Easter homily: Baron David Frost touts God in the Times of London

April 5, 2026 • 10:15 am

I guess the Times of London is considered “mainstream media” in the UK, and, like American MSM, seems to be touting religion in a way we didn’t see a few years ago. In this short article, which I found through the disparaging tweet below (an accurate, tweet, it seems), Baron David Frost, a conservative political bigwig in the UK, tells us why we should be going to church this Easter.  He seems to love “full-fat supernatural Christianity,” which apparently means the whole Catholic hog, from snout to tail. No “skim Christianity” for him!

Go below to read the article.

Hello, I am mental.

— Richard Smyth (@rsmythfreelance.bsky.social) 2026-04-03T07:46:00.501Z

Click the screenshot below to go to an archived version of the Times piece, which describes Lord Frost (is that the same thing as a Baron?) this way:

Lord Frost led the negotiations that finally took Britain out of the EU in 2020.  A Cabinet minister in the Boris Johnson government, he resigned in protest at the handling of Covid lockdowns, and has since been a persistent advocate of a more fully conservative approach to policy on the Right. He is a non-affiliated peer in the House of Lords.

Wikipedia adds this:

David George Hamilton Frost, Baron Frost (born 21 February 1965) is a British diplomat, civil servant and politician who served as a Minister of State at the Cabinet Office between March and December 2021. Frost was Chief Negotiator of Task Force Europe from January 2020 until his resignation in December 2021.

Frost spent his early professional career in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), becoming Ambassador to Denmark, EU Director at the FCO, and Director for Europe and International Trade at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. He was a special adviser to Boris Johnson when the latter was Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s government.

And yes, I have to say, although it’s Easter, the guy is mental, for he thinks that anybody who has had an elevating aesthetic or emotional experience is providing evidence not just for God, but for the God of Rome.

I’ll put a few topics under bold headings (mine). The indented parts are from the article by Baron Frost.

The evidence for a revival of Christianity is weak. First, Frost makes this admission:

The Quiet Revival – the view that people are coming back to church and the long years of decline might be over – has been much discussed in ecclesiastical circles this last year. A YouGov poll in a Bible Society report seemed to vindicate it by asserting the number of 18 to 24-year-olds attending church monthly had jumped from 4 per cent in 2018 to 16 per cent in 2024.

It’s fair to say that these figures were a bit controversial right from the start. And the doubts were justified last week, when YouGov, in its latest polling flop, had to admit it had made an error and had not applied proper quality control to its sample.

So are we back to square one? Is the whole thing just confirmation bias and wishful thinking?

So he gives the “evidence” for the revival, which he has to find in places other than the polls. One is in hearsay, another his own behavior:

I don’t think so. Something is definitely happening, if not exactly what the Bible Society described. There is too much other evidence. Numbers coming into the Catholic Church each Easter, here and across the West, are increasing (I was one in 2025). Footballers are open about their faith in a way that didn’t happen a decade back. Sales of printed Bibles have doubled. There is even a mini boom in the Greek Orthodox Church going on.

Summing it up, the Rev Daniel French, chaplain at Greenwich University and Irreverend podcaster, said: “I see considerable curiosity about faith, particularly from young adults, often men. The old assumptions that religious conversations are taboo have evaporated. My week is filled with impromptu chats about God in a way it wasn’t ten years ago.”

Why is the West becoming more Christian? It isn’t, but this is what the sweating Baron says: it’s the Internet and the stagnation of society, Jake!

Why might this be? It’s speculative, but my experience suggests several different reasons. One is the simple availability of different Christian voices on the internet. If your only exposure to Christianity is in your school religious studies class with a dull and inexpert teacher, as it might have been in the past, it could turn you off for good. But if you can hear Glen Scrivener or Bishop Robert Barron online, you are more likely to think: “I need to take this seriously.”

There is also the collapse of the narrative of inevitable progress, the belief that young people will always be economically better off than their parents, the growing dysfunction in society starting with the pandemic, all may be generating a tendency to look beyond economics for life satisfaction.

Of course we know that there is a negative correlation between religiosity and well-being, a correlation that holds across both nations and U.S. states. The worse off you are, the more religious you are. Further, there’s a positive correlation between income inequality (measured by the “Gini index”) and religiosity: the higher the inequality, the more religious people are. That the former produces the latter, so it’s not a spurious correlation, is supported by the fact that religiosity rises a year after inequality rises.  Likewise with falls of inequality and falls of religiosity. That’s not proof, but is support for the connection made famous by Karl Marx, a quotation that is often truncated to distort its meaning:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

What Marx was saying was not that religion was good for people because it soothed them, but that it was bad for people because it was what people did when they could not find relief from their suffering and oppression through means that could actually improve their situation. They thus have to turn to the opium of belief.

The Baron sees evidence for God every time people have an aesthetic or spiritual experience.  Not just evidence for God, apparently, but evidence for Catholicism!:

Reflect on the experiences in your life where you feel, for a moment, you might have had an experience of something beyond this world, a moment in the English countryside, a phrase of music that tugs at the heartstrings, and ask yourself why you feel that, if material reality is really all there is. Consider too that most people in history, and indeed most people in the world today, have not had that belief, and maybe aren’t all wrong. Maybe western secular society doesn’t know everything about everything.

But of course people throughout the world have this kind of experience, people including atheists like Richard Dawkins and me. And not for a minute do we think that emotionality is evidence for gods. Is it evidence for Allah, and also for Xenu and Vishnu?

The evidence that these emotions and epiphanies are the product of material reality can be seen, for one thing, because you can have them simply by taking drugs. I remember once when I was in college, doing a science fellowship during the summer, I took LSD and walked through the quad (the “Sunken Garden”) at William and Mary.  There were high-school brass bands having some kind of competition, and, in my psychedelic daze, their ragged, dissonant music seemed like the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. Was that evidence for God? Had I not been tripping, I would have run away in horror.

The Baron admits that Christianity is meaningless unles you believe its foundational truths. You don’t often see this kind of admission since “sophisticated” believers don’t like to admit it, nor will they say explicitly what they believe:

After all, the important thing about Christianity is not whether it makes you feel better or whether it is good for society, but whether it is true. If it is, we should all want to know that, and if it isn’t, we are right to reject it. The one thing we should not do is not properly consider it. And in Western society that is all too easy.

I’ve considered the “evidence”, which of course is almost entirely what’s in the Bible.  And I don’t buy it, as I suspect most of the readers here don’t.  And what about the gazillion other faiths of the world. Why does Frost reject Mormonism, Hinduism, Islam, and cargo cults but accept the “truth” of Christianity? (Like Christians, adherents to cargo cults keep waiting for a savior who never comes.) I’d like the Baron to tell me how he knows not just the Resurrection and Jesus’s “miracles” were true, but why the writing of the Quran is a bogus story. And why, among Christian religions, are the dictates of Catholicm true? (The Baron touts the revival of religion as involving mainly Catholicism and “Protestant evangelicals.)  Gimme that full-fat religion!

The Baron tells us why we should go to Church.

In an essay entitled Man or Rabbit?, CS Lewis gently mocked those who didn’t reject Christianity but tried to ignore it, not from disbelief, but from a suspicion that it might be true after all and that acknowledging it would be inconvenient – rather like someone who doesn’t open their bank statements for fear of what might be in them. Don’t be like that person. Face the issue head on. At least give Christianity a fair hearing. Show up to church this Easter. You never know what might happen.

I ignore Christianity because it’s a full-fat superstition supported by no evidence. I’m amused that he quotes C. S. Lewis, who I admit I find hilariously stupid about religion even though his Mere Christianity is probably the most influential work of popular theology ever. I’ve read it, of course, and I always have to laugh when I read “Lewis’s trilemma“—an argument for the divinity of Jesus and truth of his message. Lewis actually stole this argument from others, as several people had made it before him. Here’s Lewis’s version:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

Of course there are alternatives to “liar, lunatic, or Lord”; I’m sure you can think of at least one: people made up what Jesus said in the Bible. You can read alternative criticisms here.

But the real question is whether Frost himself is a liar, lunatic, or Lord. And we already know the answer: he’s a Lord.

I guess I’m just splenetic on this day when people go to Church to worship something for which there’s no evidence. And, contra Frost, I won’t be showing up to church this Easter. Instead, I’m writing this post.

A transitional fauna shows that the “Cambrian explosion” was happening before the Cambrian

April 5, 2026 • 8:30 am

The Cambrian Period, beginning at 538.8 Ma (million years ago) and lasting about 52 million years, is famous for marking the transition from simple and largely unicellular animals to, beginning at the period’s inception, representatives of modern groups.  This apparently rapid onset of modern forms of multicellular animals constitutes the famous “Cambrian Explosion.”

The Cambrian was preceded by the 96-million-year-long Ediacaran period, extending from 635 million years ago to the beginning of the Cambrian. The Ediacaran fauna, consisting of some multicellular animals of unknown affinity and things looking like members of some modern groups like cnidarians (represented today by jellyfish, corals and anemone). But most of the Ediacaran groups appeared to have died out at the end of the Ediacaran, and for unknown reasons.

The boundary between the Ediacran and the Cambrian thus marks a major transition in animal life.   Many of the “modern” groups that first arose during the Cambrian don’t have apparent ancestors in the Ediacaran, and so those modern groups were thought to have evolved almost instantaneously (in geological time!). But surely modern groups had ancestors during the Ediacaran: unless you’re a Biblical fundamentalist, you realize that ancestors of modern groups had to have existed well before the Cambrian explosion.

Now a paper in Science, based on a fossil group called the Jiangchuan Biota that spans the period from 559-534 million years ago, shows that representatives of “modern” groups seen in the Cambrian explosion were indeed present in the late Ediacaran, pushing back the time of origin of modern phyla 4-5 million years.  This conclusion was possible because of the remarkable preservation of the animals (and some algae), all present as carbonaceous films on rocks—the same kind of films (presumably due to rapid burial) that enabled us to see the remarkable Burgess Shale fauna of the middle Cambrian. The new find was in the province of Yunnan in Southwestern China.

You can see the paper by clicking the screenshot below, reading the pdf here, or reading the shorter blurb at an Oxford University sit. at the bottom. All photos below are taken from the paper.

I won’t go into all the terminology involved in identifying the groups but will show a few fossils from the paper strongly suggesting that some “modern” groups arose in the late Ediacaran.

First, an anomalous animal that appears to be some kind of worm, but one with a “holdfast” disc on its butt. We don’t know what this one is, but it has oral projections or tentacles. The disc is very clear:

Another wormlike animal (note that these are small: a few millimeters) having a clear oral region. Again, we’re not sure what this is, but the preservation as a carbon film is remarkable:

A deuterostome (animals where the first opening in the embryo becomes the anus rather than the mouth), a group thought to have appeared in the Cambrian but here seen in the Ediacaran: this one resembles  Herpetogaster, known from the early Cambrian which, according to Wikipedia, “possessed a pair of branching tentacles and a tough but flexible body that curved helically to the right like a ram’s horn and was divided into at least 13 segments”. This one, like Herpetogaster, has tentacles (at leat four) and a stalk.  It’s interpreted as a relative of acorn worms, relatives of modern echinoderms which are hemichordates, the closest living group to modern chordates (animals with notochords and a dorsal nerve chord, which include all vertebrates).

The one below,described in the paper as “Margaretia-like animal now known as a dwelling tube for an enteropneust hemichordate worm”. It’s also described as having “regular, oval-shaped holes running along its length”. Again, we see what is likely an early hemichordate, showing that the relatives of modern chordates seem to have been present several million years before the Cambrian explosion began.

The one below is identified as a ctenophore, or comb jelly, a phylum of early animals previously known only from the mid-Cambrian. “OS” stands for “oral skirt”, described as “a specialized, often scalloped, muscular, or rigid structure surrounding the mouth, primarily found in Cambrian-era fossil comb jellies such as Ctenorhabdotus and Thalassostaphylos. Unlike modern ctenophores, these ancient species used the skirt for feeding, potentially to engulf large prey.”

Finally, this animal is thought to be an early cnidarian with tentacles and a holdfast (HF). Although one form identified as a cnidarian had already been recognized from the Ediacaran, here we have another that’s different, showing a radiation of cnidarians before the Cambrian.

These fossil data support already-existing molecular data suggesting that animal groups had already evolved and diversified before the Cambrian, though until now no fossils, or only a few suggestive fossils, were known.

The authors’ summary below, though written in scient-ese, basically says that a major radiation of animal phyla had already begun before the Ediacran/Cambrian boundary, but we did not know about it because the conditions for forming this kind of trace fossil, requiring rapid burial in marine sediment (and subsequent finding by investigators!) were infrequent:

The new Jiangchuan animal fossils, dominated by bilaterians of apparently diverse affinities, with rarer fossils more typical of late Ediacaran deposits, could be described as a “Cambrian-type” assemblage from the late Ediacaran. A dominantly bilaterian assemblage from the late Ediacaran may not have been discovered until now as a result of the paucity of carbonaceous compressions from this time, hinting at a broader taphonomic bias (51).

If you want a short, readable summary of the importance of this fine, click below to read a shorter summary from Oxford University.

Sunday: Hili dialogue

April 5, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, April 5, 2026, and it’s Easter, which gives me a chance to tell my Jewish Easter joke.  My records say “It comes from the site Southern Jewish Humor, which gets the story from Eli N. Evans, who wrote The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South: Evans said he searched for the best example he could find of Southern Jewish humor. ”

He told the story of a Jewish storekeeper in a small town who was approached by the Christian elders to show solidarity for their Easter holiday.

Mr. Goldberg was chagrined but when Easter came, after sunrise services on a nearby hilltop, the mayor, all the churchgoers, and the leading families in the city gathered in the town square in front of his store.  The store had a new sign but it was draped with a parachute.

After an introduction from the mayor, at the appointed hour, the owner pulled the rope and there it was revealed in all its wonder for all to see: “Christ Has Risen, but Goldberg’s prices remain the same.”

And, since it’s still Passover (until April 9).  I hope you get this:

It’s also First Contact Day from Star Trek (humans contacted aliens on April 5, 2063 when the Vulcan ship T’Plana-Hath landed in Bozeman, Montana), National Baked Ham with Pineapple Day, National Caramel Day, and National Deep Dish Pizza Day (the best kind, but best only in Chicago).

Today’s Google Doodle marks the holiday; click to see where it goes:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 1 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*BREAKING NEWS (relevant to first post below). The missing U.S. airman has been rescued in a daring night commando raid in Iran.

An Air Force officer whose fighter jet had been shot down in Iran was rescued by U.S. Special Operations forces in a risky night mission deep inside Iranian territory, President Trump said on social media early Sunday.

The rescue followed a life-or-death race between U.S. and Iranian forces that stretched over two days to reach the injured airman, a weapon systems officer, officials said. The operation took commandos deep inside Iran and involved hundreds of special operations troops.

There were no U.S. casualties among the rescue team, Mr. Trump said. The rescued officer had “sustained injuries, but he will be just fine,” Mr. Trump added.

Finding the downed airman had been the U.S. military’s top priority since Friday, when Iran’s military shot down the F-15E Strike Eagle. It was the first known instance of a U.S. combat aircraft being shot down by Iran since the war began more than a month ago. The two members ejected from the cockpit and the pilot was quickly rescued.

Of course the NYT, which wants America to lose the war, had to qualify the above by adding this right after:

The incident underscored Iran’s ability to fight back despite weeks of attacks on its military arsenal. On Sunday, Israel and Gulf nations reported attempted drone and missile strikes they attributed to Iran. Kuwaiti officials said Iranian drones significantly damaged two power and water desalination plants, and sparked a fire at the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation’s oil complex.

This is excellent news for several reasons: the man is alive and apparently well, and Iran, who was using hundreds of forces to find him (plus offering a $60,000 bounty), would have used him as a bargaining chip to settle the war, much as the Palestinians do when they capture an IDF soldier or take civilian hostages.

*An airman shot down over Iran in an F15 fighter bailed out on Friday along with a fellow crewman. One has been rescued, but the other airman is somewhere in Iran, with the military doing a lot of sorties to find him.

The U.S. military was racing on Saturday to find an American airman who ejected from a fighter jet that was shot down over Iran, even as President Trump said time was “running out” on his ultimatum to escalate U.S. attacks unless a deal was reached in two days.

The White House has mostly been silent about the downing of the U.S. F-15E fighter jet by Iranian forces since it was first reported more than a day ago, as well as about the attempts to recover its two crew members. U.S. officials said one had been rescued, but the status of the second was unknown as of Saturday.

In a social media post on Saturday morning, Mr. Trump did not address the airman’s status. Instead, he reiterated that the deadline for his threat to massively bombard Iranian power plants would expire in 48 hours unless Iran agreed to stop blockading the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for Persian Gulf oil and gas.

Mr. Trump has already delayed the ultimatum twice, saying that there were ongoing talks between the United States and Iran. Iranian officials have publicly dismissed U.S. demands, however, and continued to voice defiance after the two airmen were shot down on Friday.

. . . The downing of the fighter jet on Friday was the first time U.S. personnel and combat aircraft have been shot down in Iran since the U.S.-Israeli war began in late February. Iranian forces were also seeking to capture the missing American, Iranian officials said, speaking anonymously to discuss ongoing operations.

I can’t help but imagine what that pilot, who is likely still alive, is doing. The television news last night said he had been trained in how to survive in enemy territory, and I presume he has at least some food and water with him (I’m presuming that it’s a male). But Iran has offered a $60,000 bounty for anyone who turns the pilot over to the police, and I can only imagine what they’d do to him if they caught him. (Do no presume that Iran adheres to the Geneva Convention for POWs!).  Sometimes I fantasize that he’ll be taken in by anti-regime civilians, who will forego the bounty, and endanger their own lives, by harboring an enemy airman.

*The Wall Street Journal discusses Trump’s attempts to open the Strait of Hormuz, a task that the WSJ calls “mission impossible”:

President Trump has called on allied nations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, to allow a fifth of the world’s oil to flow again through the passageway that Iran has effectively shut since the war started.

The problem: Naval escorts for tankers through such a narrow waterway in a war zone would be nearly impossible, say allied officials and military experts. Reopening the strait would more likely come after a cease-fire and through international pressure on Iran, they say.

Forcing open the strait militarily is unrealistic, French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday. “It would take forever and would expose all those crossing the strait to risks” of Iranian attack, he said.

“Iran is trying to hold the global economy hostage in the Strait of Hormuz,” U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said Thursday after convening a meeting of more than 40 countries seeking to reopen the strait. They discussed political and diplomatic steps, including potential sanctions, she said. Military intervention wasn’t on the list of options discussed.

Trump said Wednesday that strikes on Iran would continue for more than two weeks. During that time, shippers are unlikely to risk sending commercial vessels through the combat zone, analysts say. The question is what level of assurance they need to start sailing again in large numbers.

U.S. and Israeli strikes have badly damaged Iran’s regular naval assets. Yet the main threat to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz comes not from Iran’s conventional navy but from its arsenal of land-based antiship missiles, drones, swarms of small attack craft, midget submarines and various types of mines.

Geography complicates defending ships. The strait is roughly 20 miles wide at its narrowest point and divided into lanes to separate marine traffic, forcing merchant ships to travel along predictable routes. The warning time of a potential attack, and the chance to respond, would be exceedingly brief.

Iran has nearly 1,000 miles of coastline along the Persian Gulf, which it can use to launch attacks against ships, such as the drone strike that earlier this week hit a fully laden Kuwaiti oil tanker off the coast of Dubai. The coastline is dominated by mountains and coves, allowing Iranian forces to launch surprise attacks with swarms of speed boats. Tunnels under the rock, or ones hidden by mangroves and in salt caves, shelter boats that can either be launched directly into the water, or from trailers.

If we need a cease-fire and negotiated settlement with Iran to open the Strait, then everything becomes a mess, as a negotiated settlement that leaves the theocracy in power doesn’t solve any problem except the transit of oil. It doesn’t solve the oppression and murder of Iranian civilians, the dictatorial nature of the government, and the government’s drive to produce nuclear weapons. The war is a mess, and I worry that Trump will just tire of it, let Iran go the way of Venezuela (no real change in leadership), and move on to his next “project.”

*Luana sent this NYT headline (article archived here):

An excerpt:

Syracuse University is closing or halting enrollment in about 20 percent of its academic programs, in a move that the school’s provost said was designed to create a university that would be “more focused, more distinctive and more aligned with student demand.”

The overhaul was revealed in a letter from the provost, Lois Agnew, that was sent on Wednesday to students and faculty members. And while the letter did not list the cuts, a spreadsheet provided by the university showed that the humanities and the fine arts represented the largest share.

Classics and ceramics are out as majors, along with a host of others that had attracted few students.

In all, 93 of the 460 academic programs at the school will be closed or paused, meaning that no new students will be able to enroll in those majors. Coursework in the areas will still be offered, and minors in many of the subjects will continue to be available.

Similar changes are happening at universities around the country, as students seek out fields that they believe will more directly translate into higher-paying jobs, a recent analysis by the American Enterprise Institute showed. College administrators, following the market, have been reducing humanities offerings.

Among the 17 majors ending in the College of Arts and Sciences are the undergraduate degrees in classical civilization, classics, German, Italian, Middle Eastern studies and Modern Jewish studies, the spreadsheet showed.

Students will still be able to study German and Italian — as well as Arabic, Chinese, French and Spanish — as tracks in a new world languages and cultures bachelor’s degree program or as minors, a website detailing the changes showed.

In the College of Visual and Performing Arts, it will no longer be possible to major in ceramics, jewelry and metalsmithing, sculpture, painting or art video, though coursework in those areas will remain. Instead, students will be channeled into a broader bachelor of fine arts degree that will offer those fields as concentrations.

You can see the full list of programs cut by Syracuse here. This has also happened, though on a smaller scale, at the University of Chicago:

The University of Chicago’s Division of the Arts & Humanities is preparing for a significant reorganization to cut administrative costs, with proposed changes expected to be presented to Provost Katherine Baicker by late August.

Citing new federal policies and shifts in the “underlying financial models” for higher education, the division is considering consolidating its 15 departments into eight, reducing language instruction, and establishing minimum class and program sizes.

This is also solely in the humanities, and undoubtedly for the same reason: students aren’t majoring in those areas because you can’t get a job with a major in, say, languages or fine arts.  I find this all very sad, because consolidating departments inevitably means cutting courses that were essential for a major but not sufficiently attractive to be part of a liberal education.  And that inevitably means cutting faculty lines. What’s essential is to maintain courses that would be pivotal for a liberal education, and I’m sure that at least Chicago will do that. I am surprised that gender studies has not been on the chopping block, but that may be for ideological rather than for enrollment reasons.

*Elliott Abrams, who served in foreign-policy positions under three Republican Presidents, has a critique in the National Review of Trump’s latest update on Iran: “The President’s not-so-reassuring Iran address.” with the subtitle, “President Trump could have done a better job assuaging the concerns of the American public.”

 . . . as a performance, it was unimpressive. The president read his lines too fast, and instead of emphasizing the key words or passages, he added comments that were sometimes irrelevant, other times disturbing, and often inaccurate. Do Americans really want to bomb Iran or anyone else “back the Stone Ages where they belong”? Does anyone believe the second-level Revolutionary Guard officers who’ve replaced those killed are actually “less radical and much more reasonable”? In what possible sense was Iran trying to build “a nuclear weapon like nobody’s ever seen before”?

It would have been far better for the president to speak more plainly about the great achievements of these four weeks of combat. And the best parts of the speech were his explanations of our purpose: to prevent the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism from developing a nuclear weapon and from threatening its neighbors — and us — with intercontinental ballistic missiles and other growing military assets.

What did the president say about the future? Many predictions had suggested he would announce ending the war quickly, due to fear of the political effects of high oil prices and the falling stock market. But Donald Trump is always unpredictable and always thinking about bargaining to come. In the speech, he seemed to promise two to three more weeks of even heavier bombing, and by mid-April, it appears that both we and Israel will be getting to the bottom of our target lists. In early March, the White House and the Pentagon predicted the war would take four to six weeks, so they are pretty much on schedule.

And the war may end sooner. Pakistan is sending messages back and forth about a cease-fire. In my view, there will be no peace treaty to end the war, for two reasons. The two sides are too far apart in our demands, and there’s no individual or structure now in Tehran able to make the compromises any such multi-page agreement would require. So the likely end will come in a simple deal to stop shooting.

That leaves the Strait of Hormuz, and here the president is saying “don’t look at me, it’s an international responsibility.” He’s at least partially right: Why can’t there be an international maritime force protecting the strait from Iran? The European Union navies combine in EUNAVFOR Atalanta and the Maritime Security Centre Indian Ocean, joint efforts against piracy and to enhance maritime security off the Horn of Africa, in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Persian Gulf. The Combined Maritime Force is a 46-nation effort led by the United States with similar goals.

It is regrettable that instead of urging (or leading) pragmatic, positive action, the president most often turns to insults of allies and threats to leave NATO. On Wednesday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer invited more than 35 countries to a meeting on strait security, in London. That’s a start. There is no reason why a large multinational naval coalition cannot patrol the strait once this war ends, presumably in April.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the president’s kind words about those who are actually fighting on our side (he mentioned Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain, though except for Israel they are actually doing nothing but self-defense) makes his coldness to Ukraine even more indefensible. Ukraine is on our side too, helping our allies defend against the Iranian drones they know so well because Iran sells them to Russia. And like Israel, they fight patriotically and effectively. It is long past time for the president to square up who’s on our side and who’s against us, and to see Ukraine as a key ally and Russia as one of our worst enemies.

The speech seemed more like an effort to silence the critics who kept asking “why doesn’t the president speak to the nation?” than an important message he felt compelled to deliver on all the networks. Given that he speaks to the press almost every day, this kind of set speech may be superfluous in getting through to the public. And reading speeches isn’t his forte anyway.

I have to say that I didn’t listen to Trump’s bombast, as I simply forgot, but I know what he said from the news.  As far as defending the Strait of Hormuz as an international responsibility, I can see why European countries don’t want to put their military in service defending commercial ships, because if Israel and the U.S. had not started the war, there would be no need to defend the Strait.  Trump’s performance was lame, as Abrams says,  and I always worry that regime change in Iran is not a priority. For several years I’ve been posting Masih Alinejad’s tweets about public opposition to Iran’s theocracy, and Iran seems second to only North Korea in oppressing its people. If the theocracy stays in power, my verdict will have been that we lost the war—especially if Iran doesn’t promise to end it’s nuclear problem, which it won’t. But, as I always say, I’m just a simple country geneticist, not a political pundit.

*Hooray! (Not!) Yet another book on why sex isn’t binary is coming out, and the good news is that you don’t have to waste your money on it (h/t Krzysztof ).  Click on the cover photo below if you want to see the Amazon blurb, which includes this bushwa:

Biological sex is as nuanced as gender. Many of us are biologically more typically masculine in some ways and more typically feminine in others. The constellation of traits that make up our sex identity are wide-ranging and often overlap. Height, strength, body hair, genitalia, hormonal balances—these are all part of the picture. How should we think about this kind of variation?

The Binary Delusion explores the actual diversity of our biological sex characteristics, from genitals to brains. Some people may have typically female genitals and a Y chromosome and testes, rather than ovaries. This anatomy is intermediate, not completely male and not completely female, and it occurs in nature all the time. Depending on how you choose to count, up to 6% of the population—about 20 million people in the US or 500 million worldwide—likely have sex traits that aren’t exactly male or exactly female.

As a biologist, Dr. Berkowitz worries that more people aren’t aware of this fundamental fact of human life. Nearly all of us manipulate our bodies in one way or another to make them appear more typically masculine or feminine. The only way to make sense of these apparent contradictions is that our society insists—regardless of our biology—that each body look a specific way from infancy until death. It’s a disturbingly limited view of self-expression, and Dr. Berkowitz argues that it’s worse than that: it’s unscientific.

We see right away a conflation between “biological sex” (yes, the term is used) and gender. A tomboy or effeminate male are still female and male respectively, though their gender presentation may differ from what we usually see.  And where did Berkowitz get the inflated 6% figure?  Well, it could either include homosexuals, estimated at 3-6% of the population (yes, they are binary but are attracted to people of the same sex), or of women with polycystic ovary syndrome, which is a hormonal disorder of women, and has a relatively high frequency. But those women still produce eggs, for crying out loud.  The real frequency of “intersex” people, who aren’t categorizable in the binary, is about 0.018%. As Colin Wright says in a good summary of these inflated statistics and expanding terms:

Consider people with so-called “intersex” conditions—developmental anomalies that result in sexually ambiguous genitalia or mismatches between sex chromosomes and physical appearance. These conditions are genuinely rare, affecting about 0.018 percent of the population, or roughly 1 in 5,500 people. To put that in perspective, you could fill a mid-sized sports arena and expect to find maybe three or four people with true “intersex” conditions (in the same arena, you’d likely find around 500–1,000 gay/lesbian people, based on estimates that 3–6 percent of the population are homosexual).

But advocates worried that such a small number wouldn’t generate the public concern needed to protect these individuals from unnecessary medical interventions and social mistreatment. So they broadened the definition to include nearly any difference in sexual development, no matter how minor. This inflated statistic then took on a life of its own, getting co-opted by activists in the transgender movement to argue that sex exists on a continuum rather than as a binary. They use these numbers to claim that the categories of male and female are “social constructs” that should be open to self-identification, arguing that individuals should be allowed to enter any sex-segregated space they choose.

And always be wary if someone puts the title “Ph.D” after their names on the cover.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, it’s a typical holiday:

Hili: That Easter breakfast was wonderful.
Andrzej: I share your opinion, but we still have a lot of work today.

In Polish:

Hili: To wielkanocne śniadanie było wspaniałe.
Ja: Podzielam twoje zdanie, ale i tak mamy dziś dużo pracy.

*******************

From The Language Nerds:

From Stacy:

From Jesus of the Day, another medieval painting:

From Masih, who presents another human-rights activist imprisoned in Iran:

From Emma, describing A Very Bad Idea:

From Simon: the NYT screws up big time (they say they’ll publish a correction):

Can you imagine how many people approved it before publishing? Shameful.

— Olga Nesterova (@onestpress.onestnetwork.com) 2026-04-03T19:20:19.097Z

Two from my feed. First, boat cats (they all need lifejackets):

For some reason I love these repetitive foreign sentences:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb.  The first one is amazing.

While you slept last night: ~100 million birds took to the skies 🐦 The Mid-Atlantic saw heavy traffic moving north/northeast, with migration hotspots from the Southeast to Ohio Valley and Southern Plains. The overnight rush continues this weekend.Details at cwg.live

— Capital Weather Gang (@capitalweather.bsky.social) 2026-04-03T18:25:53.051Z

And Matthew sent me this NYT headline, saying, “If this were a UK newspaper you’d know they were taking the piss. In the case of the NYT, not.”  (They’ve changed the headline to reflect that nobody at the Waffle House remembers this guy.)

 

Caturday felid trifecta: “Crazy cat lady” banned from feeder ferals, gets big support; the cats of Istanbul; why cats make biscuits; and lagniappe

April 4, 2026 • 11:00 am

We have our usual three items plus lagniappe today.  Read on:

First, click below to see a recent Guardian story about how a mean local council tried to ban this British woman from feeding feral cats, and how the neighbors (and a charity) stepped up to help her.

An excerpt:

“Two ladies from York have just been in,” said Collette Boler at the till of her small cafe in Thurnscoe, near Barnsley. Her voice began to choke up.

“They came in with a box of chocolates and a card, a box of cat food, a bag of cat biscuits and just said ‘carry on doing what you’re doing, you’re absolutely fabulous’. And a man’s just given me a tenner for cat food. It’s been incredible.”

The grandmother of seven has become an unlikely icon for cat lovers everywhere after finding herself banned from feeding a colony of feral felines she has looked after for 20 years.

She had been visiting them twice a day, including Christmas Day, even spending her own money on vet bills and having some neutered, which she admitted cost “a fortune”.

But two weeks ago Boler – affectionately known as the “crazy cat lady” – was subject to what some of her supporters see as a heavy-handed and overzealous ban, after a neighbouring business complained to the council over cat faeces on its premises.

Now if Boler continues to feed the cats, she will be issued with a community protection notice – a type of antisocial behaviour order – which could result in a fine of up to £2,500.

But she has been overwhelmed with support after others stepped in to help, including neighbours, strangers and a national cat charity.

. . .The Cat Action Trust 1977 has stepped in by writing to Barnsley council to urge it to repeal Boler’s b

“Feeders like Collette actually play a really important role,” said Alice Ostapjuk-Wise, a volunteer for the national charity which advocates for the “invisible issue” of cats that have never had contact with humans. “[Feeders] can alert us when a new cat arrives that might not be neutered.” The charity carries out neutering to control their numbers.

The Cat Action Trust 1977 has collected food for the Barnsley cats, which are frightened of humans and mostly stay out of sight, though the council has not made clear whether it too will face consequences for feeding them.

Ostapjuk-Wise said: “We just want to do what we can because some councils actually choose to exterminate feral cat colonies, and that’s the last thing we want.

“The path they seem to be taking so far appears to be very inhumane, basically starving the cats. That’s not going to solve the problem.”

. . .Barnsley council did not respond to a request for comment but previously told local media it recognised Boler’s “good intentions” but the community protection warning was “an early step to prevent the situation from getting worse”.

“We always aim to protect public health and safety, and we encourage anyone concerned about stray animals to work with recognised animal welfare organisations, so support can be provided safely.”

Boler said she had “never expected” so much attention. “I just wish they’d let me feed my cats,” she said. “That’s all I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

The Barnsley council sucks. Just because they don’t like feral cat feces, they’re starving the cats to death. There is a change.org petition with nearly 4,000 signatures that you can sign, and I just signed it. Please join me; it costs you nothing and may help save the Barnsley cats from the meanies.

And here’s a FB video with an interview of Boler, who seems very nice.

*********************

This is a wonderful 14-minute video of the cats of Istanbul and how the locals care for them. I love that city–not just for the fact that it harbors “strays” who are effectively pets, but also because it’s beautiful and has lots of attractions.

This is really what it’s like to be in Istanbul. If you want a good commercial movie about Istanbul’s cats, do watch the movie “Kedi” (the Turkis words for cats), made in 2016.  It has a 98% critics’ rating rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a rating that only the very best movies get.

I*********************

The World’s Best Cat Litter site answers a recurring question among cat owners:

There are a variety of answers. Some condensed answers:

It’s in their nature

Kneading is an instinctual trait that begins in kittenhood. When kittens are feeding from their mother, they push on her mammary glands with their paws to help stimulate milk flow. For the mother, this releases oxytocin, also known as the bonding hormone.

You might notice your cat dribbling a little when they are kneading. This is natural too! Some cats go into “milking mode” even though they are older and fully weaned. They just get in the zone and subconsciously expect the milk that would have come from their mother.

They’re claiming their territory

Did you know that cats have scent glands in their paw pads? Scent glands are a way for cats (and other animals) to mark their territory, a trait that is especially important in the wild.

Cats tend to make biscuits on their favorite human, other pets in the home, and their favorite blankets. As a cat kneads, they release their scent to mark something as theirs. So if your cat has a habit of kneading on your stomach, congratulations! You are officially their property.

They’re making their bed

In the wild, felines knead tall grass to create a comfortable space for sleeping.

At home, your cat might like to make biscuits on your blankets, clothes, or even your body. This just means they are trying to get cozy and snuggly for a long cat nap.

They love you!

Kneading is typically a behavior that happens when a cat feels happy and secure, but they aren’t necessarily expecting milk from the process.

They’re going into heat

Female, unspayed cats are known to knead their paws before “estrus,” or going into heat. The act of kneading is a sign to male cats that the feline wants and is able to mate.

There’s further information about whether you should prevent them from kneading (no!), and advice to trim their nails so they don’t do damage when they make biscuits.

Or you can watch this explanatory video:

*********************

Lagniappe: An appropriate tweet showing a street sign in Istanbul asking people to be attentive for road cats:

. . . and an educational FB meme from Debra:

h/t: Matthew, Ginger K.

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 4, 2026 • 8:40 am

Send in your photos if you got ’em!

We have a batch of lovely hummingbird photos today sent in by Ephraim Heller, including a hummer in her nest. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

On my February visit to Trinidad and Tobago I managed to photograph 13 of the 18 hummingbirds that are sometimes present on the islands. A previous post was devoted entirely to my new favorite bird, the tufted coquette. Today’s post contains photos of six other species; a subsequent post will cover the remainder. The species that I did not photograph either do not visit feeders or are only present seasonally in the country.

Trinidad and Tobago sits at the junction of South America and the Caribbean, and its unusual diversity of hummingbird species is due to its recent geological separation from the Venezuelan coast and the diversity of habitats it retains. Both Trinidad and Tobago are fragments of the South American continental shelf that were once connected to the mainland and later became isolated as sea levels and tectonics changed. Trinidad was connected to South America via a land bridge during the last glacial maximum, 10,000-12,000 years ago. The white-chested emerald population restricted to Trinidad and the white-tailed sabrewing restricted to Tobago show that measurable biological divergence can occur over relatively short timescales once island populations are isolated.

Hermits (subfamily Phaethornithinae) diverged from all other hummingbirds early enough in the family’s evolutionary history that they are sometimes described as a parallel radiation. They share several features that distinguish them from typical hummingbirds: bills that are long and strongly curved (matching the curved tubular flowers they prefer, particularly Heliconia), plumage that is brown or green rather than iridescent, and a foraging strategy — trap-lining — in which each individual follows a memorized route through the forest, visiting widely spaced flowers in sequence rather than defending a single patch. Because trap-liners visit many individual plants across a large area, they tend to carry pollen between plants that are far apart, making them important cross-pollinators over distances that territorial hummingbirds rarely cover. Male hermits do not defend territories at all; instead, they gather in loose groups (leks), where each male sings from a fixed perch to attract females. Females select mates and then nest and raise young entirely on their own.

Green Hermit (Phaethornis guy):

Little Hermit (Phaethornis longuemareus):

Rufous-breasted Hermit (Glaucis hirsutus):

The rufous-breasted hermit is the primary and perhaps the unique pollinator of the deer meat (Centropogon cornutus) flower:

Here is a rufous-breasted hermit on its nest, built under the leaf of a Heliconius:

Now moving on from the hermits (subfamily Phaethornithinae), the rest of my photos are of species of typical hummingbirds (subfamily Trochilinae).

The white-necked jacobin (Florisuga mellivora) has been studied extensively because a proportion of adult females look like males. In most hummingbirds, the two sexes are clearly different in appearance, with males being more colorful. In the jacobin, all juveniles of both sexes bear the same ornamented, male-like plumage. As they mature, about 80% of females change to the typical muted female pattern, but roughly 20% retain the male-like appearance into adulthood. The leading hypothesis is that this reduces harassment by territorial males: for reasons I do not understand, male jacobins tend to aggressively harass and drive off female jacobins during feeding, while ignoring other males.  What makes this interesting for biologists is that it demonstrates that colorful, male-like ornamentation in females can arise through means other than sexual selection.

[JAC: I bet some chowderhead would say this bird has three sexes because of the dimorphism in females]

Male pattern white-necked jacobin:

Female pattern white-necked jacobin:

Long-billed Starthroat (Heliomaster longirostris):

The white-tailed sabrewing (Campylopterus ensipennis) occurs only on Tobago and in a small area of northeastern Venezuela. When Hurricane Flora hit Tobago in September 1963, it destroyed much of the Main Ridge Forest Reserve; the sabrewing population appeared to have been eliminated entirely and the species was presumed locally extinct for eleven years, until individuals were confirmed to have survived in 1974. Current estimates for the Tobago population range from several hundred to over 1,000 birds.

White-tailed Sabrewing male:

White-tailed Sabrewing female:

Saturday: Hili dialogue

April 4, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday,  April 4, 2026, Passover (until April 9) and shabbos for Jewish cats.

It’s also Holy Saturday, International Carrot Day, National Cordon Bleu Day, National Vitamin C Day, World Rat Day, and Ramen Noodle Day.

This isn’t really ramen, but it’s close: a bowl of Hong Kong’s famous beef noodle soup that I ate on my first visit there in 2016:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

First, two lovely views of Earth from Artemis II posted by NASA: Surprise: it’s round! And it’s round from all angles, which means it’s not flat. I’m not quite sure what continents we’re looking at. Can you help?

From inside the capsule:

A headline from today’s NYT (click to read):

*Friday’s war summary from It’s Noon in Israel (their bolding):

It’s Friday, April 3, and the thirty-fifth day of Operation Roaring Lion. The global price of oil has reached $111, up eleven percent since yesterday. Here are the latest developments while you were asleep:

  • Donald Trump’s primetime address Wednesday night marked no significant shift in the war’s trajectory—as I predicted. The president reiterated four familiar positions: the war is necessary, it has effectively already been won, it must continue, and it will end soon. As of today, the original four-to-five week timeline has elapsed. Based on an IDF statement from March 15 indicating that up to three additional weeks of strikes were under consideration, the current estimate now points to a total campaign lasting seven to eight weeks.
  • Yesterday, the U.S. struck Iran’s largest bridge, collapsing the center of a newly built B! suspension bridge—a 136-meter-high, $400 million structure connecting Tehran and Karaj. According to a security source speaking to i24NEWS, the destruction was intended to cut off supply routes that bring drone parts and missiles to Iranian firing units that launch them at U.S. and Israeli forces. Trump shared footage of the strike on Truth Social, declaring, “The biggest bridge in Iran comes tumbling down, never to be used again,” and warning of “much more to follow” if a settlement is not reached.
  • Iranian media reported this morning that a second F-35 stealth fighter had been shot down over central Iran—echoing a March 23 claim previously denied by United States Central Command. As with the earlier report, there is no independent verification.

And a bit of analysis:

More than almost any of the generals and military figures, there is one man whose elimination might truly cause the regime to topple. The man could have been a Silicon Valley billionaire; instead, he joined the Revolutionary Guards: Babak Zanjani, the architect of Iran’s crypto-based sanctions-evasion system.

Zanjani’s is a fascinating story: the son of a railway worker with no higher education who became a businessman and built a global empire of dozens of companies across Turkey, the UAE, Malaysia and Tajikistan—designed specifically to bypass sanctions. In 2013, he was arrested for allegedly embezzling $2.7 billion from state oil revenues and sentenced to death—but the sentence was never carried out. It turned out the architect of its shadow economy was more valuable to the regime alive than dead. Before and during his arrest he was a media fascination, and was the most famous prisoner in the history of the Islamic Republic. After his gamble on the explosion of crypto netted major returns for the regime, Zanjani was released under supervision in 2025.

According to Makor Rishon’s Pazit Rabina, Israel has declared the first crypto war, and Zanjani is the enemy. He has been identified as the “beating heart” of Iran’s shadow economy—the man who converted oil revenues and financial assets into digital assets, enabling the Revolutionary Guards to continue funding terror even under the heaviest sanctions.

Earlier this week, Defense Minister Israel Katz, in cooperation with the U.S. treasure department, signed an administrative order designating Zanjani’s crypto wallets and oil tankers as terror assets. The order grants Israel and the U.S. legal authority to freeze and seize billions of dollars across global trading arenas. Yet well-informed sources warned that the effort is “too little, too late.”

*Definite clickbait from the WSJ: “Iran beefs up defenses, recruits children as it prepares for ground war.”

Iran is responding to the threat of a ground operation on its soil by stepping up defenses around its biggest oil port, while threatening to attack a wider array of targets around the Gulf and launching a mass recruitment drive reminiscent of its 1980s war with Iraq.

The steps come as President Trump has ordered thousands of Marines and Airborne troops to the Middle East. While the president hasn’t said he plans to put boots on the ground, the deployments would give the U.S. more options for ground assaults or raids, and they have set off preparations and a wave of new threats from Iran.

Analysts and people familiar with Iranian military tactics say the country is gearing up for a fierce fight that could give it the chance to inflict more casualties than it can against the U.S. and Israel’s dominant air forces.

Tehran is also mobilizing its population in ways that seek to harness the spirit of the 1980s war with Iraq. They include drives to recruit millions of Iranians, including children—a fixture of the tributes to martyrs via street signs and posters that are still a part of Iran’s daily life.

Iran is hardening defenses on Kharg Island, Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the parliament’s National Security Commission, told the legislature’s news agency this week following a visit to the oil export hub and possible focus of any ground operation. Steps include boosting guided-missile systems, laying mines along the coastline and booby-trapping facilities, an Iranian official said.

Military analysts say tunnels have likely been carved into many of the islands, which Iran is preparing to defend with missiles and other munitions. Iranian-backed militias in Iraq have demonstrated the use of wire-guided first-person-view drones, which are possessed in greater numbers by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, posing a potent threat to any U.S. troops.

The Times of Israel reports that Amnesty International has condemned Iran’s use of child soldiers as a war crime:

Amnesty International on Thursday issued a statement warning that Iran’s recruitment of children as young as 12 for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ all-volunteer Basij force amounts to a war crime.

According to Amnesty, the IRGC put out a recruitment call on March 26, dubbed the “Homeland-Defending Combatants for Iran,” which it said was “open to volunteers” aged 12 and up. The call came as the Basij found its checkpoints under attack during the war with the United States and Israel.

Citing eyewitness accounts and its own analysis of video footage, Amnesty said that evidence shows “child soldiers having been deployed” to checkpoints and patrols, some armed with weapons including AK47-style assault rifles.

Iran is not dumb: they know that even a small number of American casualties on the ground will turn America against the war far more than any rise in the price of oil. Iran is surely willing to sacrifice any number of “martyrs” to stop the war.

*Despite Trump’s claim that there is “regime change” in Iran since there’s a new leadership, these new leaders are still hard-liners, and are, according to the WaPo, are pushing a hard bargain on Trump.

The assassinations of Iran’s senior leaders by Israel and the United States have triggered unprecedented churn within Tehran’s political and military establishment, eliminating the supreme leader and some of the most powerful men in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but have left in place a hard-line government and little hope of a diplomatic breakthrough, according to regional and Western officials.

Rather than usher in what President Donald Trump has called “more reasonable” leadership, the surviving Iranian regime is newly emboldened to inflict economic pain, pushing Tehran and Washington further apart in negotiations, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details.

 . . . officials in the region say they see little hope of a negotiated breakthrough in the next few weeks, even as Israel continues to pursue its assassination campaign against senior Iranian leadership. In public comments, Iran’s leaders have played down talks with the United States and laid out steep demands to end the war, including reparations and formalized control over the Strait of Hormuz, with a right to collect tolls.

. . . The regime has signaled its defense will also involve spreading more pain around the region to substantially raise the price of any attack. Tehran, which has successfully shut off most Gulf oil exports and hit facilities and airports, has told its neighbors it would expand its targets to offshore oil platforms if its islands are invaded, Iranian and Arab officials said. It has also threatened to hit vital infrastructure like power plants and desalination facilities.

“Iran intends to make any U.S. landing as costly and politically unsustainable as possible,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a London-based think tank. “I expect Iran will try to swarm and inflict pain through drones first and then widening its retaliation to its neighbors.”

Does that make you nervous? Yes, me too.

*In January an unidentified astronaut took ill aboard the International Space Station, forcing a medical evacuation of the ailing one and two companions back to Earth. Now the astronaut has been identified as Mike Fincke, and his condition described, though he seems to be okay now and doctors still don’t know what happened.

The astronaut who prompted NASA’s first medical evacuation earlier this year said Friday that doctors still don’t know why he suddenly fell sick at the International Space Station.

Four-time space flier Mike Fincke said he was eating dinner on Jan. 7 after prepping for a spacewalk the next day when it happened. He couldn’t talk and remembers no pain, but his anxious crewmates jumped into action after seeing him in distress and requested help from flight surgeons on the ground.

“It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press from Houston’s Johnson Space Center.

Fincke, 59, a retired Air Force colonel, said the episode lasted roughly 20 minutes and he felt fine afterward. He said he still does. He never experienced anything like that before or since.

Doctors have ruled out a heart attack and Fincke said he wasn’t choking, but everything else is still on the table and could be related to his 549 days of weightlessness. He was 5 ½ months into his latest space station stay when the problem struck like “a very, very fast lightning bolt.”

. . . Fincke said he can’t provide any more details about his medical episode. The space agency wants to make sure that other astronauts do not feel that their medical privacy will be compromised if something happens to them, he said.

One wonders why he was brought back home if the episode lasted only 20 minutes. But doctors couldn’t be sure that something serious didn’t happen (even a mild heart attack), and it was the right thing to do to bring him back to Earth to have him checked out. Remember, the safety of astronauts takes priority over the goals of a mission.

*Yup, the Free Press is still touting religion, and never touting the advantages of nonbelief. Here’s there new article, whose title speaks for itself, “Guys, try church“, by FP senior editor Will Rahn, He first dispels the idea of going to church to embrace “hypermasculine” Christianity, which I didn’t know was a thing. It’s the crazy idea that Christianity goes along with getting fit and buff. Instead, Rahn says that we males should go to church for the right reasons. Curiously, that means making Pascal’s wager!

I’m not saying men should stay away from faith generally. In fact, I’m writing this to encourage you to go to church—not necessarily because it will get you fit, or be fun. Pretending to be a crusader is probably more exciting than just sitting in a pew. But going to church will probably make you a bit happier, and perhaps a slightly better human. Normie Catholicism is, to my mind, a lot more attractive than the “Deus Vult” version.

Don’t get me wrong—as a kid I found it all exceptionally dull. Sit, stand, kneel, stand. The organ music. The well-coiffed priest in his robes going on about who knows what. It all struck me as a silly waste of time that would be better spent watching cartoons.

. . .I’m not making the case that you should adopt my strain of mainstream Catholicism, or even Catholicism at all. I’m not even here to sell you on Christianity. If you’re looking for that, check out C.S. Lewis or Søren Kierkegaard or Thomas Aquinas. A lot of that stuff, particularly Kierkegaard, has a way of sailing right over my skull. But I will say that the most practical argument for fostering a faith in the deity comes from the 17th-century French polymath Blaise Pascal.

In vulgar terms, it’s essentially a risk-reward hypothesis: You lose very little by deciding to live a faithful life, and if all that dogma is essentially correct, you might get to spend eternity in paradise. If there is no God, you just die like everyone else, having lived at least a little more lovingly, peacefully, and forgivingly than you might have otherwise.

The only people with something to lose here are those who stick with atheism: The hard bet that there is no God has atheists dying like everyone else at best, and at worst costs them never-ending joy. Life, in my humble opinion, is a hard enough slog without the weight of atheistic certainty.

. . . Pascal’s wager has been decried as cynical, but it worked for him. He talked himself into sincere religious faith. Go through the motions, act as if it’s true, and you might just wind up a true believer. What’s funny about the wager is that believing in God, in the promise of heaven, is really its own reward. Bet on a God who loves you, and you’ll find there are rewards for you in this world regardless of what’s next.

And another reason men should go to church: to find women!

I heard recently of a now-married couple who locked eyes for the first time at the moment in Mass when everyone wishes peace on those around them. And this was not in one of those fancy downtown Manhattan churches for hot Zoomers on the make, but rather in the sleepy, family-oriented Upper East Side neighborhood of Yorkville. Going to church indicates to women that you’re a halfway functional human being.

This is absolutely insane; I was stunned to see such stupidity. What kind of God wouldn’t know whether you were believing solely to get to heaven—or faking your belief.  Maybe Pascal talked himself into sincere belief, but how many of us unbelievers could do the same thing?  And aren’t there good reasons for being a good human being: living a decent life rather than a “faithful” life? Does it matter which “faith” you live? Finally, “atheistic certainty” is an oxymoron.  Most atheists simply see no reason to believe in God, and are not certain about Gods. No atheist I know feels that their atheism is any kind of “weight”. Atheism is no more a “weight” than is disbelieve in leprechauns, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy.

I have to say that this is the dumbest article I’ve seen lately touting religion, which seems to be a goal of the Free Press. It’s incoherent, misguided, and out of place on a serious news website.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej compares people unfavorably to cats:

Hili: People like to talk behind each other’s backs.
Andrzej: Yes, cats are better—they kill, but they don’t hold grudges.

In Polish:

Hili: Ludzie lubią się wzajemnie obmawiać.
Ja: Tak, koty są lepsze, zagryzają, ale nie żywią urazy.

*******************

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From somewhere on Facebook (I forgot); the caption is “This is how we’ll get to Mars.”

From My Cat is an Asshole:

Masih reposted this video of an Iranian civil-rights activist describing her horrifying interrogation in prison. She must be out of Iran now, but think of all the jailed protestors that don’t have a voice—or never leave prison alive. The Farsi is translated into English subtitles.

And I had to add this one I found on my feed:

From Simon: Cats on a plane!

From Luana:

From Emma. Read the description of that poor guy’s life by clicking on Sama Hoole’s tweet:

Two from my feed:

Clever cat!

One I reposted at The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz. She was four years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-04-04T10:13:08.628Z

Three from Dr. Cobb, whose hols ended yesterday. First, a treehopper disguised as a duck! Not really, but there coiuld be multiple functions for these shapes, including the new one given in the article below the photo.

Inspiration for scifi. #Bugs #Bugsky http://www.science.org/content/arti…

— 🟪 Core Traditions | 1.5°C > Normal?! 🌎 (@porcelainteacup04.bsky.social) 2026-04-03T06:33:22.701Z

A pair of osprey vids. This one was from three days ago:

Resident female Telyn (3J) arrived at Dyfi today (30th) at 14:19. Just need resident male Idris to arrive(c)DOP#UKOspreys

— Welsh_Nature_Lady 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@welshnaturelady.bsky.social) 2026-03-30T14:04:51.551Z

And this one was yesterday:

Dyfi Ospreys resident male Idris returns at 18:23 2nd April, great to see him back with Telyn (3J)#UKOspreys(c)DOP (c)MWT

— Welsh_Nature_Lady 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@welshnaturelady.bsky.social) 2026-04-02T19:23:01.006Z

The woodies are still here

April 3, 2026 • 2:27 pm

The woodies seem to fly in every day about 11 a.m. and are still here when I leave about 2. I still have no names for them, as nothing suggested struck the right chord.  Here’s a preview of the next set of duck photos, which will concentrate on the wood ducks as Vashti is nesting.

Feel free to suggest names, which should reflect the fact that they’re perky and gorgeous. (The last pair was named “Frisky” and “Ruth”, with Ruth having a Jewish name.)

Click to enlarge: