Recovery time!

We had visitors this weekend! My son Connlann and his wife Ji, escorted our grandson Knut on the long drive from Washington state to Morris, Minnesota — and they’re driving all the way back today. My daughter Skatje also decided to trek from Madison, Wisconsin to our house, bringing our granddaughter Iliana. They’ve already gone back home.

So we had two grandchildren here at the same time and same place. Now we’re totally exhausted, but we’d invite them back any time for as long as they want to stay.

Here’s Skatje and Ji at the park.

Meanwhile, Knut was on the splash pad while Major Connlann stood sentry duty.

Iliana was on the playground equipment.

The one downside of this weekend was the Evil Cat, who was at her worst. She hated having company. Her thing was hiding under the furniture, snarling and hissing, reaching out to take swipes with her claws at anyone passing by. Including me. I got my ankles slashed a couple of times.

I hope they come back to visit some day, but the cat doesn’t.

Why are we persecuting immigrants in our democratic society?

The magnitude of the approval of immigration surprises me a bit. Almost 80% of Americans think immigration is a good thing? And approval has been about 50% for the last two decades? So how did these Republican assholes get elected? Hatred of immigrants and others was their big campaign issue!

What doesn’t make sense is that the Republicans are terrorizing Los Angeles with paramilitary goon squads; they’re making mass deportations of thousands of people; the worst Supreme Court in American history (that includes the Taney court) is giving carte blanche to Trump; and for some reason, the Democrats are practically supine and largely avoiding capitalizing on this weakness in the electorate.

It’s gotten so bad that one college in California is treating ICE like a plague.

California State University, Los Angeles, is giving professors the option of moving their classes online due to students’ fears about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Heather Lattimer, university provost and vice president for academic affairs, said in a letter to faculty this week, according to the Los Angeles Times, that she had heard students are “scared to take public transit and fearful of driving to campus.”

Lattimer said faculty have “the option of working remotely for a limited time due to extraordinary circumstances they are facing.”

I remember when we made those same accommodations for COVID. I guess Republicans are just another disease.

I never thought I’d be a conspiracy theorist

I’m a fairly skeptical guy. I never bought into those claims that Epstein didn’t kill himself — hey, he was in prison, with deeply dismal prospects, his fall was precipitous from rich guy with his own private island to convicted pedophile in prison, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine he might despair and commit suicide. But then…along comes Dan Bongino and Kash Patel. Pam Bondi says she has Epstein’s client list on her desk, then Bongino and Patel announce that there is no client list. They release security footage from outside Epstein’s cell and guarantee that it is totally unedited and complete, but it turns out that there is notable splice in the middle of it.

It sure looks like something fishy happened, and that high-level authorities are engaged in a cover-up.

I mean, the alternative is that the entire Trump administration is packed with epic fuck-ups who are unqualified and incompetent and who constantly manage to piss on their own shoes. How likely is that?

It’s science!

Oh. It’s an experiment.

Man, I wish we were in the control group.

If you think the cartoon is too extreme, try reading Science magazine.

Similar conversations are taking place across the country as the federal government has paused or terminated billions of dollars of grants, proposed slashing research funding by more than 40% for key research agencies in the next fiscal year, and tried—so far without success—to cut overhead payments to universities. In response, graduate schools have reduced the size of their incoming cohorts and faculty have been anxiously watching their budgets and worrying about their own careers. “My lab is definitely going to shrink,” says Arthi Jayaraman, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Delaware.

So is U.S. academic science as a whole—perhaps dramatically. Numbers released in May by the National Science Foundation (NSF) indicate that if Congress approves the cuts to the agency proposed by the White House, the number of early-career researchers it supports could fall by 78%—from 95,700 undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs during this fiscal year to 21,400 in 2026. Young researchers supported by other agencies would also be hit, and even senior faculty worry about their future. “It’s a nightmare,” Simon says. “I really fear for the future of science.” (NSF declined to comment for this story.)

Me, too.

Spider-starved

It’s not just this aching knee that’s making me feel dismal, it’s the dearth of spiders. I limp around the yard, and no spiders. I just got back from the lab, fed the spiders, and they were all hiding — they snatched up mealworms, but really didn’t want to visit. I’ve got an incubator full of egg sacs, but nobody has hatched out yet (maybe next week?).

Even the black widows are hiding in the vegetation, behind veils of silk.

I’m supposed to be out spidering, goddamnit.

Oh well, I’ve got two grandchildren on their way to visit this weekend. I suppose they’ll have to do.

Make them cry

The word is that ICE agents are sad. You don’t like them!

he reality of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is far less glamorous. Officers and agents have spent much of the past five months clocking weekends and waking up at 4 a.m. for predawn raids. Their top leaders have been ousted or demoted, and their supervisors—themselves under threat of being fired—are pressuring them to make more and more arrests to meet quotas set by the Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Having insisted for years that capturing criminals is its priority, ICE is now shelving major criminal investigations to prioritize civil immigration arrests, grabbing asylum seekers at their courthouse hearings, handcuffing mothers as their U.S.-citizen children cry, chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots. As angry onlookers attempt to shame ICE officers with obscenities, and activists try to dox them, officers are retreating further behind masks and tactical gear.

“It’s miserable,” one career ICE official told me. He called the job “mission impossible.”

Poor babies.

Recently, they’ve been whining about a “700%” increase in assaults on ICE agents, but that isn’t as bad as it sounds — they’re phrasing the numbers to make them sound much, much worse than they are. It’s just the standard conservative persecution complex.

While ICE has previously stuck to publishing percentages, Melugin was given raw data, reporting 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 that took place in the same time last year.

For comparison, from January through May, the New York Police Department reported 970 assaults on uniformed officers in the city (granted, the NYPD employs about 15,000 more officers than ICE does—though Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would lessen the gap).

They’re not getting beat up. ICE is recognizing that the general public holds them in contempt and that their own organization is authoritarian and abuses its own members. I’m not going to feel sorry for them, though.

I recently spoke with a dozen current and former ICE agents and officers about morale at the agency since Trump took office. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of losing their job or being subjected to a polygraph exam. They described varying levels of dissatisfaction but weren’t looking to complain or expecting sympathy—certainly not at a time when many Americans have been disturbed by video clips of masked and hooded officers seizing immigrants who were not engaged in any obvious criminal behavior. The frustration isn’t yet producing mass resignations or major internal protests, but the officers and agents described a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more.

No mass resignations yet? That’s too bad. Crank up the pressure, everyone — not in the form of physical violence, but do let America’s brown shirts know that they are hated, that they are despised and hurting the America they claim to love. More effective than punching them (I know, that would be so satisfying, even if it puts you in jail) would be looking them in the eye, shaking your head sadly, and walking away to phone your representative and write a letter to your local newspaper explaining how wretchedly criminal the thugs of ICE are.

Planet of the Flies

In my state of limited mobility, the best I can do is roam around my yard looking for spiders. I’m not seeing any, other than a few Parasteatoda in the garage and compost, despite the fact that we’ve got lots of flowers, and it’s mid-July, and you’d think they ought to be thriving. We don’t even have any grass spiders!

What we do have is clouds of flies. Just hovering swarms of little bitty flies hovering around everything.

Come to my yard, spiders! There is a feast awaiting you!