'Full of blood'

'X-Acto knife job'

'Trump delivers again'

Ties to convicted jihadis

'Pissed for the American people'

Books reading recommendations Five Books About Conversing With Animals How great would it be to talk with animals, through magic or technology or… whatever? By James Davis Nicoll | Published on December 16, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share We all understand that humans and animals cannot easily communicate with each other. Most animals find it hard to understand human speech (though some commands and phrases can be learned); we often find their body language (the product of millions of years of divergent evolution) opaque1; and their handwriting is appalling (though some can push buttons). Even dogs, animals that have lived with and been shaped by humans—and have shaped humans in return—for a very long time, can be hard to understand. Bad luck for any Timmies stuck down a well. Humans often think that they are capable of understanding what an animal understands or wants, or that they have communicated clearly, but they can be mistaken2. How sure can you be that the animal understood you, or you them3? It would be so convenient if there were some shortcut to bridging the gaps… Some way to tell the cat that no, he cannot scratch the sofa, to explain to the dog that you do not want a well-aged dead gopher, or to convince the local ravens that you are not their enemy. This common human wish makes for an engaging plot premise. An ability to converse with animals (magically or technically or somehow conferred) turns up in book after book. Such as the following. The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling (1894) Mowgli learns the language of the animals by the simple expedient of having been orphaned and then adopted and raised by wolves4. Conveniently for Mowgli, for the most part all animals speak the same language. This is not an unmixed blessing, as not everything animals say is something one wants to hear. To be honest, I am pretty skeptical about many details of Kipling’s zoology. Dogs and cats are often baffled by the other’s body language. Canid and feline lineages diverged comparatively recently. Imagine the gulf between the snake Kaa and primate Mowgli. I don’t think that there is any fieldwork that supports the notion of a unified spoken language among animals. It’s almost as though The Jungle Book is not intended as a serious scientific hypothesis. Daybreak—2250 A.D. by Andre Norton (1954) Silver-haired Fors of the Puma Clan of the hidden city Eyrie is both victim of and beneficiary of the lingering radiation of the atomic war that was civilization’s final triumph. His visible deviation from local physiological norms makes him an outcast, but at least he is accompanied in his travels by his giant semi-telepathic cat Lura. Honestly, the frequent existence of telepathic bonds with animals in the works of Andre Norton probably deserves its own essay. It feels like a bit of a cheat—surely, even a direct brain-to-brain connection between dissimilar species would involve a communications gap—but at least this novel isn’t about how wonderful or inevitable such bonds are. Not primarily, at any rate. Telepathic bonds with animals do seem awesome, but the plot is focused elsewhere. The City of the Sun by Brian Stableford (1978) The starship Daedalus surveys Arcadia to determine if the human colony on that alien world survived a century of isolation or if, like most of the colonies, it collapsed in the face of alien conditions. Arcadian humans did survive, thanks to a feature of the local ecology that was overlooked prior to colonization. Moreover, the colonists now enjoy an unexpectedly close relationship with the animals around them. Whether the result still counts as human is an open question. This is a spoiler, so skip down to the next section if you want to avoid it… The local feature is an invasive fungus that every animal carries. Among its interesting properties is the ability to record and transfer information such as memories. Functionally, the fungus provides the network for a collective mind, to which human intelligence is a welcome addition. Whether this development is good or bad is rather ambiguous. A Deeper Sea by Alexander Jablokov (1992) Colonel Ilya Sergeiivich Stasov deciphers cetacean languages using intense research and also by torturing dolphins and their relatives until the sea creatures break three thousand years of silence. The unfortunate beasts are then drafted into Russia’s war with Japan and its allies, a development that proves less than ideal along a number of axes, before playing a key role in SETI… another development that is less than ideal. Jablokov’s dolphins are a rather unpleasant lot, and only some of that is due to the trying circumstances in which they find themselves. Applied research might seem an unsexy option for introducing inter-species communication, but it does have the advantage of being a lot more plausible than “telepathy,” “a very convenient fungus,” or “somehow”5. However, I must ask my readers not to take this book as a hint that torture might be scientifically productive. The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay (2020) Outback wildlife park guide Jean gains the ability to converse with animals the same way millions of other humans did, thanks to a novel and extremely contagious superflu with an unprecedented cognitive side effect. While zoanthropathy (or “Zooflu”) doesn’t provide ambiguity-free communication between species, it does make it far more difficult to ignore the gap between what animals are and what humans would like them to be. This is just the sort of distraction one does not want while searching for a missing granddaughter. Society basically falls apart as soon as zoanthropathy spreads. I am not sure why it does. I did like the detail that with the communications barrier greatly reduced, a lot of what animals have to say sounds like noisy (often hostile) gibberish. It’s difficult to convey concepts one does not have in common. Would it be better if humans could talk to animals? Might it not be worse?6 Or would it do little? No doubt you have your own conclusions, for further discussion in the comments below.[end-mark] Except in the case of my late cat Eddie, who didn’t really do body language. He maintained the same amiable demeanor whether he was thinking about head-bonking other cats, working out how to channel surf by messing with radio buttons, or contemplating waking me by lifting me by my left eyelid. ︎I remain skeptical of one owner’s claim that their dog sank its teeth into my calf because it really liked me… except perhaps in a culinary sense. ︎“Oh, good! The raised tail means that skunk is happy!” is not a sentence you want to hear from anyone standing next to you. ︎Which as all DC Comics fans know is how Black Condor learned to fly like a condor. Do not try this at home. Or at the peak of a mountain. ︎Some animals do a convincing job of seemingly learning to speak. Consider this angry cockatoo. ︎I suspect that many farm animals would see the ability to ask not to be eaten as a plus. ︎The post Five Books About Conversing With Animals appeared first on Reactor.

Family members and friends of Jimmy Lai, a businessman and a pro-democracy newspaper owner in Hong Kong, are holding out hope that he can still be released after his guilty verdict on national security and sedition charges, if President Donald Trump and other world leaders put pressure on Chinese leader Xi Jinping to free him. On Monday, both Trump and British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper called for Lai’s release. “I feel so badly. I spoke to President Xi about it, and I asked to consider his release,” Trump said. “He’s not well. He’s an older man, and he’s not well. So, I did put that request out—we’ll see what happens.” Cooper noted that Lai is a British citizen and said she had summoned the Chinese ambassador after hearing the verdict. “But for the sake of Jimmy Lai, for his family, but also for the people of Hong Kong, for the joint Declaration we signed, and for the rule of law, we will not relent on this,” Cooper said. “Joined by nations across the world, we call again for the immediate release of Jimmy Lai.” Trump’s remarks came just hours after Lai, 78, was found guilty on three charges—one sedition charge and two charges of violating the National Security Law, a heavy-handed 2020 law ushering in a human rights crackdown after pro-democracy protests dominated Hong Kong news for months in 2019. Lai’s daughter, Claire Lai, told reporters that his fate now lies in the hands of world leaders who have the opportunity to rise up and advocate on behalf of her father. “We expected the verdict,” Claire Lai told CBS News on Monday. “As much as you can expect that, you can only be so ready for it. So, I am grieving.” Father Robert Sirico, a longtime friend of Jimmy Lai’s and a Catholic priest and religious freedom advocate, argues that the Lai case exposes a deeper scandal—that Western democracies, global institutions, and even the Vatican have chosen silence over principle. In this way, they are trying to protect their access to China’s markets while allowing a man of conscience to “rot in a cell,” he said. Sirico applauded Trump’s response and his efforts to free Lai. “I think Jimmy has made his point quite eloquently and now begins the conversation as to what we can do about this,” Sirico told RealClearPolitics. “I think the important thing is just to get this man out of there.” Sirico added that Xi likely views Lai’s verdict as a symbolic message aimed at suppressing other pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and China and warned that freeing him would likely take concessions on the part of the U.S., including a possible prisoner exchange. “Xi, in some ways is like Trump—he’s very transactional,” Sirico said. “I don’t think Trump would get into a conversation with Xi not realizing that he’s going to have to give something for [Lai’s freedom].” Lai, the founder of Apple Daily, a widely read pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong that was often sharply critical of the Chinese government’s increasing controls over the city, has spent more than four years in prison awaiting Monday’s guilty verdict. The paper became the target of Hong Kong authorities controlled by Beijing after it supported the mass protests from 2019 to 2020 against restrictions on personal freedoms. Lai was arrested in 2020, and the paper closed in 2021 after police raided the newsroom, arresting editors and reporters and freezing the publication’s assets. For more than two decades, Hong Kong operated under the “one country, two systems” principle enshrined in a document called the Basic Law, which serves as the city’s mini-constitution and protects rights such as freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, which do not exist in mainland China. It was created through an agreement between Britain and China and came into effect on July 1, 1997, the day Hong Kong returned to Chinese control. These protections for Hong Kong were supposed to be valid for 50 years after the handover, but under Xi’s rule, China has tightened control over the city and stated that his ultimate goal is to reunify Hong Kong and Taiwan with mainland China. Sirico says the Vatican, under the late Pope Francis’s leadership, refused to confront Xi’s human rights abuses, but there’s a chance for a new approach under Pope Leo XIV. “Francis saw communists being persecuted in Argentina in his day,” Sirico explained. “I think it was hard for him to wrap his head around the idea that communists can be persecutors, and that’s what I see in China in this situation and in Nicaragua.” Leo met with Lai’s wife and daughter in mid-October, which human rights advocates viewed as a sign of a new approach to China and support for Lai, who converted to Catholicism in 1997 and has spoken publicly about his faith on numerous occasions. Earlier this year, Trump joined advocates in condemning Lai’s imprisonment, vowing to do “everything [he] can” to save the activist. “[Lai’s] name has already entered the circle of things that we’re talking about,” Trump said in August. Claire Lai has said that she last spoke to her father in June of this year and warned that his health has significantly deteriorated under harsh prison conditions that have included solitary confinement. She recalled that his nails had changed colors and were falling off, and his teeth were rotting, and openly worried that his diabetes and heart palpitations had worsened. She and her legal team have voiced concerns that appeals could take more than eight years and fear that he may not live long enough to endure captivity. “My father does not have eight years,” she told CBS News. “If we wait to the end of the appeals process, there will not be a man at the end of that process. Originally published by RealClearWire The post Jimmy Lai’s Family Looks to Trump, World Leaders appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Finally, A Little Good News. Kamala Harris Is Running For POTUS Again

Day Two of Judge Dugan's Trial

Everything about this world will leave you flabbergasted.