Welcome to a hump day (“வாரத்தின் நடுநாள்” in Tamil): Wednesday, April 8, 2026, and National Empanada Day. Here’s one I bought on the street in Santiago, Chile in 2019, right before my first trip to the Antarctic:
It’s also Dog Farting Awareness Day (?), National Dog Fighting Awareness Day. and Zoo Lovers Day. I am not a fan of zoos or public aquariums, and recommend that you read H. L. Mencken’s 1918 essay “The Zoo“. It’s splenetic, of course, as is all Mencken, but there is some truth in it, like this:
But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned men to study this or that. Again the facts blast the theory. No scientific discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals themselves, has ever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology, and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not in the groves of actual learning, but in the yellow journals. He is to biology what the late Camille Flammarion was to astronomy, which is to say, its court jester and reductio ad absurdum. When he leaps into public notice with some new pearl of knowledge, it commonly turns out to be no more than the news that Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian lady walrus, has had her teeth plugged with zinc and is expecting twins. Or that Pishposh, the man-eating alligator, is down with locomotor ataxia. Or that Damon, the grizzly, has just finished his brother Pythias in the tenth round, chewing off his tail, nose and remaining ear.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 8 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Trump’s deadline for Iran opening the Strait of Hormuz expired at 8 p.m. yesterday. But instead of destroying Iranian civilization, he announced a two-week ceasefire that apparently will open the Strait of Hormuz. Now both Iran and the U.S. are proclaiming victory.
The United States and Iran announced a two-week cease-fire and plans to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday evening, hours before President Trump had threatened that Iran would see its “whole civilization” destroyed if it did not allow free transit through the vital waterway.
The agreement that was brokered by Pakistan was hailed as a victory by both countries. Mr. Trump said a 10-point plan from Iran was a “workable basis on which to negotiate” a lasting end to the war after demanding Tehran’s “unconditional surrender” for weeks. Iranian officials were triumphant, with Mohammad Reza Aref, the country’s first vice president, saying on social media that “the era of Iran” had begun after Trump failed to destroy the Islamic republic’s government. Iran also said it would fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for oil and natural gas shipments, while negotiations take place to secure a permanent deal.
In Lebanon, the Israeli military said that the cease-fire did not cover its offensive against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group in Lebanon. It was also unclear whether word of the nascent deal had reached Iranian local commanders, as fresh Iranian attacks were reported in some Persian Gulf countries early Wednesday morning.
Investors welcomed the cease-fire after the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran caused an energy crisis and weeks of turmoil for global markets. The price of oil tumbled, with Brent Crude, the international benchmark, down almost 15 percent to trade at about $95 a barrel, and global stock markets soaring.
Global relief at the pause in fighting was tempered by confusion over what comes next. Many challenges remain if the United States and Iran are to achieve a permanent deal to end the war, especially given that both seem to be claiming to have achieved their goals. Shipping companies also signaled that they were cautious about resuming transit through the Strait of Hormuz immediately. And restarting operations at refineries, storage facilities, and oil and gas fields that have been damaged in the war will take time.
So if this cease-fire holds, will anything have changed? Do we expect Iran to stop trying to produce nuclear weapons, stop exporting terrorism, and to give freedom to its people? I don’t think so. And if these things don’t change, what is the difference from before the war? All the U.S. gets is the Strait of Hormuz open again, which it was before we attacked iran.
*Yesterday’s war news from It’s Noon in Israel.
It’s Tuesday, April 7, and the thirty-ninth day of Operation Roaring Lion. The global price of oil has reached $111, up 1 percent since yesterday. Here are the latest developments that occurred while you were asleep:
- As Trump’s ultimatum enters its final hours, unconfirmed reports have emerged of multiple explosions on Kharg Island, Iran’s critical oil export terminal. The strikes appear to be American, but it remains unclear if they are intended as a warning shot or the opening salvo of an invasion.
- The New York Times published Iran’s 10 conditions for ending the conflict: a permanent end to the war—not a temporary ceasefire—with a guarantee that Iran will not be attacked again by the U.S. or its allies; cessation of Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon; a halt to fighting against all Iranian-backed forces in the region; the lifting of all U.S. sanctions on Iran; and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under new rules of safe passage. Iran is also demanding that each vessel transiting the strait pay a toll of approximately $2 million, with revenues shared with Oman and used in part to fund reconstruction of war-damaged infrastructure.
- An exchange of fire near the Israeli consulate in Istanbul this morning left three people dead, two of whom were reportedly the assailants. According to the Turkish government, one of the attackers had ties to ISIS. The consulate itself is almost always closed due to the currently tense state of Israeli-Turkish relations, hence no Israelis were injured.
- Yesterday, the Israeli Air Force struck Iran’s largest petrochemical facility in Asaluyeh, at the South Pars gas field. Defense Minister Israel Katz said the strike, combined with last week’s hit on a second major facility, has eliminated the capacity to process roughly 85 percent of Iran’s petrochemical exports, inflicting what he called tens of billions of dollars in economic damage. Katz said the petrochemical industry is a key financier of the IRGC and warned that continued aggression against Israel would lead to the “collapse” of Iran’s capabilities.
- The Gaza Board of Peace has given Hamas until the end of the week to accept a new disarmament proposal. High Representative Nickolay Mladenov is set to meet Hamas officials in Cairo on Friday, and a follow-up meeting is scheduled for Tuesday.
- The IDF has completed its deployment along the “anti-tank line” in southern Lebanon this morning—Israeli forces now control the line of commanding ridges from which they can prevent anti-tank fire toward Israel’s northern towns.
Note the penultimate item about Hamas disarming. The chances of that happening by the end of the week are about zero, and if they don’t disarm, what will the Board of Peace do about it? As far as I know, they have no enforcement powers.
*In an editorial board op-ed in the WSJ, that conservative paper takes Trump to task for threatening to punish the Iranian people in pursuing his war aims.
This directs all eyes to Mr. Trump’s Tuesday night deadline for Iran to reopen Hormuz. He could always delay it again, but at his news conference he laid out what he’d need to see. “We have to have a deal that’s acceptable to me,” Mr. Trump said, “and part of the deal’s going to be we want free traffic of oil and everything else.”
If not, “we have a plan,” the President said, “where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night. Where every power plant in Iran will be out of business.”
We will soon find out who’s calling whose bluff, but don’t expect Iran’s regime to care much about what strikes like those would do to its people. Taken literally, Mr. Trump is proposing to hit many targets that would harm Iranian civilians, which could spark a refugee crisis.
Striking indiscriminately at critical infrastructure would be wrong as well as unwise, punishing the Iranian people we need on our side. “They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom,” Mr. Trump said. Regime mismanagement has already left Iran’s grid in a permanent state of crisis, but such an attack could give Iranians all the suffering with none of the freedom. It could also erode support for the war at home and abroad.
The obvious solution is to discriminate between types of infrastructure. Bridges can be legitimate targets, but it depends if they have any military use of note. Otherwise, why punish the people?
Energy sources can also be legitimate targets if they have a particularly notable military nexus, such as providing fuel for missile launchers. But not every energy target will meet that standard, and the military benefit doesn’t justify plunging 90 million people into darkness.
One yardstick by which to judge any U.S. escalation is this: In addition to increasing “pressure,” which may never be enough to sway Iran’s regime, will it help prepare an operation to reopen Hormuz? The U.S. has a strong interest in causing chaos for Iran’s military, and targeting can allow it to do so without bombing every power plant in the country.
This is all good advice. And of course bombing civilian targets, which is a war crime, will turn most people except for diehard MAGA-ites against the war. My own priorities are regime change that frees Iranian citizens, and a guarantee (effected through complete dismantling of sites and surrending enriched uranium to the U.S.) that Iran will not pursue nuclear weapons.
*Jonathan Kay at Quillette reports on some mendacity in Canada: “The IOC is protecting female athletics. Canada’s Secretary of State for Sport isn’t happy about it.”
On 26 March, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced a new policy that ensures female Olympic sports categories will be reserved for actual female athletes, as opposed to trans-identified men. Under the new policy, women will be required to prove their eligibility with a cheek swab or blood test—a simple one-time procedure that’s less intrusive than the drug-testing regimens that Olympians have submitted to for decades.
The new policy will be warmly greeted by the substantial majority of ordinary people—on both sides of the political spectrum—who embrace the common-sense view that men should not be allowed to steal roster and podium spots from women. As the IOC notes in its new policy document, at high levels of competition,
there is a 10–12 percent male performance advantage in most running and swimming events… a 20+ percent male performance advantage in most throwing and jumping events, [and a] male performance advantage [that] can be greater than 100 percent in events that involve explosive power, e.g. in collision, lifting and punching sports.
Unfortunately, this common-sense majority view isn’t the fashionable one—at least not in Canada, where former prime minister Justin Trudeau turned the slogan “trans women are women” into state policy. Even now that Trudeau’s gone, his social-justice postures are still embraced by Canadian activists and academics; many of whom went apoplectic in recent months, following the decision of Alberta’s provincial government to finally step in and protect female sports categories—something Ottawa has refused to do.
Numerous researchers have tried to argue that the male competitive advantage in sports is a “myth.” Egale, a state-funded group mandated to support what Canada now calls “2SLGBTQI people,” suggested that excluding trans-identified men from female sports is really just a “grotesque” (and possibly even prurient) pretext to scrutinise young women’s bodies. Meanwhile, the CBC, Canada’s state-funded national broadcaster, has spent years instructing Canadians that the whole idea of separating humans into male and female categories is fuzzy to begin with—juxtaposing discussion of a “hermaphroditic ginger plant” and “sex-changing clownfish” with social-justice lectures from (human) “trans historians.”
. . .On Facebook, the Secretary of State for Sport went on something of a rant, accusing the IOC’s defenders of succumbing to the “notion that scary drag queens are winning women’s volleyball games”—an idea that he called “a stupid conservative pseudo fantasy.”
Van Koeverden also claimed that efforts to protect female sports categories are actually misogynistic, because they are about “policing women’s bodies.” And lest readers accuse him of mansplaining this whole issue, he said that he constantly meets female athletes who say they agree with him.
To quote the national anthem, O Canada!
*NASA has a gallery of images and videeos from Artemis 2. Here are a couple of shots (there’s also a flyby gallery).
A setting Earth.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili takes Andrzej’s words to heart:
Hili: What does life teach us?
Andrzej: That nothing is ever certain.
Hili: I’m not sure about that.
In Polish:
Hili: Czego uczy nas życie?
Ja: Że nic nie jest pewne.
Hili: Nie jestem tego pewna.
*******************
From Give Me a Sign:
From: Cats Doing Cat Stuff:
From Things With Faces, a most excellent catch:
Masih tells Trump not to destroy the civilization of Iran, which he threatened to do.
To President @realDonaldTrump,
Don’t do their job for them in one night. For 47 years, the Islamic Republic has tried, and failed, to destroy Iran’s civilization.
Tonight, millions are living in #DigitalBlackoutInIran, cut off from the world, not even knowing if our families… pic.twitter.com/3GbdhXxpil
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 7, 2026
A post from Maarten Boudry about a Jewish professor at Antwerp who is quitting because of antisemitism in her university. Read the whole thing:
I received this heartbreaking message from a Jewish professor at @UAntwerpen, who is leaving both the city and the university after four decades. I can hardly express how deeply this saddens and enrages me—especially in light of last week’s craven and disgraceful charade…
— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) April 7, 2026
From Colin Wright, a new paper showing that you should teach biology, even if it’s misguided, so long as it makes the students happy (you can find the original BioScience paper, which exemplifies the meaning of “tendentious,” here).
🚨NEW: A recent paper claims that an “accurate approach to teaching about the diversity of biological sex” makes “LGBTQIA+” students feel more included and enjoy their course more.
The only problem is that their supposedly “accurate approach” is actually sex pseudoscience.
The… pic.twitter.com/6l6XAgN6PH
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) April 7, 2026
From Luana, a result that will rile up progressives:
Biggest medical scandal of the 21st century – and Australia is still participating in it https://t.co/wU52PUljnV
— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) April 6, 2026
One from my feed; Science girl asks the inevitable question:
Just how does this species survive in the wild😜 pic.twitter.com/ZHU7Bm6Ejx
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) April 6, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Belgian Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he got to Auschwitz. He was nine years old. https://t.co/14aRepVkj2
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 8, 2026
Two from Matthew, both involving “Astro Christina”, Christina Koch, who’s still in space aboard Artemis 1. She’s a Wikipedia editor and corrected her own article!
this wikipedia editor is orbiting the moon right now!
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2026-04-07T16:37:49.411Z
a few years ago she corrected a few details about her own spacewalk! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:As…
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2026-04-07T16:37:49.412Z
Thanks, as always, to Colin Wright, for making us aware of some of what passes for nsf-funded research these days in science. A quick look at lead/corresponding author Paula Adams’ pedigree reveals that, though apparently with a PhD in biology, she has redirected her research interest to what is referred to as the intersection of biology and education. Her major support is an Nsf grant from its education directorate ( or division…I have not kept up with their org charts), not from the biology or one of the sciences or engineering research directorates. It seems that in primarily focussing on the teaching of science, these educationalists sometimes get the science itself wrong.
On the brighter side, in other nooz, I love your selection of Artemis2 pics! Though hard to choose among these, I think that Earth-set is my favorite. How really spectacular it is!
One option for Trump is to never mention the Iran war again and hope everyone forgets about it. Two weeks will allow something else to take over the news.
It will stay in the news until the Strait is open. Iran has yet to agree to that.
Can someone explain the stovetop faces to me?
1) What are the disks which the pots are sitting on?
2) What are the lines which form the mouths? Why are they on the left corner of the pots?
3) What are the two noses? Why are they different?
4) There’s another burner not shown on the left forming the cut-off eye?
5) AI, posed, or adventitious image?
I think the noses are just bottlecaps that are different, but scrutinizing the pic because of your questions, there seems to be another thing – the eyelashes are on the wrong side of the reflection ref. to the stovetop.
The setting earth picture is extraordinary! The live pictures were of decent quality—and fun to see in real time—but not great in terms of fidelity. My guess is that the many stills that the astronauts are taking will be much better. I’m looking forward to seeing them.
We’ll see what happens in Iran. If the regime remains intact and the Strait of Hormuz is reopened, yes, one could say that not much has changed. If the Strait continues to be held hostage by the regime, one could conclude that things are worse.
I think it’s more complex than that. Iran’s trajectory to a bomb has been altered, and its ballistic missile program has been set back. The altered trajectory to the bomb may or may not be a positive development, as Iran may now try to rush a bomb into production. Also, they may cozy up more to Russia and China and revitalize their ballistic missile program rapidly. Setting Iran back, ironically, may propel them forward. And it may cause Russia and China to alter their strategic plans, with long-term consequences.
Clearly the best outcome would be the collapse of the current regime, which would (probably, but not certainly) end Iranian aspirations for a bomb (and the ballistic missile program to deliver the bomb and protect its development). Regime change may still happen in time, but it will not be a prerequisite for ending the conflict. So, lots of ambiguity will remain.
My thinking is that no party will win decisively. Iran will benefit in some ways, the U.S. in others, and Israel and the Gulf states in still others. All parties will lose some as well. It will come down to the historians to tease apart all the strands and sort it all out. Oh, and we’re not done yet. More history will take place during the next two weeks and beyond.
Read that 10 point plan that Trump says is a suitable starting point.
It would leave Iran better off than before the war, including recognition of their “right” to charge tolls in the Strait.
And regime change is now completely forgotten.
The White House is now saying that the 10-point plan published by Iran is not the one that the U.S. approved as part of the negotiating process: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/white-house-ceasefire-plan-published-by-iran-not-the-one-approved-by-us/
Trust is in short supply.
And so it goes. So it goes.
Things are not looking good.
Panda video – gave me some chuckles. Looks so much like some kid goofing.
Would be interesting to take the same man-made structures in to the wild, among a panda population, and record the results. To somewhat compare what happens in the wild to this video.
the “notion that scary drag queens are winning women’s volleyball games”
That prompted a thought. Do trans women in sports gravitate more to individual or team sports. Is there any trend there? Would the result point to the underlying motivation?
What explains the peculiar intensity in Canada of making “First Nations” superstitions into an academic cult; and of subordinating facts in Biology to the the feelings of “2SLGBTQI people”? Some WEIT posters suggest that financial issues explain the first of these as a simple grift. The second may also be a grift in terms of sporting event competition, and its associated celebrity. In academia, where prestige is analogous to money, celebrity competition is in itself a kind of grift, so that explains both phenomena in that arena. But why more in Canada than in, say, Mexico or the US or Brazil or Iceland? Could Canadian preeminence in these areas be an illusion? Or a category of sampling error due entirely to a single individual named Justin Trudeau?
It’s not an illusion – many (VERY many) of my former colleagues, family and friends have bought into this ideology. It’s embarrassing to me, as a Canadian.
Also, it’s driving me more to the Right, as the Left here has jumped the shark. My former brother-in-law, for example, called me a “racist” because I said I think cultures that force women to wear the hijab are cultures that subjugate women.
And one of my sisters, who has always been a staunch feminist, is totally against Israel and is pro-Palestinian. Go figure. When I point out this discrepancy, I get arguments all over the place about “colonialism”. Most of the people I know and am related to are uber white descendants of European immigrants. It just makes me laugh, that is, when I’m not angry at their stupidity.
I’ve encountered a lot of what you describe, Claudia, both in NYC and especially from watching (from afar) my former country, Australia.
The trans train is all aboard there, weekly Palestine marches infest city centers.
I’ve often tried to quantify which country is more woke (both are more than the US)…. its a toss up.
There’s a theory I like that the further from the cultural metropole (USA and UK) the more extreme the trends and moral panics.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
What I hear about the NDP also suggests that the Left has jumped the shark in Canada. But why is Left shark-jumping so much more evident in Canada than in, say, Denmark? What is it in the recent sociology of Canada? I say recent to underline a distinction between Trudeaus père et fils, and their times.
I have trouble following the ever-increasing list of letters and numbers that one must use when describing the ever-increasing categories of sexual desire in modern society.
How about this? Just use A2Z.
That oughtta include everyone. TWK&C*.
*The whole kit and caboodle.
The stipulations in the ceasefire agreement will not hold. The US is not leaving the Middle East; Israel will not agree to neuter itself in fighting Iranian proxies; the sanctions will not be lifted on Iran. So why the ceasefire? The US and Israel have gained a breather from an intense ops tempo. They can now conduct more thorough battle damage assessment, which will feed into a refined target base. Planes need repairs and inspections. Equipment can be repositioned. In theory, Iran can do some of the same, but a large relative advantage is with the US and Israel—and any movement by Iran while under surveillance creates future targets. Iran’s chief gain is to regroup politically without being under fire. In the meantime, its leaders can hope that domestic politics in the US make it harder for Trump to restart the war than to continue it; they will continue to stoke that fire.
Disturbing tweet from the Jewish professor in Antwerp. Jews increasingly feel unsafe in European cities. There is so much hostility.
Now, only a month ago someone at Pharyngula was saying “Jews can go back to Europe”. Not a random commentator, but a Nazi by the name of Marcus Ranum (aka stderr), who has his own site at FTB…
“From Luana, a result that will rile up progressives”:
Those numbers also rile up statisticians. They are grossly misleading.
The study was not a randomized trial; it was observational. Therefore, the group who underwent medical treatment would likely differ in important respects from the group who had counseling only. Those differences have to be controlled for in the analysis in order for the treatment effect to be valid.
If you want to know the effect of medical gender reassignment (GR) vs. gender counseling on the need for psychiatric treatment after medical treatment or counseling, you have to compare the rate of psychiatric treatment in those who underwent GR (GR+) to those who underwent gender counseling (GR–) in groups that had equivalent history of psychiatric treatment before gender surgery or counseling because pre-gender-treatment psychiatric treatment is a predictor of post-gender-treatment psychiatric treatment. Therefore, pre-gender-treatment psychiatric treatment must be controlled in the analysis (as does age and date of first clinical assessment (“index date”)). The adjusted comparison can be made using the last column of hazard ratios (HR) from Table 4 or Table 5 of the paper (both tables show the same thing). Using the numbers from Table 4, the relative risk of post-gender-treatment psychiatric treatment for GR+ vs. GR– was:
For biological males: 6.1 / 4.8 = 1.27 or, in other words, 27% higher for medical gender treatment.
For biological females: 4.9 / 4.7 = 1.04 or, in other words, 4% higher for medical gender treatment (which would not be statistically significant).
These numbers are still not favorable for medical gender treatment, but they paint a much less dire picture than the raw numbers highlighted in the tweet that Luana shared.
And would someone please teach Donald Trump the meaning of decimate.
It is important to consider that while we’re listening to the many British female newscasters etc. keening over “poor Lebanon” – probably more than half of the Lebanese people are rooting for Israel.
They know who has destroyed their country: the Palestinians and the Iranians.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Genderistas moan about the IOC’s new rules, but there’s another plus that I rarely see mentioned: these rules will also prevent men with DSDs from competing in the women’s category.
In the Olympics, DSD males are a much bigger problem than trans-identified men; think Caster Semenya and Imane Khelif. There are sports agents who go to underdeveloped countries specifically to seek out such men.
Ironically, the experience of the Jewish Professor from Antwerp illustrates the need for the Jewish people for their own country, where they can be safe from this sort of hatred. A place of refuge, when needed.
And that is the original purpose of modern Zionism. Why modern Zionism? Because Zionism is an integral part of Judaism, stretching back thousands of years.
And modern Zionism because the events of 1933-45 demonstrated beyond dispute Jews’ need for a refuge. The only other population with even a fraction as clear a claim might be the European Roma people— but they had no long-standing association with a specific location as legendary “home”.