The Israeli government identified the deceased hostage whose remains were handed over by Hamas on Thursday as Manny Godard, 73, an Israeli resident of a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip.

Some good news for the week!

Once people accepted casual social media posts as being as authoritative and formal as official press releases, that probably opened the way. Familiarity breeds contempt, etc.

It's easy to get inured to the crazy, but this is Trump referring to the main exterior window of the East Room, a part of the White House that has been there since 1800, as "a knock-out panel," a construction term for a temporary part of a wall designed to be easily demolished to allow for expansion

Unlimited toilet paper?! What other special privileges could possibly top this?

We'd be a lot further along with climate change mitigation, and adaptive measures (emergency response, better hazard mapping/zoning, etc.) -- because big insurance companies would be prodding everyone along to do something.

Lettuce consider where this is coming from

You can help make the Fifth National Climate Assessment easier to find. Watch this short video to learn how. #ClimateForUs

🚨🚨 🧵1/6 #FedFam, reporters - urgent help needed 🚨CDC Museum (a Smithsonian affiliate) is being shuttered🚨 Staff are being “un-RIFed” just to close the museum permanently — then RIFed again in Jan This is bureaucratic cruelty & cultural vandalism CDC Library is a national treasure #SaveCDCLibrary

🎥 @alertcalifornia.bsky.social cameras are capturing some incredible footage of the Northern Lights! The skies across much of Northern California were so bright that it triggered many cameras to switch into full-color “day mode.” Check out more cameras here: cameras.alertcalifornia.org

Lies are foundational to fascism

Reading various journalist takes, and B'sky speculation ... JE might have gotten that rich and powerful from dodgy financial stuff, even espionage, and possibly blackmail too. But ... even before he got onto Wall Street in his 20s, he was unusually lucky. He was just a student (a dropout in fact)

Very little value *to him*, it seems. It's funny how many self-proclaimed conservatives and pro-business boosters grab for centrally-planned economies, as soon as they seen an opportunity.

On the one hand -- the more time he spends on this stuff, the less he's making up tariffs or threatening to invade countries. On the other -- he's been much less enthusiastic about helping Alaska or Texas with the flooding, or Kentucky with the plane crash, or California with the wildfires.

So instead of having a dignified end, to something that a lot of people agreed was long overdue -- because it's being done hastily without a coherent plan, now the penny's demise has turned into a scramble with legal ramifications www.msn.com/en-us/money/...

I'm a bit late to the party -- but these are awesome! And right up to date (the arsonist kite) www.zmescience.com/ecology/anim...

It wasn't that long ago, when Cape Town almost ran out of water. Tehran's a lot bigger. foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/11/t...

From: jeevacation To: [email protected] rou gh. haev you tried assking her doter ? From:[email protected] To: [email protected] The new postdoc has a hair up her ass about my request that she smile more and declined my invitation for a private drink.

Um. "Barely legal". I don't believe that phrase means what she thinks it means. 15 = still illegal. If you just turned 18 and there's still leftover birthday cake in the fridge -- that's the "barely" part. A 15-year-old is years away from that. They are still children.

This sounds weirdly like this situation described more than 200 years ago ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_...

Important to understand the Epstein stuff and the fascism and the corruption are, in a lot of ways, really all the same story from different angles: powerful men who can and do abuse vulnerable people around them because they can, and because systems of elite accountability catastrophically failed

Check your supply of masks (ideally N95) and hand sanitizer. Looks like they'll be useful this winter.

This isn’t even the stuff they’re trying to actually stop from getting out.

Must take a powerful light to candle a mermaid's purse (shark egg capsule).

Interesting -- look at Iceland!

The woman's family had to scramble to prove she was Indigenous and shouldn't be turned over to federal immigration authorities story via @glorihuh.bsky.social

Everyone was getting into the act, including Moe Horwitz (of The Three Stooges fame). "A down period in 1926 led Moe, with the help of another brother, Jerome, to build the four Bay 43rd Street buildings."

IOW, the US government has stopped making cents.

At first this sounds bad, but if they're able to detect more cases now, and treat people before it becomes severe/fatal -- that's good news

It looks like they are having a bit of a situation in the Situation Room.

Foreshadowing

“This is a very important development,” says Dyann Wirth, a malaria researcher at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health who was not involved in the work. “We’ve been looking for this for a long time.” 🧪 #IDsky www.science.org/content/arti...

The widespread availability of automatic cameras has had a major impact, not just on fields like law enforcement, but wildlife management. Tracks can sometimes be revealing, but not always evident. Evidence like this is much more conclusive!

Even if they cost 4 cents to make, you can be sure if Trump's face was on the penny instead of Lincoln's, we'd still be minting them. www.pbs.org/newshour/nat...

Darn. Forecast where I am is socked in until next week.

Trying to insert a scene in my urban fantasy novel, where two characters are commenting that US cents have been difficult to use for magical purposes, since the penny composition switched from mostly copper, to copper-plated zinc in 1982. en.numista.com/catalogue/et...

Hookworm?!! Oh for crying out loud, are they intent on dragging the country back into the 1800s?

re: stats, that wouldn't preclude there being some stupid women in the world, but also some very, very stupid men. (Don't put stuff in writing that you wouldn't want your mom, kids, etc. to see.) p.s. define "a few", Larry.

Interesting thing about pennies in traditional American magic. The most powerful penny seems to be the "Indian Head" -- not Indigenous but Liberty in a feathered head dress. Nailing them over your doors/windows could ward off "the Police, INS, social services, DEA, collection services, IRS"

For people who are feeling a bit sad about the US penny -- that's normal, since it outlasted a bunch of other coins (like the half-penny, and the "trime" (which I first heard of when I read The Figure in the Shadows). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-c...

The last penny. (I have to admit that when Canada ditched it, I thought I'd miss it more. But not really. I think it helped, that the feds had made up a detailed transition plan. That doesn't seem to be the case with Trump.) www.cnn.com/2025/11/12/b...

That haphazard assortment of props behind him isn't really helping his case. (I've got my childhood archery set too, but not like that. And the framed flag would look better on the wall.) Also, who says "force multiplier" inside his own country?

Astonishing and in a way heartening to see what people are prepared to put up with to get the education they want.

Aurora color guide! What creates the different shades? Different atoms getting "excited" at different altitudes The bright reds are a sign of a particularly intense event

This is an incredible eulogy! RIP Cleto

What happened to the food? Most of it's perishable! Did Trump's people send it straight to the landfill?

I knew it! "Spogmai Hashemi says when she stepped outside Regina’s airport and felt the cold Saskatchewan breeze hit her face, she was immediately hit with a sense of nostalgia" "Unlike Qatar, where she had been living, both Canada and Afghanistan — where she's originally from — have cold winters"

Unfortunately it looks like we're clouded out in my town, but there still may be aurora potential tomorrow www.cbc.ca/news/science...

I can't help smiling, when people use examples from world literature that are probably going right over Elon's head. A tiny bit sorry for him, that he's missing out on some great stuff. (Only a tiny bit.)