Category Archives: General

A truncated Feline Friday

We are very sorry. Yes, we know. This is supposed to be Feline Friday.

But that guy that feeds us and then requires that we pose for photos left town with his wife without finishing this week’s pictures. And they’ve left us with a cat sitter while they’re gone. We don’t necessarily mind that because we usually get more treats when cat sitters are here.

And we’re just cats. We don’t know how to use those cameras that photo man chases us with.

And even if we did know, we couldn’t pick up a camera to take pictures.

But we did manage to figure out how to post this picture just to prove that it is Feline Friday.

So that’s all for this week.

We don’t know when the people will be back. They might never come back, for all we know, although we don’t have much of a sense of time.

But usually they reappear in what humans seem to refer to as “a week.” So do visit us again next week. Hopefully the people will be back by then and Feline Friday will return to normal.

Kinikini and Kiko

In my FB feed this morning

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I find myself looking forward to the daily missives from Mary Geddry, a very talented observer and journalist who can be followed on Facebook (Oregon’s Bay Area).

Her writing is complex and colorful, enough so that I fed some of her prose into a site designed to identify AI-produced essays. No AI here, was the report back.

So here’s an example, excerpted from today’s feed from Oregon’s Bay Area.

Let’s begin where decency compels us to: the bodies in the water.

What began Friday as a quietly horrifying Washington Post story detonated over the weekend into a rare moment of moral clarity: the U.S. military, under orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, killed two unarmed survivors clinging to boat wreckage after a first missile strike destroyed their vessel. A “double tap,” as if the U.S. Navy were reenacting a cartel execution.

The Former JAGs Working Group responded with the kind of icy precision you only get from people who have spent their lives reading war-crimes indictments in the original French. Their conclusion? The orders, “kill everybody,” followed by a second strike to kill the survivors, constitute war crimes, murder, or both. No hedging, no polite throat-clearing. Just the law, laid bare. A patently illegal order that every U.S. service member has a duty to disobey.

Adam Kinzinger, in an emergency video that should be required viewing for every American who thinks “toughness” means murdering drowning men, laid it out with military bluntness: This is the moral equivalent of shooting prisoners. It’s the kind of thing the U.S. condemned as a capital offense at Nuremberg.

In a move so rare you could bottle it as a collectible, the Republican chairs of both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees announced bipartisan investigations into the boat killings. The same Republicans who have spent the past year insisting Trump can do no wrong have suddenly discovered that maybe war crimes deserve a little follow-up.

Senate Chair Roger Wicker and House Chair Mike Rogers demanded the Pentagon’s legal rationale, which is a bit like demanding to see the blueprints for a house someone obviously set on fire. They’ve already warned the Pentagon that failure to comply violates statutory deadlines. Congress hasn’t sounded this annoyed since somebody suggested canceling August recess.

And here’s what makes this moment different: the bipartisan push itself is an indictment. It tells us two things.

First, Hegseth’s legal rationale is so thin that even Republicans won’t touch it.Second, the administration’s refusal to answer basic questions has reached a breaking point. The patience of even the most pliant GOP committee chairs has finally snapped.

One Republican aide, speaking off the record, put it in language refreshingly free of Washington varnish: this is the first time in years that Armed Services staff have encountered a Trump military operation that Pentagon lawyers “literally cannot defend on paper.”

The Pentagon, of course, responded by refusing to bring any lawyers to briefings, because when you are truly, magnificently guilty, you do not bring the person whose entire job is to use words like “illegal,” “indefensible,” and “please stop talking.”

Hegseth fled to X to declare that every trafficker “killed” was affiliated with a terrorist organization, a claim that is flawlessly untrue but perfectly on-brand for a man whose understanding of international law can be written on a Cracker Barrel napkin.

Judge blocks Trump administration attacks on California universities

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U.S. District Court Judge Rita Lin issued a preliminary injunction on Friday prohibiting the Trump Administration and its agencies from cutting or blocking current or future funding or grants to the University of California system or its faculty and staff “with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.”

“Plaintiffs have submitted overwhelming evidence” in support of their claims that Trump’s actions have violated rights guaranteed by the First and Tenth Amendments, and failed to follow legally required administrative procedures in the process, Judge Lin wrote in her order.

“Defendants do not deny any of this,” she found.

“The undisputed record demonstrates that Defendants have engaged in coercive and retaliatory conduct in violation of the First Amendment and Tenth Amendment,” Judge Lin wrote. “It also shows that they have flouted the requirements of Title VI and IX and cancelled funding in an arbitrary and capricious manner while ignoring required procedural safeguards.”

Here, I’m including the full text of the introductory section of her order granting a motion for a preliminary injunction.

INTRODUCTION
Plaintiffs have submitted overwhelming evidence. Across 74 declarations and more than 700 pages of supporting documents, Plaintiffs show that the Administration and its executive agencies are engaged in a concerted campaign to purge “woke,” “left,” and “socialist” viewpoints from our country’s leading universities. Agency officials, as well as the President and Vice President, have repeatedly and publicly announced a playbook of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune. Universities are then presented with agreements to restore federal funding under which they must change what they teach, restrict student anonymity in protests, and endorse the Administration’s view of gender, among other things. Defendants submit nothing to refute this.

It is undisputed that this precise playbook is now being executed at the University of California. Defendant Leo Terrell, who heads the Administration’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, publicly stated in a news interview that the UC had been “hijacked by the left” and vowed to begin investigations. The Department of Justice and Department of Education have
opened a series of civil rights investigations into the UC. On July 29, 2025, in one of those investigations, DOJ issued a Notice of Findings to UCLA concerning its handling of antisemitism during 2024 student protests. Defendants did not engage in the required notice and hearing processes under Title VI for cutting off funds for alleged discrimination, nor did they
mention the remedial steps UCLA had already taken to address the issues described. Instead, within 72 hours, the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Department of Energy abruptly froze $584 million in research funding to UCLA, citing alleged civil rights violations. And at least one of those agencies, NSF, has acknowledged that it is under instructions not to approve any new grants to UCLA. About a week later, on August 8, 2025, DOJ proposed a settlement to restore funding, which would require UCLA to review its DEI programs, change its handling of student protests, and adopt the Administration’s views on gender, among other things. The UC has not stated whether it will agree. However, UC President James Milliken called the situation “one of the gravest threats in UC’s 157-year history.” The UC receives more than $17 billion per year in federal funding. Defendant Terrell has vowed to take “every single federal dollar” from the UC and similar universities, if they do not accede.

Defendants do not deny any of this. Instead, their principal argument is that the UC might not agree to the proposed conditions for restoring funding, so Plaintiffs’ present case is too speculative to be heard. But Plaintiffs’ harm is already very real. With every day that passes, UCLA continues to be denied the chance to win new grants, ratchetting up Defendants’ pressure campaign. And numerous UC faculty and staff have submitted declarations describing how Defendants’ actions have already chilled speech throughout the UC system. They describe how they have stopped teaching or researching topics they are afraid are too “left” or “woke,” in order to avoid triggering further funding cancellations by Defendants. They also give examples of projects the UC has stopped due to fear of the same reprisals. These are classic, predictable First Amendment harms, and exactly what Defendants publicly said that they intended.

The undisputed record demonstrates that Defendants have engaged in coercive and retaliatory conduct in violation of the First Amendment and Tenth Amendment. It also shows that they have flouted the requirements of Title VI and IX and cancelled funding in an arbitrary and capricious manner while ignoring required procedural safeguards. None of the jurisdictional hurdles raised by Defendants prevent the issuance of preliminary injunctive relief to stop the ongoing and imminent harms that Defendants are undisputedly causing. Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction is GRANTED, for these reasons and those further explained below.

At the conclusion of her order, after spellling out the evidence of constitutional violations, Judge Lin point to specific examples of actions by the administration that would violate the First Amendment rights of plaintiffs in the case.

To be clear, examples of conditions on the grant or continuance of federal funding that would violate the First Amendment rights of Plaintiffs’ members would include, but are not limited to:

• Requiring the UC to make hiring, firing, or funding decisions on the basis of Plaintiffs’ members’ protected speech or freedom of assembly.

• Requiring the UC to restrict its curriculum, scholarship, or research based on the Defendants’ preferred viewpoints.

• Requiring the UC to screen international students based on “anti-Western” or “anti-American” views and/or “socialize” international students to favored “norms.”

• Requiring the UC to institute reporting requirements concerning Plaintiffs’ protected speech or freedom of assembly.

• Requiring the UC to adopt specific definitions of “sex,” “male,” and “female,” or adopt Defendants’ favored views as to gender or gender affirming care and disallowing inconsistent speech by its faculty, staff, or students.

• Restricting how the UC decides scholarship awards, hiring, or admissions, beyond what current constitutional or statutory law requires.

The full text of Judge Lin’s order follows.