More touting of indigenous knowledge as coequal with modern science

April 6, 2026 • 11:00 am

Once again we have an article about how science could be improved if only it incorporated indigenous “ways of knowing”—the “braiding of knowledge” referred to in the Guardian article below (click to read). I often see another metaphor used to express the same thing: “two-eyed seeing”, with one eye seeing the way indigenous people do, and the other way modern science does. (I won’t use the term “Western science,” often used to denigrate it.) The implication is that modern science is half blind without indigenous knowledge.

And once again we see five things. The first is that indigenous knowledge is local knowledge, usually about how to grow food or harvest other things that enhance the lives of locals.

Second, indigenous “ways of knowing” are not science in the modern sense—the sense that involves hypothesis testing, doubt, controlled experiments, blind testing statistics, data analysis, and mathematics. Indigenous “science” does not avail itself of these essential items in the toolkit of science. Rather, it usually involves using trial and error (mainly about food), and if something works, it becomes “knowledge”. Such knowledge—like how to build the “clam gardens” copiously mentioned in the article below—may be true and may indeed be “knowledge” conceived of as “justified true belief”, but justification usually doesn’t involve replication.

Third, the “braiding” is asymmetrical: modern science can contribute much more to indigeous practices than the other way around. How to build clam gardens or harvest sweetgrass is, after all, not something that’s widely applicable, while principles of genetics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, and so on, are universal, and science can do a lot to help indigenous people with issues like medicine, probably the most important area of asymmetry. We do not often adopt indigenous medical practices, but the other way around is pervasive, because modern medicine, based largely on science, works..

Fourth, examples of indigenous knowledge that are given in the article are few. These article are usually a lot more about people touting “other ways of knowing”, and calling attention to the past oppression of indigenous people, than they are about the expansion of human knowledge.

Finally, the article completely neglects examples of the damage done to the environment by indigeous people, and these examples are not rare. They cannot be mentioned because what indigenous people do must be uniformly regarded as good. But they are not, as the date below the fold show.

Click below to read; the author is Leila Nargi.

Examples of indigenous knowledge. I would be remiss if I neglected the “ways of knowing” that the article says should be braided with modern science. There are not many, but this list is pretty exhaustive from the article. Excerpts from it are indented, and my comments are flush left.

Clam gardens:

Beginning at least 4,000 years ago, Native communities built clam gardens into the intertidal zone from Washington state through coastal British Columbia, and into south-east Alaska. They are a unique form of mariculture that provide harvestable habitat for an array of tasty ocean creatures like butter clams – collected “in great numbers, then smoked and dried and stored and traded”, Hatch said. But they also yielded red rock crab, basket cockles, sea cucumbers, limpets, sea snails and seaweeds in a veritable smorgasbord for humans and marine mammals, such as otters.

These gardens change where sediment moves and may protect against increasing shoreline erosion; studies also show that clam productivity and populations are higher inside gardens than outside them.

Yes, this is an advance in growing clams, and may have other salubrious environmental effects, though they aren’t documented. At any rate, stemming erosion would be limited because clam gardens are restricted in size.

Sweetgrass harvesting:

Still, the necessity of “proving” the validity of longstanding Indigenous practices can frustrate. Suzanne Greenlaw, a citizen of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, is an ecologist at the Schoodic Institute, a non-profit of the National Park Service (NPS) that supports Wabanaki-led research. She participated in a 2016 study to understand how sweet grass, which grows in salt marshes, rebounds after harvesting. The study was part of a Wabanaki bid to re-establish the right to gather sweet grass from NPS land. Though the Wabanaki have made baskets from sweet grass for centuries, they have been cut off from ancestral marshes in Maine’s Acadia national park for at least 100 years.

Non-Indigenous researchers planned to conduct an environmental assessment to gauge how well plants regrew after picking, choosing sweet grass plots that had no connection to those once used by the community. This led to a comparison study in which Wabanaki practitioners demonstrated their superior understanding of how and where to harvest for the greatest ecological benefit. (They may reclaim harvest rights later this year.)

Notice that modern science will be used to verify whether the way sweetgrass is harvested affects future harvests. But that is not indigenous knowledge; rather, it’s an in-progress attempt to verify that knowledge, with the goal of helping indigenous people who have lost their right to harvest regain their rights.

Other stuff:

More Indigenous people – Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, is a notable example – are entering academia and changing it from the inside, while some tribal nations have hired their own scientists. Non-Native institutions are seeking to undo their erasure of Indigenous cultures; the Brooklyn Botanic Garden has started to include labeling that highlights Lenape names and uses for food plants like persimmons. International environmental organizations also increasingly recognize the importance of including Indigenous voices in discussions around the climate crisis. Since 2022, there’s even been federal funding to study ways to combine Indigenous and western sciences, so each part remains distinct while being strengthened by the other.

Note that labeling plants with indigenous names is an exercise in linguistics and anthropology, not a “way of knowing”. And while indigenous people should not be excluded from discussions about practices that may affect their lives, that too is not “knowledge’ but inclusion.

In fact, there are many proven correlations between Indigenous-managed food systems and ecological health. Researchers at Simon Fraser University have found that when Indigenous groups in British Columbia tended forest gardens, they not only produced an impressive biodiversity of food plants – from crabapple and hazelnut and wild plum to wild rice and cranberries – they also improved forest health.

Whyte, the University of Michigan professor, works with the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan – one of many Native nations that used prescribed burns to boost populations of sharp-tailed grouse, snowshoe hare and deer, all of which declined after the federal government’s 1911 burning ban. Collaborating with US Forest Service researchers, they conducted more than 20 ecology surveys and other projects that proved their case for fire, in the interest of establishing a co-management plan that would allow them to reintroduce this tool.

The first part is absolutely expected: if you deliberately plant diverse plants to get fruits and nuts, and compare the biodiversity with that of native forests, yes, you’ll get a more diverse “ecosystem”. If you see that as a “healihier” ecosystem because it has more ethnobotanical assets, yes, that is also true. But surely the author doesn’t mean to imply that all North American forest should be turned into “forest gardens” for growing food.

As for controlled burning, yes, that can be useful in replacing natural burns that are no longer permitted, but in the past burns set by indigenous people could become uncontrolled. This was particularly dire in New Zealand, where 40% of native forest (30-35% of the total land area) was burned by Māori people within 200 years of their arrival on the two main islands in the 13th century. (There were of course no non-Polynesian “colonists” then.) See below the fold for more data.

All in all, it’s not an impressive record, and hardly one that enriches modern science. Indeed, modern science is making a large contribution to indigenous people than the other way around. Despite that,

Indigenous knowledge is sacralized and, the article implies, should be considered coequal with modern science. Some quotes:

Rather than dismissing Indigenous knowledge, more western scientists are discovering its viability for themselves and adjusting their research goals to embrace it.

That represents a “massive shift”, according to Kyle Whyte, a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Historically, western scientists have considered themselves rigorous and empirical, while they have classified traditional Native thought as mythic, religious or plain made-up, he said.

It’s not false to say that a great deal of “traditional Native thought”, construed as “ways of knowing”, is indeed mythic, religious, or plain made-up. But some of it is not, and insofar as this knowledge can be verified by modern science, that part is indeed “knowledge”.

Western science favors distinct disciplines – ecology, biology, geology and Supernant’s specialty, archaeology. But Indigenous knowledge considers “the earth and the water and the air and the plants and the animals as deeply interdependent and interconnected; to understand one is to understand all. And that has a lot to teach western science,” Supernant said of the importance of braiding these systems.

Notice the inaccurate term “Western science”. And insofar as a system is dependent on other things, modern science has to deal with it. But, as my advisor Dick Lewontin said in an essay called “A reasonable skepticism“:

But this holistic world view is untenable. It is simply another form of mysticism and does not make it possible to manipulate the world for our own benefit. An obscurantist holism has been tried and it has failed. The world is not one huge organism that regulates itself to some good end as the believers in the Gaia hypothesis believe. While in some theoretical sense “the trembling of a flower is felt on the farthest star,” in practice my gardening has no effect on the orbit of Neptune because the force of gravitation is extremely weak and falls off very rapidly with distance. So there is clearly truth in the belief that the world can be broken up into independent parts. But that is not a universal direction for the study of all nature. A lot of nature, as we shall see, cannot be broken up into independent parts to be studied in isolation, and it is pure ideology to suppose that it can.

It is common to say that indigenous knowledge is superior to modern science because the former is more “holistic”. Lewontin shows the fallacy of that claim.

Here’s another common claim you encounter in this kind of literature:

As opportunities for western and Indigenous collaborations multiply, it’s critical that Indigenous people maintain control over any knowledge gleaned and how it’s used, especially in light of western scientists’ historic penchant for extracting information that suited their own purposes and dismissing the rest. “Western science can help, as long as Native people are still decision makers. . . ” [quote from Suzanne Greenlaw, a Native American ecologist]

If this means anything beyond the way that published data is treated in modern science, then it is an unwarranted privilege. When science is published it becomes the property of humanity, and by and large those who produced the knowledge have no control about how it’s used—nor should they. If other people want to use what you’ve published for their own purposes, well, that’s the way science works. Indigenous people should have no more control over any knowledge they make public than should anybody else.

Below we see the implication that indigenous knowledge should be considered coequal with modern science (the quote is from Kisha Supernant “Métis and Papaschase and the director of the University of Alberta’s Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology”):

What constitutes progress when it comes to braiding western and Indigenous science depends on whom you ask. “If the burden of proof remains on Indigenous communities to demonstrate, using western scientific methods, that their knowledge … is valid, I think we’re not at the place we need to be,” Supernant said. “It is difficult to braid two things together when they’re not given equal weight in the braid.”

Well, I’d say that given the toolkit that’s constitutes modern science and is used to establish “knowledge,” then yes, indigenous people should have to demonstrate that their knowledge really is knowledge in the modern sense before it’s used. When the Māori want to play whale songs to infected kauri trees because whales and kauri trees were once seen as brothers, then they should have to demonstrate the phylogenetic affinity of trees and cetaceans as well as the efficacy of whale songs. (This is a real case based on mytic lore.)

Finally, the bit below strikes me as rather patronizing, treating Indigenous people like children. (“Whyte” is a “professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.”)

Whyte is encouraged that the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which seeks to provide scientific evidence to inform government decision-making, included a chapter on Indigenous knowledge in its latest global assessment. But he sees plenty of opportunity for improvements to braiding. For starters, “Indigenous people need to be involved at the earliest stages of research,” he said. And that means western scientists “need to get into the habit of approaching potential [Indigenous] partners and saying ‘I’m interested in water. Are you interested in water?’ before any research questions have been created. Let’s just get excited together about the topic, and plan from the beginning.”

If they plan experiments on indigenous land, or experiments that affect indigenous people, then yes, there should be consultation. But “getting excited together” before any research questions have been formulated is not the way that science works, nor should it. Science is not an endeavor that involves research equity, and creating such equity must be an extracurricular activity. The job of science is to understand the Universe, not to create social justice or spread an ideology.

h/t Ron, Ginger K

Click “continue reading” to see what we know about the damage indigenous North Americans did to the environment. It gives the answer to a question I asked Grok.

Continue reading “More touting of indigenous knowledge as coequal with modern science” →

Lunary flyby day: Live coverage

April 6, 2026 • 9:00 am

Today the Artemis 2 capsule with its four astronauts does its transit around the Moon, going further into space than any human have gone into space. They’ll also see parts of the Moon’s backside that have never been seen by the living human eye, though the backside has been amply photographed.

Shortly after midnight this morning, the capsule entered the Moon’s “sphere of influence,” meaning the part of space where the gravity of the Moon exceeds the gravity of Earth. The schedule is below, and I’ve put a video of the live proceedings below.

From the Space.com site:

The Artemis 2 astronauts have arrived in the moon’s sphere of influence, and are now preparing for a very full day of lunar observations.

They crossed the celestial threshold early Monday morning (April 6), becoming the first people to do so since the crew of Apollo 17, in 1972.

The pull of the moon’s gravity on the Artemis 2 Orion capsule officially became stronger than Earth’s influence on the spcecraft at 12:37 a.m. EDT (0437 GMT), as Orion flew 39,000 miles (62,764 kilometers) above the moon and 232,000 miles (373,368 km) from Earth.

Today, they will break the distance record set by Apollo 13, which flew 248,655 miles (400,171 kilometers) from Earth. Artemis 2 reach that, and then some, but between breaking the record and setting their own, they will have hours of lunar observations to conduct as Orion makes its closest approach to the moon.

Here’s a full breakdown of what to expect today (all times in EDT):

There will be about a 40-minute communications blackout (starting at about 6:47 pm) when they go around the Moon. Here’s today’s schedule:

1 p.m.: NASA lunar flyby coverage begins.
1:56 p.m.: Apollo 13 distance record broken
2:10 p.m.: Crew remarks about record
2:15 p.m.: Crew configures Orion for flyby
2:45 p.m.: Lunar observation period begins
6:47 p.m.: Loss of communications (estimated 40-min.)
7:02 p.m.: Closest approach to the moon
7:05 p.m.: Maximum distance from Earth
8:35 p.m.: Orion enters solar eclipse period
9:20 p.m.: Lunar observation period ends
9:32 p.m.: Solar eclipse period concludes

Watching a bit this morning, I see there is a possible cabin leak, which is worrying, but it may have been a false alarm.

If the video is not working, you can see it on the Space.com site: You can also scroll back and see what was going on previously.

h/t: Bat

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 6, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today’s photo come from reader Jan Malik, who took them in New Jersay. Jan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

As an appendix to the earlier Tree Swallow pictures, here are a few more from the New Jersey Botanical Garden. A walk in that park on the first day of spring is a ritual of mine—to ensure all observable phenomena related to spring are happening again and that the thermal death of the Universe is postponed for yet another year.

Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) pausing mid-search for food. This is a female; in this species, the red plumage is restricted to the nape and the area above the bill, whereas males sport a continuous red cap:

Spring Snowflake (Leucojum vernum, possibly var. carpathicum), a Eurasian transplant. It looks succulent, but this perennial defends itself against mammalian browsing by producing bitter, poisonous alkaloids:

Eastern Cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus) hiding in bearberry brambles. Against this notorious garden destroyer, only the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch offers a true degree of protection:

Forsythia (Genus Forsythia) in bloom—the unmistakable sign that spring has arrived:

White-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis). Like the woodpecker, it is a connoisseur of arthropods hiding in bark. however, by being equally adept at feeding head-down or head-up, it finds insects that a woodpecker might miss:

Common Water Strider (likely Aquarius remigis) emerged from its winter hiding. These are predators and scavengers of insects trapped on the surface of slow-flowing streams. As a “true bug,” it has evolved to exploit surface tension. However, surface tension alone doesn’t keep it dry; the secret lies in the dense, hydrophobic hairs on its tarsi. These trap air to act as tiny “dinghies,” preventing the legs from being wetted by capillary action:

Crocus flower (likely a Woodland Crocus, Crocus tommasinianus). The flowers emerge before the leaves, which then die back in late spring after accumulating enough biomass for the year. This adaptation to montane meadows and early forests allows them to bloom early, while withdrawing underground provides a defense against browsing:

Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) picking bittersweet fruit (likely the introduced Oriental Bittersweet, Celastrus orbiculatus). The fruit is indeed slightly sweet—a fact I confirmed before spitting it out, as they are reportedly toxic to humans. As they say: don’t try this at home; try it in nature instead:

After the meal, the mockingbird sits quietly in a nearby bush. They mimic other birds’ calls, possibly to fool rivals into thinking a territory is already occupied. It doesn’t work on me, though—I can always tell the original bird from the imitation:

Snowdrop (Genus Galanthus), another Eurasian immigrant. Most of the plants in these pictures were introduced from Eurasia to the Americas; however, with the exception of the Bittersweet, they are generally not considered invasive:

A Jumping Spider. I can’t vouch for the exact ID, but it resembles Phidippus princeps. While not my best shot, it’s worth noting that, like all others in this series, it was taken with a single lens (Canon RF 100-500mm)—a blessing for a lazy photographer.

An Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), looking lean after winter and digging for roots and grubs in the lawn. This species is an unwelcome sight in Europe, where its introduction is displacing the native Red Squirrel. But can we really blame them? They are simply good at being squirrels. It is entirely a human fault that geographical barriers are collapsing. In this “Homogecene” era of a connected world, the total number of species will inevitably decline:

Monday: Hili dialogue

April 6, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Monday, April 6, 2026 and National Carbonara Day, celebrating my favorite pasta aside from Fettuccine Alfredo. As Wikipedia notes,

Carbonara (Italian: [karboˈnaːra]) is a pasta dish made with fatty cured pork, hard cheese, eggs, salt, and black pepper. It is typical of the Lazio region of Italy. The dish took its modern form and name in the middle of the 20th century.

A photo of spaghetti carbonara:

Mattes Boch (Mboch on English Wikipedia), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Fresh Tomato Day, International Asexuality Day, National Açaí Bowl Day, National Caramel Popcorn Day (the best in America is Garrett’s right here in Chicago), National Egg Salad Sandwich Day (underrated, one of my favorites, and at its best in Japan), National Twinkie Day, Sweet Potato Day, New Beer’s Eve (celebrating the evening before the end of Prohibition in 1933), World Table Tennis Day (freatured in the new movie “Marty Supreme,” which was good but not great, and, finally, National Siamese Cat Day.

Siamese cats are LOUD. For example, listen to the racket this pair makes when their staff is taking a shower (turn sound up and watch your own cats go nuts—report their reaction in the comments):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 6 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Yesterday’s war news from It’s Noon in Israel. (Bolding is theirs.)

It’s Sunday, April 5, and the thirty-seventh day of Operation Roaring Lion. The global price of oil has reached $109, up seven percent since Friday. Here are the latest developments while you were asleep:

Both crew members of the F-15 shot down over Iran on Friday have been rescued. President Donald Trump called the rescue of the second airman on Saturday night one of the “most daring” operations in U.S. military history, involving dozens of aircraft and hundreds of special forces troops. U.S. forces also destroyed at least one transport aircraft on the ground to prevent it from falling into Iranian hands after it became stranded at a remote site during the mission. They struck Iranian convoys heading toward the search area, and a firefight broke out between U.S. rescuers and Iranian search parties.

The Telegraph reports that five Chinese shipments of sodium perchlorate—a key ingredient in solid missile fuel—have arrived in Iran. China has previously supplied the same chemical to support Iran’s ballistic missile program. The deliveries come even as U.S.-Israeli strikes have specifically targeted Iran’s missile production infrastructure, including fuel and propellant facilities.

U.S.-Israeli forces struck the border crossing between Iran and Iraq for at least the second time since the war began, prompting Iraq to close the crossing. The crossing served as a transit point for at least 1,000 Iraqi proxy fighters now deployed to Basij bases inside Iran—a mobilization analysts believe is partly aimed at suppressing potential domestic unrest.

From the WSJ on the rescue:

. . . the president also shared new details about the dramatic rescue of two U.S. airmen whose F-15E was shot down over Iran. Trump said the Friday rescue of the first airman was kept quiet so a search could continue for the second pilot, who was wounded but climbed up to a mountain crevice where he was rescued.

“We didn’t play up the first one, because then they would have found out about the second one,” Trump said. “You know, normally this is not done. When airmen go down, you can’t get them in very tough countries.”

The two pilots were in the same plane but landed a long distance apart because of the speed at which the jet was flying when the airmen evacuated, Trump said.

“Even though they’re only separated by five or six seconds, five or six seconds when you’re going 1000 miles an hour, so that’s many miles, right?” he said.

And there are more details in the NYT article on the rescue (archived).

Here’s the device used by the airman to give US forces his location. (Click on screenshot or here to read more.)

Now, on to the details from INiI:.

Tomorrow, Iran’s extension on Donald Trump’s ultimatum will expire. Last night, Trump reiterated his threat initially made in March: within the next 48 hours, make a deal, open the Strait of Hormuz—or “all hell will rain down” on Iran. Trump’s version of hell, in this case, would look a lot like the real thing: flammable, as Iran’s energy infrastructure is likely in his crosshairs.

In Israel, the assessment is that the regime will allow the ultimatum to expire. So far, few positive signals have come out of Islamabad, where negotiations are supposed to take place. None have even reached the level of vague optimism of “good progress” that came out of the Geneva talks preceding the war. A senior official told Pakistan’s Dawn on Friday that “Tehran has so far not conveyed its readiness to take part in the dialogue.” Reports from The Wall Street Journal tell a similar story: Iran is “unwilling to meet U.S. officials in Islamabad in the coming days and considers U.S. demands unacceptable.”

On March 26, Trump extended Iran’s nuclear negotiation deadline to 10 days, partly because Tehran sent 10 Pakistani-flagged oil tankers as a goodwill gesture. Another delaying gesture is possible—but unlikely. . . .

*Trump has threatened to destroy every power plant in Iran if they don’t open the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday.

President Trump threatened to destroy all of Iran’s power plants if the country’s leaders don’t agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday evening, ratcheting up pressure on Tehran.

“If they don’t come through, if they want to keep it closed, they’re going to lose every power plant and every other plant they have in the whole country,” Trump said in an eight-minute interview with The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.

Pressed on when he thinks the war will end, Trump said, “I will let you know pretty soon.”

“But we are in a position that’s very strong, and that country will take 20 years to rebuild, if they’re lucky, if they have a country,” he said. “And if they don’t do something by Tuesday evening, they won’t have any power plants and they won’t have any bridges standing.”

. . . Asked if he is concerned the people of Iran, a country of 93 million people, could suffer if civilian infrastructure is hit, Trump said, “No, they want us to do it,” arguing that Iranian people are “living in hell.”

In a social-media post on Sunday morning, Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s power plants and bridges on Tuesday if the Strait of Hormuz isn’t reopened. But the post offered few details about how expansive the attacks might be.

Under international law, the military is allowed to strike civilian power plants and other key infrastructure only if it contributes to a military operation and civilian harm is minimized.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported that aides to Trump have said these types of narrowly focused strikes are allowable because they are meant to hamper Tehran’s ability to build missiles, drones and nuclear weapons. Widespread strikes on power plants and bridges, regardless of military value, raise legal and humanitarian questions.

Here’s his threat, with the gravitas and dignity we’re accustomed to from our leader:

Iran is not Gaza, not a country in which the military is deeply embedded in civilian structure, nor one in which the people support the theocracy. If we want regime change, we can’t simply take out all the civilian infrastructure for nothing more than revenge. And that is a war crime.

*In an article on his Substack site, “Washington is drowning the Iran war in noise“, Andrew Fox lays out the four viable options for Trump in the war (h/t Orli).

We cannot soft-soap the damage to the global economy. From that perspective, this war is a catastrophe. It is far more serious than simply an oil shock. Hormuz handled about one-fifth of the global LNG trade in 2025, with no alternative route for most Qatari and Emirati volumes. Conflict-related damage has reduced Qatar’s LNG capacity by 17% for up to five years. Qatar also produces nearly one-third of the world’s helium, and supply disruptions have already begun to impact semiconductor supply chains and significantly increase helium prices. Hormuz transports about 30% of globally traded fertilisers. Fertiliser prices are rising rapidly; FAO’s food price index increased by 2.4% in March, and the IMF warns that poorer countries could face higher food insecurity if the shock continues. J.P. Morgan suggests oil could reach $120 to $130 in the short term, and exceed $150 if disruptions persist into mid-May.

That leaves four plausible options for Trump moving forward (and, of course, Israel—but let us not forget who the junior partner is in this Coalition. Strategy for Israel here is easy: keep bombing things until told by Washington to stop.)

Option one: stop now and declare victory

Financially, this is the most affordable direct US option. It halts the expenditure on sorties, tankers, carriers, munitions, and reduces escalation risk. Politically, it is always accessible because the White House has already set the rhetorical groundwork, with official claims of “clear and unchanging objectives” and a televised assertion that the campaign is on track to conclude “very shortly.” Strategically, however, it leaves the core issue unresolved. The regime would still be in control in Tehran, and Hormuz would remain a point that Tehran can block, ration, or permit. The cost-benefit only makes sense if Washington decides that the domestic value of ending the war now outweighs the strategic humiliation of striking Iran hard without actually re-establishing free navigation.

Option two: keep the air war going at roughly the current level

This is the current situation. US forces have already targeted over 10,000 locations and, according to CENTCOM, destroyed 92% of Iran’s largest naval vessels while significantly reducing missile and drone launch rates. Since then, the pattern has not shifted towards de-escalation but towards coercive punishment. Trump has threatened bridges, power plants, and other infrastructure (even threatening desalination plants—essentially a threat to impose drought on 90 million people heading into a Middle East summer). A major bridge near Tehran-Karaj was hit this week. Financially, this involves ongoing direct military expenses, as well as continued macroeconomic damage from oil, insurance, and freight costs. Strategically, it can further weaken Iran and increase bargaining leverage. However, the benefits are diminishing. Bombing can punish and wear down, but it cannot, on its own, ensure a lasting reopening of Hormuz while Iran retains the capacity to control access and keep markets unsettled.

Option three: escalate with ground troops

This is the most expensive and riskiest option by far. It is the only route that might plausibly try to force Hormuz open, seize islands, or control key maritime points. It also has the highest risk of casualties, political backlash, and prolonged escalation. Current signals strongly oppose it. Rubio stated on 27^th March that US aims could be achieved without ground troops and that recent deployments were contingency measures, not plans for invasion. Reuters/Ipsos polling published on Friday shows that over three-quarters of Americans oppose sending American ground troops to Iran. At the UN, even a revised Bahrain-backed resolution on protecting commercial shipping faces Chinese opposition to authorising the use of force, with Russia and France also objecting. Regarding cost and benefits, a ground intervention offers the greatest strategic potential, but the cost would be extraordinary with no guarantee of success.

Option four: strike a deal with the regime

On paper, this represents the most advantageous economic deal. If a settlement genuinely restores shipping, stabilises energy flows, and imposes real limits on missiles or the nuclear programme, it would reduce macroeconomic costs more quickly than any military option. Washington has already submitted a 15-point proposal through intermediaries, and Iran has been reviewing it even as it publicly dismisses direct negotiations. Since then, selective ship passages and Iran’s discussions with Oman about a future Hormuz protocol demonstrate that negotiations over access are ongoing, even if formal talks remain stalled. Strategically, the cost is evident: Trump would need to engage with the very regime he continues to describe as defeated or nearly finished. The benefit is equally clear: a deal is the only feasible way to reopen the Strait without a much larger conflict.

And his assessment of the likelihood:

My analysis, based on the currently available signals, is this: the least likely option is a major ground escalation; the most probable immediate action is continued air strikes and infrastructure coercion; the most likely eventual outcome is a mediated deal that the White House will package as a complete victory. The emergency fallback, if markets and politics worsen more quickly than forecast, is a unilateral ceasefire-and-spin. In brief, the short-term path seems to be option two, with option four as the intended destination.

None of these guarantees, much less makes it likely, that the Iranian people will have a democratic government rather than an oppressive theocracy. And I don’t trust any deal that Iran will abandon its quest for nuclear weapons; it simply cannot be trusted without rigorous and unannounced inspections. This seems unlikely to happen, so yes, option two seems the most likely.

*I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column at the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: The truth of the conspiracy of the conspiracy.”

→ You’re getting drafted: Describing our approach to Iran, Pete Hegseth stood before the press and put his hand on a pretend throttle and said: “We’re keeping our hand on that throttle,” clenching the invisible throttle, “as long and as hard as is necessary.” Standing behind him was Trump, who never misses a penis joke, and who simply raised his eyebrows. Unusual self-control. Restraint. Quite presidential not to make a dick joke there, if you ask me.

Also this week, the Army raised the maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42. That’s right, 42! When the ground war with China begins, there will be a draft of middle-aged millennial men begging their platoon leader for the Wi-Fi password so that they can watch Breaking Bad on their iPads. I see this lasting about two weeks. See, 52-year-old Gen-X men would be better fighters than the millennials.

→ Just for a little taste of the streets: You should probably know what is being said in those fun progressive pro-peace protests happening all over the place. Here’s a great example from a protest in Philadelphia this week. A man stands in front of a boisterous crowd: “Until we have done everything in our power to bring the United States to its knees, let us not lose sight of the enemy!” Okay, me too, peace and love,man. He continues: “For every U.S. soldier who comes back in a casket, we cheer!” The crowd cheers.

He also says: “Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, all of the resistance forces we celebrate. These popular forces on the ground spend every waking moment in direct confrontation with Zionism and they rely on a strong Iranian state to maintain their fighting capacity.”

→ Wrong place, wrong headline: A Venezuelan migrant who was allegedly detained at the border in 2023 but released into the U.S. has been charged with murdering 18-year-old Loyola University Chicago freshman Sheridan Gorman. She was shot in the back along the lakefront. Hmm. That’s a little too perfect for the Republican narrative. Is there any way we can blame the student for being shot? Chicago electeds and local media are trying.

Chicago alderwoman Maria Hadden said it sounded like Gorman was in the “wrong place, wrong time,” and that the victim and her friends “might’ve startled this person,” i.e., the shooter. When I get startled I usually commit first-degree murder too. Wrong place, wrong time. Someone made a lot of mistakes, and it’s Sheridan Gorman, who is dead. No other mistakes here. No one else in the “wrong” anything.

In fact, the only mistake acknowledged was that of Loyola University Chicago’s student newspaper, which apologized for having called the accused killer of freshman Sheridan Gorman an “illegal immigrant” in a subsequently deleted Instagram post. I’m a lefty here, truly. Like, I believe in mass amnesty. But if someone shoots into a crowd and kills a girl, we do not blame the girl simply because she’s the citizen and he’s the immigrant. . .

I was amazed at how the local media tried to blame the victim for her own shooting. And that, of course, is that the alleged killer was an undocumented immigrant, a status considered sacred by progressives.

*And there’s good news today from the UPI’s “Odd News” section:

The San Diego Zoo Safari Park announced its four male cheetah cubs, born in January, now have names: Nyasi, Owadgi, Ohani and Nkala.

First-time mother Kelechi gave birth to the cubs on Jan. 24, becoming the first cheetah to give birth at the zoo since 2020.

Here are the cheetos:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili i referring to the d*g now owned by the upstairs lodgers:

Hili: These steps have lost their entire charm.
Andrzej: Maybe with time they will recover it once more.

In Polish:

Hili: Te schodki straciły cały urok.
Ja: Być może z czasem odzyskają go ponownie.

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

The cover of the University of Chicago magazine shows Botany Pond with ducks in it next to Erman Hall, where students who should be doing science are sitting at their computers. And the ducks are white Pekin ducks, not wild mallards. Well, you can’t have everything. There’s an article on the renovated pond that mentions the ducks, but leaves out the Duckmeister because Facilities doesn’t like him. Eventually that story will be up here.

From Stacy:

From Now That’s Wild. Don’t butter the moggy!

Masih criticizzes Trump for hurting the people of Iran by threatening to bomb them into the Stone Age and falsely promising help.

We are going to send Iran back to the Stone Age?

President @realDonaldTrump! Stop targeting ordinary Iranians and Iran’s infrastructure, the Islamic regime’s officials you call “less radical leaders” in Iran, the ones you are willing to negotiate with are exactly the ones with a… pic.twitter.com/xVSFwyzhHP

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 4, 2026

From Luana; the article with the data (from Finland) are in the link:

“Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender re-assignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment.”
Ruuska 2026 https://t.co/iJ6gBLwrgA

— James Cantor (@JamesCantorPhD) April 4, 2026

From Brian, a “math clock” (there are others in the thread:

One of the best tests of an AI is the “Clock Test” prompt I developed. Below are results from Grok (left) and from ChatGPT (right). Can your AI do better?

Prompt: “Draw a math clock. It looks like a traditional clock with hands; however, instead of 12 numbers on the clock… pic.twitter.com/IBkLZ8pTsj

— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) April 3, 2026

From Barry, a buff cat:

One from my feed. Larry just turned 19, and he is still spry, having recently caught his first mouse!

Happy 19th birthday Larry the cat at Downing Street!
🎉 pic.twitter.com/te4dZjbx1B

— Sara Mary ⭐❤️ (@saniyafatma1278) April 5, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Yugoslavian Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was three years old, and would be 85 today if he had lived. https://t.co/KJRosA52tT

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 6, 2026

And two from Dr. Cobb: First, more explanation of that famous Earth photo taken by Artemis II:

You'll have seen this – Earth from #Artemis II en-route to the Moon.But look again – it's Earth's *nightside*, lit by the near-full Moon, not the Sun 🌕️The aurorae, airglow, stars, & city lights in Europe, Africa, & the Americas give the game away. Cool.NASA/Reid Wiseman#Space #Photography

— Mark McCaughrean (@markmccaughrean.bsky.social) 2026-04-03T19:13:10.768Z

Who remember’s Bob Paine’s pathbreaking ecology work? I do! Here’s a short video post:

A nice video about how Bob Paine's work on starfish influenced modern ecology #pisaster youtu.be/rN5KzBVxNl4?…

— Chris Mah (@echinoblog.bsky.social) 2026-04-02T16:09:11.414Z

Easter homily: Baron David Frost touts God in the Telegraph

April 5, 2026 • 10:15 am

I guess the Torygraph 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 Torygraph 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:

First, Narges Mohammadi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, nearly suffers a heart attack in prison, denied proper medical care.
Now, Nasrin Sotoudeh, a lawyer and another human rights defender is arrested in Iran.

When a regime shows no mercy to those who speak the language of peace,… pic.twitter.com/ELcXW7984y

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 4, 2026

From Emma, describing A Very Bad Idea:

I attended a scientific conference a few years ago where we were invited to cycle at the side of the platform, to power – at least – the energy costs of the visuals.

Nobody needs to see a panting developmental biologist alongside someone who is changing the face of cancer… https://t.co/bbRfA1DjQi

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) April 3, 2026

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):

I didn’t know this life was an option pic.twitter.com/irtyM7zUIk

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) April 3, 2026

For some reason I love these repetitive foreign sentences:

Spanish is confusing: 😵‍💫pic.twitter.com/yrvyb687DJ

— AlphaFox (@alphafox) April 4, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was two years old, and would be 84 today had she lived. https://t.co/qIfD6CF4Tz

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 5, 2026

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.)

	Hempenstein on Sunday: Hili dialogue
	Acolyte of Sagan on Monday: Hili dialogue
	Jim Blilie on Readers’ wildlife photos
	Jeff Vader on More touting of indigenous kno…
	Mike Hart on More touting of indigenous kno…