Can tourists run?

The scene on Mount Etna yesterday:

Tourists and guides run for their lives when Mount Etna suddenly erupts pic.twitter.com/HKhTiUCuUe

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) June 3, 2025

What am I looking at? Are these people running for their life? Are they running fast enough?

Here's "An Eruption at Mount Etna Sends Hikers Scrambling for Cover/Videos circulating on social media showed visitors rushing to descend the mountain as volcanic plumes rose overhead" (NYT).

In recent years, authorities have struggled to control imprudent visitors who failed to appreciate the risks of getting a close look at the island’s most prominent landmark. Mount Etna, a stratovolcano, or a conical volcano with relatively steep sides, shows almost continuous activity from its main craters and relatively frequent lava flows from craters and fissures along its sides..... Hannah and Charlie Camper, a couple from England, were... aware of previous eruptions but thought they would be “completely fine,” since “it’s active all the time”.... 

Apparently, all the tourists were completely fine yesterday. 

Where hate seems to be going.

As perceived by Marianne Williamson, writing on X:

We seem to have gone from calling for justice for Palestinians - a call with which I wholeheartedly agree - to an absurd romanticization of a gigantic death cult. That cult is not just coming for the Jews. Those who continue yelling 'We’re not antisemites!!!' while at least passively joining Hamas in their call for our destruction are naively aligning with a movement that hates them too.

Sunrise — 4:26, 5:23.

The official sunrise time today was 5:20, so that first picture was quite early. Arriving at the vantage point 20 or 30 minutes before the sunrise time can be important in catching the most colorful parts of the very best sunrises, but you can see from the second photo that it was not one of those days. The reason for heading out early today was the hope of catching the Northern Lights. I don't think the light circle you see there has to do with the Northern Lights, though. I think it's the beginning of nautical twilight, and the circle is where the sun will rise. 

That early photo is by Meade, who took a headstart. I caught up with him at our usual vantage point and caught that stunningly bland sunrise image.

***

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"The Colorado Terrorist attack suspect, Mohamed Soliman, is illegally in our country."

Said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, quoted in The NYT reports.

She added that he had filed for asylum in September 2022, but gave no additional details....

Witnesses said a man threw an incendiary device into a group of people who were taking part in a peaceful weekly demonstration to draw attention to hostages taken in the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The man yelled “Free Palestine” during the attack, which left patches of grass burning in front of the county courthouse as people tried to put out flames with pieces of clothing....

Trump used the moment to once again criticize his predecessor’s immigration agenda. He has a long history of using crimes like this to build support for his restrictionist immigration policies....

Using crimes.... 

A terrorist also uses crime to build support for policies he favors.

"But yeah, all of a sudden, you know, you're old and you realize you've been doing something a long time."

"And this started, you know, the old garage, the, you know, just no one knew what a podcast was. I was coming out of a horrendous divorce. I was wanting to figure out how to continue living my life. Things were not looking good for me. Brendan McDonald, my producer... and I started this thing.... And it, it slowly evolved into the show. That became what you listened to twice a week, 16 years we've been doing this, and we've decided that we, we had a, a great run. And, and now basically it's, it's time, folks. It's time. WTF is is coming to an end, and it's our decision. We will have our final episode sometime in the fall. It was not some kind of difficult decision necessarily.... And, you know, God forbid we just keep plowing along and, and something diminishes. And we wouldn't wanna just keep plugging along because we can, at the risk of our burnout or our our sort of like, you know, passion, you know, starts to, to drift or it starts to get sloppy. We're just, we're just not those kind of people...."

Said Marc Maron, at the beginning of the new episode of his "WTF" podcast.

"Yeah. I mean, man, each book, you get more right wing. I have to say, you get, like, the last one. I remember you were on my show, and it was, like..."

"... one line in it that was — and I said to you on the air — like, are you implying that that, Trump, that election was stolen by Biden... you were kinda like hedging it. And now you're like, you, you...."

Bill Maher lapses into near-babbling in the presence of David Mamet, who remained calm and quietly eloquent. The quoted part begins around 5 minutes in. 

It gets quite awkward, and Mamet finally — close to the 16-minute mark — frames a question: "How would you like this part of the conversation to end so that we can move on to something else? What would end it to your satisfaction?"

It's such a writerly — multi-level — phrasing. An ordinary person would continue the decline, carping in the usual lefty-against-righty fashion. Someone with a little more distance and self-possession might say, Can't we talk about something else? But Mamet creates the scene in which he's the character who's doing something cagey with the Maher character. He's insulting him in a devious way with this sarcastic notion that he might be there to please him: What would Maher like, what would give him satisfaction? And the key word is end: "How would you like this part of the conversation to end... What would end it...?" Is he threatening to walk out? The dramatic tension is sublime. Maher, you idiot! You have the great dramatist beside you. He's giving you so many points of entry into a beautiful dialogue. Take one! 

So frustrating! Worth listening to though, for Mamet. Here's his new book: "The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment" (commission earned).

"These kids never learned the proper way to be a barfly."

Said an L.A. bartender, quoted in "Gen Z Doesn’t Want to Start a Bar Tab/To the chagrin of bartenders, many 20-something bargoers prefer to close out and pay after every single drink, no matter how many they might order during an outing" (NYT).

[B]artenders have tried gently nudging them to consider opening tabs.... Others opt for something more overt.... If a group of friends closes out separate tabs multiple times at Seattle’s Central Saloon, Tiarra Horn will call them out from behind the bar: "'You guys all know each other? You guys not friends? You can’t get this round?' They haven’t even thought about it.... Someone has to bully these people. Respectfully."

"I was irked 30 years ago when our neighbor said she intended to install a free-standing fence between our driveways...."

Writes Margaret Renkl, in "What if Robert Frost’s Neighbor Was Right?" (NYT)(free-access link, the first of the 10 allotted to me in June).

By the time she died two years ago, the unbeloved fence had become the scaffolding for pokeweed and native vines.... The fence had been built in a shadowbox style, and the gaps between the boards gave reaching vines room for twisting.... After our neighbor passed, a developer bought her modest, meticulously maintained house and reduced it to rubble.... The new fence sits on top of a concrete wall.... Unlike the old shadowbox fence, this new fence has a front side and a back side, and it’s the back side that faces us. Worse, its unbroken expanse gives climbing vines no purchase. It took 30 years for the realization to dawn, but once the new flat-board fence went up, I finally understood that my late neighbor had gone to some expense to make the fence she built as attractive on our side as on hers. This choice was her version of neighborliness. I was just too caught up in my own contrary definition of neighborliness to see it....

You can listen to Frost reading his poem, "Mending Wall," here. And here's the text of the poem, which is not entirely about the literal wall. The NYT essay is about a fence. It's quite literal. Renkl has a lot of feelings about fences and neighbors — different kinds of fences and different kinds of neighbors. Do you have neighbors who bring up Trump when you thought you were just talking about your gardens? Well, let me assure you, the NYT essayist does not bring up Trump. It's lovely, all that wall wall wall and never a peep about Trump's wall. Yes, I know, I'm bad to bring it up. But how can you talk about not bringing something up without bringing it up.

"Your post titled 'Is the news of Biden's advanced cancer news of a terrible scandal?' was flagged to us for review."

"We have determined that it violates our guidelines and deleted the post, previously at https://althouse.blogspot.com/2025/05/is-news-of-bidens-advance-cancer-news.html. Why was your blog post deleted? Your content has been evaluated according to our Hate Speech policy. Please visit our Community Guidelines page... to learn more.... We encourage you to review the full content of your blog posts to make sure they are in line with our standards as additional violations could result in termination of your blog."

So I got that email from Blogger this morning.

I'm following the review procedure, and I fully expect the post to be restored, but what jackassery! Was I "inciting hatred against" Joe Biden "on the basis of" his "disability"?!

I'd linked to something titled "This is the Most Dangerous Cover-up in the History of the Presidency...."

Is "the most dangerous cover-up" something that must be... covered up?

"For years now, progressives have been engaged in a competition of sorts, which is like, 'In the hierarchy of intersectionality, who has the most right to be upset?'"

"And that has put conservative white men in particular on the defensive at a time when they’re already freaked out about shifting social and economic hierarchies. So a lot of people are tired of feeling guilty, and they have been very open to the idea that empathy or compassion is a weakness...."

Said Michelle Cottle, in "Why Politics Feels So Cruel Right Now/Three Opinion writers on the death of empathy in America" (NYT).

So there's the "hierarchy of intersectionality," the "social... hierarch[y]," and the "economic hierarch[y]." These "progressive" minds, obsessed with "hierarchy," love their own capacity for "empathy," but it's nothing like compassion for all human beings. It's something to give only to the ones you decide are most oppressed — those with what Cottle snarks have "the most right to be upset" — and something to withhold from everyone else.

Sunrise — 5:25.

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Democrats attempt to teach themselves how to speak with American men.

Joni Ernst serves up death, apology, sarcasm, and Jesus.

Against all odds, Joni Ernst has made it worse pic.twitter.com/aElIudNmZG

— Keith Edwards (@keithedwards) May 31, 2025

I had to go back to this after reading about it because I had clicked it off in disgust thinking it was an genuine effort to make a "sincere" apology.

For background: "Joni Ernst posts sarcastic apology video following comments that 'we all are going to die'" (Des Moines Register): "The Iowa Republican's original comments came at a town hall in Parkersburg on Friday, May 30, while she was answering a question about cuts to Medicaid in President Donald Trump's tax package that the Senate is poised to consider. During Ernst's answer, someone in the audience interrupted her to shout, 'people will die!' Ernst replied by saying, 'People are not — well, we all are going to die. For heaven’s sakes, folks.'"

Sandhill cranes take a long lunch.

From the driver-side window, Meade takes a 24-second video:

 

After our hike, riding home, 2 hours later, I take a 24-second video from the passenger-side window at exactly the same spot:

One might casually and shallowly dream of needing to eat constantly, just to maintain a healthy weight. Perhaps you'd love to take a pill that would put you in this predicament. But imagine living like this!

"The F.B.I.’s increasingly pervasive use of the polygraph, or a lie-detector test, has only intensified a culture of intimidation."

"Mr. Patel has wielded the polygraph to keep agents or other employees from discussing a number of topics, including his decision-making or internal moves. Former agents say he is doing so in ways not typically seen in the F.B.I.... Jim Stern, who conducted hundreds of polygraphs while an F.B.I. agent, said... that if someone violated policy, the F.B.I. could polygraph them. But if an agent who legitimately talked to the news media in a previous role had to take one, he said, 'that’s going to be an issue.' 'I never used them to suss out gossip,' he said. At a recent meeting, senior executives were told that the news leaks were increasing in priority — even though they do not involve open cases or the disclosure of classified information. Former officials say senior executives, among others, were being polygraphed at a 'rapid rate.' In May, one senior official was forced out, at least in part because he had not disclosed to Mr. Patel that his wife had taken a knee during demonstrations protesting police violence...."

From "Unease at F.B.I. Intensifies as Patel Ousts Top Officials/Senior executives are being pushed out and the director, Kash Patel, is more freely using polygraph tests to tamp down on news leaks about leadership decisions and behavior" (NYT).

I've made a new tag — "lie detector" — and gone back and applied it to old posts. Interesting to see how many times the topic has come up:

April 2004: "[E]ven if the lie detector was not to be used on [Omarosa], and, indeed, even if lie detector tests are not reliable, if she believed it was to be used on her and believed it was reliable, her running off at the sight of it is some evidence that she had lied in her accusation about the other contestant....."

April 2005:  "Everyone on TV was into analyzing why [the groom-to-be of the Runaway Bride] would take a private lie detector test, but wanted special conditions before he'd take the police test. He wanted it videotaped, and the police refused...."

July 2005: "Some researchers attached sensors to 101 penises and then showed the possessors of these penises either all-male or all-female porn movies. It was kind of a lie detector test, because the men had all professed to being heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual...."

October 2008: Ashley Todd, the woman who claimed a black man had carved the letter "B" on her face.

June 2012: "'$1.1 million-plus Gates grants: "Galvanic" bracelets that measure student engagement.'... [I]sn't this basically a lie detector? And if so, won't students train themselves to fool the authorities?"

April 2013:

"This dude’s the last guy I want to tell us about 'we lost our way.' You’re the guy who lost.'"

Said Tim Walz, talking about himself, in "'I Didn’t Get It Done': A Reflective Tim Walz Wants to Make Good/Last year’s Democratic vice-presidential nominee has thrown himself into a robust atonement-and-explanation tour, though aides insist there is no grand strategy" (NYT).