Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I’ve often pointed out that the mainstream media seems curiously soft on religion, taking the stance that religion is good for America and can heal it in these troubled times. But they never ask—and don’t seem to care—whether religion is true. Instead, they insist that filling the “God-shaped hole”—a spiritual lacuna that supposedly exists in all of us—is what we need to be complete and happy human beings.
The New York Times is particularly guilty of pushing superstition as a nostrum. For two years, until 2023, they had a regular column and newsletter called “On Faith,” by Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest who relentlessly pushed religion. (You can see my many posts criticizing her here.) There were, of course, no atheists writing to point out that the God that Warren extolled weekly didn’t seem to exist.
Now Lauren Jackson, who professes nonbelief but is a spiritual “seeker”, has replaced Warren with a weekly newsletter and column called “Believing”. You can see the list of her columns here, and my post about the column here. Here’s one example below (click to read, or find it (archived here)
Jackson mourns her inability to fully believe:
I recognize, though, that my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god. I live an ocean away from that small Arkansas chapel, but I still remember the bliss of finding the sublime in the mundane. I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.
For years, I haven’t been able to say that publicly. But it feels like something is changing. That maybe the culture is shifting. That maybe we’re starting to recognize that it’s possible to be both believing and discerning after all.
I don’t think so—not without evidence for God. Can you be discerning and believe in the Loch Ness Monster? That would be easier than believing in God, for at least there used to be some (now discredited) evidence for Nessie.
Here’s another more recent one (click to read), a column that proves that God is made in the image of humans and not the other way around:
A quote:
Reverend Albert Cleage, a leader in the Detroit civil rights movement, wanted to counter what he saw as white dominance of Christianity. He was also trying to make the church into an important center for Black political power. So he and his team commissioned an artist, Glanton Dowdell, to replace the old church building’s iconography, which at the time depicted a white pilgrim. Dowdell scouted a young Black mother and her 3-year-old son at a laundromat and told her she had a memorable face — a crisp jawline and sharp cheekbones. Would she allow him to paint her as a Black Mary?
She said yes. The resulting mural was radical for the time, but it served to both illustrate and venerate an emerging doctrine of Black liberation theology. Cleage was developing a gospel of Black nationalism, one that claimed Jesus was a Black revolutionary whose identity as such had been obscured by white people.
“The basic problem facing Black people is their powerlessness,” he once said.
Look, I don’t care what color God is, because I’m fully convinced that God is a man-made fiction. He’s a coloring book in the mind, and you can make God whatever sex or ethnicity you want. But none of that makes God’s existence more probable.
It’s curious that Jackson, who professes nonbelief, only writes positively about it, and doesn’t allow an atheistic point of view in her column. Though she herself is an unbeliever, you won’t see her discuss the problems with religion, nor will you see her write about Islam, save for tiny mentions. That’s because her brief is to console NYT readers by allowing them to think that religion is compatible with a modern, scientific outlook. Jackson, I believe, replaced Warren because Warren’s take on faith was too strong and was alienating readers. So the paper got themselves a “none” who writes good things about faith.
This also applies to the Free Press, whose softness on religion I’ve often mentioned. This piece, for example, came out just last week:
Here’s an excerpt:
There’s something simple yet profound about mingling with people who are different. At its very best, religion can tamp down feelings of distrust, disenchantment, and disconnection. At their very best, religious institutions are places where people from every economic background and political affiliation can set aside their differences and worship together. Instead of churches being engines of social capital generation and catalysts for building trust and tolerance, the growing polarization of American religion has left us lonelier, angrier, sicker, and more divided than ever before.
. . . . I am under no illusion that American religion is the greatest panacea for all that ails the United States. But people gathering under one roof to sing together, pray together, and work in common cause to create a better community and a better society will certainly move us closer to the ideals that were set forth by the Founding Fathers of our country. There’s nothing simpler and more consequential than people getting up on a Sunday morning, getting dressed, and making their way to a local house of worship.
For religion to effect these changes, isn’t it true that worshipers must share common beliefs about what’s true, and foremost among them must be the existence of God? Well, no, because I have friends who are atheists and nevertheless go to church for the social aspects: the singing, the fellowship, the comity based on a false premise that Kurt Vonnegut called a “granfaloon.” Oh, that we could have a latter-day Mencken, who made his name in journalism even though he wrote stuff like this!:
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
Mencken regularly railed against religion, and with good reason. But the idea of a modern Mencken publishing this kind of stuff is inconceivable. Though more people than ever have given up belief or are “nones,” the curious respect for religion remains.
The University of Austin (UATX), not to be confused with the University of Texas at Austin, was founded in October, 2021 as a sort of heterodox university, one where all viewpoints could be represented and debated. In this sense it was a counter to “elite” universities like Harvard and Princeton, whose faculty are almost entirely liberal and where free speech policies are sometimes abrogated. Wikipedia says this about the founders:
The University of Austin was conceived in May 2021 when venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, St. John’s College president Pano Kanelos, British–American historian Niall Ferguson, and journalist Bari Weiss met in Austin. The proposal was publicized six months later in an article by Kanelos in Weiss’s newsletter Common Sense (which has since evolved into The Free Press).
On November 11, 2021, Robert Zimmer announced his resignation from the university board, saying that UATX had made statements about higher education that “diverged very significantly from my own views”.[26] Shortly thereafter, Pinker followed suit. UATX apologized for creating “”unnecessary complications” for Pinker and Zimmer by not clarifying [sooner] what their advisory roles entailed.[28]
The founders and founding faculty are indeed a mixture of left- and right-wing people, and, with proper guidance and care, as well as a judicious selection of faculty, UATX had the possibility of turning into a decent alternative to other high-class but left-oriented schools. That was the original aim. Sadly, it did not happen.
I sensed trouble with Steve Pinker and our President, the late Bob Zimmer, resigned in November. There must have been something about the ideological leaning of the university—the feeling that it was founded to follow an antiwoke ideology rather than just allow all viewpoints to be erred—that turned off Steve and Bob. Here’s a FB post by Steve in response to a new article in Politico about UATX:
I don’t know why Bob Zimmer resigned, as he wasn’t explicit about it except to say, as the article notes, ““The new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views.”
According to this new article in Politico by author and criminal justice professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice Evan Mandery, UATX entered the drain in the spring of 2025 when the right-wing nature of the school became explicit. And now more advisors and faculty have resigned, and it looks as if the school (which is unaccredited, but might be in two years) is doomed. But the trouble started almost immediately when the school was founded. Read about this mess by clicking the screenshot below:
Here are some of the people involved in UATX (indented quotes are from the article):
Kanelos identified 32 people as trustees, faculty members and advisers to the new university including Jonathan Haidt, the NYU professor whose work Kanelos evoked in proclaiming that UATX would produce an “antifragile” cohort with the capacity to think “fearlessly, nimbly, and inventively”; Summers; Pinker; the playwright David Mamet; Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University; computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman; authors Andrew Sullivan and Rob Henderson; the journalists Caitlin Flanagan, Sohrab Ahmari and Jonathan Rauch; Stacy Hock, an investor and philanthropist; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a conservative, Dutch politician-turned-writer known for criticizing Islam’s treatment of women, and who is married to Ferguson.
The list leaned right, to be sure. Loury, who is Black, zealously opposes affirmative action. Mamet had called Trump “the best president since Abraham Lincoln.” Hock served as chairwoman of an organization called Texas GOP 2020 Victory. Several of the academics had experienced backlash for taking conservative positions. These included Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist who’d had a planned lecture at MIT on extraterrestrial life canceled over his views on DEI; Peter Boghossian, who’d resigned from Portland State University in part because of the institution’s response to his sending hoax articles to academic journals; and University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock, who’d faced protests over her allegedly transphobic views, which she disputed.
I’m not sure if Boghossian and Stock can be said to “lean right”, but never mind. But also on the list were Pinker, Strossen, and Haidt, all of whom see themselves as classical liberals.
Resignations began early, as the school’s ideological antiwoke agenda was manifest from the outset. Others who resigned were Geoffrey Stone, Vickie Sullivan, Andrew Sullivan, Heather Heying, Nadine Strossen (former head of the ACLU), Jon Haidt, and Jonathan Rauch. This gutted the advisory board of most of its well-known liberals. Heying said she resigned because she didn’t think the university’s vission was “sufficiently revolutionary,” and Pinker emailed Mandery with further explanation:
“Dissociation was the only choice,” Pinker told me in an email. “I bristled at their Trump-Musk-style of trolling, taunting, and demonizing, without the maturity and dignity that ought to accompany a major rethinking of higher education.” Furthermore, Pinker added, “UATX had no coherent vision of what higher education in the 21st century ought to be. Instead, they created UnWoke U led by a Faculty of the Canceled.”
That was pretty much my view as well. If you look at the curriculum page of UATX, you’ll see that science is pretty much limited to math and data analysis. As Mandery notes, the curriculum was in places bizarre. He reproduces the syllabus below, saying”
Indeed, the syllabus I reviewed for a class called “Intellectual Foundations of Science II” covered a range of topics unusual for a science class including “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” A student who’d taken the course shared a slide with me on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — and said that the class had been told that IVF but not abortion could be consistent with the Catholic belief about ensoulment.
Enlarge this if you want to see part of the science curriculum, best described as a “dog’s breakfast”. Francis Collins on God? People from Colossal Biosciences on “de-extinction”? There is apparently no introduction to basic biology, but just a bunch of topics of current popular interest. This is no way to get a biology education.
Here is what’s represented as a slide from the class above. This does not belong in a biology class; it’s theology:
(from Politico): A slide on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — was shown in the class. | Obtained by POLITICO
Another quote from the article:
The poor quality of the science offerings had bothered Heying and Pinker. “Others thought I was the token liberal,” Heying told me, “but I came to understand myself as the token scientist.” In an email, Pinker wrote, “They should have hired a widely esteemed scientist and proven program builder to set up their science division.”
As far as I can see from looking at the curriculum, they don’t have a decent one that could undergird a quality liberal-arts education. The goals of UATX at the outset were admirable, but the ideological motives of the founders eventually warped the school:
Over the past three months, I had more than 100 conversations with 25 current and former students, faculty and staffers at UATX. Each had their own perspective on the tumultuous events they shared with me, and some had personal grievances. But they were nearly unanimous in reporting that at its inception, UATX constituted a sincere effort to establish a transformative institution, uncompromisingly committed to the fundamental values of open inquiry and free expression.
They were nearly unanimous, too, in lamenting that it had failed to achieve this lofty goal and instead become something more conventional — an institution dominated by politics and ideology that was in many ways the conservative mirror image of the liberal academy it deplored. Almost everyone attributed significant weight to President Donald Trump’s return to power in emboldening right-leaning hardliners to aggressively assert their vision and reduce UATX from something potentially profound to something decidedly mundane.
There are a lot of other issues discussed in this long article, issues like how it dealt with a sexual harassment violation, abrogating the school’s own rules for how to adjudicate violations. This all culminated in a meeting on April 2 of last year when conservative founder Joe Lonsdale laid down a right-wing law for UATX:
. . . in the afternoon, all of the professors and staff were summoned, quite unusually and mysteriously, to a closed-door meeting. It had been called by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire entrepreneur who’d co-founded the data analytics company Palantir Technologies with Thiel. Together with Ferguson and the journalist Bari Weiss, Lonsdale had been a driving force behind the creation of UATX and was a member of the board of trustees. But he wasn’t often present on campus, and it was almost unheard of for a member of the board to summon the staff, as Lonsdale had.
. . . . . “Let’s get right into it,” he said. Then, with heightened affect, Lonsdale explained his vision for UATX — a jingoistic vision with shades of America First rhetoric that contrasted rather sharply with the image UATX had cultivated as a bastion of free speech and open inquiry.
. . . “It was like a speech version of the ‘America love it or leave it’ bumper sticker,” one former staffer told me, and if you didn’t share the vision, the message was “there’s the door, you don’t belong here.” Like many of the people I spoke with for this story, the staffer was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal. “It was the most uncomfortable 35-to-40ish minutes I’ve ever experienced. People were shifting uncomfortably in their seats.”
. . .In an email I obtained that was sent to [President] Kanelos, the provost Jake Howland, the university dean Ben Crocker and a fellow professor, Morgan Marietta, Lind related what Ferguson had told him:
“According to Niall, under the constitution of UATX Joe Lonsdale, as chair of the board, had no authority to tell those of us at the meeting:
“That all staff and faculty of UATX must subscribe to the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, identity politics, and anti-Islamism (this is the first time I heard of these four principles);
“That ‘communists’ have taken over many other universities and that he, Joe Lonsdale, would stay on the board for fifty years to make sure that no ‘communists’ took over UATX (the identity politics crowd and some Islamists are a threat, but the Marxist-Leninist menace in 2025?)”
Lind said when he asked for definitions of “communists” and “socialists,” he’d been told they included anybody who didn’t “believe in private property” and “hate the rich.” This, he wrote, struck him “as a libertarian political test excluding anyone to the left of Ayn Rand.” Lonsdale had said that the board would make a case-by-case determination on whether “New Deal liberals” would be allowed to work at UATX. Lind said that he considered himself “an heir to the New Deal liberal tradition of FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ.” He was “in favor of dynamic capitalism in a mixed economy, moderately social democratic and pro-labor, and anti-progressive, anti-communist, and anti-identity politics.”
According to Lind, Londsdale repeatedly said that if the faculty weren’t comfortable with what he was saying they should quit.
“So I quit and I walked out,” Lind wrote.
A lot of the other resignations, including from notables like Strossen, Rauch, and Haidt, followed. There were emendations of the schools’ constitution, giving the President more power, and the Provost resigned, presumably after told he’d be fired.
Now things are in a mess. I sure as hell wouldn’t send a student to UATX to get a good education, for what they’ll get is a spotty but an anti-woke education. Yes, I am by and large anti-woke myself, but I am also pro-liberal-education, and by “liberal” I don’t mean “Left-wing’ but “liberating the mind”—through free inquiry.
At the end Mandery has two questions:
The first: Where was Bari Weiss? Many of the people I interviewed told me about internal conversations and shared internal emails. Weiss, who remains on the board of trustees, was almost never present in the conversations as they were related to me, and while I saw many emails on which Kanelos and Ferguson were copied, I never saw any including Weiss.
Weiss, one of the founders, was the person whose presence brought in many donations, but she seems to have absented herself from UATX. This may be because she’s burdened with running both The Free Press and CBS News, but she did not respond to a request for a comment. But wait! There’s more!:
The second question: Was UATX a hard-right project from the start? Based on my reporting, I don’t think it was. I was struck by the sincerity of the commitment to free speech and open inquiry from so many of the people with whom I spoke. A few were Trump supporters, but many more were best identified as anti-woke moderates or liberals. The university’s saga has a strong sense of historical contingency — that it could have gone quite differently had some high-leverage moments gone otherwise. A notable example is the episode surrounding Dan’s alleged violation [the sexual harassment charge] and expulsion, which several former staffers and faculty suggested was exploited by the Straussians as evidence of dysfunction in their successful second coup attempt.
So UATX, in its very first full year, was eroded by the very thing it tried to avoid: pervasive ideology in the curriculum:
When students returned for UATX’s second year, it was difficult not to notice the drift. The Tuesday night speaker series, at which attendance is mandatory, leaned unmistakably rightward — guests included Patrick Deneen, originalist judge Amul Thapar and Catherine Pakaluk, a Catholic University business school professor who’d written Hannah’s Children, about the 5 percent of American women who have five or more children.
As Mandery says, “The pluralists had lost.” Indeed. Nobody took care to forge a proper curriculum, and the right-wing bent of those who didn’t resign is forcing the school into a conservative version of Harvard—except it’s not nearly as good as any of the “elite” colleges that UATX aped.
My prediction is that the whole enterprise will fail. And if it doesn’t, it will never be a good place to send students, even though admission is based purely on meritocracy and tuition is free. Other schools may be full of left-wingers, but most of them don’t impose their views on the students in class, and it’s still possible to get a good education.
Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be UATX students.
Today we have a photo-and-text submission from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior on fly migration. It’s a subject dear to my heart as I used to work on it, publishing three papers on migration in Drosophila. Athayde’s subject, though, is hoverflies, not fruit flies. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Note: I changed Athayde’s words “hover flies” to the more common usage “hoverflies,” but Athayde notes that most entomologists use the two-word rather than one-word description.
On the road again, goin’ places that I’ve never been
Sometime between 1400 and 1200 BC, Yahweh (aka God) decided it was time to nudge the Egyptians to let their captive Israelites go. Yahweh could have tried diplomacy, but in his infinite wisdom he concluded that “The Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD”. And there was no better way to let the Pharaoh and his people know who the bigwig was around there than by punishing them with a series of plagues. Of the ten celestial disasters inflicted upon the Egyptians, two involved mosquitoes (or midges) and flies, which probably were also the agents behind another two plagues manifested as infectious diseases of people and livestock. Yahweh understood very well the efficacy of some flies (order Diptera) and pathogens to wreck revenge – after all, he created them.
The tales of pestilent flies depicted in the book of Exodus could have been inspired by real events, as pest infestations and epidemics were recurrent in the ancient world. Fly outbreaks are facilitated by these insects’ capability to disperse for long distances and arrive at new locations suddenly and in massive numbers. There are no better examples of these efficient colonisers than hoverflies or syrphid flies (family Syrphidae) such as the marmalade (Episyrphus balteatus) and the migrant (Eupeodes corollae) hoverflies. Each autumn, they leave Britain and head south to spend the winter in southern Europe and the Mediterranean. Their offspring move northwards in the spring, lay eggs, and the new generation sets out on the cycle again. Researchers have estimated that up to four billion marmalade and migrant hoverflies cross the English Channel to and from Great Britain every year. This represents 80 tons of biomass. If you are impressed by these figures, you should know that hoverflies account for a fraction of insects’ latitudinal migrations known as ‘bioflows’: about 3.5 trillion insects, or 3200 tons of biomass, migrate into southern Britain annually (Wotton et al., 2019). Insect bioflows pour vast amounts of nutrients (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus) and countless prey, predators, parasites and herbivores into ecosystems, but we have only a vague understanding of their impact on food webs and local species.
These hardy wanderers have another particularity of significant ecological importance: they transport pollen grains.
Most flies have no pollen-collecting structures and have few ‘hairs’ (setae), which are important pollen gatherers. These are negative marks for candidates to the pollinators’ club, but some flies compensate their shortcomings by their massive numbers. Each marmalade and migrant hoverfly carries an average of 10 pollen grains from up to three plant species on their journey into Britain. That’s paltry compared to a bee, but altogether, those flies bring in 3 to 8 billion pollen grains on each inward journey.
Pollen importation via flies is a recurrent phenomenon. In Cyprus, warm temperatures and favourable winds bring millions of insect migrants from the Middle East region, more than 100 km to the east. Flies make up nearly 90% of these bioflows, and many of them are loaded with pollen (Hawkes et al., 2022).
Pollen-loaded flies can turn up anywhere the wind takes them, even to specks of dry ground in the middle of nowhere. Over a two-month period, 121 marmaladehover flies reached a North Sea oil rig approximately 200 km from Aberdeen, UK. Over 90% of these flies had pollen attached to them, sometimes from eight plant species. Based on pollen barcoding and wind trajectory modelling, it was estimated that these flies traversed from 265 to 500 km of open water in a single journey, probably from the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark (Doyle et al., 2025).
Flies’ long-distance pollen transfers may help connect isolated plant populations, such as in fragmented habitats, but we don’t know much about the ecological implications. However we do know that their contribution can be important. In continental Europe, wild carrot (Daucus carota) depends on a range of insects for pollinators, especially bees. But bees are absent from La Foradada, a 1,6 ha Mediterranean islet about 50 km off the Spanish coast. In this solitary spot of land, D. carota subsp. commutatus relies on the accidental arrival of common drone flies for its pollination (Pérez-Bañón et al., 2007).
Butterflies, bumble bees, moths and dragonflies are known travellers, but we know much less about migrant flies, which may have significant roles in pollination ecology. We just have to pay more attention to these unpretentious pilgrims.
References
Doyle, T.D. et al. 2025. Long-range pollen transport across the North Sea: Insights from migratory hoverflies landing on a remote oil rig. Journal of Animal Ecology 94: 2267–2281.
Hawkes, W.S.L. et al. 2022. Huge spring migrations of insects from the Middle East to Europe: quantifying the migratory assemblage and ecosystem services. Ecography e06288.
Pérez-Bañón, C. et al., 2007. Pollination in small islands by occasional visitors: The case of Daucus carota subsp. commutatus (Apiaceae) in the Columbretes archipelago, Spain. Plant Ecology 192: 133-151.
Wotton, K.R. et al. 2019. Mass seasonal migrations of hoverflies provide extensive pollination and crop protection services. Current Biology 29: 2167–2173.
Welcome to Monday January 19, 2025, and a holiday in America: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (the third Monday in January, which guarantees everyone gets the day off). As always, I’ll put up his famous “I have a dream” speech given in Washington, D.C. Sadly, King’s sentiments are is increasingly irrelevant (see 3:12). If you’ve heard it before, listen again to these seven minutes of rhetoric heard on August 28, 1963. The film is a bit out of synch with the sound.
Google has a special Doodle for Martin Luther King Day. Click on it below to see where it goes:
In a single post on Saturday night, President Trump upended months of progress on trade negotiations with an ultimatum that puts Europe on a crash course with the United States — long its closest ally and suddenly one of its biggest threats.
In the Truth Social post, Mr. Trump demanded a deal to buy Greenland, saying that otherwise he would slap tariffs on a group of European nations, first 10 percent in February, then 25 percent in June.
It appeared to leave little room for Europe to maneuver or negotiate in a harsh and combative era of geopolitics. It also left Europe with few options to counter Mr. Trump without repercussions.
European leaders are loath to accept the forced takeover of an autonomous territory that is controlled by Denmark, a member of both NATO and the European Union.
Officials and outside analysts increasingly argue that Europe will need to respond to Mr. Trump with force — namely by hitting back on trade. But doing so could come at a heavy cost to both the bloc’s economy and its security, since Europe remains heavily reliant on the United States for support through NATO and in Russia’s war with Ukraine.
“We either fight a trade war, or we’re in a real war,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research institute in Brussels.
Europeans have spent more than a year insisting that Greenland is not for sale and have constantly repeated that the fate of the massive northern island must be decided by its people and by Denmark. Last week, a group of European nations sent personnel to Greenland for military exercises — a show of solidarity that may have triggered Mr. Trump, since the same nations are the ones to be slapped with tariffs.
. . . .In that sense, the exercises were part of an ongoing effort to placate Mr. Trump. For weeks, officials across Europe had dismissed Mr. Trump’s threats to take Greenland, even by military force, as unlikely. Many saw them more as negotiating tactics and hoped that they could satisfy the American president with a willingness to beef up defense and spending on Greenland.
But Mr. Trump’s fixation on owning the island and his escalating rhetoric is crushing European hopes that appeasement and dialogue will work. Scott Bessent, the American Treasury secretary, doubled down on that message in a Sunday morning interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
American ownership of Greenland would be “best for Greenland, best for Europe and best for the United States,” Mr. Bessent said, suggesting that would be the case even if Greenland were taken by military force.
I can’t believe this. We do not need to own Greenland and I apologize to my European friends for Trump’s derangement: a fixation that seems to have suddenly emerged from of nowhere. We could have half a dozen military bases there, and that should satisfy any rational person. The danger of Russia and China taking over the country is nil, nor are their ships swarming around Greenland. With a couple more bases on Greenland and the presence American submarines, already in the area, that should be enough. We’re already going to be in a trade war, but our so-called President of Peace is going down a road that could get the U.S. involved in a war with NATO. I hope that Republicans can join with Democrats to stop this mishigass.
*The tweet below was scary, but I was a bit loath to believe it. It turns out it’s true, and a sad testimony to a failure of immigrants to live according to the standards of the European country they came to: in this case the Netherlands.
125 migrants were put in housing with 125 Dutch students, in hopes of integrating them faster. Instead Dutch kids got raped and beaten.
One girl, said: “He wanted to learn Dutch, to get an education. I wanted to help him.”
The municipality of Amsterdam saw the Stek Oost housing project as the dream solution to the housing shortage: refugees and young people together under one roof. But it goes wrong: stabbings, confused behavior, and sexual violence. Zembla reconstructs how the housing experiment could derail so badly.
De gemeente Amsterdam zag het woonproject Stek Oost als de gedroomde oplossing voor het woningtekort: statushouders en jongeren samen onder één dak. Maar het gaat mis: steekpartijen, verward gedrag en seksueel geweld. Zembla reconstrueert hoe het woonexperiment zo kon ontsporen. pic.twitter.com/fswCpFOSLb
I have checked with my friends in Amsterdam, who, along with Maarten Boudry (who reads Dutch), have verified the story and sent me links. The story in the Daily Mail is here, at Great Britain’s news channel is here, and a documentary video (alas, in Dutch) is here.
From The Daily Fail:
Terrified Dutch students made to live side-by-side with 125 refugees to aid their ‘integration’ were subjected to years of sexual assault and violence, an investigation has reported.
Stek Oost, located in the Watergraafsmeer district of Amsterdam, was sold to the Netherlands as the dream solution to the housing and refugee crisis.
A total of 125 students and 125 refugees would live alongside each other, and were even encouraged to ‘buddy up’ so the migrants would adapt to life in the Netherlands more quickly.
But students living there told Dutch investigative documentary programme Zembla they faced multiple sexual assaults, harassment, violence, stalking and even claimed a gang rape had taken place.
One woman said she would regularly see ‘fights in the hallway and then again in the shared living room’.
A man told the programme that a refugee threatened him with an eight-inch kitchen knife.
And they claimed they were ignored despite filing multiple reports to authorities.
In one shocking case, a former resident said that a Syrian raped her after inviting her to his room to watch a film then refusing to let her leave.
The woman, identified only as Amanda, said: ‘He wanted to learn Dutch, to get an education. I wanted to help him.’
Amanda described how he asked her several times to come to his room. She eventually relented and agreed to watch a film with him.
However, he soon made her uncomfortable and she asked to leave, only for him to trap her in his room and sexually abuse her.
Despite her filing a police report following the incident in 2019, police dropped the case due to a lack of evidence.
But just six months later, another woman living in Stek Oost raised the alarm over the Syrian, telling the housing association that runs the complex that she was concerned for the safety of herself and other women living there.
But the local authority, which had set up the arrangement, claimed it was impossible for the man to be evicted, the Zembla documentary claims.
It was only when he was formally arrested in March 2022 that he left the student-refugee complex. He was later convicted of raping Amanda and another resident, and was sentenced to just three years in prison in 2024.
Carolien de Heer, district chair of the East district of Amsterdam, where Stek Oost is located, claimed it was legally difficult to remove people from these blocks: ‘You see unacceptable behaviour, and people get scared.
‘But legally, that’s often not enough to remove someone from their home or impose mandatory care. You keep running into the same obstacles.’
. . .For its part, Stadgenoot wanted to shut the complex down as early as 2023, but the local authority refused.
It will, however, be shut down by 2028 after the contract to run the site expires.
There are other stories of gang rapes, and what strikes me (and one Dutch person I know) is that the government ignores these things for two reasons: they regard immigrants as more or less sacred (or at least untouchable), and the authorities have no idea about how “assimilation is proceeding”. (The second possibility is less credible when there have been reports about it. It is incidents like these, repeated in other European countries, which largely explains the turning of Europe towards right-wing politicians.
The Pentagon has ordered about 1,500 active-duty soldiers to prepare for a possible deployment to Minnesota, defense officials told The Washington Post late Saturday, after President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to unrest there.
The soldiers are assigned to two infantry battalions with the Army’s 11th Airborne Division, which is based in Alaska and specializes in cold-weather operations.
The Army placed the units on prepare-to-deploy orders in case violence in Minnesota escalates, officials said, characterizing the move as “prudent planning.” It is not clear whether any of them will be sent to the state, the officials said, speaking like some others on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military planning.
The White House said in a statement that it’s typical for the Pentagon “to be prepared for any decision the President may or may not make.” Sean Parnell, a spokesman for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, said in a statement Sunday that the Pentagon is “always prepared to execute the orders of the Commander-in-Chief if called upon.” Two officials said that the orders are unrelated to Trump’s recent rhetoric about the United States needing to take control of Greenland.
. . .Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey on Sunday called the federal government’s surge of immigration enforcement officials, and the possible deployment of active-duty soldiers, an attempt to “bait” protesters in the city.
“We’re not going to give them an excuse to do the thing that clearly they’re trying to set up to do right now, which is these 1,500 troops,” Frey told CNN. “I never thought in a million years that we would be invaded by our own federal government.”
The Insurrection Act, a federal law dating to 1807, permits the president to take control of a state’s National Guard forces or deploy active-duty troops domestically in response to a “rebellion.” Invoking the act would be an extraordinary move and mark the first time a commander in chief has done so since President George H.W. Bush called on the military during the Los Angeles riots of 1992 that killed dozens of people and caused widespread destruction.
Typically, invoking the Insurrection Act is considered a last resort, when law enforcement personnel are unable to keep the peace during times of civil unrest.
Neither the Army nor the National Guard, with the latter already called up,. have experience in law enforcement. Given that many of the Minnesota protestors are already bent on keeping ICE from apprehending immigrants, you can imagine yet another bloody clash—and that’s on top of our threats to Iran, attacks on Venezuelan ships, threats to Greenland, and what is likely to be a clash between Hamas and Gaza’s new governing board (more on that tomorrow). If protestors would stop impeding ICE from doing its job, and just protest peacefully (and no, that’s not an exculpation of the agent who killed Renée Good), and if ICE would take off their masks and use force only when necessary, then this could be over soon, as it pretty much is in Chicago.
*There’s a column in the NYT called “An old theory helps explain what happened to Renee Good” by David French. It turns out that the old theory comes from James Madison. First, French shows the hopelessness of those who want an investigation of the Renée Good killing:
Imagine for a moment that you’re a member of Renee Good’s family. You’re mourning her death at the hands of an ICE agent in Minneapolis, and you want justice.
So you visit a lawyer to see what can be done.
First, you want to help in any criminal investigation of the officer. You’ve got information about Good’s intentions when she protested ICE activities — information you think might be relevant to prosecutors looking into the case.
“I’m sorry,” the lawyer replies. “The administration has already declared that the agent did no wrong, and the Justice Department’s civil rights division hasn’t opened an investigation into whether the agent violated Renee’s constitutional rights.
“Federal officials are, however, investigating Renee and may investigate her family, so you might need a defense lawyer.”
You didn’t have high hopes that the Trump administration would hold anyone accountable, but surely the next administration could? There’s no statute of limitations for murder, right?
“I’m sorry,” the lawyer replies. “Given President Trump’s past pardons, I’d say it’s quite possible that he’ll pardon the agent. And once he pardons the agent, he’s beyond the reach of federal law for the shooting.”
But there’s state law, right? You’ve seen the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, speak out. Tim Walz, the governor, is furious. Murder is still against the law in Minnesota.
“I’m sorry,” the lawyer replies, “but there is only a small chance that will work. There is a doctrine called supremacy clause immunity that prohibits state officials from prosecuting federal officers when they’re reasonably acting in their official capacity. It’s not absolute immunity like the administration claims, but it’s still a high hurdle for any prosecution to overcome.”
We can still sue the officer, can’t we? Even if the government can’t or won’t prosecute, we’ll still want to hold him liable.
“I’m sorry,” the lawyer replies, “but there is almost no chance that will work. There’s a federal statute that gives you the ability to sue state and local officials when they violate your constitutional rights, but there’s no equivalent law granting the right to sue federal officials for the same reasons.
“In 1971,” the lawyer continues, “the Supreme Court created a path for plaintiffs to sue federal officials for violations of their constitutional rights. Since then, however, the court has limited the reach of that case, and it is now extremely difficult to sue when the federal government violates your civil rights.”
This all leads up to the “lesson” imparted by Madison in a Federalist essay: we need both internal and external checks and balances on government. And we don’t have them, at least in practice:
Madison’s next words were crucial. “A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
In the Trump era, those auxiliary precautions have utterly failed. They’ve been undermined to the point where the reverse is now true. Rather than providing additional precautions against the rise of authoritarian rule, American law and precedent seem to presume that angels govern men, and those angels would be free to do even more good if only they possessed a free hand.
Like many, I am wondering how we got to this point, and, of course, how we get out of it. Protests are not enough, and the courts, while they do their best, are impotent before the Trump-approving Supreme Court. What about Congress? It’s dominated by Republicans who are in lockstep with Trump, and they will do nothing. They will not stop wars that may be illegal, and they certainly won’t impeach Trump. Congress thus seems impotent. When one feels powerless, as many of us do, it creates anxiety, and believe me—I’m anxious and low. When Machado gave her Nobel Prize medal to Trump, that crushed the last faith in humanity that I have.
. . . . The tricky part of all this for America’s opposition party is that it’s a grave political sin to assume that voters know things. (Some voters know pretty much nothing.) The art of democracy is educating people on the issues, convincing them that your position is the right one, and steering the electoral conversation toward subjects where the majority is on your side. Messaging, messaging, messaging: There’s a reason every elected official in Washington has a communications staff.
That being so, one could argue that Democrats should be devoting more time and money to highlighting ICE’s abuses and opposing Greenland’s seizure. They’re hot topics, and most adults agree with the left on the merits, which means they’re a no-brainer for midterm ad campaigns. Right?
I don’t think so, for a simple reason. If Americans still think of themselves as the good guys, not much needs to be said about either issue; if Americans no longer think of themselves as the good guys, nothing Democrats say will matter.
So apparently we don’t think of ourselves as the good guys. Why? Because, I guess, Trump represents “America” to the world. But French is a bit wonky because many individuals still think of themselves as the good guys.
. . . .The 2024 election blackpilled me about our country’s virtue, as regular readers know. An ex-president whose last major act during his first term was to attempt an autogolpe was returned to office because swing voters hoped he’d reduce prices at the supermarket.
George Washington’s heirs elected a fascist in exchange for cheaper groceries. (Oops.) The lesson going forward, inescapably, is that if your party has an advantage on kitchen-table issues, it would be insane to run on anything else. Especially appeals to civic conscience, which is what messaging about ICE’s brutality or respecting Denmark’s sovereignty would necessarily involve.
Last week Politico asked Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, how Democrats should address the capture of Nicolás Maduro and the White House’s exploitation of Venezuela this fall. They shouldn’t, Emanuel replied—except to use the subject as another example of Trump losing the plot on affordability. His recommended line of attack: “The president wants to focus on Venezuela? Democrats are focused on Virginia. He wants to talk about what’s happening in Caracas? I want to talk about what’s happening in Columbus.”
Seems right to me. If “he’s a fascist” didn’t work in the last election, why would it work in the next one? If the winds on managing the cost of living have shifted to favor Democrats, why would they trim their sails and squander such a momentous advantage by focusing on anything else? Pivoting to other issues would signal that the party still has yet to learn its own lesson about the primacy of affordability after the debacle of 2024, a political gift to the White House.
Well, the economy isn’t doing badly though the price of groceries has outpaced inflation. My concern is that running on the price of groceries alone, and ignoring inflation and ignoring the fact that the economy is indeed growing, is a losing cause for Democrates. Rahm’s message is that of James Carville in Clinton’s 1992 campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” But the economy isn’t bad and can Democrats win on the high price of eggs?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is apparently anti-China:
Hili: Did he catch a scent of something?
Szaron: A Chinese computer mouse.
In Polish:
Hili: Coś tam wywęszył?
Szaron: Chińską mysz komputerową.
*******************
Remember Laura Helmuth, former editor of Scientific American who woke-ified the magazine and, after an epic Twitter bout of cursing and unhinged ranting on the last election night, she parted ways with the magazine. What happened to her? Well, she’s now an advice columnist for Slate magazine, which of course will not fire her for being woke because the site is, as they say, “progresive”. But her anger persists, and comes out sometimes, as you can see on this public Facebook note about gardening—from 2025.
Simon sent this, which saddens me because it reminds me of Maria Machado, hamhanded act with her Nobel medal. (I’ve used a linked screenshot because, again, I can’t post the original BlueHair post.). It is, of course, made with AI:
From Malcolm; I think this couple is in trouble, but it could be a set-up:
Two Hungarian Jewish children were gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. They were four and six years old. The girl, Sarolta, would be 86 years old today had she lived. https://t.co/Jwg0vudnlW
Can confirm, British people do be like this.#Meme #Funny #VennDiagram #British #Ant #Insects #BritishPeople #Joke #LOL #WhyDoHashtagsWorkWtf #LikeThisPostOrElseTheBritishAreComing #BritishPeopleBeLike
Matthew says this of this post: “There’s a big argument on Reddit and on Bsky as to whether this is real or AI. I don’t know and I don’t care as it’s clearly staged one way or another and is still funny. If it’s AI, props to whoever came up with the repeated cycle of prompts!
Here we have an 83-minute interview of Matthew Crick by Michael Shermer; the topic is Francis Crick as described in Matthew’s new book Crick: A Mind in Motion. Talking to a friend last night, I realized that the two best biographies of scientists I’ve read are Matthew’s book and Janet Browne’s magisterial two-volumebiography of Darwin (the two-book set is a must-read, and I recommend both, though Princeton will issue in June a one-volume condensation).
At any rate, if you want to get an 83-minute summary of Matthew’s book, or see if you want to read the book, as you should, have a listen to Matthew’s exposition at the link below. I have recommended his and Browne’s books because they’re not only comprehensive, but eminently readable, and you can get a sense of Matthew’s eloquence by his off-the-cuff discussion with Shermer.
Click below to listen.
I’ve put the cover below because Shermer mentions it at the outset of the discussion:
I now have two sets of photos after this one, but I’m still nervous. If you have good wildlife photos, please sent them in. Thanks!
It’s been a cold week in Chicago (right now it’s 9°F or -13°C), and it’s going to be cold this coming week as well. I hope the turtles at the bottom of Botany Pond are okay. But given the weather it’s appropriate that today we have photographs of Antarctica from reader Paul Turpin. Paul’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
My brother Mark recently returned from a cruise to the Antarctic on the Scenic Eclipse. I told him you loved penguins and he gave me permission to send you these photos. I believe these are all gentoo penguins [Pygoscelis papua] except for one which included a chinstrap friend [Pygoscelis antarcticus]. The open water photo is when they were at the Antarctic Circle.
Welcome to the Sabbath that is made for cats, not cats for the Sabbath: it’s Sunday, January 18, 2026 and National Winnie The Pooh day, commemorating the birthday of A. A. Milne in 1882. Christopher Robin Milne‘s stuffed toys that served as inspiration for the books still exist, as you see below. Note Eeyore, my favorite character and personal spirit animal (I put in the arrow). Pooh Bear is there, along with Eeyore, Kanga and Tigger. You can see them at the New York Public Library, an odd place for them to wind up.
A federal judge in Minnesota imposed restrictions on the actions of immigration agents toward protesters in the state on Friday, a decision that comes after weeks of mounting tension between demonstrators and federal officers.
Judge Kate M. Menendez ordered agents not to retaliate against people “engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity,” and not to use pepper spray or other “crowd dispersal tools” in retaliation for protected speech. The judge also said agents could not stop or detain protesters in vehicles who were not “forcibly obstructing or interfering with” agents.
The ruling, which granted a preliminary injunction, stems from a lawsuit brought by activists who said agents had violated their rights. The suit was filed before an immigration agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7.
Ms. Good, 37, had partially blocked a roadway where agents were working and did not follow commands to get out of her S.U.V. As she began to drive, an agent near the front of her car opened fire.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement responding to the injunction that “D.H.S. is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous rioters.”
She said agents had faced assaults, had fireworks launched at them and had the tires of their vehicles slashed. She added that despite “grave threats,” agents had “followed their training and used the minimum amount of force necessary to protect themselves, the public and federal property.”
Ms. McLaughlin did not say whether the department planned to appeal the ruling.
The judge also said, ““the court’s injunction does nothing to prevent defendants from continuing to enforce immigration laws.” All this seems perfectly proper. What I don’t know, having not been on the scene, is how often protestors do violate the law or obstruct agents from doing their job, which I don’t think is a rare event. The poster below, which urges protestors to violate the law in several ways, is said to have been put out by the group Minnesota Ice Watch. I can’t vouch for its reality, nor am I excusing the ICE agent who killed Renée Good, and there are posters, like one put out by the Minnesota ACLU, that do apprise people of their rights without urging them to act illegally. Still, I suspect that at least a moiety of the protestors hope to incite violence by doing things like obstructing the vehicles of law enforcement or helping suspects escape arrest. So long as these things don’t happen, though, there’s no excuse for firing tear gas or flashbang devices, much less firing guns.
The Trump administration has opened a criminal investigation into elected Democrats in Minnesota, according to a senior law enforcement official familiar with the matter, a major escalation in the fight between the federal government and local officials over the aggressive immigration crackdown underway in the city.
The investigation would focus on allegations that Gov. Tim Walz and Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, had conspired to impede thousands of federal agents who have been sent to the city since last month. Last week, one of those agents killed a 37-year-old woman, Renee Good.
It remained unclear what investigative steps have been taken. The senior law enforcement official said subpoenas had yet to be issued, but could be in the days to come. Both Mr. Walz and Mr. Frey responded with combative statements on Friday night, denouncing what they said was a weaponized use of law enforcement power and promising to stand firm in the face of the administration’s efforts.
“Weaponizing the justice system and threatening political opponents is a dangerous, authoritarian tactic,” Mr. Walz said in a statement released by his office, which said it had not yet received notice of an investigation. “The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.”
Mr. Frey described the investigation as an “obvious attempt to intimidate” him, but vowed it would not work.
“America depends on leaders that use integrity and the rule of the law as the guideposts for governance,” he said. “Neither our city nor our country will succumb to this fear. We stand rock solid.”
. . . the growing public protests in Minneapolis have angered President Trump, who has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and send the military into the city. In a social media post on Thursday, Mr. Trump called the protesters in Minnesota “professional agitators,” but offered no evidence to support his claims against what by most accounts are ordinary citizens.
On Friday, however, Mr. Trump appeared to back away from his threat.
“I don’t think I need it right now,” he told reporters, referring to the Insurrection Act.
I suspect this will come to nothing; I don’t even know what laws Walz and Frey are supposed to have violated. Conspiring to impede the action of federal officers? Yes, that could be a violation, but I suspect this is another example of Trump’s bluster and will come to nothing. After all, it’s an investigation, and charges haven’t been filed.
During President Trump’s first term, Delcy Rodríguez was a pariah.
The administration sanctioned Rodríguez, then vice president to autocrat Nicolás Maduro, citing corruption and mismanagement that left the country’s economy in tatters. She oversaw the intelligence agency that rounded up and tortured dissidents. And she blamed U.S. sanctions, not the regime’s socialist rule, for hunger and shortages of medicine.
Now, Trump has made her the U.S.’s primary partner in Venezuela since the ouster of Maduro in a military raid on Jan. 3.
The decision has an obvious upside for Trump: He avoids a military occupation of Venezuela, necessary to install a new, democratic leader.
But it also puts Trump into partnership with a canny Venezuelan politician who, along with her brother Jorge, leader of the National Assembly, has scraped her way to the top with a mix of guile and pragmatism. Rodríguez is guiding Venezuela on an unknown path, but one with a potentially huge payoff for her.
Andrés Izarra, a former minister under Maduro who now lives in exile, said those who believe her to be committed to leftist ideology misunderstand her. He said the primary goal of Rodríguez and her brother is to rule Venezuela.
“Their only principle is power,” Izarra said. “If they need to be capitalist, they will be capitalist.”
Whatever her ideology, diplomats and former regime officials said they expect she’ll do what is needed to survive—not necessarily in a way that would get Trump what he wanted.
“It’s a big mistake to underestimate her,” said Thomas A. Shannon Jr., a former high-ranking State Department official who negotiated regularly with Rodríguez. “Delcy is no dummy.”
So far, Rodríguez has outmaneuvered her main rival, the exiled opposition leader María Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year and whose party won presidential elections in 2024 that Maduro and Rodríguez ignored. Trump met Machado for a private lunch Thursday and accepted her Nobel medal but didn’t appear publicly with her and has dismissed her ability to run the country.
Note that Rodriguez “oversaw the intelligence agency that rounded up and tortured dissidents. And she blamed U.S. sanctions, not the regime’s socialist rule, for hunger and shortages of medicine.” Just running that intelligence agency is sufficient to bar her from running the country, but somehow Trump is in her thrall. I have no idea why; she seems the worst possible replacement for Maduro, especially when compared to Edmundo González or María Corina Machado. González actually won an election against Maduro, and should be the acting President (there’s the nagging question of the country’s military, though). And Machado, in a sad attempt to court Trump, gave him her Nobel Peace Prize Medal (18-karat gold!). Now Trump can say he has a Nobel Prize (figuratively but not literally) while the country continues to be governed by the remnants of the previous dictatorship.
In 2013, Marriott announced that it would transition to cage-free eggs at all of its properties worldwide. It renewed the pledge in 2018, vowing to meet the goal by the end of 2025. But as the deadline approached, activists began to question whether the company would keep its word. Then they began to protest, with demonstrations as far-flung as Thailand, India and Brazil.
Marriott released an update in May that said that the company was “working closely” on its cage-free-egg sourcing efforts and was “pleased with the progress that has been made,” but that it had not achieved its goal. In fact, it was not even close. The company, which has a portfolio of more than 9,300 properties and 30 brands in 144 countries and territories, alluded to challenges posed by avian flu and the global supply chain.
Activists were not satisfied.
Organizations and grassroots groups started ramping up awareness campaigns. They staged more protests in the United States and abroad. They built a website that featured grotesque artificial-intelligence-generated images of Marriott International CEO Anthony Capuano surrounded by bloody feathers and dead chickens.
Marriott declined interview requests and said it did not have more information to share beyond a recent statement that reported that 47 percent of egg purchases in its franchised hotels in the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean and Latin America were cage-free by the end of 2024. The statement said 92 percent of egg purchases for Marriott-managed properties in the U.S. were cage-free.
You don’t want to go to that website if you don’t want to see the abuse suffered by battery chickens. And I’ve seen video of male chicks being ground up alive, for, after all, only hens lay eggs. I have to admit that I don’t check on my eggs, though I have bought free-range chicken eggs, but I should check more closely, and admit that I’m hypocritical in this respect.
Many people wish they could spend more time with their dogs.
Director Ben Leonberg took that idea to extraordinary lengths, spending three years making the horror movie “Good Boy” with his dog, Indy, as the protagonist.
“I feel incredibly lucky that I was able to make a movie where I essentially just got to play with my dog,” Leonberg, 38, told The Washington Post.
One scene in the film shows Indy getting caught in a snare. On his back, Indy vigorously shakeshis body to try to escape.
In reality, Indy was enjoying a blissful moment while shooting, wiggling during a belly rub from Leonberg.
Through editing and ominous music, Leonberg helped make Indy look frightened and desperate. The suspenseful movie follows Indy as he protects his owner from evil forces only the dog can see.
The Astra Film Awards have been going since 2018, and I have to say that I’m not impressed with their selections. But giving a dg an acting award raises a serious philosophical question: how can a dg deserve such an ward if it’s not acting. It’s all AI and tummy-tickling! I can imagine how the five losers felt when they were beaten out by a mutt. But kudos to the mutt; I hope he got some treats alongside the plaque.
From Masih, we hear Iran’s chief prosecutor saying that they’re not withholding punishment of protestors. It was that idea that made Trump stay his hand. Someone should show him this video:
Regime in Iran responds to president @realDonaldTrump with threat of execution 800 protesters.
Ali Salehi, Tehran’s chief prosecutor, dismissed comments by Donald Trump regarding a reported halt to executions, saying Iran’s response would be “firm, deterrent, and swift.”
Islamic… pic.twitter.com/0jwUyIq0vt
From Simon: live and learn. Hamsun gave his Nobel Prize to Goebbels! And I’ve read Hamsun. I can’t embed the tweet, but click on it if you want to go to the post:
The Number Ten cat shows a conspecific individual gamboling in the snow:
This Polish girl, born in 1928, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp along with her mother in December 1942 as part of the repression against Polish citizens. Just a few months later, on February 18, 1943, Czesława was murdered at the age of 14 with a phenol injection… pic.twitter.com/uoTEIMB60S
And of this Dr. Cobb says, “A thread on the possibility of life on Europa which now looks less likely 🙁 “
New paper alert!tl;dr: the seafloor of Europa is probably tectonically inert, meaning little to no active fracturing that could expose fresh rock to seawater.Without such water–rock reactions the prospect for there being life within Europa just took a big hit.A thread:
