It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
It’s the now-deleted AI image that has sparked heated criticism and accusations of blasphemy, with Jon Stewart calling out Trump for the explanation behind the image, and Jack White slamming Christians who continue to support Trump – dubbing him the “worst American of all time.”
It’s been described as the “crazy” and “blasphemy”.
Yesterday, Donald Trump posted an AI-generated photo of himself.
The image sees Trump seemingly dressed as Jesus Christ, and came shortly after he criticised Pope Leo XIV as “weak” and claimed that "if I wasn't in the White House, Leo wouldn't be in the Vatican".
His comments on the Pope as well as the AI image drew immediate criticism from... well, everyone – from his own MAGA base to prominent members of the Catholic Church.
“Not even Hitler or Mussolini attacked the Pope so directly and publicly,” Massimo Faggioli, an expert on the papacy, said in a statement to Reuters.
Trump's postTruth Social
Related
“Seriously, I cannot understand why he’d post this. Is he looking for a response? Does he actually think this?” conservative influencer Riley Gaines posted on X. “Either way, two things are true. 1) a little humility would serve him well 2) God shall not be mocked.”
Former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi said the AI image was "crazy" and as a Catholic he thinks it is "blasphemous", while The Knights Templar International wrote in a post that they “demand that this offensive and blasphemous image be removed forthwith! We supported President Trump in 2016 and 2024… However we are deeply offended by this and have no other choice but to condemn it wholeheartedly and ask for a public apology to the Christian brethren who have been deeply upset by this depiction.”
Trump deleted the image – a rare occurrence – and insisted that the image was “supposed to be me as a doctor making people better."
No one bought the explanation and several celebrities have also spoken out against Trump’s use of AI.
On this week’s episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart said about Trump’s excuse: “Do you even care about lying to us anymore? Is this over? Has this relationship gone stale? Your lies used to have a real spark. ‘They’re eating the cats and dogs! Venezuela stole the 2020 election!’ And now the best you’ve got is, ‘Eh, no, I wasn’t Jesus. I’m a doctor!’ You need to go back and find your happy place and fast.”
Elsewhere, rock star and vocal Trump critic Jack White issued a scathing critique of Trump and his Christian supporters.
"How can any so called Christian support him after this blasphemy?" White posted on Instagram. "How could any Catholic support him after he attacks the character of their Pope multiple times? How did so many millions of people fall for this conman?"
White went on to chastise Trump's evangelical Christian supporters for standing with him despite his "felonies, epstein files, rapes, bombing of schoolchildren, gestapo ICE agents attacking his own citizens, threatening to invade Greenland, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran."
White added: “He’s already got worst President in the history of America on lock, but I’m gonna go ahead and take the honor of pronouncing trump ‘Worst American of All Time’.”
Sunbirds suck their nectar, in dramatic contrast to hummingbirds, which sop it up
Sunbirds employ tongue suctioning, which is unique among vertebrates.
While we often think of hummingbirds as sucking nectar from flowers, they’re not sucking the way we suction juice through a straw — they’re really sponging up nectar with their tongues and squeezing the juice into their mouths by compressing their tongues with their beaks.
Humans are naturally able from birth to use mouth suction to draw in liquid, but it’s not easy if you don’t have lips to create an air-tight seal, and few animals besides mammals have lips.
But a new study by current and former University of California, Berkeley biologists found that sunbirds, the African and Asian counterparts of the nectar-sipping hummingbirds of the Americas, do use suction to slurp nectar. They’re the first animals known to employ their tongues to suction up liquids.
The results highlight the fact that nature often finds different solutions to similar problems — in this case, how to use a long, tubular and often curved beak to extract sustenance from deep within a flower. It’s referred to as convergent evolution.
“It's just a really amazing example of the power and beauty of convergent evolution, where in nature we have two organisms filling the same ecological role, but when you look in detail, they're achieving that outcome in two completely different ways,” said Rauri Bowie, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and a study author. “In our case, we're seeing a mechanism that is completely novel in vertebrates and a remarkable example of innovation.”
The proof comes from experiments conducted in Africa and Indonesia using high-speed cameras installed adjacent to 3D printed artificial flowers, plus microCT scans of sunbirds obtained in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ). The results were reported last month in the journal Current Biology, in a paper led by first author and Berkeley alum David Cuban, now a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University.
“I am fascinated by the phenomena of convergent evolution,” Cuban said. “Hummingbirds and sunbirds — and some other nectar-feeding birds — have similar morphology, coloration, behavior and ecological niches, but once we zoom in on something specific, in this case their feeding mechanism, we find that they use completely distinct mechanisms.”
Lapping, licking and sucking
Most vertebrates use lapping or licking to take in liquids with their tongues (think dogs and cats). But a few animals employ suction. Fish, for example, inflate their mouths to suction in food. Butterflies use a muscular pump to suction up nectar and pollen. Pigeons suction water from pools, though only by submerging their beaks in the liquid and using their tongue as a piston. These options are not available to nectar feeders, who stick their tongues into the sweet liquid.
For nectar-eating birds — nectarivores — it was thought until recently that they used capillary action to passively tap a pool of nectar. Surface tension was thought to pull liquid into their tube-like beaks or tongues.
But many biologists doubted this, because using capillary action is a slow way to take in calories. For frenetic fliers like hummingbirds and sunbirds, this would not provide sufficient energy.
“When you think about it, there's no way they would ingest enough nectar, given that sunbirds and hummingbirds have this incredibly beautiful ornamentation that they're very actively displaying, using a high calorie intake to fuel their lifestyles,” Bowie said.
Nearly 10 years ago, former UC Berkeley Miller Postdoctoral Fellow Alejandro Rico-Guevara demonstrated with high-speed video that hummingbirds don’t use capillary action. Instead, they compress their tongues before sticking them into a pool of nectar. As the tongue expands, nectar fills the pores as if it were a sponge. As the birds retract the tongue, they squeeze it between the upper and lower bill, wringing out the nectar like the mangle of an old-fashioned washing machine. Hummingbirds do this repeatedly, and it’s about 10 times faster than using capillary action.
Cuban, a former UC Berkeley undergraduate and then master’s student in mechanical engineering, doubted that sunbirds used capillary action either, and set out to prove it. He had become fascinated by the convergent evolution of nectar-feeding birds during an ornithology class taught by Bowie and teaching assistant Cynthia Wang-Claypool, then a Berkeley graduate student. Seeing hummingbird and sunbird specimens laid out next to one another in the MVZ, he said, “I knew I had to look into the convergent evolution of nectar-feeding birds, and I wanted to use my background in mechanical engineering to do so.”
One tip-off that sunbirds were not feeding by capillary action came from early high-speed video analyses. Cuban saw bubbles around the tongue, which would interfere with surface tension, though not suction. Sunbirds also keep their beaks slightly open when drinking nectar, whereas hummingbirds do not.
3D-printed flowers
Working as a doctoral student with Rico-Guevara at the University of Washington in Seattle, he traveled to South Africa and Sulawesi in Indonesia to conduct experiments with seven sunbird species, using high-speed cameras to film birds visiting 3D-printed fake flowers filled with sugar water. He modified techniques that Rico-Guevara had originated to study hummingbird feeding, initially in his native Colombia.
Cuban discovered that sunbirds in Asia, where they originated, and in Africa, which they subsequently colonized, use the same tongue technique to draw in nectar. Their tongues have a V-shaped trough at its base. As the bird sticks its tongue into a pool of nectar, it presses its base against the top beak, creating an air-tight seal. As the bird gradually pulls its tongue back in, this creates suction that draws in liquid via the tongue groove. When the seal breaks, the bird swallows the nectar.
“Pushing the base of the tongue against the top of the beak — that's what is really creating that hermetic seal,” Bowie said. “It's the interaction between the tongue and the beak that creates that negative pressure.”
MicroCT scans by Wang-Claypool, now with the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, provided anatomical confirmation.
“They provided the evidence we needed that the structure of the tongue differs from hummingbirds, with sunbirds having special flexible flaps at the base of the tongue so that when the tongue pushes up against the top of the beak, it generates a tight seal,” Bowie said.
The researchers continue to explore the differences between sunbirds and hummingbirds and convergent evolution among nectar eaters — a lifestyle that evolved at least 30 times among animals, Bowie said. A native of South Africa, Bowie started working on sunbirds as part of his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Cape Town and has continued to explore the diversification and evolutionary ecology of these remarkable birds over the 20 years he has been a member of the Berkeley faculty.
“I'm interested in nectarivory as a lifestyle, looking at it from the point of view of the diversification of these species, how they've adapted to different kinds of habitats, including the extensive radiation by both sunbirds and hummingbirds into mountains,” he said.
“By studying the physical interactions, or biomechanics, of organisms we can better understand how the immutable laws of physics are shaping the many diverse adaptations found across the tree of life,” Cuban said.
The work was funded in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (DEB 1457845). Co-authors with Cuban, Bowie, Rico-Guevera and Wang-Claypool are Yohanna Yohanna of the National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia, Colleen Downs and Steven Johnson of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and Fabian Brau of the Free University of Brussels in Belgium.
A greater double-collared sunbird (Cinnyris afer), one of the South African sunbirds studied.
Credit
Keith Barnes
CT scans reveal striking bill and tongue differences between the olive sunbird (Cyanomitra olivacea, top) and Anna’s hummingbird (Calypte anna, bottom). Cross sections at several places along the bill show that, from base to tip, the sunbird tongue shifts from a U-shaped trough to a closed tube, while the hummingbird tongue transforms from two solid rods into twin hollow tubes. The U-shaped base of the sunbird tongue interacts with the upper bill to create the suction the birds use to sip nectar from flowers.
The journey of my prayer rug reflects my own as a Muslim American. It has seen a lot, and despite its fraying fringes, remains resilient as ever.
Praying five times each day is one of the pillars of Islam. Each prayer includes recitations from the Qur’an.
My blue and gold prayer rug was a childhood gift from my late maternal grandmother, or nana as we called her, who brought it from Saudi Arabia. I still remember praying by her side. She taught me to read the Qur’an and would lovingly correct my Arabic.
Wherever I’ve been, I’ve prayed on that same rug. In a world that often leaves me feeling unmoored, my faith anchors me. It’s a sentiment so many Muslims and other people of faith in this country share.
The right to freely practice my religion is enshrined in our Constitution under the First Amendment. It protects this right for allpeople to practice any faith, or none at all, and prohibits our government from establishing an official religion.
You would think members of Congress, who swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, would know this. Yet many continue to attack the faith of millions of Muslim Americans, including their own constituents.
Some have invoked “sharia” — which refers to the various rules Muslims follow, like prayer guidance — to preposterously claim that Muslims are trying to “replace” the Constitution. Islamic learning institutions — like the summer school where I first learned the Arabic alphabet in my youth — are a growing target.
When the Islamic Academy in Alabama tried to relocate from the Birmingham suburb of Homewood to a larger building in nearby Hoover, a local Islamophobic campaign ensued, resulting in Hoover city officials voting against the relocation late last year. In response, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) said, “Islamic Indoctrination Centers have NO PLACE in our state.”
Would Tuberville have denigrated Catholic schools, Protestant youth groups, or Jewish summer camps this way?
Unfortunately, Tuberville is hardly alone. Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) recently compared Muslims to dogs and has labeled Muslim officials like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani “terrorists.”
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) declared this March that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” That’s not only hateful but ignorant. Among the first Muslims in the U.S. were enslaved West Africans who helped build this country. Despite significant obstacles, many preserved their Islamic faith and were guided by it in their struggle for liberation.
Since then, Fine and Ogles have only doubled down on their bigotry. In a March post on X, Fine wrote “We need more Islamophobia, not less,” while Ogles said Muslims “all have to go back.” Virtually no high profile Republicans have condemned this hateful rhetoric.
This racist fearmongering is a tried and true tactic — a cheap deflection from these leaders’ own failure to respond to their constituents’ actual needs, like affordable housing, health care, and groceries.
But it’s also more than that. The more Muslims are dehumanized, the easier it is for politicians to justify their endless, costly, and immoral wars on Muslim-majority countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iran, and the genocide in Gaza. Like clockwork, each new bombing abroad fuels more anti-Muslim racism and violence against my community at home.
Already, Islamophobic social media posts have proliferated since the war on Iran began. The NYPD recently foiled an assassination attempt against Muslim and Palestinian American activist Nerdeen Kiswani. And according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, anti-Muslim discrimination complaints in the U.S. have reached record highs.
Muslims don’t need to defend our existence. It’s the racists and religious bigots who don’t belong in Congress — or anywhere in a free society.
But while hateful politicians spew division, I see more people in this country refusing to do the same. Instead, multi-faith coalitions are uniting around real threats: war, billionaires controlling our economy, the climate emergency, and the alarming erosion of the constitutional rights we hold so dear, including the freedom of religion.
Farrah Hassen, J.D., is a writer, policy analyst, and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona.
