planning a lawsuit to block the order, which is set to go into effect at 5 p.m. Read more ›

• Defending the order: In her first news conference as President Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt defended what she described as a review of federal spending and promised that direct aid to individuals would not be affected by the freeze. However, a lot of federal money goes to states and other organizations that provide individuals with aid, and it’s not clear whether that would be suspended.

Of course there will be lawsuits:

The move drew immediate outrage and lawsuits from nonprofit groups. Several states were planning to file suit on Tuesday afternoon to block the order, which is set to take effect at 5 p.m. Democrats assailed it as an unlawful encroach on Congress’s authority over federal spending, while the White House press secretary defended it as following through on the promises that restored Mr. Trump to the presidency.

“The use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” the Office of Management and Budget said in a two-page memo announcing the temporary halt.

There are exceptions:

We need to get a bunch more judges, because for sure Trump’s spate of EOs will provoke a gazillion lawsuits. The problem is that these are federal issues and ergo need federal judges. And you know who appoints the federal judges.  As for science, my own special interest, well, stopping it is arrantly stupid.

*Two from the Free Press today. First, “Christopher Caldwell: The biggest policy change of the century.” I’ll give a long excerpt since this is a very significant change in the law:

So tumultuous was the first week of Donald Trump’s second term that people have barely noticed, a week on, that last Tuesday he repealed affirmative action by executive order. That is astonishing.

For half a century, affirmative action has been the federal government’s principal instrument for carrying out desegregation, the longest and costliest moral crusade in American history. After the 1970s it was adapted to liberation movements, from feminism to gay rights. Supreme Court justices anguished over the way its call for special consideration of minorities might clash with the letter of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred racial discrimination. Over the past decade affirmative action became the hammer of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement, which grew so unpopular that it has now brought affirmative action (and much else) down with it.

Trump’s decision to repeal it is the most significant policy change of this century—more significant than the Affordable Care Act of 2010 or anything done about Covid. How can people be talking about anything else? Yet major news outlets treat Trump’s bold move as a detail of personnel management: “Distress and Fury as Trump Upends Federal Jobs,” headlined The New York Times.

Somewhere along the line, the Trump administration came to understand in a sophisticated way how the enforcement of civil rights actually works. Not many Americans do—and it’s worth reviewing.

. . . . [Lyndon] Johnson used it. He basically enlisted the country’s top executives as the commissars of a radical interpretation of civil rights policy. They liked diversity from the moment it was invented until last Tuesday. They had better! Whenever a “global chief diversity officer,” like Ken Barrett of GM, intoned “diversity is our strength,” he was doing more than philosophizing. He was keeping billions of dollars of shareholder value safe from the sanctions and penalties laid out in Chapter 60 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

Had Johnson’s affirmative-action scheme been devised for anything but desegregation, it might have been considered sinister and totalitarian. Since Ronald Reagan’s time, conservatives have crowed that they could undo affirmative action “with the stroke of a pen.” Reagan mulled doing so himself in 1985. But he faced opposition from corporate donors and more liberal Republicans led by Kansas senator Bob Dole and opted not to. In 1996, Tennessee Republican senator Lamar Alexander tried to kick-start his presidential candidacy with a promise to zero out affirmative action—but Republicans chose Dole instead.

Now Trump has done what Reagan would not. His repeal came via three executive orders, two issued on Inauguration Day. The first overturned dozens of Biden decrees, including the “Advancing Racial Equity” executive order signed in the first hours of his presidency in 2021. The second ended all initiatives, offices, contracts, and employees connected to DEI, which Trump referred to as “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.”

. . .RIP affirmative action.

But that is only part of the story. A curious element of Trump’s third executive order is its invocation of the president’s “solemn duty” to enforce “longstanding Federal civil-rights laws,” mentioning the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is not a concession. It’s a threat.

While the Civil Rights Act mentioned “affirmative action” it attached no specific meaning to the term, and the law was resolutely color-blind. Affirmative action programs, with their differing treatment of races, are in tension with it. DEI programs, many of which scapegoat white people, are even more so. It is Trump’s assertion that DEI programs “violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws.” Trump is doing more than reforming the public sector. He is signaling to the private sector that certain kinds of programs are liable to prosecution, even asking each federal agency to name up to nine large private-sector organizations that might be engaged in discrimination.

There can be little doubt of the general effectiveness of such methods. In 2020 and 2021, as civil rights regulators and the Biden administration rallied behind it, DEI went from the hobby of a handful of quirky CEOs to the unanimous policy of corporate America. Today the rush in the opposite direction is just as precipitous. Among the new foes of DEI are some of its erstwhile champions: Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, Walmart, and even Target, home of the “tuck-friendly” bathing suit. More will follow.

This, in turn, will have an effect on the entire ecology of the Democratic Party. DEI and affirmative action are among the last things everyone in this divided party believes in, and the source of a good deal of its organizing muscle. Now, there is no work for affirmative-action lawyers, diversity consultants, and inclusion trainers to do. Whole job categories are being zeroed out.

And this:

In other words, Trump is not simply eliminating the affirmative-action enforcement machinery. He is throwing it into reverse. Companies will be assumed to be violating civil rights laws, we suddenly learn, if they engage in “racial balancing.” What the hell is racial balancing? How do you define DEI, for that matter? A different set of Americans are about to learn how vague mandates like these can lead to a feeling of being tyrannized and toyed with.

Finally, on the unpopularity of “affirmative action,” in particular how it morphed into favoring some minority groups:

This was a course that the public could not tolerate and neither government nor business could avow. A climate of dishonesty was the result. Affirmative action was a big factor—perhaps the biggest—in convincing about half of Americans never to trust anything any person of authority said.

Ten presidents managed to insulate affirmative action from public accountability. Then it became obvious to the public that changing anything would require dismantling everything.

And so it’s been done—or rather, threatened to be done. We’ll see in the next few months what really happens. Universities throughout the country are desperately trying to rename DEI groups or policies so that they can still operate as they did before the executive order.  I’m not sure if that will work or not, and it won’t work if Trump has “DEI detectives” who are savvy at sniffing out how DEI keeps on, but under other names.

*Second, “Emilia Peréz and the curse of Oscar bait,” with the subtitle “Why is the Academy obsessed with movies no one wants to see.”  GUESS! First, from summary in the FP newsletter:

Emilia Pérez,a 2024 French-produced, Spanish-language musical about a transgender Mexican drug lord, bombed at the box office and was so disliked by Mexican audiences that a government agency is now investigating whether disappointed moviegoers are entitled to a refund. But last week, it was nominated for 13 Oscars, more than any other film.

Then the meat.  All I’ve heard about this movie is bad stuff, and I will try to watch it, even though its Rotten Tomatoes critics’ ratings are 74% and the audience ratings a dismal 23%.

And from the article:

Emilia Pérez is what people call Oscar bait: the sort of film that is made, seemingly, for the express purpose of catching the attention of the approximately 10,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Mostly film-industry insiders, their tastes are predictable. They like austere dramas and social commentary—stories that will make you cry while also attempting to say something about politics. Think of 2016’s Moonlight, a tragedy about a poor, gay drug dealer that grossed $65 million worldwide at the box office. It beat La La Land, which grossed $509 million worldwide, to the title of Best Picture. Or think of Nomadland, which won Best Picture in 2020: It follows a homeless widow who travels the country in a van after losing her job in the Great Recession.

The tastes of the academy are so predictable that they’ve been delightfully parodied—most succinctly perhaps in a 2008 episode of American Dad!, in which Roger the Alien takes on a supervillain persona and produces a film called Oscar Gold about an intellectually disabled Jewish alcoholic whose puppy dies of cancer while he’s hiding in an attic during the Holocaust. The movie is intended to make viewers cry themselves to death.

Late Night with Seth Meyers did a similar parody in 2017, producing a trailer for a fictional film simply called Oscar Bait featuring “racial tension,” “latent homosexuality,” the French language, and “dialogue that feels sort of profound.”

A conservative might say the film industry is being used to produce far-left propaganda, but the truth is the politics of Oscar bait typically run a few years behind progressive ideology du jour. Case in point: Emilia Pérez wasn’t good enough trans representation for the professional scolds over at the ultra-leftist GLAAD, the LGBTQ media watchdog, but it was good enough for the liberal boomers running the academy. They also loved 2018’s Green Book, a movie about a black musician and his friendly but slightly racist Italian American driver—even though The New York Times called it a “racial reconciliation fantasy,” and 2013’s 12 Years a Slave, which was deemed a “white savior story” by The Atlantic.

. . . Typically, Oscar bait receives a lot of hype before underperforming at the box office then fading into obscurity. I haven’t thought about Green Book since it stoked a debate about whether or not black and white people are allowed to be friends in movies. Remember The Artist, nominated for 10 Academy Awards in 2012? I doubt it. It was a black-and-white, partially silent French film about an alcoholic actor in Depression-era Hollywood—perhaps the most Oscar-baity film ever made. I’ve never met anyone who has seen 2022’s Best Picture winner, CODA—a coming of age film about the hearing daughter of a deaf fisherman who aspires to become a singer—and I also don’t know anyone who liked Emilia Pérez (which has a 24 percent Popcornmeter approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes). And I hang out with snobs! Not even Mexicans like it. When the film hit theaters south of the border, there were so many refund requests a government consumer-protection agency had to become involved.

Oy!  Do I have to watch this movie?  I’m pretty sure I won’t like it but I can at least give it a shot (I give up on very few movies that I start watching). Here’s the trailer:

*Finally, the WSJ describes a putative painting by Van Gogh that was bought at a garage sale for less than fifty bucks and may be worth $15 million—if it’s real.

In 1889, Vincent van Gogh committed himself to a psychiatric asylum in Southern France, where he spent a turbulent year creating roughly 150 paintings, including masterpieces such as “Irises,” “Almond Blossom” and “The Starry Night.”

Now, a former curator of ancient art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has teamed up a with a group of conservators, scientists and historians who believe they’ve discovered No. 151—a previously unknown Van Gogh portrait of a fisherman plucked from a Minnesota garage sale a few years ago by an unsuspecting antiques collector for less than $50.

The thickly painted piece depicts a pensive fisherman with a white chin-beard and a round hat who clutches a pipe in his mouth as he repairs his net on an otherwise empty beach. In the lower righthand corner, the name Elimar is scrawled.

The discovery could represent a notable addition to the oeuvre of one of the world’s most famous artists. “Elimar” could also prove to be a lucrative windfall for LMI Group International, the New York-based art-research firm that bought the work from the anonymous antiques collector for an undisclosed sum in 2019 and has investigated it ever since, pouring in well over $30,000 and involving a team of around 20 experts from disparate fields, from chemists to curators to patent lawyers.

Later this month, they will begin unveiling their find in private viewings to major Van Gogh scholars and dealers around the world. They believe it is worth at least $15 million.

But is it really a Van Gogh?

“That’s the big question,” said Richard Polsky, an art authenticator who wasn’t involved in the project. “People love it when things fall through the cracks, and it would be wonderful if they found a Van Gogh—but they’ve got to pin everything down and get a scholar at the Van Gogh Museum to sign off on it.”

Doing so could prove to be a tall order. The discovery, if accepted, comes at a time when artist foundations and estates are increasingly shying away from making ultimate rulings on the authenticity of artworks for fear of being sued by owners who aren’t happy to hear that their works aren’t authentic. Museums touting deep holdings in certain artists like Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum turn down most would-be examples shown to them.

There are lots of things to consider, like the signature “Elimar” (people have that one figured out), but there are characteristics of the pigments and canvas that don’t jibe with Vincent’s other work. How would YOU like to be the person on whose judgment millions of dollars could rest. And what if you’re later proven wrong?  You can see the painting by clicking here and looking at the upper left.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, a blurry Hili gets pwned by Andrzej, and Malgorzata explains:

I knew that no biologist (and not a Pole) could understand it! There is a joke known to most Polish children:

“Daddy, does a snake have a tail?” and the dad answers: “Solely”.

Andrzej changed it a bit.

Hili: Does a snake have a tail?

A: Yes, and a head.

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

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From The Cat Haven:

From Things With Faces, a doglike mushroom!

Some good advice from Michael Shermer (note #3!):

My advice to Democrats:

1. The far left progressive woke movement is over. Even if it seems like a good idea at the time (#metoo, #BLM, #georgefloyd, etc.) it has failed utterly & the vast majority of voters are against it.

2. Course correct to the center & focus on core…

— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) January 28, 2025

From Bryan, the famous “Planetary Parde,” with real pictures:

I captured the entire “Planetary Parade” using my 11″ telescope, and combined everything into one composite photo that stayed true to the angular scale of these objects.

Made entirely with real photos, I hope this composite helps illustrate the scale of these things! pic.twitter.com/T2SP4sxaKw

— Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy) January 25, 2025

From Malcolm, a cat having fun. (Sound up.):

This made my day! 😂 pic.twitter.com/5SVFB8BeeL

— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) January 15, 2025

From my feed. But I don’t think this is unique to Asian kids. After all look at the gymnastics teams in the Olympics. Still, these kids are amazing:

Asian kids are incredible. pic.twitter.com/Pgvemla8dr

— The Goddess (@TheGoddessF) January 27, 2025

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

A Dutch woman, about 28 years old, was one of the three-quarters of Dutch Jews murdered by the Nazis.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-01-29T12:06:56.426Z

Two posts from Matthew. First, what he calls “a groaner,” which it is:

Seen on FB (not by me):

— (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-01-28T19:45:23.207Z

A four-post thread (I give just the first) about “lazy corn” and what makes it grow horizontally:

A brief #Cornfax. And since I've been lazy with my #cornfax, let's talk about lazy corn. Lazy corn is, well, a pretty apt description. Unlike the corn on the left which stands tall and proud, the lazy corn just lies on the ground. It doesn't grow straight. So what's up (or not up in this case)? 1/4

— Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra (@jrossibarra.bsky.social) 2025-01-22T14:26:26.511Z

Welcome to Monday, January 27, 2025, and National Chocolate Cake Day. Once again I present you with one form in which it’s served in Chicago, as lumps in milkshakes from Portillo’s. I really need to try one of these (see it made at 4:15 in the video below, but watch the whole thing).

It’s also International Port Wine Day, Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day (who among us has not popped it?), National Geographic Day (it was incorporated on this day in 1888), and International Day of Commemoration of the Victims of the Holocaust Day, marking the day that Auschwitz was liberated by the Russians in 1945.  A photo of the liberation labeled in Wikipedia: “Still photograph from the Soviet Film of the liberation of Auschwitz, taken by the film unit of the First Ukrainian Front, shot over a period of several months beginning on January 27, 1945 by Alexander Voronzow and others in his group. Child survivors of Auschwitz, wearing adult-size prisoner jackets, stand behind a barbed wire fence.”

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

Da Nooz:

*First the FBI and Department of Energy admitted that the Covid pandemic was more likely the result of a lab leak than a wet-market contamination by the virus, though neither agency had huge confidence in their conclusions. Now, as the WSJ reports. the CIA has also given a higher probability to a lab leak.

The Central Intelligence Agency has now concluded that the deadly Covid-19 pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, lending credibility to a view that has been the focus of sharp debate among scientists and politicians for years.

In doing so, the CIA has now joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Energy Department in identifying a laboratory mishap in Wuhan, China, as the probable source of the Covid virus. It has killed more than 1.2 million Americans and over seven million people worldwide.

“CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” an agency spokesman said in a statement released Saturday.

The spokesman added that the judgment was “low confidence” and that the CIA would continue to evaluate “any available credible new intelligence reporting or open-source information that could change CIA’s assessment.”

The agency had previously taken the stance that it didn’t have enough information to assess whether the virus had leapt from an animal to a human or arose from a laboratory mishap.

Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan in late 2019 and then spread rapidly through the world in 2020 and 2021 before the development of vaccines helped limit deaths. It marked one of the worst pandemics in modern history.

But the origins of the virus still divides the U.S. intelligence community, in large part because the Chinese government hasn’t cooperated with international investigations. Four U.S. intelligence agencies have favored, with low confidence, the animal transmission theory. So has the National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officers that reports to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The fact that the Chinese won’t cooperate with the investigation, which after all can help us understand worldwide epidemics, always makes me think that something fishy is going on, and by that I don’t mean “wet market”.  My friend Luana has always been a big booster of the lab-leak hypothesis, and while I used to be pro-wet-market, I’m not somewhat agnostic leaning towards lab-leak. What cannot be denied is that both Facui and Francis Collins did their best to discourage the lab-leak hypothesis, and not solely on the grounds of science! They simply demonized those who suggested it, which is not a scientific attitude.

*According to CNN, the U.S. has frozen nearly all foreign aid—even to Ukraine, though Israel and Egypt are still getting US $$.

The US State Department has frozen nearly all foreign assistance worldwide, effective immediately, days after President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order Monday to put a hold on such aid for 90 days.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a cable, seen by CNN, to all US diplomatic posts on Friday outlining the move, which threatens billions of dollars of funding from the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for programs worldwide.

Foreign assistance has been the target of ire from Republicans in Congress and Trump administration officials, but the funding accounts for very little of the overall US budget. The scope of the executive order and subsequent cable has left humanitarian and State Department officials reeling.

The cable calls for immediate “stop work” orders on existing foreign assistance and pauses new aid. It is sweeping in its scope. Essentially all foreign assistance appears to have been targeted unless specifically exempted. That means lifesaving global health aid, development assistance, military aid, and even clean water distribution could all be affected.

The cable provides a waiver only for emergency food assistance and foreign military financing for Israel and Egypt. The cable does not specifically mention any other countries that receive foreign military financing, like Ukraine or Taiwan, as being exempt from the freeze.

In the coming month, the cable said, the administration will develop standards for a review of whether the assistance is “aligned with President Trump’s foreign policy agenda.”

I happen to favor continued aid to both Ukraine and Taiwan, and so am not keen on this latest decision. Fortunately, it’s only for a short while (but every minute counts for Ukraine). One thing I hope: Trump continues to stop the funding to that Supporter of Terrorism: UNRWA.

* Presidential insanity of the day: Trump has upset the Danes by calling the Prime Minister and hectoring her about the U.S. buying Greenland again (h/t Matthew).

Donald Trump had a fiery phone call with Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen over his demands to buy Greenland, according to senior European officials.

Speaking to the Financial Times, officials said that Trump, then still president-elect, spoke with Frederiksen for 45 minutes last week, during which he was described to be aggressive and confrontational about Frederiksen’s refusal to sell Greenland to the US.

The Financial Times reports that according to five current and former senior European officials who were briefed on the call, the conversation “was horrendous”. One person said: “He was very firm. It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious and potentially very dangerous.”

Another person who was briefed on the call told the outlet: “The intent was very clear. They want it. The Danes are now in crisis mode.” Someone else said: “The Danes are utterly freaked out by this.”

According to one former Danish official, the call was a “very tough conversation” in which Trump “threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs”.

Trump has previously said that the US needs to control Greenland and has refused to rule out using US military force to take over the territory. During a press conference a few weeks ago, Trump said that the US needed Greenland “for economic security”. The 836,300-sq-mile (2,166,007-sq-km) Arctic island is rich in oil and gas, as well as various raw materials for green technology.

The man is nuts, and I can see how his bullying form of conversation would scare the bejeezus out of PM Frederiksen. However, I don’t think that either she or the Danes have much to worry about. This is one case in which I think Ttrump’s threats are simply bluster. On the other hand, we’re learning that he’s serious about his campaign “promises.” He may slap some tariffs on Denmark, but I’m not sure how much damage that would do to the country. At any rate, I’d say, “Hey, Danes, don’t freak out so much. The optics of this are not good for Trump.”

*Heterodox STEM reports a blatant violation of antidiscrimination laws, this time by the National Science Foundation (NSF). This kind of action is palpably illegal by the agency.

By now, most are familiar with the term “People of Color,” but “Geoscientists of Color” was a new one to me—and deeply concerning. As someone skeptical of identity politics, the idea of dividing an already small field (just 24,620 employed in the U.S. as of May 2023, per BLS) by skin color is troubling. However, given the limited pipeline of geoscientists, it’s understandable why the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched the “Geoscience Opportunities for Leadership in Diversity”1 (GOLD) program in 2016, aiming to expand the field through outreach and other lawful means. But just like many of the zealous “diversity, equity, and inclusion” efforts that have morphed into outright unlawful discrimination, the GOLD program’s days are numbered.

The original mission of the GOLD program was “to achieve greater and more systemic diversity by creating a network of diversity and inclusion ‘champions’ who can generate greater implementation of evidence-based best practices and resources.” Reading this mission statement in 2025 certainly triggers a warning that discriminatory “DEI” styled as new-age “antiracism” could be at work. But in 2016, America had not yet seen the avalanche of race-based preferences we have recently witnessed– and certainly not at the hands of Federal agencies.

Indeed, it seems the GOLD program was founded with pure intentions. But as we have seen all too often lately, when individuals have intentionally or unintentionally blurred the line that separates true diversity and inclusion from outright race-based discrimination, the Federal government has not only turned a blind eye to it but thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars at it. But if you’re up to speed on President Trump’s Executive Orders, you know that those days are over.

Consider an incident reported to FAIR about a March 2023 summit organized by the University of San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The event promised an excellent opportunity to participate in a multi-day summit to plan a future professional conference, with housing, meals, travel, and a $500 stipend included. The catch? Only “Geoscientists of Color” were invited. The organizer openly embraced this exclusionary approach, even boasting on X (formerly Twitter): “I want to create a conference for only Geoscientists of Color. If you are a Geoscientist of Color, I invite you to join us.”

At FAIR, we immediately recognized this as illegal under Civil Rights laws and sought to address it. Our investigation uncovered the grant application for the summit, titled “Proposal for a SUMMIT to Plan a Conference Workshop for Minoritized Geoscientists.” The application made clear that participation would be restricted by skin color, yet the NSF’s GOLD program awarded over $90,000 in federal funds without objection. This negligence likely led the organizer to believe no laws were being broken (not that it would have saved UC San Diego from legal liability if they’d gone through with it as planned).

When FAIR alerted Scripps to the issue, they took swift corrective action, removing the discriminatory eligibility criteria and extending the application deadline so that all geoscientists would have ample opportunity to apply. While this outcome was positive, it highlights a broader problem: many federally funded DEI initiatives have been implemented without oversight or accountability, often violating civil rights laws.

*The other day I posted about a law (was it in Egypt?) allowing a husband to have sex with his wife for a certain period after she was dead. A few readers saw no problem with that, and, indeed, it’s somewhat of an ethical dilemma of the kind Jon Haidt used to discuss. But this is a report of behavior that’s clearly illegal: digging up dead bodies of women (to whom you’re not related) and having sex with the corpses. That (h/t Anna) is what a Pakistani man is accused of.

On Friday (9th August), Karachi Police arrested a 40-year-old man who ‘confessed’ to desecrating recently-buried graves and sexually abusing dead women at the Korangi graveyard in Karachi, ARY News reported citing police. For those unversed, committing sex with corpses is called necrophilia. According to the police, the accused confessed that he desecrated four graves of women and subjected their dead bodies to sexual abuse. The locals caught him desecrating the grave of a recently buried 55-year-old woman. They thrashed him before handing over to the Police.

Speaking to a TV channel, crime reporter Tahir Abbas identified the accused as Salman Waheed.

The Police added that the accused, who was arrested from Bagh Korangi Cemetery, confessed to the crime and revealed a shocking tale of sexual abuse and desecration of female graves. According to the Police, accused Saleem used to target fresh graves of women, exhume bodies, and commit sexual abuse.

. . .In a statement, the Korangi police stated that the accused was arrested “on the rape charge” in the Bagh-i-Korangi graveyard.

As per a person’s complaint stated in the FIR, he had buried his mother in the graveyard on Thursday evening. At around 10:30 pm, he learned that the accused desecrated the grave and molested the body. However, some of the locals caught him and thrashed him. They then handed him over to the local police. The FIR states that the accused was found using an emergency light to commit the heinous crime.

During interrogation, he told the police that he used to keep an eye on the burials of women, and during nights he dug up graves to commit the heinous crime against the dead.

. . .Earlier on 22nd June, a shocking incident came to light from Lahore. Hours after the burial, the body of a three-month-old child went missing from the grave. The horrific incident occurred in Miani Sahib Graveyard, Lahore. The child’s father, Abdul Rahman found that the body of the child went missing from the grave the next day, finding the shroud outside. He then alerted the police.

Subsequently, the Police arrested three individuals, including a security guard, in connection with the offense. According to the FIR, the incident occurred on 23rd April this year.

It is pertinent to note that numerous cases of necrophilia have been reported from Pakistan. [The article goes on to describe more, but I’ll refrain . . . .]

Here’s a tweet with the perp:

Police arrested a 40-year-old Muslim Man Muhammad Saleem and booked him on digging up the grave of a recently-buried woman and Raping with the corpse, in a graveyard in Karachi. https://t.co/0pUysfhRON pic.twitter.com/6Yp0U0msIu

— Faraz Pervaiz (@FarazPervaiz3) August 10, 2024

Perhaps one could justify criminalizing raping one’s dead wife because it leads to stuff like this, which is clearly illegal.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains Hili’s pun:

This must be difficult (or impossible) to understand by a non-Polish speaker. The (mildly) amusing thing is that “hippo” and “hypo” sound exactly the same in Polish.

The dialogue:

Hili: Can a hippo be a hypocrite?

A: You’ll have to ask somebody wiser.

Hili: Czy hipopotam może być hipokrytą?

Ja: Musisz o to zapytać kogoś mądrzejszego.

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

From Jesus of the Day:

From Things with Faces:

From Cat Memes:

From Reddit: I have a last found an example of how indigenous knowledge could be usefully incorporated into modern science, in this case giving a suggestion to Elon Musk (h/t Andrzej). I cannot find the original cartoon nor the artist “Roy”.

From Masih, and yes, the Houthis are terrorists. How could anyone maintain otherwise?

Yes, let’s call terrorists by their name: It’s time to END the era of appeasement.

President @realDonaldTrump’s decision to re-designate the Houthis as a terrorist organization is a bold and necessary move. For too long, the Houthis have acted like international pirates,… pic.twitter.com/g22OnDS7kj

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 23, 2025

This came from Colin Wright. Watch the cartoon!

Why did @amazeorg remove this 5-year-old video from their YouTube channel today when @BillAckman brought attention to it on X?

Is it be because, as Bill said, it acts as a “transgender recruitment cartoon” for kids feeling awkward about their bodies during puberty?

Or is it… pic.twitter.com/am2fxAB4pW

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) January 26, 2025

Barry wonders if this is true:

A dog making eye contact with you creates a love hormone called oxytocin. When a cat makes eye contact with you, the body produces two fear hormones, adrenaline, and cortisol, because the cat knows what you did.

— lisabug (@lisabug.bsky.social) 2025-01-25T15:47:12.685Z

From Malcolm; who is gonna win?

واضح الامور خرجت عن السيطرة pic.twitter.com/7HQvo3nqYd

— CUTE CAT (@cute_catse) December 31, 2024

From Ricky Gervais: a good girl crosses the Rainbow Bridge

Sad News. ‘Anti’, who played ‘Brandy’ in AfterLife, has died. She was 13 and a very good girl 😢 pic.twitter.com/KgxnFfAOWl

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) January 22, 2025

She was the second to disappear in the ending of the series, which always brings tears to my eyes. Here’s the ending, recording successive deaths:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

Today is International Day of Commemoration of the Victims of the Holocaust Day, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Russians in 1945. This family, gassed to death, must stand for the 1.1 million people murdered at the camp, of which 1 million were Jews.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-01-27T11:42:38.881Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb.  He suspect this first one is a kind of amoeba, but it’s awful big!

The Xenophyophore is a single-celled organism that can grow several inches across, building its body out of sand, shells, and other seafloor debris. It’s a walking trash castle, but it’s thriving. #marinelife #science

— Dr Craig R McClain (@drcraigmc.bsky.social) 2025-01-25T21:00:04.510Z

This bizarre urchin is in a two-ninute video I’ve put below:

The deep-sea pancake urchin looks like a squishy disk but can move with spines and suction tube feet. It’s like evolution said, “Make it weird, but also kind of adorable, also let's give it little boots" #invertebrate #marinelife

— Dr Craig R McClain (@drcraigmc.bsky.social) 2025-01-24T18:31:27.521Z

Here’s the video:

Welcome to the sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, January 26, 2025, and National Peanut Brittle Day.  Here’s how to make it with only three ingredients:

It’s also National Green Juice Day, a drink I’ve never had but I suppose is good for you. I’d try it if the version didn’t have Satan’s vegetable: broccoli

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Inspectors general are individuals that have oversight of an agency, being a general auditor and looking for waste, embezzlement, and the like.  And, yesterday, Trump fired at least a dozen of them, a move that, like preventing birth citizenship, is probably illegal (archived here):

President Trump fired at least 12 inspectors general late on Friday night, three people with knowledge of the matter said, capping a week of dramatic shake-ups of the federal government with a purge of independent watchdog officials created by Congress to root out abuse and illegality within federal agencies.

The firings appeared to violate a law that requires presidents to give Congress 30 days’ advance notice before removing any inspector general, along with reasons for the firing. Just two years ago, Congress strengthened that provision by requiring the notice to include a “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for the removal.

The move was the latest wave of abrupt upheavals following the inauguration of Mr. Trump that have put the government in increasing confusion.

There were competing lists circulating in Washington on Saturday morning of which inspectors general had received an email from the White House telling them that “due to changing priorities, your position as inspector general” was “terminated, effective immediately.”

But agencies and departments whose watchdogs were said to have been removed included the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education, housing and urban development, interior, labor, transportation and veterans affairs, along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Small Business Administration.

It was not clear whether the departments of State and the Treasury were included, but multiple people said that Michael E. Horowitz, the inspector general for the Justice Department, had been spared. Mr. Horowitz was lauded by Mr. Trump’s supporters in 2019 after he uncovered serious errors and omissions in the F.B.I.’s applications to wiretap a former foreign policy adviser to the 2016 Trump campaign as part of the Russia investigation.

I don’t know enough about the fired IGs to render an opinion on the specifics, but surely the illegality of the firings is sufficient to contest it. I suppose Trump has the right to do this if he fulfills the required month’s notice to Congress, but perhaps he should slow down on the housecleaning, and Congress (and the American people) deserve to know why these oversight people are getting dumped.

*And another bad Trump appointment comes though: Pete Hegseth was confirmed as Secretary of Defense after Vice President J. D. Vance broke a tie in the Senate after three Republicans defected from a bloc vote, while all Democratic Senators rejected the nomination.  (archived here).

The Senate narrowly confirmed Pete Hegseth as defense secretary on Friday after he survived a bruising struggle with Democrats who decried the Trump nominee as unqualified and unfit to oversee the country’s 1.3 million active duty troops and the Pentagon’s nearly $850 billion budget.

Vice President JD Vance had to cast a tiebreaking vote to confirm Mr. Hegseth, after three Republicans — Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — joined all Democrats in opposition.

Kudos to Collins, Murkowski, and (LOL) Mitch McConnell, who, though Republican, still recognize that Hegseth really is unqualified for the job.  McConnell even said this:

Mr. McConnell stressed that in his estimation, Mr. Hegseth had not demonstrated a sufficient understanding of national security challenges to handle the job of defense secretary, which he called “the most consequential cabinet official in any administration.”

“Effective management of nearly 3 million military and civilian personnel, an annual budget of nearly $1 trillion, and alliances and partnerships around the world is a daily test with staggering consequences,” Mr. McConnell said in a statement explaining his vote. He added: “Mr. Hegseth has failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this test.”

*At the Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan approves of “Undoing Biden’s left-extremism.”

To say I have conflicted feelings after a week or so of Trump’s return to power would be an understatement. Some of his early decisions remind me why I couldn’t vote for him. His decision to pardon even those among the J6 mob who assaulted cops jibes with his own instinctual love of vigilante justice against anyone in his way. That’s why his egregious withdrawal of security detail from John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is so instructive. Trump is no longer fond of these men, so he has all but invited a foreign hostile government to murder them. His embrace of anti-police vigilanteism at home is matched by his removal of sanctions on the violent settlers in the West Bank this week. He’s a thug who loves thugs.

But for all this, a large part of me is exhilarated by this first week. Yes, exhilarated. Liberated even. I wasn’t quite expecting this, but I can’t deny it. I suddenly feel more oxygen in the air as the woke authoritarianism of the last four years begins finally to lift. And let me put the core reason for this exhilaration as simply as I can. On the central questions of immigration and identity politics, what Trump is proposing is simply a return to common sense — a reflection of the sane views of the vast majority of Americans, who support secure borders and oppose unfairness in sports and medical experiments on children. My conservative soul is glad.

Joe Biden brazenly lied when he promised moderation in 2020. Check out my column on his initial flurry of executive orders four years ago this week:

[Biden] is doubling down on the very policies that made a Trump presidency possible. In every major democracy, mass immigration has empowered the far right. Instead of easing white panic about changing demographics, Biden just intensified it.

All Trump had to do was wait. But Biden’s EOs on “equity” were even more extreme, effectively ending any pretense of color-blindness in American law and society. Biden, I wrote four years ago, was:

enforcing the Ibram X. Kendi view that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” And he’s enforcing it across the entire federal government and any institution the federal government funds.

It was a direct and proud embrace of systemic race and sex discrimination by the federal government. It was accompanied by a massive shift in the private sector toward illegal race and sex discrimination in hiring, firing, and promotion. This was buttressed by actual mandatory workplace indoctrination in critical race, gender, and queer theory. This was authoritarian brainwashing, accompanied by blatant race discrimination.

Biden also decreed by executive order that the postmodern notion of “gender” would henceforth replace biological sex in determining who is a man or a woman. He mandated that any school or university getting federal funds should remove distinctions between boys and girls — even in sports and intimate spaces. His administration fully backed the medically irreversible transing of children with gender dysphoria, lied about the science, and secretly urged removing all age restrictions on transition — subjecting countless gay and autistic children to the permanent destruction of their future ability to have kids or even an orgasm.

Biden was, in these respects, an unremitting extremist; and almost all Trump is doing this week is unraveling this insanity. The one actually radical act from Trump is rescinding LBJ’s “affirmative action” directive of 1965. Reagan wanted to do this, but he faced bipartisan opposition. One justification of the feds moving from anti-discrimination to being pro-discrimination was because, in LBJ’s words, African-Americans “don’t have their 12 percent” in federal employment, i.e. their proportion in the country at large. Today, African-Americans are almost 19 percent of federal employees — much higher than their population share. The MSM won’t frame it this way. But that’s the truth. And Trump’s EO language suggests he now has a staff shrewd and determined enough to push back. This week was more regime change than shit-show.

But he’s not that hopeful, and, of course, we will some day have a Democratic President who may undo much of what Trump did.

It is, however, far too soon to declare the war on left authoritarianism over. It is far from dead; it has replaced Christianity entirely for many, as we saw with Bishop Budde at the National Cathedral this week, or the Oscars giving an unpopular film 13 nominations just so they can give a Best Actress award to a biological man. The Ivy League will do everything it can to keep discriminating against members of “oppressor classes.” The MSM is too far gone to reform itself. If you want proof of that, notice that the NYT has two emphatically “queer” columnists pushing gender woo-woo, and it just fired the only writer in that publication, Pamela Paul, who helped expose the medically baseless transing of children.

*Over at the Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi, trying to understand Trump’s order on sex while desperately trying to adhere to gender-activist extremism, gets a lot of stuff wrong or confused:

Most scientists now reject the idea that sex is strictly binary. The likes of Nature, possibly one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, has noted that “the research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female”. And there’s a huge amount of disagreement as to how these categories should be described. “Scientists ourselves cannot agree on how to define the two sexes,” Rachel Levin, a Pomona College neuroscientist who studies the development of sex, told me over the phone. “To say that sex is simple and easily defined – and defined at conception – is factually incorrect.”

I urge you to look at the Nature link to see if it shows that science rejects the sex binary, particularly one based on difference in the reproductive apparatus to produce sperm or eggs. No, it doesn’t, but it involves the reader in a lot of confusion about intersexes and DSDs. The paragraph below makes an argument that is becoming familiar: because the development of secondary sex traits is complicated, and different organisms use different cues to produce the universal gamete binary), and because people differ in their secondary sex traits, then sex cannot be binary.  But it’s binary in other animals!  I’d like to ask these people four questions:

1. How many sexes are there in nonhuman animals likes cats, horses, hyenas, ducks, or sharks?
2. If “two,” Is there a universal way to tell them apart? (the answer, of course, is “two” and “gamete type”
3. Now how many sexes are there in humans?
4. If answer to #3 differs from that to question #1, Why is that the case, and then how do you tell the more-than-two sexes apart?

Biologically, we are animals, mammals, and primates, and have the same number of sexes in all species of animals (and vascular plants). Bringing in hormones, chromosomes, and the like is what I now call “The Argument from Complexity,” Remember, the definition of biological sex is not the same as the way that biological sex is determined (it differs among taxa), and those are also different from the way biological sex is usually recognized (genitals, in humans, but that can be wrong.

More palaver:

There are lots of factors that contribute to how we think about sex, including physical characteristics, hormone levels, gamete size (larger gametes are eggs while smaller gametes are sperm), sex chromosomes, etc. Trump’s executive order seems to tie sex to just gamete size at conception. This is despite the fact that a lot of academics have moved away from a sex-classification system based primarily on gametes because some people will never produce a gamete. And, while it’s true that most people inherit either XX (typically female) or XY (typically male) chromosomes at conception, declaring that sex is determined so early is overly simplistic. “Most of us develop along a certain fairly common pathway, but a lot of us do not,” Levin notes. “One really important thing for the public to realize is that the president declaring something to be the case doesn’t make it true.

Note the arrant stupidity of claiming that if you’re a sterile male or a postmenopausal or prepubertal female, you’re not male or female. Does this writer have two neurons to rub together? (This claim, which is common, is really a move of desperation.  If you have the reproductive anatomy to make one of the two types of gametes, but your gun is jammed or you’re out of ammo, you are still male or female. Just as clearly, a male who gets castrated is still a male.  Further, we do not have “gamete size at conception,” we have the genetic underpinning at conception of what your gamete size has the potential to be.

What all this boils down to, in short, is that sex is a hell of a lot more complicated than Trump’s executive order would have you believe. Shocking, I know. Who would have thought that the guy who suggested “nuking hurricanes” to stop them hitting America wouldn’t be the most trustworthy scientific voice?

Yep, it’s the argument from complexity, which refuses to recognize the biological universal of two sexes based solely on the apparatus used to produce large, immobile or small, mobile gametes. Why do they refuse to recognize one of the few “laws” of biology that holds across all animals and vascular plants? Because it makes those who don’t feel male or female uncomfortable, including trans people. But, as I’ve often said, biological fact is not dictated by ideology, nor should we discriminate against people (except in a few cases like sports or where one is incarcerated) because of differences in gamete size.

It’s no surprise that Mahdawi is a columnist and not a biologist, and not even a science columnist.

*Good news in medical science, at least: a woman with a pig kidney as her sole kidney has now survived for two months. As you might expect, the pigs had been genetically altered to make their kidneys more like human ones to prevent immunological rejection.

An Alabama woman passed a major milestone Saturday to become the longest living recipient of a pig organ transplant – healthy and full of energy with her new kidney for 61 days and counting.

“I’m superwoman,” Towana Looney told The Associated Press, laughing about outpacing family members on long walks around New York City as she continues her recovery. “It’s a new take on life.”

Looney’s vibrant recovery is a morale boost in the quest to make animal-to-human transplants a reality. Only four other Americans have received hugely experimental transplants of gene-edited pig organs – two hearts and two kidneys – and none lived more than two months.

“If you saw her on the street, you would have no idea that she’s the only person in the world walking around with a pig organ inside them that’s functioning,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health, who led Looney’s transplant.

Montgomery called Looney’s kidney function “absolutely normal.” Doctors hope she can leave New York – where she’s temporarily living for post-transplant checkups – for her Gadsden, Alabama, home in about another month.

. . .Scientists are genetically altering pigs so their organs are more humanlike to address a severe shortage of transplantable human organs. More than 100,000 people are on the U.S. transplant list, most who need a kidney, and thousands die waiting.

Pig organ transplants so far have been “compassionate use” cases, experiments the Food and Drug Administration allows only in special circumstances for people out of other options.

And the handful of hospitals trying them are sharing information of what worked and what didn’t, in preparation for the world’s first formal studies of xenotransplantation, expected to begin sometime this year. United Therapeutics, which supplied Looney’s kidney, recently asked the Food and Drug Administration for permission to begin a trial.

Loobey donated a kidney to her mother, and then lost her other one when she developed post-pregnancy high blood pressure. So far there is no sign of rejection, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that she does well. It’s amazing that we got to this point, a point where we could modify in animals hard-to-get organs that can be used in place of human organs.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is perturbed (Malgorzata uses fat-free milk, but Andrzej’s milk in his coffee has fat in it):

Hili: This coffee has a strange color.

A: Because Małgorzata adds a strange milk.

In Polish:

From Things with Faces:

From Cat Memes:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy (this looks like the UK to me):

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

Retweeted by Masih. “Woman, Life, Freedom”

In a normal country, #PakhshanAzizi & #VerishehMoradi would be heros. In #Iran, they face death row. And these death sentences are nothing but acts of revenge against #WomenLifeFreedom

پخشان_عزیزی#
وریشه_مراد# pic.twitter.com/yRvC2J625f

— Hannah Neumann (@HNeumannMEP) January 23, 2025

A woman who is fed up with people forcing women to get undressed in front of trans women:

A left wing snob was mansplaining to a woman why she should undress in front of men in women’s changing rooms.
She let him ramble on for a few minutes before this epic interruption📺
Fine example of a snobby ideology clashing with working class reality.🍿pic.twitter.com/mannbQuT7Y

— Biology Rules Ok (@OkayBiology) January 25, 2025

From Malcolm, who captions this, “I have one, too!”:

Mommy cat showing her baby to the newest member of the family.. 😊

🎥 IG: pearlsragdolls pic.twitter.com/mnw3xQrWuC

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 11, 2024

From Jez’s thread of heartwarming pet stuff:

Patient older dog teaches young basset hound puppy how to use the pet door pic.twitter.com/Hg8qaz34qR

— Ozor Ndi Ozor (@eemmanuels4) January 17, 2025

From the IDF, re the four female soldiers returned by Hms:

They’re in our hands now and we are not letting go💛

Welcome home, Daniella, Liri, Karina and Naama. pic.twitter.com/A1V9FcbQY6

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) January 25, 2025

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

A 38-year-old Czech woman, born on this day in 1906, died in Auschwitz at 38.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-01-26T11:23:26.537Z

Two posts by Dr. Cobb.  About the first one he says, “I guess you need to write about this.” So I’ve just printed out the paper.

A single gene underlies male mating morphs in ruff sandpipers, a new Science study finds. The results show how evolutionary changes in a single gene's structure, sequence, and regulation can drive significant diversity within a single species. Learn more in our new issue: https://scim.ag/4arzNmU

— Science Magazine (@science.org) 2025-01-23T19:05:01.357Z

I stole this from Matthew’s feed. Crikey: chewed its legs off!

Predators predated.

— (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-01-25T13:46:23.003Z

Welcome to the weekend: it’s CaturSaturday, January 25, 2025, the Sabbath for all Jewish cats, and National Irish Coffee Day, a drink that shouldn’t be disdained, especially when made with good Irish whiskey, strong coffee, and real whipped cream. Proper preparation: running the cream into the drink over a spoon:

It’s also National Fish Taco Day (perhaps the most horrible item in Mexican cuisine), Fluoride Day (soon to disappear), and Burns Supper (honoring the birthday of Robert Burns in 1759, and the meal goes this way:

Supper begins with a soup course, which usually is a Scottish soup like potato soup, Scotch broth, Cullen skink, or cock-a-leekie. The main course is haggis, a traditional Scottish meat dish. Vegetarian haggis has become an option in recent years. Everyone stands as the haggis is brought in, usually by the cook, on a large dish. The bagpiper plays and the haggis is brought to the host’s table and set down. Address to a Haggis, written by Burns, is then recited. During the poem, a knife is usually sharpened and used to cut the haggis. At the poem’s end, a Scotch whisky toast is given for the haggis, and the guests are seated. The haggis is usually served with mashed potatoes (tatties) and mashed swede turnip (neeps).

I suppose it’s better than a fish taco, so long as the haggis is McSween’s haggis with meat rather than offal.

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

Da Nooz:

*Hamas has apparently reneged on the ceasefire blackmail deal that Israel agreed to by releasing four female soldiers tomorrow instead of four female civilians. (Note that the fmale hostages were captured in their pajamas, but were released in IDF uniforms, a clever piece of propaganda by Hamas.)  This could mean that there are only a handful remaining live female civilians, though one may be released next week by Palestinian Islamic jihad. This also means that Israel has to gin up extra Palestinian prisoners: instead of 30 per hostage, for soldiers it must produce 50 freed terrorists, each on imprisoned for murdering Israelis. This was a serious enough violation that Netanyahu had to huddle with his security officials before deciding what to do, but in the end accepted Hamas changes (the pressure from the U.S.—from the Trump administration—for Israel to adhere to Hamas’s blackmail was too great).

Israel has informed the mediators that the list of four female hostages Hamas published earlier this evening violates the terms of the agreement, which requires the terror group to release all living female civilians before releasing female soldiers, Channel 12 reports.

Hamas has informed the mediators that it remains committed to the deal and that there were simply technical complications that led to the violation. Arbel Yehud, one of the last female civilian hostages believed to still be alive, is being held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, not Hamas.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held consultations with his security chiefs and ultimately decided to move forward with the list that Hamas has provided, despite the violation. Participants in the meeting determined that while Hamas violated the agreement, the violation was not serious enough to blow up the entire deal.

Israel has informed the mediators that the list of four female hostages Hamas published earlier this evening violates the terms of the agreement, which requires the terror group to release all living female civilians before releasing female soldiers, Channel 12 reports.

Hamas has informed the mediators that it remains committed to the deal and that there were simply technical complications that led to the violation. Arbel Yehud, one of the last female civilian hostages believed to still be alive, is being held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, not Hamas.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held consultations with his security chiefs and ultimately decided to move forward with the list that Hamas has provided, despite the violation. Participants in the meeting determined that while Hamas violated the agreement, the violation was not serious enough to blow up the entire deal.

It is not yet clear, though, whether Israel will retaliate with steps of its own that violate the terms of the agreement. Israel is slated to begin allowing Palestinians to return to northern Gaza tomorrow. It is also required by the deal to release 50 Palestinian security prisoners for each female soldier freed.

The families of the four female hostages have not yet been formally notified by the government that their loved ones will be released tomorrow.

Those notifications are expected to take place shortly, Channel 12 says.

Later this evening, Israel is slated to publish the list of Palestinian security prisoners that it will release tomorrow.

From another article:

The list of the four soldiers is in apparent violation of the ceasefire agreement, which states that female civilians are to be released first, then female soldiers, followed by the elderly and then those who are deemed extremely ill. Israel however reportedly agreed to receive the hostages, deciding the breach was not grave enough to collapse the deal.

Outside of the five surveillance soldiers, there are two female civilian hostages from the original list of 33 slated to be released in the first phase of the ceasefire deal: Arbel Yehud, 29, and Shiri Silberman Bibas, 33. Israel had conveyed to Hamas that it expected Yehud — who is thought to be held by fellow terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad — to be released this weekend, however, she was not named by Hamas on Friday.

So far Israel has kept its part of the bargain, but Hamas is toying with the negotiations like a cat with a mouse. How long will it be before Hamas starts handing back coffins instead of living hostages? Believe me, they will be the last “hostages” released, and yet Israel has agreed to exchange 30-50 Palestinian prisoners for each body of a dead hostage. I predict that the turnover of dead hostages in coffins will not be filmed.

*No! The latest NYT headline as I write, at the top left, is “Trump leaves Democrats dazed and on the defensive” (archived here).  Who could have foreseen this six months ago?

As President Trump pushes aggressively to reshape the federal government, Democrats have retreated into a political crouch that reflects their powerlessness in Washington.

Far from rising up in outrage, the opposition party’s lawmakers have taken a muted wait-and-see approach as Mr. Trump tries to end birthright citizenship, halt diversity programs in the federal government, undo foreign policy alliances and seek retribution against his perceived political enemies.

In some cases, Democrats are even making a show of working with Republicans.

Scores of them voted for the Laken Riley Act, which allows the deportation of unauthorized migrants who are accused but not yet convicted of crimes. Others volunteered to work with Republicans on a border security bill. And while Democrats are fighting the nominations of Pete Hegseth as defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard as national intelligence director, Mr. Trump’s other cabinet appointees appear on a glide path to confirmation without much vocal resistance.

It is telling that in the opening days of the new Trump administration, the loudest pushback to the president’s policies has come not from an elected Democrat but from the bishop at Washington National Cathedral, who asked Mr. Trump directly during a service to have mercy on immigrants and L.G.B.T.Q. children.

“We’re no longer trying to win a news cycle,” said Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat who has become an outspoken messenger for his party on social media. “We’re trying to win an argument, and that’s going to take time and patience and discipline.”

A group of 70 progressive House Democrats and six Senate Democrats gathered at the Capitol on Thursday to try to settle on a single message of opposition to Mr. Trump as he takes aim at myriad liberal constituencies and priorities. The assembled Democrats concluded that their best course of action was to focus on economic concerns, which they believe led to the party’s November defeats.

Well, yes, economic concerns was one issue, and Trump had better bring down inflation by the midterms, but there was more to the defeats than economics.  Immigration, to name one.  Perhaps Schatz could conceive of the strategy more as having to confect a program that Americans will vote for than to “win an argument”!

*It just gets worse. As you know, for no rational reason, Trump pardoned 1500 convicted insurrectionists, and doing that is similar (but not identical) to freeing Palestinian terrorists. For the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers aren’t going to sit around twiddling their thumbs; they’re going to cause trouble.

Enrique Tarrio thought he would be in prison until 2040. As he waited to board a plane to Miami, now a free man thanks to President Trump, the Proud Boys leader wasn’t certain what was next for him except for one thing: retaliation.

The 40-year-old Tarrio was among the roughly 1,500 individuals who received pardons for their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. “I was innocent of the charges,” he said in an interview before his flight, but alleged the legal system was “weaponized” against him and others. Now, he said, it’s time to turn the tables and prosecute the prosecutors, including former Attorney General Merrick Garland.

*As usual, I’ll steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary from the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: I solemnly swear“. Oh hell, I’ll add another, as Nellie’s collection this week is simply too good:

→ The Dem reformation is coming: First the bad news for Democrats, then the good news for me. Bad news: The Democrats have never been more unpopular. From CNN, which this week announced layoffs for about 200 staffers: “Overall, just 33% of all Americans express a favorable view of the Democratic Party, an all-time low in CNN’s polling dating back to 1992.” The good news: This is rock bottom. And now we can look around and think about what brought us here and why some of us made the choices we made. We can think about what we’ve done until we’re ready to come back to the table and act nicely. I’m still waiting for apologies from my old Hamasnik friends but I’m sure those are on the way, right? Hello? Stop throwing Vegenaise at me, I’m just here to gloat!

I used to think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the future of the party. She’s so pretty and put-together and has such a great origin story. But AOC has not evolved with the times. Her vibe has not shifted. Here she was this past Sunday, on her couch while delivering a straight-to-camera warning:​​

We are on the eve of an authoritarian administration. This is what twenty-first-century fascism is starting to look like. Republicans really model themselves after Orbán’s Hungary. And so you can look to see how Viktor Orbán runs Hungary to get a taste of how they will try to govern and control media, and companies in the United States. . . . As far as what we do, you know, this is a time of experimentation. A lot of people will still use platforms—can still use platforms—but I also look towards places where you have more ownership as well and develop your audiences there.

→ The long arm of the Kama-law: The Democrats’ official social media posted an image of Kamala Harris that is fully AI. How can you tell? Her arm has been stretched to strange, unnecessary proportions. The caption reads: “History made.”

Perhaps it was a heavy-handed metaphor: Kamala’s reach was so inspiring, so historical, that her arm had to be doctored to show it. Or maybe they’re saying she made history for having the longest arm ever. Were there no real-life pictures of Kamala Harris walking?

→ Hamas’s startling show of strength: As three young Israeli hostages were finally freed from captivity, Hamas militants used the moment to project some amount of strength. Gone was their ragtag civilian garb, the flip-flops; now they had clean, matching military uniforms and bulletproof vests. They stood on top of trucks jeering and waving guns, as if saying resolutely: “We’re still in charge of Gaza.” Which raises the question: How in the hell is Hamas still in charge of Gaza? How could Israel wipe out Hezbollah in what seemed like days but Hamas is still holding hostages, still marching, still waving guns from trucks? As the hostage girls were loaded into cars to go back to Israel, they were given special gift bags that included photos of them in captivity. Someone there has a sick sense of humor.

One clue to Hamas’s continued hold might be that the UN department in Gaza is quite literally an extension of Hamas: The hostages reported that they were held in a UNRWA refugee camp. I’m pretty dumb, but even I’m not dumb enough to believe that the folks running a UNRWA refugee camp would have no idea there were Israeli hostages there. Like, a camp with a bunch of refugees and then three Israeli girls with ropes around their hands and ankles. Just normal, everyday Gazans at the refugee camp, screaming in Hebrew, begging to go home?

→ Also, knives: Actually, there are two big English scandals, and the second one is knives. They’re too easy to buy! Knife-wielding terrorists don’t kill people, knives do.

After a young terrorist in Southport stabbed to death three young girls in a dance class, much was done to suppress that information. And to suppress the fact that the killer, Axel Rudakubana, was of Rwandan descent and an Islamist who wanted to kill the little girls because dance class is sinful. The police went so far as to say it absolutely wasn’t terrorism, and the media only described him as a “quiet choirboy” from Wales. Eventually, it all came out. The killer had an al-Qaeda training manual and ricin at home. Plus, people tried to report him to the police three times beforehand. Anyway, here is the British response:

Now to buy a knife, you’ll have to present ID and appear on live video. Axel killed three people that day in the dance studio and stabbed 10 more. And these were horrific slayings: He stabbed six-year-old Bebe 122 times; seven-year-old Elsie had 85 knife wounds—a teacher hiding in the closet thought everyone had escaped until she heard the girls asking him to stop. And the British response was to protect Axel, to hide his motives, to smear those who were upset over the killings, and now to make all British people do a video call before buying a kitchen knife, which is more likely to deter tech-illiterate Boomers who want to up their kitchen game than would-be terrorists. Modern England is the best argument against genetic determinism that I could imagine. Because the same set of genes that once conquered the world have now made for a small, poor little island, worried over seeming too harsh toward the teenager with the kitchen knife killing children—don’t offend him, Barnaby! It’s fascinating. Into the nature vs. nurture debate, we must add the case of the British people.

[JAC note]: the perp was 18, but I can’t find evidence of an Al-Qaeda training manual at Nellie’s link]

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being intellectual:

Hili: Do you really believe in what is written in the newspapers?

Andrzej: No, but for a sociologist lies are important information about society.

Hili: Czy ty naprawdę wierzysz w to, co piszą gazety?

Ja: Nie, ale dla socjologa kłamstwa są ważną informacją o społeczeństwie.

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

From Things With Faces:

From Cat Memes:

From The Cat House on the Kings:

From Masih; if you don’t think the Houthis are terrorists, when they fire on ships of several nations going through the canal, you’re blind (or have a weird definition of “terrorism”):

Yes, let’s call terrorists by their name: It’s time to END the era of appeasement.

President @realDonaldTrump’s decision to re-designate the Houthis as a terrorist organization is a bold and necessary move. For too long, the Houthis have acted like international pirates,… pic.twitter.com/g22OnDS7kj

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 23, 2025

Two from Luana: anti-Semitism in Australia (no surprise):

This is an “anti-racism seminar” at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.

Stereotyping Jews as pets of the right wing Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton.

This is an absolute farce. “Anti-racism training” everybody pic.twitter.com/cV2RKYhIzk

— Drew Pavlou (@DrewPavlou) January 23, 2025

And a bizarre new law in Egypt:

This is so enlightened and progressive. https://t.co/nj5E39RytC

— Climate Warrior🐬 #ClimateJustice🇵🇸🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 (@ClimateWarrior7) January 24, 2025

One from Malcolm, and doesn’t this brighten your day?

Cat enjoying the sun.. 😊 pic.twitter.com/pqChCp29IR

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) January 7, 2025

From my feed; another smile-bringer:

If you’re having one of those days when only baby goats in pyjamas can help, here’s some baby goats in pyjamas. pic.twitter.com/ZuuQpiJZ2z

— Paul Bronks (@SlenderSherbet) January 23, 2025

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

Gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz, this French girl (Jewish of course) was ten.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-01-25T11:21:59.821Z

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a well camouflaged caddisfly (with attached debris):

Another Caddisfly larva feeding, this time on a more typical food, scraping algae/biofilm off a dead leaf Pretty sure this is Limnephilidae #Pondlife #BugSky #UKWildlife #inverts #Insect #Caddisflies

— Neil (@uk-wildlife.bsky.social) 2025-01-23T19:34:04.466Z

Matthew loves Mars!

These are just some rocks.But they're rocks on Mars.Photographed earlier today.And now on your phone.

— Paul Byrne (@theplanetaryguy.bsky.social) 2025-01-22T19:49:32.377Z

Welcome to Friday, January 24, 2025 and National Peanut Butter Day, celebrating a comestible I have for lunch nearly every day. Here’s how it’s made commercially:

It’s also Beer Can Appreciation Day, Macintosh Computer Day (the only kind I’ve ever used), National Edy’s Pie Patent Day (celebrating the patent of the Eskimo Pie on this day in 1922; for reasons that are obvious, we can no longer call them “Eskimo Pies”), and National Lobster Day. 

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

Da Nooz:

*Just in: Yesterday a federal judge declared Trump’s “birthright” Executive Order, which denied automatic citizenship to those born in the U.S., to be an unconstitutional act. I predicted this, but it ain’t rocket science. It’s in the Constitution in black and white (well, black and yellow now):

A federal district court judge on Thursday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at limiting birthright citizenship — the first skirmish in what promises to be a protracted legal battle over the new administration’s agenda.

Senior U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour heard 25 minutes of arguments and then issued an order from the bench blocking the policy from taking effect for 14 days. There will be a further briefing on a preliminary injunction to permanently block the executive order while the case proceeds.

“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades,” Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee, said. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”

This one ain’t gonna fly.

*OMG he did it! Trump not only sacked the head of the Coast Guard (a woman) but, supposedly to bolster border security, ordered more forces to the GULF OF AMERICA, since his executive order has now renamed the Gulf of Mexico. Shoot me now!

The Coast Guard will surge additional resources to the “Gulf of America” and several other locations, the service said in a statement Tuesday, after the Trump administration sacked its top admiral and alleged that she had failed to prioritize the security of U.S. borders.

The statement marked one of the U.S. government’s first official uses of President Donald Trump’s desired name for the Gulf of Mexico, a policy shift that has elicited derision from his domestic political foes and leaders in Mexico. Trump signed an executive order soon after his inauguration Monday setting a 30-day deadline for the Interior Department to take “all appropriate action” needed to codify the new name.

Asked about the statement’s reference to “Gulf of America,” Coast Guard officials cited Trump’s executive order. The Defense Department, which also is preparing to deploy additional forces in support of the new administration’s emphasis on border security, said it had no updates to provide when asked whether the Pentagon will also adopt Trump’s desired name for the gulf.

Here’s the insane order:

Sec. 4.  Gulf of America.  (a)  The area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America.  The Gulf was a crucial artery for America’s early trade and global commerce.  It is the largest gulf in the world, and the United States coastline along this remarkable body of water spans over 1,700 miles and contains nearly 160 million acres.  Its natural resources and wildlife remain central to America’s economy today.  The bountiful geology of this basin has made it one of the most prodigious oil and gas regions in the world, providing roughly 14% of our Nation’s crude-oil production and an abundance of natural gas, and consistently driving new and innovative technologies that have allowed us to tap into some of the deepest and richest oil reservoirs in the world.  The Gulf is also home to vibrant American fisheries teeming with snapper, shrimp, grouper, stone crab, and other species, and it is recognized as one of the most productive fisheries in the world, with the second largest volume of commercial fishing landings by region in the Nation, contributing millions of dollars to local American economies.  The Gulf is also a favorite destination for American tourism and recreation activities.  Further, the Gulf is a vital region for the multi-billion-dollar U.S. maritime industry, providing some of the largest and most impressive ports in the world.  The Gulf will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping America’s future and the global economy, and in recognition of this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our Nation’s economy and its people, I am directing that it officially be renamed the Gulf of America.

(b)  As such, within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of the Interior shall, consistent with 43 U.S.C. 364 through 364f, take all appropriate actions to rename as the “Gulf of America” the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba in the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico.  The Secretary shall subsequently update the GNIS to reflect the renaming of the Gulf and remove all references to the Gulf of Mexico from the GNIS, consistent with applicable law.  The Board shall provide guidance to ensure all federal references to the Gulf of America, including on agency maps, contracts, and other documents and communications shall reflect its renaming.

Yes, it’s the Greatest Gulf in the History of the World, and it has to be named MGAA: “Make the Gulf American Again.”  Can we expect commemorative coins?

*Over at the Silver Bulletin, pollster and statistician (and Democrat) Nate Silver asks, “Are we entering a Conservative Golden Age?” At first he says “no”, we’ve reached peak MAGA:

According to this framework, the inauguration on Monday could be the high-water mark for the Conservative Golden Age. With narrow majorities in Congress — and a less unified caucus than Democrats had under Biden — legislative accomplishments may be hard to come by for Trump, and Democrats are favored to retake the House in 2026. Courts will challenge his executive orders. The alliance between MAGA and the Tech Right — Trump’s new Silicon Valley buddies — already shows signs of strain. Furthermore, Trump is now a 78-year-old, lame-duck president, and few other Republicans have been able to achieve star power under his shadow. The potential efficacy of his government, or lack thereof, is another potential weak point. Although he deserves more credit than he gets for Operation Warp Speed, Trump mismanaged the biggest crisis of his first term, COVID, and many of his Cabinet appointments and civil servants will have little experience in government. And Trump can put personal pique or profit above the good of the country or the long-term interests of his party and the conservative movement.

What’s more, there is a pretty good argument for simple mean-reversion. Democrats, for all their problems, are a highly competitive party. Kamala Harris became the first Democrat to lose the popular vote since John Kerry, but she lost it by only 1.6 percentage points — and Kerry lost his election by just 2.4 points against a president who’d had an 90 percent approval rating just two years earlier. No Democrat has lost the popular vote by more than that since 1988, while five Republicans have, including Trump in 2020. Republicans’ Electoral College advantage all but disappeared last year, meanwhile, so a narrow popular vote win like Al Gore’s in 2000 or Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 might be enough to flip the White House for a fourth time in a row in 2028.

But then Silver backs up and says, well, the history of America shows random swings, but we might be in for conservatism for a while

But I’ve given short shrift to the claim that we are entering a new era — whether a Conservative Golden Age or something else entirely. That’s because, as Ezra Klein writes, the evidence for a conservative vibe shift goes beyond Trump’s narrow popular vote margin. To take a few data points:

• It’s much harder than in 2016 to write off Trump’s win as a fluke. He won the popular vote. There’s no Electoral College, Comey Letter or (dubiously) Russian interference to blame for his win. Democrats essentially lost the election twice last year — first with Biden and then with Harris — and this came on the heels of Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. Maybe it’s bad candidates — the Democrats’ presidential nominees lately have been about as successful as New York Jets quarterbacks — but their product isn’t selling.
• Furthermore, Democrats show every sign of being defeated. Unlike in 2017, there’s little protest activity against Trump. MSNBC ratings and Washington Post subscriptions are down. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s teams are fighting, but none of it is particularly constructive or forward-looking, and there’s no clear consensus on what the Democratic Party should do next.
• Trump’s win was buoyed by some sharp demographic shifts, including among voters that Democrats once took for granted as being part of their “team”: Hispanic and Asian American voters, and to a lesser degree Black voters (especially Black men) — and younger voters, too. Democrats can no longer credibly claim to win elections just by turning out their base; in fact, Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the November electorate by 5 points. Americans are also voting with their feet, fleeing blue states and cities.

Here’s his chart of the random political walk:

In the end, he thinks all things are possible, including a return to the “Biden/Obama” liberal age. In other words, he punts.

*From the Free Press: Coleman Hughes on “The end of DEI.” Hughes, a heterodox black intellectual, thinks this is a good thing.

Trump has ordered the executive branch and its agencies “to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements.”

. . . . Trump’s executive order accurately describes the enormousness of the DEI bureaucracy that has arisen in government and private industry to infuse race in hiring, promotion, and training. Take, for example, the virtue-signaling announcements made by big corporations in recent years—such as CBS’s promise that the writers of its television shows would meet a quota of being 40 percent non-white.

And so, we will now see what federal enforcement of a color-blind society looks like. We’ll certainly see how many federal employees were assigned to monitor and enforce DEI—Trump has just demanded they all be laid off.

The most controversial part of this executive order is that it repeals the storied, 60-year-old Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Johnson’s original order mandated that government contractors take “affirmative action” to ensure that employees are hired “without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin.”

The phrase affirmative action, however, has come to have a profoundly different meaning for us than it did during the 1960s civil rights era. Back then, it simply meant that companies had to make an active effort to stop discriminating against blacks, since antiblack discrimination was, in many places, the norm. Only later did the phrase come to be associated with the requirement to actively discriminate in favor of blacks and other minorities.

. . .In the intervening decades, this racial spoils system has not only caused grief for countless members of the unfavored races—it has also created incentives for business owners to commit racial fraud, or else to legally restructure so as to be technically “minority-owned.” As far back as 1992, TheNew York Times reported that such fraud was “a problem everywhere”—for instance, with companies falsely claiming to be 51 percent minority-owned in order to secure government contracts. In a more recent case, a Seattle man sued both the state and federal government, claiming to run a minority-owned business on account of being 4 percent African.

For progressives, Trump’s repeal of LBJ’s 1965 executive order is being framed as a reversal of Civil Rights–era gains. In covering the repeal, Axios reminds readers that “Segregationists during Johnson’s time opposed the executive order.” This framing makes sense only if you omit the changed meaning of affirmative action over time. In context, the segregationists of the 1960s believed in a race-based society and wanted to exclude black people from opportunities, whereas today, Trump is opposing racial mandates. They were against color blindness; Trump is for it.

Trump’s executive order gets closer to the original intent of the civil rights movement than today’s DEI policies. During the Senate debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the bill’s lead sponsor, Senator Hubert Humphrey, famously promised that if anyone could find any language in the Civil Rights Act that required preferential hiring based on percentages or quotas, he would eat the entire bill page by page. In the twenty-first century, it’s today’s progressives who would be the ones chewing.

. . .In one sense, Trump is simply riding an anti-DEI wave that he cannot claim credit for. For instance, he could have done this in his first term, but like every Republican since Nixon, he chose not to.

In the end, Hughes says this is one of the rare moments in American politics when a leader gets to turn his ideology into law.

*Just when we thought the LA wildfires were going to abate, they’ve started up afresh, fueled by those pesky Santa Anna winds. And the new ones are bad:

A second new fire ignited in the Los Angeles area overnight near the affluent Bel-Air neighborhood, while thousands of firefighters continued to battle a blaze that ripped through more than 10,000 acres north of the city.

The fresh blaze, named the Sepulveda fire, had reached 40 acres with 0% containment early Thursday, according to state fire officials. It broke out roughly 2 miles from the perimeter of the Palisades fire that has already ravaged more than 23,000 acres and destroyed thousands of structures this month.

*A kid hit the jackpot by finding a very rare (but not old) baseball card: the Topps rookie card for Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes:

One of the sports card hobby’s most sought-after modern cards came to light Tuesday.

The 2024 Topps Chrome Update Rookie Debut Patch one-of-one autographed card for Pittsburgh Pirates phenom pitcher Paul Skenes was pulled by an 11-year-old collector in Los Angeles, the card company announced via social media. It later added that the child only opened one hobby box (which includes 24 packs with four cards in each pack) when they hit the card.

Apparently there’s only one of these (see below):

Shortly after Topps released the news Tuesday, the Pirates reaffirmed their offer for the card via Instagram.

The MLB Debut Patch, which was first introduced last year, has been one of Fanatics’ most prominent innovations since acquiring Topps. Before each player’s first MLB game they play, a small patch is placed on the sleeve of their uniform. Once that game is complete the patch is removed and put into a trading card that the player autographs. The card then goes into a set and becomes a highly coveted and unique collectible. This is also currently being done in MLS, for which Topps also has a trading card license. And with Topps acquiring the licenses for both the NFL and NBA in the coming years, plans for expanding the program to those leagues are also being made.

“Getting to the big leagues is one thing,” Skenes said in a Topps-produced video right after signing the card. “Sticking around and pitching is another. This patch shows that I’m a big leaguer, and there are only so many people in the world who can say that. There’s kind of a small fraternity of people who can say they made their debut. There’s a small number of people who have this patch. To have something physical like that, to be able to commemorate it, it’s pretty cool.”

Via Card Ladder, the 2024 Rookie Debut Patch carrying the highest price tag on the open market came from the Tampa Bay Rays’ Junior Caminero. His PSA 9 graded card sold for $66,000 on Dec. 20. The Rookie Debut Patch card for the Cincinnati Reds’ Elly De La Cruz received a PSA 10 grade recently and should also fetch a much higher price than the Caminero card. Last July, a $150,000 bounty was accepted for Anthony Volpe’s 2023 Debut Patch card.

The Skenes card should eclipse them all. Even hand-drawn imitations of the Skenes card have sold for significant amounts on eBay in recent months, with one going for $150 in November and another for $200 earlier this month.

As you see above, there’s a big reward if you get it:

Collectors have been hunting for Skenes’ unique rookie patch autographed card ever since the release of the 2024 Topps Chrome Update set dropped in November. Many collectors have offered up bounties for the card, most notably the Pittsburgh Pirates and Livvy Dunne, Skenes’ girlfriend. The team has offered a package that includes two season tickets behind home plate at PNC Park for 30 years and a host of other unique experiences and items. Dunne, an LSU gymnast and social influencer, offered the card holder a chance to sit with her in a suite during a game if the person took the Pirates’ deal.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is using her tail as an indicator:

Hili: You look as if you forgot where the fridge is.

A: I’m thinking about something else.

Hili: The fridge is where my tail is pointing.

Hili: Wyglądasz tak, jakbyś zapomniał gdzie jest lodówka.

Ja: Myślę o czymś innym.

Hili: Lodówka jest tam gdzie wskazuje mój ogon.

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

From Things with Faces:  This should scare you!

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Merilee:

From Masih. Finally the ICC goes after the right people!

The International Criminal Court’s call for the arrest of Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban leader, is a historic and momentous day in the fight for justice. Today, I stand with the brave women of Afghanistan, congratulating them and dreaming of the day when these criminals are… pic.twitter.com/zg0I3VZOqu

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 23, 2025

Wikipedia was captured by the Jew haters, but I see now this part of the entry has been changed back to the deaths caused by Hamas. Look what was there before!

WOW.

Nefarious Wikipedia editors have made it appear as though Israel was responsible for every death on October 7. The system is broken. @WikiBias2024 pic.twitter.com/sSnYXveDl3

— The Mossad: Satirical and Awesome (@TheMossadIL) January 21, 2025

From Bryan:

Haha this math joke is hilarious. pic.twitter.com/4cYI20wkpq

— Abakcus (@abakcus) January 22, 2025

From Luana:

This is an “anti-racism seminar” at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.

Stereotyping Jews as pets of the right wing Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton.

This is an absolute farce. “Anti-racism training” everybody pic.twitter.com/cV2RKYhIzk

— Drew Pavlou (@DrewPavlou) January 23, 2025

From Malcolm; a useful helper at work:

Office helper. pic.twitter.com/QT92IUeh2t

— cats with jobs 🛠 (@CatWorkers) January 5, 2025

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I posted:

Gassed upon arrival at the camp, this Norwegian woman was just seventeen.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-01-24T11:33:30.007Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. Look at this worm! I put the video below the post, and Matthew added a paraphrase of Shakespeare:

How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous nature is! O brave new world,
That has such worms in’t.

The spaghetti worms (Terebellidae) flail tentacles like a chaotic noodle monster to trap food. Elegance is overrated when tentacle spaghetti works just fine.#NoodleTactics #invertebrates #marinelife

— Dr Craig R McClain (@drcraigmc.bsky.social) 2025-01-23T17:25:09.612Z

Matthew thinks that this guy looks like he’s from the 1980s (it’s a bit enhanced but not colorized):

I think this is a remarkably contemporary-looking photograph, which masks the fact it was actually taken 111 years ago! I've enhanced this amazing autochrome of Henri Lumiere, which was photographed in 1914, during the Great War, by his father Auguste. It was taken in colour and isn't colourised.

— BabelColour (@babelcolour.bsky.social) 2025-01-23T19:11:20.018Z