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Rain nixed the sunrise run today, but the weather was lovely when the time came for what I call The Second Walk, and I encountered 2 very tiny, very active birds along the woodland path. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger jokes about seeing his son Patrick naked on screen in ‘THE WHITE LOTUS’:

“I’m watching your show, and I’m watching your butt sticking out there. And all of a sudden, I see the weenie. What is going on here? This is crazy.”

pic.twitter.com/okdNsYx5PE

— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) June 3, 2025

"I want to marry someone who allows me to protect feminine energy in a world that is forcing me to be a girl boss because they keep sending Steve to prison. Perhaps I have…"

Said Natalie Winters, quoted by Katy Balls in The London Times, "My night out with Trump’s young Maga crowd in Washington."

"Steve" = Steve Bannon. Winters works as a White House correspondent for Steve Bannon’s "War Room."

Here's Miley Cyrus, from an interview in the NYT:

I was talking to my stepdad, and he said, “Why are you the only celebrity without a makeup line?” And I said, “’Cause I’m not passionate about it.” And he said, “That’s the right answer.” I feel that way about motherhood. It’s just never been something that I’ve been overly passionate about. It’s a lot of responsibility and devotion and energy, and if you’re not passionate about that, I don’t know how you do sleepless nights and 18 years of what my mom dealt with. And when I say 18 years, I mean 33, ’cause I’m still a baby. So I’ve never felt the burn, you know? And I think for me, the burn is everything.

For any given individual, it's an individual decision... unless you take individuality away.

"Friends gathered for an evening snowshoe. As the globe turned toward spring, though, the sun’s rays became stronger and the days stretched on. I stayed in.... But I grew restless and started heading out for night hikes.... A few weeks in, I was running along Lake Ontario when I stopped to watch the sun dip below the horizon. I became obsessed with that transition, stopping to watch it whenever I could. It slowed me down enough that I began noticing how a day ends in stages... 'civil twilight'... 'nautical twilight'... '[a]stronomical twilight'.... The sun wasn’t setting.... I was the one rotating away, a fleck on the back of an enormous spinning globe. Once I sorted out my relationship with the universe, my perspective changed. The fading light made me feel small and out of control — which was exactly why I loved it...."

Writes Claire Cameron, in "Skin Cancer Made Me Nocturnal. It Was Illuminating. How the earth’s rotation taught me to find peace in the face of death" (NYT).

"... won the largest number of seats in November 2023 elections, sending shock waves through the Dutch political system. Mr. Wilders was able to form a government with three other right-wing parties... after more than six months of wrangling.... Mr. Wilders had aimed to bring the 'strictest migration policy ever' to the Netherlands, something his governing partners had said they agreed with. In May 2024, the four parties reached a deal that included 'the strictest asylum admission policy and the most comprehensive migration control package ever.' But Mr. Wilders said that implementation was not going quickly enough. Last week he said he wanted to add 10 more proposals... includ[ing] calls for a complete halt to asylum, a temporary stop to family reunions for asylum seekers who had been granted refugee status and the return of all Syrians who had applied for asylum or were in the Netherlands on temporary visas. The leaders of the other coalition parties said that while they did not oppose Mr. Wilders’s plans, they wanted him to propose them in the House of Representatives. That would have taken longer and would not have guaranteed implementation...."

From "Dutch Government Collapses Over Migration Dispute/The populist Geert Wilders withdrew his right-wing party from the ruling coalition, saying partners were stalling plans for the Netherlands’ 'strictest migration policy ever'" (NYT).

Writes Malika, at Rex Parker Does the NY Times Crossword Puzzle.

Here's the clue: "Girl in Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit.'"

One day everything new will be old, and one day everything will be forgotten. 

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.

"... and accused the renowned publication of destroying evidence in an open investigation. The administration demanded that Harvard 'cease and desist' from interfering. In a series of letters that have not been previously reported, the government also disclosed that it had a 'cooperating witness' inside the student-run journal. That witness now works in the White House under Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s domestic policy agenda, Trump officials confirmed.... Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, praised Mr. Wasserman as a whistle-blower and encouraged more students to speak out. 'Harvard is violating federal law with its discrimination, and a student was brave enough to call them out on this,' Mr. Fields said....."

From "A Stephen Miller Staffer and Tough Talk: Inside Trump’s Latest Attack on Harvard/The Justice Department opened an investigation into the student-run Harvard Law Review. The startling accusations show how the Trump administration is wielding power in pursuit of its political agenda" (NYT)(free-access link).

"The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. (How the board itself would be selected is unclear, but Yarvin has suggested that airline pilots—'a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What’s not to like?'—could manage the transition between regimes.) To prevent a C.E.O. from staging a military coup, the board members would have access to cryptographic keys that would allow them to disarm all government weapons, from nuclear missiles down to small arms, with the push of a button.

I'm reading this crazy article in The New Yorker, "Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America/The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee" by Ava Kofman.

"And the county that jumps out to me, there is Starr County. Starr County is the county that has moved the most in the entire country from 2012 to 2024. Hmm. This is a county that Barack Obama won overwhelmingly in 2012, and that Donald Trump won comfortably in 2024..... It's moved continuously in the Republican direction, and the sum of that movement is 89 percentage points. And what's interesting is Starr County isn't just this county that has moved the most, it also is the most predominantly Latino county in America. And it's not just shifting away from the Democratic party, it's stampeding away from the Democratic party. And while Starr County is this one small county in the Texas border, what you see is that same type of movement in counties with broad Latino populations, whether you're talking about the Bronx in New York City, Queens, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, places with diverse populations have moved steadily to the right, even in a lot of them, where Democrats are still winning, they're winning by less and by a lot less. I mean, to use like a fancy political science term, we're talking about racial depolarization.... For, for a long time, one of the most important markers of how a person was going to vote in America was what race are you?"

From today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast. Audio and transcript here (at Podscribe).The guest is Shane Goldmacher, who wrote the NYT article "Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward" that we were talking about on May 27th, here.

Said Erin Patterson, the Australian woman accused of murdering three relatives by serving them lunch laced with deadly mushrooms, quoted in "Australia mushroom trial: Erin Patterson ‘drawn to exotic varieties’/Woman accused of murdering three relatives by serving them death cap mushrooms, says she is adept at foraging and can identify different species" (London Times).

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?

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.

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. 

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