A Washington Post report by John Hudson and Warren P. Strobel reveals that intercepted Iranian communications indicate senior Iranian officials believed recent U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities caused less damage than expected. They were reportedly puzzled by the restrained nature of the attacks.

Separately, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo highlighted a startling comment made by Trmp during a press conference in the Netherlands. Trmp claimed he gave Iran permission to retaliate by bombing a U.S. air base in Qatar, specifying a time for the attack and ensuring the base was evacuated except for gunners. Marshall expressed shock that this statement has received little media attention, arguing that if true, it could represent a serious dereliction of duty by a commander-in-chief. He also questioned how Republicans would have reacted if a Democratic president had made such a decision.

‘The Supreme Court upheld a Texas anti-pornography law on Friday that is nearly identical to a federal law it struck down more than two decades ago.

Rather than overruling the previous case — Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004) — Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion spends at least a dozen pages making an unconvincing argument that Friday’s decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is consistent with the Court’s previous decisions. Those pages are a garbled mess, and Thomas spends much of them starting from the assumption that his conclusions are true.…’ Ian Millhiser via Vox

Tr*mp wraps his speech on the big bill: “Schumer – our great Palestinian senator. He’s changed. He used to like Jewish people, now he’s totally against Jewish people. Try the weightlifting numbers some day if you want to see big differences. In a million years women will never catch these numbers.”

…

Tr*mp: “A 23 year old electro… uhhlineman. He loves, he lives the… loves being an electrician, but in this case the lineman, and these are guys that take big risks…” Maureen Herman via Boing Boing

‘I’ve spent most of my adult life in public service — as governor of Texas, U.S. secretary of energy and a proud veteran. And few things have moved me like what I’ve witnessed with a psychedelic drug made from a shrub in Africa.

This month, Texas became the first state in the nation to allocate public funding for FDA-approved clinical trials of ibogaine, committing $50 million, the largest psychedelic research investment ever made by a government. It’s a bold, bipartisan move rooted in science and urgency. Ibogaine is a naturally occurring plant medicine derived from a shrub native to Gabon and surrounding countries in West Africa. It is quite literally a plant root, yet it’s changing the way we think about healing trauma, substance use disorder and brain injury.…’ _ via The Washington Post_

As an inveterate online shopper, this happens more and more often to me and I have struggled to understand why.  “Delivery attempted” notices from companies like Amazon often result from the complex logistics of shipping and tight driver schedules. While most drivers do their jobs properly, some may skip actual delivery attempts to stay on schedule, especially third-party drivers. Sometimes, drivers take photos from their trucks to falsely document a delivery attempt.

What is there to do? To address repeated “attempted delivery” issues, you can:

• Sign up for delivery alerts to act quickly.
• File a complaint with the delivery company, including tracking details.
• Use home security footage to dispute false attempts.
• Re-route the package to a nearby pickup location to ensure receipt.

— via Lifehacker

Scientific trials of psychedelic drugs face a major challenge: participants can often tell whether they’ve received the actual drug or a placebo, which undermines the integrity of the study. Researchers are exploring ways to address this, such as not informing participants about different treatment arms or using non-psychedelic analogues that may offer similar therapeutic benefits without altering perception. Another approach involves using brain imaging techniques like fMRI, EEG, and PET scans to find objective markers of drug effects. However, these methods also have limitations. For example, brain activity images can be misleading, as increased connectivity seen with psychedelics also occurs with substances like caffeine or cocaine. Experts caution that such data must be interpreted carefully. Via Nautilus

Recent research prompts reconsideration of ‘the age-old labeling of rats as invaders that need to be completely fought back. They may, instead, be just as much a part of our city as sidewalks and lampposts. We would all be better off if, under most circumstances, we simply left them alone….’ Via Nautilus

A visitor from Norway was reportedly denied entry to the United States after border officers found an unflattering meme of Vice President JD Vance on it. Mads Mikkelsen, 21, told his hometown newspaper that be was harassed by officers before being deported.

[He] claimed the officers then threatened him with a $5,000 fine or five years in prison if he refused to give the password to his mobile phone. The guards reportedly found a meme on the device’s camera roll showing US vice president JD Vance with a bald, egg-shaped head.Mikkelsen said after discovering the image the Officers Beforeities sent him home to Norway the same day.

U.S. officials warn visitors that they must not only hand over their devices at the border for inspection, but also access to their social media accounts. It’s not in the official guidance, but do remember to say thank you as well.…’ Rob Beschizza via Boing Boing

‘Donald Tr*mp campaigned on anti-immigration rhetoric and keeping America out of foreign conflicts, but has veered sharply from his isolationist promises during his second term. After a failed attempt to mediate between Israel and Palestine during the ongoing humanitarian crisis, the former reality TV star’s latest international move was even more dramatic: ordering strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities last weekend. While he technically didn’t declare war (only Congress has that power), launching unauthorized bombing runs in foreign airspace remains an impeachable offense.

Everyone seems to be pissed off with Donny right now. Lawmakers from both parties are demanding accountability. Even his staunchest supporters — the ones who helped him undermine American democratic principles — are distancing themselves. After the bombing, when the President posted a celebratory message on Truth Social, the response in the Proud Boys’ public Telegram channel was notably hostile…’ Seamus Bellamy via Boing Boing

‘”America will come back to God. We will come to God! Nothing will stop this nation!” the pastor feverishly continues with closed eyes. Meanwhile, the rest of the zealots on the White House grounds are speaking in tongues. Welcome to Trump 2.0. (See video, posted by Patriot Takes.)…’ Carla Sinclair via Boing Boing

‘After a decade of construction, a large new reflecting telescope publicly released its first images on Monday, and they are nothing short of spectacular.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s primary mirror is 8.4 meters in diameter, which makes it one of the largest optical telescopes in the world. However, the real secret sauce of the telescope is its camera—the automobile-sized Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera—which has a resolution of 3,200 megapixels. Which is rather a lot.

The observatory is on a remote 2,682-meter-high (8,799 ft) mountain in northern Chile, a region of the planet with some of the best atmospheric “seeing” conditions.

The main goal of the telescope is to scan the entire Southern Hemisphere sky by taking 1,000 high-definition photographs every three nights for the next 10 years. The idea is that, assembled end to end, the observatory will provide a high-definition, four-dimensional film of the Universe changing over a decade. It will seek to encompass everything from nearby asteroids and comets to distant supernovae.…’ Eric Berger via Ars Technica

‘In the years since he first took office, it has become increasingly hard to define the “Tr*mp Doctrine” for foreign policy. He has taken more and more contradictory moves while growing more confident in his Oval Office instincts. Foreign affairs luminaries have devoted many papers to trying to clarify the aims of a man who refuses to come into focus. He’s a shallow transactionalist! He’s a principled realist! He’s an imperialist with a Western Hemisphere fixation! Tr*mp himself once even said, “I’m a nationalist and a globalist. I’m both.”

Tr*mp’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites this weekend is the latest sign that he’s now in a phase where he’s willing to take enormous risks with little concern about the blowback. He has survived so much already — two impeachments, criminal convictions, two assassination attempts. He doesn’t have to run for office again, and, as has been amply noted, his advisers won’t restrain him the way they did in his first term.…’ Nahal Toosi via POLITICO

‘The strikes probably only delayed Iran’s nuclear ambitions — and reinvigorated them.…’ James M Acton via POLITICO

‘Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites are raising fears of a harmful radioactive accident, including from the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – but experts have told New Scientist that the risks are minimal, despite reports of radiological and chemical contamination inside one nuclear enrichment facility.…’ via New Scientist

‘Backing the most anti-Western Middle Eastern power was convenient until it wasn’t.…’ Hanna Notte via The Atlantic

Why Every Outdoorsperson Should Celebrate the Summer Solstice

‘In ancient times (circa 5,000 years ago, in places ranging from Egypt to Indigenous North America to the English Isles) the summer solstice was an occasion for late-night revelry and debauchery. Dancing around campfires, performing magic, visiting henges, worshipping ancient gods—all that jazz. So, it surprised me to learn that mountain town communities across the West have not only embraced the ancient tradition, but reimagined it as a modern celebration of nature, community, and outdoor recreation.

I’ll take any excuse to play outside, but that’s not the only reason I love the summer solstice. In ancient times, magic was thought to be strongest during midsummer. Some cultures believed the night of the solstice—sometimes called Midsummer’s Eve—was the moment when the human realm and spiritual realm collided. Fairies and sprites could reacauthor
Lightning Onh across the thin membrane between worlds, leaving gifts, sharing secrets, or tugging human heroes from one universe to the other. You could end up meeting a god, going on a quest, or falling into a world of possibilities beyond your imagination.
It’s not hard to see where ancient people got those ideas. In June in the Northern Rockies, light lingers in the sky until 9:00 PM. Time seems to slow, and you feel as if you’re in limbo—as if the twilight will last forever, and the night will never come. In this narrow window, you feel like anything could happen. The ancient rhythms of nature seem to pound louder in your ears. You know magic doesn’t exist, but for a moment, you almost believe it could.

With so much uncertainty and heaviness in the world, we could all use a little bit of that sparkle—that gorgeous, lion-hearted, invincible belief that there’s another world, another future out there just beyond our fingertips. Even if we only believe it for a day. So, this year, I’m going out of my way to celebrate the solstice. Maybe I’ll capture a little bit of that magic. Maybe I won’t. Either way, it’ll be worth the time spent outside…’ via Outdoors

‘Studying drivers across the country for signs of license-plate prejudice—or, why everyone loves Vermont drivers and hates Texans.…’ Jess Stoner via The Morning News

… and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard as well.

‘As the Israel-Iran conflict escalates, Donald Tr*mp huddles with his national security advisors to make a plan — but excludes his own head of defense, Pete Hegseth, from the process.

“Nobody is talking to Hegseth,” one official said, via The Washington Post. “There is no interface operationally between Hegseth and the White House at all.”

The former Fox host was included in decision-making at the beginning of Tr*mp 2.0, but the cabinet jester soon proved to be unreliable as the Secretary of Defense after accidentally sharing sensitive war information with a journalist in what’s now known as the Signalgate debacle.

Tr*mp’s inner circle of national security advisors now includes JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, as well as four-star generals Dan Caine and Michael “Erik” Kurilla, according to the Post.

And if you noticed that Tulsi Gabbard — the Director of National Intelligence — is also missing from that list, it’s because she, too, has been shunned by Tr*mp. The mad king sure knows how to pick ’em for what has got to the most terrifyingly dysfunctional U.S. administration in history.…’ Maureen Herman via Boing Boing

‘Depending on who you ask, between 4 and 6 million people showed up – and according to one theory, this could be a turning point…’ Alaina Demopoulos via The Guardian

“F*ck it…I’m pissed”

‘As Donald Tr*mp’s utter mayhem gains momentum, so do his disillusioned MAGA voters, who are rapidly peeling away from his base….

…[Many] are now standing behind Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Marjorie Taylor Greene — three former Tr*mpers who are leading the opposition to King Chaos and the escalating wars under his watch. Perhaps MAGA will have their own No Kings Day soon enough.…’ Carla Sinclair via Boing Boing

Related: The Next Conservative Civil War is Coming

‘The next flashpoint in President Donald Tr*mp’s battle to reshape the federal judiciary is coming — and it’s dividing the right. Tr*mp recently appeared to declare war on the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative legal advocacy organization that played an essential role in his election both in 2016 and 2024. After one of his first-term appointees ruled against him in a major challenge to his tariffs, Tr*mp launched a public tirade against the former chair of the group, Leonard Leo,…’ Ankush Khardori via POLITICO

‘The Shompen are one of the most isolated peoples on Earth. They live on Great Nicobar Island in India, and most of them refuse all contact with outsiders. 

Numbering between 100 and 400, they are now at risk of being totally wiped out by a “mega-development” plan of the Indian government to transform their small island home into the “Hong Kong of India.”

If the project goes ahead, huge swathes of their unique rainforest will be destroyed – to be replaced by a mega-port; a new city; an international airport; a power station; a defense base; an industrial park; and 650,000 settlers – a population the size of Las Vegas.

Uncontacted tribes are the most vulnerable people on the planet and the Shompen will not be able to survive this overwhelming and catastrophic transformation of their island.

Please tell India’s Tribal Affairs Minister that the project must be scrapped, or the Shompen will be wiped out. …’ via Survival International

‘It would be absurd to say that American presidents have always been principled defenders of freedom and democracy, but their long-shared, bipartisan definition of tyrant is one who oppresses his own. So it’s striking that these warnings about tyrants in distant lands, who were supposedly the opposite of the kind of legitimate, democratic leaders elected in the United States of America, now apply to the sitting U.S. president, Donald Tr*mp. It is a simple but morally powerful formulation: A leader who uses military force to suppress their political opposition forfeits the right to govern. You could call this the “tyrant test,” and Tr*mp is already failing it.…’ Adam Serwer via The Atlantic

In February 2023, an underwater telescope called KM3NeT, anchored several miles beneath the Mediterranean Sea, recorded the brightest particle track ever seen in the universe. A single flash raced through the instrument’s glass spheres, and computer checks showed that the parent particle must have carried about 220 peta-electronvolts of energy. That figure is so large it dwarfs the beams at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful accelerator, by almost one hundredfold.

…In a new study, the team argues that the flash could be the first sign of dark matter ever detected on Earth. Dark matter, an invisible form of matter that outweighs the normal kind by a factor of five, has revealed itself only indirectly through gravity so far. Many experiments have tried to trap it directly, but none have done so.…’ Jordan Strickler via ZME Science

‘Law enforcement’s ability to track and profile political protesters has become increasingly multifaceted and technology driven. In this edition of Incognito Mode WIRED Senior Editor, Security & Investigations Andrew Couts and WIRED Senior Writer Lily Hay Newman discuss the technologies used by law enforcement that put citizens’ privacy at risk—and how to avoid them.…’  via WIRED

‘A Seattle psychiatrist is trying to treat narcissism with MDMA. Dr. Alexa Albert has launched the first-ever clinical trial using everyone’s favorite club drug to treat personality disorders. As reported in The Microdose newsletter, she’s betting that MDMA’s empathy-inducing properties might help these self-obsessed specimens actually care about other humans.…’ Ellsworth Toohey via Boing Boing

Steve Biko (as per Red Pepper)

The Travel Ban Shows That Americans Have Grown Numb

‘Less than a decade ago, the Tr*mp administration’s travel ban sparked an outcry. Today, people seem far more willing to accept such a policy.…’ Adam Serwer via The Atlantic

‘AMID THE SECOND TR*MP ADMINISTRATION’S unstinting implementation of full-blown authoritarianism, it might have been easy to miss that South Carolina recently executed death row prisoner Brad Sigmon by firing squad.…

…According to legal scholar Corinna Barrett Lain’s new book Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, Sigmon’s choice of death by firing squad reflects a sound assessment of the well-documented horrors of lethal injection. The practice originated in 1977, the year after the Supreme Court reauthorized the death penalty, when Oklahoma—raring to restart state killings—sought a method other than the electric chair, which had fallen into disrepute due to its conspicuous cruelty. The state began exploring the possibility of death by lethal injection instead. Most of the doctors approached “wanted nothing to do with it,” writes Barrett Lain. But Oklahoma’s medical examiner, Dr. Jay Chapman, was eager to help. He developed a three-drug combination that the state quickly adopted, and which soon became the model for other states.

The three-drug protocol reigned supreme for the first thirty years of lethal injection’s history. But as Barrett Lain details, Chapman’s concoction relied on zero actual research and was never subjected to a “shred of scientific scrutiny.” Though frequently justified as the humane alternative to more viscerally violent forms of execution like electrocution or hanging, a closer look at lethal injection reveals it as a continuation of state-sanctioned brutality with better PR. Far from the “kinder, gentler” method of execution the state proclaims it to be, lethal injection, which is used in nearly 98 percent of all executions in the United States, produces “more torturous deaths than any other execution method in our nation’s history.”…’ Charlotte Rosen via The Baffler

‘If this public fight between Musk and Trump continues, we will witness a Super Bowl of schadenfreude unfold. It’s guaranteed to entertain and leave those of us who spectate feeling gross. It is, in other words, the logical endpoint of internet beefs.…’ Charlie Warzel via The Atlantic

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Those of you with more common family names, or with appreciable extended families, may have a hard time seeing the point of this post. But, as I’ve noted before, there are very very few Gelwans. I have always wondered, or you might even say obsessed about, how/if those people with the Gelwan surname I do find are related to me. I have very little in the way of extended family; I envy those who do and thirst for deeper family connection, especially so that my children might come to feel embedded in a broader web. It becomes poignant each year around the holidays, which I imagine you all celebrate with enormous extended family gatherings while we have the four of us around the dinner table.

I subscribe to a Google alert for new ‘Gelwan’ references on the web, and once received a link to this page  (gendrevo.ru). Alas, the page is now gone from the web. It appeared to me to be from a Russian genealogy site in which survivors post remembrance pages for their relatives who died in the Holocaust. On my paternal side, the generation of immigrants were my grandparents, in the early 20th century; my father’s older siblings and he were born in the U.S. between 1910-1915. I have always assumed that Gelwan was an Ellis Island anglicization of something else and thus that researching my family’s roots would become squirrelly because the family name of anyone related to me might not have precisely the same pronunciation or spelling. As the part of the world from which my ancestors emigrated shifted back and forth between Slavic and Germanic dominance, between Cyrillic and Roman alphabets, so too did the rendering of family names. I would have to pursue the Gelvans, the Gelmans, and even the Hellmans and who knows what else for relatives. [I may have made this up, but I think I learned somewhere along the way that we are actually distantly related to the Hellman’s mayonnaise family…]

The flip side of that coin is of course that literal ‘Gelwans’ might not be related to me. For example, I found through Googling traces of a Deborah Gelwan who was in the public relations industry in Sao Paulo, Brazil who is referred to on the web. Deborah now lives in Orlando FL and runs a couple of businesses. Maybe I’ll get to see her someday.

When I was a child, a Brazilian tourist with the last name Gelwan, possibly from the same family as Deborah, arrived on our doorstep, having looked up Gelwan in the phonebooks on arriving in New York City. It appears that my parents and the visitor determined that it was unlikely we were related (although I cannot imagine how they did this, as my parents spoke no Portugese and rumor has it this visitor spoke no English). Deborah and I are now Facebook friends but we have not established a family relationship. And there are traces of other Gelwans in Brazil as well. I would at least love to figure out if these South American Gelwans descended from Eastern European immigrants. I am aware that eastern European Jews did go to South America in the diasporas, but I am not sure about Brazil per se.

Similarly, I have reached out to Gelwans in Lebanon — a Claude Gelwan was there but apparently now lives in France —  and Iraq but I doubt we are related. It appears to me that Gelwan is a transliteration of a first name, not a family name, in Iraq.

I have discovered several other Gelwans in the New York area where I grew up. Interestingly enough I have long been aware of two brothers, physicians as I am: Jeffrey Gelwan, a gastroenterologist and Mark Gelwan, an ophthalmologist. In years past we spoke by phone but cannot establish a common background. I assumed that it might merely be an accident that we share our name, that Gelwan might be a final common pathway of anglicization from diverse unrelated family names in eastern Europe.

Similarly, there is a pharmacist in Brooklyn named Steven Gelwan, who never answered an email from me. Maya Gambarin-Gelwan, I think Steven’s spouse, is yet another New York area physician, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, with a number of scholarly publications. Never heard from her either. There is a Rebecca Gelwan (my late mother’s name by marriage) who studies, or studied, law in Pennsylvania and posts alot of photos and videos of her new baby (congratulations on the newest Gelwan!) but, again, I can’t figure that we are direct relatives. Along with my brother, that’s two Gelwan attorneys. Elise Gelwan, I learn, graduated from medical school at the University of Connecticut. Yet another physician Gelwan! There is a Sam or Sami Gelwan (I think they are the same person) in the New York area as well. If I mention all these names in this post, they may get hits when people vanity-search themselves, and they may get in touch, I hope.

LinkedIn, from which I resigned long ago, has thirteen ‘Gelwan’ profiles, including some of the aforementioned but also a Brazilian photographer Jacob Gelwan, and a Miriam Gelwan in Argentina. A Samantha Gelwan is/was a student at Indiana University in Bloomington. A Mohammed Gelwan is an engineer in Egypt.

From time to time I see passenger manifests listing Gelwans who disembarked at Ellis Island in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. I have found the arrival records of my grandfather’s two sisters and alot of other mysterious Gelwans. But where do I go from there? Some 19th century records show Gelwans emigrating from Ireland to Manitoba, but I cannot find Canadian Gelwans today.

I was told that my family originated in Riga, Latvia. Given that, I’ve written to Vladimir, or Wladimir, Gelwan, who I learned was the principal dancer in the Latvian National Ballet and who now runs a ballet school in Berlin, suggesting that we may be related, but have never gotten a reply back. I have seen a picture of Vladimir Gelwan on the web and can even imagine a certain family resemblance, although he’s certainly got the dancer’s grace that I do not. I’m determined to try and drop in on him when next in Berlin. [Do I have any readers in or near Berlin?]

What is it, by the way, with these nonresponses? I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but a message from afar suggesting the writer might be my relative, with such a rare name, would immediately pique my interest and would surely get a response. Do you think recipients might have worried that my messages represented some kind of con? I don’t want anything from them except connectedness. Is that the problem right there?

Given the waves of upheaval that repeatedly washed over eastern Europe in the 20th century, with ever-changing political hegemony over various regions, large scale displacement of populations, the Holocaust, the destruction of records, the changing of names, etc., conventional genealogical research is not possible. It is not as if there is an established family tree, with records waiting around for the taking, as is the case for many families with western European origins. My father’s older brother, now deceased, once returned to eastern Europe to try to find some of our roots. Despite a reputation for being extremely resourceful, he apparently had no success at all. Lamentably, I cannot find any notes from his research; otherwise I (acknowledged as someone with no lack of resourcefulness myself!) might pick up the trail where he left off, despite the passage of time having added fifty further years of obfuscation.

It has been a little (not much) easier to find information about my mother’s ancestors. She herself, as a young child, emigrated with her family in the 1920’s from Eastern Europe. Several years ago, my son and I visited the small out-of-the-way town of her origin looking for indications of her family, armed with notes from a maternal uncle of mine who had made a similar trip decades before and retracing his steps. Unfortunately (probably because they were a Jewish family), the town hall and the burial grounds held no traces; the Nazis had razed the Jewish cemetery. I discovered when I visited the site that my uncle had been the one to fund the reassembly of the smashed fragments of gravestones into a monument there. There were no Jews left but a non-Jew who lived adjacent to the site of the burial ground kept the key, tended the grounds and let Jewish visitors into the site to see the monument.

My son and I did see the house where my mother had been born; eerily, we had by coincidence parked our rental car right in front of it when we had entered the town center.

We learned that, because of their persecution, the entire family hid from the authorities behind a falsified family name for several generations. Interestingly, that was the same name as a boss of mine, whose family I knew originated from the same region. Instead of being intrigued when I mentioned my discovery to him when I returned from my Eastern European trip, he scoffed. (I think he was appalled at the possibility that we were related.)

I am on Ancestry.com (here is a link to what I know so far of my family tree) and Ancestry keeps notifying me that they’ve discovered someone who is probably a third or fourth cousin. None of the family trees I’ve been directed to seem to intermesh so far. (I wonder how many third or fourth cousins a person has, on average…)

If you have a complicated heritage that will not be easy to trace on a geneology research site, my advice is to embark on a project of tracking down and documenting what you can, as soon as you can. It only disappears over time. Your children and their children may appreciate it if information about their mysterious family origins might one day help them find their place in the world in the face of the increasing rootlessness of modern life.

Perhaps one day someone googling their family name will be linked to this post and wonder how they might be related to Eliot Gelwan. Hurry up, Google, crawl this post and index it!