I have been an atheist all my life, but I have never been as certain of the fact that there is no state of “life after death” that could interact with the living on this plane than I am at this very moment, after having watched three minutes and 11 seconds of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talking out of his ass about healthcare. Because if such a thing did exist, the ghost of his uncle, noted single-payer healthcare advocate Ted Kennedy, would have risen up from the grave and beaten the absolute shit out of him. Or made him explode. Or something. Or if telekinesis existed, I would have been able to do so, somehow.

I’m sorry to report that there is no such magic.

The whole announcement is six minutes long. It’s meant to be a justification for firing 10,000 workers from critical departments like the FDA, the CDC, and the NIH — even as we are currently dealing with a measles outbreak, the threat of bird flu and other nonsense. It’s not a very good one.

But let’s examine it, shall we?

Hey everybody, I’d like to share with you a paradox that I've encountered here in Washington DC as the new secretary of HHS. Our department is filled for the most part with competent, conscientious public servants, and yet the agency has been inefficient as a whole.

How? He does not say.

Over the past four years, during the Biden administration, HHS’s budget increased by 38 percent and its staffing increased by 17 percent.

Yes, because there was a massive Medicaid expansion, which included providing 462,000 people across the nation with postpartum care; because they helped “3 million eligible seniors and people with disabilities enroll in the Extra Help program in 2023 to benefit from the program’s lower cost premiums, deductibles, and copayments”; because they re-enrolled “500,000 children and adults who were improperly disenrolled from Medicaid and CHIP”; and because they “invested $105 million in funding to support more than 100 community-based organizations working to improve maternal and infant health.” Also because there was a fucking pandemic and people needed help and still do.

But all of that money has failed to improve the health of Americans. In fact, the rate of chronic disease and cancer increased dramatically as our department has grown.

Is this because of “bureaucracy” or is it because the largest generation, the Baby Boomers, have gotten older and therefore more prone to these issues? Chronic illnesses are increasing around the world for a variety of reasons, one of which is the fact that people simply live much longer these days.

Our lifespan has dropped, so Americans now live six years shorter than Europeans. We are the sickest nation in the world and we have the highest rate of chronic disease. The US ranks last among 40 developed nations in terms of health, but we spend two to three times more per-capita than those nations.

Gee! Why might this be? What do these other countries have that we do not? Could it be … that everyone has healthcare?

It’s one thing when people on the Right or even centrist-y Democrats claim that we have the best healthcare in the world. That, I’m basically used to, and I’m sure they feel that it’s true, if only because it’s been said over and over enough times that they’ve absorbed it into their bones. They say things like “but what about choice?” or “but what about the long wait times!” and it’s clear that they haven’t actually given it much thought beyond a vision of “socialized healthcare” that I suspect involves eating a lot of borscht and being given a single, lint-covered Ibuprofen in lieu of chemotherapy.

It’s another entirely when someone admits that we pay more and have worse outcomes than the rest of the world and their solution is that less healthcare is more. Because yes, that is where he is going with this.

As secretary, I now understand why all this money is not improving our health. HHS is a sprawling bureaucracy that encompasses literally hundreds of departments, committees, and other offices.

You know how bureaucracies work. Every time a new issue arises, they tack on another committee. This leads to tremendous waste and duplication, and worst of all, a loss of any unified sense of mission. The resulting pandemonium has injured American health and damaged department morale. When I arrived, I found that over half of our employees don’t even come to work.

Oh fuck right off with that. If people can do their jobs from home, let them do their jobs from home.

In one case, defiant bureaucrats impeded the secretary’s office from accessing the closely guarded databases that might reveal the dangers of certain drugs and medical interventions.

It’s not clear what he’s specifically referring to, here, but we do know that DOGE accessed the child support database after “defiant bureaucrats fought against it,” which included sensitive personal income information.

The rest of the video, which I did force myself to watch just now, is just a bunch of nonsense about how, somehow, cutting all of these jobs is going to, somehow, allow the HHS and the agencies that fall under its purview do better. Somehow.

I have some good news though. As part of President Trump's DOGE workforce reduction initiative, we are going to streamline HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We are going to imbue the agency with a clear sense of mission to radically improve the health of Americans and to improve agency morale. We’re going to eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments and agencies, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. We have two goals. The first is obvious: to save the taxpayer money by making our department more efficient. And the second, is to radically improve our quality of service.

I want to promise you now that we are going to do more with less.

This is all nonsense. The whole thing is nonsense and it’s very clear that he has no idea what the hell he is doing.

Donate Just Once!

Ten thousand people are going to lose their jobs today. Ten thousand households are going to be fucked, because the Health and Human Services secretary is an imbecile who doesn’t know what anyone’s job is and therefore assumes they are expendable. This is like me trying to take a car apart and put it back together again while going “Oh, I don’t know what this part does, guess I’ll just throw them away!” and expecting it to run better than ever before. RFK Jr. knows less about running Health and Human Services than I know about fixing a car and I don’t even own a car.

States have already lost billions of dollars in funding this week that had been allocated during COVID and weren’t supposed to expire until 2027. Billions of dollars that were going towards things like handling the measles outbreak, drug addiction, mental health care, and modernizing database systems (extremely necessary should there be another pandemic). This included “$11.4 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as around $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, known as S.A.M.H.S.A.”

Now, not only is much of the money invested previously in these now half-finished projects being wasted, now not only are they losing this funding for their other health needs, but they are also going to lose workers, offices, and programs that were helping as well.

It’s going to be a fucking shitshow.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

Vice President JD Vance has been ordered “to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.”

The order is not explicit, but it is likely that one of the improper things that Vance will root out at the National Zoo will be any same-sex penguin couples. Both male and female penguins have coupled to raise chicks. In one case, a male pair stole eggs from a female pair. But that was at a Dutch Zoo. In Spain, Electra and Viola have raised chicks together.

Closer to home, a female penguin, Green Bean, at Kentucky’s Newport Aquarium, brings a toy to her partner, Randi, on the nest. Ahem, Rob! Or Roy and Silo in New York’s Central Park Zoo.

Subversive interpretations imply that such behavior is natural. We cannot have our children exposed to such things.

Clearly this is the sort of improper and divisive behavior that Our Vice President will make sure never happens at the National Zoo.

The post The Scourge of Lesbian Penguins appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

In a video that fills me with wonder at being alive in 2025, someone in an inflatable Pikachu costume was seen loping down the street in Turkey alongside anti-Erdoğan protesters fleeing from the cops.

The protests—reportedly the largest mass movements in the region in decades—started last week, after Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu was arrested for alleged corruption. Ekrem is the main rival to the country's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has attacked LGBTQ+ and women’s rights and democracy, and critics say is leading the country into authoritarianism and autocracy.

Early Thursday morning, as students tried to issue a statement outside of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, security forces launched pepper spray, water cannons and plastic pellets at the demonstrators and arrested nearly 1,900. 

People are protesting in several major cities in Turkey, and Pikachu was at one in Antalya, according to local news outlets and social media. In the video, the person in the mascot suit hauls yellow nylon ass as fast as a pair of short, inflated legs can carry them—which is surprisingly fast, actually, considering how they’re keeping up with the people running all around them. The original video was captured by Ismail Koçeroğlu, a photojournalist at Akdeniz University in Antalya.  

On Instagram, Koçeroğlu posted another photo of Pikachu posing with protestors and security.

And because nothing good is safe from AI—not even Protest Pikachu, arguably one of the purest pieces of iconography to come out of the resistance to the worldwide creep of authoritarianism yet—an AI-generated image of Pikachu rushing through the streets alongside protestors went viral shortly after Koçeroğlu’s video. Several local outlets have debunked the image, which is made to look like a high-resolution photojournalism shot from the ground, as being generated with AI. 

The AI image of Pikachu has gone nearly as viral as the real video of the person in a Pikachu costume running away from the cops, and shows how people looking to take advantage of any widely covered news event are creating AI imagery in near real time with the event itself. 404 Media saw various people sharing the AI image of Pikachu as though it were real, and on first glance it was difficult for us to tell that it was fake, especially because the real video of Pikachu running away is blurry. But, as several news outlets in Turkey have already pointed out, things like mixed-up lettering on the police jackets, distorted details, and inconsistencies in the street lamps give it away as fake.  

Pikachu has always been for the people, showing up at rallies and protests around the world. 

Erdoğan recently called the demonstrations "street terrorism,” which technically makes Pikachu a terrorist in the eyes of the president of Turkey. In the midst of widespread turmoil, President Donald Trump praised Erdoğan, calling him a “good leader.” 

Protest Pikachu isn’t the first to show up to an anti-Erdoğan protest in an inflatable suit: A young woman came to a protest earlier this week in a dinosaur costume. 

12th and Jackson Street, NE opened here back in June 2014

Brookland’s Finest truly lived up to their name. This is a very tough loss.

Brookland’s Finest owner Tony T writes:

“Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we are going to have to close the doors at Brookland’s Finest. A word I grew to hate during the lockdown was pivot. Unfortunately, we could not pivot at BF. There were many factors.

A decrease in foot traffic. An increase in cost of good. The payroll challenges Initiative 82 presented. I want to make clear that this was in no way a landlord dispute. The cast and crew at BF, the staff, and the customers, have been a true pleasure to get to know, work with, serve, and be around. The neighbors who rallied to help us get open. (Yes, we still hold the record for the longest ABRA hearing to get open). I can’t tell you how much we appreciate all of you, and how grateful we are for the last ten plus years in operation.

We are gonna go until mid April, so we can get a few more dollars in for our staff, and we can get a chance to say good bye to our loyal customers.“

Today I’d like to talk about that delightful little companion of field and garden: the shrike.

[copyright Rosemary Mosco, 2024, birdandmoon.com]

If you know, you know.  And if you don’t know… well, let’s talk about shrikes.

Shrikes are a group of birds found across the tropics and the northern hemisphere.  There are about 30 species, which means they’re a reasonably successful group.  They’re a sister clade to the Corvidae — the crows, jays, and ravens — and like their corvid cousins, they’re pretty bright.  Today’s paper is about loggerhead shrikes, which is the little guy in the cartoon above.  (The cartoon is very accurate; Ms. Mosco takes her bird art seriously).  But it applies generally to most species of shrike.

So let’s go to the obvious bit first: shrikes are sometimes known as “butcher birds”.  This is because of their strange and rather gruesome habit of impaling their prey on thorns or sharp branch-ends.


Shrikes of all species and both genders do this, because it’s a way to store food safely.  (It’s basically the same strategy that a leopard uses when it stashes a dead antelope ten meters up in a tree.)  However, in several species the male shrikes take it further and will decorate a particular bush or tree with dozens of little corpses — mice, large insects, small birds — as a display to impress and attract females.

Okay, that’s strange and interesting.  But while it’s the thing most people know about shrikes, it’s far from the strangest thing about them.  Shrikes are much weirder than people realize.

Let’s start with something so obvious it gets overlooked.  Look at those photos.  The shrike is a predator, right?  It’s a pure carnivore, eating nothing but meat and flesh.  Its entire diet is large insects and small vertebrates: mice, frogs, lizards, snakes, and other birds.

What do we expect a predatory bird to look like? Well, normally we expect it to look something like these guys:



Okay, those are big and shrikes are small.  So, what do we expect a small predatory bird to look like?


Despite their differences, these guys are all very obviously birds of prey.  They all have hooked beaks for tearing flesh, forward-facing eyes, and — this is key — they all have large, powerful talons.  And those talons are absolutely crucial!  They use those sharp, strong claws for gripping, for killing, and for dismembering their prey.

Now look at the shrike.  It has a slightly hooked beak, its eyes are only somewhat forward-facing, and it has no talons whatsoever.  It’s hopping around on pretty ordinary little bird feet, not much different from a common thrush or sparrow.

Okay so:  why doesn’t it have talons?  And without talons, how does it manage to capture, kill and dismember its prey?

Well, the shrike has evolved its own, very strange mode of predation.  It’s not a pursuit predator, like a wolf; nor an ambush predator, like an owl or a cat; nor even a speed predator, like a hawk or a cheetah. No.  The shrike is a deceit predator, and it uses a strategy that is completely unique among birds.

Let’s start with its appearance.  The shrike looks like a harmless songbird.  In fact, it looks like what birders call a “Little Brown Job” — meaning, one of the dozens of species of small-to-medium-sized brownish or greyish songbirds without much color or any distinguishing characteristics.

[all images public domain]

Can you spot the killer in this lineup?

— And here’s a thing: the shrike is, in fact, a songbird.  It’s not related to hawks or falcons at all.  Its remote ancestor was probably something like a small jay or magpie.  But while other songbirds evolved to hop around and eat seeds and little bugs and whatnot, the shrike went a different route.

Because, you see, the world is full of Little Brown Jobs.  Sparrows and chickadees, thrushes and tits, flycatchers and warblers and wrens: they’re all small, they’re mostly spotted or striped white and grey and brown, and they’re all harmless to anything larger than a beetle.  So animals of all sorts — frogs and mice, small snakes and lizards, newts and shrews and of course other birds — have evolved to ignore Little Brown Jobs. 

Because if you’re a mouse or a lizard or a sparrow or some other small prey animal?   And you freak out every time a harmless chickadee or nuthatch comes near?  You’re going to quickly die of sheer stress, because Little Brown Jobs are everywhere.  You can’t be fleeing for cover at every pipit or junco.  You have to do threat assessments.  You have to filter.

And that cognitive-perceptive filter is where the shrike makes its living.  It has evolved to look just enough like a harmless songbird that it doesn’t trigger any avoidance reflexes in potential prey. 

But this introduces some problems.  As we all know, one of the triggers for prey is the distinctive silhouette of a raptor.  That’s why those hawk-shadow cutouts work to warn birds away from glass, and it’s why a fake owl makes a great scarecrow.



But another trigger is… talons.  Studies have shown that a bunch of different prey species will flee or hide in the presence of a bird that has talons. 

So the shrike doesn’t have talons because it can’t.  Talons would completely blow its cover.  But without talons, how then does the shrike kill its prey?  

Put a pin in that, because there’s one more freaky thing about the shrike.

“She will stand at perch upon some tree or poste, and there make an exceedingly lamentable crye and exclamation…all to make other fowles to thinke that she is very much distressed and stands in need of ayde; whereupon the credulous sellie birds do flocke together at her call. If any happen to approach neare her, she…ceazeth on them, and devoureth them (ungrateful subtill fowle) in requital for their simplicity…”

— That’s from The Boke of St. Albans, a 15th century treatise on hunting and falconry.  And it describes the shrike using what scientists call an “acoustic lure”.  

Because shrikes don’t just look like songbirds.  They sound like them, because they mimic their calls.  The shrike’s default call is a harsh little shriek, like a jay’s call but higher pitched.  (Hence the name.  Shriek, shrike.)  But they’re not restricted to that call, because they’re also excellent mimics.  And they will very deliberately mimic other birds in order to lure them close.  They start with distress calls, presumably because those are easiest.  But older and more experienced shrikes can expand their repertoire to include territorial challenges and mating calls.  

When I described this to an academic friend, he cried out “It’s a monster from folklore!”   And it kind of is, right?  The voice from the forest that calls out for help, or that sings a song that’s seductive and sweet?  But don’t you go there… Yes, if sparrows could talk, the shrike would be their Dracula, their Grendel.

Acoustic luring is rare among land vertebrates, but it’s not unknown.  Most famously there’s the margay, a South American jungle cat, that can mimic the distress calls of baby monkeys.

The shrike’s cousin, the jay, also mimics the calls of hawks — though apparently it does this, not as an acoustic lure, but defensively, to protect its territory and drive away competitors.  Jays have been observed using hawk calls to clear a bird feeder for themselves.

But okay: the shrike gets close to prey by looking harmless and sounding harmless, and it can even lure other birds with fake calls.  But now that it’s up close… with a relatively small beak and no talons, how does it actually kill its prey?

Well, we used to think we knew.  Let’s look again at our little friend:


[Neighbors said he was quiet and kept to himself]

It doesn’t have talons.  And it doesn’t have a massive beak like a hawk or an eagle, either.  But its beak does have that little overhanging “tooth” at the end. And its head is rather big for its body, and its neck is quite thick.  From a certain angle, it almost looks a bit hunchbacked.  What’s going on with that?

Well, what we saw was that the shrike would often begin its attack with a sudden sharp peck, always delivered to the prey’s head or neck.  So it was assumed that this was the killing blow, presumably severing the spinal cord.  The shrike would then grab the prey, give it a shake, and fly off.  When vertebrate prey items were examined post-mortem, sure enough, the spine was severed.  

(By the way: the impaling on thorns?  This is how shrikes dismember their prey without talons.  They evolved to use a tool, the thorn, as a utensil.  Using it as a larder, and then as a sexual display, presumably evolved later.)

Okay so that seemed to make sense, except… even with disguise and luring, killing your prey with a single very precise blow seems like kind of a tall order.  Also, while the shrike’s beak is sharp and strong, it didn’t seem quite the right shape for a deep severing blow.  And further, while the shrike would often start with the peck, sometimes it would skip it and go straight to grabbing and shaking.

Which brings us at last to the paper.  These guys captured shrikes, gave them various prey items, and then took video of the attacks.  And what they discovered was: the peck is not the killing blow.  The peck, a sharp strike to the head or the back of the neck, is just the setup.  It’s done to stun and disorient the victim, just for a second or two.  But it’s not what kills the prey.

What kills the prey is the shaking.  The shrike’s strong, hooked beak isn’t designed to kill with a blow.  It’s designed to stun with a blow, and then to clamp down strongly on the prey’s neck while the shrike shakes it.  The shrike’s thick neck?  Is because the shrike has massively powerful neck muscles.  The shaking can deliver sudden accelerations of up to six gravities in a fraction of a second, which is roughly like having a 50 pound weight quite suddenly dropped on your neck from a yard up.  It’s the shaking, not the peck, that severs the prey’s spinal cord.  The shrike suplexes its prey to death.


[yes strictly speaking this is a rear naked choke not any kind of suplex, don’t @ me.]


What triggered this post: I saw a shrike in our garden recently.  And it was shaking a prey item — a small snake, I think — and also slamming it against a tree.  (They do that, too.)

Like a lot of carnivores, shrikes are fiercely territorial.  So if our garden is part of its territory, it’s probably been around for a while.  But I never noticed it.  Until I saw it in the actual act of killing, my brain just processed it as another nondescript small dull-colored songbird, not very interesting.  

And it’s not just me.  If you live in the northern hemisphere, and not in a large city, you’ve almost certainly  seen a shrike.  They’re not particularly rare!  But you probably didn’t notice it, because not being noticed is exactly their thing.

Anyway.  Shrikes can live a decade or more, getting more experienced and more cunning all the time, harder to spot yet also more convincing in their mimicry and lure.  (“Like a Master Vampire!” said my academic friend.)  So good chance that little guy is still out there, hopping around, looking and acting and sounding like a harmless little songbird… until.



I hope so.