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.
In his latest “New Rules” report, Bill Maher takes on immigration, favoring it but promoting assimilation, all while defending liberal American values—values like supporting gay and women’s rights, even when they class with religious (in this case Muslim) values.
One issue: Maher seems to defend the practices of different cultures, like child marriages, so long as they’re not practiced in America. In other words, his message seems to be one promoting cultural relativism, so that things we consider odious might be okay on their home ground. Now I know Maher doesn’t believe in child marriage, honor killing, genital mutilaiton, and the like, but it would have been nice had he said that these things are wrong everywhere, even if they’re not considered wrong everywhere. Others might object to his criticism of accepting immigrants who come to the U.S. for economic reasons.
All in all, it’s a pretty good piece though the apparent cultural relativism spoils it a bit.
For this edition we include the Sun and Moon as wildlife, as Jan Malik reports on the solar eclipse of April, 2024. Jan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Oh, and Google “solar eclipse 2024” and see what you get!
The recent total solar eclipse in Europe reminded me of the Great North American Eclipse of April 8, 2024, which I had the opportunity to observe from the Adirondack Mountains of New York.
After spending the night in the back of my truck, I set off early in the morning toward the summit of Whiteface Mountain. This being early April, the roads and trails were still snowbound, which allowed for decent skiing. Whiteface Mountain, like Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, features a scenic toll road open in the summer. In winter, this path converts into a gentle, 5-mile cross-country ski course, safe even for bungling skiers like myself. I met another skier on my way up; our goal for the day was to reach the summit before 1 p.m., when the eclipse was about to begin:
The area was still quite snowy, and the summit observatory building was plastered solidly with snow:
In the summer, Whiteface Mountain is a tourist attraction and one of the few places in the USA where you can see the metric system at work:
The toll road winds up the mountain at a steady 8-degree incline. If you look closely, you can spot three hikers making their way up. Our main concern for the day was to pick an outlook with a clear view of the sky. Adirondack weather is notoriously unpredictable, but we were lucky that day, with only some wispy clouds in the sky:
As predicted, at about 1 p.m. we could see the Moon bite off a small piece of the Sun. All observations of the Sun must be done through a dark solar filter, except during totality. The filter I had bought was not of very high quality; it had an orange cast and severe dispersion issues:
After about half an hour, little remained of the Sun in my viewfinder:
Even with 99% of the Sun covered, it was still bright outside, but the light had an unusual, unsettling quality—quite subdued, but with a color temperature equal to normal daylight. Normally, we experience diminished light only at sunset or sunrise, when the color temperature shifts toward red, but here it happened almost at high noon. The picture doesn’t fully convey that experience; you have to see it to understand the strangeness of the moment:
Then it happened. Seemingly within a single second, the light went out, as if someone had flipped a giant switch, and what we saw above our heads no longer resembled our familiar day star. That was the only time we could observe the Sun with the naked eye. It is not a sensation easily described by words, but I—and I am sure everyone else—was stunned and overwhelmed by this transition from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. If you look closely, there are a few solar prominences visible in the lower half of the Sun’s disk, each of them larger than the Earth’s diameter:
Totality in this part of the Adirondacks lasted a full 3 minutes and 20 seconds, and that time passed quickly. Everyone was absorbed in the moment, trying to capture as much of it as possible, both in memory and on their devices. It became noticeably colder, and the only non-human animal present—a pet dog—started barking, unable to comprehend why the world had changed so abruptly:
We were in the so-called umbra (totality), but in the distance we could clearly see the distant horizon glowing where the shadow ended, marking the transition back to partial daylight:
The Sun high above frozen Lake Placid:
I was not prepared for the momentary shock of transitioning from the commonplace to the unworldly and let my photographic guard down, missing the “diamond ring” effect, where the Sun begins to shine again from behind the Moon’s cover. But some moments in life should be savored by observing rather than documenting:
The “diamond ring” lasts only a second or two, and after that, the switch is turned back on and the light reappears. The thermal death of the universe having been averted, it is back to using the filter to protect both eyesight and the camera:
As a bonus picture, here is the entire sequence of the Moon passing in front of the Sun’s surface over 2 hours. The colors are a bit uneven due to an unfortunate choice of camera settings—live and learn. The black specks are sunspots:
At the beginning of that day, I was curious if the hype surrounding the eclipse was somewhat inflated by the tourism lobby or if it was something truly worth seeing. In the afternoon, skiing down the toll road while trying to control my emotions, I knew that it was a mind-altering event that everyone should experience once in their life. I was lucky that it happened in my Adirondack backyard, with hassle-free access and familiar surroundings, but I would now travel far just to see one. The next eclipse, with an exceptionally long totality of more than 6 minutes, will occur over North Africa, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia on August 2, 2027. People will be streaming in by the hundreds of thousands to see it, but crowds or not, I promise you will not regret it. Now is a good time to start making travel arrangements.
Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s back to work we go. Yes, it’s another Monday and the beginning of the “work” week for those who take weekends off; to be precise it’s August 17, 2026 and National #2 Pencil Day, celebrating the only pencil worth using. (I cannot abide mechanical pencils.) Here’s how they’re made, but the process is the same for the unusable #1 and #3 pencils, too. This ten-minute video is quite informative, showing that the pencil number depends on the ratio of graphite to clay in the pencil’s core.
Here’s the first photo in: Kira’s black cat named “Gitel”:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 17 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal describes the toll that constant fighting is taking on the IDF. The piece is called “The price of showing up.”
It’s Sunday, August 16, and “I met a young conscript during reserve duty who told me he could not see any future,” said Ori Oberman, a reservist and one of the authors of a new Taub Center study examining the expected impact of prolonged service on reservists and their families. “The young soldier knows that once he is discharged, he will be called up for reserve duty again and again. He cannot see his future.”
It’s been over 1,000 days since October 7, and for many, the time has been marked by days back and forth from reserve duty, some serving as many as 400 days—more than a year. The average reservist, who served 233 days, is expected to lose nearly 5 percent of their salary in the long term, the report reveals. Among reservists who are fathers and served between 290 and 320 days—a population the researchers said numbers more than 100,000 people—the expected salary loss is about 6 percent. Under more severe estimates, the damage to wages could reach about 20 percent. These are prime working years, drawn from the most productive stretch of a working life.
Among salaried spouses, 30 percent reported a hit to their pay and 3 percent were simply fired. Among the self-employed, 73 percent said their business suffered. And non-employment among reservists’ spouses jumped 40 percent between the autumn of 2023 and the spring of 2025—while the comparable figure for women whose partners stayed home didn’t move at all.
Roughly 70,000 students served in 2024/25. Among Jews and others, enrollment dropped below its 2018/19 baseline for the first time—and it fell hardest on women aged 22 to 24 and men aged 25 to 29, the very ages that set the academic and professional track for life.
. . . Underneath it all sits Israel’s version of the “affordability” issue—a pressure most families are feeling that politicians believe will be the hinge issue of the election; fitting for a country in which cost of living has always been secondary to security in voting priorities. Every party, with the notable exception of the ultra-Orthodox, has signaled toward easing the burden: financial compensation, housing benefits, promises of Haredi service. The war on all fronts will likely not be changed by the election, but the conditions of service likely will be—regardless of who wins.
. . After many of America’s recent wars, the question that greeted returning soldiers was how to relate to those who had sacrificed for a conflict that was deemed unnecessary or was simply unpopular. Israel’s question is simpler and harder: how to keep asking for sacrifice without breaking the people who answer.
How often do people wonder about the conditions under which the IDF works, including the requirement that reservists have to serve if needed? On top of that, they are demonized everywhere they go outside of Israel. At least Israel should make the ultra-Orthodox serve, as there is no excuse for making the hyper-religious exempt from defending their country. You don’t defend it by reading the Torah.
A movement of young, progressive outsiders has stormed Democratic politics this year, sparking a wave of contentious primary contests across the country and fueling a fraught debate over whether these new, left-wing candidates are remaking the party in their image.
But as primary season winds to a close, the results reveal not only the strength but also the potential limitations of this insurgent movement.
In Minnesota last week, Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor, won a Senate primary by a double-digit margin, pressing a fiercely progressive message to defeat a more moderate opponent. Just a week earlier, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a left-leaning Democrat, won a Senate primary in Michigan despite being vastly outspent. And Francesca Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, came close to winning a primary for governor in Wisconsin, falling short by less than one percentage point.
The results marked a new level of political strength for candidates affiliated with a resurgent, activist left, showing that their movement can be competitive in statewide primaries, well beyond deep-blue House districts.
. . .Yet while a vocal group of strategists, activists and college-educated voters have raced to embrace these pugnacious, boldly liberal — and in some cases untested — candidates, some of the voters who have historically been most crucial to the party’s fortunes remain skeptical.
In Michigan and Wisconsin, both pivotal battleground states, the progressive candidates appeared to have struggled to sway voters who have long been the backbone of the party — including Black, more moderate and older Americans who vote reliably.
As left-wing candidates have notched victories in primary after primary, many progressives hope they will be able to move the Democratic Party further to the left—mirroring, in some ways, how the rise of the Tea Party movement nearly two decades ago pushed the Republican Party much further to the right. But the results raise questions about whether these candidates can piece together a broad enough coalition of Democrats, independents and moderates to win general elections in swing states that could determine whether Democrats are able to regain power in Congress and, eventually, the White House.
. . . The candidates share some unifying principles: Support for “Medicare for all,” opposition to A.I. data centers, a commitment to ending corporate money in politics and a view that opposition to American support for Israel is a moral litmus test, fueled by a belief that the Gaza war amounted to a genocide.\
Not really much new here: progressives have won a surprisingly large number of races, but many of those are primary races. I’d vote for most progressives over nearly all Republicans, but I’d rather not hold my nose when I vote. I tend to adhere to what’s near the end of this article:
“People are less willing to trust the political class and what we think is electable,” said Lauren Hitt, a Democratic strategist who has worked for candidates across the ideological spectrum. “They’re looking for people who break the mold, but if you break the mold so much that you’re eccentric, that’s not the solution either.”
*At the Free Press, Jed Jed Rubenfeld (a professor of law at Yale), claims that “Mangione pleaded guilty to stalking. He’s still on the hook for murder,” something that people here have argued about. (The federal and state charges are said by some to constitute prohibited double jeopardy.) So can there be a state trial for second-degree murder? Rubenfeld says the answer may be “yes”:
Technically, while Mangione admitted stalking resulting in the death of Thompson, he did not plead guilty to killing him, because that was not the charge he faced in federal court. (There were murder charges in the original federal indictment, but those charges were dismissed on technical grounds back in January.) Instead, Mangione pleaded guilty to “stalking” Thompson with the intent of killing him.
We don’t know yet what sentence Mangione will receive. What we do know is that Mangione’s New York state court murder trial is set to begin on September 8. The timing of the surprise federal guilty plea strongly suggests that Mangione’s lawyers intend to argue that the state trial is now barred by double jeopardy, and according to some reports, they have already filed motion papers on this basis seeking dismissal of the state charges. “One plus one is two,” Mangione told reporters last February. “This is double jeopardy by any common-sense definition.”
It’s a little complicated, but I think this argument is a loser.
Rubenfeld then discusses Mangione’s “fawning supporters,” a group that is utterly despicable. He’s got thousands of love letters from women, and Rubenfeld doesn’t think Mangione’s guilty plea will turn them off. After all, the evidence against him seemed pretty strong. At first it looks as if Mangione has a good case against double jeopardy:
The U.S. Constitution’s Double Jeopardy Clause protects people from being convicted twice for the same offense. On its face, that might seem to apply to Mangione.
But as a constitutional matter, Mangione’s federal guilty plea has absolutely no effect on his New York trial. This rule is called the “dual sovereignty” doctrine. Because the United States and New York are different governments—different “sovereigns”—federal crimes and state crimes are different offenses for constitutional purposes, and the Double Jeopardy Clause therefore does not apply.
But Mangione has another, stronger argument—under state law. States are allowed to give people more protection than the federal Constitution does, and New York happens to have an unusual double jeopardy statute that does so. Under New York’s statute, the dual sovereignty doctrine does not apply. If a person pleads guilty to a crime in federal court, the state can’t prosecute him for the very same crime in a state court.
The argument is a bit convoluted:
But wait—Mangione is set to be tried for murder in state court, and he didn’t plead guilty to murder in federal court. He pleaded guilty to stalking resulting in death, which is not the same crime. It’s not crystal clear whether those crimes should be considered separate under New York law. The question under New York’s statute will probably boil down to whether the crimes he’s charged with in the state prosecution are “designed to prevent very different kinds of harm or evil” as compared to the crime he pleaded guilty to in federal court. And murder seems pretty clearly to be a harm or evil very different from stalking—even stalking with intent to kill.
There’s a wrinkle though. The federal stalking statutes permit a much more severe sentence—life imprisonment—if the victim dies, and as a result, Mangione’s lawyers will probably argue that the “harm” the federal stalking statute is aimed at is not only stalking, but also killing. It’s conceivable a state judge might buy this argument, but I doubt it.
The death-of-the-victim provision in the federal statute is a penalty enhancement. The underlying crime—the crime to which Mangione just pleaded guilty—remains stalking, not murder, and stalking remains a “very different kind of harm or evil” than intentional murder. For this reason, the judge in Mangione’s state prosecutioncan—and in my opinion should—hold that Mangione can still be tried for murder despite his guilty plea in federal court.
And there’s more in favor of a state trial:
. . .Putting aside the state murder charge, there are other charges that can almost certainly still go forward in state court. Mangione’s state indictment accuses him not only of murder, but also of a host of gun crimes as well as forgery of a driver’s license. These crimes carry various possible sentences, which, if imposed consecutively, could amount to decades to prison.
In other words, even if the state murder charge were dismissed as double jeopardy (which in my opinion would be a mistake), Mangione still faces serious legal jeopardy in his state court prosecution.
There you have it: from a lawyer’s mouth. One way or another, Mangione will probably spend the rest of his life in prison, and the love letters will be received behind bars.
*St. Louis Cardinals rookie outfielder Josh Báez did something amazing yesterday, and a first for Major League Baseball: he hit three home runs in his first three times at bat in his debut game, something never accomplished before in the big leagues. And he’s with my favorite team (I was born in St. Louis and inherited my love of the team from my dad.) He hit them against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. It’s a rare accomplishment for any player to hit four homers in a game (and that’s the single-game record, but we haven’t seen three in a row for a rookie debut! I don’t know of any other player who set a MLB record in his first game. From ESPN:
Cardinals outfielder Joshua Baez smashed the first pitch he saw in the majors about 450 feet then flashed a grin to the St. Louis dugout as he began his home run trot.
“There was a calmness and a smile, like, ‘I’m here,'” Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol said. “It’s rare for me to pick my head up to enjoy parts of it. He didn’t exactly give us an option but to actually take a step back and enjoy the heck out of what was going on there.”
There has never been a show quite like it.
Baez, 23, became the first player to hit a home run in each of his first three at-bats in the majors, leading St. Louis to an 8-4 victory over the Chicago Cubs on Saturday.
Called up from Triple-A Memphis before the game, Baez had 30 family members in attendance at Wrigley Field. The traveling party, which included his mother, Yris, gathered on the field for photos afterward despite rain.
“It’s just unreal,” said Baez, the fourth-ranked prospect in the Cardinals’ system and No. 93 overall, according to ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel. “To not only get a hit but three home runs? It’s crazy.”
He did it with flair too.
The first came on the first pitch he saw from Matthew Boyd and landed an estimated 449 feet away in the left-center bleachers. It was the third-longest homer in a player’s MLB debut since ESPN began tracking home run distances in 2006. Only Jason Heyward (476 feet) in 2010 and Aaron Judge (457 feet) in 2016 had longer shots.
Baez’s next at-bat ended with a solo shot down the left-field line, and the third, on his ensuing at-bat, went the opposite way, giving him five RBIs.
“He hit three different pitches for home runs. He had a great game. He beat us, for sure,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said.
Thirty family members in attendance! You can’t be happier than that, can you! I wish Báez luck in helping my Cardinals, whose performance this season has been so-so.
Here’s the feat:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s remembering her friendship with the late d*g Cyrus:
Andrzej: Penny for your thoughts. Hili: I was remembering the walks Cyrus and I used to take to the river.
And do you remember Carol Piller’s polka/klezmer song, “Hili and Cyrus”, first posted here. and put below. It’s a fabulous song—with photos:
In Polish:
Ja: Grosz za twoje myśli.
Hili: Przypomniały mi się spacery nad rzekę z Cyrusem.
Two from my feed. First, Ibram Kendi defends the late Jason Arday, but McWhorter calls Kendi out (see Kendi’s article here):
No engagement with the arrant lies, the massive plagiarism, the airy public addresses. Kendi thinks all of that is okay if you’re Black (and have dreadlocks) and that Arday was still a legitimate academic seized upon because of his color.
And one from Doctor Cobb: a beautiful video of rays swimming:
The way the morning sun's rays lit up this pair of big, beautiful Spotted Eagle Rays yesterday at the beach near Clearwater, Florida. #nature #animals #wildlife #rays #florida
Yes, I can hear you thinking, “Here goes Professor Ceiling Cat again arguing that popular music reached its apogee in his youth and has gone downhill ever since.”
Well, you’re right. I do think that, but I think the same thing for all the arts save photography, literature and film. The decline of the arts, in my view, holds for painting, classical music, and poetry.
Here I’ll maintain that the Broadway musical is an example of this decline. Let me be explicit about what I’m saying: although musicals may have gotten more sophisticated with time (viz., “Hamilton”), the songs in musicals have gotten worse in recent days, having reached their peak between the early 1940s and the early 1960s. So I’m talking about the songs in plays, not the quality of the stories in or intricacies of those songs.
I realized this when I came across the song below, which I see as one of only three great Broadway-musical songs in the last fifty years. It is, of course, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” from the musical “Evita,” written Andrew Lloyd Webber (tune) and Tim Rice (lyrics; the musical is completely sung). The song had a somewhat bumpy genesis, but, as Wikipedia reports,
Rice and Lloyd Webber’s research showed that Eva had not in reality delivered any major oration on the day of her husband Juan Perón’s inauguration ceremony, but not long after becoming Argentina’s new First Lady, she started making highly emotional speeches, the intensity of which they wanted to capture with “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”. The song was composed to appear at the opening and near the end of the show, initially as the spirit of the dead Eva exhorting the people of Argentina not to mourn her, and finally during Eva’s speech from the balcony of Casa Rosada.
The original was sung by Julie Covington on a “concept album” issued in 1976 (her version here), by Patti LuPone in the 1979 Broadway play (her version here) and by Madonna in the 1996 film version (her rendition here). None of these versions comes close to that of Karen Carpenter, which was suggested for me by YouTube. Covington’s version is too high and too light, and LuPone’s lacks lyrical force (LuPone was a belter, which is why she snagged so many Broadway roles). Madonna’s is the best of the so-so lot, but in my view lacks emotion.
This version by Karen Carpenter, who along with Barbra Streisand is one of the two great female singers of our time, is virtually unknown. I’m a huge Karen Carpenter fan, but I’d never heard this until the YouTube bot spat it out:
The song is beautiful, with several parts, including a speech, and, as far as I know, is something that Evita herself would have though, as it accurately reflects her life and her goals. I highly recommend the biography Evita: The Real Life of Eva Perón, by Nicholas Fraser and Marysa Navarro, It’s easy to become mesmerized by Eva’s short life—she died at 33 of cervical cancer—regardless of whether you think she was beneficial or injurious for Argentina (I hold the former view). But don’t get me started on Eva; all I can say is that I know of no other political figure save Margaret Thatcher who was so polarizing, but the attachment or dislike of Eva continues strongly, while most people have forgotten Thatcher. To see why, read Evita’s biography.
Here’s Evita’s final speech in 1951 from the Casa Rosada; she was already dying when she gave it:
And that’s it for recent times. I can’t think of another Broadway song that combines words and (especially) music in ways like the three songs above. And believe me, I’ve listened to “popular” Broadway songs of recent days, and have been disappointed. Have a listen, for example, to the much-touted song “My Shot” from “Hamilton” (here). It is heavily influenced by rap: good words and a good story but set to a totally lame tune. Overall, it’s dreck: it doesn’t work as a song. Have you heard anybody humming or singing it lately?
But I’ll stop here about recent musicals; if you know of fantastic songs from Broadway musicals appearing after 1980, by all means describe and defend them below.
Now I get to tout my favorites: the earlier musicals that have memorable songs. I give them in no particular order save when they came to mind. I’ll link to the musicals and list some of my favorite songs from them, linking to the best. I claim that no modern musical comes close to these in musical quality:
Brigadoon, by Lerner and Loewe (1947). This great musical is all but forgotten. The original cast album is far superior to the 1954 film that starred Gene Kelly. Great songs (i’ve highlighted YouTube versions from the original cast):
I’ll Go Home with Bonnie Jean
Come to Me, Bend to Me There But For You Go I From this Day On (After time travel, the lovers part, apparently to be separated forever. Such a beautiful song.)
Oklahoma!by Rodgers and Hammerstein (1943) Great songs:
West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim (1957)
Maria Tonight
Gee, Officer Krupke
I Feel Pretty Somewhere (I’ve put up Barbra Streisand’s live version as there’s nothing comparable to it. The preliminary music starts about 16 seconds in).
Show Boatby Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein (1927)
Ol’ Man River
Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man
And I may have forgotten one or two, as I’m working from memory here.
Now some of these musicals came out when I was too young for them to have been part of my life, except that my parents had most of them on albums and I listened to them. Since none of my contemporaries listened to them, I will argue that I like them because of their quality, not because they were in the air when was I was growing up. I will further argue that I love jazz (up to and including Coltrane) despite not having heard a lick of it until I was in my forties. I love jazz because much of the stuff up to Coltrane was great, not because it was part of my youth.
I’ll end with two great songs that came out more recently than those above, as well as an earlier song recycled into a movie. Both are renditions by Barbra Streisand, for who else could do them justice?
First, “Send in the clowns” from “A Little Night Music” by Stephen Sondheim (1973):
Second “All I ask of you” (by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, from the 1986 play “The Phantom of the Opera”. This song gives me the shivers.
The song below, “My Man,” didn’t originate in a Broadway musical, but as a 1920 French song, “Mon Homme”, by Maurice Yvain, Jacques-Charles and Albert Willemetz. Comedian, actor, and singer Fanny Brice (1891-1951) popularized the English version; which became one of her hallmark numbers. Brice’s version came out in 1921, and later appeared in the eponymous 1928 talkie (that version is here).
But the hallmark version, and a comsummate piece of both acting and singing is (again) Barbra Streisand’s version in the 1958 film “Funny Girl” (“My Man” did not appear in the earlier stage verssions). In the movie, Streisand sings it when she has to go onstage immediately after having broken up with the gambler Nicky Arnstein in her dressing room. That accounts for the slow and tearful beginning you’ll see below. Eventually it segues into a fantastic ending, which is why I’m posting it here.
So be it; those are my views and have at me, maties. I just realized that everybody mentioned in this video, including all the songwriters, Fanny Brice, and Barbra Streisand, were Jewish. The sole exception is Karen Carpenter and a few people like Andrew Lloyd Webber. So there: you just wouldn’t have classic Broadway without the Jews. It must have been a conspiracy to indoctrinate people and infect them with earworms. Joking aside, it’s amazing that, given their low percentage in the American population, the predominance of great musicals were written by Jews. I have no idea why.
Welcome to the Sabbath made for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, August 16, 2026, and it’s National Tell a Joke Day. Here’s a grammatical joke, and it may even be true:
France’s greatest lexicographer, Émile Littré, was once found by his wife, in flagrante delicto, and in the conjugal bedroom at that, with their housemaid.
“Emile,” cried Mrs Littré, “I am surprised!”
“No, my dear,” replied the adulterous lexicographer calmly. “You are astonished. It is WE who are surprised.”
Here’s another joke (it can stand alone without the photo):
Senior Trump administration officials have doubled down on economic pressure in the fight with Iran, making lower oil prices a top war aim and vowing unprecedented financial sanctions that would force Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran late Thursday attacked two United Arab Emirates ships in the strait, Emirati officials said.
With those strikes, Iran is signaling that it is impervious to more economic sanctions and is willing to take the military initiative even when President Trump appears reluctant to return to a shooting war. With Trump relying more on the Navy’s blockade of Iranian ports as financial pressure on Tehran, Iran’s leaders are trying to show they won’t relent and will keep the strait closed until energy prices force the U.S. to back off, analysts said.
“Tehran has drawn a simple lesson from every game of chicken with Washington: Hold your nerve long enough, and America swerves first,” said Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group’s deputy program director for the Middle East and North Africa. “For a system that believes it is fighting for survival…existential threats tend to harden resolve, not impose a price ceiling on resistance.”
Washington this week indicated it would slap new restrictions on Iran’s economy in the coming days. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said it would be a “one-two punch” along with the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports.
The efforts by both sides to inflict economic damage on each other put them further from the diplomatic off-ramp they appeared to reach with the deal in June. That agreement set out financial rewards for Tehran if it reopened the strait and entered serious negotiations on its nuclear program.
There’s one more thing:
While Iran is suffering mounting economic pain, it is shifting into a survival economy designed to endure it. Tehran, which has endured years of sanctions, is pushing more of the burden onto households by rationing fuel and electricity, restricting scarce foreign currency and cutting investment while preserving essential imports and state resources.
Unless Trump takes some military action and stops with the sanction stuff, he is going to lose this war. Iran will neither allow the Strait of Hormuz to go back to the way it was before the war, nor promise (and take action) to stop trying to make nuclear weapons.
*In light of the U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln leaving the Middle East after reports of poor maintenance, food, and facilities, now Trump has stuck his nose into the design of new U.S. aircraft carriers, and it’s a nose-sticking that will be expensive and perhaps injurious to carriers themselves:
The U.S. Navy is considering a major redesign of its new aircraft carriers to better match President Donald Trump’s preferred aesthetic for the warships, according to seven current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The service isevaluating the feasibility of moving the multistory tower that acts as the carrier’s command center farther forward, toward the middle of the ship, to resemble older vessels, the officials said. The review, which has not been previously reported, is in response to Trump’s concerns about the “look” of the new Ford-class ships, where the tower is near the rear, these people said.
The timing and extent of the Navy’s evaluation is unclear, with current and former officials cautioning that the service was concerned that such a change would require significant time and money. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation.
. . .The U.S. Navy is considering a major redesign of its new aircraft carriers to better match President Donald Trump’s preferred aesthetic for the warships, according to seven current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The service isevaluating the feasibility of moving the multistory tower that acts as the carrier’s command center farther forward, toward the middle of the ship, to resemble older vessels, the officials said. The review, which has not been previously reported, is in response to Trump’s concerns about the “look” of the new Ford-class ships, where the tower is near the rear, these people said.
The timing and extent of the Navy’s evaluation is unclear, with current and former officials cautioning that the service was concerned that such a change would require significant time and money. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation.
. . .Relocating the island would be “a major redesign,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy officer who studies the service at the Hudson Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Washington. Such an alteration to the carrier’s layout, he said, would affect the ship’s buoyancy and weight and come at a significant cost.
“You could change it,” he added, “but it’s very disruptive.”
Here we have the man who’s destroyed a wing of the White House to build a ballroom, who’s designing a triumphal arch that will ruin the entry to Wsshington from Virginia, and who renamed the Kennedy center (or rather forced others to do so). Now he wants to aircraft carriers to be redesigned to look like ones in World War II. That will not only cost a gazillion sollars, but will, as the officer above says, affect the ship’s weight and buoyancy. It seems to be infinitely preferable to let the ship designers design the ships.
I’ve been watching the signs that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be considering a bid for president for over a year. She spoke about foreign policy at the Munich Security Conference in February. A few months later, she brandished her organizer street cred with a visit to a rural Georgia community fighting a data center. She is among the astonishingly few big-name Democrats embracing data center resistance, a rare point of bipartisan agreement in a divided electorate.
This week she all but soft-launched the presidential bid so many of us have been expecting, with a video series about freezing her eggs. The rollout — personal, confessional and intimate — had all the social media savvy that made her a political star. It also gets ahead of the inevitable questions about how, or if, she will have children. In short, Ocasio-Cortez has crafted a political message in which the form andcontent suggest that she will run as a woman but unlike how every woman before her was forced to run.
To be a viable potential presidential candidate is no small feat for any woman, much less a young, attractive woman without a political dynasty. Were she to formally declare a presidential bid, she would be one of the youngest and most progressive people to do it. She can run. But can she win?
To say women haven’t had an easy path to presidential power would be an understatement.
. . . Hillary Clinton was both too unfathomable (a first lady who wanted more) and too well known (saddled with her husband’s scandals and positions). Kamala Harris was, alternately, too novel (a mixed-race Black woman) and too much like the same old (a capitalist hawk). They each werecondemned as too uncharismatic to overcomea culture that is supremely suspicious of women who want, pursue and hold power. The ambition that brought them within reach of the of the presidency was a trap that ensured they couldn’t win it.
But these are different times. Ocasio-Cortez is a different woman, and Americans love to turn to women when the house is burning down. Social scientists call it the glass cliff — the phenomenon in which women are recruited to lead failing companies. President Trump’s businessman brand of governance has many Americans feeling this nation is failing. I suppose the dumpster fire of climate denialism, political corruption and general scamminess of, well, everything would be dire enough circumstances to make a female president possible.
In particular, Democrats — whom you might expect to be wary of placing another female candidate before the American public — are facinga political disaster of their own making. Americans are primed for an anti-incumbent electoral wave. They want an alternative to Trump’s MAGA-dominated Republican Party, but a lot of them indicate they would have to hold their nose to vote for mainstream Democrats.
Well, there are many of us who would have to hold our noses to vote for progressives like AOC. She has done almost nothing in terms of getting bills passed in the House (she’s originated some, but they didn’t pass, and has co-sponsored some more bipartisan bills that became law), seems to spend most of her time either flubbing speeches and interviews or promoting herself on social media, and is unable to answer even very simple questions if she has to extemporize rather than stick to a script. As a progressive, she is a Democratic Socialist, and many of their policies don’t resonate with either me or the public (AOC will, of course, disavow the bad ones before she runs). She has no executive experience or foreign-policy expertise. Like all “progressives,” she detests Israel. What she has is big ambition, and it shows. As for electability, her progressivist views will energize Republicans, something we don’t need. And this seems batty to me:
This is why Ocasio-Cortez’s choice to lead her campaign intentions with a very public discussion of reproductive choices is so important. She is performing the preservation of her status as a mother for the public, creating the possibility that she would be a mother for the nation, even if she is not yet a mother..
Whaaaat? Where did that crazy idea come from? Who cares if a woman President has kids or not? Certainly not I. Nor am I opposed to a woman President; in fact, it’s time we had one, though she has to be qualified. That’s why I wrote in Gretchen Whitmer in the last election, and I’d be delighted if she were to run. But no, not Kamala Harris, who brings me no joy.
*A bit more on the death (likely suicide) of Jason Arday, which I reported yesterday. Although the police, as is the case in the UK, didn’t release his name, they noted that the deceased was 41—Arday’s age. And his family did issue a death notice. From the NYT:
Jason Arday, the former Cambridge University scholar whose remarkable rise to stardom was followed by a rapid fall from grace in recent weeks, has died, his family said on Friday.
“Jason was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse” in the years since he accepted a role at Cambridge, his family wrote in a statement. “The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.”
The Metropolitan Police of London said that an ambulance was called on Friday afternoon to a South London residence connected to Mr. Arday after a report that a man there had been found unresponsive. The man was pronounced dead at the scene, the police said, without confirming his identity, in keeping with British police practice.
The death was being “treated as unexpected” but was not believed to be suspicious, the police said.
“We are desperately saddened to hear this tragic news,” Professor Deborah Prentice, the Cambridge vice-chancellor, said in a statement. “Our heartfelt sympathies go to Jason Arday’s family and friends at this incredibly difficult time.”
“Jason was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse for more than three years since he accepted the role of professor at Cambridge University by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him.
“The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.
“We are in shock to have lost this amazing father, partner, brother, uncle and son.
“We won’t comment further at this point beyond asking the press to leave us alone now, and to stop the campaign of harassment which has been waged against Jason and his family for too long.”
The family is going along with Arday’s claim that he was abused and subject to a “campaign of misinformation” and “harassment.” While some people might have been motivated by bigotry in going after Arday, the fact is that what was uncovered were very disturbing allegations, and an autobiography that was at best exaggerated and at worst an arrant litany of lies.
But of curse the man had a family who loved him, and that is why his death saddens me. I cannot bear those who say he “had it coming” because of what he did. He was either mentally ill or a grifter, but either way he had a bad comeuppance, and that is a tragedy which triggered his suicide—another tragedy. He needed help and didn’t get it, but we can’t blame those who didn’t intercede. He is no longer at Cambridge; he resigned before killing himself. It is all ineffably sad.
*Finally, from the UPI’s “odd news” site, we hear about a hula-hoop record, all derived from a doctor’s diagnosis of obesity:
A Chinese man managed to spin 33 hula hoops around his body while suspended upside down to break a Guinness World Record.
Yan Yanjia was suspended upside down from playground equipment in Guilin, Guangxi, and two friends then helped pull the hula hoops over his head and down to his hips.
Yanjia was able to keep the hoops spinning for the time required by Guinness World Records, earning him the title for the most hula hoops spun while suspended upside down. He beat the previous record by 10 hoops.
Yanjia said he started hula hooping eight years ago as a means of losing weight.
“In 2018, I was diagnosed with fatty liver due to obesity, and my doctor advised me to lose weight. At that time, I bought a 2-kilogram [4.4-pound] hula hoop for exercise, and in a month, I went from 80 kg [175 pounds] to 63 kg [132 pounds],” he told Guinness World Records. “Of course, the main factor in successful fat loss is gradual control of diet.”
Yanjia said the next record his has his eye on involves spinning hula hoops while doing pullups.
“This exercise consumes many times more force than dozens of hula hoops upside down, requiring much greater core stability,” he said.
Of course you’ll want to see it, so here is Mr. Yanjia:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili puts things in their proper perspective:
Hili: We talk about everything while leaving out the most important thing. Andrzej: And what’s the most important thing?
Hili: Buying beef.
In Polish:
Hili: Rozmawiamy o wszystkim pomijając to, co najważniejsze. Ja: A co jest najważniejsze?
Hili: Kupno wołowiny.
*******************
From Stacy, original posted by the National Park Service:
From Masih, detailing two women who were killed for defending themselves against rape; she notes the insuperable obstacles, under Muslim law, of even mounting an accusation of rape:
Under Sharia law in Iran, to prove rape, a woman must produce four male witnesses to the act itself. Four. Male. Witnesses. If she cannot, her accusation becomes a confession. She is no longer the victim. She is the criminal, facing flogging, prison, or death.
To those who asked why Iranian women Marzieh and Reyhaneh didn’t report rape in court before defending themselves.
Marzieh Nayeri was forced to marry a man at 17. Child marriage is legal under Sharia law in Iran.
From Richard Dawkins via Luana: an infuriating exposé about how Cambridge University (yes, the school that hired Arday) is promoting creationism. This time it’s in the education faculty, and the anti-science, pro-creationist view is promoted, don’t you know, by “the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), [which] is led by Cambridge’s assistant research professor of education, Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the since banned terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir.. It’s being done to placate Islamic sentiments, which don’t countenance evolution. Read the whole tweet:
Extracts from a further Spectator article (Aug 15) by Andrew Gilligan:
An academic project hosted by Cambridge University platforms creationism, the belief that the world was created by God in seven days. It promotes an academic paper demanding that schoolchildren be taught to…
From Jeff Maurer, who retweeted this saying, “Somebody should fix this.” The “fix” involved putting up a waning sign:
Someone made the really, really poor decision to situate the chair in nonstop direct sunlight, and the bronze doesn’t just get hot. It becomes literally SCALDING. Like today, a breezy 80°, you can’t put your hand on it for more than a second before >actually< burning yourself. pic.twitter.com/N1NI7lF8Oc
And two from Dr. Cobb. First, a whole show about the Beatles in one post:
The prologue is superb, and just how I recall shows like this in the 60s. Sitting up with my parents / elder sister watching some music prog like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TDL…
I wanted to remind readers of the “Roolz” (the commenting rules) for two reasons. First, there are some new commenters who should read them, as some people violate them from the get-go (e.g., calling other readers names or being generally uncivil).
Second, even long-time readers who know the rules should be reminded about the frequency-of-posting recommendation. Here’s rule number 9 (wasn’t that a Beatles song?)
9. Try not to dominate threads, particularly in a one-on-one argument. I’ve found that those are rarely informative, and the participants never reach agreement. A good guideline is that if your comments constitute over 10% of the comments on a thread, you’re posting too much.
The ten percent guideline is there to prevent people from commenting over and over again, as some try to do. Although I vary in how hard I enforce it, I don’t like to see someone posting, say, three comments out of the first ten that appear. Of course, as comments accumulate, the rule becomes less and less relevant, but be aware that if you make comments, they should generally constitute about 10% of what’s there at the time you comment. One way to avoid violating the guideline is to wait a while until comments accumulate, and then have your say.
Although I tolerate and sometimes like one-on-one discussions, they should generally be limited to four comments total (two each). Persistence in the face of fact can be construed as obtuseness, which is frowned on.
Oh, one more thing: please don’t leave comments consisting only of a link. At least add a few words about what the link refers to, or what it says.
I haven’t been able to post duck photos or videos for a while as I changed computers (orders of the University, which is a bit authoritarian about such things). Anyway, a crack IT guy helped me restore things, and I have some pictures and photos to post. More will be coming as I get up to speed. But today I want to show you how much my ducklings—or rather, Miss Duck’s ducklings—have grown. Today is their “monthiversary”, as it was four weeks ago today, on Saturday, July 18, that they hatched, and they first entered Botany Pond the next day.
Miss Duck laid five eggs in her nest on the ground, situated in a niche of the Student Union. I learned of her nest from a student, who reported it to me two days before hatching. It was bloody hot then, and I left a pan of cold water by her for two days. I hadn’t seen Miss Duck for the entire month she was nesting, and if she came to the pond for food or water, I didn’t see it. She must have had a rough 28 days of incubation, which is one reason I now spoil her and her brood.
Miss Duck laid five eggs, and four of them hatched. I took the unhatched one and put it under a heat lamp for several days, but no dice. The egg must have been infertile. But she led four healthy babies all the way around an adjacent building and into Botany Pond, where I first saw them early Sunday morning, July 19. By then the drakes had gone, and I had great hopes that this brood would stay until fledging. And—knock on wood—so it will be.
Here are the four on July 20, only one day after they came to Botany Pond. They were adorable. I treasure this as one of the best duckling photos ever. (Click all photos to enlarge them.)
They are still adorable but now, four weeks later, they are going through what we call their “awkward teenage phase”as they shed their duckling down and start growing feathers, In another month they should be about ready to fly.
They are all healthy and vigorous, and Miss Duck (named because we ran out of monickers) has proved to be one of the best duck mothers I’ve seen—right up there with Honey the Duck.
Here is a photo taken yesterday, with mom and brood sacked out on the edge of the pond after lunch. Miss Duck is keeping guard nearby, but is also catching a few winks (she doesn’t sleep for more than a minute or so before waking up to check on everything). You can see the mixture of feathers and down on the babies: they’re starting to look like miniature ducks.
I often wonder, when I see Miss Duck and her brood, if she feels a kind of happiness or satisfaction, or if she’s just acting according to her genetic dictates, and feels no emotion. We’ll never know, but I like to think that if her brood were removed or disappeared, she’d feel bereft. That itself indicates a kind of satisfaction with taking care of her babies.
Here’s a full and tired duckling. Note the stretched leg and the tiny feathers on breast and wing:
Head shot of the baby above:
And the lovely Miss Duck. She’s proudly displaying her conspicuous speculum (the blue bar on the wing feathers). Miss Duck is distinguishable by her long neck, her grayish color, and her dark black bill with an orange tip. I hope she returns next year. Her brood is very late (they usually appear at the beginning of May), suggesting that she re-nested after some unfortunate circumstance. She is not one of the hens who nested and came to grief earlier in the season.
I love to hang out at the pond after I feed them all (three times per day); it’s very meditative to watch the ducks, even when they’re sleeping. So many people walk by, see them, and pull out their phone for a quick shot, but I would like to tell them to hang around a while and actually watch the animals. There’s a lot to learn, and I’m often there to explain things. In fact, I get so many questions from visitors that I’ve though of preparing a FAQ sheet to give to people.
People have been generally well behaved around the ducks and do not bother them, so they’ve gotten pretty used to people. I worry a bit about that if they migrate, for it may marginally affect their chances of getting shot, but they’re sufficiently wary that my worry is not large.
Since I have no kids, my genetic legacy resides in the DNA of these mallards, and nearly a hundred others that I’ve helped raise over the years.
