Sunrise — 5:11.

Talk about Trump's Army parade or whatever you like in the comments.

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"Kate Middleton was effortlessly elegant as she attended Trooping the Colour to honour the King on June 14."

Tatler reports.

An interesting contrast to America, with our "No Kings!" rallies and critique of Trump's military parade and offense that it's happening on his birthday.

Wikipedia: "Trooping the Colour is a ceremonial event performed every year on Horse Guards Parade in London, United Kingdom, by regiments of Household Division, to celebrate the official birthday of the British sovereign, though the event is not necessarily held on that day. It is also known as the Sovereign's Birthday Parade. Similar events are held in other countries of the Commonwealth. In the UK, it is, with the State Opening of Parliament, the biggest event of the ceremonial calendar, and watched by millions on TV and on the streets of London."

"When we did a search of the [fake police car], there was a manifesto that identified many lawmakers and other officials."

Said Police Chief Mark Bruley, of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, quoted in From "'No Kings' protests in Minnesota canceled as authorities search for suspect who shot 2 lawmakers/Police in Minnesota are cautioning residents to avoid 'No Kings' protests after two state lawmakers and their spouses were shot early Saturday" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Melissa Hortman, a former Minnesota House Speaker, and her spouse were shot and killed early Saturday in their Brooklyn Park home. A second state lawmaker, Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, were shot multiple times in Champlin. Officials say both Hortman and Hoffman were mentioned in the suspect’s writings.....

State Patrol Col. Christina Bogojevic asked people “out of an abundance of caution” not to attend any of the “No Kings” protests that were scheduled for across the state on Saturday. Bogojevic said authorities didn’t have any direct evidence that the protests would be targeted, but said the suspect had some “No Kings” flyers in their car. Organizers announced that all of the protests across the state were canceled....

UPDATE: "A former appointee of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is being sought in connection with the assassination of a state lawmaker and the shooting of another, police sources said. Vance Luther Boelter...." (NY Post0).

"Padilla... actually received preferential treatment by not being arrested and jailed for his menacing display."

"The Secret Service agent warned [California Sen. Alex] Padilla, whom agents did not recognize as a senator and who wasn’t wearing his Senate pin, to back away from Noem and then forcibly removed him when he ignored their entreaties. 'They can represent this however they want, but those agents made the right decision to get him out of the room,' Charles Marino, a former Secret Service agent told RealClearPolitics. 'He did not have a congressional pin on, he was yelling and closing distance very quickly to make it to the front of the room to confront Noem. Look, he’s not above the law. Anyone taking those actions would been treated far worse – they would have been arrested and been forced to spend some time in jail...."

Writes Susan Crabtree, in "Secret Service Followed Protocol in Padilla Incident" (Real Clear Politics).

"'Any sudden movement towards a protectee that feels threatening, especially when that person has not been identified, the policy is 100% to prevent further escalation or movement toward Noem,' said a source in the Secret Service community.... After the two assassination attempts against Trump, agents are highly attuned to aggressive behavior and working to ensure they’re not involved in any security lapses...."

Apparently, they didn't know who he was, but what if they had? Is he saying he deserves special treatment? The "Don't You Know Who I Am?!" argument ought to fail.

The protectee was protected by those entrusted with protecting her. 

"'It’s just a lot less pressure posting on TikTok,' said Sheen Zutshi, 21, a college student in New York. She uses Instagram to send direct messages..."

"... to her friends, but sees it as a more curated option — the sort of place where someone might earnestly post a photo of the night sky, like her older cousin did recently. 'It’s just really cute, because she’s a millennial,' she said."

From "Instagram Wants Gen Z. What Does Gen Z Want From Instagram? Young people are using Instagram for everything except the app’s original function" (NYT).

"She sold antiques and handmade goods meant to conjure a slow, bucolic life: taper candles, spongeware vases, frill pillows mismatched to perfection."

"To Ms. Gelman, the store felt safe, like a 'cozy sort of womb,' she said. The entrepreneur whose brainchild had once attracted a $365 million valuation — who had named a conference room in San Francisco after Christine Blasey Ford and a phone booth in Washington after Shirley Chisholm — was now content collecting woven Longaberger baskets and dreaming up fictional English villagers to inspire the shop...."

I'm reading "First, a Feminist Utopia. Now, a Dollhouse in the Country./Audrey Gelman, the creator of the Wing, is taking another stab at shaping millennial tastes, this time with a pastoral inn — and more hotels on the way" (NYT).

The "Feminist Utopia" was the store that "felt safe, like a 'cozy sort of womb.'" Who knows what's feminist about dreamy nostalgia about English villages? 

The "Dollhouse" is an inn that the NYT describes as "a hallucinatory boardinghouse furnished by a flea market picker and haunted by Ichabod Crane" with rooms that are "almost entirely shoppable: scalloped rattan coffee tables from England ($2,250); mattresses from Massachusetts (starting at $1,349); hand-painted dinner plates ($59) from Italy; a thrifted pig-shaped cutting board ($55)."

"But as Conor Cruise O’Brien, an Irish writer and politician, noted, 'Antisemitism is a light sleeper.' It tends to re-emerge..."

"... when societies become polarized and people go looking for somebody to blame. This pattern helps explain why antisemitism began rising, first in Europe and then in the United States, in the 2010s, around the same time that politics coarsened.... The political right, including President Trump, deserves substantial blame....  Mr. Trump himself praised as 'very fine people' the attendees of a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., that featured the chant 'Jews will not replace us.' On Jan. 6, 2021, at least one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for 'the big Jew,' referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer has said.... Joe Rogan, the podcaster who endorsed Mr. Trump last year, has hosted Holocaust conspiracy theorists on his show. Mr. Rogan once said of Jews, 'They run everything.'... [Antisemitism also] has a home on the progressive left.... They have failed to denounce antisemitism in the unequivocal ways that they properly denounce other bigotry.... Americans should be able to recognize the nuanced nature of many political debates while also recognizing that antisemitism has become an urgent problem. It is a different problem — and in many ways, a narrower one — than racism. Antisemitism has not produced shocking gaps in income, wealth and life expectancy in today’s America. Yet the new antisemitism has left Jewish Americans at a greater risk of being victimized by a hate crime than any other group.... No political arguments or ideological context can justify that bigotry...."

From The Editorial Board of the New York Times, "Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses."

"This is our last night, so we thought we would brave the city and brave it is."

Fiongal and Jamie on their "last night" — in Ahmedabad, India:

“Where is our air defense?”/“How can Israel come and attack anything it wants, kill our top commanders, and we are incapable of stopping it?”

Said Iranian officials in "private text messages shared with The New York Times," quoted in "A Miscalculation by Iran Led to Israeli Strikes’ Extensive Toll, Officials Say/Interviews with half a dozen senior Iranian officials show that they were not expecting Israel to strike before another round of talks" (NYT).

Hamid Hosseini, a member of the country’s Chamber of Commerce’s energy committee, said, in an telephone interview: “Israel’s attack completely caught the leadership by surprise, especially the killing of the top military figures and nuclear scientists. It also exposed our lack of proper air defense and their ability to bombard our critical sites and military bases with no resistance.” 

From the article: "Iran’s senior leaders... never expected Israel to strike before another round of talks that had been scheduled for this coming Sunday in Oman, officials close to Iran’s leadership said on Friday. They dismissed reports that an attack was imminent as Israeli propaganda meant to pressure Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program in those talks. Perhaps because of that complacency, precautions that had been planned were ignored, the officials said."

Why would they concede "complacency"? Perhaps because they didn't really have "precautions" that, if taken, would have helped significantly. Still, I would have expected them to denounce Israel for treachery, especially given the promise of peace talks. 

"The Trump administration has abruptly shifted the focus of its mass deportation campaign, telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to largely pause raids and arrests in the agricultural industry, hotels and restaurants..."

"... according to an internal email and three U.S. officials with knowledge of the guidance.... The new guidance comes after protests in Los Angeles against the Trump administration’s immigration raids, including at farms and businesses.... On Thursday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that the crackdown might be alienating industries he wanted to keep on his side. 'Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,' he said on social media.... Mr. Trump has for decades owned luxury hotels, an industry with a strong immigrant labor force.... The guidance did not appear to rule out raids at work sites in other industries, like the one at a garment factory in Los Angeles that sparked the protests...."

From "Trump Shifts Deportation Focus, Pausing Raids on Farms, Hotels and Eateries/The abrupt pivot on an issue at the heart of Mr. Trump’s presidency suggested his broad immigration crackdown was hurting industries and constituencies he does not want to lose" (NYT).

Sunrise — 5:09.

Talk 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 uniformed body crystallizes all these associations we have. It makes your chest look broader, your posture straighter, your shoulders stronger. It becomes shorthand for words like manly, strong, brave, dominant."

Said Paul Achter, "an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Richmond, who has written on 'military chic,'" quoted in "Why Trump Loves a Man in Uniform/As thousands of soldiers prepare to march in President Trump’s military parade, what exactly will we see?" (NYT).

The article is by Vanessa Friedman, who writes that, in a military parade, "the uniformed body is part of a mass — denatured and subsumed into a whole — and particularly when the parade in question does not signify the end of an actual conflict." "Instead of honoring the sacrifice of individuals... it becomes a moment of sheer pageantry dedicated to the glory of the state or the head of state...."

Quoting Achter again: "It’s difficult to see this and not see Leni Riefenstahl" (that is, Hitler, as presented in "Triumph of the Will").

When it comes to expression about the military, is there some reason to prefer the rhetoric of "sacrifice" over that of "glory"? A parade is a form of expression. It's visual speech, visual propaganda. Can you tell whether the theme is sacrifice or glory? Is it inherent in the nature of a military parade that it will say: glory?

"So this goes back to 2017 when President Trump was in Paris and watched France's Bastille Day military parade. There were tanks..."

"... there were troops, and they're marching down Champs d'Elysee. There were war planes, there were fighter jets. And he watched this with President Emmanuel Macron of France, and he loved it. So he came back and announced to the Pentagon that he wanted his own military parade. And the response he got from the Pentagon during his first term was: We don't do this, Sir. Jim Mattis, who was then his defense secretary, said he'd rather swallow acid. In a meeting in the Pentagon, Paul Selva, who was the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Mr. Trump that Mr. President, he said, dictatorships do that. Democracies do not..... [D]ictators need to frighten their population... with this show of ostentatious military might. And they want to frighten their adversaries too and make them think that they're very strong. I don't really get the France part because France is a democracy...."

I'm listening to the new episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, an interview with Helene Cooper about tomorrow's military parade. Audio and transcript at Podscribe, here. (I do listen to the audio and tweak the transcript. Otherwise, instead of of "Champs d'Elysee," you'd be seeing "Sean.")

I loved the line "I don't really get the France part because France is a democracy."

And by the way, Cooper goes on to describe the many military parades we've had in the United States over the years.

Maybe reexamine the premise:

"Slowly, he attracted followers, like-minded individuals interested in living sustainably, outside traditional supports, who were captivated by his thrifty ways and homesteading solution..."

"... and by the lovely short videos he posted: of desert cottontails eating off his mother’s Limoges plates; of dung beetles rolling a cow patty like a stone; of bees drinking from a pan of water. Within a few years, nearly a million people had visited his blog — more recently, the number was well over four million — and he had a core group of 1,000 or so regulars who followed his daily struggles and small triumphs...."

I'm reading "John Wells, 64, Who Fled New York for the Solitude of the Desert, Dies/A fashion photographer, he built a do-it-yourself life on 40 lonely acres in West Texas, living like a modern-day Thoreau and telling millions of his experience on a blog" (NYT).

Is it good to see the word "blog" in an obituary? Yes. 

It's also good to see someone memorialized for his frugality: "[H]e sold his house for $600,000 to a family of five, winnowed his possessions down to what he could fit in a rented truck and set off to build a new life. He paid $8,000 in cash for his 40-acre parcel. His property taxes that first year were $86.... He started with a tiny shack, where he could live, and equipped it with a bunk bed, a galley kitchen and a desk...."

"A prolific criminal who threatened to behead Aled Jones and attacked a Bridgerton actress was not deported back to Algeria as he was under 18, the Home Office has said."

"Zacariah Boulares admitted stealing a phone from Genevieve Chenneour, 27, and assaulting another customer when he appeared at Westminster magistrates’ court last month. The Algerian, now 18, has 12 previous convictions relating to 28 offences, magistrates heard, which include stealing a Rolex watch worth £20,000 from a 78-year-old man at Paddington station in May 2023. In July 2023 Boulares threatened to behead Jones, 54, the Songs of Praise presenter, and cut off his arm when he stole his Rolex Daytona watch in Chiswick, west London. He pleaded guilty to robbery and possession of an offensive weapon and was given a 24-month detention and training order. He was released after 14 months...."

I'm reading "Thief who attacked Bridgerton actress was too young to be deported/Zacariah Boulares, who stole from the actress Genevieve Chenneour, has 12 convictions but was not returned to Algeria as he was under 18" in The London Times.

Trump asserts that he "saved L.A."

At Truth Social:

The Appeals Court ruled last night that I can use the National Guard to keep our cities, in this case Los Angeles, safe. If I didn’t send the Military into Los Angeles, that city would be burning to the ground right now. We saved L.A. Thank you for the Decision!!!

You never get to find out what would have happened if what was done had not been done. When do courts choose to stop a President and find out what the alternative would look like? Depends on the judges, but I tend to think they don't want to know. It's scary, and Trump is trying to scare them.

Booing or cheering?

From a Reddit discussion of the crowd reaction to Trump's appearance in the audience at the Kennedy Center performance of "Les Miserables":

"Honestly it sounds like a mix of both? Boos and cheers/clapping together. Because as disappointing as it is, there is a lot of people who literally reside up Trump’s ass crack & worship this man. I fully despise him and everything he stands for. And the fact that he simultaneously, gets to go to the theater and exist peacefully while terrorizing the immigrant populations in LA & around the US."

"Israel launched a stunning series of strikes Friday morning on Iranian nuclear sites and killed several of the nation’s security chiefs, in a remarkable coup of intelligence and military force..."

"... that decapitated Tehran’s chain of command. President Trump warned that further attacks would be 'even more brutal' and redoubled pressure on Iran to reach a new deal to curb its nuclear program.... The attacks also killed top Iranian officials and nuclear scientists and hit Tehran’s long-range missile facilities and aerial defenses."

The NYT reports.

Trump at Truth Social: "I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to 'just do it,' but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done. I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told, that the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come - And they know how to use it. Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse! There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end. Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. God Bless You All!"

The "Oh no, not work!" guy is so repulsive that I had to wonder if he is an actor deliberately evoking our disgust.

"Oh no, not work!"pic.twitter.com/RSfBNl90j9

— Stephen Knight 🎙️ (@GSpellchecker) June 12, 2025

The lovely black woman also seems perfectly cast.

But I'll assume they are real people in a real confrontation. Somebody's there with the camera, and they know it, but everything's in front of cameras these days. Human behavior is behavior for the camera now. Is this scene real? It's real in today's terms — real and very viral.

The scene is so perfect: The ordinary person, burdened in her daily life, is so reasonable, so appealing, and the man, cocksure in his cause, is so enragingly and hilariously awful. His cause is, to him, so obviously more important than her work. But what is his cause? It is, ironically, persons of color getting to work in the United States of America.

Sunrise — 4:56, 5:23, 5:25, 5:27.

Talk 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.

"These are horrific crimes"/"They're horrific crimes that are committed on your watch."

Elise Stefanik versus Kathy Hochul:

Transcript: "Stefanik Exposes Kathy Hochul on Sanctuary State Policies, Kathy Hochul Heartlessly Does Not Even Know Illegals Who Burned Alive, Raped, Molested New Yorkers."

Why did Hochul not take the precaution of committing these names and stories to memory? She knew the subject matter of the hearing. She chose to look out of touch. Perhaps it was a rational choice. If she'd said she knew, she'd have been forced to recite the details and pressed about any detail she omitted. 

"The windmills are killing our country, by the way. The fields are littered with them. Junk. They get older and rusty and get bad...."

"It's the greatest scam in history. The most expensive energy you can buy. They are ugly. A friend of mine comes from Minnesota... He said it's unbelievable what happened.... The most beautiful fields.... I was so looking forward to seeing them again... and they had windmills all over them. These horrible structures.... these ugly horrible things.... I looked at this field that was one of the most beautiful places in my own mind and imagination. It's littered with this garbage. It looked like a junkyard, he said. Then you get different manufacturers, and [the windmills] don't look alike. And they're not painted alike. Different colors. Even if they're white, one's a beige-y white, one's a darker white, one's a lighter white. And they start to rust after four or five years. And then they start to wear out. And nobody takes them because you're not allowed to bury the props... There's a certain type of fiber, and if it goes the ground, we are all going to die. What bullshit this is! Okay?... What they do is leave them up.... Windmills all over the place. Tall ones, short ones, dead ones, they're all dead. Some are hanging over by a thread...."

Said Trump today.

 

You may not like Trump's aesthetics all the time. We were just talking about all the gold leaf in the Oval Office. But he is attentive to the details of the visual world. He's an aesthete. What kind of man cares that the windmills are not painted alike even if they are all white because one's a beige-y white, one's a darker white, one's a lighter white? He not only cares, he will calmly detail the problem of shades of white as if you are expected to notice the variations and become unsettled by them as he is.

You are expected to see it as part of what should concern the President of the United States, this discontinuity of the whiteness of windmills.

I like this about him. I think it matters how things look. These places that are beautiful in our "mind and imagination" need to be kept beautiful. Anyone who modifies the landscape owes us all a duty to take care of this beauty. I don't think this comes naturally to most politicians, but it's something that Trump slowed down to contemplate out loud. 

Are these the same celebrities who denounced anyone who resisted the mask, the vaccine, and the lockdown in Covid times?

I'm reading "Pop Culture Takes Up Smoking Again/From movies and TV shows to music, the habit is no longer taboo. It’s even being celebrated for the way it makes characters look cool or powerful" (NYT).

Both Lorde and [Addison] Rae have worked with the singer whom [Jared Oviatt, the man behind the Instagram account @Cigfluencers,] credits with the smoking revival: Charli XCX, the Brat Summer pioneer who is a proud smoker. She even once received a bouquet of cigs for her birthday from Rosalía, another notable smoker. (The bouquet evoked the bowls of cigarettes Mary-Kate Olsen reportedly set out at her 2015 wedding to Olivier Sarkozy, a subversive, very French detail.)

"After the contentious interactions in the jury came to light, [Harvey] Weinstein addressed the court directly, telling the judge that 'it’s not fair' that they continue to discuss his case."

"'This is my life that’s on the line,' he told the court. 'And you know what? It’s not fair.' The judge, trying to reassure him, said, 'I’m not going to allow any injustice to happen to you,' but he declined to declare a mistrial. Following the partial verdict, Justice Farber ordered everyone to return on Thursday to continue with the trial."

From "After a Wild Day in Court, Weinstein Jurors Will Resume Deliberations/On Wednesday, the jury convicted Harvey Weinstein of one felony sex crime. The judge sent jurors home to cool off after their discussions devolved into threats and yelling" (NYT).

UPDATE: MISTRIAL! "Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault retrial in New York ends in mistrial/The disgraced Hollywood producer was convicted Wednesday on a separate criminal sex act charge" (WaPo).

Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault retrial on a rape charge ended in a mistrial Thursday after the jury foreperson refused to return to the jury room because of threats from other jurors, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

The jury foreperson had sent a note Wednesday afternoon asking to speak to the judge and then told the attorneys and Judge Curtis Farber: “I feel afraid inside there. I can’t be inside there.” He added that other jurors had been trying to get him to change his decision, and, when he had refused, had said “Oh we will see you outside,” and that he was concerned for his own safety....

On Monday morning, the foreperson had also asked to speak to the judge and said that jurors were considering elements from Weinstein’s past that weren’t being used as evidence in the trial and weren’t part of the charged crimes.

Another juror, who was juror No. 7 on this case and the youngest on the jury, had asked to address the court twice Friday, first saying he had heard jurors discussing another juror in the courtroom elevators, and then asking to be excused from the jury as he did not feel the process was “fair,” while staring at the defense table.

“If you’re a deliberating juror you have to be punched in the face in order for it to rise to the level of a real threat,” Weinstein’s attorney, Arthur Aidala said Thursday, while urging the judge to call for mistrial before the juror entered. “It’s insane in the membrane, insane on the brain.”

"You called on Americans to stand up to Trump right now. And you even suggest that to not stand up to Trump is to be complicit. And I wonder what situation that puts you in."

"It seems like a potentially tricky one, right? I mean, you want protestors to be peaceful. You want those who commit violence to be prosecuted. You're now simultaneously asking people to fight back against Trump, presumably in places like L.A. but perhaps not just L.A. perhaps in Chicago, San Antonio, New York, on and on. Are those messages in conflict?"

Michael Barbaro confronts Gavin Newsom, at 00:18:04, in today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast (audio and transcript, at Podscribe, here).

Newsom does not answer the question asked. He says a bunch of things, e.g., "People care about their kids and grandkids, or dare I say, people care about the constitution of the United States and the rule of law."

And good for Barbaro. He follows up:

"But that might be a mistake—as it turns out, many of those edible villains have earned their 'bad' wraps unfairly, and, according to recent studies, some of them might even be healthier for us than we initially thought."

Says the first sentence I read in this Vogue article Meade sent me — Meade sends me Vogue articles?! — "9 Foods That Are Healthier Than You Would Think."

That article is from March 2024, and no one has corrected the error yet?

I'm giving Vogue a "bad wrap" — perhaps a tainted burrito or a scruffy mink stole.

By the way, these 9 foods are healthier than I "would think" if I hadn't already read numerous articles touting potatoes, eggs, coffee, butter, cheese, whole milk, nuts, chocolate, and fatty fish. 

"Every guy had one picture back then.... In the future, of course, it’ll be different. Fifty years from now..."

"... people will be going, like: 'You want to see 100,000 pictures of my great-grandfather? I got ’em right here! Plus everything he did every day of his life.'"

Said Norm MacDonald, 10 years ago, showing a photo of his great-grandfather to David Letterman. 

MacDonald is quoted in "The Strange Rise of the Before-and-After Tragedy Meme/Online, people pair ordinary bits of video with news of the life-changing shocks that followed. It can be unnerving — or surprisingly moving" (NYT Magazine).

That's the kind of article that gets my "MSM reports what's in social media" tag.

To do the meme, just display whatever ordinary bit of video you have of someone who died suddenly or got badly hurt and add text like:

"Through one Canadian ancestor, Louis Boucher de Grandpre, who was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, the pope is related to... Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber, Jack Kerouac and Madonna."

The NYT informs in an article that seems mostly concerned with whether the Pope is — in some sense — black.

We're told the article is written "by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami."

The article contains an amazing — and amazingly wrong — assertion: "Every one of us descends from an astounding number of recent ancestors: two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great great grandparents, 32 third great grandparents and 64 fourth great grandparents — that’s 126 unique ancestors through two parents. Go back to our 12th great grandparents, and everyone has a whopping 32,766 forebears."

As if the 32,766 positions on the family tree are always — and for everyone — going to be 32,766 different individuals! I think it's unlikely that anyone has 32,766 different individuals on a family tree going back to the 12th great grandparents.

The terms for this very well known issue is "pedigree collapse."

Uninvited from the picnic and wondering why things can't be more highbrow.

JUST IN - SENATOR RAND PAUL: "I've just been told that I've been uninvited from the [White House] picnic...every Democrat will be invited, every Republican invited, but I will be the only one disallowed. I just find this incredibly petty."pic.twitter.com/rXTIDuXIeq

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 11, 2025

"I'm a big boy and we can go have a picnic in another park, you know we can go to the mall but it's just really kind of sad that this is where we are.... I mean literally every Democrat is invited, every Republican is invited, and to to say that my family's no longer welcome kind of sad. Actually, my grandson has a Make America Great hat. My son and daughter-in-law, they like Donald Trump. I like Donald Trump, but when they want to act this way, it's where they begin to lose a lot of America who just wonders: Why does everything have to descend to this level? Why can't anything be more highbrow and more of a intellectual discussion where we have a disagreement but it doesn't have to descend to this?

UPDATE: Of course, Rand Paul is invited, says Trump at Truth Social:

Of course Senator Rand Paul and his beautiful wife and family are invited to the BIG White House Party tonight. He’s the toughest vote in the history of the U.S. Senate, but why wouldn’t he be? Besides, it gives me more time to get his Vote on the Great, Big, Beautiful Bill, one of the greatest and most important pieces of legislation ever put before our Senators & Congressmen/women. It will help to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! I look forward to seeing Rand. The Party will be Great!

Sunrise — 4:56, 5:27, 5:28.

Talk 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.

Goodbye to Brian Wilson.

"President Trump, during a speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., said on Tuesday that he would restore the names of all Army bases that were named for Confederate generals..."

"... but were ordered changed by Congress in the waning days of his first administration. His move skirts the law mandating the removal of Confederate symbols from the military through the same maneuver used to restore the name of Fort Bragg, which was briefly renamed Fort Liberty. In a statement, the Army said it would 'take immediate action' to restore the old names of the bases originally honoring Confederates, but the base names would instead honor other American soldiers with similar names and initials."

From "Trump Says Army Bases Will Revert to Confederate Names/The move would reverse a yearslong effort to remove names and symbols honoring the Confederacy from the military" (NYT).

Maybe you like the traditional names, not because you're wistful about the Confederacy but because the place was named long ago and feels familiar and seems to stand on its own as the name of the place, but do you approve of the law being treated that way, evaded with such a sneaky, snarky ploy?

Once again, we've got alternating pro- and anti-Trump headlines at Real Clear Politics.

I blogged a screen grab like this 2 days ago, here, so let's take a look today's image of distanced balance:

Once again, I'll use my time-saving method of picking one of each:

On the anti side, I'm going with Judith Levine, "Trump is waging war against citizens in LA. This is a dangerous new era/In its first months in office, the Trump administration enacted what could be called soft authoritarianism. Now we are in a second phase" (The Guardian):

"Stone became a kind of blinkered realist. His down-in-the-basement singing could sound depressed."

"Among the most pungent moments on these later albums is a version of 'Que Sera, Sera.' Stone makes it a gospel dirge, this smoky funeral march. It’s a touch bitter and sopping with rue. 'The future’s not ours to see,' he sings, as each verse unspools a childhood anticipation of what might happen someday. Stone imagines a baleful, shrugging acceptance of what is, rather than what’s possible. Possible, this version seems to ask, what’s that?"

Writes , in "Sly Stone and the Sound of an America That Couldn’t Last/The influential musician, who died on Monday at 82, forged harmony — musical and otherwise — that he wasn’t able to hold together on his own" (NYT).

Beautiful version of a song that one usually associates with Doris Day. Here's Day singing it as loud as possible in "The Man Who Knew Too Much." Here's how she sang it when it wasn't an incredibly intense scene in a Hitchcock movie. And here's a beautiful version by 2 young women on TikTok.

From the Wikipedia article about the song, I figured out that I'd heard the Sly and the Family Stone version before — every time I've seen the darkly comic movie "Heathers." It plays over the closing credits. A more cheerful version of the song plays over the opening credits.

The seeming lightness of the song has made it useful in dark comedy:

Grok explains Musk's regret.

"Some." 

The return of the flying creature.

At 5:18 this morning:

I believe it's the same bird observed at 5:23 on Monday morning, here. In the comments there, Quaestor and rehajm said owl. "Owl," "Yes, totally owl."

Jaq said: "I think that we are going to have to use Bayesian logic to figure out the bird, and before I zoomed in my first thought was buzzard, but after zooming in, I am betting my case of whiskey on owl," and then "Nah, I was thinking about it and I think that time of day, milieu, and the general silhouette has me changing my bet to a night heron flying home after working the night shift fishing," and then, "the tail is not right for a night heron."

Quaestor returned to say: "Night heron? Not enough beak or neck showing Furthermore, a night heron's legs trail behind the deck feathers in flight. I'm sticking with an owl, probably a great horned owl. They aren't usually associated with lake environments, but they are opportunistic hunters. This one could have spent the night hunting ducklings."

Rusty concurred: "Yeah. Goin' with owl. Good catch."

Sunrise — 5:25.

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"I would have gone to my grave peacefully had I never been reminded of the smug, horny entitlement of young men in the two-thousands—the Tucker Maxes and Adam Carollas..."

"... or the pressure I felt to find their humor funny or smart. I did not enjoy being reacquainted with male journalists’ gratuitous comments about teen girls’ breasts in Rolling Stone, or the haranguing of diet books like 'Skinny Bitch' ('You need to exercise, you lazy shit'). I had repressed all memory of the ghastly reality-TV show 'The Swan,' in which desperate and body-dysmorphic women undergo a series of plastic surgeries and are then assessed by a panel of judges so that one may be crowned 'the swan' among ugly ducklings...."

Writes Dayna Tortorici, in "What Did the Pop Culture of the Two-Thousands Do to Millennial Women?/'Girl on Girl,' by the critic Sophie Gilbert, is the latest and most ambitious in a series of consciousness-raising-style reappraisals of the decade’s formative texts" (The New Yorker).

"But many Iranians love their pooches. Speaking of her ShihTzu terrier, Teddy, Asal Bahrierad, a Tehran resident, said... 'No one, not even the police, can take him away from me.'"

"She also said then that the ban was not being taken all that seriously. 'The police are actually very friendly to us,' she said of her daily walks with Teddy. Some even view walking a dog in public as a quiet rebellion against the Iranian government, which has long tried to enforce an Islamic lifestyle and restrict citizens’ civil liberties...."

From "'Dog Walking Is a Clear Crime': Iran’s Latest Morality Push/The government regards pet dogs as a sign of Western cultural influence. They are also considered impure, in Islam. Now there is a crackdown" (NYT).

Meanwhile, according to the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's fatwa, "Prayer is invalid with the presence of dog hair." We're told "A dog’s saliva or hair would render anything it touched — like a person, clothing or a surface — impure."

If you have a dog, you've always got at least one dog hair on you, I would think. All your prayers are invalidated. If things as puny as one dog hair invalidate a prayer, it's hard to imagine any prayers getting through. 

"I've written 1274 blog posts so far this year, and I will write 1 more today."

"Starting tomorrow, how many posts must I write per day in order to have 3,000 when the year ends?"

Answer: 8.4559 posts per day.

"For a long time, I've done at least 3,000 a year, but the last 2 years, I've cut it close. That's not because I'm writing less. I'm probably writing more, just writing longer posts. But there's something motivating about the 3,000 goal, which I've hit ever year beginning in 2008. Give me a structured framework for analyzing whether I should go for the goal or break it on purpose or just go without calculating and let what happens happen."

Things I asked Grok.

"I don’t know how one changes the minds of others. Through fifty years of writing, I’ve regularly heard that film and drama..."

"... should be enlisted in the service of good works; but no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie. That’s not how they function—they’re entertainment, with as little ability to alter ones thinking as does a meal. Exodus no more reduced anti-Semitism than tacos clarify the border crisis.... Islamists at home and abroad have been demonizing the Jewish State since 1948: Why would a bunch of septuagenarian Jews in Hollywood conclude they could be defeated by 'changing the narrative'? The answer: they did not conceive of them being defeated; they merely wanted peace, which to their minds might be achieved rationally, without war, through mere dialogue, as if murderous savagery were the result of misunderstanding...."

I'm reading "The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment" by David Mamet (Amazon Associates link).

Wait. What about "The Birth of a Nation"? Did Mamet consider the movies and plays that have changed people for the worse? How about all the pornography? 

"My party loses the moral high ground...."

I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration—but this is not that.

This is anarchy and true chaos.

My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement. pic.twitter.com/pPYbvP6xR0

— U.S. Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) June 10, 2025

What did John Fetterman say about the riots in the summer of 2020?

"Joe Rogan Reveals Oliver Anthony’s Own Nasty Divorce Inspired New Single, 'Scornful Woman' – 'She Wants EVERYTHING.'"

Headline at Whiskey Riff, which I found after I heard Joe Rogan do the revealing and I listened to the song. You can find video of both the Joe Rogan segment and the song at that link.

... Joe shares some rather intimate details about Anthony’s seemingly pending divorce, and how it sparked this song. The “Scornful Woman” is Oliver’s wife, Tiffany, and from the side of the story we’re given, it sounds like she’s trying to take as much money as she can off him.

“He starts making millions of dollars, playing arenas. The wife divorces him. She wants everything. She wants EVERYTHING. She wants more than half. She wants all the money he’s going to be making in the future because she was with him when he was broke. It’s f***** crazy...."

It's not crazy for her to want more than half. If you are married and sharing equally, and you've gone through the poor times together — maybe you scrimped together while one of you went to medical school — then you're owed a share of the earnings that only arrive later. 

When Anthony's song “Rich Men North of Richmond" made him an overnight sensation in 2023, he and Tiffany and their 2 children were presented as the definition of happiness.

The new song says "She'll turn a warm afternoon/Into a cold, cold one."

"Each morning, Shelly Shem Tov would enter her son’s empty bedroom and recite Chapter 20 from the biblical Book of Psalms, an ancient plea for deliverance."

"All the while she was unaware that her son, Omer Shem Tov, happened to be uttering the very same verses of Psalm 20 — 'May the Lord answer you on a day of distress.' He had adopted the same daily ritual about 130 feet underground, alone, in a Hamas tunnel in Gaza...."

From "Finding God, and Nietzsche, in the Hamas Tunnels of Gaza/How Omer Shem Tov, who was 20 years old and not particularly religious when taken hostage, survived 505 days in captivity" (NYT)(free-access link).

"A few days into his captivity, he said, he began to speak to God. He made vows. He began to bless whatever food he was given. And he had requests — some of which he believes were answered.... Some taken hostage said they found the will to go on in a motto they heard from Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American hostage, before he was killed by his captors. It was a version of a quotation... from the atheist German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and often echoed by Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor: 'He who has a why can bear with any how.'"

"Winners at the April tasting... included melt​ed snow that had been filtered through Peruvian volcanic rock, and deep-sea water that had been pumped up 80 miles off the coast of South Korea."

"There was water gathered from nets hung in a misty Tasmanian pine forest, and a Texas brand laced with lithium called Crazy Water.... Hotels are adding precisely designed water bars. Home wine cellars have become water cellars, where children are encouraged to select bottles with their parents. Water sommelier programs continue to grow. And of course, water influencers gather more and more followers...."

From "You’ve Heard of Fine Wine. Now Meet Fine Water. Bottled waters from small, pristine sources are attracting a lot of buzz, with tastings, sommeliers and even water cellars" (NYT).

It sounds like comedy, but it's really happening. As for that water pumped up from the "deep sea," it sounds salty, and it had me wondering if it's possible for unsalty water to somehow exist below the salt water. The NYT article doesn't impinge on the fantasy of the specialness of the water, but I believe these waters are processed, are they not? That deep-sea water must be desalinated and then a chosen mix of minerals is added, right? And "water gathered from nets"? Does that sound ethereal to you... or unclean? Why not water gathered from towels hung in a steamy bathroom?

Sunrise — 4:53, 5:24, 5:48.

Talk 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.

"Because women are doing it and women are the principal actors in this, it’s been stigmatized differently.... just another way to regulate women’s lives."

Said Camila Infanger, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of São Paulo, quoted in "Extremely Lifelike Dolls Cause a Frenzy in Brazil/To some, the dolls, known as reborn dolls, provide comfort, escape or just plain fun. But politicians across Brazil have tried to pass bills banning the dolls from public spaces" (NYT).

What's the "frenzy" supposedly in need of a legislative solution?

Goodbye — and thank you — to Sly Stone.

 

NYT obituary: "Sly Stone, Maestro of a Multifaceted, Hitmaking Band, Dies at 82/Leading Sly and the Family Stone, he helped redefine the landscape of pop, funk and rock in the late 1960s and ’70s" (free-access link).

Everybody's talking about L.A.

A glance at Real Clear Politics:

I love the way RCP just alternates pro- and anti-Trump headlines. I'll just check in on one of each:

"The Reason The Left Loves Riots/Is Because It Hates Civilization," asserts Michael Shellenberger: "It's 'inflammatory' to enforce migration laws, say Democrats. But it's not. It's essential for protecting the vulnerable. The reason the Left opposes law enforcement is that they take pleasure at the destruction of civilization, at least so long as it only hurts other people."

"We are witnessing the first stages of a Trump police state," warns Robert Reich: "As civilian control gives way to military control, the nation splits into those who are most vulnerable to it and those who support it. The dictatorship entrenches itself by fomenting fear and anger on both sides. These are frightening and depressing times. But remember: although it takes one authoritarian to establish a police state, it takes just 3.5% of a population to topple him and end it."

That link on "3.5%" goes to a definition "the 3.5% rule": "Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change." Reich is hoping 3.5% of Americans will take to the streets — peacefully and patriotically — and "topple" the duly elected President.

Both Shellenberger and Reich say they're for peace, and both also say that they believe the other side is out for violence.

"The search for parallels between then and now often includes the juxtaposition of Mr. Trump and Mr. Nixon, the president often relegated in popular memory..."

"... unfairly, I believe — to a symbol of what the ’60s rose up against.... Scandal followed Mr. Nixon throughout his career, as it has Mr. Trump. Both scrambled back to the forefront of politics — Mr. Nixon until he was felled by Watergate. ('He left. I don’t leave. A big difference,' is Mr. Trump’s take.) Both positioned themselves as victims of liberal elites and champions of a silent majority; both maintained an enemies list of people and institutions they wanted to punish.... But... Mr. Nixon entered the fray only at the tail end of the ’60s.... His predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, were far more responsible for the upheavals of that time.... Mr. Trump, by contrast, defines what is happening today. The troubles of the country and world, whether the Gaza protests, the war in Ukraine or unchecked immigration, may predate his second term, but the way he has incorporated them into his broad assault on American institutions and values stamps this era with his brand. Mr. Nixon never came close to anything of the sort...."

Writes Serge Schmemann, in "It May Feel Like the 1960s. But It’s Worse" (NYT).

John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson are held responsible but Obama and Biden are not. Why not?! The obvious difference between Nixon and Trump is that Trump is currently in power and the opposition to him is happening now. There's no political cost to holding Kennedy and Johnson accountable now. But when Nixon was in power, he was hated and demonized, quite effectively. The big difference between Trump and Nixon is the one Trump is quoted as saying: "He left. I don’t leave. A big difference."

Let me thank Trump, once again, for increasing our freedom of speech.

I'm reading "YouTube Loosens Rules Guiding the Moderation of Videos/The world’s largest video platform has told content moderators to favor 'freedom of expression' over the risk of harm in deciding what to take down" (NYT):

For years, YouTube has removed videos with derogatory slurs, misinformation about Covid vaccines and election falsehoods, saying the content violated the platform’s rules. But since President Trump’s return to the White House, YouTube has encouraged its content moderators to leave up videos with content that may break the platform’s rules rather than remove them, as long as the videos are considered to be in the public interest. Those would include discussions of political, social and cultural issues....

[U]nlike Meta and X, YouTube has not made public statements about relaxing its content moderation. The online video service introduced its new policy in mid-December in training material that was reviewed by The New York Times....

My post title says "once again," because I thanked Trump before, in a dream I had in 2015, recounted here: "Last night, I dreamed that I was talking to someone about Trump.... And then I look over and see that Donald Trump has been eavesdropping.... I thanked him, effusively, for teaching us to have the courage to speak freely." Teaching by example, I believe it was. 

Flying creature competes with the sun.

At 5:23 this morning.

A bit later, the sun competed in this picture Meade took of me:

"The 'selfie yacht' of the 'celebrities' is safely making its way to the shores of Israel."

Wrote the Israeli foreign ministry, quoted in "Israel Intercepts Gaza-Bound Aid Ship With Greta Thunberg Aboard/Israel had vowed to prevent the vessel from reaching Gaza, saying its military would use 'any means necessary' to stop it from breaching a naval blockade" (NYT).

The Madleen was carrying only a symbolic amount of humanitarian assistance — an amount the Israeli foreign ministry dismissed as “tiny” in its statement, and “less than a single truckload of aid.”... 

“We are doing this because, no matter what odds we are against, we have to keep trying,” Ms. Thunberg said last week. “Because the moment we stop trying is when we lose our humanity. And no matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s not even near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the live-streamed genocide.”

Those statements from Israeli foreign ministry and from Thunberg are saying the same thing: The boat trip was symbolic speech.

The speech was delivered, no one was hurt, and no one received substantive aid.

Sunrise — 5:09, 5:33, 5:33.

Talk 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.

"Did I lie? Yup. Did I also write a book that tore people to shreds? Yeah."

Said James Frey, quoted in "Oprah Shamed Him. He’s Back Anyway. Twenty years after 'A Million Little Pieces' became a national scandal, James Frey is ready for a new audience" (NYT)(free-access link).

As Frey sees it, the public has gotten increasingly comfortable with falsehoods, without getting fully comfortable with him. He finds it all a bit absurd. “I just sit in my castle and giggle,” he said.

I'm using my 3rd free link of the month of June on this because I am a long-time admirer of photographs of the interiors of writers' homes. As I wrote 12 years ago: "I love this book, 'Writer's Desk,' with excellent photographs by Jill Krementz (who was married to Kurt Vonnegut) and an introductory essay by John Updike."

I see Frey has an "extra-large mohair Eames chair, which he had custom-made so that he could sit in lotus pose." I identify. I've been buying chairs that accommodate the lotus position since I first bought furniture, which would have been in the 1970s. I wish I still had the chair I bought at Conran's that got me through law school. I'm one of those people who feel more comfortable with my legs folded up. 

Speaking of things written on this blog long ago, I've been around long enough, doing this low-level writerly thing that I do, to have covered the "Million Little Pieces" foofaraw when Oprah was agonizing:

"Patel, Bongino and the other leaders are caught in a trap of their own making. The world they helped create, a world in which conspiracy destroys facts, is now the world they have to inhabit."

Said politics professor Russell Muirhead, quoted in "Once Champions of Fringe Causes, Now in a ‘Trap of Their Own Making’/Top leaders at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. are struggling to fulfill Trump campaign promises often rooted in misinformation and conspiracy theories" (NYT).

From the article:

The tension between practicing politics based on conspiracy theories and having to govern extends far beyond the F.B.I. and Justice Department’s problems with the Epstein case.... Days after the backlash over his Epstein comments, Mr. Bongino offered other promises — new investigations into other episodes that have gripped the president’s base: the discovery of cocaine in the West Wing during the Biden administration, the leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning abortion rights in 2022 and the discovery of pipe bombs near Republican and Democratic Party headquarters before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, an unsolved crime that has already consumed significant law enforcement resources.... 

Emerald Robinson, a former White House correspondent for Newsmax, made her frustration clear on social media. “Dan Bongino & Kash Patel know they destroyed their credibility by claiming that ‘Jeffrey Epstein killed himself’ so now they’re trying to offer up three investigations you don’t care about to misdirect you from the Epstein files you do care about,” she wrote. “Sad!”

"If there was a big, explosive there there.... If it was there, we would have told you."

So said Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the F.B.I., sitting alongside the F.B.I. director Kash Patel, quoted at the end of the previous post. The topic is what does he know about Thomas Crooks, the man who shot Trump's ear.

Here's the Fox News interview where Bongino makes the statement. Listen to his tone, watch his eyes, assess his demeanor. 

I'm noticing this verbal tic, this argument format: If X were true, I would have told you. It's an oft-expressed idea. It's the same idea as "Trust me" or "Would I lie?" But those are laughably ineffectual  expressions these days. 

I'm noticing this new effort at demanding trust. Kash Patel used it on Joe Rogan (talking about the Epstein video): "If there was a video of some guy — or gal — committing felonies — and I'm in charge — don't you think you'd see it?"

I'm paying attention to this after experiencing Tim Dillon's brilliant trashing of Patel. "They're doing 'Who's On First,'" with Joe as Costello and Kash as Abbott:

"Thomas Crooks was acting strangely. Sometimes he danced around his bedroom late into the night. Other times, he talked to himself with his hands waving around."

So begins the NYT article, "The Quiet Unraveling of the Man Who Almost Killed Trump/Thomas Crooks was a nerdy engineering student on the dean’s list. He stockpiled explosive materials for months before his attack on Donald Trump, as his mental health eroded."

Sidenote: The NYT is writing "acting strangely" again. We just talked about this grammar error 2 days ago, here. The NYT had "acting strangely" in a headline 2 days ago — "People Around President Trump Are Acting Very Strangely." Please, editors, learn about copulative verbs (AKA linking verbs). You should be writing "acting strange" (for the same reason you'd write "The sky looks blue" and not "The sky looks bluely").

Now, what can we learn about Thomas Crooks? Let's see...

"Shortly after President Trump praised the National Guard for their work in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass reminded residents that the troops had not arrived."

"'Just to be clear, the National Guard has not been deployed in the City of Los Angeles,' she said on social media."

Written in the NYT, 3 hours ago.

More detail, again from the NYT, published 3 hours ago:

National Guard troops will arrive in Los Angeles County within the next 24 hours, the Trump administration’s top law enforcement official in Southern California said, to quell protests over immigration enforcement that are “out of control.”

Bilal A. “Bill” Essayli, the interim U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said in an interview on Saturday night that the 2,000 troops were needed to keep the peace in the sprawling region.... "They threw rocks at the officers,” Mr. Essayli said. “We had Molotov cocktails thrown. We had all kinds of assaults on agents. The state has an obligation to maintain order and maintain public safety, and they’re unable to do that right now in Los Angeles. So the federal government will send in resources to regain order.”...

Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed back against the president’s order, calling it “purposefully inflammatory.” Mr. Trump had federalized the National Guard “not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle,” Mr. Newsom said.

“The governor doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said Mr. Essayli, a former Republican state legislator who before his federal appointment in April was a frequent critic of Mr. Newsom, a Democrat.