Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats: It’s Sunday, April 12, 2026, and National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day, celebrating the perfect accompaniment to a bowl of good tomato soup. Wikipedia even has a page on this sandwich, showing the combo in this photo:
It’s also, appropriately, International Day of Human Space Flight and National Licorice Day. Licorice flavoring comes from the roots of a herbaceous perennial plant, Glycyrrhiza glabra.
Here: sections of licorice root:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 1 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*It’s no surprise that the U.S. and Iran have failed to reach a peace deal. The negotiations lasted 21 straight hours, but came up dry.
Vice President JD Vance said on Sunday that 21 hours of peace talks between the United States and Iran had failed to produce an agreement to end the war, leaving the fate of a fragile two-week cease-fire, and whether President Trump will resume major combat operations, uncertain.
“They have chosen not to accept our terms,” Mr. Vance said at a brief news conference in Islamabad, Pakistan, although he left open the possibility that terms could still be reached.
“We leave here with a very simple proposal: a method of understanding that is our final and best offer,” he added. “We’ll see if the Iranians accept it.”
Mr. Vance did not provide specifics, but said the United States needed an “affirmative commitment” that Iran would not seek a nuclear weapon or the tools with which to achieve one.
By early Sunday, reopening the Strait of Hormuz remained one of three main sticking points, according to two Iranian officials familiar with the talks. The United States had demanded that Iran immediately reopen the strait to all maritime traffic. But Iran refused to give up its leverage over the critical choke point for oil tankers, saying it would do so only after a final peace deal, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic negotiations.
The other two key issues were the fate of nearly 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium and Iran’s demand that about $27 billion in frozen revenues held abroad be released, the officials said.
Those are major sticking points! In other news, the U.S. claimed that two American warships went into the Strait and began clearing mines. Iran, however, denied that U.S. Navy ships were in the Strait. And Israel continued bombing Lebanon, in the south this time. Right now, it looks like the war will go on.
Earlier, President Trump played down the importance of the peace talks, which took place against the backdrop of a fragile cease-fire. “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me,” Trump said. “And the reason is because we’ve won.”
We did?
*Obituaries second: Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Mount Everest (in 1963), and latter the CEO of REI, died on April 7. He was 97 years old.
Mr. Whittaker, who died April 7 at 97, vaulted from a little-known mountain guide to a national celebrity, a symbol of American achievement at a time of roiling Cold War anxieties. As a literal flag-bearer, he became a role model who helped popularize climbing and crystallized American pride less than nine months after the Cuban missile crisis, said Broughton Coburn, author of “The Vast Unknown,” a book about the U.S. expedition to Everest.
Charley Shimanski, executive director of the American Alpine Club, later called Mr. Whittaker’s accomplishment “a defining moment in American mountaineering,” saying it signaled U.S. climbers were of the same caliber as the Europeans.
Mr. Whittaker, who was nicknamed “Big Jim” for his rangy 6-foot-5, 200-pound frame, was taller than others on the expedition. He stretched head and shoulders above his climbing partner, Tibetan-born Sherpa Nawang Gombu, with whom he stepped side-by-side onto the top of the world.
Before Gombu and Mr. Whittaker, the people who stood on the globe’s apex were recorded only in the single digits. New Zealand climber Edmund Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay were the first to reach the summit, in 1953.
, , , Mr. Whittaker spent 24 years with the outdoor equipment retailer REI, starting in 1955 as the co-op’s first full-time employee. By the time he retired as CEO in 1979, he had helped build it into a $46 million business with more than 700 employees and 900,000 members. He initiated REI’s signature annual sale to clear out inventory, created a product testing department, added goods such as parkas and sleeping bags, funded conservation groups, and led the expansion to its first stores outside Seattle.
Jim had an identical twin brother, Lou, who died in 2024. Lou was also a mountaineer. Here’s a video about Whittaker’s legacy, including the famous photo of him atop Mount Everest, snapped by Gombu. You can see more photos of Whittaker on the 1963 Everest expedition on his website, And don’t forget that two other Americans, Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, also reached the summit, but took a far more adventurous (and dangerous) route.
*As a result of the war with Iran, the WSJ predicts that “the era of free seas is unravleing—and now everyone’s going to pay” (page archived here).
In just six weeks, the Iran War has shattered a system of global trade that has enriched people and nations for more than a century: the freedom to sail the open seas.
The Strait of Hormuz long functioned as an artery for the world’s maritime economy. But that 30-mile-wide waterway is now a monument to a new global disorder. As some 20,000 sailors effectively held hostage at sea digested President Trump’s cease-fire announcement this week—contingent on the complete opening of the strait—Iranian officials stressed they would determine which ships could leave and at what price.
The “Tehran toll booth” was taking effect, as the U.S. Navy watched on, an admission that, at least here and now in the world’s oil corridor, America no longer rules the waves.
Captains, owners and managers of the more than 700 vessels stuck near Iran, carrying tens of billions of dollars in cargo, were messaging one another to try to make sense of Tehran’s shifting rules. After days of drones and missiles flying overhead, Iran’s navy broadcast a radio message clarifying their position: “If any vessel tries to transit without permission, [it] will be destroyed.”
. . .The Strait of Hormuz, sailors said, risks becoming a graveyard for a trading system so integral to the modern economy that most consumers, accustomed to cheap imports and three-day shipping, take it for granted. The price stands to be shouldered by consumers across the world, in inflation, scrambled delivery schedules and the snarls of a new arrangement in which Tehran can choose which countries access Middle Eastern oil.
If Iran continues to charge tankers for safe passage, the added cost will hardwire a higher price for a gallon of gasoline, economists said. Or its Revolutionary Guard Corps could choke the flow entirely, wreaking havoc on energy markets. Either way, shipowners, their insurers and crew remain wary of sailing back into a once-bustling strait that could spring like a trap on the slightest misunderstanding between an aggrieved Iranian regime and an American president who threatened to wipe out its entire civilization in a single night.
Whatever happens next, the precedent of a toll booth in open waters will reverberate across a world order the U.S. helped build. America’s allies worry other players could try to replicate Iran’s example, like empires of the 17th century, when China’s Qing dynasty, the Ottomans and Portuguese taxed passing vessels. Trump has floated his own wish for an American toll on the Persian Gulf, and his expenditure of naval power in the Middle East has given Beijing and its navy—the world’s largest—freer rein to expand control over the South China Sea.
. . . American thinking evolved after World War I to advocate free navigation for all countries, an idea that only came into widespread practice when the U.S. Navy became the global maritime police force after World War II.
I’m trying to think of what other areas of strategically important open ocean don’t already charge for sea transit but could be ripe for tolls. The only one I can think of is the Taiwan Strait, between China and Taiwan, which is 160 km wide at its narrowest point. Taiwan wouldn’t charge to traverse it, but I bet China would. And the Beagle Channel through which Darwin (and I) traveled, could be controlled (it’s 5 km wide at its narrowest point), but it’s free and international (Chile and Argentina), and not of strategic importance.
*To top that, Iran now says it can’t find all the mines it laid in the Strait of Hormuz. Even if the Strait gets opened in ceasefire talks, this will inhibit ships from wanting to pass through the narrows.
Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them, according to U.S. officials.
The development is one reason Iran has not been able to quickly comply with the Trump administration’s admonitions to let more traffic pass through the strait. It is also potentially a complicating factor as Iranian negotiators and a U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance meet in Pakistan this weekend for peace talks.
Iran used small boats to mine the strait last month, soon after the United States and Israel began their war against the country. The mines, plus the threat of Iranian drone and missile attacks, slowed the number of oil tankers and other vessels passing through the strait to a trickle, driving up energy prices and providing Iran with its best leverage in the war.
Iran left a path through the strait open, allowing ships that pay a toll to pass through.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has issued warnings that ships could collide with sea mines, and semiofficial news organizations have published charts showing safe routes.
Those routes are limited in large part because Iran mined the strait haphazardly, U.S. officials said. It is not clear that Iran recorded where it put every mine. And even when the location was recorded, some mines were placed in a way that allowed them to drift or move, according to the officials.
As with land mines, removing nautical mines is far more difficult than placing them. The U.S. military lacks robust mine removal capabilities, relying on littoral combat ships equipped with mine sweeping capabilities. Iran also does not have the capability of quickly removing mines, even the ones it planted.
I can see that this would be problematic for any peace agreement!
*John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor and U.S. ambassador to the UN, asserts in the Free Press that it was “a big mistake to have the ceasefire.” This is an interview conducted by Nicholas Clairmont:
Nicholas Clairmont: I’m just going to start by asking, what is going on with Iran and with the ceasefire? Have we lost? Have we won? And what do you predict is about to happen?
John Bolton: Well, I think it was a big mistake to have the ceasefire. I don’t think the Iranians have any intention of doing any of the things that Trump wants in terms of opening the Strait of Hormuz. I think they needed relief from the pounding they’ve been taking. We’ve been through this in various iterations with them before, and it’s very unclear to me what happens next. Because having basically backed down on the effort at regime change, if there ever was one, by acknowledging now that we can kind of negotiate our way out of the Strait of Hormuz closure, Trump is conceding the key, central point of leverage that we have. And I’m just very concerned that we’re going to be faced with a choice of which concessions we’re going to make that we don’t want to make. And the regime will skate free, basically.
It’s suffered enormous damage. But, from the regime’s point of view, if they survive that amounts to victory for them. And they will rebuild the nuclear program, rebuild the ballistic missile program, rebuild the terrorism program, and reconstitute in full their capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz. So this is what you get for mowing the lawn, as the Israelis call it. You can do a lot of damage, but you don’t resolve the underlying problem.
NC: So what would it take to resolve the underlying problem? What should we be doing differently?
JB: I think there are a lot of things that should have been done differently well before the military attack. Like, for example, coordinating and assisting the opposition. If you take Trump at his word that he wasn’t going to put boots on the ground—and I don’t see he has any inclination to do that, except for limited specific missions—then the role of the opposition internally becomes critical. Because the pounding that the regime has taken on their principal instruments of state power I do think has caused fractures in the top of the regime. Certainly, we’ve caused a lot of fractures by eliminating the top 400 or 500 people. This is how regimes like this can begin to come apart.
“Trump is conceding the key, central point of leverage that we have,” said Bolton.
And I think that’s happening. I think it’s a mistake to say the regime has survived. Pieces of it have survived, but we don’t know that there’s any central authority or that its capacity has very much longer to survive if it does. The Times of London reported on Monday that the Supreme Leader is in a coma being treated for severe wounds in the ayatollah’s city of Qom. If that’s true, and it’s purportedly based on intelligence that they’ve seen, it means that the Revolutionary Guard, the ayatollahs and whomever, are ruling through some kind of council mechanism, and they haven’t picked a new Supreme Leader. We can’t say for certain, but I think they have begun the process of seeing the regime disintegrate. So every time they get a break, which is what the ceasefire is, that’s time that they can come out from wherever they’re hiding and see if they can’t get their act back together.
. . . the logic is pretty straightforward: Unless you’re willing to live under a nuclear terrorist threat, and now a threat to the global economy, if you can’t change the regime behavior, changing the regime is the only alternative.
Bolton thinks the regime is actually beginning to fall apart, but given that whoever’s in charge has the weapons, and the civilian population doesn’t want to get shot during peaceful protests, how do we get regime change? Some have suggested arming civilians, but they are not an organized force, nor can the Kurds topple the regime itself. Bolton sees regime change this way: “I think ultimately in Iran, you’ll get a military government that can restore order after the ayatollahs are overthrown. Hopefully it’ll have the sense to provide some kind of consultative mechanism so the Iranian people can pick whatever kind of government they want to come next. And then, basically, it’s up to them.” But he thinks that Trump simply wants out, and sent Vance to Pakistan to do that.
*Both the NYT and the Washington Post are touting (with glee, I bet), the supposed increase in Catholicism in America. But their data is misleading, as the number of pious Catholics, as well as their church attendance, is declining. It’s just that young ‘uns are converting to Catholicism more often than before. As the WaPo notes, the rate of deconversion far outstripping conversions. From the NYT:
People are joining the Roman Catholic Church in surprising numbers.
This Easter the Archdiocese of Detroit will receive 1,428 new Catholics into the church, its highest number in 21 years. The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston will have its most in 15 years. In the Diocese of Des Moines, the count is jumping 51 percent from last year, from 265 people to 400.
The first year after the election of Pope Leo XIV, the first pontiff from the United States, many Catholic churches across America are welcoming their highest numbers of new Catholics in recent years. The newcomers are set to officially be received into the church during the Easter Vigil Mass, the night before Easter Sunday on April 5.
Bishops are buzzing about the surge, and confounded by what is behind it.
“Of course we think the Holy Spirit is,” Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington said. “But we are kind of stymied.”
From the WaPo:
In many places, the converts are disproportionately young. These reports have encouraged talk of a religious revival in Generation Z and generated controversy on social media. Discussion has centered around the sudden prominence of a few “hot” churches, such as St. Joseph’s in New York’s West Village and St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Nolita. At these spots, young professionals mingle at post-Mass wine receptions. Meanwhile, Catholic social media influencers have helped make an ancient faith seem trendy.
Is Catholicism undergoing a revival? Not in broad numerical terms. A Pew survey suggests that for every young adult who joins the Catholic Church, a dozen leave it. This year’s conversion wave doesn’t come close to offsetting the decades-long decline in Church membership, or solving the problem of ever fewer infant baptisms. Indeed, the recent wave of converts is best understood as a response to religious decline. In a secularizing world, becoming Catholic has a rebellious cachet.
Of course the papers don’t really concentrated on the data showing the extreme decline of religiosity in America. For example, the Pew survey reported in 2012 that the number of Catholics who consider themselves “strong” Catholics is at an all-time low, and church attendance is dropping rapidly, having fallen nearly 50% cince 1974. Here are the facts, ma’am (note that the rate of Protestants claiming “strong religious identity” has gone up by about 11%.)
Why is the MSM so eager to report the rise in religion in America when it’s actually on the way out? Does the media have a God-shaped hole?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili had a good idea:
Andrzej: I don’t enjoy the taste of anything.
Hili: Eat from my bowl, and I’ll eat from your plate. You’ll see everything will taste different.
In Polish:
Ja: Nic mi nie smakuje.
Hili: Jedz z mojej miseczki, a ja mogę jeść z twojego talerza. Zobaczysz, że wszystko będzie ci smakowało inaczej.
*******************
From Give Me a Sign:
From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:
From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs or Notices:
Re the tweet below: The U.S. State Department is expelling Iranian non-citizens from the U.S. if they have ties to the theocratic regime. As they announced:
This week, three Iranian nationals with ties to the Iranian regime were arrested by federal agents following Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s termination of their lawful permanent resident (LPR) statuses.
Seyed Eissa Hashemi, Maryam Tahmasebi, and their son are now in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement pending their removal from the United States.
Eissa Hashemi is the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, also known as “Screaming Mary,” the infamous spokeswoman for the Islamist militants who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
Ebtekar was notorious for her role as the leading propagandist for the violent Islamists who perpetrated the Iran hostage crisis.
. . . Last week, Secretary Rubio terminated the legal status of the niece and grandniece of deceased Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Major General Qasem Soleimani. Hamideh Afshar Soleimani and her daughter are now in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Masih, of course, is all for this.
Behind me is the luxury home belonging to the son of Islamic Republic Vice President @ebtekarm in Los Angeles.
The same Ebtekar who took American diplomats hostage in 1979. Children of top officials in Iran prefer to live in the US away from the hell their parents have created. pic.twitter.com/l8BftjNAkw— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 1, 2021
From Luana: chimp fingerprints!
Our evolutionary sibling, with whom we share more DNA than either of us do with gorillas or orangutans. pic.twitter.com/XSWRorDDOT
— Apatheia Ⓥ 🇺🇸 (@DanKellyFreedom) April 8, 2026
Also from Luana; the alphabet soup gets more voluminous:
This is done perfectly.
The MMIWG2LGBTQQIA+ is NOT inclusive ENOUGH pic.twitter.com/Oi6wWGRH1L
— Marc Nixon (@MarcNixon24) April 10, 2026
From Malcolm; a great cat artist:
Dudu Cat King is a Chinese artist who paints expressive cats with a few effortless sumi ink strokes.
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) March 29, 2026
One from my feed—an ant bridge.
No other species on Earth has a teamwork system quite like ants.
This tiny creature pulls off missions far bigger than its size could ever suggest. pic.twitter.com/GVP799bGry— The Figen (@TheFigen_) April 10, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would be 90 today had she lived.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-04-12T09:56:50.310Z
And two from Dr. Cobb. Look at this deep-sea siphonophore! It was identified as Stephanomia amphytridis, which can apparently grow more than 10 meters long:
Bargmannia? I hope they see a bunch of siphonophores on the next SOI expedition b/c Dhugal is finally going to be on the ship for that one! I've been waiting years for this. This 1 is from @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 642 #sepacificseamounts #MarineLife
I have no idea what’s going on here, and neither does Matthew:
This morning it occurred to me that Nasa has just completed something really remarkable: the safe operation of two entirely separate human-in-space programs simultaneously. While we all were engaged with the Artemis2 crew’s remarkable trip around the moon and home over the past two weeks, the ISS with its human crew was quietly continuing to orbit a few hundred miles above the Earth. And because their needs are ongoing, Saturday morning, a Space X booster stuck the landing back at the Cape after delivering a cargo craft with five tons of supplies to orbit for rendezvous with Station.
Meanwhile back on Earth it appears we are revisiting the days of the Barbary pirates, a time that spurred Jefferson and the American leaders of his time and the next more than one hundred years to build and assure U.S. hegemony of the seas. Can anyone imagine the Republican screaming if Biden put us in this fix? I just hope that countries don’t start charging a toll for the ISS to orbit above their soil every 90 minutes(please see first paragraph above with good news)!
And as far as playing together and building something the seven astronauts currently on ISS comprise three American, three Russian, and one European (ESA) … and pretty damn diverse by any peckinsniff’s measure I would say.