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.
This morning a friend who works in the department office called me and said “there are two ducks in the pond.” I instantly knew that this would be a male/female pair of mallards scoping out the pond as a potential nesting and rearing site. Within one minute I grabbed my camera and my container of adult duck food (I saved it from last year; I have plenty and it’s still good), and ran down to the pond.
Sure enough, there was a pair of mallards at the far (south) end. Moreover, then swam near me when I whistled, though they didn’t come right up to me. This suggests that these are the mallards knew me, though, based on bill patterns in the hen, I don’t think they are Esther and Mordecai from last year.
Those ducks were named because they arrived on the Jewish holiday of Purim, and, sure enough, that holiday is tomorrow. These are again Jewish ducks and will have to be named accordingly.
I am so happy. There is no guarantee they’ll stay, but food is thin on the pond, and I am making sure they know it is a place to get a nice meal. After filling their tummies, they retired back to the south end for a rest.
Photos. First, the pair (name suggestions welcome, especially Jewish-themed names—but not Mordecai and Esther):
The hen:
The hen eating (out of focus). They were hungry!
The drake, dripping water from his bill after having eating a food pellet (I give them only the best):
The hen’s bill:
This is Esther from last year. The bill pattern of today’s hen is clearly different, so the hen we have now is not Esther. But there’s no guarantee that this one will breed here (remember, Esther was our first ground-nesting female). Note that today’s duck lacks Esther’s black markings on the top and tip of her bill, and those should have remained over a year.
Originally I was going to call this post “The New York Times coddles faith again,” but there is not all that much coddling in this review of Christopher Beha’s new book Why I am not an Atheist.
What puzzles me is that the review is on the cover of the NYT’s latest Sunday book section. That position is usually reserved for important or notable books, but Timothy Egan’s review doesn’t make the book seem that interesting. Could it be that the cover slot came from the book being about . . . . God? At any rate, given that Beha’s book came out February 17, the fact that its Amazon ranking is only 1,562 (very low for a new book on the benefits of faith), and there are only 8 reviews (all 5-star reviews, of course), is not a sign that this is a barn-burner that will fill the God-shaped lacuna in the public soul.
Beha has previously given an excerpt of his book in the NYer, which I discussed in my recent post “A New Yorker writer loses faith in atheism.” I found Beha’s arguments lame, and I summarized the book this way, as well as provided information on the author. From my post:
Even the title of this New Yorker article is dumb: “faith in atheism” is an oxymoron, for a lack of belief in gods is not a “faith” in any meaningful sense. But of course the New Yorker is uber-progressive,”which means it’s soft on religion. And this article, recounting Christopher Beha’s journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back to a watery theism, is a typical NYer article: long on history and intellectual references, but short on substance. In the end I think it can be shortened to simply this:
“Atheism in all its forms is a kind of faith, but it doesn’t ground your life by giving it meaning. This is why I became a theist.”
So far as I can determine, that is all, though the article is tricked out with all kinds of agonized assertions as the author finds he cannot “ground his life” on a lack of belief in God. But whoever said they could? But it plays well with the progressive New Yorker crowd (same as the NY Times crowd) in being soft on religion and hard on atheism. The new generation of intellectuals need God, for to them, as to Beha, only a divine being can give meaning to one’s life.
Christopher Beha, a former editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of a new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, with the subtitle Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. The NYer piece is taken from that book
You can read the Sunday NYT review by clicking on the screenshot below, or find it archived for free here.
Here’s the cover highlighting the book (thanks to Greg for sending me a photo of the paper version he gets). Stuff like this roils my kishkes:
Reviewer Tinothy Egan is somewhat lukewarm about the book, even though he avers that he is a believer and had his own search for faith as well as an inexplicable faith epiphany. The NYT identifies him this way:
So both author and reviewer, as well as the MSM (including the NYT), are rife these days with either promotions of religious books or softball reviews of them. And all this manages to centeron the search for meaning in these dire times, a search for meaning that always winds up filling the “God-shaped hole” in our being. That is something Egan apparently documents in his own book and is, of course, the subject of Beha’s book.
As I noted when reviewing Beha’s New Yorker piece, he went back and forth from a youthful Catholicism to a materialistic atheism and then found his way back to God again, always tormented by the fact that he saw an angel who spoke to him when he was 15. As reviewer Egan says:
As someone who also saw something inexplicable (a long-dead saint opening her eyes from a crypt in Italy), I preferred the teenage Beha who was filled with religious wonder. Not to worry. By the end of the book, he returns to the angel with an expanded view. It was both miracle and real. “I know what ‘caused’ these visitations, from a strictly material standpoint, but I also know what they in turn caused — a lifelong journey that I am still on.”
Not to worry! That statement alone speaks volumes. But Egan continues:
In between are several hundred pages that make up that journey, almost all of it through the mostly atheistic philosophers of the Western canon. Unlike a traditional pilgrimage, this book is an odyssey of the mind. Beha debates the old masters: Descartes, Kant, Locke, Mill, Hobbes, Camus, Nietzsche and many, many others, but he starts with a poke at the “New Atheists” Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the like — all of them now passé, in his view.
This tells you two things: the reviewer is soft on spiritual experiences, since he himself had one (see the link three paragraphs back), and that the author bashes the New Atheism as being “passé”, a cheap shot which doesn’t at all give New Atheism credit for pushing along the rise of the “nones” and making criticism of religion an acceptable thing to discuss.
But Beha is still somewhat critical of the scholastic tenor of the book, so it’s not a totally glowing review:
Beha is not a stone thrower or even much of a picker of fights. He reveres the great minds, to an obsessive degree. He’s the guy you wanted as your college roommate in the pre-A.I. era. Or maybe not. He’s done all the reading and even wrote a memoir about it, “The Whole Five Feet,” recounting the year he consumed all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics series. Just looking at the list makes most of us tired.
He climbed that mountain, so we don’t have to. But, alas, at times in his new book he gets lost in the clouds. Here’s a sample, discussing Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher: “Kant is here invoking two binaries we’ve already discussed. The first is that between a priori and a posteriori truth; the second is that between analysis and synthesis.”
But Beha is sincere, honest and likable on the page. I found his personal story more engaging than his intellectual one. He started to doubt his faith at 18 when he nearly lost his twin brother to a car accident. He suffered from depression and life-threatening cancer, drank too much and took too many drugs. (He was an atheist for a long time.)
. . . But Beha is sincere, honest and likable on the page. I found his personal story more engaging than his intellectual one.
But as for the things I highlighted in my own take on Beha’s NYer article—things like the “faith in science” that we supposedly have, and the “romantic idealism” that is coequal to science in its inability to apprehend universal truths—of these things Egan says nothing. Nor does he point out that many people (I’m one) have found satisfaction without God, though many of us don’t have a God-shaped hole nor are actively looking for meaning. Instead, Egan’s take is anodyne, for one simply cannot get away with pushing nonbelief in the New York Times. What you can do is bash atheism in general and New Atheism in particular.
Egan:
Ultimately, atheism failed [Beha], as it did some in the French Revolution who briefly converted the Notre-Dame Cathedral into the spiritually barren Temple of Reason. The religion of nonreligion can be like nonalcohol beer: What’s the point?
I have to interject here to note that “nonreligion”—atheism—is not religion, in the same way that not drinking is a form of alcoholism. The trope that atheists have “faith” is simply ridiculous. What they have is a failure to be convinced of a phenomenon when there is no evidence for it. But I digress. Egan continues his review’s peroration:
Beha is not interested in trying to sway those who’ve given up on God. He simply wants to explain what moved him back to the faith of his fathers, “listening to the whispering voice within our souls.” There’s no Road-to-Damascus conversion. He’s not blinded by the light. It’s more about his often miserable life getting better with the right woman, a Catholic confession, regular attendance at Mass. And that woman — “she was the reason I believed in God” — isn’t even a believer. She’s a lapsed Episcopalian.
If Beha doesn’t necessarily win his argument with Russell, give him credit for following the imperative of all sentient beings — to deeply consider the mystery of ourselves in an unknowable universe.
“I don’t believe I will ever see things clearly; not in this mortal life,” he concludes. “The best we can hope for is to be looking in the right direction, facing the right way.”
I put something like this up years ago, but it’s a good way to see, with just a few clicks, what happened to Iran after the “Revolution”. Let’s taken women’s dress, a touchstone of misogyny and theocratic oppression. Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, it was a pretty free country in that respect, and everyone could dress how they wanted.
To see that, do a Google Image search for “Iranian women, 1970”. I’ve done it for you: click here. And this is the first images you see (click photo to enlarge):
And the “after” page. Click “Iranian women, 2000” (again, just go here). This is 21 years after the “Revolution.” You’ll see this.
I didn’t manipulate the search in any way save put in what’s above, and I’ve used the first four rows of photos for both.
I don’t think I need to comment on the change, which speaks volumes about the oppression of women in that country. Oh, and why the cry for change is “Women, Life, Freedom.”
This is the last full batch I have, though I’m saving singletons and the like for a melange post. But today is our first post (as I remember) that features carnivorous plants, from reader Jan Malik. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
A few species of carnivorous plants grow in New York and New Jersey, primarily in swamps or bogs where it is difficult for plants to obtain nitrogen and phosphorus. Compounds of both elements are highly soluble in water and are poorly retained in waterlogged, low-pH soil. So far, I have found two species, each using a different strategy to catch its prey.
Sundew (likely Drosera intermedia).
“A small plant growing in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. While there are other Drosera species in the Eastern USA, this one has leaves spaced along a short stem rather than a ground-hugging rosette. The plant must receive a rich payoff for the resources spent producing mucus and protease enzymes, as the remains of digested victims were obvious on many leaves. Research suggests that nitrogen from captured invertebrates can account for 30% to 70% of the plant’s total uptake, depending on prey density.”
The “Expensive” Glisten.
There must be something in the glistening droplets of mucilage on these tentacles that attracts insects. It looks like a lavish investment, but mucilage is mostly water with a small amount of polysaccharides to provide stickiness. The “expensive” enzymes are only produced after a victim is captured. I wonder if this secretion occurs only in the leaf where the victim is immobilized or systemically throughout the plant. In this shot, it even looks like the plant accidentally produced a web of sticky mucilage strands (on the right), mimicking a spiderweb.
Digestion in Progress.
An example of a fresh victim: a species of crane fly being digested. By plant standards, this process is quite fast; in a couple of days, little will remain except for fragments of chitin.
Purple Pitcher Plant (Sarracenia purpurea).
Photographed in the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks, NY, this species is a less “active” predator than the sundew. Both plants form traps from modified leaves, but pitcher plants form jugs that fill with rainwater. When small invertebrates (or occasionally small salamanders) fall in, they drown. Unlike the sundew, the pitcher plant generally doesn’t produce its own enzymes (except in very young pitchers); instead, it relies on a micro-ecosystem within the water—protozoa, mosquito larvae, and bacteria. These organisms decompose the victims, eventually releasing nitrogen and phosphorus for the plant to absorb through the leaf wall.
Carnivorous plants have a dilemma: how to capture invertebrates but let the pollinators live and do the job. The Purple pitcher plant soles it in the most logical way, by extending stems of its flowers so that they are far away from entrances to the pitchers. Apparently, that is the investment that pays off for the plant.
Durability vs. Chemistry.
Pitcher leaves are green in June but eventually turn deep purple. These plants are more cold-hardy than sundews and are likely the most northern-reaching carnivorous plants in North America. In the Adirondacks, they survive harsh winters buried under snow for half the year, and their leaves can remain active traps for several seasons. While Droserainvests in “biochemical weapons,” Sarraceniainvests in durable structures. Nutrient uptake is slower in pitchers but comes at a lower metabolic cost.
The Downward Path.
A close-up of the barbs on the lower lip of the pitcher trap. These guide victims downward, aided by scent and secreted nectar. Because they are downward-pointing, a victim has a difficult time climbing out, especially given the waxy, slippery surface of the leaf. Functionally, these barbs serve the same purpose as the sundew’s mucilage—preventing escape—but they are much “cheaper” energetically since they are part of the permanent leaf structure.
Welcome to the first Monday in March, March 2, 2026 to be exact, and, like “yesterday” (because I mixed up dates), International Rescue Cat Day. But that just gives me an excuse to show another cat rescue video. ‘This wonderful woman rescued five kittens from under a gas tank as well as their mom outside. The kittens are being adopted out, though it’s not clear what happened to Mom:
It’s also all the days I said it was yesterday, as I screwed up with the dates: Casimir Pulaski Day, honoring the Polish man who helped the colonies during the Revolutionary War, but was neither born nor died on this day, and National Banana Cream Pie Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 2 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Lots of news about the conflict in the Middle East: several Israelis and Americans have now been killed by Iranian strikes, and the Iranian regime has now appointed an interim leader. Meet the new boss: same as the old boss. (Pretty much the same as in Venezuela.)
Iran unleashed deadly retaliatory strikes on Sunday against Israel and the countries of the Persian Gulf, home to several U.S. military bases, in a conflict that has drawn in much of the Middle East and that critics say has no clear endgame.
Three U.S. troops were killed in action, the Pentagon said on Sunday, the first Americans to die in President Trump’s war with Iran. United States Central Command did not say where the troops were killed. At least nine people were killed in Israel, and amid fears of a wider conflagration, at least four people were killed in attacks across the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, according to official reports tallied by The New York Times.
Iran’s top national security official, Ali Larijani, announced that an interim committee would run the country until a successor to the ayatollah was chosen. He also said the death of the ayatollah would not deter Iran, which he said would hit Israeli and American targets “with a force they have never experienced before.” The supreme leader was killed in his home office in the U.S.-Israeli attack on Saturday, Tasnim, the Iranian news agency, reported.
As the United States and Israel pressed on with their high-risk military campaign, the Israeli military said on Sunday that its air force was again bombarding “the heart of Tehran.”
. . .In total, at least four people were killed and more than 100 others were injured in the attacks across the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, according to official reports tallied by The New York Times.
Many of the most shocking episodes played out in Dubai, the largest Emirati city and the business and tourism capital of the Middle East. Five-star hotels caught fire, explosions shattered the windows of apartment towers and the emirate’s bustling international airport was damaged, injuring four people. Social media influencers and terrified migrant workers shared videos of fiery projectiles in the night sky, streaking past the city’s iconic skyscrapers.
And there are reports of a strike on a girls’ school, though there are some reports that this was a misfired Iranian missile:
The death toll from a strike on a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran rose to at least 115 people on Sunday, according to Iranian state and state-affiliated media. It appears to be one of the worst mass casualty events of the American-Israeli bombing campaign so far. The strike hit Shajarah Tayyebeh school on Saturday, the start of the workweek in Iran, after many Iranians had already dropped their children off there. The school in the southern town of Minab appears to be adjacent to a naval base belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, according to satellite imagery.
Asked to respond to reports of the strike, a United States Central Command spokesperson said that the United States was “aware of reports concerning civilian harm resulting from ongoing military operations. We take these reports seriously and are looking into them.” The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Given Iranian news blackouts and restrictions on outside journalists, the strike could not be independently verified, but is sad if true, especially because it would involve girls being educated something against many Islamists’ views. However, a school should not be located next to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base, which is pretty much like protecting the basis with a human shield.
And this morning the NYT announced gleefully that the war had widened (they want nothing more than a Trump failure), but the main widening is that Hezbollah, breaking the truce, struck Israel, and Israel retaliated. Trump also announced that the war could last several weeks. I am getting antsy: how can the Iranian people depose a regime with weapons that is dug in and about to create a successor conservative theocracy?
Here are two maps by Daniel Wood in the NYT, showing where Israel and the U.S. attacked and where Iran attacked in response:
Large crowds of Iranians took to the streets, cheering with joy and playing celebratory music, Saturday night and early Sunday as reports spread that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been killed.
Internet and phone service are almost entirely down in Iran, making accounts hard to verify and causing difficulties in assessing how widespread the celebratory sentiment was.
Celebrations in Tehran began shortly after 11 p.m., even before Iranian state television confirmed the killing of Khamenei, who brutally ruled over the country for 36 years.
The video player is currently playing an ad. You can skip the ad in 5 sec with a mouse or keyboard
The New York Times, citing video calls with three residents of Tehran, said that “loud Persian dance music filled the streets. Many residents, from their windows and balconies, joined in a chant of ‘freedom, freedom.’”
The newspaper also published videos — with some individuals’ faces blurred — of celebrations in Abdanan, a Kurdish city where many protesters were killed in January — showing men and women cheering and honking their car horns in the middle of the street upon hearing the news.
Here’s a BBC video purporting to show celebrations of Khamenei’s death, including fireworks. First, the English translation:
These images, showing the joy of citizens in Dehgelan, Mehrshahr, and Memseni following the publication of reports on the killing of Ali Khamenei, have been released. After the announcement of the news of Ali Khamenei’s killing, videos published on social media depict the celebrations of citizens in various cities across Iran.
این تصاویر از شادی شهروندان در دهگلان، مهرشهر و ممسنی پس از انتشار گزارشهای کشته شدن علی خامنهای منتشر شده است. پس از اعلام خبر کشته شدن علی خامنهای، ویدیوهای منتشرشده در شبکههای اجتماعی از شادی شهروندان در شهرهای مختلف ایران حکایت دارد. pic.twitter.com/Tfb0ylP3F9
. . .US President Donald Trump authorized Operation Epic Fury against Iran after Washington received intelligence indicating that the Islamic Republic would deploy its ballistic missiles either preemptively or simultaneously with any American action against Tehran, a senior US official said on Saturday.
For their part, Iranian officials have asserted that they would only deploy the country’s arsenal if attacked, which is what ended up happening.
“The president decided he was not going to sit back and allow American forces in the region to absorb attacks from conventional missiles,” the senior US official said, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity.
“We had analysis that basically told us [that] if we sat back and waited to get hit first, the amount of casualties and damage would be substantially higher than if we acted in a preemptive, defensive way to prevent those launches from occurring,” the senior US official claimed.
Well, that may be true, but the horse is not out of the barn and it’s not clear how much it matters how it got out of there in the first place. The “hard problems” are stopping the Iranian drive to get nuclear warheads and somehow ending the theocratic regime. Both will be hard, but the latter is harder.
The pharmaceutical giant Novartis has reached a settlement with the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cells were taken from her without her consent in 1951, when she was dying of cervical cancer in a segregated ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Ms. Lacks’s cells were the first to reproduce in a laboratory, outside the human body, and have been used in groundbreaking research, including to develop vaccines for polio and Covid-19 and treatments for cancer, Parkinson’s and the flu. The National Institutes of Health found the use of her cells, which were known as HeLa cells, was cited more than 110,000 times in scientific publications between 1953 and 2018.
In August 2024, more than 70 years after Ms. Lacks died at age 31 and was buried in an unmarked grave, her family filed a federal lawsuit in Maryland that accused Novartis, which is based in Switzerland, of amassing substantial profits through the use of the HeLa cell line.
It’s been a long time coming, but hospitals, due partly to Skloot’s book and partly to lawsuite and partly to reconsideration of ethnics, now ask patients to give consent to use any material derived from their bodies. That is how it should be.
I believe this is the only picture of Lacks as an adult.
Oregon State University, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
*Over at the Heterodox STEM website, reader Coel Heller has a piece called “Why do people still not know about genes,” subtitled, “Even right-wing commentators seem oblivious to the role of genetics in human behavior.”
The Blank Slate, the idea that differences in human personality and behaviour are entirely the result of that person’s experiences earlier in life, is utterly dominant in swathes of the social sciences, including sociology, criminology, and anthropology. Left-leaning academics adhere to the blank slate because it implies that humans are fully malleable. If a person’s behaviour, good or bad, is entirely the result of how they have been treated, then one can fix all of society’s problems by re-engineering society to give everyone an idyllic upbringing and so produce a utopia. Indeed, the failure to have done that already can only be attributed to the iniquity of the capitalists who thus need to be overthrown and deposed.
We’ve known for decades that this is utterly wrong. By far the biggest influence on a person’s personality and behavioural traits is their genes [1]. Twin studies, corroborated and supported by adoption studies and other types of study, tell us that about 50% of the variation in behavioural traits is attributable to differences in genes. Everything else – including biological randomness in embryonic development, the influences of families, schools and communities, and all the other influences and experiences specific to each person – only adds up to the other 50% [2].
The heritability of criminality is about 40–50%, which means that whether or not a child is likely to grow up to have a criminal record depends primarily on the genes he was born with, and less than that on his upbringing and childhood environment [3]. So why is this totally ignored in most discussions of the causes of crime?
I was mulling that question while listening to a podcast involving Rob Henderson, Rafael Mangual and Theodore Dalrymple. The 90-minute discussion about “the real drivers of antisocial behavior and crime” is well worth listening to, but not once did they mention genes, and there was only one passing reference to innate biological factors. I would have expected as much in a discussion among left-wing academics (for whom crime is always explained by “poverty”), but this podcast was sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank, and none of the three participants could be described as “left wing”.
To answer my own question, it’s because in today’s universities the arts, humanities and social sciences are completely dominated by left-leaning academics, who either don’t know about biology or have an ideological aversion to genetics when it comes to human personality and behaviour. And since nearly all opinion formers, and nearly everyone in the media, all studied the arts, humanities or social sciences at university, they were never taught about the actual science. And so even those critical of left-wing analyses also end up discussing the topic in Blank Slate terms.
This is one of many examples where people object to what seems to be scientifically true because it’s ideologically unpalatable. (See “The Ideological Subversion of Biology” by Luana and me.) But such genetic studies are becoming increasingly common, and publishable. The research is still largely taboo, however.
*One of the people objecting to the attack on Iran (and to Israel in general) is Andrew Sullivan, whose Weekly Dish column, “The Last War for Israel,” refers to Israel’s participation as “The last gasp of a country that is losing America.”
Why are we on the verge of another regime-change war in the Middle East?
No one really knows. The US already “obliterated” or deeply damaged Iran’s sites that were aiming to build nuclear weapons capacity. The beleaguered Iranian regime currently poses little threat to the US, is not close to having a viable nuke, is nowhere near to constructing ICBMs that can reach America, has a wrecked economy, tattered legitimacy, and has seen its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, devastated by Israel to a staggering degree.
How on earth do they pose a threat significant and imminent enough to justify a risky, expensive war of choice?
Beats me. The American people don’t see it either: opposition in the polls ranges from 50 to 70 percent. Trump, for his part, was elected precisely not to do this kind of war, and MAGA could (and should) erupt if he does, especially if it drags on. Trump already pushed his luck with his base with the 2025 attack. And if you thought a State of the Union might be the time to make the case in full, you’d be shocked by Trump’s brief, vague comments toward the end. There was no case made. Because there is no case to be made.
Even the usual pro-Israel suspects have come up empty. Bret Stephens, for example, has spent much of this century calling for war on Iran (you have to admire the energy and consistency), but even he has to concede that everything I wrote above is true:
The [Iranian] regime has lost much of its nuclear infrastructure; watched its regional proxies be overthrown, decimated and incapacitated; presided over the implosion of its economy; and lost whatever domestic and international legitimacy remained to it.
. . . The war the Israelis want is therefore not a war to make the Middle East a nuke-free zone, which might be a legit US aim; it’s a war to ensure Israeli nuclear exclusivity in the region, allowing them to routinely attack their neighbors with relative impunity. Why should we enable that?
Sullivan then gets in a few licks at Israel’s behavior in Gaza (what would he have done differently?) and ends this way:
The only reason we may be on the brink of war is because Netanyahu knows this could be his last chance to leverage the might of the United States for his own ends: unchallenged Israeli supremacy in the region alongside more aggressive ethnic cleansing at home.
This is, in other words, the last chance for the tail to wag the dog. Get ready for the fallout.
He doesn’t dwell on the Iranian people crying for freedom, but entirely on whether Iran posed a danger to the U.S. (he doesn’t mention Islamic intervention, like plots to kill people like Masih.)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants a little lie-down:
Andrzej: History is interesting. Hili: Yes. But sleep is more important.
In Polish:
Ja: Historia jest ciekawa.
Hili: Tak. Ale sen jest ważniejszy.
From Luana (sound up if you want to hear the cheering and ululation:
All over the world people have come out to celebrate Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iran.
I wonder what the pro Palestine protesters must be thinking seeing these scenes on the same streets they’ve owned for the past 30 months 🤔 pic.twitter.com/a1hrvQfQOK
I didn’t appreciate that escaping squid could squirt their ink in blobby, squidlike patterns:
All ink, no stink!Squid ink is a natural, dark-viscous fluid primarily composed of melanin pigment, mucus & water — like a deep-sea smoke screen for a hasty getaway. These ink-blob shapes are called pseudomorphs. Filmed during #OBVI #LivingBioreactors expedition w/@schmidtsciences.bsky.social.
We’re back again with readers’ photos, but this is only one of two batches I have left. Please send ’em if you got good photos.
Today we have plants (and one video of flamingos), and different views of one species of plant from reader Eric Cabot. Eric’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Following Wallace Stevens, I’d call this “Eleven Ways of Looking at a Lotus.”
Here is a series of photographs featuring the American Lotus (Nelumbo lutea), taken at a roadside pond in Middleton, Wisconsin, in mid-August, 2018 There are few things as comforting as a quiet boardwalk-stroll through a flotilla of this beautiful plant towards the end of a fine day.
I was unsure of the plants’ identity until I found this statement on an informative website (https://www.wisconsinwetlands.org/): Lotus leaves are circular but do not have a notch/sinus—they are continuous all the way around.
Unfortunately, the pond and the paths and boardwalks associated it were completely washed away by a deadly flash flood the following spring. The pond has since been rebuilt, but not the boardwalk. I haven’t gone back to see if the site has any lotuses. For now the images will have to do.
Here a video of pink flamingos the I recorded in “Cabo” a few years ago. [JAC: Keep watching for the displays and weird cries.]
The Hili dialogue will be shortened today as I was preoccupied with the war between Iran and every other country.
Welcome to the first day of March: Sunday, March 1, 2026, and International Rescue Cat Day. Here’s the rescue of a kitten in Malaysia, and of course it ends well (the woman who rescued him had nine cat!). Click “play on YouTube” or go here:
Here’s the March entry from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1412-1416), showing plowing and other spring planting activities at the Château de Lusignan. Almost nothing remains of the castle, château, and town.
Limbourg brothers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
I’ll feature the latest on the war today, but concentrating on opinion beside the news. First, though, an update from the NYT and the Times of Israel.
First, the NYT headline, which affirms that the Supreme Leader was taken out. Click on headline to read, or find it archived here:
An excerpt:
The Iranian government vowed on Sunday that it would retaliate for the attacks that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s longtime supreme leader and an implacable enemy of Israel and the United States, as attacks on the country entered a second day.
The Iranian state news agency confirmed the ayatollah’s death on Sunday morning, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — a powerful institution answering to the supreme leader — said that Iran would avenge him. Ali Larijani, a senior leader and Khamenei confidant, vowed that Iranian forces would fight even harder.
The ayatollah’s death prompted a range of reactions within Iran on Saturday. Large crowds poured into the streets of Tehran and other cities to celebrate the toppling of a leader who had ruled with an iron fist for nearly 37 years. Others mourned him.
The killing is a seismic political shift that raises the prospect of chaos and a power vacuum in an already turbulent region.
The United States and Israel said overnight that they were still attacking Iran. President Trump said on social media that U.S. strikes would continue “throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
In Israel, where the authorities reported one death on Sunday, air-raid sirens warned of further Iranian missile launches. Iran fired waves of ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for the initial strikes. The United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait — all of which host U.S. military bases — said they had come under attack, as did Jordan.
Of course Iran is already retaliating as hard as it can, and I’m not sure how they’ll retaliate even harder. I am shedding no tears for the death of Khamenei; as he really was a guiding force of Iran and its use of proxies. The council of theocrats he appointed will of course choose a replacement. Iran should have given up its nuclear program, but of course that was never in the cards.
From the Times of Israel:
An excerpt:
US President Donald Trump threatened early Sunday morning to hit Iran with unprecedented force after Tehran warned it would step up attacks in retaliation for the killing of its supreme leader and fired successive volleys of rockets at Israel for a second consecutive day Sunday.
In Iran, the Israel Defense Forces continued to carry out strikes on military sites, including a massive blast in Tehran. The army announced that it had dropped over 1,000 pieces of munition in just over 24 hours of attacks that kicked off Saturday morning with a strike that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top officials.
“Iran just stated that they are going to hit very hard today, harder than they have ever hit before,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social social network. “THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT, HOWEVER, BECAUSE IF THEY DO, WE WILL HIT THEM WITH A FORCE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!”
His comments came just a few hours after the Iranian regime confirmed that its longtime leader Khamenei had been killed in a strike on his office early Saturday morning.
Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said Sunday morning in a video carried on state TV that Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have “crossed our red lines” and “will suffer the consequences.”
The elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps vowed in a statement Sunday that Iran’s armed forces would soon retaliate again with the “most ferocious offensive operation in history” against US bases and Israel.
“The hand of revenge of the Iranian nation for a severe, decisive and regrettable punishment for the murderers of the Imam of the Ummah will not let go of them,” the IRGC said in a statement.
Waves of sirens rang out repeatedly across much of central, southern and northern Israel on Saturday night and Sunday morning as Iran fired ballistic missiles at the country, sending millions of Israelis to shelter. Iran’s state broadcaster said 27 US bases in the region, as well as Israel’s military headquarters and a defense industries complex in Tel Aviv, were among the targets in the new wave of strikes.
There were no reports of impacts in residential areas or direct injuries following the salvos, medics said. Magen David Adom said it treated people lightly hurt by falling while running to bomb shelters.
Police said they received reports of missile and interceptor fragments that landed in the Jerusalem area, and the Fire and Rescue Service said it was responding to a gas leak caused by falling shrapnel in the West Bank.
In contrast to the large barrages fired at Israel during the 12-day war with Iran in June, most salvos Saturday and Sunday have consisted of small number of missiles, usually three at a time, with breaks of a few minutes between each launch, according to the IDF.
There has been one Israeli killed, a remarkably small toll for a supposedly big reprisal:
The attacks have caused only a small number of injuries, aside from a particularly large barrage of some 20 missiles toward the Tel Aviv area Saturday night in which one projectile managed to evade air defenses, hitting near a residential building and killing a woman.
The slain woman, a foreign caregiver for an elderly woman, did not manage to reach a shelter in time, the military said Sunday after an initial investigation. The woman she was caring for was extracted by rescue workers from the rubble alive.
According to the NYT, the CIA helped locate the Ayatollah, which led to the attack taking place when it did:
Shortly before the United States and Israel were poised to launch an attack on Iran, the C.I.A. zeroed in on the location of perhaps the most important target: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.
The C.I.A. had been tracking Ayatollah Khamenei for months, gaining more confidence about his locations and his patterns, according to people familiar with the operation. Then the agency learned that a meeting of top Iranian officials would take place on Saturday morning at a leadership compound in the heart of Tehran. Most critically, the C.I.A. learned that the supreme leader would be at the site.
The United States and Israel decided to adjust the timing of their attack, in part to take advantage of the new intelligence, according to officials with knowledge of the decisions.
Another NYT piece (archived here), summarizing world reaction, says that most governments in the West, save Australia, have urged restraint in the attacks, and few (save Spain, Turkey, and some Arab states) have outright condemned the attack on Iran. I’m surprised by the mildness of the reaction, but it seems to come from Iran’s position as a promoter of worldwide terror, combined with the reported killing of up to 30,000 of its own citizens who protested the government.
Those protesting the attacks include the MSM, including the New York Times. whose op-ed yesterday was called “Trump’s attack on Iran is reckless.”
Mr. Trump’s approach to Iran is reckless. His goals are ill-defined. He has failed to line up the international and domestic support that would be necessary to maximize the chances of a successful outcome. He has disregarded both domestic and international law for warfare.
. . .A responsible American president could make a plausible argument for further action against Iran. The core of this argument would need to be a clear explanation of the strategy, as well as the justification for attacking now, even though Iran does not appear close to having a nuclear weapon. This strategy would involve a promise to seek approval from Congress and to collaborate with international allies.
Mr. Trump is not even attempting this approach. He is telling the American people and the world that he expects their blind trust. He has not earned that trust.
It’s hard to see how “freedom for the people” can be accomplished in any meaningful sense without some U.S. boots on the ground, at least for a time. Yet Trump appears to lack any appetite for doing so. That might give pause to civilians trying to decide whether to risk their lives by rising up.
Whether Trump has made the right call will hinge on factors now beyond his control. No president has ever intended to get drawn into a quagmire.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Short of that, the War Powers Act ensures the legislative branch will get a say on this war of choice. It’s essential that the people’s elected representatives get to vote on whether these strikes are justified. A comprehensive case has yet to be made, and better late than never.
Most of the NYT op-eds are critical of Trump and say the attack either was useless or conducted incorrectly. Here’s a screenshot of some the paper’s op-eds (there is at least one pro-attack one, see below):
But then there’s Bret Stephens, whose take on the war seems to be sensible (i.e., it resonates with mine). His column yesterday was called “The case for striking Iran” (archived here). An excerpt:
It’s happening. On Saturday, the United States and Israel jointly launched what President Trump has described as a “massive and ongoing” series of strikes on Iran, aiming not only to destroy the Islamic Republic’s military capabilities but also to overthrow the regime itself. The president may rightly be faulted for barely bothering to spell out the reasons for war in the weeks leading to Saturday’s attack. But it doesn’t mean there isn’t a compelling case for action.
There are three, in fact.
Iran poses a threat to global order by way of its damaged but abiding nuclear ambitions, its deep strategic ties to Moscow and Beijing, its persistent threats to maritime commerce and its support for international terrorism.
It poses a threat to regional stability, not just through its support for anti-Israel proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, but also by its meddling in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and (until the overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime) Syria.
And it’s a mortal threat to the life and safety of its own people, many thousands of whom it slaughtered last month. There was a time not long ago when Americans, both left and right, cared enough about human rights to believe it could, in some circumstances, justify military intervention.
Why is a military attack crucial? Look at what hasn’t worked to change the regime’s behavior.
He then lists all the sanctions, economic engagements, failed diplomatic efforts that have failed. Those failures would have simply continued without the US/Israel attack on Iran. Stephens concludes this way:
No wonder protests in Iran have resumed, this time among university students who are bravely undaunted by the terrifying risk. Their protests seem connected to the 40-day memorials for the victims of last month’s massacres. But it’s not a stretch to assume those protests are also a signal to Trump that his promise last month to Iranians that “help is on its way” hasn’t been forgotten, and that ordinary Iranians are prepared to join the fight for their own liberation.
If so, then there is at least a reasonable chance that a sustained military operation that not only further degrades the regime’s nuclear, missile and military capabilities — a desirable outcome in its own right — but also targets its apparatus of domestic repression could embolden the type of sustained mass protests that could finally bring the regime down. Even more so if the leaders who give the orders, including the supreme leader and his circle, are not immune from attack.
For all of its willfulness and the evil it has wreaked over 47 years, the regime does not stand 10 feet tall. It nearly fell during the 2009 Green Movement against that year’s fraudulent elections. It nearly fell again in 2022 during the Women, Life, Freedom protests.
The difference on those occasions was the absence of external military support. Donald Trump now has a unique opportunity to provide it. Despite the risk that military strikes entail, the bigger risk, in the judgment of history, would be to fail to take it.
His sentiments are echoed in the short video below by Elica Le Bon, an Iranian-American activist and lawyer whose parents fled Iran during the Revolution. Here is her eloquent indictment of the Western media and defense of the attack on Iran. She winds up in tears. (If you can’t see this 3-minute video, go to her X page here.)
In my view, now that the attack has commenced, the horse has left the barn. It has to be seen through because the Iranian people need to live free. All the kvetching by the press seems to me like so much pilpul, writen largely because it was Trump who did it. It also seems that the MSM, and my own Democratic Party, would prefer that there would never have been an attack on Iran, and, though they criticize the Iranian regime, would sit on their hands rather than stop its horrors, its nuclear program, its spread of terror to other countires, including the U.S., and above all, the slaughter of its people. The kvetchers would, I think, prefer Iran to continue as it has (as Stephens notes, no attempts to change the regimes behavior have worked). And if the results are nuclear weapons in Iranian hands, well, too bad. Of course Trump needs a viable endgame, and he hasn’t articulated one, nor did he have a decent one in Gaza. But once the attack was begun—and I was ambivalent about that from the start—it has to be carried through. We can’t simply stop and let Iran go back to how it was. And, in their hearts, I think that most Western countries agree, despite their calls for caution or even a ceasefire. I am moved by Le Bon’s words.
******************
And we can’t forget The Princess!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is befuddled again.
Hili: I’m trying to understand the world and I’m not sure.
Me: What are you not sure about?
Hili: Whether these attempts aren’t a waste of time.
In Polish:
Hili: Próbuję zrozumieć świat i nie jestem pewna.
Ja: Czego nie jesteś pewna?
Hili: Czy te próby nie są stratą czasu.
