Welcome to the end of a long week, though the troubles of the week won’t end tomorrow. It’s Friday, April 10, 2026, and National Siblings Day. Here’s the passport photo showing my mother, me, and my sister (2.5 years younger than I), taken before we went to Greece in the mid-Fifties. Look at my big ears!
It’s also National Dive Bar Day, National Farm Animals Day, and National Safety Pin Day, marking the day in 1849 when Walter Hunt got a patent for this device. Hunt sold the patent for $400.
And Artemis II returns to Earth today, splashing down somewhere in the Pacific at 8:07 p.m. Eastern time. I will give a live feed. There are some concerns about the heat shield:
The Artemis II heat shield, NASA agrees, is flawed.
The heat shield is the critical layer at the bottom of a spacecraft that protects it — and the astronauts inside — from searing temperatures upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. If the shield fails, the underlying metallic structure could melt, rupture and disintegrate.
And there is no backup, and no way for the astronauts to escape.
NASA officials, however, are confident that despite the known shortcomings of the heat shield, the four Artemis II astronauts will remain alive and comfortable as they arrive at Earth on Friday evening at a speed of nearly 24,000 miles per hour, concluding a 10-day trip to the moon and back.
Extensive analysis and testing of the heat shield material “got us comfortable that we can undertake this mission with lots of margin to spare,” Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, said in an interview in January.
However, Charlie Camarda, a former NASA astronaut and an expert on heat shields, says NASA should never have launched Artemis II. The agency does not understand well enough the chances that the heat shield might fail, he says, and the mission, a success so far, could end with the deaths of the astronauts.
“I’m going to pray that nothing happens,” he said during an interview a few days before the launch of Artemis II.
His hunch is that there is a 95 percent chance that the astronauts will return safely. But that would mean a 1-in-20 odds of a disaster.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 10 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Now Israel is beginning cease-fire talks with Hezbollah, though I suspect that Israel will accept a cease fire only if Hezbollah disarms, which it’s already required to do under UN Security Council Resolution 1701. But it won’t, and Iran appears to be invested in keeping up Hezbollah terrorism. Israel is still striking Hezbollah, and PM Netanyahu refused to participate in a cease-fire and will not do so until Hezbollah is disarmed.
Hours after vowing to continue strikes targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appeared to make a concession on Thursday by saying his government would start talks with the Lebanese government on disarming the Iran-backed militant group.
Mr. Netanyahu’s announcement came as Israel’s attacks on Lebanon put immense strain on the shaky two-day-old cease-fire, as Iran has insisted the agreement covers Lebanon and the strikes violate the terms of the truce.
Israel’s attacks have also further strained and U.S. relations with Europe, where several leaders of NATO countries have been insisting that Lebanon be included in the truce.
While Lebanon has been pushing for talks with Israel since Hezbollah joined the war a month ago, the talks between Israel and Lebanon face enormous hurdles. It is far from clear how much buy-in the talks have from Hezbollah, which has long overshadowed the official Lebanese government. And while Lebanese leaders have voiced interest in disarming Hezbollah, Israel has voiced intense skepticism that they are willing or able to do so.
At the same time, the Israeli military warned civilians to evacuate parts of the country, including Beirut’s southern outskirts, suggesting another wave of strikes was imminent. People going north packed the roads.
It remained to be seen whether the Lebanon dispute would derail the cease-fire or affect talks between American and Iranian officials, which the Trump administration said were scheduled for the weekend in Pakistan.
There is more justification for Israel continuing its attacks on Hezbollah, which has been firing missiles and drones at Israel for a long time, and finally, violating the cease-fire sufficiently that Israel went after Hezbollah in Lebanon with boots on the ground (southern Lebanon only), as well as intensively bombing Hezbollah targets. If Trump includes Lebanon in the cease-fire deal, he is endangering Israel and promoting the continuation of terrorism. But the Lebanese government does not speak for Hezbollah, so talks with Israel seem futile.
*Here’s a 30-minute video about the ceasefire discussed by Niall Ferguson and put up by the Free Press (h/t Bill) in an article called “Why Iran thinks it’s winning.” (the subtitle is a quote from Ferguson: “‘President Trump may have made a mistake by not deploying ground forces. Because without them, it’s simply not going to be possible to shut down the Iranian threat to the Strait”). Ferguson discusses the Lebanon add-in to the deal, and argues that there’s no easy way to eliminate Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz save “deploying ground forces.” The U.S. has won militarily, he says, but not economically or strategically.
A quote from Ferguson: “One lesson of history is that negotiation when the two sides are this far apart is highly unlikely to deliver a result—certainly within a 14-day time frame.”
The video title is below, and it’s certainly provocative.
*The Washington Post adds that Iran is already trumpeting that it’s defeated the U.S.
Whatever the outcome of the unstabletwo-week ceasefire that the United States and Iran agreed to just before Trump’s apocalyptic deadline — whether it becomes an enduring truce or a return to the violence that has upended life from Israel to Azerbaijan — the pause in hostilities did not begin with images of an “unconditional surrender” that the president repeatedly demanded.
Exhausted Iranians may yet get a fortnight’s respite from airstrikes, but Trump’s central war objectives remain unmet, and hard questions are left unresolved. Each side is claiming victory, but neither is a clear winner.
Trump launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28 demanding unconditional surrender, the elimination of Iran’s nuclear program and the destruction of its ballistic missiles. He, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said they hoped the attacks would lead to regime change.
By those measures, Wednesday’s scorecard after nearly six weeks of bombing makes for sober reading.
Iran is battered but unbroken. The regime has not collapsed; it has hardened. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still has weapons to fire, including ballistic missiles shot at Israel and Persian Gulf states in the hours after the ceasefire was announced, injuring two teenagers in Beersheba, Israel. Somewhere in Iran, a few hundred kilograms of enriched uranium remains as prospective raw material for a nuclear weapon.
Yep, I think we all agree that this is correct. The Post calls the cease-fire a “rest stop” rather than an “off ramp”. I am curious what is going to happen, but worried that we’ve gone to war and didn’t accomplish anything. But with Trump in charge, we don’t know what is going to happen, though I think he is quite reluctant to send in ground troops. Nothing creates more opposition to a war in the U.S. than the sight of body bags coming home containing the remains of U.S. fighters.
*Greg Mayer called my attention to another public dismantling of Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. The dismantling is at Current Affairs, conducted by Brian McLoone (!), and is called, “Ross Douthat’s shoddy arguments for religion“.
According to Pew’s most recent Religious Landscape Study, a growing share of Americans identify as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular.” These so-called “nones” made up 16 percent of the population in 2007, but 29 percent in the latest survey, from 2023-24. The trend among younger Americans is even more striking. In this latest survey, 43 percent of those born in the ’90s and early aughts identified as nones.
In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, hopes to stem the tide. Referring to the Gospel of Mark’s admonition to be awake when the “master of the house” (i.e., God) returns, Douthat warns the reader: “If you are this sleeper, I beg of you—awake.” But he doesn’t think there are only fear-based, prudential reasons for believing in God. He thinks there’s good evidence that God exists. “The religious perspective,” he explains, “has the better case by far for being true.”
At the start of Believe, Douthat says part of his job at the Times is “to make religious belief intelligible to irreligious readers.” Believe is an outgrowth of that project, and succeeds at the task; it is clear what Douthat takes his factual premises to be and how he thinks one can infer from those premises to a theistic conclusion. The problem is that many of those premises are false or suspect, and many of the inferences unwarranted. His conclusion, that we should all be religious, is a house built on sand.
Remember that Douthat thinks that science itself gives evidence for God. This view is dismantled:
Note that, while this scientific perspective doesn’t posit a God, it doesn’t strictly rule one out either. Of course, the perspective does raise some challenging questions for someone (like Douthat) who believes in the Judeo-Christian God. (In Believe, Douthat describes himself as “a conservative Catholic by the world’s standards.”) If we humans are special, why did God wait billions of years to create us? Why did He make many trillions of other solar systems? And, perhaps most pressing, why is none of this mentioned in the Bible? One possibility is that God wanted to speak metaphorically in Genesis about our origins. Another is that those stories were created by people who were trying their best to explain how the world around them came to be. If they had known how old and big the universe is, or that humans share a common ancestor with fish and olive trees, they would have incorporated those facts into their origin story. But they didn’t, so they didn’t.
The latter possibility, of course, is more parsimonious. But Douthat argues that science (e.g., the “fine tuning” argument) shows that the universe was “made for us.” Yet his method of arguing is inconsistent:
That argument [science shows that the Universe was “made for us”] sits uneasily with Douthat’s claim, elsewhere in the book, that we don’t understand some important bits of our existence, like consciousness. He says that “the immense progress we’ve made in figuring out how chemistry and biology interact in the pathways of the cerebellum has brought us no closer to answering the question of why these physical interactions yield both conscious self-awareness generally and the specific kind of experience we have.” Douthat takes science’s inability to explain consciousness to be evidence that the mind has a “supernatural character.” When we put these two arguments side by side, we see that together they make a rigged game: if science can render some natural phenomenon intelligible, then that’s evidence for God; and if science can’t render some natural phenomenon intelligible, then God must be the supernatural force pulling the strings. Heads theism wins, tails atheism loses.
The end of the piece, which is long but a very good review of Douthat’s execrable book, suggests that McLoone might be—gasp—a New Atheist:
How I wish that the issues Douthat discusses in Believe were of purely intellectual interest. But they’re not. Despite the decline in religiosity among Americans that I noted earlier, religion of course still has an enormous influence on U.S. culture and policy. To take a recent example, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who is almost certainly overseeing war crimes in Iran, clearly views that conflict from the perspective of Christian nationalism. One way to counter this trend is to amplify the commendable commitments to social justice that one finds in many religions, perhaps especially in Christianity and its strands that emphasize dedication to the poor (incidentally, the tradition in which I was raised). This is the rhetorical strategy that Texas politician James Talarico has adopted in his campaign for U.S. Senate. The problem is that adjudicating which politics better aligns with a given religion is a fool’s errand, since religious doctrine underdetermines how one ought to act. Some passages of the Bible seem to extol pacifism, others genocide. The better strategy is to show that the foundations for religious beliefs are very shaky. That skeptical project, spanning millenia and continents, has been slow but successful. Believe reminds us that the project is far from complete, and the current political moment reminds us that the project remains critical.
I should add that Greg wrote me, after the NYT hired Douthat, “Who, other than his close friends and family, could care at all what Ross Douthat thinks about anything?”
*According to the AP’s “oddities” page, New Yorkers are flocking to a NYC park to see American woodcocks (Scolopax minor), which are not that rare! But they have a weird walk.
American woodcocks came to New York City looking to strut their stuff, and New Yorkers fell in love.
The curious birds, known for their bobbing walks and kazoo-like calls, have drawn a crowd to Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan since arriving in late March. Dozens of spectators are gathering at the park every day to try to catch a glimpse of the grapefruit-sized birds as they poke their long bills in the ground for earthworms.
“It’s a very charismatic bird. I mean, it’s goofy-looking. It’s got eyes that are always looking at you no matter where you are. It does this nice little dance when it’s nervous,” said Bill Rankin, a Yale University professor who stopped by the park. “Having two of them together is a kind of nice little romantic story of spring.”
The woodcocks are known to stop at Bryant Park every year as they migrate north in early spring. They are strange-looking critters, seemingly assembled from the parts of other birds — a round body, enormous eyes and a long, thin bill. They’re also called “timberdoodles” or “bogsuckers” by some.
Here’s a woodcock photographed in, of all places, at Bryant Park in NYC.
Nobody knows why it walks like this, though there’s one explanation given in the video below:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is nosing about:
Hili: Do you have something you want to talk to me about?
Andrzej: No, I just wanted to make sure everything is alright.
In Polish:
Hili: Masz do mnie jakąś sprawę?
Ja: Nie, chciałem tylko zobaczyć, czy wszystko jest w porządku.
*******************
From The Language Nerds:
From CinEmma:
From Things With Faces; a distraught melon:
Masih is angry at loose talk about “regime change” in Iran:
My message to the U.S. government on CBS: stop talking about a fake “regime change” in Iran.
Any negotiation that says nothing about executions, political prisoners, mass repression, and internet blackouts is not about the Iranian people. It’s about saving a regime that is… pic.twitter.com/WdToTWiyik
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 9, 2026
From Jay, a video compilation of driverless cars stopping in the road to avoid hitting animals:
More than 350 million vertebrate animals are killed by human driven vehicles every year. In general, autonomous vehicles are much better than humans at dodging animals.
A compilation I made of @Tesla’s FSD stopping for animals, and often saving their lives: https://t.co/BL6LiryTdu pic.twitter.com/MC7QhcdwRG
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) April 9, 2026
A mutation in goats from Sciencegirl. I’m not sure that breeding up a bunch of animals like this is an ethical thing to do:
The myotonic goat is a breed with a condition that makes it prone to stiffening or falling over in response to excitement or surprise. pic.twitter.com/EbsWAHESN5
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) April 8, 2026
From Malcolm, who says, “Cats always win.”
Cats always win.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/DjxaAJ6GVR
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) March 22, 2026
From my feed: interspecies love:
A male orangutan started bottle-feeding four orphaned tiger cubs after watching his human caretakers.
Suryia lived at Myrtle Beach Safari, a wildlife preserve in South Carolina in the United States. In 2015 the cubs were just one to two months old and had been rejected by their… pic.twitter.com/rUHxFYMi9c
— Dr. Lemma (@DoctorLemma) April 9, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This German Jewish boy was one of the 90% of people in his transport gassed to death when it arrived in Auschwitz. He was 12 years old. https://t.co/CDQcQVRpzs
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 10, 2026
And two from Matthew. First, the astronaut fixation with watches (see the thread to see what models of watches were issued by NASA:
WATCHES IN SPACE 🧵Ever notice how all of the astronauts are wearing a billion watches in every picture? Christina Koch is wearing three in this picture1/x 👇
And a video showing that the pharyngeal nervous system of this flatworm can by itself organize feeding behavior (I don’t like them cutting up flatworms):
One of the wildest things I learned about planarian flatworms: you can isolate their pharynx (throat) and it will autonomously engage in feeding behavior.www.science.org/doi/full/10….
— Sam Gershman (@gershbrain.bsky.social) 2026-04-08T18:59:12.843Z
Yes the woodcock – not far from me – is our latest avian celebrity. In NYC we have owls and hawks we make famous – and now these punks – they flutter into our city and try to tell us what’s up. Forgetabahtit – we’re walkin’ here. Woodcocks. Meh.
More seriously, thx for the Nial Ferguson clip, for my money he is about the best commenter/historian out there, and I’ve read many. All his books and “shows” are excellent.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
First, space.com has a complete article on the timeline for today’s return from space of the Orion crew, scheduled for splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off SanDiego at 5:08pm local (pdt) time tonight. The article also has several links for watching live coverage and should be at url
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/artemis-2-moon-astronauts-splashdown-what-to-expect-reentry-landing-timeline
Regarding concerns with heat shield: retired Nasa astronaut Charlie Camarda is a subject matter expert on high temperature materials and structures. This expertise placed him on the return-to-flight Space Shuttle mission to the ISS after the stand-down following the Shuttle Columbia disaster. Charlie, along with fellow astronaut Don Pettit, had developed several potential tile repair techniques (in Don’s garage..a favorite creative hangout for engineer astronauts) and I think there were some tests of some of these techniques carried out by Charlie on the mission. He is from Queens, outspoken (as is a certain other man from Queens), but a no BS guy. I worked with him in the 80’s and 90’s at my Nasa lab until he was selected to the astronaut corps, and again after his flight, starting with him flying up to Virginia to serve on a subject matter expert review team for Virginia K12 STEM curriculum standards that I led in 2007. He wants 21st century education to reflect 21st century needs.
He wrote a book in 2024 regarding his experiences in decision-making in large organizations, using several Nasa-centric examples. The book is “Mission Out of Control: An Astronaut’s Odyssey to Fix High Risk Organizations and Prevent Tragedy” (Headline Books Inc).
(EDIT added). I think charlie’s point aligns with 1. The solid rocket motors worked safely until they didn’t= Challenger; foams strikes on orbiter were not fatal until they were= Columbia. We held Butch and Suni on ISS and sent Starliner back uncrewed because we did not understand its anomalies. What is the scheduling imperative to fly this heat shield before we can fully model the physics? Is it a race to moon base that puts schedule ahead of safety?
Ceiling cat speed today, Artemis2.
Fascinating insights as always, thanks Jim.
Nasa responses to Both the o-ring behavior and the foam shedding/impacts were examples of what Diane Vaughan refers to as normalization of deviance: something that is out of bounds of what is expected, but (apparently) does not compromise the mission, so becomes acceptable over several or many missions even when unexplained. Charlie discusses Prof Vaughan’s work at several points in Mission Out of Control.
That’s definitely an insight of the “Aha! Duh!!” variety — not previously thought of but blindingly obvious once you know it.
Decades ago a colleague had previously worked at WED Enterprises on the software for a new digital controller in Disneyland’s Space Mountain. It was passively tested in parallel with the active analogue one¹, and there was an incident which activated the emergency shutdown sequence². It worked fine, no-one was injured, and the other engineers were not alarmed. But, as he told me, “I could not work in a job where a mistake might kill people”, so he quit. I now infer that this was his first such near-miss, and he had not yet been acculturated into ignoring it. Maybe safety-critical engineering jobs, like politics, should have term limits.
…………
¹ A Square D mechanical-relay system.
² Safely shutting down a roller coaster in an emergency is not a simple matter. You can’t just cut the power and let it glide to a stop 🙂.
Normalization of deviance is one of the aerospace analytics that has been brought profitably into attempts to reduce clinical errors in medicine, Dr. Don Berwick being an early proponent. What you find is that it’s just not one process where deviance was normalized. Everyone was doing it. This causes all the holes in the Swiss cheese to get bigger, not just the holes in your slice. So the holes in adjacent slices will line up with much greater frequency than you expected from looking at your own large hole while assuming everyone else’s were as small as “nominal.”
Not only thingamajig, but also doohickey, gizmo, and (much more recently), wossname.
Dealiebobber.
Re astronauts and their watches, when I saw Kathy Sullivan talking about her (then) new book Handprints on Hubble, she explained how she and Sally Ride were embarrassed standing around doing nothing in front of photographers and so pretended to synchronise their watches: https://www.thoughtco.com/sally-ride-picture-gallery-4123129
It seems to me that anyone arguing for belief in God should not be doing so by arguing from a viewpoint of a particular, exclusionist faith. That is just one reason for Douthat’s terrible performance and the task that he has set for himself. He makes it worse for himself when he debates an atheist who is a true intellectual like Pinker- he is so far out of his league that he does his cause a disservice, at least for an intellectual audience, whether the members of that audience are religious or not. One of my friends, a well known scientist, who happens to be religious (but stays out of such arguments) watched that debate and found it embarrassing.
That’s the thing about newspaper columnists. Many pose as experts, without any expertise. And getting a job at an “elite” news outlet puts one at the top of the heap.
Me, I prefer columnists like Mike Royko and Michael Kelly. Members of a species that is sadly extinct.
Art Buchwald.
Further “Da Nooz”
https://www.bbc.com/sport/darts/articles/c33lm6d154eo
A good decision! 👍
Congratulations to Emma Hilton – that’s the second time that her expert evidence has been instrumental in protecting women’s sports from male advantage. (The earlier one was in Haynes v English Blackball Pool Federation: https://jrlevins.co.uk/successful-judgement-in-haynes-v-english-blackball-pool-federation/ .)
Congratulations also to female darts champion Deta Hedman, who has been campaigning for this for years.
Is there evidence for a sex difference in throwing precision?
The article mentioned says so:
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You can email Emma Hilton if you want to see her report.
The capsule’s heat shield has been a problem ever since (my boyhood hero) John Glenn rode Friendship 7 back to earth in 1962. If I remember my reading correctly, the heat shield was known to be faulty even then, and Mission Control determined that the retropack—which was supposed to be jettisoned before re-entry—would remain attached to the capsule during re-entry in order to provide additional protection. Fortunately for Glenn, the space program, and the country, Glenn splashed down safe and sound. I wish that NASA would discover the magic formula to solve this problem once and for all. I, for one, will be watching the Artemis II re-entry this evening, holding my breath and hoping (once-again) that the faulty heat shield holds for just long enough to get our astronauts safely to Earth.
And back here in Earth, even though talks between Israel and Lebanon may seem like a concession, I think that something good can result. No, the government of Lebanon does not speak for Hezbollah, but both Israel and the Lebanese government want to be rid of the scourge of Hezbollah. The two states—Israel and Lebanon—have common interests, so talking to each other makes some sense.
I think you’re mis-remembering the Friendship 7 incident. There wasn’t a concern about the heat shield per se; it was about whether the heat shield was still firmly attached to the capsule. The heat shield was attached to a bag that was intended to cushion the impact of hitting the water at splashdown. After reentry, the heat shield would be released from the capsule and it would drop down, becoming the bottom of what was essentially an airbag.
A faulty sensor on Friendship 7 indicated that the heat shield may have come loose while still in orbit. Since the retro-rocket package was attached to the capsule over top of the heat shield with three straps (and normally jettisoned after use), the thinking was that leaving the package attached during reentry would hold the heat shield in place until the straps burned through, by which time the pressure on the heat shield would hold it in place for the remainder of the reentry.
Luckily, retaining the retro-rocket package didn’t itself harm the heat shield and it performed its job as designed.
βPer
If I recall correctly, Norman, the worry about Friendship 7’s heat shield was that the entire shield structure might fully detach, not that some portions would melt, sublimate, or explode off. I think, but it is a ghost of a thought, that the material was applied in much smaller areas, taking many more applications in those days and that it is the larger pieces used on Artemus that seem to have this new problem.
But overall, you are correct that thermal protection systems (TPS) are a difficult technology on these missions.
Whoops, meant as a reply to #7 Norman…mea culpa my big fingers
Hi Jim. Interesting that on Friendship 7 it was the whole Megillah they were worried about. I think I remember from 1962—when I was five years old—that John Glenn was warned that if the shield failed he would feel it in the form of heat in the middle of his back. Can you even imagine lying supine in that diminutive capsule, engulfed in a glowing ball of plasma in the midst of a communications blackout, focusing all your attention on the skin in the center of your back to assess whether you were going to live or to die?
Our astronauts are so brave, then and now! National treasures all.
And I remember how really tiny the Mercury capsules were. Space Task Group started out at Langley Research Center where my father (and some years later, I also) worked. There was an open house around 1959 or 60 with a full scale Mercury capsule mock up on display that visitors could sit/lie in. I was twelve years old and I can still recall that it was snug for me.
I remember seeing the Friendship 7 when I visited the Smithsonian Air and Space museum in DC as a teenager in the early ’70s – absolutely tiny!
Fingers crossed for a safe splashdown shortly.
We won. We lost. This common binary thinking on Iran is both premature and unhelpful. Are the US and Israel stronger (or weaker) relative to Iran than each was before the war, which might not be over? It depends on which facet one observes.
Let’s put the last six weeks in perspective. The US and Israel struck at least 13,000 targets in Iran. Let’s reverse the scenario. The US population is nearly four times that of Iran and its land mass six times greater. A comparable air assault against the US homeland? 55,000 to 65,000 targets struck. A comparable naval assault would have nearly eradicated our fleet. Similar decapitation strikes would have eliminated 100-200 senior political and military leaders. How might we assess that in terms of America’s remaining strength in the world? Somehow I doubt we would say that “With Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum having assumed the presidency, it is clear that the Trumpian regime has survived, thus dealing a devastating defeat to its enemies.” Yet, that is how some of the commentariat sounds about Iran.
Yes, you can win on the battlefield and still lose a war, but it’s too early to declare “Game over.” We aren’t even sure what inning we are playing right now.
Well put, Doug. A problem is TDS, which is disappointing. At this stage the war is going pretty well: Iran’s capabilities across many domains are severely damaged. I think there’s no “winning” that’ll be sufficient for those who let their personal hatred for Trump (and I’m no fan myself) color their view of the war.
Sort of like — pretty much ANYTHING Israel does is cast as inhuman and evil.
The commentariat isn’t sending us its best people.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
I only call it a win if the enriched uranium is secured. I don’t believe that could happen without boots on the ground, lots of boots, and casualties. It is not TDS to observe that Trump seems to be thrashing around without a clear plan or even a clear goal.
Yet the Iran demands Vance to negotiate and Vance flies in. Iran demands control over Hormuz and currently exercises it. Escalation by the US is steadily met by escalation from Iran.
While the asymmetry of firepower is obvious, the asymmetry in the ability to endure pain is, too. Thus Iran has little interest in ending this, since it can take the US air strikes longer than the US is willing to endure economic pain and mild casualties.
You correctly note that the asymmetry in the pain each side is willing to endure (and to inflict) can be more important than operational success on the battlefield. This is what I alluded to in the possibility of winning on the battlefield yet losing the war. But I believe you misread “the US.” Opposition to this war predates both casualties and economic pain. Most of it is reflexive opposition to Trump, some is more principled, some is informed, much of it is not. You would have a valid case if the country went to war with majority support and then recoiled in the face of gasoline prices. That isn’t what happened. Much that you read is selective outrage. The most vocal opposition voices wouldn’t flinch if gas were $5.00 a gallon after implementing their green policies; just like they remain insensitive when three times as many people are murdered in Chicago in a month than we have lost in this war. It’s opportunistic grousing from those who despise Trump. The bigger threat to the president and the Republicans comes from his small isolationist right flank—many of whom are hurt by gas prices driven by a war they never wanted. Where he appeared to err here is in assuming this conflict would be over by now and that internal party opposition would quickly fade.
I disagree with Niall Ferguson (for once) that boots on the ground is a good idea in Iran as the cost will be huge and our president probably wouldn’t do it anyway: he seems leery of the bad press of flag draped coffins returning.
A large %ge of the Lebanese population are rooting for Israel (though obviously they don’t want to be bombed personally).
Our idiotic lefty media are unable to understand Lebanon, thinking “Bombs bad, eh?” without realizing a)Israel can shoot straight
and
b) Hezb – Iran and the Pals together – are the ones who destroyed and continue to ruin their lovely country.
When it comes to driverless vehicles the data is pretty clear that humans (and animals) are safer without the human behind the wheel.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
From McLoone’s review of Douthat’s book.
As I try sympathetically to understand the religious, nothing quite stands in the way like intercessory prayer. It’s like you’re saying that the Word of God is Tough Shit If You’re Friendless.
Other than that someone can, why on earth would anyone deliberately breed a goat to fall over when startled? Makes them easier to pick up if they are momentarily stunned? What if a predator sneaks into their enclosure?
Isn’t “chingadera” rude?
You might want to check out the book on NDE (Near Death Experiences) as follows https://www.amazon.com/Imagine-God-Heaven-Near-Death-Experiences/dp/1496479904