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.
Alan Lightman a physicist best known for his writing about science, most famously his 1992 novel Einstein’s Dreams. At present he’s a “professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT.”
First, he denies materialism, but latter accepts it (see below).
Second he deals with two forms of dualism: the mind/body dualism dealt with by Descartes, but also a dualism caused by recent advances in medical technology, in which part of your body is not made of tissue (examples are artificial hearts and mind/electrode interfaces) making people part human, part machine.
After reading the piece, I wasn’t sure what the point was except to mirror Lightman’s wonder at the world and his unanswered questions.
It began when Lightman had a colonoscopy, which got him wondering what was going on inside himself; as he said, “I felt like a trespasser in my own body.” And that gets him into the first form of dualism. All bolding henceforth is mine:
Modern neuroscience has largely overthrown the classical view that the mind and the body are fundamentally different substances, and it has shown that all of our thoughts and mental experiences are rooted in the material brain. But even granting that scientific view, there remains a profound disconnect between our conscious self-awareness—rooted in the three pounds of gooey stuff in our skulls—and the rest of our body.
And here’s the confusing bit, where he denies materialism: he simply has to be more than just the substance of his body. Bolding is mine:
After that unsettling medical adventure, I began mulling over why I was so disturbed to see the insides of my body. A number of issues come to mind. For starters, the experience struck me as a vivid demonstration of my materiality. Even though I am a scientist and have a materialist view of the world, I still harbor the belief that I am more than just a jumble of tissues and nerves. The experience of consciousness and life is so sublime that it is hard to imagine it all arising from mere atoms and molecules.
This seems like a case of cognitive dissonance, but it’s not clear whether he really believes what’s in bold as opposed to “harboring” that belief. Yes, we don’t know how consciousness works, but what else is there to create it except the stuff of our bodies and brains? For other people, like Ross Douthat, a failure to understand is by default evidence for god, but nobody who knows the history of science would think that.
Lightman then muses for a while about our failure to fully understand our own bodies, but what is a source of puzzlement to him is a challenge to scientists. We have never made progress in understanding nature by assuming that naturalism is wrong, and so the program to understand consciousness must begin with a naturalistic program—until we find an exception to naturalism!
But later on, Lightman says that he’s really a materialist:
I must again confess that I am a materialist.I respect the belief in an immortal soul. I respect the belief in a nonphysical mind. But, despite my predilection for some transcendent element, I do not share those beliefs. Still, I am baffled by the disconnect I feel between body and mind. I look down at my bare feet and command my toes to wiggle. And they wiggle. But “I” am looking down at them from above. My toes are things that I gaze at from some distance. But what distance? The distance from the camera of my eyes? The distance from my conscious mind, which has these thoughts? And my toes are visible. The inside of my body is even more distant.
Once again his source of wonder is his victimization by an illusion, one described so clearly by Dan Dennett, that there is an “Alan Lightman” sitting somewhere in his brain, a little homunculus that looks down on his toes. Again, he’s baffled, while a biologist would see a challenge. My own view, and I’m no expert, is that the “hard problem of consciousness” will simply devolve to a problem of what brain connections are necessary for the sensation consciousness, and then we’ll have to say, “And that is all we know.”
Finally, having confessed his bafflement, Lightman goes on to describe some medical advances that truly are amazing, but, like the one below, must surely have a naturalistic explanation:
In 2013, scientists at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California implanted two computer chips in the brain of Erik Sorto, then 32, who was paralyzed from the neck down from a gunshot wound. The output from the chips is connected to a computer, which interprets the patterns of their electrical activity; the computer, in turn, is connected to a robot arm. When Sorto is thirsty and merely thinks about reaching for a cup of water, the computer chips in his brain sense his desire and relay that thought to the computer, and the robot arm grabs a cup of water and brings it to his lips. When I interviewed Sorto in November 2021 and asked him what it felt like to have this machine in his body, he said that he felt mostly human but also part cyborg.
Now that is amazing, especially because, as far as I know, the way it works was not designed from first principles, although some knowledge of neuroscience was surely required (where do you put the chips?). But this surely has a naturalistic explanation, unless you think that god did it or some fundamental principles of how neurons and muscles work has eluded us.
And that’s pretty much it. I may have failed to be impressed simply because I’m jaded, and as a scientist I’m used to unsolved problems that to other conjure up spiritual or even non-naturalistic explanations. But still, I wonder why The Atlantic published this.
I’m pretty much out of photos, so please send some in. Thanks!
Today’s photos comr from Jan Malik and were taken in New Jersey. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Here are a few pictures from my walk on the first day of spring in the New Jersey Botanical Garden in Ringwood, NJ. The quality isn’t the best (long distance, heavy cropping, fast‑moving subjects, and, let’s be honest, a mediocre photographer), but the series gives a sense of what early spring feels like for the birds.
Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor) have arrived in the Northeast from their wintering grounds in the Caribbean. The first task for the males is to secure a nesting site. A natural tree cavity will do well, but those are scarce, so human‑made nest boxes are highly prized:
There are no property rights in the swallow world. A box is yours only if you can defend it, and a challenger usually appears sooner rather than later:
Both birds are males, judging by their metallic blue sheen and their persistence in aerial combat;
Outside the breeding season, Tree Swallows can be quite social, but securing a nesting site takes precedence over chivalry. No swallow lady is going to elope with a nestless beau:
Nest boxes are fitted with metal predator guards meant to deter squirrels and rat snakes. This one, however, wouldn’t slow down a determined squirrel for long:
Sometimes these fights end badly. Not because one bird actually kills the other, but because a damaged wing is effectively a death sentence:
The combat pauses briefly when a Red‑shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) appears, circling in the thermals to gain altitude on its northward migration. Both swallows take shelter in a nearby tree until the danger passes:
Once the hawk moves on, the duel resumes, with both birds circling around the prize they’re fighting for:
Their Latin name suits them well — they are indeed “fast‑moving, two‑colored” birds. Their high airspeed is a challenge for inexperienced photographers. It doesn’t help that they’re smaller than an average sparrow and weigh only about 20 grams. No way they could tow a coconut, even in tandem:
I’ve had better luck photographing them during nesting season, when they fly more predictably while hunting insects on the wing. In this aerial melee, though, their flight is wildly erratic:
Eventually, the winner of this round inspects his real estate. The duel lasted a little under an hour, with both birds spending most of that time in the air and burning a lot of energy:
Welcome to the penultimate day of the month: March 30, 2026, and National Hot Chicken Day. celebrating a fad that begin with Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville, Tennessee. Wikipedia even has an entry on “hot chicken” that includes this salacious lore:
Anecdotal evidence suggests that spicy fried chicken has been served in Nashville’s African-American communities for generations. The dish may have been introduced as early as the 1930s; however, the current style of spice paste may only date back to the mid-1970s. It is generally accepted that the originator of hot chicken is the family of André Prince Jeffries, owner of Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack. She has operated the restaurant since 1980; before that time, it was owned by her great-uncle, Thornton Prince III. Jeffries says the development of hot chicken was an accident. Her great-uncle Thornton was purportedly a womanizer, and after a particularly late Saturday night out, his girlfriend at the time cooked him a fried chicken breakfast with extra pepper as revenge. Instead, Thornton decided he liked it so much that, by the mid-1930s, he and his brothers had created their own recipe and opened the BBQ Chicken Shack café.
Hot chicken, indeed. Here’s a video (the higher degrees of hotness are apparently incendiary; I think this is a form of masochism):
It’s Sunday, March 29, and the thirtieth day of Operation Roaring Lion. The global price of oil has reached $112, up four percent since yesterday. Here are the latest developments while you were asleep:
The USS Tripoli and its Marine Expeditionary Unit have arrived from Japan, including the forces on the USS Boxer and reinforcements from the 82nd Airborne—this marks the largest U.S. military deployment to the region in over 20 years. Trump has extended his ultimatum on the Strait of Hormuz to April 6, while the Pentagon weighs sending up to 10,000 additional troops and prepares plans for limited, weeks-long ground operations focused on targets like Kharg Island rather than a full-scale invasion.
Iranian missiles and drones struck Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, damaging refueling aircraft and wounding 10–12 U.S. personnel, some critically, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. The aircraft seem to have been stationed on the tarmac when they were struck, in violation of U.S. Air Force protocol. Open-source imagery verified the attack, while the Pentagon has yet to comment.
According to Iran International, the president of Iran and the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are in “deep disagreement.” The president warned that without a ceasefire, Iran’s economy could face total collapse within three weeks to a month.
Over the weekend, the Houthis fired a ballistic missile at Israel for the first time since the October 2025 ceasefire with Hamas. This marks their partial entry into the war. So far, they have refrained from attacking U.S. forces, limiting their attacks to Israel. The Yemen-based group has also yet to declare the closure of the region’s other oil chokepoint, the Bab al-Mandab, which would be a significant boon to Iran and mark their full entry into the conflict.
The IDF’s Alpinist force recently climbed from the Syrian slopes of Mount Hermon to Mount Dov in southern Lebanon in an operation against entrenched terrorist organizations along the Lebanese border. This marks the unit’s first cross-border operation in its more than fifty-year history—unsurprising given that Israel and the region are not known for an abundance of snow and cold weather.
At this point in the war, the question is less whether there will be a ceasefire and more what kind it will be—negotiated or unilateral. The reality Israel has understood from the outset is that the war in Iran is Trump’s to decide. When he is done, so is Israel—but the question is whether that principle applies to Lebanon as well.
Hezbollah is aware of this question. Behind the scenes, the group is pleading with Iran to be included in any negotiated agreement. Even a unilateral ceasefire—which would likely involve some degree of coordination behind the scenes—Hezbollah wants to be part of it.
*According to the NYT, “Iran is flooding the internet with disinformation and propaganda in an attempt to undermine support for the U.S. and Israeli attacks.” An excerpt:
The videos and posts relentlessly mock President Trump or vilify him as a bloodthirsty leader who strikes civilian targets indiscriminately. They make up content about attacks on American and Israeli targets, including one on Wednesday that featured a fabricated video of a missile striking Liberty Island in New York Harbor. They regularly mention Jeffrey Epstein.
Iran is waging what researchers have described as a sophisticated information war, aided by Russia and China, that is spreading content designed to exploit worldwide opposition to the U.S.-Israeli military campaign and deflect from the country’s considerable losses on the battlefield.
Nearly a month into the war, Iran’s state media outlets and covert operatives are producing a steady torrent of propaganda, overstated narratives and outright disinformation. They are often wielding generative A.I. tools to create increasingly realistic-looking images and videos, according to human rights organizations and research groups studying foreign influence.
Much of the false content has been debunked, but not before reaching millions of people on X, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other social media platforms.
The information war, the researchers say, has given Iran’s beleaguered leadership a weapon almost as potent as its ability to disrupt the world’s energy economy by throttling shipments of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. While the impact of the information war can be difficult to measure, experts said it appeared to have stoked popular anger and unease about the conflict in the United States and beyond.
“They’re winning the propaganda war,” Darren L. Linvill, a director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, said of the Iranians. “They were prepared for it more than the administration, because they’d been preparing for this entire conflict for 50 years.”
. . . Many of the posts appear to come from accounts controlled by humans, rather than automated bots. Researchers at Clemson identified a furtive network of at least 62 accounts on X, Instagram and Bluesky that spread pro-Iranian content.
The Clemson site shows photos of a number of these fake accounts; I was amused to see that several of the bogus accounts were on Bluesky, the site that is supposed to be beyond hatred, showing hateful content:
This time last year, art enthusiasts in Tehran were celebrating an extraordinary event. A masterpiece by Pablo Picasso, “The Painter and His Model,” went on display in the city for only the second time in decades. It was shown at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, in an exhibition entitled “Picasso in Tehran” — a rare highlighting of a different face of Iran, with similarly rare approval from the Islamic regime.
The 1927 painting was described by Bloomberg last week as “arguably the most important canvas in the world that cannot be visited or seen.” The work that helped inspire Picasso’s “Guernica,” which showcases the destruction caused by the Spanish Civil War, it sits in what Bloomberg called “one of the world’s most dangerous cities.”
But the current war is only the latest factor preventing the piece from being made available to the public, with little known about the museum’s current fate. (Its website, like many others in Iran, has been down, possibly due to internet disruptions in the country. Some users on social media have shared posts showing artifacts in some museums put away or wrapped in protective materials.)
Like dozens of other masterpieces in the museum, “The Painter and His Model” has spent virtually all of the 47 years since the Islamic Revolution shut away in TMOCA’s vaults, considered too inappropriate by the ayatollahs for display.
. . . Like dozens of other masterpieces in the museum, “The Painter and His Model” has spent virtually all of the 47 years since the Islamic Revolution shut away in TMOCA’s vaults, considered too inappropriate by the ayatollahs for display.
Deeply passionate about art, the queen took advantage of the soaring prices of oil to bring to Tehran some of the best modern and contemporary art, acquiring works by Picasso, Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Vincent Van Gogh and dozens more, including Jewish and Israeli artists such as Marc Chagall and Yaacov Agam, and gay ones like Francis Bacon. In 2018, the value of the collection was estimated at $3 billion.
It’ll be all up and open if the theocracy falls. In the meantime, here’s a YouTube video of the Picasso in Tehran exhibit. That is one hell of a diverse group of Picassos!
And here’s the 1927 “The Painter and His Model” from Wikiart:
A YouGov survey showing a significant rise in church attendance in parts of the UK has been withdrawn after some respondents were found to be fraudulent.
But YouGov, which carried out the research in 2024, said on Thursday that the data sample was flawed, with “a number of respondents who we can now identify as fraudulent”.
The pollster’s chief executive, Stephan Shakespeare, said: “YouGov takes full responsibility for the outputs of the original 2024 research, and we apologise for what has happened.
“We would like to stress that Bible Society have at all times accurately and responsibly reported the data we supplied to them. We are running the survey again with Bible Society to get robust data on this topic.”
The report had claimed 12% of adults in England and Wales were attending church once a month or more in 2024, which YouGov described as “a significant increase from 8% in a previous 2018 study”.
The data also purported to show a rise in young people’s attendance, from 4% of 18- to 24-year-olds attending monthly in 2018 to 16% in 2024.
So YouGov screwed up, but believers were eager to spread the news. The point is that, given the continual decrease in Christian belief in the last several decades, a rise would need explanation, and there’s not a good one. Nevertheless, even when the Christians were told they had been misinformed, they tried to turn it into a good thing (bolding is mine):
The Bible Society insisted there remained “a very positive story to tell”. It said in the past year, “we have seen an unprecedented public conversation about Christianity, with countless stories of a spiritual awakening among Gen Z”.
The chief executive of Humanists UK, Andrew Copson, said the withdrawal of the data was “both validation and vindication”.
“We need to be absolutely clear: there is no revival of Christianity in Britain,” he said. “For almost a year, Humanists UK has taken a rational, evidence-based approach, repeatedly and rigorously explaining why the Bible Society’s claims do not stand up.”
The “public conversation” is due almost entirely to Christians touting the revival of Christianity! It’s an example of the kind of self-deception that Bob Trivers wrote about..
A British Columbia cafe owner celebrated his 80th birthday by baking and assembling a massive carrot cake measuring 17 feet by 17 feet.
Ted Martindale, owner of Granville’s Coffee in Quesnel, teamed up with multiple local bakeries to assemble his birthday cake, which contained over 1,760 pounds of carrots, 700 pounds of butter, thousands of eggs and nearly 2,000 pounds of icing.
Martindale said it took over a month to bake the 430 individual cakes that made up the final product.
The cake was served Wednesday at Martindale’s birthday party at the local senior’s center.
The current Guinness World Record for the largest carrot cake is held by a Surrey, British Columbia, bakery that assembled a 4,574-pound cake in 2016. Martindale said his cake weighed in at about 6,044 pounds, but evidence must still be reviewed by Guinness World Records for him to officially take the record.
There are two things I want to know. First, is it kosher to put together 430 individual cakes and call it one whole cake? Second, is the frosting made with cream cheese? If not, it shouldn’t count. Here’s a video:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej note the signs of Spring:
Hili: You can feel spring everywhere.
Andrzej: Yes, the forsythia has begun to bloom, and in the newspapers scoundrels are in full bloom.
In Polish
Hili: Wszędzie czuć wiosnę.
Ja: Tak, zakwitała forsycja, w gazetach kwitną łajdacy.
From Mash, apparently with Kristen Welker on NBC, speaking eloquently about why American should finish the job in Iran. Masih is quite passionate and yet eloquent when speaking off the cuff:
You don’t hear about this in the international media. Why?
Because people who’ve never lived a single day under war, never spent one hour under a theocratic regime, are sitting comfortably, debating the Middle East like it’s a Netflix series. but this is the reality that people… pic.twitter.com/PYtG9IMGAO
From Pamela Paresky, but it sounds like the kind of witticism that Andrzej would make (h/t Jay):
Reminds me of the unfortunate joke:
Q: What is the definition of antisemitism?
A: Hating Jews more than absolutely necessary. https://t.co/mDJkxU7RFU
— Pamela Paresky 🟦 (Habits of a Free Mind) (@PamelaParesky) March 28, 2026
Larry the Cat is back tweeting! Yay! He asks an important question here, but I’m sufficiently anal that I change my stove and microwave clocks the day after the time changes:
The clocks went forward an hour in the UK last night, which means it’s time for an important question:
Is the clock on your oven…
From Luana, who says to excuse the politically incorrect word “retarded”:
The British left might be the most retarded in the world. They actually believe a man who screams Allahu Akbar whose wife wears a full niqab is a progressive champion who cares about women’s rights, LGBT and the environment. pic.twitter.com/y8NhZf4fjr
She looks like she’s having a blast—you’d never guess this is a world-class performance. What amazes me isn’t the speed, it’s her flawless timing and dynamics—she truly feels the music. This level isn’t from practice alone; it comes from the heart. ❤️
— 🎶𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀 ✨ (@Old_But_Gold50s) March 28, 2026
Here’s the whole piece that someone posted in the thread; her name is Alexandra Dovgan, and she’s now 18. I believe she was eleven when she did this piece:
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz, along with 90% of the people on her transport. Fanny was eight years old. https://t.co/1yYqJmpXhr
I didn’t realize how popular Bill Maher is on YouTube: this clip, a fragment of his “Real Time” show on HBO, has garnered over 520,000 views since it was posted on Friday night. At any rate, this week he takes on the recent conspiracy theories that alien spacecraft are appearing regularly, and that some of their spaceships and even their bodies are in possession of companies or the government.
Maher notes that the UFO believers are no longer nutjobs but reputable people: politicians and “people with buzzcuts.” Steven Spielberg even has a movie coming out this summer about UFOs; it’s called “Disclosure Day.”
He then addresses the aliens directly, asking them not to kill us even though they could, and apologizes for America’s once firing a missile at a UFO. He even offers minerals to the aliens and then pleads for them to destroy our nuclear weapons, and to “get us off oil–and our phones.” In the end, he tells the aliens “you should think of the human race as Britney Spears. It would be nice if we needed a conservatorship, but in reality we really do.”
It’s clear that Maher, like me, doesn’t believe that these aliens and their craft really exist. He’s just using the notion to criticize what’s wrong with America. If craft and aliens did exist, and we possess crashed ships and alien bodies, then somehow there has been a massive conspiracy to hide it by both Democratic and Republican governments—as well as by the press— to cover up the greatest news story in the history of humanity.
The panel guests for this show were Laura Coates, CNN chief legal analyst, and Stephen A. Smith, host of Straight Shooter.
Here’s a teaser for “DIsclosure Day”. There are aliens in animal bodies, and it even buys into the discredited idea that aliens make crop circles.
The Free Press has a long article on Calla Walsh, a 21 year old American woman who became radicalized at about 16 and now lives in the Middle East, making propaganda for Hezbollah and Iran.
Here’s a mugshot of Walsh from an earlier arrest in the U.S. for vandalism and trespassing on the grounds of an Israeli-owned company said to be involved with “genocide.” She served two months in prison.
Merrimack, Massachusetts Police Department, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Here she is all growed up (see link below). I’ve put a recent Instagram post at the bottom.
Walsh was the definition of “privileged” when young: the scion of two academics from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one who attended two fancy prep schools before dropping out of Canada’s McGill University after one semester. She started off advocating against climate change and writing about the Democratic Socialists of America for Teen Vogue (thank goodness that rag went belly-up!), and campaigned for the successful re-election of Senator Ed Markey, as well as other Democrats (see an admiring profile of Calla in a 2021 Boston Magazine ). She then went on to oppose the “genocide” committed by Israel in the Gaza war, visited Cuba, and after that she went full Monty—or should I say full Mamdani? She traveled to Iran and has apparently settled in Beirut.
The Free Press details what happened to her and where she is now. Click below to read; the article cannot be archived. If you want a shorter account, read her Wikipedia bio, which includes the following:
Walsh’s political ideology has shifted over time. In the 2010s, she was a member and activist in the Democratic Party, as well as an environmental activist. In 2021, NPR described her as a “progressive organizer and activist based in Massachusetts”. Later in 2021, she identified as a Democratic Socialist and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. In 2023, she described herself as a communist and anti-imperialist.
Following the October 7 attacks, Walsh tweeted that “defending their homeland from illegal occupation and genocide isn’t ‘ugly Palestinian retaliation'”. Later that day, Walsh posted a map of the attack sites with the message, “This is what decolonization looks like”. In April, Walsh added, “We will never forget who called Palestinian freedom fighters ‘terrorists’ after October 7 and then turned around and claimed to support Palestine”. On October 12, Walsh tweeted that those living in the US have “an obligation to take direct action against murderous companies like Elbit”.
In December 2025, Walsh was nominated by the pro-Israel group StopAntisemitism for “Antisemite of the Year”.
In February and March 2026, following the 2026 Iran conflict, Walsh wrote a series of posts on X social network calling for the use of global violence against Israeli and American officials. Following the start of the 2026 Iran massacres, Walsh was one of several media personalities that promoted the Iranian state’s claim that the protests had been stoked by the CIA and Mossad.
She’s clearly a hater of both Jews and America, and given what she’s done, she’ll never be allowed back in the U.S., or, if she is, she’ll have to spend a long time behind bars.
A couple of long excerpts of a very long article:
In the weeks since the U.S. and Israel launched their joint assault on Iran, perhaps no American has more aggressively and publicly rallied behind the Islamic Republic than Calla Walsh. From her new base in Lebanon, the 21-year-old Cambridge-raised activist has taken to social media and left-wing podcasts to incite her fellow countrymen and women to sabotage U.S. and Israeli defense contractors wherever they can find them. On March 3, she mocked four American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike, posting: “They all died fighting for fascism, genocide, pedophilia, and cannibalism.” She attached pictures of the dead Americans. In recent days she reposted a list of missile-production sites inside the U.S.
“We have a duty to escalate,” Walsh told her host on the Psychic Militancy podcast last Saturday from Beirut, noting that “lockdowns” of weapons factories and vandalism alone are “not sufficient at this point.”
She added: “And as the genocide and these wars of aggression continue to escalate, much more is demanded of people in the West.”
Walsh looks every part the art-school hipster, with her thick-rimmed glasses and a mop of curly hair. But she’s a chameleon of terror.Five years earlier, as a 16-year-old, Walsh was fawned over by The New York Times for being a young, social media-savvy activist who was helping to shake up the Democratic Party in Massachusetts. But as a monthslong investigation by The Free Press shows, she’s thrown her allegiance squarely behind the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Axis of Resistance, which includes the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The U.S. government has placed her on a suspicious persons watch list for her expansive dealings with the governments of Cuba and Iran, U.S. officials told me, as well as a spiderweb of U.S.-designated terrorist groups.
Over the past few years, Walsh’s radicalization has played out in real time on X and Instagram. She quickly moved from political organizing for the Democrats to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to conducting guerrilla-style raids on Israeli defense companies in New England, for which she received jail time in 2024. She has regularly called for the assassinations of Israeli officials and their allies in the U.S. and elsewhere.
In October, she formally relocated to Beirut, The Free Press learned, where she has established herself as a regular contributor to Iranian state media, particularly the English-language site of Tehran’s Press TV on which Washington has imposed sanctions. She is actively engaging in propaganda and information-warfare operations on behalf of the Iranian regime and Hezbollah, which is fighting Israeli forces in south Lebanon.
She’s too far gone, I think, to ever return to the U.S., and perhaps she doesn’t want to. But those who ally themselves with American enemies in this way are rarely either allowed back to where they were born or, when do they are jailed. I suspect that Walsh will be in Lebanon for good. A bit more:
According to U.S. counterterrorism officials I spoke with, any financial or operational ties Walsh has established with blacklisted organizations—whether in Iran, Cuba, or Lebanon—means she could be indicted for providing material support to proscribed groups. Walsh’s latest trip to Tehran places her in even greater legal jeopardy if she ever returns home.
“I’ve never seen someone who’s done jail time so publicly integrate herself into terrorist infrastructure,” a senior national security official told me. “She’s totally exposed now.”
More:
. . . . Walsh’s new role as Tehran’s Gen Z propagandist has her regularly appearing on Iranian state media with other outcasts from Europe and North America. In December, Walsh was a guest on a Press TV show called Palestine Declassified, with two Britons who have been banished from UK politics and academia in recent years for antisemitism. She set up a camera from her Beirut apartment to tape the show and extol the military prowess of the late Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani, whom the U.S. assassinated in a 2020 drone strike.
And this, near the end, show how ideologically captured she is, so much so that she blames Mossad for massacring Iranian civilians:
In February, when Walsh returned to Iran, she provided an American face to spread the message that it was the CIA and the Israeli spy service, Mossad—not the Iranian government—that massacred thousands of Iranians during the prior month’s uprising. (The United Nation’s special rapporteur on Iran estimated the number could be over 20,000.) “The fact of the matter is police in Iran are defending the revolution and are defending their government from U.S. and Zionist-backed regime change,” she said on Press TV.
. . Experts in extremism tell me they’re deeply worried that the American is now too far gone. In recent weeks, she’s crisscrossed the Middle East in support of the Axis of Resistance, placing her in the range of American and Israeli bombs and fighter jets, whether in Tehran or south Lebanon.
“She’s a true believer. It’s over after that, because you’ll do anything for your cause,” said Mubin Shaikh. He was a jihadist in Pakistan and Syria before going through a deradicalization program in Canada and emerging as one of his country’s top counterterrorism experts. “Martyrdom? Don’t think that’s off the table.”
You can imagine how dicombobulated her parents are. They are quoted as saying, “We love Calla deeply and absolutely. . . . And we have serious, fundamental political disagreements with her.”
Here’s a recent Instagram post. Click screenshot to see a video interview from presstvchannel, an Iranian-controlled state media site. Note that she uses “anti-Zionist” instead of “antisemitic”. This euphemistic ploy disgusts me.
Botany Pond now harbors (temporarily, I think) a pair of the most beautiful American ducks: wood ducks (Aix sponsa), in the same genus as mallards. At first I mistook them for mallards on the duckcam, but when I went down to investigate, it was clear that they were a bonded pair of woodies.
I love these ducks, but one or two show up at Botany Pond only every couple of years, and they do not breed here. We had a post-breeding pair, Frisky and Ruth, a few years ago, but although they hung around a while, it was after they had bred, and they were probably headed south. My photos from that era have disappeared from this site, but here is Frisky nuzzling Ruth. It’s one of my favorite duck photos (I like to imagine that wood ducks are very romantic!):
Frisky was so named because although the mallards chased him, he was very quick and adept at sneaking among them at feeding time to get pellets. After he filled his belly, he’d get quite rotund and then perch on a knob of the bald cypress that used to be in the pond. He used that knob so often we called it The Sacred Knob. Here he is having a postprandial rest. Look at those colors!
Males have satanic red eyes. Here’s a closeup of Frisky’s head. Their bills are short compared to those of mallards.
They’re called “wood ducks” because they nest in treeholes and perch on trees—nearly the only species of duck to do so. Sure enough, when I first saw them a few days ago, they were both up in trees next to the pond. I thought they left, but, sure enough, they were back three days ago and haven’t left since.
Some photos of our new pair. Feel free to suggest names, but they should be fitting for these glorious birds.
The new male:
. . . and the new female. The shots aren’t great as I took them in the early morning when it was light, and the shutter speed was slow:
Wikipedia describes them like this:
The adult male has stunning multicolored iridescent plumage and red eyes, with a distinctive white flare down the neck. The female, less colorful, has a white eye-ring and a whitish throat. Both adults have crested heads. The speculum is iridescent blue-green with a white border on the trailing edge.
Besotted with each other, the ducks are always together. Here are two videos of our new pair swimming together:
In this next video, the male gives her a little kiss 6 seconds in. He then chirps at her (they don’t quack).
The loving couple. Look at that sexual dimorphism! These ducks are in full breeding plumage:
Vashti is nesting nearby, and Armon is always in the pond waiting for her to drop in for a quick snack, a drink, and a preen before she hurries back to her nest. There are seven lovely green eggs in Vashti’s nest, and I anticipate ducklings will hatch around April 20 (a bit early in the season) if all goes well.
Armon chases the woodies, but only in a desultory manner, and they manage to sneak some of the food I give him. At other times he allows them to rest next to him on the rocks.
Here’s Armon halfheartedly chasing the female. He never gets near either of them as they swim faster than he, and they can simply jump out of the pond when they’re tired of being chased.
Ducks on the rocks (a good name for a drink). You can see that Armon doesn’t mind them being nearby so long as it’s not feeding time. The size difference between mallards and woodies is clear:
The male is like a feathered jewel! Here is the range of Aix sponsa from Wikipedia. As you see, Chicago is in their year-round range.
You might be able to see them on the DuckCam if you look now, but keep looking from time to time. In the meantime, feel free to suggest woody names, and get ready for mallard ducklings in a few weeks.
I think the woodies will soon depart to breed in a place where there are trees with holes.
I’ll add a Smithsonian video of a large clutch of hatched woodies jumping about 50 feet down to the water as mother calls them:
Abby Thompson of UC Davis has sent in some pictures of California tidepool organisms, as well as a video. Abby’s captions are indented and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
Late January-early March tidepools, plus an octopus.
Bryozoans:
Lepas anatifera (pelagic gooseneck barnacle). Usually found clinging to something drifting around in the open ocean (the “pelagic” part of their name), these were on a large log washed up on shore:
Intertidal zones, illustrated. A well-placed vertical rock face, like this one, exhibits the idea of the different intertidal “zones”, each of which has its own specific collection of inhabitants. You can see mussels and barnacles clustered at the top (in the “high intertidal”), exposed to the air as soon as the tide goes out even a little. There are smaller colonial anemones next, beneath them the orange and purple ochre stars, and below those, arriving at the low intertidal level, some giant green anemones. If you peer into the water under the open giant green anemone, you’ll see a crab, probably a rock crab. There’s some back and forth- there are a few giant green anemones pretty high up in this photo- but the general idea holds.
This reflects each animal’s differing tolerance for specific conditions- time out of the water as the tide goes out, harshness of wave actions, etc. The nudibranchs (next few pictures) are usually in the very low intertidal:
Doto amyra (nudibranch). Visible through the translucent skin on its back are lobules of the “ovotestis” (thanks inaturalist expert! ). From google AI: “Ovotestes in nudibranchs are specialized, hermaphroditic reproductive glands that produce both male (sperm) and female (oocytes/eggs) gametes simultaneously”:
More eggs, this time from a snail in the genus Amphissa. I like the pointy egg casings, like wizards’ hats:
And here’s an adult of the genus- almost certainly Amphissa versicolor, but it’s an unusual color (they’re usually shades of orange or brown/tan):
In honor of Ghost the octopus, and also because I’ve finally figured out how to include videos, below is a clip from 2021 of an East Pacific red octopus (Octopus rubescens), cruising around the rocks (out of the water!) at low tide. I’ve only seen one twice, probably because they’re too cleverly camouflaged (possibly just too clever) for me to spot. This guy was about the size of a human hand, a miniature compared to the 50 pound Ghost.
