Trump: “Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective” pic.twitter.com/QwilJJpuSc
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) June 22, 2025
Video of Trump backing out of the Iran Deal in 2018. The deal would have allowed inspections to ensure that Iran wouldn’t develop nuclear weapons.
Obama’s Iran nuclear deal was working until Trump pulled out of it. His own staff warned him not to because the alternative was war. Well, now we’re at war with Iran because Trump is weak, stupid and hated Obama more than he cared about preventing Iran from getting a nuke. pic.twitter.com/FwqB7W7OM7
Trump is now bombing Iran. Here are multiple clips of Trump campaigning against endless wars, Middle East conflicts, and boasting that he will stop World War III. pic.twitter.com/dabDTfUqw4
The 2025 Tribeca Film Festival wrapped up last weekend, and I have some more reviews to share with you. Hopefully, some of these will be coming to a theater near you sometime in the near future! Let’s dive in…
Birthright (Australia) ***½ – As Queen Eleanor muses in The Lion in Winter: “What family doesn’t have its ups and downs?” Writer-director Zoe Pepper’s twisted dark comedy thriller is like a 21st-Century take on James Goldman’s classic tale of family dysfunction. In this case, the prodigal son has not returned to the manor for a brief visit, but for an indeterminate stay.
Cory (Travis Jeffrey) and his very pregnant wife Jasmine (Maria Angelico) have been hit with a double whammy: Cory has been laid off and the couple have been evicted. Broke and desperate, Cory shows up on the doorstep of his upper middle-class parents’ estate and asks if it’s okay that they stay a few days . His judgemental father (Michael Hurst) and ice-queen mother (Linda Cropper) seem wary at best. They agree, but with some “tough love” caveats. As temporary lodging morphs into “taking up residence”, family tensions mount, old wounds reopen and an epic battle between father and son for the title of King of the Castle ensues. This is the most trenchant Australian social satire I’ve seen since Don’s Party.
Maintenance Artist (USA) *** –
Rimmer: [pretending to be interested in art to impress Legion] Now, this 3-dimensional sculpture in particular is quite exquisite. Its simplicity, its bold, stark lines. Pray, what do you call it?
Legion: The light switch.
Rimmer: The light switch?
Legion: Yes.
Rimmer: I couldn’t buy it, then?
Legion: Not really. I need it to turn the lights on and off.
– From the comedy series Red Dwarf (written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor)
That exchange is chiefly played for laughs of course, but it also makes a point about the subjectivity of “art”. In my 2007 review of the documentary My Kid Could Paint That, I wrote:
Whose judgment determines the intrinsic and/or monetary value of a painting-a local newspaper reporter, a New York Times art critic or Mike Wallace? Does the eye of the beholder still count for anything? Does it really matter who painted it, if you feel it’s worth hanging on your wall? Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays-Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, and do you care? Does it really matter that the Monkees didn’t write any of their hits or play their own instruments?
How about an artist whose “art” was literally garbage? Would you label their work as same? In this fascinating documentary, director Toby Perl Freilich profiles the life and work of performance artist/self-billed “eco-feminist” Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who holds the title of (unpaid) Artist in Residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation.
That is not to say all of her work is garbage. Frelich mixes the septuagenarian artist’s recollections with archival footage to glean what led to Ukeles’ decades-long obsession with transforming the mundane tasks of everyday housewives and maintenance workers into a form of socially-conscious high art.
Ukeles didn’t pop out of the box fully formed. Early in her career, she experimented with everything from abstract sculptures to inflatable “air art”. But it wasn’t until after her marriage in 1966 that she discovered her path. In a 1969 manifesto, she stated in part:
Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.) The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom. The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs=minimum wage, housewives=no pay. […] Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art. “We have no Art, we try to do everything well.” (Balinese saying). […] My working will be the work.
Maintenance Artist is a thought-provoking film worth hanging on your wall.
A Bright Future (Uruguay) *½ – More lo-fi than “sci-fi” (as it is billed), Lucia Garibaldi’s minimalist drama suggests a near-future Uruguay wherein dogs have disappeared, ants are to be feared, youth is revered, and everybody’s weird. The story centers on a sullen and taciturn 18 year-old named Elisa (Martina Passeggi), who lives with her mother in a dark and dreary apartment complex. Elisa has been chosen by some nebulous government institute to go to “the North”, which appears to be a coveted Shangri-La to the citizenry. Problem is, once people go there, they are never heard from again (like Elisa’s sister, for example).
Regardless, it’s considered an honor to be chosen; there are even lotteries for a chance to make the journey (echoes of Logan’s Run, where people about to turn the state-mandated life termination age of 30 hope for a chance at “renewal”-which no one ever seems to achieve). Elisa’s mother is scraping and saving for a lottery ticket; and she’s chagrined at Elisa’s ambivalence about her own luck.
When a 30-something female neighbor with a prosthetic leg and dubious intentions takes a sudden interest in becoming Elisa’s bestie, complications ensue. A scene where Elisa offers the “smell of youth” for a fee was nearly a bail point for me. While there are a few interesting ideas, none of them really go anywhere, much less the narrative. Unfortunately, A Bright Future is little more than a dim bulb.
Yanuni (Austria, Brazil, United States, Canada, Germany) ***½ – Tribeca’s closing night selection this year is a riveting eco-doc that profiles Indigenous rights activist Juma Xipaia (the first female Indigenous chief of her people in the Middle Xingu) and her husband Hugo, who heads up a government special ops team that locates and shuts down illegal mining operations in Brazil’s Amazon region.
Richard Ladkani’s doc unfolds like a Costa-Gavras political thriller; early on in the film we see harrowing footage of Juma participating in a protest outside of the National Congress Palace in Brasilia where riot police suddenly fire a fusillade of live rounds into the crowd. A distraught Juma kneels beside a tribal activist who appears to be gravely wounded, pleading for him to respond (he doesn’t) until fellow demonstrators pull her away, out of the line of fire.
Juma, we learn, is no stranger to the threat of violence; she has survived a number of assassination attempts over the years and continues to be under threat. Yet she soldiers on, fighting outside and (eventually) inside of Brazil’s political system for her people…as does her husband (Juma and Hugo form an eco-warrior power couple).
Ladkani follows Hugo and his team on several missions; these scenes play like they are straight out of an action film, but instilled with an all-too-real sense of danger (the illegal miners are frequently armed and rarely happy to see the government commandos). Mining has been prohibited since Brazil’s Federal Constitution of 1988, as it not only wreaks havoc on the Amazonian ecosystem, but has a number of negative health effects on the Indigenous peoples of the region.
Ladkani’s film is slickly made and lushly photographed, but doesn’t pull any punches regarding its heavy subject matter. When you consider 10,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest are destroyed every day, the sense of urgency here becomes all the more palpable.
The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard (Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, Croatia, Taiwan) *** –
Many were increasingly of the opinion [that humans] made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
― Douglas Adams, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
What makes us “human”…is it nature, or nurture? How many times have you heard admonishments like “don’t wolf your food” or “you’re acting like an animal”? Are we not mammals, after all?
Writer-director David Verbeek tackles that age-old question in this speculative fiction yarn about the discovery of a young woman (Jessica Reynolds) who has literally been raised by wolves. Naturally, her first accommodation in the “civilized” world is a cold, clinical research facility, where she is poked and prodded and ogled at by people in white coats.
Frightened and confused, she barely has time to acclimate to these alien surroundings before a pair of cultish survivalists spirit her away to an abandoned offshore oil rig. The couple imprint themselves as parental figures and methodically indoctrinate her into their vision of an impending environmental apocalypse.
The trio seem well on their way to forming a cozy family unit-until the young woman discovers (much to her chagrin) that her “parents” have feet of clay (you can take the wolf-girl out of the forest…).
I see touchstones like The Wild Child, The Emerald Forest, Altered States, and Charly; but Verbeek has put a unique 21st Century spin on some time-worn themes. His secret weapon is Reynolds, who delivers an extraordinary performance that runs the gamut from running around on all fours and dining al fresco on small game to making small talk with her customers at the grocery checkout counter.
Billy Idol Should be Dead (USA) *** – Jonas Åkerlund ‘s rock doc is a fairly straightforward portrait of William Michael Albert Broad, noted member of the Bromley Contingent. Okay…you know him better as Billy Idol, and “The Bromley Contingent” (which featured future members of The Clash and Siouxsee and the Banshees, among other seminal punkers) was basically an unofficial fan club that followed the Sex Pistols around on their earliest UK gigs. Billy, of course, was destined for bigger things, so he did not remain a mere fanboy for long.
Mixing archival footage with present-day ruminations from Idol (still alive!) Åkerlund retraces the rocker’s trajectory from co-founder of Generation X (one of the first punk bands to perform on the BBC’s Top of the Pops program) to MTV superstar and beyond.
The price of fame is paid in full along the way; sex, drugs, and rock and roll takes its toll…but like some kind of sneering, leather-clad Energizer Bunny, Idol somehow just keeps going, and going. The present-day Idol is thoughtful, self-reflective, and surprisingly candid about where he’s been and where he’s headed. Being partial to Idol’s pre-MTV output, I found his punk era to be the most absorbing portion of the doc, but overall it should be an enjoyable ride for fans.
Ride or Die (USA) **½ – Never pick up a stranger. Aspiring St. Louis filmmaker Paula (Brianna Middleton) has a chance encounter at a checkout counter with former classmate Sloane (Stella Everett), who is running the register. There is an instant spark between the pair; it turns out that Paula had a secret crush on Sloane in their high school days.
Faster than you can say “Thelma and Louise”, free-spirited Sloane quits her job and sweet-talks the hidebound Paula into a spontaneous road trip to California-against the advisement of Paula’s mother, who senses (as we do) that This Girl is Trouble. Paula is too head-over-heels to pick up these signals (and clearly, she has never seen Something Wild).
Director and co-writer Josalynn Smith honors the venerable “road noir” tropes well enough, and the two leads have good chemistry, but the third act fizzes a bit by leaving a startling narrative development curiously unexplained. Still, it’s a promising directorial debut.
Sun Ra: Do the Impossible (USA) *** -How does one describe Sun Ra’s music? Whether you label it “free jazz”, “avant-garde”, “experimental”, or “free-form”…to the uninitiated ear, it might as well be music from outer space. That perception would suit its creator just fine, because he was from Saturn, after all.
I should probably back up a moment.
Herman Poole Blount was actually born in Birmingham Alabama, and as we learn in Christine Turner’s bio of the late jazz pioneer, was a natural musician. He starting playing piano as a child and was composing and sight reading by his early teens. The “Saturn” quotient entered his personal mythology at some point in his 20s or 30s (the timeline was subject to change, depending on to whom he was recounting his story of being “teleported” to the planet, where alien beings instructed him to speak to the world through his music).
The veracity of this story is moot; because whatever (or whoever) sparked this visit from the Muse, from that moment forward Sun Ra dedicated every waking minute of his life to not only push his musical boundaries, but to create a simpatico cosmology that embraced elements of philosophy, quantum physics, and Black consciousness.
Turner mixes recollections from former members of the Arkestra, historians, music scholars, and archival Sun Ra interviews with amazing performance footage to paint a fascinating (if not definitive) portrait of a unique artist whose true origin remains a bit of a mystery. I’m compelled to quote my favorite line from Close Encounters of the Third Kind: “Einstein was probably one of them.”
Tom did a post this morning about some of the ICE raids here in LA but I’m going to post some more just for posterity. I don’t know if they will last — they’re on X, unfortunately and I could easily see Elon ordering them all taken down. Many of them are also on Tik-Tok and Youtube (but hard for me to find them there.) For now it’s worth just making a note about what’s going on, if nothing else. This is deadly serious stuff and we are in deep trouble.
ICE agent points gun directly at the head of innocent civilian—just for taking picture of his license plate.
He drew his gun with one hand—while fumbling to open the car door with the other.
The "agent" did not seem to be aware someone else was already recording his vehicle.… pic.twitter.com/Bmry1iXyad
— LongTime🤓FirstTime👨💻 (@LongTimeHistory) June 19, 2025
These Ice Bounty Hunters pieces of shit blocked our streets in Maywood, and as they're leaving casually, throw a flashbang at a crowd of spectators just recording in the park next door
Those people are not federal agents. Real law enforcement wouldn’t behave like that. Pointing guns at random people is some MAGA coward shit. These are probably MAGA militants hired by Trump administration. pic.twitter.com/WVSYiV8374
What the actual fuck! Trump's ICE Gestapo hangs out in strip malls and then pounces on American citizens for the crime of having brown skin. These fucking Nazis drive around in unmarked vehicles and like fascist cowards, hide their faces behind masks. 😡👇 pic.twitter.com/rAG6sP0jGJ
There are many of these posts all over social media. I can’t vouch for every one of those, of course. They are just snapshots. But I think the evidence is quite clear that ICE is completely drunk with power and out of control. They have been given a quota and the promise of a huge bonus if they hunt down and capture as many immigrants as they can find. Here in LA it’s mostly latinos but they have rousted asian immigrants in the garment district as well and I’m sure that anywhere there’s a Haitian or African community they’re going in there too. (Well, except for South Africa — they’re welcomed with open arms and instant citizenship.)
This is already one of the most shameful chapters in American history and it’s getting worse every day. Now we have national Guard and marines on the streets to “protect” these masked, armed thugs. What do we think is going to happen?
It’s only a matter of time before he has it reprogrammed to only consider wingnut conspiracy theories. Right wing loons like Musk are incapable of dealing with their worldview being challenged. We’ve seen it for years.
AI has major problems and cannot be relied upon, for sure. But not because it is too “woke.” It’s that in this environment in which the right is increasingly dependent on bullshit to sell it’s grotesque worldview and even rudimentary AI critical thinking can see through it.
“I think it’s very important to state that incredible things are happening in our country. I think we’ve made more progress in three weeks than they’ve made in four years, especially with respect to the reputation of our country, and people are respecting us again as a country and as a powerful country and maybe a smart country. — Donald Trump Feb. 24, 2025
Hey, we’re still perceived slightly more positively than Russia, so there’s that.
Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.
In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.”
Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”
At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades.
The Trump-nominated judge who taught the class, John L. Badalamenti, declined to comment for this article, and does not appear to have publicly discussed why he chose Mr. Damsky for the award.
That left some students and faculty members at the law school, considered Florida’s most prestigious, to wonder, and to worry: What merit could the judge have seen in it?
The granting of the award set off months of turmoil on the law school campus. Its interim dean, Merritt McAlister, defended the decision earlier this year, citing Mr. Damsky’s free speech rights and arguing that professors must not engage in “viewpoint discrimination.”
Ms. McAlister, in an email to the law school community, also invoked “institutional neutrality,” an increasingly popular policy among college administrators. It instructs schools not to take public positions on hot-button issues.
Unless those positions are “woke” of course in which case they must be stamped out with fervor.
Look for Mr. Damsky to be immediately hired by Pam Bondi and elevated to the bench within two years. He’s just the kind of fair and neutral thinker the Trump administration is looking for.
A Florida state judge was lobbying for a seat on the federal bench. After he sided with the president in a defamation case, Donald Trump gave him one.
Ed Artau, now a nominee to be a district court judge in Florida, met with staff in the office of Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott to angle for the nomination less than two weeks after Trump’s election last fall, according to a new Senate disclosure obtained by POLITICO. In the midst of his interviews, Artau was part of a panel of judges that ruled in Trump’s favor in the president’s case against members of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
About two weeks after the court published his opinion — which called for the overturning of a landmark Supreme Court case that made it harder for public officials to sue journalists — he interviewed with the White House Counsel’s Office. In May, Trump announced his nomination to the federal judiciary.
There is no way Trump didn’t know and that this deal wasn’t explicit. I’d be surprised if a little cash wasn’t involved as well.
Got something to prove? Available at Chicyea dot com.
One supposes keeping a sense of humor is important as the United States of America devolves into dictatorship. Not seeing it yet? The world is.
Alexandra Petri offers snarky fashion advice for thugs asking how to look the part when “seizing someone’s mom and hurling her into an unmarked van without reading her her rights” (The Atlantic):
How are the people we thrust into our vans supposed to know that we are, in fact, acting under color of law and not just kidnapping them? Can I really do this job while wearing either an Army uniform that I have assembled myself in a confusing, over-the-top way or the same T-shirt I just wore to my failed custody hearing?
No uniform required, Petri suggests:
If you’re wearing a uniform, people will be disappointed when you fail to show them an arrest warrant before entering their place of work. If you’re not wearing a uniform of any kind, they won’t know whether to be disappointed until it’s too late!
If you decide to wear some sort of uniform anyway (Army Surplus? January 6 Surplus? Your choice!), you can still send the message that you intend to be accountable to no one by wearing a face covering.
You get the idea.
The sick irony is that these masked agents aren’t even asking to see people’s papers as a uniformed Nazi thug might. If you don’t look American enough (whatever that means), ICE will pile out of a vehicle armed for war and grab you off the street (or off a lawn) without asking such questions.
ICE grab two gardeners right off his front lawn—leave lawnmower running.
"They left lawnmower going right here on my front lawn," homeowner said.
"Threw my gardeners’ phones in their car along with the keys—left everything open and just took off."
— LongTime🤓FirstTime👨💻 (@LongTimeHistory) June 20, 2025
The ICE kidnapping scenes coming out of Los Angeles should disturb all freedom-loving Americans, left or right.
This chaotic scene from a Los Angeles Walmart is all too typical of ICE raids in the city. Watch for the masked man in the gray t-shirt at timestamp 0:48 (image above, video below).
We need to call it out for what it is.
The majority of these ICE “agents” are just miserable, angry, bitter people that are cosplaying as cops.
A couple of comments on the video. First from an MSNBC opinion:
“We’re seeing the rise of secret police — masked, no identifying info, even wearing army fatigues — grabbing & disappearing people,” California state Sen. Scott Weiner wrote on X Monday before calling it “antithetical to democracy & harms communities.” Weiner and another Democratic colleague, state Sen. Jesse Arreguin, have introduced a bill called the “No Secret Police Act,” which Weiner said “can help end the fear & chaos” that police wearing masks “creates in communities.”
Second, claims by ICE that agents are hiding their faces for their own safety because of “a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them” is nonsense, or else “cooked.” Philp Bump notes that ICE did not respond when asked where that figure came from. And besides, how would a face mask prevent an assault?
“ICE didn’t provide me with any examples of immigration officers being identified, targeted and assaulted outside of the context of an arrest,” Bump writes.
“That’s assault! That’s assault!” an unmasked agent claims after (possibly) one agent bumps into the videographer and another shoves him [timestamp 2:04 above]. The videographer was later arrested for that “assault.” The U.S attorney alleges that that video shows Adrian Andrew Martinez “punching” a border patrol agent.
ARRESTED: Adrian Andrew Martinez, 20, of Pico Rivera, the individual in the blue Walmart vest, was arrested for an allegation of punching a border patrol agent in the face after he attempted to impede their immigration enforcement operation, in violation for 18 USC 111. I will… pic.twitter.com/MjBXNPak7R
— U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli (@USAttyEssayli) June 18, 2025
Something else to note. Only the nonuniformed “agents” seemed to be carrying accessorized long guns. As if they’ve got something to prove. One advertised that with his t-shirt.
In another incident, ICE arrested an American citizen, Job Garcia, after shoving him:
“A split second after that is when he lunged at me. I was still recording, so he pushes me, puts both hands on me, and I pushed his hand off. And then, he didn’t like that, so he grabbed my left hand,” Garcia recalled.
Garcia, who is a PhD student at Claremont Graduate University, said the officers seemed surprised when he told them he was a U.S. citizen. He says he was first taken to a holding area at Dodger Stadium, where he heard agents boasting about how many people they had grabbed.
“Like, ‘How many bodies did you guys get today?’ And one of them said 31, and they started like, ‘Yay! It was a good day today.’ And they were like, high-fiving each other,” Garcia said.
He said the officers also debated about what they could charge him with.
So yeah, about that 413 percent….
As Marcy Wheeler suggested on Friday, Stephen Miller must get moist and erect watching these scenes of rough handling of alleged undocumented workers.
Back in college I worked a few construction jobs. Few of my colleagues were college educated, save perhaps for the most skilled tradesmen. These were their permanent jobs. This was a decade or more before Rush Limbaugh hit, and before Fox News and the internet made political propaganda ubiquitous. One of the lines you’d regularly hear from colleagues was, “Now, I’ll tell you what’s the truth.” What came next was going to be a strongly expressed uninformed opinion on whatever the topic was. In the vernacular, a doozy.
Former Canadian “shock jock” Dean Blundell writes about that phenomenon at his Substack. A recent study by Ottowa’s EKOS Research Associates Inc. finds that “Trump’s approval rating among the most misinformed Canadians is 72%. Among the most informed? Just 1%. That’s not a typo.”
This study doesn’t just expose Trump fandom as a cult of personality—it lays bare a frightening link between disinformation, cognitive rigidity, and political loyalty.
If you believe vaccine deaths are being covered up, that climate change is a hoax, or that the 2020 U.S. election was stolen? Congrats. You’re likely part of the Trump fan club.
Additionally:
This isn’t correlation; it’s cause and effect. When lies shape your worldview, Trump starts to look like a genius.
And it doesn’t stop at Trump:
Favourability toward Russia skyrocketed 10x among the disinformed.
Favourability toward Ukraine? 10x higher among the informed.
Trust in scientists and journalists fell off a cliff for the misinformation crowd.
It’s a worldview built on sand, curated by algorithms, and spoon-fed by propagandists.
Blundell goes on to emphasize how the kind of propaganda we see today erodes democracy:
When 70% of a major political base is actively misinformed, democracy doesn’t just erode—it warps.
Trump doesn’t need to convince people he’s right. He only needs to confuse them enough to believe that everyone else is wrong. That scientists, journalists, judges, and facts themselves can’t be trusted.
And guess what? It’s working.
Blundell brands the actively misinformed more harshly than I would. I work in election turnout. But a friend points out that what persuades people more than a pile of facts is how listeners perceive the speaker. As former president Bill Clinton said, ”When people are feeling insecure, they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right.”
It’s not enough to have the facts. How you perform the facts matters. The left needs to be just as cocksure of their values as the right to break through. A little righteous anger wrapped in self-confidence and Americanism wouldn’t hurt. It’s why AOC and Bernie Sanders are attracting Republicans to their rallies.
Well, hello LA925! 😍 Just days old, this California condor chick is already hitting big milestones — eating well, gaining strength, and growing steady. #LAZooCondorStoriespic.twitter.com/ccKGLrQoMV
Earlier in June, wildlife enthusiasts were excited over a pair of young bald eagles that flew out of their nest for the first time, hovering high above Big Bear Lake.
This week, the focus is on 10 condor chicks that were hatched at the Los Angeles Zoo, making them eligible to be released into the wild to help restore the state’s depleted condor population.
“This year’s chicks will eventually help increase the genetic diversity of the wild population of condors,” Denise Verret, chief executive and director of the Los Angeles Zoo, said in a news release. “This iconic species represents a conservation win for Los Angeles and for California.”
Four of the chicks are being raised under a double-brooding method, which means two chicks are being raised at the same time by two surrogate California condors, according to the release. The Los Angeles Zoo was the first zoo to use this breeding technique.
[…]
Condors are under threat from lead poisonings and other toxins. According to a 2022 study, there were 40 DDT-related compounds—or chemicals that had made their way to the top of the food chain from contaminated marine life—found in the blood of wild California condors.
There were only 22 California condors left on Earth when the California Condor Recovery Program started four decades ago. As of 2024, there were 561 condors, with 344 living in the wild. The species remains critically endangered.
HABITAT
California condors live in the grasslands and chaparral-covered mountains of California, Arizona, and Baja California, Mexico.
DIET
As vultures, condors are carnivorous scavengers, feeding on a variety of carrion from livestock to deer and smaller animals, bison, pronghorn, and marine mammals.
PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
Adult condors measure three to four feet in body length and typically weigh between 17 and 24 pounds. They can live more than 50 years. The oldest bird at the L.A. Zoo, Topatopa, was born in April 1966.
What incredible birds. They are dinosaurs living among us. Let’s hope we can save them.
