Monday: Hili dialogue

March 2, 2026 • 6:45 am

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:

*From the weekly Times of Israel summary, more news:

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.

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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.

. . .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.

*If you’ve followed the saga of the unauthorized use of cells derived from Henrietta Lacks (“HeLa cells”, read the story in Rebecca Skoot’s great book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I reviewed very positively for Barnes and Noble).  At that time the family of Henrietta, a young black woman who died of that cancer, was incensed that her body material had been taken and given or sold to in labs all around the world (her cancer cells did very well in cell culture). Now Novartis has settled with her surviving family for what I assume is big bucks.

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 the Unitarian Universalist Hysterical Society:

From Give Me a Sign:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Masih. I love that first tweet:

This is Masih’s time (i.e., Iran’s time), so let’s have another. She is SO happy (I’ve been featuring her tweets first in this section for YEARS):

From Luana (sound up if you want to hear the cheering and ululation:

Grok tells us what biological sex is. From Emma:

Two from my feed:

Evolution!

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

. . . and two from Emeritus Professor Matthew Cobb. First, his comment on the one below is “Here’s a caterpillar I didn’t know existed.”

The tiny Ramshorn Bagworm moth Luffia lapidella caterpillar in its case on a lichen covered gravestone, Alphington Church Exeter, Devon today.

— John Walters (@johnwalterswildife.bsky.social) 2026-02-24T18:50:26.872Z

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.

— Schmidt Ocean Institute (@schmidtocean.bsky.social) 2026-02-27T22:15:34.92700215Z

27 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Remember that eugenics, before Hitler, was considered a progressive cause. That’s why Margaret Sanger embraced it. Eugenics was seen as a way to help curb crime and poverty. But its implications today are ethically frightening to us: it implies some people shouldn’t breed. Remember that some people used to be forcibly sterilized.

    So now, we can determine some individuals carry genes for high propensity to criminality and are likely to pass those on to their offspring. What then? We can’t ethically forcibly sterilize them, so then what? Offer them money in exchange for voluntary sterilization? Is that ethical?

    There’s also good evidence that IQ is highly heritable and differs between certain racial groups and even men and women. Academia won’t allow that research to be done either for many reasons, including blank slatism.

    I honestly don’t blame progressives here though. Because if these things were to be established and widely accepted as true, they would only be twisted and used to hurt the “lesser” groups. Lawmakers would re-enact sterilizations, segregation, denial of opportunities, and who knows what else. Just as they did in the past when the same ideas were based on assumptions and pseudoscience. Take as an example fetal protection laws, that, when they were enacted, lawmakers swore would never be used against pregnant women. And what happened? Just that.

    Reply

    1. Yes, I think, especially on the right, fear of being accused of promoting eugenics and being branded Nazis probably inhibits discussion of inherited characteristics. Then, of course, there is the Minority Report-like fear that children of criminals will face restrictions based on the presumed likelyhood that they are potential criminals.

      Reply

      1. David Reich predicted that (truth coming out and it not being pretty) circa 2017 in the NYTimes.
        D.A.
        NYC

        Reply

    3. IQ tests do not show that women are “smarter” than men or vice-versa. However, this proves less than you might think. A verbally oriented test will ‘prove’ that women are smarter. A visual-spatially oriented test will show the reverse. Indirect quote from James Flynn (now deceased)

      “He points out that if you try to intentionally create a gender-neutral IQ test by throwing out items that favor one gender over the other, you find that you can’t eliminate a female verbal advantage and a male advantage for visual-spatial items.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beautiful-minds/201207/men-women-and-iq-setting-the-record-straight)

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    4. “Remember that eugenics, before Hitler, was considered a progressive cause.” Indeed, a fact universally overlooked by fashion-conscious contemporary “Progressives”. In 1932, the 3rd International Eugenics Conference was addressed by H.J. Muller (although with a complex message about eugenics). A year later, Muller moved to the USSR in order to contribute, through his science, to the building of Socialism. A few years later, after Lysenko & Co. (and General Secretary Stalin) had discovered that Mendelism-Morganism was a fascist plot, Muller found it prudent to leave the USSR.

      Reply

  2. Thank you for the Daniel Wood maps. Just to remind readers that information on what’s happening to ships and shipping in the in- between waters of the gulfs (Oman and Persian) and Strait of Hormuz and, even adjacent waters, is available free of charge from former Merchant Mariner and now Academic, Sal Mercogliano at his excellent “What’s Going on with Shipping” videos. Yesterday’s should be at url:

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  3. Re: Iran
    “‘If you were in a bunker in Tehran or Karaj, would you rise up against the Iranian regime on the basis of Trump’s call to arms when he might, even now, be negotiating with a Revolutionary Guard general to cement the regime in place, as he did in Venezuela, on the proviso oil flows west rather than east?”(Sunday Times of London)

    Reply

    1. This is a reality in dictatorships which we in democracies often don’t “get,” Reese.

      In Saddam’s Iraq the Muqabarat/secret police would wake up big shot Ba’thist dudes in the night: “We’re overthrowing Saddam! Are you with us?” – saying yes would be dude’s last words. It was a trap.

      Prof. Stephen Kotkin* talks at length about how dictators stay in power via collective action problems. Which is partly why the first defectors are often ambassadors (and physically safe to defect).

      D.A.
      NYC
      *The best historian in the known universe.

      Reply

      1. And the decisions on the ground are even more fraught, especially with Israel utterly destroying trust between members of the Iranian upper echelons. Imagine:

        Your are an IRGC general and you get a text: “Meeting, Tehran 101, subbasement” from a comrade. Old friend from your army days fightin’ the Iraqis.

        Is it a trap? Your buddy does seem to have encountered some financial “good luck” lately….
        WWYD?

        Reply

      2. And the decisions on the ground are even more fraught, especially with Israel utterly destroying trust between members of the Iranian upper echelons. Imagine:

        Your are an IRGC general and you get a text: “Meeting, Tehran 101, subbasement” from a comrade. Old friend from your army days fightin’ the Iraqis.

        Is it a trap? Your buddy does seem to have encountered some financial “good luck” lately….
        WWYD?

        Reply

  4. “ 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%”

    And how much of this is Michael Shermer’s self-determinism (YOU)?

    Reply

  6. British cousins here: can you explain your P.M.’s obvious “go slow” on the Iranian expedition?
    Would he like us to do military stuff more preferable to his lefty constituency in the new Islamic Republic of the UK?

    D.A.
    NYC

    Reply

    3. Starmer’s Labour Party has just lost a by-election of what was a very safe seat, largely because the large number of Muslim immigrants in that constituency voted for the Greens instead of Labour. Much of that was wanting to punish Starmer and Labour for not hating Israel and not supporting Gaza/Hamas. Labour is sunk without the immigrant vote. Hence, Starmer will do all he can to appease Muslims.

      Reply

    4. Starmer is trying to make a distinction between offensive and defensive military actions, saying that the UK will only participate in and enable the latter. He’s also using the distinction to deny parliament from having a vote, arguing that only offensive military operations require one. I can’t see his take being very persuasive or popular on either side.

      Reply

  7. Let me pose a different question, one I used to ask my students.

    Does anyone know of a complex human behavior that does not have a genetic component? One that is not, at least partially, determined by genes?

    Often, this was in response to questions about gender.

    Reply

  8. There are several ways to interpret President Trump’s statement that the war could continue for a month or more. As much as I would like it to end decisively in short order, my concern all along has been that Trump might execute a limited operation and then declare victory while leaving the regime intact. The fact that he is preparing the country for a longer campaign suggests that he has the resolve to do more—potentially toppling the regime so that a new government can emerge. I think that doing more is critical, as a weakened but still breathing Iranian regime will go right back to its effort to develop a nuclear weapon and the ballistic capability to deliver it.

    I understand that “toppling the regime so that a new government can emerge” is reminiscent of the famous Sidney Harris cartoon where the phrase “and then a miracle occurs” ties two mathematical expressions together. It’s entirely unclear how that new government might emerge, but the “day-after plan” for WWII was unclear as well.

    Regarding Andrew Sullivan’s piece, it’s quite true that a lot of the U.S. public opposes the war in Iran and wonders why Trump—who campaigned that he would not get us into more “forever wars”—risks violating his commitment. But one can also look at situation a bit differently. Recognizing that the U.S. has been at war with the Islamic Republic of Iran since 1979, Trump’s intervention can also be interpreted as ending a forever war, not starting one.

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  10. It’s been reported without further detail that those who the US had looked to to take over in Iran were killed along with Khameni. Sounds like a big miscalculation / missed signals or something of that nature.

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  11. Why is Henrietta Lacks a heroine in the African-American pantheon? She contributed nothing intellectually or financially to the research her immortalized cancer cells made possible. She didn’t even sit in the wrong end of a bus. Her family of parasites grifted unearned money out of the med-tech industry.

    Commercializing discarded tissue taken for legitimate medical purposes was customarily done at the time and consent was not needed. You asked it to be removed -> It’s no longer yours. Jonas Salk made polio vaccine in HeLa cells. That alone should have repaid whatever debt society owed to Mrs Lacks.

    She received standard-of-care treatment for her cervical cancer at world-renowned Johns Hopkins. I don’t know if she was what was then called a charity teaching case or whether, if so, that might have contributed to the hospital’s sense of entitlement to help itself to the leftovers of her specimens. Nonetheless, it was standard practice at the time. It was, after all, diseased tissue removed in an effort to cure her cancer. It was of negative value to her.

    What tort did the scientific companies inflict on her, or on her family? The mission of the tort system is to force the defendant to make the victim whole, to the extent that money alone can (because that’s all the Court can order.) Henrietta Lacks lost nothing of value to her, and even less did her family. Even by the wildly generous American concept of damages for pain and suffering, she suffered none of that, either. Therefore the family should not profit now from the intellectual and financial investments of others into the cells that used to be hers. (Specifically, once her cancer cells were immortalized, their mitotic descendants were no longer “her.” They are a unique life form.) In their first lawsuit the family filed claim for all the profits Thermo Fisher Scientific made from selling HeLa cells for decades. That’s pure greed.
    (ref: Wikipedia)

    It’s fair that the law now requires consent for tissue to be retained for possible research instead of being incinerated as medical waste. (Even tissue that’s making you sick.) But the donor doesn’t profit from any commercialization of the research. It’s a gift, not a commercial transaction where you get an equity interest from your zero-cost “investment”.

    Reply

  12. It’s so weird to remember, I’ve worked in labs that used HeLa cells back in the day. I don’t remember if I was ever told the specifics of the cells at the time, but they were definitely from that population of cells.

    Reply

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