Welcome to a Hump Day (“Dita e Humpit” in Albanian): Wednesday, March 4, 2026, and National Grammar Day. My tip today is to properly place the word “only.” Example of wrong usage: “I only ate one donut.” Example of proper usage: “I ate only one donut.” (The Liberty Mutual insurance commercial whose motto is “Only pay for what you need” is also incorrect.) And don’t put up signs like this, which merely encourages copulation.
It’s also National Pound Cake Day, National Snack Day, and of course World Obesity Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 4 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Lots from the conflict with Iran: the U.S. has closed its embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after Iranian drones hit them, and, in Lebanon, Israel has taken control of southern Lebanon after Hezbollah broke the fragile truce and fired rockets into Israel.
The Israeli military said it had seized areas of southern Lebanon on Tuesday in its escalating conflict with the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia, as the State Department closed its embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after drone attacks and urged Americans to depart immediately from 14 Middle East countries.
As Iran expanded its retaliatory strikes and the regional conflict widened, the Trump administration signaled that the assault on Iran could go on for weeks. The Israeli military said that it was carrying out additional strikes in Iran, and had targeted weapons storage facilities in Beirut, the Lebanese capital, as Hezbollah said it had fired attack drones at Israel.
Israel’s advance in Lebanon prompted fears that it could be weighing a wider ground assault similar to the one it launched during its yearlong war with Hezbollah that ended in late 2024.
The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital, sustained minor damage after an attack by what appeared to be two drones, the Saudi Defense Ministry said on Tuesday. A day earlier, a drone attack caused a fire at the American Embassy compound in Kuwait, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The sources of the drones in both incidents were not immediately clear.
In another sign of the widening conflict, Qatar’s Defense Ministry said its air force had shot down two Su-24 bombers coming from Iran. It was the first report that, in addition to missiles and drones, Iran has also sent warplanes toward its Gulf neighbors.
Iran has now alienated all of its would-be allies, leaving it with only China, which doesn’t seem to care much about Iran right now. The question about other countries being attacked by Iran raises questions addressed in the next news item. As for what’s happening with Hezbollah, that is totally its own fault for violating the cease-fire agreement, but it’s worth noting that the UN forces there aren’t doing anything to keep Hezbollah from violating the UN’s own mandate. Hezbollah’s new activities are thus partly the fault of the UN itself. Lebanon was once such a nice country, and it’s a shame that Hezbollah happened to it.
*The WSJ reports an arms race between the Gulf States, who have been shooting down Iranian missiles, and Iran, which may have more missiles than needed to exhaust the Gulf States’ defenses:
Persian Gulf nations targeted by Iran have, so far, managed to limit the damage by deploying sophisticated U.S.-made air defenses against the hundreds of drones and missiles that have rained on their cities.
With costly interceptors and radar, all integrated with the U.S. military, the oil-rich Gulf Arab states have fielded some of the most advanced air defenses in the world, despite their small populations and militaries.
A crucial variable in this war, however, is whether these monarchies start running out of interceptors before the Iranian regime runs out of projectiles.
At current burn rates, it could be very soon.
“The intensity of interceptor usage that we have seen over the last couple of days can’t be maintained for more than another week—probably a couple of days at most, and then they will feel the pain of interceptor shortage,” said Fabian Hoffmann, a missile expert at the University of Oslo.
The other important part of this equation is the speed with which Israel and the U.S., which began the air campaign against Iran on Saturday morning, manage to hunt down and destroy Iran’s missile launchers and missile and drone stocks.
. . .The United Arab Emirates alone said that by Monday evening it has been targeted by 174 Iranian ballistic missiles, eight cruise missiles and 689 drones in three days, with no missiles and 44 drones hitting the country.
Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar also came under heavy barrages, with Bahrain reporting 70 incoming ballistic missiles. On Monday, the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait and Qatar’s key power station and main liquefied-natural-gas plant were struck by Iranian drones, among other targets.
It usually takes two or even three interceptors, such as missiles for the Patriot or Thaad systems, to shoot down one ballistic missile. Western officials have estimated that Iran possessed well over 2,000 missiles capable of reaching the Gulf nations at the outset of this round of fighting. While the exact number of interceptors deployed in the region is classified, Hoffmann calculated from open sources that the U.A.E. has ordered fewer than 1,000. Kuwait has ordered about 500 and Bahrain fewer than 100.
Here’s the WSJ’s figure showing the defensive capabilities of the Gulf states. Saudi Arabia leads the pack by far, and, all told, the states have enough power to down all the Iranian missiles, but that assumes that they’re all fired at the Gulf states, and mostly at Saudi Arabia. That’s a lousy assumption, and we should worry about Kuwait and Bahrain.
*And some (perhaps unwarranted) optimism about the U.S./Israel strikes and the world’s oil supply:
There are countless ways the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran could go wrong. Indeed, commentators seem to have dwelt on little else.
Instead, let’s game out everything going right, if only because that would be a game changer for world energy security and geopolitics.
If Iran, along with Venezuela, is soon ruled by a regime friendly or at least not hostile toward the U.S., that would neutralize two oil exporters who have regularly been the cause of supply disruptions in recent generations. Russia would remain the only adversarial oil power with significant sway, and its clout would be diminished.
This is a scenario, not a forecast. A range of outcomes is possible in coming days or weeks, and events in Iran remain fluid.
That said, they have so far gone well for the U.S. and Israel. They killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day, significantly degraded Iran’s military capabilities, and suffered limited retaliatory damage.
Iranian attacks have left gas facilities in Qatar and an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia damaged. Tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has halted. But the strait technically remains open, and Iran’s ability to close it will likely diminish as the U.S. destroys its navy and missile batteries.
Market reaction Monday suggests disruption has been less than feared. Brent crude oil rose 7% to $77.74 a barrel Monday, below the $80 or higher many analysts had expected. U.S. stocks were little changed.
While President Trump initially called for regime change, he might stop short of that. After removing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump left Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, in charge, in exchange for control of its oil exports and industry.
An interim council now rules Iran while the country seeks a successor to Khamenei. Trump may conceivably let the regime stay in place if it meets his original conditions: an end to nuclear enrichment and ballistic missile development, and a halt to support for proxies such as the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The regime may conceivably see that as a less-bad option than a continuing air war and threat of domestic revolt. Agreement could pave the way for an end to sanctions.
But if the regime continues along its former lines, it will continue to enrich uranium, no matter it they agrees to. That has always been the case: Iran lies. Perhaps international inspection could stop development for a time, but that has never worked. A parallel outcome with Venezuela, in which a New Boss is similar to the Old Boss, is simply not acceptable in Iran given the 30,000 or so Iranians murdered by the regime (yes, Venezuela oppressed its people, too, but not nearly to the extent of Iran). If Iran remains a theocracy and its people remain afraid to protest for fear of being shot, then Trump will have failed.
*For those who want more good news about Iran to cling to, here’s a NYT op-ed by Abbas Milani—director of Iranian studies at Stanford University—called “The coming Iranian revolution.” What revolution, pray tell, would that be? (Bolding is mine.)
The people of Iran wanted a revolution based on the idea of modern citizenship and a social contract, to bring democracy, freedom, independence and a republic, even an Islamic one but without clerical rule. Ayatollah Khomeini promised those ideas, giving Iranians and the Western powers what they were desperate to hear. In the end, what he orchestrated was a counterrevolution. . . .
. . . . For Ayatollah Khomeini, it was not a philosopher that was needed but an expert in Shariah. As he assumed power, Islamic revolutionary courts led by an infamous hanging judge killed members of the old regime and then regime opponents in summary trials. The ayatollah imposed strict social constraints such as mandatory hijab for women. Not surprisingly, women, secular democrats, people on the left and ethnic minorities felt betrayed and began to fight back.
The history of Iran over the past 47 years has been, partly, the tale of the people trying to regain the rights they lost in that bait and switch. One recent scholarly study at the program in Iranian studies at Stanford shows, with granular detail, that from 2009 to 2024 there was one credible, located demonstration every three days, on average, in Tehran alone.
In other words, the real revolution in Iran has been fought, battle by battle, over these nearly five decades. The Green Movement of 2009-10; the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022-23; and the defiance of over a million people who went to the streets less than two months ago and were murdered in the thousands by the regime are all fronts in this incremental revolution.
. . .This paradigmatic shift in public opinion is not just the result of the gradual grind of more than a century’s fight for democracy but also — even more crucially and perhaps paradoxically — the consequence of 47 years of despotic, dogmatic and misogynist clerical rule. Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, came to embody the apparently immovable power of divine dogma, particularly when fueled by petrodollars and propped up by brute force.
The most reliable polling on public opinion in Iran, by the Netherlands-based Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran, indicates that fewer than 12 percent of Iranians support the Islamic republic’s status quo. The data was collected even before the government’s mass murder of citizens in January.
. . . The policies of the new leadership and the identity of the next supreme leader are unknown. The appointment of a hard-liner like Mr. Vahidi does not necessarily mean that the regime will choose the path of widening or prolonging the current war or even continuing in its practices of brutality or sponsoring terrorism. Even if the Revolutionary Guards and the regime try to continue the rigid and failed policies of Ayatollah Khamenei, the population is not likely to be satisfied with their continuation — politically, socially and, especially now, economically.
. . . the new secular women and men of Iran are unwilling to accept anything less than what they were initially promised before being deceived nearly half a century ago. The machinery of the regime may survive today. But the counterrevolution of yesteryear is begetting the revolution of tomorrow.
Milani seems to have a crystal ball! I hope he’s right, but the “coming revolution” seems to be a revolution only in feeling, and who knows what will happened? I am heartened by the poll showing how few Iranians support the regime, though, for that gives the lie to the contention that only “urban Iranians” are against the government.
*Some levity from the UPI’s “odd news”: the world’s smallest arcade game has been made, and it’s quite tiny—less than an inch tall.
A 24-year-old electronics enthusiast in India has constructed the world’s smallest arcade machine — a .98-inches-tall device that runs Space Invaders.
Kiran Patil said he has been fascinated by electronics since he was a child, and over the years his interest has led him to experiment with multiple microelectronics projects.
“I have built many electronic projects before involving microcontrollers and displays, but this is the first gaming arcade project that I have attempted,” Patil told Guinness World Records.
Patil’s arcade machine measures .98 inches tall, .6 inches long and .59 inches wide. It features four buttons and can run an emulated version of classic arcade game Space Invaders.
He said the idea first came to him during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I built an initial prototype during that time, but it was fairly rudimentary and I also needed to further develop the software side of the project. University and work commitments paused the progress for a while, but in the summer of 2025 I decided to revive the idea and take it forward,” he said.
Guinness World Records confirmed the result of Patil’s efforts is officially the world’s smallest arcade machine.
Here’s a video showing its tiny-ness—and its inventor.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili quotes a feline version of Shakespeare, and Andrzej reminds her that he’s hard of hearing:
Hili: To meow or merely to watch, that is the question?
Andrzej: It’s your choice, yet remember – the deaf cannot hear.
In Polish:
Hili: Miauczeć, czy tylko patrzeć, oto jest pytanie?
Ja: Twój wybór, lecz pamiętaj, że głusi nie słyszą.
*******************
From the Language Nerds, a meme well worth seeing again:
From Diply Trending;
From Now That’s Wild:
Now Masih chews out the Democrats, Kamala Harris in particular:
My direct message to you, @KamalaHarris
Who are you?
No, honestly. Who are you? A Democrat who built a career talking about women’s rights, yet stayed silent when more than 30,000 people were massacred.
Now suddenly you’ve found your voice?
Thanks to @MariaBartiromo pic.twitter.com/eDSyIEsavo
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) March 3, 2026
From Matthew (Note: I couldn’t find this tweet shot but didn’t look hard. However, you can find supporting evidence here (h/t David). Are you surprised
From Luana; sigh. . . Chicago schools:
Chicago has a public school with space for 912 kids, yet only 28 students are enrolled.
The school is 97% empty.
It spends $93,787 per student.
It’s staff to student ratio is 1:1.
ZERO of the kids are proficient in reading. pic.twitter.com/gB8LduQ2k2
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) March 2, 2026
Two from my feed. Israelis in a bomb shelter singing an appropriate song:
Los israelíes en un refugio antibombas tienen a un “Maduro” cantando “I will survive” en una fiesta bastante animada 😂pic.twitter.com/qc51tcdpGM
— Emmanuel Rincón (@EmmaRincon) March 3, 2026
And a parrot doing awesome impressions:
Einstein, an African Grey parrot known for her brilliant mimicry, showing off impressive sound impressions.
📹Zoo Knoxville
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) March 3, 2026
One I reposted from the Auschwitz memorial:
This entire family of German Jews was gassed to death as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-03-04T10:57:31.744Z
Two from Dr. Cobb. I remember the days of asking players for autographs (I still have one from Harmon Killebrew, a Hall-of-Famer now).
Some guys in uniform just sign a baseball when they're asked to sign a baseball. But if a kid asks Aaron Boone to sign a baseball, he gets a whole conversation..:About baseball!
— Jayson Stark (@jaysonst.bsky.social) 2026-03-01T17:00:03.312Z
Matthew adds, “And I bet it tastes good, too!”
I'm addicted to these videos from a bakery in Uzbekistan this bread is beautiful
— Jessica (Vittoriya) (@chefjessica.bsky.social) 2026-03-01T04:47:19.001Z
Some miscellaneous things about the Iran campaign: 1) I saw a video yesterday showing Israel shooting down Hezbollah missles with a frickin’ laser beam! It’s called Iron Beam; 2) Steve Witkoff, the American envoy that was negotiating with Iran, says they started off talks by announcing that they had enough enriched Uranium to make eleven bombs; 3) Attacks seem to be focusing on the Iran Revolutionary Guard and ignoring the Army. This may be in hopes that the Army turns against the regime; 4) I saw a story that the C.I.A. is arming the Kurds against the regime; 5) Finally, Rubio responding to a reporter:
Trying to keep to my WEIT roolz limit here, Dr. B:
the Iron Beam laser tech has been coming for awhile, unsure how well it is currently working IRL.
There is an argument that Sinwar pushed up the Oct 7 date to when he did because he feared his well stocked inventory of missiles would soon be rendered obsolete by this new game changing tech.
D.A.
NYC
The reasoning that this had to happen now because of their stockpiling of conventional weapons to earn immunity is interesting. I had not seen that angle before. I will say one thing about the Orange One, he sure does not sit on his hands.
Well, I think that the ‘enough uranium to build eleven nukes’ must have been part of the consideration, too. I wouldn’t want to take the chance that Iran would start tossing nukes around. I think they would.
I’m not sure why anybody even makes comment on the UN forces in Lebanon as … doing anything. They’ve been Non Playing Characters ALL my life.
On that, note how Hezb attacks on Israel are rarely part of the story, just the Israeli response. So people think the IDF is monstering Lebanon for no reason.
I have an article about this out today variously, which I’ll post here. In case you wondered why everybody seems to hate Israel/Jews, my article’ll learn ya!
D.A.
NYC
Where is your article, David?
Yes. I seem to recall that more than 100,000 Israelis in Northern Israel were displaced for more than a year by ongoing Hezbollah missile fire.
Coming today I think, I’ll post it here Jim. Keep well. D.A.
This is the third comment on this post, PLEASE do not exceed the comment limits. Thanks.
I think the quotes about Iranian revolutions are missing one other aspect that is important to the Iranian people. The first revolution happened not just as a reaction against the brutal repression by the Shah, but also as a reaction to the fact that the Shah was a US puppet who was put into power by foreign governments (US and Britain) to control Iran’s oil. Now we are quite bluntly and openly doing the same thing again, promoting regime change not for the Iranian people (which would have been a noble goal, and should have been done during the protests) but to control their oil, just as we did recently in Venezuela.
I can’t help but wonder if this whole war would not be happening at all, except that Tump promised to help the Iranian protesters, but could not amass an armada in time before the protests fizzled with high 1000’s murdered. So after going to all that fuss, why not just say f- it and start a regional war?
No, I feel sure that his early comment about helping the Iranian people was just window dressing to divert from his (now explicit) real purpose, oil. Just as in Venezuela.
I don’t think the U.S. has identified Reza Pahlavi as the new head of the Iranian government. And are you really sure that that’s what they intend?
Also, Pahlavi, who is the one person Iran might accept as a TEMPORARY head of government, has declared that he wants to hold democratic elections in Iran. See here.
No, I didn’t mean that they would necessarily repeat the strategy using the same family. I just meant that once again, we are a foreign government trying to install a compliant Iranian government to control their oil.
A nice story if it was true.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/cia-coup-in-iran-that-never-was-mossadegh
Thoughts on Iran:
There have been multiple, shifting, and conflicting reasons given for attacking Iran. No surprise.
There is no timeline or set of concrete objectives. No surprise.
Americans have been told to leave 14 countries in the region via commercial airlines but airports are closed or flights are few. No surprise.
Why hasn’t the USA formed a coalition of Arab countries to attack Iran if Iran was such a threat?
For various reasons, including lack of an air force, the other Arab countries would find it hard to join in the attack.
I presume you don’t think that the U.S. should have done anything but negotiate. How would THAT have worked?
Oh, and the U.S. is in the process of sending military planes to these countries to evacuate Americans. See here (or many other sites).
The Royal Saudi Air Force has over 1,000 aircraft and is well-equipped with US-made F-15s and Eurofighter Typhoons. It also has a large fleet of attack and recon drones. The Egyptian Air Force has US-made F-16s and Apache attack helicopters, plus French and Russian fighters.
My point regarding a coalition is that it is easy for the US and Israel to look like the bad guys and we’re doing the dirty work in that region for free. Operation Desert Storm had a willing coalition of countries that included Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. If removing a threat from Iran benefits the whole region, it seems the Trump administration could have worked to form a similar coalition.
Arranging charter flights four days after the attacks began? I chalk that up to incompetence and lack of planning in the administration. I really think we have incompetent amateurs cosplaying as serious people running the show.
My last comment on this thread: you have to admit that both the Iran and Venezuela operations were masterfully done, from a strictly military point of view. Compare Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs, Carter’s Iran hostage rescue attempt, and Reagan’s Contras in Nicaragua.
The MRFF website backs up the story about “Complaints of Gleeful Commanders Telling Troops Iran War is “Part of God’s Divine Plan” to Usher in the Return of Jesus Christ” https://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/2026/03/mrff-inundated-with-complaints-of-gleeful-commanders-telling-troops-iran-war-is-part-of-gods-divine-plan-to-usher-in-the-return-of-jesus-christ/
The scary part is so many people, including people in power, believe that. We must kill so the Prince of Peace returns.
Crazy crazy times. But the video of the costumed Israelis in the the bomb shelter, singing the greatest disco song ever, put a bit dopey grin on my face.
UPDATE: Ward Carroll, retired naval aviator, just said on his youtube channel that the three U.S. F-15E Strike Eagles shot down yesterday were indeed the result of friendly fire BUT air to air from a Kuwaiti F-18C, not a ground to air Kuwaiti Patriot as first reported. His short video update should be at url
The World Bank estimates that in 1979 the Iranian population was 51% rural. By 2024, that had declined to 23%. Nevertheless, it remains true that the base of regime support is in various rural areas, but even there it is an overall minority.
The GAMAAN polling is interesting, the most heartening being that barely 12% support the status quo. However, in the same poll, an additional 12% still support the theocracy but would like to see gradual reform within the framework of the Islamic Republic. Those supporting regime change account for 41%, but only 18% overall thought foreign pressure and intervention would be effective in creating change and fewer than 6% thought violent struggle would do so.
Other issues also paint a mixed picture. 36% believe the country should build nuclear weapons, including 13% of those who support regime change. And 36% thought the government should not stop enriching uranium as the price of preventing another war. What most surprised me was the overall favorable view of the US: 53% favorable to 37% unfavorable. The US is the only major country with majority support; with Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, the European Union, and the UK all having greater unfavorable numbers. The Iranians hate the Brits far more than they hate Israel and almost as much as they hate Russia!!!
Overall, plenty of reasons for hope, but also many reasons to tread carefully.
That 12% support figure is reassuring. I continue to wonder what we’ll never know – how many of those 30K massacred would have been those who would have helped Iran rise from the ashes of the mullahs. Such thoughts prompted by the fact that Geo Washington very nearly died on or very close to my literal yard in 1755.
And I never associated much of anything with Uzbekistan before, but that bread will now be the first thing. And that parrot is astonishing.
Meanwhile, the Department of Defense has cancelled all education arrangements with Wm&Mary and will no longer send active duty personnel to study because coursework there will, “diminish critical thinking, have significant adversary involvement, or fail to deliver rigorous education grounded in realism.”
Piling on, Hegseth observed, “No longer will we sit back and treat these woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination as valid centers of so-called intellectual curiosity,” (This only impacted one student, who will be allowed to finish.)
Wonder if they are cancelling all college undergrad ROTC programs?
Apparently not (I asked). That’s why it further makes no sense. H’seth gets all puffed up over something affecting one person.
Well of course it makes no sense. No two things these clowns do make sense together because they operate as simple nihilists…early on I stopped analyzing their actions simply to avoid insanity.
Here is the most trenchant analysis of the Iran war I have found – it really opened my blinkered eyes to the bigger picture and helps explain what are the true interests of the US, Iran, Russia, China wrt this conflict.
Imho, definitely worth a watch:
I watched this and it was quite interesting. Countering China is certainly a part of the calculus behind the U.S. campaign in Iran, but when the speaker argued that Iran’s effort to develop a nuclear weapon is to provide protection to its ally China, I started having some doubts with his analysis. The Iranian nuclear effort goes back decades, so it wasn’t initiated to protect China, although China might see it as such today. Anyway, China certainly is part of the picture, as the speaker argues.
The Iranian’s may be crazier than we think (which is saying a lot). There is a report that Iran has even attacked Turkey. Of course, they may have just been attacking a U.S. base in Turkey. Since the Turks have not allowed the U.S. base to be used for attacks on Iran, the justification remains quite unclear.
Everything Trump does is about China. It is pretty clear when you look at the big picture.
Everything trump does is about trump. That’s pretty clear looking at any size picture.
Absolutely. One thing you can count on.