Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I am pleased to report that the Gang of Four (now five days old) have made it with flying colors through another day at Botany Pond. Today they are five days old. They are vigorous, healthy, and have a hearty appetite, as does Miss Duck, their watchful mother. She’s proving to be an excellent mom, and I like to think that they’re all content, if not happy. I have high hopes that they’ll all make it to fledging (mid-September at the earliest).
Here’s a video of the ducklings eating. The big pellets are for Miss Duck, the little ones for the babies. Everyone gets crushed-up mealworms.
More lunching with the family. People love to come by at feeding time. It’s at 1:30 pm today (the last of three feedings), and if you’re one of the women from the Regenstein Library or the Dean of Students’ office, be prompt!
After lunch yesterday, the ducklings, who are quite vigorous, jumped up on a big rock abutting the north end of the Pond. I didn’t think they could make it, but they all did. Miss Duck overlooked them from the pond ledge. Below is a passel of photos as well as two more videos:
Mom stretches a wing and raises a leg:
Babies perching and jockeying for position on the rock.
More:
Babies napping:
Now everybody takes a nap. It lasted nearly an hour before the ducklings decided they’d had enough and jumped into the pond. Miss Duck, of course, had to follow.
When Miss Duck preens, the babies do, too. I was doubtful whether babies imitate the mother, but now I have no doubt that they do.
Welcome to Thursday, July 23, 2026 and National Refreshment Day. Honoring that, I give you below the best beer I ever had, procured by a friend in Amsterdam—with difficulty (see below). It’s a Belgian beer made by actual monks in an actual monastery (Westvleteren), and you have to go there in person to get your pre-reserved and limited supply. Wikipedia says this about the brewery and the beer:
As with other Trappist breweries, beer is brewed and sold to financially support the monastery and other philanthropic causes. Whilst the brewery is a business by definition (its purpose is to make money), it does not exist for pure profit motives and they do not advertise. The monks have repeatedly stated enough beer is brewed to run the monastery, and production volumes will not be increased to meet market demand. During World War II, the brewery stopped supplying wholesalers, and since then they only sell to individual buyers at the brewery and visitors’ centre cafe. On the opening of the new brewery, the Father Abbott said “We are not brewers. We are monks. We brew beer to be able to afford being monks.”
There is no label; the cap tells you what it is:
I drank the beer in 2019, and oy, was it good! Thick, chewy, and somewhat sweet, as all these beers are. It is not a swilling beer, but a beer to enjoy at leisure with good conversation. It is more like a meal than a drink. From Wikipedia:
Westvleteren 12 (yellow cap) (formerly Abt), a quadrupel, 10.2% ABV, introduced in 1940. , , , , In June 2005, when Westvleteren 12 was ranked as “Best Beer in the World” on Ratebeer.com, news organizations followed this up and articles appeared in the international press, highlighting the beer ranking and the unusual business policies. In 2014 it was again rated best beer in the world by Ratebeer.com for the fourth year in a row
Buyers were originally limited to ten 24-bottle crates of the beer per car, but as the beer increased in popularity, this was first reduced to five, then to three and now to two or one crates. For the Westvleteren 12 in 2009, it was limited to one case. When making an order now, the type and quantity of beer available for sale are revealed. Sales are limited to one order every 30 days per person per license plate and phone number. The beer must be reserved online through the abbey’s website, with registration weeks before the planned pick up date. The online system has replaced the “beerphone” in 2019. The monks do not sell beer to individuals who drive up to the abbey hoping to purchase beer. The reason for this is to eliminate commercial reselling, and hence give all visitors a chance to purchase the product.
The current production is 475 kilolitres (60,000 cases) per year, and has remained the same since 1946.
President Trump threatened on Wednesday to strike bridges and power plants in Iran if it targeted any more ships in the Strait of Hormuz, as the prospect of a prolonged conflict pushed the price of oil to its highest level in over a month.
“Any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship” in the strait, Mr. Trump said on social media, U.S. forces would hit the sites, including in or near the capital, Tehran. Deliberate strikes on civilian infrastructure could be considered a war crime under international law.
Mr. Trump has escalated his threats through weeks of rising bluster and deadly military exchanges, in which the United States has failed to either stop Iranian attacks or force the country’s hard-line leaders, who want to prolong the war, back to the negotiating table.
The threats also reflected how much the focus of the war has narrowed into a fight over the strait, a critical passage for global oil and gas, even as Mr. Trump maintains that his wider objective is preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon. The strait was open and free to transit before the war began, but Iran has proved it can effectively control traffic with threats of strikes and, in doing so, gained powerful leverage over global markets.
The latest escalation came as Iranian officials had already reported recent strikes on bridges, and as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the United States would keep waging war as long as Iran tried to control the strait. Iran’s attacks on vessels there have brought ship traffic there to a near-total halt.
While Mr. Rubio left the door open for diplomacy after another night of U.S. and Iranian strikes across the Persian Gulf, he told reporters in Manila that Iran at this point was “not serious about talks,” arguing that Tehran had violated a preliminary agreement that says it should allow ships to transit the strait.
What strikes me about the article, besides the prospect of a longer war, is how much criticism there is of the U.S. conduct here. Each of the first four paragraphs contains a subtle critique. Well, that’s the NYT’s right, but let’s not pretend they are just reporting objectively.
It’s Wednesday, July 22, and rattled by Operation Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer last June, Saudi Arabia went looking for a deterrent. Pakistan, still bruised from its May 2025 confrontation with India, was looking for the same thing. The arrangement was mutually beneficial: Islamabad acquired a wealthy patron, Riyadh signaled it could diversify away from Washington, and Pakistan’s defense minister declared that his country’s nuclear program would be made available to the kingdom if needed.
Then came February 2026, and Iranian missiles and drones began landing throughout the kingdom. Riyadh invoked the pact. Islamabad sent a foreign minister to deliver a stern warning to Tehran and flew a squadron of fighters to a Saudi air base. The lesson was not subtle. Pakistan would not be the new guarantor, and a nuclear guarantee secured by diplomacy is a considerably weaker deterrent than one whose button sits under your own finger.
That is the context for today’s Wall Street Journal report that Trump has approved a 30-year agreement providing Saudi Arabia with a civilian nuclear program and potentially opening the door to uranium enrichment on Saudi soil.
. . .The obvious truth is that Saudi Arabia needs nuclear power like a drowning man needs water. But Mohammed bin Salman revealed the real game in 2018: If Tehran got a bomb, the kingdom would follow as soon as possible. Throughout its long campaign for nuclear power, Saudi Arabia conceded nothing to the industry’s “gold standard,” a binding commitment not to enrich uranium or reprocess spent nuclear fuel domestically.
The nuclear campaign is a symptom, not a cause. Riyadh concluded years ago that the American security guarantee is unreliable, regardless of who holds the White House. On September 14, 2019, cruise missiles and drones took roughly half of Saudi production offline in a single morning. Washington attributed the attack to Iran, moved some air defense assets into the kingdom, and did nothing further. Biden completed the lesson from the opposite direction. On February 4, 2021, in his first major foreign policy address, he ended American support for the coalition’s offensive operations in Yemen, including arms sales, and the following day the State Department moved to delist the Houthis.
. . . All that changed with Trump. He detached the nuclear file from normalization entirely, having already signed an executive order in May 2025 directing the State Department to promote nuclear exports. In November 2025, Washington and Riyadh signed a Joint Declaration on the Completion of Negotiations on Civil Nuclear Cooperation, alongside an F-35 package. Now they have an agreement for U.S. firms to construct a uranium enrichment facility in Saudi Arabia if a joint American-Saudi study concludes that such a project is justified.
. . .this deal may not represent [Trump’s] hedge on a nuclear Middle East. Trump is not reconciled to Iran getting the bomb. This is not the nuclear equivalent of his statements last month about it being “unfair” to deny Iran ballistic missiles if Saudi Arabia has them. He is simply doing a deal he thinks is good for the United States—American vendors, American reactors, Russian and Chinese competitors locked out of the market.
Nor is all hope lost for normalization. Israel still has much to offer Saudi Arabia, but taking one of the largest carrots off the table does make an agreement significantly more difficult. In the future, one would hope the dealmaker in chief remembers the value of leverage.
Yep, that big carrot just rolled off the table, and, according to Segal (I am not sure I agree), it’s to benefit the American military-industrial complex. Who can fathom Trump’s mind?
*Masih Alinejad’s brief is to keep calling attention to the Iranian theocracy’s detention and execution of protestors, and she does this in a new Free Press article, “Iran’s killing machine is operating in plain sight.”
Yesterday, I woke up to a message that broke my heart. Erfan Esfandiari had been hanged. He was 18 years old, and his parents’ only child. His crime, according to reports circulated by Iranian journalists and human rights activists, was opening a door. Specifically, he opened his door to let terrified protesters in as they ran from security forces during the January 2026 uprising against the Iranian regime.
That act of compassion was enough to send him to the gallows.
On that same Sunday morning, the regime hanged Gol-Mohammad Mohammadi, a 23-year-old Afghan refugee who had fled to Iran seeking safety. His crime, according to those same reports, was identical: He opened his door for protesters fleeing bullets. He was arrested, thrown into a show trial, and forced to endure three hearings, each lasting one hour. There was no independent lawyer.
Erfan and Gol-Mohammad were two of 59 men arrested together during the January uprising, in what has since become known as the Alikhani Square case. The two of them, alongside 10 others, were sentenced to death. Last week, all 12 were moved to quarantine. That is the signal: For the 10 still alive, execution is likely imminent.
. . .On Sunday, the chess champion Garry Kasparov posted a comment on X about the executions. “How tragic that these executions became the norm in Iran and accepted as such by the Free World,” he wrote.
He’s right. The world is not paying enough attention. While diplomats negotiate, bombs fall, and flimsy ceasefire agreements are signed, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been running a quiet, systematic execution campaign against the young people who dared to stand up for their freedom. And they are using the world’s distraction as cover.
During the war, President Donald Trump publicly urged the Islamic Republic’s leaders to stop executing protesters. He even said they promised they would. But we Iranians knew better. We knew that the regime was only buying time to turn mass arrests into mass executions. That is exactly what has happened.
I know that international pressure works. I have seen it. In April, Trump shared a photo of eight women who were about to be hanged, writing, “Please do them no harm!” The regime paused. On Monday, Trump shared my post about Esfandiari hanging on Truth Social, where it reached millions. But at that point, it was too late. And Esfandiari is not alone. Since the war began on February 28, according to CNN, at least 47 people have been put to death. Hundreds more remain under death sentences. We do not know the exact numbers, because the regime puts pressure on families to stay silent.
I certainly feel for Masih, and, after all, I’ve been putting up a tweet from her about civilian deaths every day for several years. But to get the regime to stop oppressing the Iranian people, we have to effect regime change, for the theocracy stays in power by exerting power: power through terrorizing the people, who don’t want to be executed. (Even given that, many Iranians still went out in the streets.) And the regime is succeeding by having executed 30,000 or more protestors. I don’t know if international pressure will do much to quash that mindset.
I don’t see how we can completely ignore this stuff when we’re at war with Iran. No, we’re not the world’s policemen, but we’re at war with Iran, Trump told the Iranian people to more or less take over their government, and this is, indeed, a laudable aim of the war.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday night challenged the federal government to execute an international arrest warrant against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, calling him a “war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people” in a striking video statement.
The mayor said the city Law Department explored whether the New York Police Department could arrest the Israeli prime minister during his expected visit to the city in September but that the city did not have “independent legal authority” to do so.
On Tuesday, Mr. Mamdani said in the video that those conversations had led his administration to determine that it did “not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.”
Seated between the flags of the United States and New York City, Mr. Mamdani looked directly into the camera and solemnly told New Yorkers that Israel’s prime minister had no place visiting New York.
“Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large,” Mr. Mamdani said. “While we cannot end the genocide on our own, we can decide whether our silence will become another weapon, and we can examine every tool we have to defend the humanity and dignity of all people.”
There appears to be no chance of federal law enforcement arresting Mr. Netanyahu in the near future. President Trump said on Monday that the Israeli leader, whose country is a longtime American ally, would not be arrested in the United States “in any way, shape, or form.”
I’m not fan of Netanyahu, but I wouldn’t arrest him on the verdict of the International Criminal Court, which didn’t deem him a war criminal but found “reasonable grounds” to have a trial (the U.S. does not abide by the ICC’s decisions, and if Mamdani arrested him in NYC there would have to be a trial here. No chance of that!) Are the people of NYC who voted for him stupid or what? And if they vote for him again, they’d be even stupider, for he’s shown his cards. Why would a mayor spend his time trying to arrest Netanyahu rather than running the city? You know the answer: he is doing performative actions to cater to his base, the “progressive” left, which is increasingly anti-Israel and antisemitic. He doesn’t want to piddle around running a city; he has his eye on the Big Stage. Thank Ceiling Cat that because he was born overseas of non-American parents, he could never be President.
Here’s Mamdani’s statement; a friend of mine commented that “Mamdani would expel the Jews from New York City if he could.” I think that’s true.
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) July 22, 2026
*The NYT has a summary article about a new PNAS paper examining geometric similarities as judged by humans and monkeys (rhesus macaques and olive baboons). It turns out that the primates are as good as human preschoolers at recognizing shapes in different orientations, while adults are the best. From the NYT:
Just like people, monkeys seem to grasp the abstract qualities of geometric shapes, such as whether they are symmetrical, have parallel sides or contain right angles, according to a new study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This ability allows the monkeys — and us — to understand when two shapes are the same, even when they’ve been rotated or resized.
This finding challenges a long-held notion that humans’ geometric abilities are part of what makes our brains one of a kind. “Our hypothesis was that humans are not that unique,” in possessing this mathematical understanding, said Jialin Li, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University and the lead author of the study.
In their experiment, Ms. Li and her colleagues decided to give monkeys (a total of eight rhesus macaques and olive baboons), preschoolers and adult humans with different education levels the same geometric task. That way, if humans truly had an innate advantage, it would show up when comparing the young children and the monkeys. And if the advantage was learned, it might show up when comparing the humans who had different levels of schooling.
It was a challenge to find a task simple enough that even preschool-aged children and monkeys could reasonably complete it, but the team eventually decided to have all the study participants do a matching task. All were shown a shape with a specific size and geometric form on a screen. Then they were asked to pick that same shape out of a group of others.
“By manipulating the similarity of the shapes, we were able to look at what kinds of rules they’re using,” said Jessica Cantlon, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University whose lab conducted the study.
. . .The researchers then analyzed the results alongside those from another lab’s recent experiment, in which monkeys, young children and adults had to identify a geometrically dissimilar shape in a group.
Through this analysis, researchers realized that their participants were all capable of making connections between shapes and their angles, ratios and patterns — monkeys included.
This shared foundation suggests that our geometric intuition evolved long before humans did, which isn’t a surprise to many researchers who study animal cognition.
“These are hardly the only animals on Earth that have to deal with geometry,” said Ed Wasserman, an experimental psychologist at the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the new study.
Here are two types of tests that were done: a “which shape is the one above?” test and a “which shape is the odd one out” test. These figures are from the PNAS paper:
I’m not in the least surprised. Except for stuff like playing chess, most human abilities have their evolutionary roots in our ancestors, and those can also be seen in our relatives. Darwin was the first to realize this in The Descent of Man (1871), and looks for similar parallels in behavior, facial expression, etc. Here’s a video about the shape experiment, its background, and its meaning:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the two enemy cats have an encounter:
Hili: Are you pretending you don’t see me? Kulka: No, I’m thinking about social relationships.
In Polish:
Hili: Udajesz, że mnie nie widzisz?
Kulka: Nie, zastanawiam się nad relacjami społecznymi.
From Luana; the Canadian government and the indigenous people still haven’t dug up any bodies in the residential school grounds. Now the First Nations people don’t need no stinkin’ evidence because they can detect from the “power and energy” that there are dead bodies. It’s ridiculous. This joker says that it’s “disrespectful” to ask for evidence.
“I don’t think we should have to prove to anybody what happened to these [dead children at Kamloops] because they are there and they send us messages telling us they’re there…[@tkemlups] Chief Casimir and I went to visit the sacred site. You can tell they’re there, right?” pic.twitter.com/O7rZfoM84E
— Frances Widdowson (@FrancesWiddows1) July 18, 2026
In which Larry is held responsible for British politics:
My degree of anxiety about the new ducklings decreases asymptotically as they age. The first week I get nervous, for they are at their most vulnerable, but as they age over the next several weeks I relax (a bit!) and am never fully complacent until they can fly, which is about two months after they hatch. They appeared on Sunday morning, which means they hatched on Saturday, so today the four ducklings are four days old. My first task of the day is to count them.
And they’re doing well: they are plump, lively, and eating well. Their mother, aka Miss Duck, is still being the perfect mom, watching over them and warming them when they’re wet. (It’s a bit chilly today: about 68°F). Here are the quadruplets getting warmed.
Few things have shocked me more than the open acquiescence—or even outright support—of the international “humanitarian” community for Egypt’s decision to seal, and even reinforce, its heavily fortified border with Gaza throughout the war. Early on, Israel tried to negotiate with Egypt to allow Gazan civilians out of harm’s way so it could target Hamas more effectively. The international “humanitarian” community reacted with outrage to the very suggestion. Meanwhile, Egypt threatened to tear up its peace treaty with Israel and declared that it was “ready to sacrifice millions of lives so that nobody would approach a grain of sand [in Sinai].”
You expect that kind of cynicism toward “fellow Arabs” from a corrupt and authoritarian regime. But from self-proclaimed Western “humanitarians”? Apparently, they’d rather keep Gazan civilians trapped in an active war zone, where Hamas could exploit them as human shields, because evacuation would supposedly amount to “ethnic cleansing.” And all this while they were hurling the obscene “genocide” libel at Israel. Because that’s obviously how you would behave if you sincerely believed a genocide was taking place, right? Prevent people from escaping? It’s either callousness, mendacity, or both.
By way of analogy, imagine that Poland had sealed its border with Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in 2022, telling the world: “Why should we let in Ukrainian civilians? We don’t want a bunch of Nazis in our country.” Bad enough. Now imagine the “humanitarian” community supporting that stance—insisting that Poland bore no responsibility for Russia’s aggression, and that admitting Ukrainians would amount to “ethnic cleansing” because Moscow might never allow them to return.
In this brilliant article, my good friend Shany Mor uses a series of clever thought experiments to expose the revealed preferences of the “humanitarians” in the Gaza war. The conclusions are deeply disturbing. They reveal an astonishing level of indifference—whether intentional or not—to the very people these organizations claim to care about. If they have to chose between demonizing Israel and helping Palestinians, they always chose the latter.
I will never, ever, ever donate to any of these organizations again—even though I supported many of them regularly in the past.
I’ll mention below which organizations Maarten deems not worthy of donations. But you’ll want to read Shany Mor’s piece, which I discuss below.
In reality, the accusation of genocide is as obscene as it is absurd. Netanyahu and his far-right cronies may be guilty of many things, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that Israel intends to exterminate Gazans, and abundant evidence to the contrary. The eagerness of Western intellectuals to nonetheless accuse Israel of genocide is by now depressingly familiar, as is their blindness to Hamas’s cynical war tactics and the extraordinarily difficult conditions under which Israel has had to pursue its legitimate aims of defeating Hamas and freeing the hostages. In my latest book, Het verraad aan de verlichting (The Betrayal of Enlightenment), I trace this reflex to a postcolonial ideology that casts the West as perpetual oppressor and anti-Western forces as inherently virtuous victims.
And a very nice essay on his substack site (originally published in Quillette) called “They don’t believe it either,” which is mostly about how those who accuse Israel of “genocide” don’t believe that accusation. An excerpt:
The many fabrications and distortions in the genocide case against Israel are evidence of something different from rational inquiry and truth-seeking. What explains the frantic search, from almost the first day of the war, for statements by Israeli officials that can be twisted into proof of genocidal intent? What accounts for the willful blindness to Hamas’s cruelty, to the point of erasing Hamas altogether, as if the war had only one combatant? And why is the definition of genocide gerrymandered by NGOs to implicate and condemn Israel—through inventions like “slow-motion genocide” or “incremental genocide”—even though the Palestinian population grew from 1.1 million to 5.1 million between 1960 and 2020?
The answer is that the “Gaza genocide” calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the “stolen election” hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. That is why nonsense like the Amalek verse keeps being recycled, impervious to correction—the point is not to offer evidence, but to hammer down a pre-established conclusion.
Shany Mor is described by Tablet as “an Associate Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and a Research Fellow at the Chaikin Center for Geostrategy at the University of Haifa. He served as a Director for Foreign Policy on the Israeli National Security Council.” His Substack, “Roter Faden“, began in April, and you can subscribe to help get it off the ground. The article mentioned by Maarten is otherwise free to access, and you can read it by clicking on the screenshot below.
Mor considers the “epistemic community of nongovernmental organizations, activists, experts, scholars, and even a few formal intergovernmental bodies united by loosely overlapping commitments to global and transnational justice,:” and divides what he calls these “Humanitarians” into four groups. He then performs a thought experiment on the groups, to wit:
Take everything you know about the course of the war which began on October 7, about the capabilities and actions of the belligerent parties, about the war’s duration and casualties, and about the terms of the various ceasefires, but pretend you know nothing about the claims and calls to action of the Humanitarians. And ask yourself what you might expect them to say and do under each of the following four hypotheses about the rough overlapping consensus of their collective preferences.]
H1: Humanitarians, especially including scholars of international law regarding armed conflict, are neutral regarding the belligerent parties in the war, and the Humanitarians collectively are genuinely committed to the humanitarian needs of civilians and noncombatants among both Israelis and Palestinians.
H2: Humanitarians are indifferent to the humanitarian needs of the Israelis but genuinely committed to the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians. Operating on imperfect information in rapidly changing conditions, and limited by what is allowable in international law and what is politically or materially feasible, they seek whatever can be done to reduce or eliminate loss of life or suffering on the part of Palestinians either as a direct or indirect consequence of the war.
H3: Humanitarians are indifferent to the immediate humanitarian needs of Palestinian civilians, but they fervently wish to see Israel defeated in the war Hamas started on October 7. They fervently believe that the only moral conclusion to the war is one that is a net gain for the Palestinians and a net loss for the Israelis. To this end, they endeavor to act as force multipliers both in theatre to preserve Hamas’ power and, especially, in Western states, to push for policies that limit Israel’s freedom of action, cut it off from military supplies, and apply pressure on it.
H4: Humanitarians are indifferent to the war’s strategic outcome and prefer to see more death and more suffering on the Palestinian side, not as an end in and of itself but rather as a means to confirm beliefs in Israel’s essentially demonic nature, and as a way of mobilizing hatred and social isolation of Jews in the West. In particular, there is a preference for any rhetoric or political action which removes what are believed to be the unfair social privileges which western Jews hold due to the memory of the Holocaust.
Mor then says what one would expect from each group if the characterization were true. (Of course he’s operating with the wisdom of hindsight here, but that doesn’t negate his argument.)
Did you decide which was the most accurate characterization of the worldwide “humanitarian” response to the war? In light of what Maarten said above about the border with Egypt, and the total neglect of Hamas’s stealing of humanitarian aid to Israel, as well as the distortions about the “starvation” situation in Gaza and the push to stop Israel from taking military action, I guessed correctly. Yes, it’s H3. Here’s what Mor “retrodicted” under that scenario:
H3 would see immediate demands for Israel to forgo any military offensive against Hamas at all, effectively locking in the tactical gains Hamas made on October 7, and opening the door for future October 7-style operations as a means to securing political advances for the Palestinian cause. Humanitarians would do nothing to get Palestinians out of a war zone, and they would boycott aid mechanisms that threatened Hamas’s continued rule in Gaza. They would pressure Western governments to cut off weapons supplies to the IDF and to suspend trade relations with Israel. They would mobilize international courts to try to stay Israel’s hand on the battlefield in order to limit Hamas’ defeat. And they would use their influence to push governments to hand the Palestinians tangible diplomatic achievements that could have been secured for decades with a peace agreement for free as a reward for the war launched on October 7.
That is pretty much what happened: the calls for Israel to not retaliate, or calls for a cease-fire, began even before Israel attacked and entered Gaza to retaliate. The lack of criticism of Egypt for sealing its borders was deafening to some of us, though most people—perhaps on purpose—didn’t even consider the implications of that silence. The pressure on Israel is obvious: Douglas Murray said something like, “Israel is the only country in the world that is not allowed to win a defensive war.” Many apologists said that Hamas’s attack was justified retaliation for Israel’s oppression of the territory, despite the fact that Israel booted the Jews out of Gaza in 2005 and handed it to Palestinians. They had, in effect, a state, but then elected Hamas, which ruined whatever valid governance Gaza had. (Don’t forget that the Palestinians had rejected a two-state solution half a dozen times before.)
Mor’s conclusions:
The war has provoked a lot of anguished discussion about the role of international law and global civil society, to say nothing of the role of international norms and the “rules-based order.” But the epistemic community that claims for itself the role of protector of those values is due for a serious moral reckoning too.
And once that reckoning begins, it shouldn’t limit itself just to the Humanitarians’ actions following October 7. Critics of Israel’s government often point to its role in supposedly propping up the Hamas regime in Gaza in the years before October 7, supposedly as a counterweight to the more moderate Palestinian Authority operating in the West Bank. It’s a legitimate critique, voiced domestically in Israel as well. But it’s worth remembering that Israel’s role in propping up the Hamas regime was tiny compared to that of international organizations such as UNRWA, MSF, and others who took care of crucial governance functions for the de facto Hamas statelet during its two-decade reign in the Gaza Strip, freeing it to hijack all the Strip’s resources for tunnel digging and weapons smuggling and manufacture. And these were joined by the experts and agencies who invented bespoke international norms after 2007 that meant that any Israeli action that we now know could have prevented October 7 would have been decried as a war crime.
Oh, and what were the NGOs that were in group 3? Maarten got a list from Claude that you can see here; it includes Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights. The question he posed to Claude was this:
Which international humanitarian NGOs or organizations have criticized the Israeli proposal early in the recent Gaza war to evacuate Gazan civilians to the Sinai peninsula, worrying that it might amount to ethnic cleansing, or arguing that Egypt has no responsibility to help Israel’s war efforts? Give me names and links please.
Maarten added, “Amnesty was appalling, as usual.” Amnesty International has gone the way of the ACLU and SPLC: ideologically captured by “progressives.”
As for the “g-word”, I write off those who accuse Israel of genocide as either ignorant blockheads or antisemites.
Welcome to a Hump Day (“Ghjornu di a Gobba” in Corsican): Wednesday, July 22, 2026, and National Mango Day, celebrating my favorite fruit. I have visited India quite a few times, but my biggest regret is that I’ve never gone in the summer, which is mango season (the photo below shows a small selection of the varieities available). It’s bloody hot then, and I haven’t been willing to trade off eating mangos for being broiled.
The Trump administration plans to announce Wednesday that it has reached a broad nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could lead to the country enriching its own fuel for nuclear reactors, U.S. officials said.
The accord is intended to further bind the United States with the Saudi government as the war with Iran strains the relationship. The Trump administration, according to officials, estimates it will provide billions of dollars for the U.S. nuclear industry — starting with Westinghouse, which designs many of the reactors sold abroad.
The Trump administration plans to formally sign and announce the agreement with the Saudis on Wednesday, said two U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It would announce the details to Congress soon afterward.
Although the agreement likely would have support among many Republicans, some U.S. lawmakers from both parties along with Israeli officials have expressed opposition to such a plan, fearing that the kingdom could use a civilian nuclear project to eventually develop nuclear weapons.
What’s the point? To keep Iran at bay? I don’t think so.
If the Houthis make good on their threat to blockade ships traveling to and from Saudi Arabia via the Red Sea, it would yet again upend global oil markets by compromising a crucial fallback for the Strait of Hormuz.
Since the early weeks of the war with Iran, Saudi Arabia has been relying on a pipeline that bisects the country to reroute millions of barrels of oil from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea.
Most of that oil gets to market via the Bab al-Mandab strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, off the coast of Yemen and near territory controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia. A smaller portion goes north to the Mediterranean Sea, via a pipeline that crosses Egypt or, in the case of oil-derived fuel, via the Suez Canal.
Any disruption to those alternatives would further restrict the supply of oil and fuels to a market rattled by renewed attacks on vessels in the Persian Gulf. The threats already appear to be having an impact. Two oil tankers, the Rodos and the Xin Long Yang, that were headed toward the Bab al-Mandab made U-turns on Tuesday, according to the maritime data firm Kpler.
Here’s a map from Wikipedia showing the chokepoint. The article adds, “The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is 26 kilometres (14 nautical miles) wide at its narrowest point, limiting tanker traffic to two 2-mile-wide channels for inbound and outbound shipments.”
In the earlier case of genocides that “succeeded” because of impunity at the time or the absence of subsequent accountability, the perpetrator state went on to benefit from its criminal actions. The invention and codification of the concept of genocide after World War II was meant to prevent the persistence of this dynamic of impunity and profit.
What we have seen unfold in Gaza, where Israel stands accused in the International Court of Justice of committing genocide in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, appears to portend a new future for the crime.
It is a future in which other nations or leaders may have an incentive to pursue genocidal policies knowing they will not only get away with murder but may even benefit from it. It is a future in which the countries and international organizations that had been committed to stopping and punishing genocide may give license to its recurrence.
Since the current cease-fire in Gaza went into effect on Oct. 10, and President Trump’s 20-point plan was endorsed by the Security Council on Nov. 17, more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli attacks. The military now controls nearly 70percent of the Strip. Two million Palestinians, who had previously lived in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, are now confined to a third of it, trying to survive in devastated spaces lacking the most basic humanitarian infrastructure.
. . . Israel is unlikely to face a reckoning for its actions. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and his former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as for a Hamas official, who turned out to have been killed. The United States has tried to undermine the court, and Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly visited the White House to, among other things, try to reportedly persuade Mr. Trump to launch his attack on Iran. Israel may eventually be found guilty of genocide by the International Court of Justice, where South Africa has lodged a separate case against Israel, but the implications of such a ruling are unclear as long as Israel retains U.S. support on the U.N. Security Council, which acts as the enforcement arm of the I.C.J.
. . . Some may argue that the case of Gaza is singular because Israel enjoys a unique international position thanks to its tight alliance with the United States and its reliance on the legacy of the Holocaust. Perhaps other states cannot expect to be rewarded and may even be punished for genocide. Yet what we are seeing today sets an extraordinary precedent, one that has the potential of undermining the entire premise of genocide as a crime punishable under post-World War II international law.
Two points here. Bartov mentions Hamas only twice, one in the third sentence of this extract (and in the whole article). There is no criticism of Hamas, nor any recognition that its attack on October 7 was intended to begin a real genocide. The original Hamas Charter of 1988 explicitly calls for the killing of Jews, and while the later 2017 charter has effaced the antsemitism, it’s still antizionist, calls for a Palestinian state from the “river to the sea” and does not recognize the state of Israel. It now uses the words “Zionist” and “Zionism”, but nobody’s fooled by that. Palestinian children are still taught to kill Jews and become martyrs, and the PA still has its “Martyr’s Fund” to reward Palestinians jailed for killing or attacking Jews. Does Bartov not recognize the explicit genocidal intent of Hamas?
Second, what did Bartov want Israel to do in the face of repeated terrorist attacks on Israel culimating on the October 7 massacre? Did he expect the Israeli army to go into Gaza, shoot a few bullets at Hamas without harming the populace in which they were embedded, and then withdraw? What would he have done to stop the terrorism?
t’s Tuesday, July 21, and buried at least 100 meters deep beneath a mountain near the city of Natanz lies a critical piece of Tehran’s nuclear program. But it isn’t enriched uranium that makes Pickaxe Mountain the stuff of Israeli nightmares.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Israeli intelligence has determined that Iran moved thousands of uranium-enrichment centrifuges into tunnels deep within the mountain last fall, following the 12-day war in June. If accurate, this represents a significant acceleration of Iran’s path to reviving its nuclear program—one that both the U.S. and Israel believed was effectively dead and buried.
Pickaxe Mountain has been under construction since the fall of 2020. At the time, Iran claimed the underground halls would replace the destroyed above-ground centrifuge assembly facility at Natanz’s main site, which was severely damaged in an explosion widely suspected to have been an act of sabotage. Iran describes the facility publicly as a centrifuge assembly plant. Israeli intelligence, however, indicates the purpose is far more ambitious: The site is believed capable of supporting not just assembly operations but limited uranium enrichment.
Over the past 15 months, satellite imagery has documented steady activity: truck traffic, tunnel reinforcements, and expanding security perimeters. The assumption had been that U.S. overflights and the implicit threat of precision strikes would deter Iran from restarting its nuclear program—but that calculation appears to have been wrong. The facility was not targeted during last year’s Israel-Iran war, nor has it been struck during the current round of U.S.-Iran fighting, either because operators assessed that bombs would have minimal effect or because the site remained under construction. But that calculus may now be shifting.
Last week, Donald Trump broke his public silence on Pickaxe Mountain. “Pickaxe is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right near the front door,” Trump said.
. . . and from the WSJ’s similar report:
Known as Mount Kolang in Iran, Pickaxe has been under surveillance by the U.S. and Israel for years, and what little is known about Iran’s activities at the site suggests it would present challenges to any airstrikes. Located near one of Iran’s main nuclear installations, Pickaxe was commissioned as an underground replacement for an Iranian centrifuge-assembly facility that was badly damaged after a 2020 explosion, which might have been an act of sabotage.
Activity has continued there steadily for the past 15 months, with truck traffic, tunnel reinforcements and a security perimeter springing up, said the Institute for Science and International Security, a think tank on nuclear and nonproliferation issues. There was also work around an older tunnel network that dates from 2007, which Iran has since sealed up.
“It is plausible that Iran moved centrifuges into the tunnels” in Pickaxe, said David Albright, the institute’s president.
Experts estimate that the subterranean complex reaches 300 to 450 feet deep beneath solid rock, with enough room to accommodate several nuclear-related facilities.
It still amazes me that any sentient being thinks that Iran will obey an agreement to not construct nuclear weapons. That is its overweening task, and if it agrees to abandon the drive for nukes, it is lying. And, of all people, Trump seems to believe it, too. If he was serious in saying that no agreement to end hostilities can be made without Iran promising to never make nuclear weapons, he was deluded. Besides, we’ll have a new President in 2029, and all bets are off.
I was a member of the DSA from the 2010s until 2022. During that time, I witnessed a rise in extremism, ranging from an eagerness to collaborate with Leninist groups to a growing animosity toward the U.S. and the West. My final departure was prompted by a DSA statement that attributed Russia’s aggression against Ukraine to American “imperialist expansionism.”
So what does the DSA stand for? An answer to that question arrived last week in the form of a new platform. Among the DSA’s core aims are ending the presidency and Supreme Court. Abolishing prisons. Universal free housing. The elimination of all debt. Closing all U.S. military bases overseas. Lifting all sanctions from Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. And so much more.
“Workers Deserve More!”—the title of the new platform—is meant to present a friendlier face to the world and overcome the radical reputation the organization has developed in many corners of the public. That makes it even more remarkable that the document is still so radical on its face. It advocates the elimination of capitalism, not a thick layer of redistribution on top of the current economy. It prompts readers to imagine a world where the profit motive has been squelched out of existence. “You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded.” It goes on to promise open borders, the abolition of the police, “free” everything, and guaranteed jobs, all with less effort from the individual. This is the stuff of fairy tales, but instead of a fairy godmother, the reader is greeted by an agent of the secret police.
. . .Crucially, DSA’s foreign policy positions ignore America’s enemies: While DSA targets U.S. and Israeli leadership for prosecution, the platform is silent on the actual atrocities committed by the Russian, Iranian, Venezuelan, and Chinese regimes. In early 2019, when I argued that the DSA should denounce the Nicolàs Maduro regime for mass persecution, abuse, torture, and murder, a local leader told me that to advocate against the Maduro administration would be to play into U.S. war propaganda.
It is always the U.S.—so-called American imperialism—that comes in for the harshest criticism while America’s authoritarian enemies get apologia. For the DSA, the world’s most authoritarian regimes deserve political cover. DSA blamed NATO and Western “imperialist expansionism” for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. October 7, 2023, the DSA first expressed its solidarity with Palestine and then laid the blame for Hamas’s terror attacks on Israel. After the Maduro regime brutalized and murdered its opponents, DSA members were happy to visit him and celebrate his regime. Meanwhile, the West is expected to dismantle its military capabilities.
Part of the DSA program is an attack on the forces of law and order. The DSA continues to push for police and ICE abolition while simultaneously establishing what sounds like a paramilitary wing. The DSA has formed a group called the Red Rabbits to prepare for a “national uprising against federal agents and police brutality.” So it’s a paramilitary force for the DSA, but no protection for the rest of us.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, and dare I say comrades?: this is what the mayor of NYC wants, along with AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Bernie Sanders (the former two card-carrying DSA Congresswomen, and Bernie a running dog. Some day, when AOC tries to realize her ambition of becoming a Senator, or even President, this will come back to haunt her. Well, it should.
*More ideological corruption in publishing: the Times of Israel reports that a U.S. publisher refused to publish a book, Cartoonists Against the Holocaust, containing 150 political cartoons published in the U.S. during the Nazi era, unless the author let the publisher add an anti-Israel statement. This is unbelievable.
A US publisher canceled a book about the Holocaust because the author refused to add text denouncing Israel to the book, the StandWithUS advocacy group said this week.
Dark Horse Comics was scheduled to publish the book, “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust,” by Dr. Rafael Medoff, this summer, but informed the author’s team last month that publication had been canceled.
The book uses 150 editorial cartoons that had been printed in US newspapers in the Nazi era, alongside commentary from Medoff, to show what Americans knew about the Holocaust at the time.
An editor at Dark Horse last year told Medoff that he would add a statement to the book accusing US President Donald Trump of “attempting to create concentration camp-style prisons,” among other offenses, according to correspondence shared by StandWithUs.
The proposed addition also included a paragraph condemning Israel.
Get a load of this “addition”:
“A country populated by a [sic.] ethnoreligious group who were immorally and horrifically tortured and killed in the Holocaust for their ethnicity is led by a Prime Minister that the world’s top war crimes court has issued warrants for his alleged acts of war crimes an [sic.] crimes against humanity,” the paragraph said.
In a response emailed to the editor, Medoff pushed back against “politicizing our book” and called the claims “factually inaccurate.”
The email also said that, during a phone conversation, the editor had demanded Medoff accuse Israel of genocide in the book’s introduction to prevent people from getting “mad.”
Medoff said the editor’s proposals amounted to minimizing the Nazi genocide and Holocaust inversion.
“What you are saying, in plain English, is that the Jews were victims of the Holocaust and now the Jews are committing another Holocaust,” Medoff wrote. “I understand it has become fashionable in certain circles today to accuse Israel of mass murder. But being fashionable is not the same as being right.”
More of the same—every damn day. Here the publisher wanted to establish purity by damning Israel, in a book that was about the Holocaust in WWII. Relevant? No. Shameful? Certainly.
Scottish middle-distance runner Josh Kerr became the fastest man in world history over four laps on Saturday, clocking 3:42.66 to break a world record set 27 years ago by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco.
The historic run at the London Diamond League fulfilled Kerr’s season-long Project 222 quest, so named for the number of seconds required to break 3:43.13, the standard set by El Guerrouj in 1999 at Rome’s Stadio Olimpico, the site of his still-standing world record of 3:26.00 in the 1500 meters set a year prior. Prior to this race, Kerr was the sixth-fastest man in world history with a personal best of 3:45.34.
Kerr’s Brooks Beast teammate Brannon Kidder of the United States and Zan Rudolf of Slovenia paced the attempt with splits of 54.75 and 1:50.63. With a lap and a half to go, Rudolf stepped off the track and it was up to Kerr, who led American Yared Nuguse and Germany’s Robert Farken through 1200 meters in 2:46.39 with a quarter-mile split of 55.76. The final result was never in contest as the Brit powered home in a new world record. Nuguse finished a well-beaten second in 3:45.69, a season’s best.
. , ,Kerr has built a reputation as one of the most confident middle-distance runners in the world. On Saturday, he said he relied on the pacemakers to carry him through.
“The best analogy we worked with today was that my two pacemakers set the tone, the river,” Kerr said to FloTrack. “They set the stream and all I had to do sit in that water for as long as I could, follow it, and not fight it. I said I wasn’t on a chase today. I was flowing with the conditions that were set and I just needed to not slow down.”
It took year to shave off half a second from the previous record. Of course there is a physiological limit to how fast it can be run: humans cannot run a mile in ten seconds but they can in 3:43. And the time is reaching an asymptote, though we don’t know what it is. .
Here’s the record run:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is lording it over Kulka (Hili hates Kulka but Szaron doesn’t mind her):
Szaron: Kulka is right below you. Hili: Everyone ought to know their place.
In Polish:
Szaron: Pod tobą siedzi Kulka.
Hili: Każdy powinien znać swoje miejsce.
*******************
From Addicted to Ducks. And this is true, too! In French, for example, duck noises are “kwan kwan” (IPA: /kwɛ̃/), with the vowel nasal.
From the Free Press via Masih: two young Iranians just executed for sheltering protestors. The regime continues to kill left and right, but “regime change” is not on Trump’s agenda:
Two Iranian teenagers were just executed for opening their doors to fleeing protesters. They are only the latest victims of a regime that uses the world’s distractions to carry out mass killing, writes Masih Alinejad. https://t.co/2OabCNqUqL
Photo du Jour: Members of the press photograph a dead mouse caught by Larry the Downing St cat (left). By Stefan Rousseau/PA pic.twitter.com/2TrY1OFJh8
One from my feed; a lovely baby otter and its mom:
The embrace between Sea Otters and their babies is one of the most tender behaviours in the animal kingdom.
The mothers hug them against their bellies to keep them warm, groom them, and prevent the current from carrying them away.#WildlifePhotography#Otters 🦦
Two from Doc Cobb. He posted this one about a man part of whose job is to remove knobs from the Tour de France course. He’s been doing it for 15 years!
The guy who artfully removes the knobs from the Tour de France roads so TV viewers will not be shocked by infantile graffiti.
Since there’s no significant news today, allow me to bore you with my latest duck pictures, as I’m chuffed that all the babies are in their fourth day, having survived two nights without attrition. They look healthy, are eating heartily, and are lively, swimming around between bouts of napping with Miss Duck, their mom. All these photos are from this morning.
Feeding time (four—count them, four:
Their adorableness abides:
A postprandial stretch:
And an early morning nap, with Miss Duck being nearby. (I’ve already fed them twice):
And naptime turns into a huddle underneath mom. One underneath:
Two underneath (look at those fat little tummies!):
All underneath and getting warm. Miss Duck is proving to be a great mom.
