Caturday felid trifecta: Thailand declares cats as its national symbol; art exhibit features medieval cats; and viral Belgian cat staffed by the Prime Minister is the continent’s equivalent of Larry; and lagniappe

January 10, 2026 • 9:45 am

The meme below, from Cats Doing Cat Stuff: implies that Thaland has declared all cats as official national symbols. Well, as the articles below say, that’s not exactly true. Some cats have become national symbols, but only breeds from Thailand. Read on:

Here are two articles, the first from the Singapore-based cna news organization and the second from the Bangkok Post. Click on either to read, though the first is more informative:

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From cna:

Five cat breeds native to Thailand were approved as national pet symbols by the government on Nov 18, joining the Thai elephant, fighting fish and Naga among other nationally recognised emblems.

The pure Thai breeds – Suphalak, Korat, Siamese, Konja and Khao Manee – possess distinctive physical and behavioral traits that clearly differentiate them from other breeds, according to Thailand’s National Identity Committee, which had proposed their designations as national pets.

“Their uniqueness has gained international recognition, with some foreign breeders attempting to register purebred Thai cat lines and establish global breed standards,” the Thai government’s public relations department said in a report on Nov 20.

A drawing of the five lucky breeds from cna graphics:

More from cna:

Preecha Vadhana, a cat breeder who operates Bangrak Cat Farm in Bangkok, said that each of the five breeds has very distinct features, making them easily distinguishable from one another.

“But they also share similarities, particularly their structure and short coat.”

The Suphalak has a distinct copper coat and is considered a symbol of prestige and fortune. The Korat is a bluish-grey cat with large, vivid green eyes, while the Khao Manee – a rare, white species – often has eyes with two strikingly different colours such as gold and blue.

The Konja is known as a lucky black cat, unlike its foreign counterparts which are often infamous for the opposite.

Finally, the “king of cats”, the Siamese or Wichienmas, is marked by its distinct dark spots and treasured for its intelligence. It is typically the most expensive of the breeds and can cost 15,000-20,000 baht (US$465-US$620) from a local breeder, while others cost 7,000-15,000 baht.

. . . . The decision to elevate these species is not just symbolic: It is meant to help conserve rare native breeds, standardise them and protect Thailand’s ownership of them. The species will also be used more in creative-economy and tourism branding, according to the government.

Then there’s some grousing about how this recognition won’t help the hundreds of thousands of feral Thai street cats.  That’s probably true, but this is just symbolic. I think the USA needs a National Cat too, and give the genetic admixture that is America, it should be a regular moggy, like a tabby.

Here’s a 4½-minute video about the recognition of National Cats:

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This article from artnet (click to read) describes a new exhibition of medieval manuscripts with cat drawings at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum. The title of the exhibit is cute: “Paws on Parchment”.  Click to read, and go to the site to see some of those medieval cat drawings, none of which look like real cats!

Note that if you live near Baltimore, the exhibit runs only through February 22, so get your tuches there soon. If I lived nearby, I’d sure go.

An excerpt:

In the 1470s, a Flemish scribe left some meticulously drafted pages of an illuminated manuscript out to dry, only to find out the next day that his cat had trod over them, leaving inky paw prints on the parchment. (Contemporary writers will know the similar pain of typos and elisions wrought by a feline friend’s frenzied scamper across a keyboard.)

Now, more than 500 years later, those pattered pages are the “cat”-alyst for an exhibition at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum. Aptly titled “Paws on Parchment,” the show explores how medieval illustrators in Europe, Asia, and the Islamic world celebrated cats in the marginalia of their manuscripts and beyond. On view through February 22, 2026, it’s the first of three exhibitions over the next two years dedicated to the depiction of animals in art.

Here is that page with the cat print on it, a cat that lived over 550 years ago!

(from artnet): A 15th-century manuscript bearing the tell-tale marks of a frisky feline. Photo: courtesy of the Walters Art Museum.

Herbert researched the works from a lot of different angles to better understand how people felt about cats. This included primary sources like medieval poetry, moral and cautionary tales, recorded pet names, and discussions of cats in encyclopedic works like Isidore of Seville’s Etymology, from the 7th century, and in medieval bestiaries.

Pets with Purpose

She was surprised by what she found. “Many medieval people loved their cats just as much as we do,” she said. However, the reason people kept them in homes, churches, and libraries was less for company and more for the practical reason of rodent control. Their skills at hunting mice and rats were critical to protecting food stores, valuable books, and textiles—and of course, preserving their owners from the plague and other diseases carried by vermin. “Because this was their key purpose in people’s lives, they are most often shown hunting mice,” Herbert said. “While this is still something a house cat might do today, our lives and livelihoods generally don’t depend on their success.”

A manuscript cat that was on display. Does this look like a cat?  Go to the artnet page or the Walters Museum page to see other illustrations and photos.  This exhibit has been running since last August, and you have about six weeks to see it.

Here’s a FB video of cats that didn’t make the cut for the exhibit.

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We all know about Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, who roams around in and around 10 Downing Street, but did you know that there’s an equivalent cat in Belgium. He belongs to the Prime Minister, and has the lovely name of “Maximus”, short for his full name, “Maximus Textoris Pulcher”. Click below to read the Guardian article about him:

An excerpt:

For nearly 15 years, Britain’s Larry the Cat has charmed visitors to 10 Downing Street. Now another prime ministerial pet is proving a social media hit in Belgium.

Maximus Textoris Pulcher was announced in August as an official resident at the Belgian prime minister’s office, Rue de la Loi 16 in central Brussels.

The grey rescue cat is now thought to have the second most popular political account on Belgian social media, with more than 142,000 followers on Instagram – second only to his master, Bart De Wever, who became Belgium’s prime minister in February.

The cat’s full name is a mock-grandiose title rooted in the prime minister’s love of Latin and Roman history, conveying the meaning “De Wever’s beautiful Maximus” (textoris being “of the weaver”, or De Wever).

De Wever adopted the cat, an abandoned Scottish fold, from a refuge. “I have a cat in my office, it is grey and it does not catch … mice, but I love it anyway,” he told journalists during a recent press conference.

Maximus’s posts on Instagram have lit up the Belgian internet, whether he is stretching for a toy, lolling on a windowsill or being tickled on his chest to an electropopsoundtrack.

. . . Unlike Larry, officially an apolitical cat, Maximus offers subtle observations on his country’s political life. “Another strike,” reads one Maximus thought bubble on the day Belgium began a three-day national action in November against proposed spending cuts, hinting at the exasperation of his master. In another post when De Wever’s eclectic five-party coalition was locked in budget talks, a grumpy-looking Maximus lies on the floor with a thought bubble reading: “Even on Sunday, these nuisances [cabinet ministers] are here.”

A source close to De Wever – described as “a cat person all his life” – said the account was a low-effort part of his team’s work and offered the public a behind-the-scenes glimpse of Rue de la Loi 16.

My friend Maarten Boudry, a Belgian philosopher, tells me that everybody in Belgium knows who Maximus is, and many people follow him.

Here are a couple of Instagram entries showing Maximus making pronouncements. I’ll put a translation for each:

“I’m lookng forward to 2026”:

What do you think of my Christmas sweater, Maximus?
Maximus: Gorgeous!
Maximus (thinking): Ugly…

BDW: What a lovely present, Maximus!
Maximus: Happy birthday… you old sock!

 

(Note that the socks bear pictures of Maximus)

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Lagniappe. This cat seems to be real, or at least the same photo is everywhere. One specimen:

 

h/t: Peter N.,, Ginger K.

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 10, 2026 • 8:15 am

Reader Ruth Berger sent some butterfly photos taken last year in Germany.  Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge Ruth’s photos by clicking on them.

Here are some butterflies I snapped on my walks on mostly sandy soil near the Main and Nidda rivers in and around Frankfurt, Germany, last year. I’ll start with a good picture (some of the others aren’t that good) of the small copper, Lycaena phlaeas, a holarctic species, on ragwort.

The next not so brilliant photo is of the orange tip (Anthocharis cardamines), whose males are so busy chasing females and each other at borders between patches of woodland and grassland in spring. Only the males of the species have the eponymic orange tip, here visiting the species’ major caterpillar feeding plant, Cardamine pratensis.

Unlike the males, orange tip females look much like any typical white butterfly (Pierinae) from above. The underside of the females has greenish markings similar, but not identical, to the species you see in the next picture, Pontia edusa, here shown feeding on a Centaurea flower:

I saw several species of red-spotted burnet moths this year, all members of the West Palaearctic Zygaena family. These are wondrous creatures, dressed in what looks like a blue black fur coat with a red-spotted cape on top. The following two pictures are of the most frequent species here, the 6-spot burnet moth, Zygaena filipendulae:

The next picture shows a moment from a scene I watched for around ten minutes: a male Queen of Spain fritillary (Issoria lathonia), the biggie on the left, chasing and harassing a small skipper (Thymelicus cf. sylvestris). Should any of the insect lovers here know what might be behind this behavior, please tell me:

The caterpillars of Issoria lathonia feed off Viola flowers. Below, you can see a female getting nectar from a European field pansy (Viola arvensis) in spring, showing its underside that has
silvery-white spots with a mother-of-pearl-like appearance:

Next is one of the prettier pictures, a male common blue (Polyommatus icarus):

While the males have a beautiful upper side of shiny blue (in young animals, the color can become washed out with age), the females of the German subspecies tend to be plain brown with orange spots: 

Next is a female marbled white (Melanargia galathea) , a species of the Nymphalidae family that despite its English name has nothing to do with the Pieridae family that most “whites” belong to. The females have a beige/tan hue seen from the side:

The boys are more black and white: 

And this one, shown from above, is apparently a bird-attack survivor:

Saturday: Hili dialogue

January 10, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, January 10, 2026, and Save the Eagles Day. America’s bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) doesn’t need much saving, for within my lifetime it’s gone from being an “endangered species” to a “species of least concern” (other species of eagles in other countries may be threatened, of course).  Here’s a lovely 52-second slow-motion video of eagles catching salmon. I still have no idea how they can see the salmon so well! (Yes, I know they have awesome eyesight, but still).

It’s also National Oysters Rockefeller Day and National Houseplant Appreciation Day. (If anybody can help me with a moribund Adenium obesum, I’d appreciate it.)

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 10 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The buzz all over my Facebook page (which is where I go for solace, not controversy), is about the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. One friend’s comment said this:

It was an act of domestic terrorism: terrorism by ICE,Trump’s personal Gestapo bought to you by this NAZI regime

To me that is offensive, because whatever the Trump regime does—and of course I detest the administration—it is not comparable to what the Nazis did.  The term “Nazi” has become hyperbole meant to tar those anybody with whom you disagree politically. When Trump starts rounding up groups, putting them in camps, and gassing them, then you can talk to me. Yes, the killing was a tragedy, but given the hard-to-interpret evidence I am not laying blame on anyone at this point, and perhaps never will. All we have is some snippets of video and reports on what Good was doing at the police action.  Further, it bothers me that people’s take on the incident is nearly 100% correlated with their political ideology. That means that people are passing judgement based more on their politics rather than the evidence.

The WSJ reports on a controversy about who will investigate the killing:

Local officials in Minnesota called on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to bring in state law enforcement to run a joint investigation into the fatal shooting of a woman by an ICE agent.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and other elected officials on Friday asked the FBI to share evidence with the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

“The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in Minnesota has consistently run these investigations before. They have done so without bias,” Frey said at a news conference.

“Our ask is to include the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in this process because we in Minneapolis want a fair investigation,” Frey said.

Frey’s comments marked the latest escalation in a deepening rift between Minnesota and federal officials over the shooting incident where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a 37-year-old mother of three, Renee Nicole Good.

From the second WSJ article:

A federal immigration agent’s fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis has spurred deeply diverging narratives of who is to blame.

The incident also has created an unusual rift between federal and local law enforcers, raising questions about whether, and how, Minnesota officials might seek to prosecute the agent over a shooting they say was unjustified. And it has renewed questions about Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda and the surge of ICE agents into the streets of American cities.

Here’s what to know about the shooting and potential next steps.

When does the lethal use of force cross legal lines?

To use lethal force, an officer has to have a “reasonable apprehension” of an “imminent threat” of serious bodily harm or death being imposed against the officer or someone else, said Phil Stinson, a Bowling Green State University criminologist who studies police misconduct.

The ICE agent’s actions raised questions about whether the incident was a case of “officer-created jeopardy,” where the law enforcement officer put himself in a position of danger and then felt the need to use force, said Geoffrey Alpert, a University of South Carolina criminal justice professor.

Investigators—or a jury—would look at the totality of the circumstances surrounding the shooting, not just the video, to determine whether the officer was reasonable in his belief that the driver he shot posed an imminent threat.

“We have a lot of video material to look at, but I always caution people that video isn’t everything,” said University of Chicago law professor Sharon Fairley. “They’re also going to look at other pieces of evidence and aspects of the situation that may not be reflected on the video. It’s going to be a tough question to answer.”

Could Minnexsota prosecutors file criminal charges against the federal officer?

Law enforcement officers are prosecuted occasionally for excessive use of force, but it is typically local cops being charged by local prosecutors. Legal observers say it would be rare, though not unprecedented, for local and state leaders to look to prosecute a federal officer over the objections of the federal government.

As I said, I have no idea whether I’ll form an opinion about this killing, just as I’m hesitant to form an opinion about the origin of the Covid virus.  If you want good “progressive” opinions, you know where to go. But surely the evidence should be shared among investigating offices, state or federal, unless there are strict rules about evidence-sharing that I don’t know about.

*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column in The Free Press, called this week “TGIF: Eat real food.”

→ Total MAHA victory: This week marked total, complete, and unequivocal MAHA victory over America. The Free Press MAHA moms are giving each other promotional rankings in their army—they’re slapping lentil patches on their uniforms. First, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dropped the recommended number of childhood vaccines from 17 to 11. No longer is it advised that you give your little sack ’o vax (child) vaccines for things such as meningitis and rotavirus before they leave the hospital. We’re now in line with Denmark’s health recommendations. I’m the last pro-vax millennial natalist. I give those kids everything I can find; I read about cool new vaccines in development like other women read about Bottega bags and think, Hmm, I want it. I respect the low-vax Danish, sturdy people with few needs, but when I look around America—no offense, but I do not see any strapping Danes. Anyway, as I tell the moms in MAHA lane at our office, watching them eat a new, seed oil–free venison stew: You people do whatever you want. Sure, when you’re in charge of the company lunch order we’ll all get diarrhea, but that’s political heterodoxy. That’s an open-minded newsroom.

The second part of the MAHA victory is that they inverted the food pyramid, so now it’s actually healthy. Like now the government is telling us to eat well.

→ Cea Weaver: There’s a new, made-for-TGIF character on the scene—Cea Weaver, newly appointed director of the New York City Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. It’s a real position of real political power. Here’s Cea:

  • “There is no such thing as a ‘good’ gentrifier, only people who are actively working on projects to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism and people who aren’t.”
  • “Rent control. . . is a perfect solution to everything.”
  • “Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.”
  • “Impoverish the *white* middle class. Homeownership is racist / failed public policy.”

Amid outrage over her appointment, here’s Sal Albanese, a former New York City council member, defending Cea: “The piling on Cea Weaver is disgraceful. A young woman attempting to make the world a better place. Disagree with her philosophy, don’t like her posts from a long time ago, that’s fair. However, the pummeling is cruel.”

A young woman. Cea Weaver is 37 years old, just like me, and my face is entirely crow’s feet. Or here’s a Nation columnist: “As millennials achieve political power, we’re going to need a general amnesty on bad old tweets.” Which would be totally fair if she didn’t actually believe in those positions anymore—but she does. Her only apparent effort at damage control was to say that she’d phrase those thoughts differently today. And her stance clearly fits into the broader Mamdani Doctrine, which is to slowly abolish private property. For example, right off the bat: They tried to delay a building’s bankruptcy sale, arguing that rent regulations have made that building an unsupportable business (Supreme Court, are you hearing this? Mamdani might be a gift. .

→ Tim Walz out, no questions please: Tim Walz won’t run for reelection amid the Somali scam news. And he will not take questions. There’s a fun video of the press conference where you can hear a reporter shout: “I thought you said you were gonna take questions? Why didn’t you?” Perhaps it’s related to his doing things like giving awards to people who later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. But that’s just a guess.

Look: I get it. I also avoid answering questions. Right now, there’s a New Yorker writer profiling my Bar, and the writer sent me these long, thoughtful questions asking about details from past years. Sorry, Tim and I are on Lake Minnetonka, and we can’t hear over the wind! No, but seriously, my comment to The New Yorker: “I support whatever my earnest, hardworking wife gets up to. As the better writer and generally accepted ‘hotter’ one, I just love to see her succeed in her endeavors.” And I stand by it.

*The United Arab Emirates has cut scholarship money to its citizens who wish to study in the UK.  Why? The UAE is worried that the students could be influenced by Muslim extremists there! (h/t Williams)

The United Arab Emirates has restricted funding for its students wishing to study at British universities over concerns about extremism on campuses.

A list of eligible universities where students from the UAE can receive scholarships for study in the coming academic year has been published and notably excludes all UK institutions.

The scholarships, which do cover universities in the US, Australia and across the rest of Europe, provide students with generous funds to cover both tuition fees, as well as a monthly stipend to cover basic living expenses while they study abroad.

According to reporting in TheTimesand Financial Times, all UK funding has been limited because of concerns over the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood on UK campuses, which is proscribed as a terrorist group in the UAE.

People familiar with the situation told the FT that the exclusion was not an “oversight”, but that the UAE did not want its students to become “radicalised” while studying at British institutions.

The UAE has long campaigned for the Muslim Brotherhood to receive the same status in the UK and across Europe, but a previous 2015 government review – led by John Jenkins, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia – concluded that while the group “promoted a radical [and] transformative politics”, it stopped short of banning the group.

The exclusion of UK institutions does not prevent Emirati students from studying in the UK, and those who are able to self-fund will still be able to apply.

According to figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the number of UAE students studying in the UK doubled between 2017 and 2024 to 8,500.

This is hugely ironic: the UK, because it now harbors so many Islamists, is not a place where the UAE wants its Muslim citizens to study!

A tweet:

*Maarten Boudry reports from Belgium that the new rector of Ghent University (the place where he works, but probably not for long) used AI to write her inauguration speech. The result? She gave several quotes from people like Einstein that were completely fabricated by AI. I first found out about this when Matthew send me this tweet:

OMG. The Rector of the University of Ghent used ChatGPT for her opening speech this academic year. Journalists pointed out the hallucinated quotes (including Einstein). Now she's doesn't dare to go and get an honorary PhD in Amsterdam.There's A LOT in there. But still some *shame*, which is great.

— Liesbeth Corens (@onslies.bsky.social) 2026-01-08T19:56:05.117Z

From VRT News:

At the start of the academic year, Rector Petra De Sutter gave a speech containing fabricated quotes from well-known thinkers. These quotes were ‘hallucinations’ generated by an AI tool. The matter came to light after an investigation by news website Apache. Ghent University confirms that errors were made due to the use of AI or artificial intelligence.

De Sutter, who for the Green Party earlier served as Europe’s first trans cabinet minister in PM De Croo’s federal government, spoke at Ghent University on 19 September 2025 at the start of the academic year. She quoted philosopher Hans Jonas and psychologist Paul Verhaeghe, among others. She also attributed the statement ‘Dogma is the enemy of progress’ to Albert Einstein. Apache’s investigation shows that the three quotes used are fabricated. They appear to be hallucinations of an AI tool.

The UGent press service explains that things went wrong when the draft text was edited by AI. On the university’s website the speech has twice been amended since September. The first time was in October and the second time was recently in January. This happened after Apache pointed out the errors. There is now a disclaimer accompanying the text on the website. The speech with the hallucinated quotations can still be viewed in the video on the website .

In the speech, Ghent University has now replaced the quotations with paraphrases and also corrected the sources that turned out to be incorrect. The blunder is embarrassing, especially since Ghent University itself has a very clear AI policy. ‘If you use AI tools irresponsibly, you may provide information without sources, the sources may be fabricated (hallucinations), or the information may be accompanied by incorrect sources,’ it states.

From an email response by Maarten (published with permission) when I asked him about this:

She tried to cover up her tracks with mendacious and half-hearted “corrections”, pretending that she just “summarized” the quoted luminaries (she didn’t, it was all hallucinated and the speeches didn’t even exist). And finally, when the dam had broken and it was all over the media, she published an embarrassing “nonpology” in the passive voice (she “fell” in a trap and “let” herself be fooled), then pivoting right away and having the chutzpah to lecture others about AI.
She MUST resign.
He added later:

Did I tell you she previously LIED about her equally outrageous and stupid quotes on the Gaza genocide? She warned in an interview that any researcher who dared to question the genocide narrative is “crossing a red line” and will not be protected by academic freedom. [Maarten has crossed the red line.]

When there was an outcry about this, she proceeded to tell bare-faced lies to her own Board of Directors, claiming that her statements were about the Holocaust and were “twisted” and “framed” by the journalist. It was a lie, and the journalist pointed it out: the whole conversation was about Gaza, and she even proof-read the whole interview.

Here is the journalist correcting the record: https://x.com/barteeckhout/status/1990682977786036392

Here’s the Rector’s “nonpology” (translated from Maarten) and a tweet from him::

On Thursday, January 8, 2026, media reports surfaced about incorrect quotes in Rector Petra De Sutter’s speech at the opening of the academic year. These errors resulted from the use of generative AI.

The Rector would like to convey the following message to all students and staff.

AI has become an indispensable part of our daily lives. At Ghent University, we embrace the benefits of AI and want to teach our Ghent University students to use it critically. It’s easy to be fooled by AI. Most users have probably experienced this before. I deeply regret that I, too, fell into this trap. Unfortunately, I can’t undo this. This experience is a good lesson for me and will undoubtedly further fuel the debate around AI use.

With this message, I want to emphasize to all Ghent University staff to maintain a critical eye when assessing AI-generated output. Use AI responsibly. You, as the user, are and remain solely responsible for what you do with the tools, and it is up to you to verify the reliability and source of the tools’ output. Never abandon your critical attitude and continue to hone your AI literacy, because developments are moving at breakneck speed.

A tweet. The translation from Dutch is this: “As Einstein said at the Sorbonne in 1927: “Sorry is the hardest word”. If you don’t know how to apologize, ask GPT. Really, @Ugent, how much more painful can this get?

Because of this flub, the Rector decided not to accept an upcoming honorary degree from the University of Amsterdam.  I guess this is marginally more ethical than plagiarizing from others, as Harvard’s ex-President Claudine Gay was supposed to have done, but crikey, if a University President can’t write in her own words, what hope is there? Of course, the University of Ghent is a hotbed of wokeness, which does seem associated with AI.

*You may have listened to the famous banjo player Béla Fleck of the former Béla Fleck and the Flecktones (he’s won 17 Grammy Awards). Fleck has just withdrawn from giving three concerts at the Kennedy Center x

The celebrated banjo player Béla Fleck announced on Tuesday that he had withdrawn from three concerts at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, becoming the latest artist to forgo playing at the venue amid changes from the Trump administration.

Mr. Fleck, an 18-time Grammy Award winner, was scheduled to play with the National Symphony Orchestra in February. Several musicians have cut ties with the Kennedy Center since its board voted last month to add President Trump’s name to the institution.

“It has become less and less a musically and artistically based situation and more of a highly politicized and divisive one,” Mr. Fleck said in a statement to The New York Times. “This pushes against the deepest motivations of why I want to be a musician.”

In a social media post announcing his withdrawal, Mr. Fleck said that performing at the Kennedy Center had “become charged and political, at an institution where the focus should be on the music.”

When asked for comment, the Kennedy Center pointed to a social media post by its president, Richard Grenell, who responded to Mr. Fleck’s post by saying, “You just made it political and caved to the woke mob who wants you to perform for only Lefties.”

Mr. Grenell added, “We want performers who aren’t political — who simply love entertaining everyone regardless of who they voted for.”

An updated listing on the Kennedy Center’s website said that Mr. Fleck, who was scheduled to play “Rhapsody in Blue” by George Gershwin, had pulled out of the concerts because of “personal issues.” Replacing him is the orchestra’s principal clarinetist, Lin Ma, who will perform Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto.

I don’t think the “woke mob” wants Fleck to play only for Lefties, and I don’t think Fleck was forced to cancel because of a mob.  He just doesn’t want to play in a place that was renamed to link “Trump” to “John F. Kennedy.”

Here’s Fleck playing some bluegrass with his band; the song is “Wheels Up”:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, I worried that Hili was getting religious, but Andrzej tells me she is joking.

Andrzej: Can you see anything out there?
Hili: No, I’m hearing the voice of Providence.’

In Polish:

Ja: Coś tam widzisz?
Hili: Nie, słucham głosu Opatrzności.

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From CinEmma:

From the New Yorker’s FB post, a cartoon by Lynn Hsu, showing the new food pyramid:

From Cat Memes:

Masih retweeted this. It’s time for Americans to start calling attention to what’s going on in Iran. It’s a MASSIVE protest against a repressive theocracy. Roberta Metsola is President of the European Parliament.

We support Hamas? What kind of morons ARE these?

A meme from Simon, sent to him by his friend:

From Malcolm: a road map of Australia (I want to go across the south and then back and up to the north):

One from my feed. Is it real? I hope so, and hope that the muntjac came out unscathed. How did it get in there with the rhino?

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb, who, like me, is depressed at the state of the world. This singing kitty makes us both feel better. You can find the full video here.

Timeline cleansing

— Oregon 🕎🎲 (@oregonthedm.bsky.social) 2026-01-09T03:36:08.426Z

Here’s another “timeline cleanser,” part of a series:

Best TikTok thing going is the two dudes trying food from every country without leaving NYC. If you haven’t seen them yet, it’s incredible. My favorite so far is last week’s. Legit got me emotional.

— Brian Coulter (@philabcoulter.bsky.social) 2026-01-09T01:50:56.483Z

Melanie Phillips explains, once again, why anti-Zionism is antisemitism

January 9, 2026 • 11:30 am

Reader Norman sent me the first video below saying, “in one of your posts the other day you gave a link to an article about how anti-Zionism = antisemitism.”  Yes, I’ve frequently said that and in fact did so in the last post. And I think the equation is clearly true. For those on the left justifying anti-Zionism, the claim that it is NOT antisemitism rests on an incorrect construal of “anti-Zionism” as “criticism of the politics of Israel/Netanyahu”. Alternatively, “anti-Zionism could mean “favoring a one-state solution, a state that includes both Palestinians and Jews—and we all know what that means for the Jews.

As the moderator defines it in the video, “anti-Zionism” is “opposition to the existence of a Jewish state in the territory defined as the historic land of Israel or Palestine” and that view implicitly favors the erasure or destruction of Israel, which to any reasonable person is antisemitic (where would the Jews go?). Further seeing the “anti-Zionism” trope as being politically okay ignores the fact that nearly all Muslim states in the Middle East are explicitly religiously Muslim as part of their government (viz., the formal name of Iran is “The Islamic Republic of Iran”). In contrast, while Israel was approved as a homeland for Jews after WWII, there is no requirement for residents to adhere to the tenents of Judaism, for 20% of the population are Arab Muslims and many of the resident “Jews” are, like me, atheists who are culturally Jewish. To show the difference, try being gay in Gaza or Iran as opposed to Israel.

So, below is what Norman wanted me to see: a short speech by British author and commentator Melanie Phillips.  It’s part of a four-person intelligence² debate that took place six years ago. The proposition debated is is “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” Phillips’s bit, agreeing with the proposition, starts 47 seconds into the video, and I’ve begun the video at that point. Her bit ends at 10:28, so the part to listen to is about ten minutes long. The rest is some person, not part of the formal debate, banging on.

As Norman says, “this is one of the most forceful and succinct statements I have heard or read.” It is indeed. And despite its title, Mehdi Hasan does not explode here. That is in the second video below, which gives the entire two-hour debate.

Here’s the whold video, including besides Mehdi Hassan (his speech starts at 35:45) and Melanie Phillips, Einat Wulf (who agrees with Phillips; her speech starts at 24:00) and Ilan Pappé, an Israeli who favors a “one-state solution” (his speech starts at 12:25). The audience, clearly on the side of Hassan and Pappé throughout, defeated the motion.  They are wrong.

Quinn Que: To save liberalism, “progressives” must apologize and abandon their air of moral certainty

January 9, 2026 • 9:40 am

This longish diatribe against “progressives” (i.e., left-wing extremists who aren’t Communists) appeared in my weekly Substack recommendations. Intrigued by the title, I printed it out and read it (I can’t read on screens.) Que’s thesis is one you’ve often seen me advance: “progressives” have gone so far that they’ve alienated much of the Left, and must acknowledge this honestly before Democrats get a decent chance of winning substantial power.

Que’s indictment is on the mark, but his proposed solutions (see below) seem unworkable—something Que realizes. In other words, he thinks that wokeness will hang on tenaciously until its advocates apologize and work with moderates to “center-ize” the Left, but that this is highly unlikely.

Click below for a free read, but subscribe if you like the content of “Edokwin Editorial”. Que is described as “a prolific storyteller and journalist. A lover of (micro-)blogging, Que’s primary areas of interest are arts, entertainment, philosophy, and politics.”

Que’s thesis starts with a laundry list of “progressive” sins, though it’s ironic to use “sins” for calling out a movement based on moral certainty (see below). I’ve bolded one sentence.

Rationalized bigotry and identitarianism. Political violence and terrorist apologia. Mass migration madness. Cancel culture. Overreaches around BLM, COVID, trans issues, and so much more. The 21st century progressive movement’s mistakes turned outright malfeasance make it one of the most totalizing failures of activism, public policy, global governance, and general wellbeing. It is a global phenomenon, with far reaching and overwhelmingly negative implications.

Keir Starmer’s approval rating sits at 18 percent. His government—barely a year old—polls at 19 percent. A far right party that didn’t exist two years ago, Nigel Farage’s Reform, has surged to 31 percent support, nearly matching Labour and the Conservatives combined. This pattern repeats across the Western world. Trump’s return in America. Wilders in the Netherlands. Le Pen’s surging support in France. Germany’s AfD. The far right isn’t ascendant despite progressive politics & policies. It’s ascendant because of progressivism.

The only hope for this movement, which has been the vanguard of leftism for most of my adult life, is to moderate and make massive mea culpas. I am not optimistic on either front however. The only thing worse than its terrible track record is the constant gaslighting about it.

Before singling out six areas in which, says Que, “progressives” have alienated the rest of America, he points out one specimen of what he calls “craven complicity”: columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein.  To Que, Klein epitomizes the problems afflicting “progressives” called out on their nonsense. Klein, like others of his ilk, “adjust their language just enough to avoid total campaigning disasters and PR implosions, but they never question the core conviction that animates everything they do: We are the moral vanguard, and opposition to our program stems from bigotry, ignorance, or malice.”

And that, Que argues, is the main reason why progressivism has failed, and failed largely because Americans can’t stomach it. It is “progressives'” air of moral certainty. so that they see no point engaging in introspection about their views, nor arguing about them.  They are, they believe, morally right, even when they’re tactically wrong. And it is this smug air of moral rectitude that regular Americans—however dumb “progressives think they are”—can see right through, and reject. A summary:

Here’s what people like Harris, and also Andrew Sullivan, understand that most progressive critics miss: The problem isn’t just that progressives got specific policies wrong. It’s that they’ve constructed an entire worldview in which very basic things most human beings take for granted are deemed “fundamentally and morally wrong.”

That foreigners are not citizens, and citizens’ interests come first. That children are not adults capable of consenting to irreversible medical procedures. That rapid demographic transformation of neighborhoods affects quality of life. That borders serve legitimate functions. That merit matters. That parents have primary authority over their children’s education and upbringing. And that the wrongness of racism & sexism leave no space for social justice carveouts; racism against Asians, Europeans, and Jews is still racism, sexism against men (misandry) is still sexism, and so forth.

These aren’t fringe positions held by extremists. They’re baseline assumptions held by overwhelming majorities across every Western, liberal democracy. And progressives have spent fifteen years treating people who hold these views as moral monsters. They are a political movement that has played footsie with far left extremism for ages, and which believes radical, revolutionary social change is not only permissible but necessary, even against the wishes of the voting public.

Que then singles out six areas in which “progressives” went too far (characterizations are mine, and bolding within quotes is Que’s).  Que’s quotes are either indented or in quotation marks, and my comments are flush left.

a.) Cancel culture and the suppression of discourse, something that Americans see as an extreme form of “mob justice”). Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize for treating disagreement as a moral emergency and for wielding social ostracism as a political weapon.

b.) The Covid-19 pandemic.  Que thinks, and many agree, that “progressives” over-enforced things like masking and closing schools, to the detriment of American well-being. He’s not saying that precautions needn’t have be taken, but that they went too far, and were mandatory rather than voluntary. He argues that, especially in blue states, responses involved not using available evidence but “suppressing legitimate scientific debate.”

Que is right to some extent, especially in light of Fauci’s and Collin’s recently-revealed attempt to suppress investigation of the origin of the virus, but at the time it wasn’t clear what the scientific evidence was, as there was no time to accumulate it. To a large extent, health departments and the government acted on their best guess, and they sometimes got it wrong. And some were certainly wrong in suggesting (and implementing, in Vermont and New York), the idea that minorities get prioritized at the expense of other people more susceptible to infection and death.  Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize for treating emergency powers as a blank check, for suppressing legitimate scientific debate, and for the generational harm inflicted on children who lost years of education and socialization to policies that didn’t work.”

c.) Hamas’s attack on Israel. I’ll quote Que here:

Nothing has more starkly revealed progressive moral bankruptcy than the response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre.

Within hours of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust—an orgy of rape, torture, murder, and kidnapping that killed over 1,200 people and harmed thousands more—segments of the progressive left were…celebrating. The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter posted an image of a Hamas paraglider. Democratic Socialists of America rallied in support of Palestinian “resistance.” Harvard student organizations issued statements blaming Israel for its own massacre.

The reaction stunned even moderate progressives themselves. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote: “for a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed. i’d like to just state that i was totally wrong.” CNN’s Jake Tapper described the aftermath as “a real eye-opening period in terms of antisemitism on the left.” New York Governor Kathy Hochul spoke of a “category five hurricane of left-wing antisemitism.”

The pattern was unmistakable: progressivism’s oppressor/oppressed binary had trained a generation to see Jews—successful, often “white”-presenting—as oppressors whose suffering didn’t count. When Hamas terrorists raped and murdered Israeli women, the feminists of #TimesUp, #BelieveWomen, and the #MeToo movement stayed silent. When progressive university professors failed to condemn celebrations of the massacre, they revealed that their commitment to “social justice” was conditional on the identity of the victims.

This is absolutely true. The condemnation of Israel began before it even went into Gaza, and a lot of antisemitism that had lain latent before October 7 was quickly revealed.  Jews became “Zios,” a euphemism confected by anti-Zionists, who are the same as antisemites.  Many NGOs, as well as the UN, were arrantly favoring Hamas over Israel: Doctors without Borders, for example, repeatedly condemned Israel for perpetuating “genocide” without (or only rarely) condemning Hamas. Que’s conclusion: “Progressives must apologize to Jews for creating an intellectual and moral environment where celebrating the mass murder of Jewish civilians became acceptable in progressive spaces, and where opposition to that celebration gets you called a hater yourself.”  Harvard has sort of done that, but “progressives” in general? Naah.

d.) Trans issues. “Progerssive” moral certainty has gone so far here that even if you think that biological men shouldn’t compete in women’s sports and generally shouldn’t be put in women’s prisons, you are tarred as a transphobe. But most American’s aren’t afraid of or hate trans people; like me, they believe that trans people should have the same dignity and respect as anyone else, but also that “trans rights” sometimes clash with other rights (as in sport, which has men’s and women’s divisions for a reason), and those clashes must be discussed and resolved.

Que:

Few issues better demonstrate progressive detachment from reality than transgender policy—and few reveal more starkly the gap between progressive rhetoric and progressive belief.

Let’s be clear about what Americans actually think. Large majorities support allowing trans adults to transition to the gender they want. Large majorities support banning discrimination against trans people. These are not controversial positions. They represent basic decency.

But Americans also believe, by even larger majorities, that: genetic human sex is real and determined by biology, not subjective feelings; children should not undergo irreversible medical transitions, especially without parental consent; male sex athletes should not compete in women’s sports; women deserve single-sex spaces for privacy and safety.

According to Ezra Klein, these majority positions are “fundamentally and morally wrong.” Not mistaken. Not worthy of debate. Fundamentally and morally wrong.

This is the progressive tell.

Que’s solution: “Progressives must apologize for sacrificing children’s health to ideological purity, for eliminating women’s spaces and sports, for calling majority opinion immoral, and for making reasonable discussion of transgender policy impossible.”  I agree, but again, this ain’t gonna happen. One thing I’ve learned, from my own “cancellation” for the views expressed above, is that ideologues will never broach questioning of their views.

e. The DEI “debacle.  Que has written about it here. Originally well-meaning (and still held as “morally right” by its advocates), DEI, promoted mostly by progressives and those who are relatively well off, became by 2020:

. . . . a multi-billion dollar ecosystem of administrators, consultants, and training programs. Universities created massive bureaucracies dedicated to DEI, often with more administrators than faculty in some departments. Corporations mandated unconscious bias training despite no evidence it reduced bias. Hiring and promotion decisions were made with explicit racial preferences defended as “equity.”

The contradictions were glaring. Progressives who claimed to oppose essentialism reduced people to their demographic categories. They claimed to empower minorities while treating them as fragile victims requiring constant protection. They denounced discrimination while implementing explicit racial discrimination in admissions and hiring.

Most perversely, DEI’s benefits accrued primarily to affluent, educated minorities who needed help least, while working-class minorities—and working-class people of all races—were left behind. As a Tablet Magazine analysis noted, progressivism has always been an elite movement with “class condescension and a paternalistic attitude to the laboring classes” at its core.

Que’s solution: “progressives must apologize for reducing equality to a spoils system, for treating minorities as political clients rather than individuals, and for poisoning the well of genuine anti-discrimination efforts.”  I should add here that, lest Que be accused of racism, he is black.  Finally, we have:

f. “Migration madness.” Although now Trump and his flunkies are going overboard with their seizures and deportations, I well remember when everyone, including many Democrats, were calling for migration reform to stem the tide of people entering America illegally. (This also goes for Europe, which has suffered greatly from a policy of lax enforcement, leading to the rise of the far right in European politics.) Que:

This is the tell. Progressives will finally admit, under electoral duress, that maybe they got immigration a bit wrong. But they cannot stop believing that mass immigration remains a moral signifier, a virtue, an elevating repudiation of “whiteness.” They feel they have to adjust because Trump is dangerous and the country is full of racists, but they still believe their critics on immigration are “on the wrong side of history” and almost all bigots.

Que’s solution: “Progressives must apologize for treating immigration as a morality play rather than a policy challenge requiring trade-offs, and for abandoning working-class concerns as beneath consideration while calling basic immigration enforcement “immoral.”

You’ve already seen the problem with this critique: solutions don’t seem workable. At the end of his piece, Que recommends three actions:

  1. “Apologize, Genuinely and Specifically”
  2. “Reform Institutions and Methods.”
  3.  “Work with Moderates to Combat Real Extremism”

For each of these Que describes what must be done specifically.

But, ridden with moral certainty, “progressives” simply won’t be able to apologize, for apologies constitute one of the hardest things for anyone to tender. I can envision #2 and #3 happening, but only if we get a centrist liberal President and Congress, and those aren’t in the offing. Even Que admits that this seems unworkable:

Will they do it? Based on the evidence at the moment, my current prediction is: “no.” The moral supremacy is too intoxicating. The institutional capture is too complete. The social rewards for performing wokeness are too powerful.

And he leaves the choice in the hands of progressives. That’s like leaving a lion the choice between eating an antelope or eating cabbage.  Kudos for Que to distill the problem of “progressivism” into a bit-sized hunk, but, as John McWhorter and Sam Harris argued yesterday, wokeness (the manifestation of progressivism) seems here to stay.

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 9, 2026 • 8:15 am

Thanks to the people who sent in photos when our tank was almost empty. (I could use more, though. . . )

One of them was reader Ephraim Heller, who sends in part 11 of his installment “Brazil virtual safari.”  Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them:

Here are my photos, please don’t shoot the cute duck!

These photos are from my July 2025 trip to Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland area and the world’s largest flooded grasslands. Today I have photos of birds in the tyrant flycatcher family as well as a few miscellaneous birds.

In Brazil, “flycatchers” and “tyrants” refer to the same family – Tyrannidae. It is the world’s largest family of birds, with more than 400 species in North and South America, including 28 species in Brazil. Tyrannidae belong to the suborder Tyranni (suboscines), a primitive passerine lineage that lacks the complex vocal learning abilities of songbirds.  This places them in an entirely different major evolutionary branch from that yielding the Old World flycatchers (Muscicapidae), which are oscines (advanced songbirds).

Boat-billed Flycatcher (Megarynchus pitangua):

Fork-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus savana). The elaborate tail serves both aerodynamic and display functions:

Vermilion Flycatcher (Pyrocephalus obscurus). A real beauty:

White Monjita (Xolmis irupero):

White-headed Marsh Tyrant (Arundinicola leucocephala):

Black-tailed Tityra (Tityra cayana). Tityras were formerly in the tyrant flycatcher family, but have been split into their own family:

Now for some miscellaneous birds:

Black-capped Donacobius (Donacobius atricapilla). This pair kept up their singing as I photographed them:

Chotoy Spinetail (Schoeniophylax phryganophilus):

Rufous Hornero (Furnarius rufus). Argentina’s national bird, famous for constructing elaborate clay nests resembling traditional mud ovens, with complex internal chambers and entrance tunnels. This master builder creates new nests annually, with old nests often used by other bird species. The clay construction provides excellent thermal insulation and protection.

Friday: Hili dialogue

January 9, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the tail end of the week, as it’s Friday, January 9, 2026, and the wind is blowing like a banshee in Chicago. It’s blowing so hard, in fact, that it’s sometimes hard to walk against it. Welcome to the Windy City which is, I’m told a misnomer, as I’m told that it’s no windier here than in Boston.  Look it up; I don’t know.

It’s also National Static Electricity Day. Here are 9 tricks you can do at home demonstrating the phenomenon:

And it’s National Apricot Day, Play God Day, and National Cassoulet Day,  I adore cassoulet no matter what the weather. Here’s a big pot I ate (well, tried to eat) at Chez Joesphine Dumonet in Paris in November, 2023:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 9 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*In a rare event, the NYT got to interview Trump for two hours, during which the “President” said that the U.S. could remain in Venezuela “for years”, running the country (articles archived here and here respectively).

President Trump said on Wednesday evening that he expected the United States would be running Venezuela and extracting oil from its huge reserves for years, and insisted that the interim government of the country — all former loyalists to the now-imprisoned Nicolás Maduro — is “giving us everything that we feel is necessary.”

“Only time will tell,” he said, when asked how long the administration will demand direct oversight of the South American nation, with the hovering threat of American military action from an armada just off shore.

“We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” Mr. Trump said during a nearly two-hour interview. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”

Mr. Trump’s remarks came hours after administration officials said the United States plans to effectively assume control of selling Venezuela’s oil indefinitely, part of a three-phase plan that Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlined for members of Congress. While Republican lawmakers have been largely supportive of the administration’s actions, Democrats on Wednesday reiterated their warnings that the United States was headed toward a protracted international intervention without clear legal authority.

During the wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, Mr. Trump did not give a precise time range for how long the United States would remain Venezuela’s political overlord. Would it be three months? Six months? A year? Longer?

“I would say much longer,” the president replied.

Oy! And we’re going to have all the oil from Venezuela? Not just oil from refineries that used to belong to American companies? Again, I don’t understand why, within a year or so, we couldn’t, along with other countries, set up fair and supervised elections, let someone win, and then decamp.  The issue with that is the military may not accept a new President, who would likely be Edmundo Gonzalez or Maria Corina Machado; Machado Machado has just just said that she should be the rightful President of Venezuela.

*As the war between Trump and Minnesota rages, it was exacerbated yesterday as an ICE agent fatally shot a woman who, the U.S. government says, was trying to run down the agent. There is a huge controversy about whether the ICE agent murdered the woman and was in no danger himself:

Protesters took to the streets of Minneapolis overnight after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a 37-year-old woman Wednesday, sparking outrage from residents and local officials already angered by the Trump administration’s massive enforcement effort in the city.

President Donald Trump and the Department of Homeland Security said the officer feared for his safety and was acting in self-defense after the woman threatened him with her vehicle. But state and national Democrats repudiated that claim — with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey calling it “bullshit” — accusing the administration of recklessness and demanding an end to the immigration operations.

On social media, some members of Congress described the killing as “murder” and called for federal officials to be held accountable.

Several hundred people blocked the intersection where Renee Nicole Good was killed Wednesday. Protesters at the scene chanted “f— Trump” and “f— ICE” but remained peaceful. A quiet, smaller group held vigil down the block in front of a shrine that included flowers, candles and balloons.

. . .Videos posted online after the Minneapolis shooting show the woman’s vehicle, a burgundy Honda Pilot SUV, stopped in the middle of the road across travel lanes with the driver-side window rolled down. They do not show the events leading up to that moment.

Two ICE officers pulled up, exited their vehicle and approached the SUV. The vehicle began to reverse, and one of the officers reached out and held on to the door handle. As the SUV moved out of reverse and drove forward, a third officer, positioned closer to the front of the car, quickly drew his weapon and fired three times.

That third officer appears, in the videos, to have been in front of the vehicle when it began advancing and to have been beside it by the time of the last shots. Minneapolis police said the driver suffered a gunshot wound to the head and was pronounced dead at a hospital.

An investigation is being conducted by the FBI and Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Minneapolis police said. Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) said on social media that the woman was a U.S. citizen, but federal authorities did not identify the woman by name or confirm her citizenship.

Her name is Renee Nicole Good, she was 37, and she had three kids. I’ve seen the videos, but it’s really hard to tell what happened.  If she was trying to run the agent over, he had the right to shoot, but it’s not even clear from the videos if that was what went down.  (He might have been trigger-happy as he was dragged by a car several months ago in an identical situation.)  I will reserve judgement rather than make an instantaneous decision about what likely happened.  And I’m glad that if the ICE agent is indicted for manslaughter or murder, I won’t be on the jury.

*In a blow against academic freedom at Texas A&M, philosophy professors are being told to cut back on studying Plato (article archived here).

Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M University, was thunderstruck when he was told on Tuesday that he needed to excise some teachings of Plato from his syllabus. It was one way, his department head wrote in an email, that Dr. Peterson’s philosophy class could comply with new policies limiting discussion of race and gender.

. . .The course Dr. Peterson was planning to teach — Philosophy 111, or Contemporary Moral Issues — would examine “representative ethical positions and their application to contemporary social problems,” according to the university’s academic catalog. Students can use the course to fulfill one of their core curriculum requirements.

Dr. Peterson’s original syllabus called for modules focused on debates around abortion, capital punishment, economic justice, and race and gender ideology, among other topics. When Dr. Peterson, who has been at Texas A&M since 2014, submitted his syllabus for review last month, he told his department head that his “course does not ‘advocate’ any ideology.” Instead, he wrote in an email he shared with The New York Times, “I teach students how to structure and evaluate arguments commonly raised in discussions of contemporary moral issues.”

On Tuesday, Dr. Peterson got a response from Kristi Sweet, the philosophy program’s head. University officials had discussed his syllabus, she wrote, and the new A&M policies. Dr. Sweet gave the professor two choices.

Either Dr. Peterson could “mitigate” his course’s “content to remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these,” Dr. Sweet wrote, or Dr. Peterson could be reassigned to an ethics and engineering course.

According to the syllabus, Dr. Peterson’s planned Plato readings included passages about Diotima’s Ladder of Love and Aristophanes’ myth involving split humans.

The background of this is that the state is trying to prevent liberal professors from using their classes to proselytize.

Under policies approved late last year, courses may not “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” In select instances, after “demonstration of a necessary educational purpose,” some graduate and “noncore” undergraduate courses may teach on those topics.

Universities across the country routinely say that classes cannot be used for political purposes. But the push by the A&M regents reflects a noisy debate in Texas, the nation’s most populous conservative state, over its public universities. Republican elected officials — often echoing the Trump administration’s grievances about American higher education — have argued that universities were too often veering away from academic instruction and into liberal proselytizing around , for example, diversity, equity and inclusion.

This is not a false fear. Even at Chicago, for example, we have one professor who said she took the job here to do just that: proselytize for Palestine. However, Peterson’s course doesn’t sound like that. Rather, he was going to use classical philosophy to inform discussions of topics without pushing the discussion one way or another. Of course you can talk about race or gender in a class, so long as the professor facilitates open discussion and those topics are indeed “contemporary moral issues.” I’m on Peterson’s side and think that A&M should leave him alone, for they’re violating his academic freedom to teach what he wants–in a sound manner.

*The Trump Administration, via the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has issued new dietary guidelines, somewhat inverting the classical food pyramid by telling us to eat more protein and more fats.

The Trump administration released new dietary guidelines Wednesday that call for Americans to limit highly processed foods, such as those high in added sugars and sodium, and that endorse products that had once been discouraged by many nutritionists, such as whole milk, butter and red meat.

The recommendations emphasize eating whole foods — such as fruits and vegetables in their original forms — and foods rich in protein and whole grains. They call for avoiding packaged, prepared or other ready-to-eat foods that are salty or sweet — such as many chips, candies and cookies — as well as staying away from sugar-sweetened beverages like sodas, fruit drinks and energy drinks and some artificial sweeteners.

Under the guidelines, Americans should eat three servings of dairy products a day and include full fat without added sugar, a shift from decades of advising Americans to favor skim and low-fat options over whole milk. They should eat ample protein, from animal and plant sources — including red meats nutritionists had long told Americans to limit. They should have no more than 10 grams of added sugar per meal, a more specific limit in an effort to make it easier to understand than previous guidance advising less than 10 percent of daily calories from added sugars.

The guidance comes as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made overhauling the nation’s food supply a priority of his Make America Healthy Again agenda, aimed at addressing chronic disease and childhood illness. He has claimed the industry is mass poisoning this generation of children, and his messaging around food has found broad appeal, unlike his handling of vaccination policy. Nutrition experts generally praised some of the main changes, such as the move away from processed foods, while a few raised concerns about promoting some fatty foods. The guidance also generally received a warm reception from some major MAHA allies.

Even the AMA approves!

The American Medical Association, which this week fiercely criticized Kennedy’s moves to upend the childhood vaccination schedule, praised the dietary guidelines as offering “clear direction.”

This is all in line with what RFK, Jr. wants, of course, but in this case I can’t object. I will still use 2% milk in my lattes (it foams better) and will eat red meat in moderation, so I think I’m already adhering to these guidelines. If you have objections, weigh in below.

Here’s the new food pyramid on the cover of the USDA booklet, with the link given in the first quoted paragraph above. The stuff at the top is what you should be eating:

*According to ScienceAlert (h/t Ursula), well-preserved jawbones found in a Moroccan cave have features that suggest it was close to the common ancestor of modern H. sapiens and Neanderthals (the same species, of course).

Ancient bones discovered in a cave in Casablanca, Morocco, could fill in some of the blanks about human evolution.

The cave, known as Grotte à Hominidés, contains assemblages of jawbones, teeth, and vertebrae dating back to 773,000 years ago – a period close to when the modern human lineage began to diverge from the ancestors we share with Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Detailed analyses suggest the remains belonged to an early African hominin population living near this evolutionary crossroads, showing a mix of features later seen in modern humans and Neanderthals, alongside more archaic traits inherited from earlier members of the genus Homo.

It’s a finding that helps anchor humanity’s origins firmly in Africa, away from the confusion introduced by Homo antecessor hominin fossils from Europe dating to a similar time period.

Well, it’s that not confusing and, to my mind, not that important, as both H. antecessor and the newly-found fossil were clearly near the time when modern humans branched off from Neanderthals, and both could have been offshoots that went extinct without issue. We can’t be sure whether the new fossils were actual ancestors of the two forms of H. sapiens, or were a group genetically close to those ancestors. (Paleoanthropologists tell us, though, that H. antecessor, which wasn’t found in Africa, did go extinct without issue.)

“The fossils from the Grotte à Hominidés may be the best candidates we currently have for African populations lying near the root of this shared ancestry, thus reinforcing the view of a deep African origin for our species,” says anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, who led the research.

. . .Every so often, Earth’s magnetic poles flip. These events are recorded geologically, as ferromagnetic materials in rock realign. The most recent flip was the Matuyama-Brunhes reversal, which took place around 773,000 years ago and may have lasted at least a few thousand years.

It’s recorded very, very clearly in the sediment in Grotte à Hominidés – and the fossilized bones were found in the same layer as the signature of magnetic reversal. This dates them very cleanly and precisely to 773,000 years ago – right within the timeframe most anthropologists think the process of human divergence was underway.

So that’s part of the picture. Based on the sediments in which they were found, we know these bones belonged to a population that was living at a critical moment in human history.

Their features showed a mixture of archaic and modern features, the latter features unique to H. sapiens (“modern” H. sapiens + Neanderthals).  This shows that they were from what we call a “transitional form”. What’s really new? Only that these were found in North Africa—and that still doesn’t mean that North Africa is where the ancestor of the two forms of H. sapiens divided into the two subspecies.  If they can get DNA out of these bones, we can see what that looks like compared to Neanderthal and modern human DNA, which have diagnostic differences. That again will shed some light on what everyone wants to know: how did modern humans arise?, but it won’t really give us much more than we already know. You can see photos of the jaws, teeths, and vertebrae at the links.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili touts her status as an influencer:

Hili: Good day, everyone. Thank you all for showing up in such great numbers.
Me: Who are you talking to?
Hili: What do you mean, who? To my readers, of course.

In Polish:

Hili: Dzień dobry Państwu, dziękuję za tak liczną obecność.
Ja: Do kogo ty mówisz?
Hili: Jak to do kogo? Do moich czytelników.

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

From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

From America’s Cultural Descent into Idiocy:

From Beth:

Masih continues to document the protests in Iran, now in their thirteenth day (this was from yesterday). I’m starting to think that the Iranian regime might be doomed, and that’s excellent.

From Colin Wright via Luana; more supposedly educated people who deny reality:

I love this sassy (and talented) kid!

From Warren; be sure to hear the pathetic meow at the end.

One from my feed: a baby sloth rescue!  Translation from the Portuguese is “Greatness comes only from action, life is blessed by good work [plus heart].

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

. . . and two from Dr. Cobb, Emeritus. First, Feynman on magnets. I could listen to him for hours (this is part of a longer and equally entrancing interview):

If you haven’t seen this classic bit of Feynman, watch it – only 8 minutes – and it will reassure you that it’s ok that you don’t understand magnets (unless you are a physicist obvs).

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-01-08T16:50:22.349Z

Cats and dominoes, winding up with a kitty treat:

I think we could all do with this kind of thing this morning.youtu.be/7Nn7NZI_LN4

— Joe Scaramanga (@joescaramanga.co.uk) 2026-01-08T08:39:35.758Z