10 views of the sunrise — from 6:54 to 7:35.

Write about whatever you like in the comments. And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"The government has assured tourists that Afghanistan is safe, scenic, welcoming — and a bargain to boot."

I'm reading "Ignoring Warnings, a Growing Band of Tourists Venture to Afghanistan/With the war now over, the Taliban are welcoming foreign travelers, even as governments advise their citizens to stay away" (NYT).

Taliban officials said they relied on tourists, especially bloggers and YouTubers, to extol the virtues of visiting Afghanistan... A small percentage of foreign visitors are women, tourism officials said... They are not required to wear burqas or cover their faces.... Male tourists, too, are expected to dress modestly, but they do not face the same intense scrutiny as women....

[When] Allen Ruppel, 63, a retired insurance company executive from Wisconsin... told his wife where he was going, he said, she joked that “I can’t stop you, but I might get an Afghan hound to replace you.” Mr. Ruppel, who wore a blue shalwar kameez, said he was surprised by how warmly he had been received by Afghans and by how safe the country seemed. He said he would encourage his friends to “open your minds and take a fresh look at Afghanistan.”

There's a photo captioned: "A Chinese visitor from a tour group in front of the remains of the 1,600-year-old Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 in Bamiyan." Imagine posing in the empty niche of a colossus and posting on Instagram. I met a traveler from an antique land....

Judge Merchan and Judge Cannon respond to Trump requests.

Merchan says no: "N.Y. judge denies Trump effort to block sentencing in hush money case/Lawyers for Donald Trump asked a New York judge to stop Trump’s sentencing scheduled for Friday on his convictions for falsifying business documents" (WaPo).

Cannon says yes: "Cannon temporarily blocks report on Trump classified-documents probe/Two Trump employees charged alongside him in the classified documents case separately asked Judge Aileen Cannon to block the release" (WaPo).

"He saw his reputation tarnished when he pleaded guilty to a morals charge involving a minor."

A sad subheadline to the headline that, otherwise would have elicited a fond goodbye: "Peter Yarrow, troubadour of Peter, Paul and Mary folk trio, dies at 86" (WaPo).

Let's go back to simpler times, 1965:

ADDED: From Wikipedia:

A Trump news conference is going on now... a lot going on.

I'm reading the NYT live updating. Excerpt:

"Anyone with money can live abroad. It’s a sort of an extended holiday. The true test of an expatriate is holding down a job, learning a language, paying taxes..."

"... passing a local driving test, negotiating the culture, truckling to unbudgeable authority and now and then enduring the gibes of co-workers. I was conspicuous in Africa as a muzungu and as an ang-mo-kui (red-haired devil) in Singapore, and very often an English person would begin a sentence, 'Well, you Yanks….' There is also an existential, parasitical, rootless quality to being an expatriate, which can be dizzying: You are both somebody and nobody, often merely a spectator. I always felt in my bones that wherever I went, I was an alien. That I could not presume or expect much hospitality, that I had nothing to offer except a willingness to listen, that wherever I was, I had no business there and had to justify my intrusion by writing about what I heard. Most travel, and a lot of expatriate life, can be filed under the heading 'Trespassing.'..."

Writes Paul Theroux, in "The Hard Reality American Expats Quickly Learn" (NYT). And that's a free-access link, which I'm giving you because I love Theroux's book "The Mosquito Coast," and the book is connected to the topic under discussion, as he explains. Also there's a great Mark Twain quote and a pretty decent JFK quote. So, please read the whole thing.

"It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression... We're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X."

"The fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S...."

Mark Zuckerberg explains in this video posted today:

"What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with differing ideas...."

ADDED: Meta is moving its "trust and safety" and "content moderations" teams out of California and into Texas, where there is "less concern about [their] bias."

AND: Zuckerberg says his company needs to ally with the U.S. government in order to be able to fight the censorship that is coming from foreign governments. It's been "difficult over the past 4 years," because "even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship." "By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now, we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it."

This is great! I hope it goes well. I wish I new more about how much of this emerged from recent hobnobbing with Musk and Trump at Mar-a-Lago, but I can see Zuckerberg is smart not to talk about that. His criticism of the Biden administration and response to Trump is plain enough. 

ALSO: Here's how the NYT sums it up:

"The Pentagon carried out the secret operation in the early hours of Monday..."

"... days before Guantánamo’s most notorious prisoner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was scheduled to plead guilty to plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in exchange for a life sentence rather than face a death-penalty trial. The handoff had been in the works for about three years. An initial plan to conduct the transfer in October 2023 was derailed by opposition from Congress. The 11 who were released included Moath al-Alwi, a former long-term hunger striker who gained attention in the art world for building model boats from objects found at the Guantánamo prison; Abdulsalam al-Hela, whose testimony was sought by defense lawyers in the U.S.S. Cole case; and Hassan Bin Attash, the younger brother of a defendant in the Sept. 11 conspiracy case...."

From "U.S. Sends 11 Guantánamo Prisoners to Oman to Start New Lives/The secret mission left the smallest number of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay since the day the detention center opened in 2002" (NYT).

Sunrise — 7:18, 7:24.

"Every bone in my body has always told me to fight because I care deeply about Canadians."

Said Justin Trudeau, quoted in "Canada Live Updates: Trudeau Is Stepping Down as Party Leader and Prime Minister/Justin Trudeau, who has led the country for nearly a decade, is giving up leadership of the Liberal party. He said he would remain in both roles until his replacement has been chosen through a party election" (NYT).

Listen to the Dalai Lama giggle at the idea of open immigration.

An Indlan reporter is given the opportunity to interview the Dalai Lama about a number of things, but chooses to focus on lmmlgratlon to The West and asks...

Reporter: People from Afghanistan or Africa who want to stay in Europe, shouldn't they be allowed to?

Lama: No, Europe… pic.twitter.com/sNE0nVAlHr

— Dane (@UltraDane) January 5, 2025

People from Afghanistan or Africa who want to stay in Europe, shouldn't they be allowed to? No, Europe will become like Afghanistan or Africa... he he he he he. Like my parents came to The UK from India, that's ok too isn't it? England is small island, 90% become lndian he he he he he he....

The interview is from 2019.

It's funny because the Dalai Lama is world-famous as an icon of compassion, and the idea he's openly experiencing as too silly to deserve anything more than giggling is an idea that we in blue America have been made to feel that we must embrace with great seriousness or we will become social pariahs because of our complete lack of compassion.

I hope you met your 3-drink minimum at breakfast this morning.

How to assemble and consume breakfast:

"'There is, technically, no snail darter,' said Thomas Near, curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum."

"Dr. Near, also a professor who leads a fish biology lab at Yale, and his colleagues report in the journal Current Biology that the snail darter, Percina tanasi, is neither a distinct species nor a subspecies. Rather, it is an eastern population of Percina uranidea, known also as the stargazing darter, which is not considered endangered. Dr. Near contends that early researchers 'squinted their eyes a bit' when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to build the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, about 20 miles southwest of Knoxville. 'I feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the "conservation species concept," where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,' Dr. Near said."

From "This Tiny Fish’s Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction/Scientists say the snail darter, whose endangered species status delayed the building of a dam in Tennessee in the 1970s, is a genetic match of a different fish" (NYT).

When else have scientists "squinted their eyes a bit" to see a way to achieve a result they desired? When have they not? Who can ever feel secure that we know whether the "snail darter" is something specific or just another stargazer?

Is Donald Trump today the same guy that Clay Aiken knew in 2012?

Clay Aiken, the erstwhile "American Idol" and "Apprentice" contestant, is impressively articulate and diplomatic expounding on Trump's personality (on the Zach Sang Show):

 

"I do believe that the reason that he was unwilling to accept the results in 2020 are not really because he wanted to continue to be President but simply because he does not want to lose. He does not like to lose. He does not like it. He refuses to accept it. That's why he doesn't apologize for anything. He thinks it's weak...."

Nikki Glaser's Golden Globes monologue.

Great? Good? Okay?

At the End-of-Darkmonth Café...

 ... rejoice in the return of the light.

This is the evening of the last day of the darkest monthlong stretch of the year. You might notice that night is falling more slowly. It's almost 5 here, and it's not fully dark yet.

Tomorrow is a day some of us call the anniversary of one of the worst days in American history and some of us — with a longer time frame — call Epiphany.

However you view the Eve of January 6th, you may take this post as a place to talk about whatever it is you're thinking about.

"Leader Schumer, what do you say to Americans who feel as though you and other top Democrats misled them about President Biden's mental acuity?"

Chuck Schumer is confronted on NBC for covering up Biden's mental health decline.

Never forget: The Democratic Party knew that Biden wasn't competent enough to be president and hid the truth from Americans for four years.

Democrats do not care about Americans. It's that simple. pic.twitter.com/4sJbzMPi4C

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) January 5, 2025

"No. Look, we didn't. And let's – let’s look – let’s look at President Biden. He's had an amazing record. The legislation we passed, one of the most significant groups of legislation since the New Deal – since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, putting in 235 judges, a record. And he's a patriot. He's a great guy. And when he stepped down, he did it on his own because he thought it was better not only for the Democratic Party, for America. We should all salute him. We should all salute him."

The question was "What do you say to Americans who feel as though" we were lied to. The question was framed to exclude an assertion about what you supposedly really did. But you gave that kind of response anyway — the nonresponsive response. Why'd you do that? It wasn't believable. It was a bald-faced lie about a bald-faced lie. It didn't even address us, the people — people with feelings about what you did. You just went off on a screwy rant that ended with a demand that we salute Joe Biden.

Salute the President? And they say Trump supporters seem like fascists.

ADDED: Here's the transcript. In case you are questioning whether Schumer said "We should all salute him" twice. 

"The two candidates who have emerged as front-runners... are both middle-aged white men from the upper Midwest and chair of their state parties whose politics are well within the Democratic mainstream...."

"[Ken] Martin, 51, is campaigning on a platform of returning power and resources to state parties, while his supporters are attacking [Ben] Wikler, 43, as a tool of major donors and Democratic consultants in Washington. Mr. Wikler’s supporters include a host of D.N.C. officials who have been perturbed at Mr. Martin for creating a group of state party chairs that has competed within the national committee for influence. They say that the Wisconsinite, who turned his state party into a fund-raising juggernaut, is the more dynamic figure who managed to turn state elections... into national causes.... Some Democrats see the D.N.C. contenders’ arguments about relationships with donors and their regular promises of more money for state parties as papering over a broader discussion of why Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election."

"As Democrats Reel, Two Front-Runners Emerge in a Leadership Battle/The race to lead the Democratic National Committee centers on the favorites, Ken Martin and Ben Wikler, but the party’s infighting over them looks nothing like a broad reckoning with its 2024 defeats" (NYT)(free-access link).

Well, Kamala Harris had plenty of money, so she lost for reasons other than money. And yet, if it's pretty obvious why she lost — and isn't it? — then raking in the money may still be more important than any elaborate soul-searching about the dismal loss last November. In any case, what evidence is there that Martin is better than Wikler at figuring out why the Dems lost? Personally, I knew Ben Wikler when he was a teenager, and I think he can do anything. I mean, I knew Ben Wikler when he was a white teenager, and now he's a middle-aged white man, and I tend to think he can do the best that anyone can to revive the Democratic Party.

Tomorrow is January 6th, and we're seeing efforts to frame the occasion.

I'm seeing this at Politico: "Donald Trump’s quiet Jan. 6/Monday’s certification of Trump’s victory will be the antithesis of the carnage at the Capitol four years ago." Oh! The first part of the headline changed while I was in the middle of writing this post. It's now "Donald Trump is about to get the Jan. 6 that he denied Joe Biden." Excerpt:

It’s the utter antithesis of the carnage unleashed four years ago, under clear blue skies, by thousands of Trump supporters, goaded by lies about a stolen election. Hundreds of them bludgeoned police officers guarding the Capitol as the mob fought to stop Congress from counting the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden president.

I asked Grok if that last sentence was factually correct and it said that the "essence" is "supported by substantial evidence" but "the precise quantification of 'hundreds' as attackers specifically 'bludgeoning' officers might be an oversimplification or exaggeration of the exact actions...."

Over at The New York Times, there's: "'A Day of Love’: How Trump Inverted the Violent History of Jan. 6/The president-elect and his allies have spent four years reinventing the Capitol attack — spreading conspiracy theories and weaving a tale of martyrdom to their ultimate political gain." Excerpt:

"Glaser... was still questioning the point of view of a few jokes. She was still going back and forth about the sexual jokes..."

"... counting the number of references to her being horny, feeling there were too many, but now thinking she’s good at them, so it’s the right number. And the 'Wicked' jokes were still fluid. Glaser was adding to things to obsess over. 'Do we have too many jokes about pedophiles?' she wondered. This wasn’t exactly the panic attack she had predicted. But Glaser said she had performed the jokes at clubs so often (91 times before the ceremony) that she could no longer tell if they were funny. How could she? She knew every surprise coming. She likened her relationship with her material to a marriage where she’s not gaga anymore. The jokes have been reliable, sure, but a political one that always kills recently bombed. That rattled her. 'Maybe it bums people out,' she said, sounding confused...."

From "Nikki Glaser Wants to Kill as Host of the Globes. Is She Overthinking It?/ To refine her monologue for Sunday’s show, she relied on two writers’ rooms and 91 test runs. Then came the fickle audiences and a crisis of confidence" (NYT).

Should a standup comedian reveal the inner workings like this? It can't make anything funnier for us, the audience. Eh, but who watches the Golden Globes? I used to, but now, I don't even know how to watch them. And I don't think I've even gone to the movies all year (other than to see that one documentary).

The political joke that always kills recently bombed — hmm. Wonder who that was about?

Do we have too many jokes about pedophiles? Are we suppose to experience that question as funny?

ADDED: I have one other post with the tag "Nikki Glaser," and it may shed some light on what sort of joke she might make about sex criminals. From March 28, 2022:

"The Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck that a man used to kill at least 14 people Wednesday on Bourbon Street and the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside the Trump International Hotel on the same day..."

"... were both rented through the [Turo] car-sharing platform, which allows owners to list their vehicles to drivers.... Turo touts the unique nature of its vehicles as opposed to traditional rental car fleets; the value of its pricing; and the option for a 'personalized experience' that allows users to coordinate with local hosts and skip a 'cold, impersonal' rental car counter...."

From "What is Turo? Car rental app was used in New Orleans, Vegas incidents/The peer-to-peer car-sharing company said it is 'devastated' and working with law enforcement" (WaPo).

Insurance detail: "Customers get liability insurance when they book on Turo, which covers property damage or physical harm to another person if the driver is responsible...." 

Both men chose a truck, but I hadn't noticed until now that the New Orleans terrorist, like the Las Vegas terrorist/"terrorist," chose an electric truck. That isn't an odd choice for someone seeking to cause maximum damage. The electric truck is much heavier. A gas F-150 weighs 4,021 to 5,540 pounds. An F-150 Lightning weighs between 6,015 to 6,893 pounds. That's an extra ton.

(I wondered whether gasoline, like the battery, adds much weight. The weight of the gasoline in a full tank of an F-150 is 139.68 pounds or 218.63 pounds, depending on whether you have the 23 gallon tank or the 36.)

An electric vehicle may have been chosen because of the potential for fire — not that the EV is more likely to catch fire, but the fire is more difficult to extinguish:

IN THE COMMENTS: Two additional features of the electric truck: 1. It is quieter, giving less warning to the victims to clear out of its way, and 2. It accelerates faster, especially from 0. Thanks to Breezy and Narayanan for immediately raising these points.