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.
Carl Zimmer and Catrin Einhorn are the authors of a new article in the NYT about our old friend Colossal Biosciences, which you’ll remember as the outfit in Texas that has promised to “de-extinct” the woolly mammoth, the thylacine (marsupial “wolf”), the dodo and the moa, after having claimed that they’ve already de-extincted the “dire wolf”.
As I’ve written at length here (and in an article in the Boston Globe), Colossal has not de-extincted anything. It simply edited 14 genes in a gray wolf cell, and then put that cell into the nucleus of a domestic dog egg. What came out were three slightly tweaked gray wolves, white in color and, Colossal says, larger than normal wolves. But 14 changed genes in a genome of about 20,000 protein-coding genes, and having 2.5 billion DNA bases, does not turn a gray wolf into a dire wolf. Their response was that a dire wolf is anything that you think resembles a dire wolf, no matter how much. That is disingenuous.
I lost respect from Colossal when they decided to double down on their claim that they’ve brought something back from extinction, which they surely have not. And their claims that they will release these things into the wild—their ultimate aim—is ridiculous. The three faux white dire wolves (I doubt the original was even white) are kept secretly on an enclosure somewhere in the West, with only a few toadying journalists or donors allowed to visit them.
Likewise, Colossal’s promise to give us woolly mammoths by 2028 is unbelievable, for they won’t be able to put an engineered Asian elephant egg into the endangered Asian elephant, much less produce a creature that has more than a minute fraction of mammoth DNA. On top of that, Colossal says their aim is to release these faux mammoths on the tundra, which won’t happen, and that when they do so, it will help with global warming since the furry elephants’ trampling on the permafrost will prevent release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, ameliorating global warming. Gullible donors like Paris Hilton, Tiger Woods, and Tom Brady have swelled Colossal’s coffers by $400 million, and it’s now worth, notes the article below, more than $10 billion.
I think that when Colossal realized it couldn’t make good on its de-extinction promises, it started investing in other projects. One of them is described in this article in the NYT (click below or find it archived here). What they propose to do, with the promised help of the Trump administration, is save the DNA from endangered species. Now this project has its good aspects, for if Colossal sequences a lot of new genomes and publishes the sequences (which it promises to make public), we could learn quite a bit about evolution. And the American taxpayer doesn’t have to foot the bill for any of it. But Colossal has no experience in “biodiversity banking” of this sort, even though nonprofit conservation organizations like the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance has been doing it for over half a century (Colossal is decidely a for-profit company). The San Diego noprofit has in fact created clones of black-footed ferrets, a highly endangered species, from biobanked material, so at least it has something useful to show for its efforts.
Further, if Colossal is doing this for “de-extinction” purposes, and will retain sole possession of the material, as it will do, then it is preventing other organizations or scientists from using what is “banked.” The U.S. government has no business partnering with such an enterprise. I don’t worry about de-extinction because that is (pardon the pun) a dead issue. But the concentration on biobanking may, as the authors note, “erode support for on-the-ground conservation,” which mainly involves saving existing habitat and keeping humans from destroying new habitat.
A few quotes from the article, which, as science journalism should, maintains a neutral viewpoint while emphasizing both pros and cons:
The Trump administration and a company that is promising to bring long-gone animals back from extinction announced a partnership on Thursday to preserve cells, tissue and DNA from threatened and endangered species.
The company, Colossal Biosciences, said its goal was to store samples from every animal and plant protected under the Endangered Species Act, which includes more than 2,300 listings worldwide.
As more species face the risk of extinction, scientists see such biobanks as a critical backup. But concerns are also growing that the rise of genetic engineering and efforts to revive extinct species will erode support for on-the-ground conservation, which often requires protecting habitat from drilling, mining and other development.
The announcement comes as the Trump administration has been rolling back protections on land and water, including through actions to weaken the Endangered Species Act, in favor of expanded oil and gas exploration, commercial fishing and other economic activities.
“This partnership brings together the scientific expertise of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the ingenuity of the private sector to develop new tools that can help recover species, preserve critical genetic resources, and strengthen the future of wildlife conservation,” Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, said in a statement.
Under a memorandum of understanding, Colossal and the Fish and Wildlife Service will collaborate to identify high-priority actions, and the government will provide a list of which species it wants to prioritize.
Well, I’d prefer that a consortium of scientists decide which species should be prioritized, and I’d prefer that the material be given to the San Diego Zoo organization rather than to Colossal, which will have sole use of the material and is a for-profit organization. The agreement is supposed to run for five years, and that Colossal gets to keep all the samples it collected with its own funding, equipment, or personnel”, which means pretty much all the samples.
Colossal has been busy doing other stuff, too:
After beginning its de-extinction efforts, Colossal branched out into biobanking. In February, the company announced a partnership with the United Arab Emirates to build what it calls a BioVault in Dubai, intended to store cell and tissue samples from more than 10,000 species.
Why Dubai? Why not store all the material in one place? Who knows? And they clone pets!
[Colossal] currently gets revenue from cloning pets and horses through a company it acquired last year, and claims to have future sources of revenue from licensing technology it develops for its de-extinction projects.
The article notes some criticism of Colossal’s proposal, too (I’m not quoting the criticism of the “de-extinction” endeavors, which the article also mentions):
But some conservation biologists expressed worries about depending so much for the long-term guardianship of precious samples on a private company.
“It seems like a bit of a risk for the U.S. government to place biomaterials in a for-profit company that doesn’t have a very long track record,” said Oliver Ryder, a conservation geneticist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, which operates a storage effort called the Frozen Zoo that has been preserving cells for about 50 years.
and
Gabriela Mastromonaco, chief science officer at the Toronto Zoo, called the U.S. plan laid out in Thursday’s announcement hugely ambitious.
“To collect every threatened and endangered species, that is a massive endeavor,” she said. “That means tracking, trapping, immobilizing, and getting your hands on a lot of animals.”
She expressed concern that the initial announcement was short on planning details that would be standard in many other nations.
. . . Dr. Mastromonaco of the Toronto Zoo said the announcement left many questions unanswered, such as how Indigenous communities would participate in decisions about the program and the rules for who gets to use the samples for research. She said she was addressing these questions herself as Canada develops its own plan for biobanking wild species.
and
Concerns that genetic engineering would replace critical conservation work heightened when Mr. Burgum, the interior secretary, celebrated the company’s announcement on X, writing that “the marvel of ‘de-extinction’ technology can help forge a future where populations are never at risk.” The Fish and Wildlife Service is part of the Interior Department.
Colossal executives emphasize that their efforts are intended to add to conservation strategies, not supplant the important work of protecting habitat.
I guess Colossal needs government cooperation since that’s required to collect DNA samples from endangered species. But if Colossal is dong this “for public good and impact” as Colossal CEO Ben Lamm has said, why do they retain the sole right to use the material? Even if it’s collected by Colossal, the permission to do so has to come from the U.S. government, and we should not be entangled with a private, for-profit company that will store material only it can use.
I see Colossal as having provided some valuable knowledge, but also largely as a pack of grifters, making promises they cannot keep and distorting what they have done. In my view they should stick to cloning Fido and Fluffy for rich pet-owners who want to “de-extinct” their postmortem pets.
And it’s a true equation, at least as demonstrated by the paper below (and others) in a special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, brought to my attention by Luana (I don’t know how she finds these things).
I had to read this paper three times to even understand its thesis, but I think I do now. And its thesis is something like this (I may of course be wrong since the paper is not only opaque but dreadful).
All babies are queer. But “queer” doesn’t mean the definition below produced by Grok:
In activist and academic circles tied to the LGBTQ movement, it now functions mainly as a broad umbrella label for people who identify as non-heterosexual in orientation or who reject alignment between their self-perception and biological sex. Its meaning remains imprecise by design in many cases.
Rather, by “queer”, the author and, I guess, the contributors, apparently mean “a departure from norms”, so that every baby is “non-standard”. This leads to the question, “How can a baby be non-standard” when all babies are nonstandard?” This is the conundrum that apparently motivates this issue.
The author apparently means, and I quote:
In our approach, queer babies are neither having gay sex nor are they the babies destined, by the backward logic of cause-effect development, to become gay adults. We are not, in other words, using ‘queer’ as a descriptor of either sex acts or people. Rather, claiming the essential queerness of babies posits that babies are queer on their own terms – which is to say, because we were all babies once, that there is something constitutive about this queerness.
So how were we all queer as babies? To answer this, the author turns to Freud.
Freud provided more than a hint of how to think about the queerness of babies. In his first foray into a theory of sexuality, overtly entitled Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905/1955), Freud introduced the notion of polymorphous perversity, beginning in the first essay with an insistence that what is deemed ‘perverse’ – namely, a deviation from either the normal (reproductive) sexual aim or normal (hetero)sexual object – is so common in sexual life that he is forced to conclude ‘there is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions’ (1905/1955, p. 171). That which is deemed non-normal, or perverse, thus sits at ‘the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct’, a claim that Freud further insists is ‘only … demonstrable in children’, specifically in infants. What for Freud is crucial about the early stages of infantile sexuality is that the sexual instinct, which in adults appears to be singular and teleological, is revealed to consist of ‘component instincts’ and partial objects
Okay, so all babies are queer because they all have infant sexuality as construed by Freud, a sexuality instantiated at adulthood when the psychoanalysts get their claws into patients. But this still doesn’t tell us how babies are “departures from the norms”.
At any rate, this exercise in academic logorrhea combined with discredited Freudian theory can be read by clicking the title below (it’s the introduction to a whole issue on queer babies), or by reading the pdf here. The author is Misha Kavka at the University of Amsterdam, whose c.v., laden with papers about queerness, is here.
Here is a screenshot of some but not all of the contents so you can see what academics are getting paid to produce:
I will give one extended quote from the paper so you can see how dire it is: full of opaque and just awful writing, wordplay (common in this kind of postmodern piffle), and a questionable thesis that cannot be tested.
For an introduction to the issue of ‘the queerness of babies’, it may be no bad thing to attempt a definition of both terms. First, the easier one: ‘baby’ both is and is not a metaphor, which is why we present it here in the plural. There is no getting away from the fact that the baby, always an overdetermined signifier, slides into a metaphorics of potential on the one hand and helplessness on the other, precisely because the baby in reality is the infans, defined in the psychoanalytic tradition as ‘the one who does not speak, and is therefore not fully inscribed, only partially represented by language as a symbolic system’ (Poulios & Papadaki). This infans who does not yet speak – and who may never speak, as the psychoanalyst Nadine Cordova reminds us – is nonetheless ‘spoken of long before its arrival … and is even inscribed somewhere long before it appears’ (2024, p. 97, my translation). Marked by the trauma of birth, not (yet) in language but already inscribed into and symptomatic of the family, as Bice Benvenuto argues in ‘Oedipus in Pieces’ here, the baby is a psychic enfleshment that arrives both too soon (born prematurely, according to Lacan) and too late (as Diego Semerene posits in this issue, ‘A baby is a commissioned portrait. After someone’). Moreover, as Poulios and Papadaki argue, the infans represents not just an early developmental period but a field of psychic life that remains ‘active during the whole life of the subject, in parallel to and quite independent from the primary and secondary processes of mental function’. In that sense, the baby marks a (prelinguistic) developmental phase as well as a psychic formation which we never leave behind – that is to say, from which we must always depart. Thus, our very attempts to figure, to re-member and/or to analyse the baby make of it a quandary and a question. In that sense, this perfectly standard baby – the infans whom we cannot (yet) make sense of – is also perfectly queer.
Beyond its complicated linguistic history, ‘queer’ in contemporary use tends to circulate between two meanings. As an abstraction, whether philosophical or socio-cultural, it gestures towards that which is non-standard, anti-normative or what Sara Ahmed calls ‘oblique or “off line”’ (2006, p. 161); in Lee Edelman’s psychoanalytically inflected understanding, queerness sits on the edge of the Symbolic, rather like the infans, since it is ‘a matter of embodying the remainder of the Real internal to the Symbolic order’ (2004, p. 25). In its more specific uses, on the other hand, the term ‘queer’ is aligned with sexuality, referring to practices, desires and identities that deviate from heterosexual norms, as denoted by the ‘Q’ in LGBTQIA+. As queer theorists of the last three decades have shown, there are many points of crossover between these two meanings, to the degree that the sexual lurks in many a mention of ‘queer’, however abstracted, in often enticingly scandalous ways.
“Infans” in Latin translates to “one who cannot speak”. Yet Kavka also repeatedly talks about “interrogating the baby,” although babies can’t answer questions. That, too, must be postmodern lingo.
Had enough? I won’t quote the Freudian stuff because the man was a fraud, though the authors swallow his theories as “truths”, just as a pelican swallows a fish. At the end of the paper, Kavka tells us “what we are calling on ourselves, and others who feel beckoned, to do. A quote:
to turn our attention to the baby, the infans, as the post-foetal but pre-Symbolic agent provocateur who arrives both too soon and too late;
to acknowledge the baby as a primary site of queerness, which describes the as-yet-undetermined formation of the becoming-subject;
to separate the sexual from the genital and, by extension, to understand sexuality (infantile and beyond) on the spectrum of polymorphous perversity rather than as a binary;
to position the queer baby before identification and hence before the adoption of sexual identity, while acknowledging its necessary connection to the sexual nature of the drive; and
to turn our attention to the clinic, where the invitation to question the baby in a different way can, we hope, open up ‘the path to sovereignty amidst inhospitable conditions’ (Poulios & Papadaki).
At any rate, you can see what the authors are called to do, which again includes “questioning the baby,” even though the baby cannot speak.
After reading this paper several times, between swigs of Pepto Bismol, I left both amused and angry. Amused because the author could have given her thesis in one paragraph, but tricks it out with all kinds of allusions to Freud, postmodernist thought, and wordplay like this (bolding is mine):
. . . let us begin by sitting with the notion that the baby is ‘essentially queer’ – which is, no bones about it, both the core contention and the field of play for the contributors to this issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society.
. . . Taking an autotheoretical approach to disinterring the personal, political and familial histories that swaddle the baby within the (in)vestments of those who came before, Semerene adopts the word travesti – reclaiming the Latin American term for a not-quite-passing transwoman – to figure the travesti baby as a stand-in for parental lost objects whose hand-me-downs fit only ‘as an act of passing’.
. . . If this polymorphous yet indeterminate baby, swaddled but never quite separate, is a symptom of the family, as Benvenuto reminds us, then the queerness of the baby is also bound, precipitously, to a queerness of relations stretching from the first car(ri)er to the transference between analyst and analysand.
This is just one symptom of bad writing: not only opaque prose (perhaps it’s comprehensible to other contributors, but certainly not to well-read academics like me), but also showing off by making puns.
And why was I angry? Because as a scientist all I see is a bunch of obscurantist theorizing with no way to test it, and the authors are getting both money and professional credit to write this stuff. And either a library or subscribers have to pay to read the stuff. Most of all, because although psychoanalysists and sociologists purport to be engaged in truth-seeking, there is no truth, and no way to find it, within this paper. It is empty theorizing. How appropriate that it draws on Freudian psychoanalysis, founded by perhaps the most famous fraud in academic history. Although throughout his life Freud claimed to be doing science, Fred Crews shows definitively that he was a grifter and a charlatan, making up many of his results and simply lying about many things. And yet Freud is still regarded by many academics as a great thinker, and analysts still use his methods—which will cost you a lot of time and money—to “address” people’s problems.
If you want an example of why the humanities are in trouble, simply read this paper or (God help you) the rest of the issue. I’ve written before about why the art—and by extension much of the humanities—can’t help us find propositional truth, but rather aim at helping us see how other people think and thereby prompting us to reflect on ourselves. But the only light this paper sheds is on the convoluted thinking of a coterie of postmodern academics.
And for a purgative, read the book below, which is not only immensely revealing (it’s based on a ton of research) but superbly written. We live in a culture that, sadly, is still saturated with Freud’s ideas, and everyone who calls themselves educated needs to read Freud: The Making of an Illusion.
Welcome to Sunday, June 28, 2026: Sabbath for goyische cats and National Foodie Day. Here’s one chowing down on fried chicken at Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room in Savannah, George last April.
And here’s a terrific book of fiction I’m reading whose protagonist is a Japanese writer visiting Taiwan in the late thirties (Taiwan was Japanese land in that period). The writer is a foodie, each chapter is titled with the name of a Taiwanese dish, and the writer is always searching for new local food. Beyond that, the book is about love and colonialism, and it won the International Booker Prize for 2026.
Colombia finished the World Cup’s opening round as the Group K winners after playing Portugal to a scoreless draw Saturday night.
Both teams had already secured spots in the knockout stage before the match, needing only to learn their opponents for the next round.
Colombia will play Ghana, which lost 2-1 to Croatia earlier Saturday. Portugal, who entered the expanded 48-team tournament as a favorite, will face Croatia as the Group K runners-up.
Despite the lack of goals, it was a lively affair. Bruno Fernandes came close to putting Portugal ahead in the first half but was denied by Camilo Vargas. Portugal’s Diogo Costa had six saves, more than in the team’s first two matches combined.
Portugal, looking for their first World Cup title, head to the knockout stage after an up-and-down group stage.
I really want Argentina to win as a sendoff to Messi, the best player ever. Yes, Ronaldo is great, but I don’t like his constant strutting and preening.
Here are the highlights:
*The Iran/U.S./Israel war continues as Iran has retaliated at the U.S. retaliation for Iran attacking a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has reportedly struck yet another tanker, as well as Bahrain.
Bahrain said it came under attack from Iranian drones, and a tanker was hit Saturday while crossing the Strait of Hormuz, as fighting around the strategic waterway extended into a third day despite the agreement signed earlier this month to wind down the U.S.-Iran war.
Iran didn’t specifically claim responsibility for the attacks. But state media said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had carried out strikes against American targets in the region and reasserted Iran’s claim of control over traffic in the strait.
The outbreak of violence began Thursday when the U.S. said Iran struck a ship that transited the strait via a path near the coast of Oman that Tehran had warned shippers not to use. President Trump called the attack a violation of the two sides’ ceasefire and ordered strikes on Iranian positions along the waterway.
A U.S. official said two Iranian drones were detected in the Saturday attack on Bahrain. One was shot down by a ground-based defense system and the other landed in a remote airfield area without hitting any target, the official said. Bahrain didn’t detail any damage from the attack.
An Iranian drone struck a tanker carrying 2 million barrels of crude near the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. official said. Two other drones targeting commercial shipping were shot down by U.S. forces. The U.K. Maritime Trade Operations Center, which is affiliated with the Royal Navy, said the ship struck Saturday was hit in the bridge by an unidentified projectile.
The Joint Maritime Information Center, a U.S.-U.K. navy body, raised its maritime security threat level in the Strait of Hormuz to “substantial” on Saturday, citing the new attacks on merchant vessels.
I suspect the U.S. will retaliate for the retaliation for the retaliation, and the loop will go on forever. I’m actually glad that things are happening this way, as the deal with Iran that Trump was making was a terrible deal (see Sam Harris’s video below), and would not only empower the new hard-line Iranian regime, but would do nothing to free the oppressed people of Iran. But that freedom is no longer a priority for Trump, and is too much to hope for.
*In the meantime, the “memorandum of understanding” that will supposedly end the war hands huge economuc bonuses to Iran, bonuses that will allow it to rebuilt. It’s ridiculous.
The preliminary peace agreement between the United States and Iran, a broad framework still taking shape in early rounds of talks, hands Iran’s leadership a major economic lifeline as Tehran looks to consolidate strategic gains after months of war with Israel and the United States.
Sanctions waivers that allow Iran to sell oil in U.S. dollars and commitments to unfreeze Iranian assets could grant Iran’s government access to billions of dollars in desperately needed hard currency. Having survived mostly intact despite devastating assassinations throughout its ranks, the Iranian system must now address widespread damage and destruction. Even before the war, the country’s spiraling economic crisis was the driving source of domestic discontent.
But critics of the deal argue the relief will ultimately allow Iran to rebuild its military and support allied armed groups, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Trump administration says it is requiring Iran spend some of its unfrozen assets buying food from U.S. farmers, but Tehran’s oil revenue are not similarly restricted.
In the wake of war with two of the most powerful militaries, the Iranian system entered peace talks with the United States emboldened and has used the negotiations to secure critical concessions from economic aid, formalization of Iran’s control over the crucial Strait of Hormuz and a say in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Trump administration officials say the deal is “performance based” and most of the economic incentives demand Iran comply with the terms of the initial agreement, including that it open the Strait of Hormuz and allow nuclear inspections.
“For Iran to benefit long-term, it has to achieve a final deal with the United States,” said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House. “We can simply rescind waivers and restore pressure if Iran fails to implement its commitments. The waiver does not diminish our leverage, it strengthens it,” the official said.
And what if Iran does not abide by a final deal. After all, it’s broken deals repeatedly, including nuclear deals, and it’s just broken its agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz. Iran can simply wait until we get a new President, and be it J. D. Vance or a Democrat, no President is going to have the stomach to attack Iran again. As for the oil money, we can’t cut that off unless we do attack again.
Israel, Lebanon and the United States on Friday signed a trilateral framework agreement aimed at paving the way for an eventual peace deal between the two long-time Middle East adversaries.
The agreement — which includes a pilot effort in which Lebanese soldiers take control of some small areas currently held by Israeli troops, as well as a process aimed at disarming the Hezbollah terror group — is the result of five rounds of talks in the US capital.
The deal “begins to put in place a framework for lasting peace and security,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the signing ceremony, noting: “It’s the beginning of the beginning. There’s a lot of work ahead.”
The framework deal was reached on the fourth day of the fifth round of talks that the US has mediated between Israel and Lebanon in Washington, beginning in April. The latest round of fighting in the country kicked off when Hezbollah attacked Israel on March 2, in support of Iran. Several truces declared since then have unraveled.
The areas the IDF will withdraw from have already been cleared of Hezbollah infrastructure. In some cases, this has included Israel razing entire Lebanese villages to the ground on the border, with the IDF arguing that Hezbollah was using much of them to plan and carry out attacks against Israel.
Israel, Lebanon and the United States on Friday signed a trilateral framework agreement aimed at paving the way for an eventual peace deal between the two long-time Middle East adversaries.
The agreement — which includes a pilot effort in which Lebanese soldiers take control of some small areas currently held by Israeli troops, as well as a process aimed at disarming the Hezbollah terror group — is the result of five rounds of talks in the US capital.
The deal “begins to put in place a framework for lasting peace and security,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the signing ceremony, noting: “It’s the beginning of the beginning. There’s a lot of work ahead.”
The framework deal was reached on the fourth day of the fifth round of talks that the US has mediated between Israel and Lebanon in Washington, beginning in April. The latest round of fighting in the country kicked off when Hezbollah attacked Israel on March 2, in support of Iran. Several truces declared since then have unraveled.
The areas the IDF will withdraw from have already been cleared of Hezbollah infrastructure. In some cases, this has included Israel razing entire Lebanese villages to the ground on the border, with the IDF arguing that Hezbollah was using much of them to plan and carry out attacks against Israel.
Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter said Israel will maintain its buffer zone in southern Lebanon until the Lebanese Armed Forces demonstrate that they can dismantle Hezbollah and assume responsibility for security.
Leiter stressed that the deal will not be based on a fixed timetable, but on measurable progress by the Lebanese army in disarming Hezbollah.
Additional “pilot” handovers from the IDF to the LAF will take place as benchmarks are met, he said.
Excuse me if I have little confidence that Lebanon and its own military will force Hezbollah to disarm. Why would Hezbollah (or Iran) agree to that? Rubio and Vance are good at putting a positive spin on these deals, but I don’t see how Lebanon can force Hezbollah to do anything, especially since the terrorist group is financed and supported by Iran, who wants continued attacks on Israel from the north
*Recently I lost a $500 check in the mail (the recipient never got it); it was probably stolen and I stopped payment. But the NYT tells us we should never send checks in the mail, period. (Article archived here.)
A practice that was common not so long ago has become increasingly risky — sending checks in the mail. But if you must send money this way, scour your account statements promptly.
Skipping that advice can leave you vulnerable to check fraud, and may also make it more difficult to recover the money if you lose it.
Joan K. Atchinson, 63, a retiree who lives in Washington, D.C., is dealing with that right now.
Ms. Atchinson said in a phone interview that she was trying to recover several thousand dollars stolen when someone intercepted a check she mailed last year. The check was altered to be payable to someone else before it was cashed. After months of trying, she said, she still has not recovered payment from either of the two banks involved — Charles Schwab, where she has an account that she used to write the check, and Chase, where the falsified check was cashed. “I’ve kind of lost hope.”
Checks sent through the Postal Service have become targets for criminals in recent years. While fewer people write checks, the checks haven’t disappeared. Two-thirds of adults say they rarely or never use paper checks, but more than a fifth either have experienced check fraud or know someone who has, according to a poll in 2025 by the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade group.
In some cases, thieves may pilfer one or more checks from local mailboxes. Adam Rust, director of financial services for the Consumer Federation of America, said thieves sometimes “fish” for checks at free-standing drop boxes, using long tools with sticky pads on the ends to grab letters. In other cases, more sophisticated criminals may steal large batches of checks, copy them and then sell them on the internet.
Often, the purloined checks are chemically altered in what’s known as “check washing” to remove the name of the recipient. The thief replaces it with a fraudulent name, and often increases the amount of the check, before cashing or depositing it.
How can I avoid check fraud?
Try to break the check-mailing habit. “No one should ever mail a check,” Mr. Rust said.
If you must write a check, he said, try to deliver it in person or take it inside a post office to mail rather than relying on your own mailbox or public drop boxes.
The American Bankers Association recommends using permanent “gel” ink pens when you do write checks to reduce the risk of tampering. Promptly review your bank statements — including online check images — for anything that looks suspicious. And if you don’t already, consider using your bank’s online bill payment service.
All states now offer some type of electronic payment option for paying taxes, so look into using your state’s system if you owe money at tax time.
Chicago is notorious for stolen mail, so I mail checks only from the post office and have stopped mailing checks in mailboxes since I experience theft. It’s a pain in the tuchas to go to the PO, but given the possibility of stolen checks, it’s worth it.
*Here’s a 20-minute video of Sam Harris expatiating on the cease-fire deal, which he calls a “betrayal”. He also has some choice words about Trump, and says that if the DSA takes over the Democratic Party, then the next Presidential election will be a “forced choice between lunatics of different flavors.”
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is having trouble seeing:
Andrzej: Hili, could you give me back my magnifying glass?
Hili: There’s no need. You just need to clean your glasses.
In Polish:
Ja: Hili, czy możesz mi oddać moje szkło powiększające?
Hili: Nie ma powodu, wystarczy umyć twoje okulary.
🎯 And when Westerners travel to repressive Islamic countries, they’re told to respect Islamic traditions. When representatives from these nations come to the West, Westerners are told to discard their traditions and freedoms and respect Islam. https://t.co/CWIETNWnr0
From Luana. This is, according to another tweet, “Leftist San Francisco lawmaker Scott Wiener, who supports all radical trans demands, showed up to the extremist Trans March on June 26 where he was accosted by the Trantifa he empowered. They surrounded him and kicked him out because he had supported Israel.” Wiener is a California State Senator who fought hard for LGBTQ rights, and I’ve rarely seen such vociferous hatred over a pseudo-issue (the Gaza “genocide”), though I’ve watched a lot of demonstrations. Unfortunately, he’s very pro LGBTQ but his downfall was being Jewish.
This is why you don’t give psychopathic movements an inch. They can never be appeased. Give in to one demand, and you become the target of endless struggle sessions designed to humiliate you into total ideological submission.pic.twitter.com/7PgU01cBcc
And two from Dr. Cobb. First, centipedes do not have 100 legs!
The smallest centipedes have 30 legs, while the largest ever discovered had 382 👀🐛 Despite the name, no centipede with exactly 100 legs has ever been found. Surprising science explains why!
Last night Bill Maher took up soccer and the World Cup, but that was an excuse to extol America—an exercise that seems to be a big sin these days.
He begins by dissing the sport because there is too little scoring, but that remark misses the point of the “beautiful game”, which is skill and tactics. After that he goes all pr0-U.S.A.,, admitting our problems but still proud to be an Americas. The connection with soccer is that many foreigners who come here to watch the World Cup wind up admiring things we take for granted (I love the Japanese guy tasting Texas BBQ for the first time). Unfortunately, most of the stuff Maher uses as evidence for America’s greatness is just that, stuff—consumer goods, air-conditioning, and food. But Maher points out that we have more immigrants than the next four countries combined, and that says something. I would tout the freedoms which we still enjoy, though some of them may have been temporarily interrupted.
Maher’s love of America won’t endear him to “progressives” who really hate the country, but I’m still glad I was born here compared to all the places where I could have been born. And, as usual, Maher is funny.
The guests this week included Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock (Georgia) and comedian and writer Larry Wilmore.
There’s little doubt that the richest cat in the world was Choupette, the pampered and beloved blue-cream Birman cat owned by fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. She was reported to have earned $3 million in one year alone, and, as the Atlantic article below notes, she had all her needs met—and more, until Lagerfeld died in 2019. First, here’s the pair from an Instagram post (click on screenshot to go to it). I don’t think she’s broke: read the Atlantic piece.
Click below to see the archived article; excerpts are indented:
More than seven years later, here is what is known for certain about the details of Lagerfeld’s will and estate: nothing. (Under French law, such matters are not made public.) But plenty has been rumored. Various figures close to Lagerfeld have been suggested as beneficiaries, including several male models and fashion executives, his bodyguard, his housekeeper, and the princess of Monaco. Even so, from the start, one improbable name has stood out: Choupette, Lagerfeld’s blue-cream Birman cat.
In the years before he died, Lagerfeld often spoke in extraordinary ways about the role Choupette played in his life. Listen to just a fraction of his avowals: “I never thought that I could fall in love with an animal like this.” “She is the center of the world. If you saw her, you would understand. She is kind of Greta Garbo.” “She has lunch and dinner with me, on the table, with her own dishes. She never touches my food. She would never eat on the floor.” “I have only one great love, my cat, Choupette.” And, ruefully, “There is no marriage, yet, for human beings and animals.”
The first public window into this change in Lagerfeld’s life came not long [after 2011], when a friend of his posted a picture of Choupette sitting wistfully in Lagerfeld’s apartment, next to what appears to be a full bathtub, an arrangement of several dozen roses arching over her. By that summer, Lagerfeld was explaining in interviews that Choupette was “like a kept woman”; that she had “two personal maids, for both night and day—she is beyond spoiled”; and that these maids, aside from their other duties, were charged with writing down every detail of Choupette’s behavior when he wasn’t around so that he might know what he had missed: “Everything she did, from what she ate, to how she behaved, if she was tired, and if she wasn’t sleeping.” Already, Lagerfeld declared, there were 600 pages of such documentation.
Choupette’s fame swiftly grew, and Lagerfeld routinely extolled the extravagance of his cat’s day-to-day life: how she ate chef-prepared meals off the best china, traveled by private jet, appeared with models on magazine covers, and starred in advertising campaigns. Lagerfeld proclaimed her the most famous cat in the world, and declared that her advertising work had made her independently wealthy. “She has her own fortune from things she did,” he stated. “She’s a rich girl!”
According to Lagerfeld, in 2014 alone, Choupette earned more than $3 million from campaigns for Opel Corsa cars and Shu Uemura’s Shupette makeup line. That same year came a book, Choupette: The Private Life of a High-Flying Fashion Cat, including photos, biographical tidbits, and details of Choupette’s beauty regimen. A second book, Choupette by Karl Lagerfeld, 53 photos of Choupette taken by the designer on his iPhone, followed in 2018.
Once he adopted her, few Lagerfeld interviews failed to include testimony to Choupette’s outsize role in his life, albeit clearly one that reflected his own particular tastes and needs. “She’s peaceful, funny, fun, graceful, she’s pretty to look at, and she has a great gait,” he’d explain, “but her main quality is that she doesn’t speak. It was love at first sight.”
Then reality intervened. Lagerfeld had learned he had cancer several years before his death in a Paris hospital on February 19, 2019, but this was information he had shared with almost no one. To ensure that Choupette was properly taken care of after he was gone, he designated his housemaid Françoise Caçote, who had long been the cat’s primary lady-in-waiting (and diarist), as her ongoing caretaker. During Lagerfeld’s last days, she surreptitiously brought Choupette to his hospital room. Once, not long before Lagerfeld’s death, Choupette caused great panic by disappearing, feared lost in the wider hospital, until her tail was spotted sticking out from her hiding place in Lagerfeld’s en suite bathroom.
As the post-death arrangements were made (Lagerfeld would be cremated with a piece of aquamarine jewelry bearing Choupette’s likeness), the media speculation about Lagerfeld’s estate began. The narrative that this involved Choupette had been primed by Lagerfeld himself, who had referred to how, should he die first, Choupette would be lavishly provided for. Although some reports that week allowed that any bequest to Choupette was, as yet, unconfirmed, a fair few were more absolute—led, as many such narratives are, by the British press, even its supposedly more respectable sectors. Their cumulative message was clear: “A cat belonging to the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who died on Tuesday, is reportedly in line to receive up to $300m (£230m) of his estate” (The Telegraph); “Karl Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette, may be set to inherit some of his £150 million fortune” (the Daily Express); “Karl Lagerfeld’s cat Choupette is reportedly set to inherit some of the formidable fashion designer’s £150m fortune” (the Independent).
The rest of the article—and it is a long one—deals with settling Lagerfeld’s estate (still unsettled because of French tax complications) and detailing what Choupette is doing: mostly occasional ads that punctuate her usual napping. The article is full of photos of the eccentric Lagerfeld and Choupette, so have a look.
Lagerfeld used Choupette’s image in his own products, and here are three photos I took of Choupette-y Lagerfeld products on offer at a fancy department store (Galeries Lafayette) in Paris in 2018:
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If you know anything about famous American cats, you’ll know about a cat named “Room 8” after a classroom the cat entered and inhabited for 16 years. Here’s an introduction from Wikipedia, but there are videos and more information below:
Room 8 (c. 1947 – August 13, 1968) was a cat who became a celebrity for attending Elysian Heights Elementary School in Echo Park, California, United States. He wandered in through a window in 1952 and quickly made himself at home in Room 8, where he joined class for the next 16 years. Room 8 vanished each summer and reappeared in the fall when students returned, a routine he kept up until the mid-1960s.
In the 1960s, Room 8 became world famous. Beverly Mason, the school principal, said in a 1968 newspaper story: “He disappeared all summer, but the minute school started, the day the first bell rang, down the street he’d come. On the first day of school, every newspaper and television station in town showed up at the crack of dawn to watch this cat appear from out of the hills.”
A short from Jen, Good News Girl:
More about Room 8 from Purr-n-Furr(click screenshot to read). It’s a good shortish summary with photos:
But if you really want to get into the details about how a feral tabby cat became world famous, and how students competed to get the coveted position of Cat Feeder, there is a 50-minute documentary film, and it’s a really good one:
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And from the Guardian we hear of a recent sighting of a sand cat (Felis margarita) in Libya, where it was not known to exist. Now there’s a short video (below). Click to read:
An excerpt:
When wildlife photographer Mohammed Almuntasir uploaded 18 seconds of footage to YouTube, he thought little more about the small, pale cat seen digging a hollow in the sand in the remote dunes of south-west Libya.
The video, however, posted in 2017, turned out to be the first material evidence that the sand cat (Felis margarita), the world’s only felid adapted to true desert conditions, existed in the country.
“When I posted it, nobody believed it had been filmed in Libya,” he said. “Everyone denied it, but I kept insisting that the cat is here, in several places; one of them was only 70km (43 miles) from Zintan, where I live.”
Nearly a decade later there is increasing evidence that this was not just one sand cat but that south-western Libya may represent a previously unrecognised stronghold for the species. The sand cat is no bigger than a domestic cat and its sandy colour means it is almost impossible to spot in the terrain it inhabits, earning it the nickname “ghost of the desert”.
Almuntasir did not actively circulate his film of the cat, but it drew attention on its own, prompting numerous researchers to contact him over the years, including Firas Hayder, a zoologist specialising in small carnivores and a postdoctoral researcher at Sol Plaatje University in South Africa.
. . . Their efforts culminated in a peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Arid Environments in February 2026 documenting the sand cat at 13 sites across the Libyan Sahara, as well as the Saharan striped polecat at eight new locations, seven of them outside the species’ recognised IUCN range. A high proportion of sand cat sightings, 15 out of 36, were concentrated in Wadi Armet, an isolated valley roughly 1,000km south-west of Tripoli.
. . .“This valley is incredibly vast,” Almuntasir says. “More than half of it remains unexplored because of how rugged the terrain is. Animals migrate there in summer because of the water. Many of them come from the Tassili n’Ajjer reserve on the other side of the Algerian border.”
The findings suggest that the species is more widespread and in better condition in Libya than previously believed, and that the country’s south-west may represent a strong refuge for desert-adapted species. The sand cat is one of a number of mammals considered threatened in Libya, including the cheetah, dama gazelle and sand gerbil.
. . .Because sand cats feed primarily on rodents such as jerboas, as well as venomous snakes and scorpions, they have an important role to play in preventing cascading damage to the limited vegetation that sustains desert ecosystems
“All Libyans should be involved in conservation efforts,” says Hayder. “They need to feel a sense of responsibility, that these species represent their environment and represent their country.”
Here’s the dispositive video showing the kitty getting some shade (and a scratch):
And here’s the distribution of the sand cat from Wikipedia. Notice that it doesn’t include Libya, but that should now be changed:
Today’s photos and videos come from reader/physicist/origami master Robert Lang in California. Robert’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the two DUCK photographs by clicking on them.
The creek named Arroyo Seco runs from Red Box Saddle in the San Gabriel mountains down past the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), through western Altadena and Pasadena, and then on to Los Angeles, joining the Los Angeles river near downtown L.A.; the historic Pasadena Freeway (now State Highway 110) follows its channel much of the way. True to its name, it’s dry much of the year, but above JPL, it runs year-round, providing lush, verdant and shady hiking any time of year. Since the Eaton Fire resulted in the closure of much of the front range of the San Gabriels, the still open Arroyo Seco and its Gabrielino Trail have been my go-to spot for a quick, regular getaway.
It’s also been a regular source of wildlife sightings, some of which have made it to RWP (for example, here, here, and here), but today I have an offering particularly near and dear to our host: ducklings and their momma!
This was at Brown Mountain Dam falls, which is about 3.5 miles up the trail from JPL. The dam was built in the 1940s, and quickly filled up its basin with sediment (there is now a forest of full-grown trees at the level of the top of the dam), but it provides a 40’ waterfall with a deep pool at the base and is a popular destination for bikers, hikers, and runners, especially on a hot day. Today, it had some unusual visitors: a momma mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) and her seven ducklings, who followed her up the creekbed to the pool where they then proceeded to feed, play, and shower under the falls.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, June 27, 2026; it’s shabbos for Jewish cats and Helen Keller Day, celebrating the anniversary of her birth in 1880 (she lived for 88 years). Here’s Anne Sullivan Macy, the woman who supposedly taught Helen to talk with her hands (there are doubters who suggest that Keller’s writings were actually facilitated communication from Sullivan).
Why are some players wearing pink cleats in the World Cup? Click on the new Google Doodle below to see the answer:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
Footy news: In another miracle, the team from Cape Verde, a tiny archipelago nation with a population around half a million, reached the knockout stages of the World Cup by tying Saudi Arabia 0-0.
After the full-time whistle Cape Verde’s players formed a huddle around their head coach, Bubista, eyes straining at the tiny moving images on a mobile phone. They sought the certainty that a dream had come true and, when the outcome nearly 1,000 miles away in Guadalajara was confirmed, erupted in unfathomable joy. Dailon Livramento, the centre-forward, leapt on to the back of his teammate “Diney” Borges. Everyone in view grabbed the nearest person to embrace and then came all the flags, the islands represented by their 10 stars made famous during one of the World Cup’s most compelling underdog stories in decades.
One of them was waved in the stands by Ana Cândida Évora, the mother of their remarkable goalkeeper, Vozinha. Others made their way on to the pitch and what a sight it was when the entire squad, visibly buzzing to a man, stayed still for long enough to pose for photographs in front of a disbelieving support. They drummed and sang into the night because never has the most formidable of tasks seemed so glorious. Cape Verde, the country of 530,000, will take on Lionel Messi and Argentina in the last 32.
Respect will need paying to a veteran of barely imaginable global fame. Yes, Argentina will have to acknowledge fully the prowess of Vozinha, the 40-year-old who has become a sensation in real life and online since the display that thwarted Spain. The meeting between Vozinha, who was playing in the São Vicente island league at the age of 29, and the tournament’s highest goalscorer of all time [Lionel Messi] will be one for the history books.
Here are the highlights of the game, but I doubt Cape Verde can beat Argentina. Still, for a country that small to make it to the knockout round is amazing.
Cape Verde had several great chances, but didn’t manage to score.
Iran’s armed forces struck a container ship that was passing through the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, according to U.S. and Iranian officials, undermining efforts to restore shipping traffic through the crucial waterway.
The attack came hours after Iran, demonstrating its hold over the strait, had warned ships that the only route through the vital pathway for oil and natural gas was through its waters. Many ships had been using a route on the southern side of the strait, hugging the Omani coast.
The strike halted traffic through the crucial waterway, contradicting President Trump’s claim that Iran did not control the strait and his assurances that it was open once again to shipping. Oil prices jumped after the attack, with the cost of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, rising over 2 percent to about $75 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, also rose over 2 percent, to around $72 a barrel.
A U.S. official, who spoke anonymously in order to share details of the strike, said the vessel had been hit by a drone. The attack prompted the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, to suspend its plan to evacuate seafarers from hundreds of ships that had been stranded in the Persian Gulf.
It was not clear how the strike would affect the ongoing negotiations between the United States and Iran over control of the strait and over Iran’s nuclear program. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met on Thursday with Gulf Arab leaders in Bahrain to try to allay their security concerns.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had warned ships earlier on Thursday that they must coordinate with its navy and that they should not take an alternative route, in an apparent reference to Omani territorial waters. The threats came just as shipping in the waterway was surging this week after months of near-paralysis.
The U.S. retaliation:
The U.S. military said it launched strikes on Iran on Friday in retaliation for an Iranian attack in the Strait of Hormuz a day earlier, hours after President Trump called the Iranian action a “foolish violation” of the fragile cease-fire between the two countries.
U.S. Central Command said in a statement that it had struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites as a “powerful response” to the Iranian attack on Thursday.
The extent of damage from the new U.S. strikes was not immediately clear. A U.S. defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly, described the strikes as a retaliatory measure and not a restart of major combat operations.
The strikes on Friday concluded after about 90 minutes, a U.S. official said, and included strikes by American fighter jets against four Iranian sites along the Strait of Hormuz and on Qeshm Island, a U.S. official said.
Iran’s security forces claimed that in response to the American attacks on Friday, Tehran had struck U.S. Army positions in the region. There was no immediate confirmation from the U.S. military of such strikes.
It looks as if Iran really is trying to control the Strait of Hormuz. If it specifies that ships cannot transit in international waters, or in waters controlled by Oman if Oman permits it, then, yes, Iran is controlling—or trying to control—the Strait. What gives them the right to say that ships must go through Iranian territorial waters? It’s starting to look as if the vaunted cease-fire deal is not going to happen any time soon, for the 60-days specified to iron out the remaining differences will slip by quickly.
And though each side is striking the other (and each retaliates for a strike in a never-ending cycle), they have “not resumed combat operations.” Well, we’re told it will all be settled in two months.
. . .Ukraine is swamping Russia’s air defenses with a growing armada of long-range drones that target refineries, port infrastructure, military industries and those air defenses themselves.
The escalating campaign is leading to restrictions on fuel sales in Russia, surging gasoline prices and regular images of black smoke clouds over parts of the country that thought the war in Ukraine was far away.
On Thursday, Ukraine hit two oil refineries in Ufa, a city in Russia that is over 930 miles from the front line, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a social-media post.
Ukraine’s cities have been under fire from Russian missiles and drones since the fall of 2022. When Moscow began its strategic bombing campaign, it aimed at breaking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, military-related industries and will to continue the country’s defense. Since last year, the Russian barrages have inflicted a rising toll of civilian deaths and injuries in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities.
Ukraine has been trying to hit back for over two years, targeting primarily Russia’s oil infrastructure to hurt its economy, government finances and military logistics. But a lack of long-range firepower has limited Kyiv’s efforts.
This year, Ukraine is producing more and better long-range drones, and is adding domestically made cruise missiles to the mix—inflicting growing damage deep inside Russia. Since March, more than two dozen strikes on Russian oil refineries have knocked out some 20% of the country’s refining capacity, analysts estimate.
“The strikes have become more effective because the technology is better and Ukraine has the ability to put together more large strikes than they could before,” said Michael Kofman, a military analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank.
Here’s a plot from the article showing the increase since January of Ukrainian long-term drone strikes on Russia. They’re gone up at least eighfold.
I doubt that these strikes will turn the tide against Russia, but we can hope that they’ll eventually tire out the Russian people by hurting the economy. But remember that Putin is still in charge.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, a “senior insider” (presumably in Israel)explains why the ceasefire deal isn’t all that bad. The premise is that Trump can’t afford to lose the House of Representatives, for if he does he’ll spend the rest of his term being investigated and impeached. And if the price of oil skyrockets, that (as the narrative goes) is what will happen.
. . . So Trump is, in fact, fighting the Iranians with one hand tied—without the Kurdish invasion, without a ground operation, and without striking the energy infrastructure, at least until the elections.
And so the deal was born. This is not a nuclear agreement but a deal about Hormuz. And here, says the senior Israeli source, one must pay attention to something very significant regarding the clause that goes beyond Hormuz matters and into money: it’s a temporary easing of the sanctions on Iran, not their permanent removal.
What this means is that from the moment of signing, one hundred percent of the economic pressure on the United States comes off, but only a few percent of the economic pressure on Iran. There’s disagreement over what damage Iran suffered in the war—those who minimize it estimate three hundred billion dollars, those who maximize it, a trillion. Either way, the benefit to Iran is like filling an empty pool one cup at a time.
Senior figures in the Mossad expressed deep pessimism after the signing of the agreement about the chances of an uprising in Iran while the wind blows at the regime’s back. The senior source is more optimistic: “It’s worth remembering that even before this enormous damage, the masses went out into the streets with nothing to lose. What will Iran’s citizens do in another six months when they understand the harsh economic situation is here to stay? What will the regime do?”
In the past week people have been comparing Trump’s deal to Obama’s agreement. The former president even needled the current one, saying it’s worse. “It’s not just that Israel has poor messaging—the Americans do too,” the source replied. “The most important part is that the Iranians have now signed a commitment to freeze the nuclear program. That’s dramatic. In a situation of ‘no deal and no war,’ as, for example, after Operation ‘Lion’s Roar’ in June 2025, they kept advancing their nuclear program. Under Obama’s deal they could continue, with permission and authority, with many elements of the nuclear program.”
And as for Hormuz? For now everyone is finding workarounds. The weapon of closing the strait will only work for the Iranians if they use it and Trump does nothing. But what would happen, for example, if they closed the strait a month before the elections? One can only imagine the president’s reaction. Here is the fundamental clash of interests between Trump and Netanyahu: both face elections in the fall. The first needs an agreement to keep his chances of winning; the second needs to avoid an agreement for that very same purpose. Trump, unsurprisingly, chose himself.
. . .The Lebanon issue remains. The main difference now compared to the situation twenty years ago, at the end of the Second Lebanon War, and a year and a half ago, at the end of the previous round, is that the IDF is deep inside the country. “Quiet will be answered with quiet” is not Israel’s desired conclusion for the long term, but it is for the short term, because of Hezbollah’s difficult condition and the complex situation of the US president.
“The Israelis have to understand that there is no scenario in which Israel alone dismantles Hezbollah without conquering all of Lebanon or Iran collapsing, and therefore, until further notice, the story is deterrence. You can create a situation in the coming months in which you’ve preserved the relationship with the US, let the agreement with Iran collapse on its own without giving an excuse, locked in the reality that no one fires into your territory, and the soldiers keep operating against military buildup in the new security zone. You need to wisely secure the American green light to act—not act nonstop and get cast as the neighborhood bully who has to be reined in.
There’s no good news, though, but Segal’s source recommends that Israel sit tight and take no initiatives save self-defense, saying this:
“Here’s one piece of advice for Israel: what would happen if, for once, we stayed silent? True, this week Trump also attacked Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and she replied sharply. But Italy doesn’t have a two-front war on its head, and it can also count on the support of America’s Democrats. For us it’s nothing but a loss. Stay quiet, breathe, give it time. That’s what needs to be done.”
In other words, the Israel Dude should abide.
*Sadly, this week’s TGIF column is written not by Nellie Bowles but by Will Rahn, who isn’t nearly as snarky. However, I’ll still steal a few items from his column, “TGIF: This is why I can’t have friends.”
First, on the anti-Israel mishigass that’s going on in NYC:
—>You don’t need to be Bibi Netanyahu’s number-one fan to conclude that this has all become totally deranged. Criticize the Israeli government all you want. Stand against the settlements. Plenty of Israelis certainly do so. But why was the Sunrise Movement—a supposedly environmentalist organization—gleefully posting photos this week of some poor woman who apparently elected to get a “FUCK AIPAC” tattoo on her forehead?
Call me old-fashioned, but I associate face tattoos with meth, mental illness, and Mike Tyson. Not. . . anti-Israel political posturing?
And what’s this lady going to do when the left inevitably moves onto its next cause du jour? I’m not a big fan of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the two Weather Underground leaders who had plum seats at the opening of Barack Obama’s ugly-as-hell presidential center last week. Yes, they were communists who carried out a bombing campaign against the government. Yes, Dohrn was a big fan of the Manson Family’s murder spree. But at least they had the good sense not to get “VICTORY FOR THE VIETCONG” tattooed on their foreheads. Such a thing might well have cost them their post-terrorism posts in snobby academia.
→ Checking in on P-Hustle: The Graham Platner scandals just keep on coming, this week in the form of a Reddit joke he told that is too vulgar and too unfunny to repeat in this family newsletter. The only funny thing about this guy is that he sexted with “up to six” women right after he got married in 2023, which is just perfect. Up to six. Like he’s placing a bulk toilet paper order at Costco. His whole schtick is that he’s a working-class guy (not really) who’s a different and better person than he was, what, six months ago?
Platner is just an exhausting figure. And we’re going to spend the next several months learning more and more unpleasant things about him. And then, God willing, Susan Collins, the long-serving moderate Republican he’s facing in November, will add him to her throne of skulls.
→ Leave Caitlin Clark alone: Caitlin Clark isn’t just the biggest star of the WNBA, she is the WNBA. She’s the reason they’re now making the medium bucks. And fans say the league isn’t giving her the star treatment she deserves.
Clark was knocked to the floor during a game this week and roughed up in a way that does look pretty intentional. One player, Alyssa Thomas, pressed her fist against Clark’s throat, but no foul was called. Clark exited the game early with a reported back injury. Clark’s supporters say the league allows her to be attacked without calling any fouls, but Caitlin would be fouled if she hit back. What’s going on here?
Meanwhile the NBA’s biggest star, Victor Wembanyama, gets to flail his limbs around Gumby-slapping everyone up and down the court, and isn’t fouled, either. The guy throws the shorter, better, cooler Jalen Brunson to the ground and the refs just shrug it off. Why is basketball like this? Though to its partial credit, a day after the photo of Thomas’s fist going into Clark’s neck made its way all over the media, the WNBA did suspend Thomas for one game and gave her a flagrant foul penalty.
Here’s a video of Caitlin getting roughed up. I have no idea why Clark, a player who doesn’t rough up others, is the target of so much physical violence. She’s very good; are they trying to get her off her game?
On Tuesday, the Democratic establishment suffered a crushing defeat when nine out of 10 candidates endorsed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) coasted to victory in their primaries. In some instances, long-serving progressives were caught in the crosshairs, including Representative Adriano Espaillat, a five-term House member who lost the Democratic nomination to a 32-year-old socialist. A House staffer for a New York Democrat told me that in progressive cities like New York, the DSA is “the new establishment.”
Hasan Piker, the far-left Twitch streamer, squealed with excitement at an East Williamsburg watch party when he saw yet another Democratic Socialist clinch the Democratic nomination.
“Brother,” he said, “the Democratic Party machine in the blue stronghold of New York City was thoroughly defeated tonight.”
The night was a major test for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who pulled off his own upset almost a year ago against Democratic Party giant Andrew Cuomo. The mayor, a long-standing DSA member, worked overtime to appear at countless campaign events for a trio of candidates he dubbed “the Team”: Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier. Meet the Mamdani-backed candidates who soared to victory last night.
A bit on each of the three primary winners for Democratic House seats:
Claire Valdez Age: 36 Seat: New York, District 7
With about 92 percent of the results in, Valdez, a first-time state legislator, trounced Representative Nydia Velázquez’s preferred successor, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, by a margin of more than 20 points. When the news broke at Valdez’s watch party in East Williamsburg, “DSA!” chants erupted.
“Solidarity forever,” she told her supporters last night. “Abolish ICE. Free Palestine. Organize your union, and join DSA.”
Brad Lander Age: 56 Seat: New York, District 10
Brad Lander is the quintessential anti-Zionist Jew. At his son Marek’s bris, Lander gave a speech lambasting Israel.
“We pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history,” he said in the speech, which was later reprinted in a 2003 book titled Wrestling with Zion. “But even then, we hope you will appreciate this absence of nationalist privilege in your inscribed identity.”
. . . Although many New York City races on Tuesday centered around Israel, none became more of a de facto referendum on the Jewish nation than the showdown between Goldman and Lander, a self-described “progressive Zionist” who has accused Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and “forced starvation.” Only a few years ago, Goldman would’ve been considered a safe seat as a progressive center-left legislator in a deep-blue district—and yet, with about 90 percent of the results in, Lander is poised to win the Democratic nomination by more than 30 points.
An “anti-Zionist Jew” is about a credible a label as “a segregationist black person.”
And one we’ve met already:
Darializa Avila Chevalier Age: 32 Seat: New York, District 13
Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old PhD candidate with no prior experience in office, toppled Representative Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent.
On Tuesday night, Avila Chevalier told the crowd at her watch party at a Puerto Rican restaurant about her fight against the “Democratic machine.”
Avila Chevalier’s social media history is chock-full of offensive content. In 2020, she called Joe Biden a “rapist” and “war criminal” and referred to the U.S. as a “fucking disgrace.” According to CNN, in 2021, she also retweeted posts declaring that the border should be abolished and that “all deportation is wrong.”
Perhaps no other candidate in American history has been so brazenly hostile toward Israel and made it this far. As a student at Columbia University, Avila Chevalier was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2024, she returned to her alma mater to help organize an anti-Israel encampment that took over the South Lawn and was ultimately disbanded by the police. The day after the October 7 attack, she attended an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square—a decision she has since defended.
“I can only say I have been advocating for the human rights of Palestinians for my adult life,” she told City & State when asked about her attendance at the rally.
Yes, it was a referendum against Israel, as well as against the mainstreatm Democratic Party (if there still is one). Who woulda thunk that three Israel-hating candidates could be handily elected in New York?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is contemplating a tipple:
Hili: Amazing.
Andrzej: What’s so amazing?
Hili: Cherry wine. I’ve never seen anything like it before.
Andrzej: Me neither, but it’s actually quite good.
In Polish:
Hili: Zdumiewające.
Ja: Co jest takie zdumiewające?
Hili: Wiśniowe wino, takiego jeszcze nie widziałam.
From Masih. I don’t agree with her about World Cup matches (or any sports matches) displaying ideological symbols, but she does make a good point about Islamist hypocrisy. Read more about the Pride Match between Iran and Egypt here, which includes this information:
This so-called “Pride Match” was planned before the World Cup draw was made back in December. After it took place, though, it quickly became apparent that the match would be played between Egypt and Iran.
Homosexuality is still illegal in Iran and punishable by the death penalty. And while homosexuality isn’t outlawed in Egypt, members of the LGBTQ+ community can be prosecuted for violating public decency laws.
Wow, now Iran’s regime and Egypt have objected to Seattle’s Pride Match and urged FIFA to remove Pride-related symbols.
This is exactly what I’ve been warning about: authoritarian Islamists never stop at asking for tolerance.
First: “Respect our religious practices. Respect our…
This is Richard. He's sometimes accused of not being a real dog because of his weird paws and inability to bark. Thinks his pack would say otherwise. 12/10 for all (IG: richardandtheguardians)
A few quotes from the article, which, as science journalism should, maintains a neutral viewpoint while emphasizing both pros and cons:
