Welcome to Monday, April 20, 2026 and Big Word Day. My big word is probably the same as last year’s: “ratiocination.” It’s a word I learned from Hitchens and don’t usually remember what it means, so here we go from Merriam Webster:
Ratiocination:
1: the process of exact thinking : reasoning
2: a reasoned train of thought
By all means add your big words (and meanings) below.
Today will be a truncated Hili as I have touring to do.
It’s also Boston Marathon Day, Chinese Language Day, National Cheddar Fries Day, National Cold Brew Day (I’ve never had it), and National Pineapple Upside-down Cake Day, one of my favorites sometimes made by my mom when I was a kid.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 20 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The U.S. attacked and then seized an Iranian ship that would not surrender.
A U.S. Navy destroyer on Sunday attacked and seized an Iranian cargo ship that defied an American blockade of Iran’s ports, President Trump said, posing a fresh threat to the fragile cease-fire that is set to expire this week.
Mr. Trump announced the attack hours after a White House official said the U.S. was dispatching a high-level delegation including Vice President JD Vance to peace talks in Pakistan, even as Iranian state media said Tehran had not yet agreed to a meeting.
The guided missile destroyer USS Spruance fired on the cargo vessel in the Gulf of Oman, Mr. Trump said on Truth Social, “blowing a hole” in its engine room before Marines took possession of the vessel. The president said the ship was under U.S. sanctions because of a “history of illegal activity” and that U.S. forces were “seeing what’s on board!”
Mr. Trump did not say whether there had been any casualties. Iran’s semiofficial Mehr news agency reported that U.S. forces had fired on an Iranian merchant vessel, but said naval units from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had forced the Americans to retreat.
The attack occurred in the Gulf of Oman, south of the Strait of Hormuz, the economically vital waterway that has become a flashpoint in negotiations. Iran imposed a blockade on the channel itself, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil normally travels, and the U.S. countered by blocking traffic to Iranian ports. On Saturday, Iran attacked two Indian vessels attempting a transit, acts Mr. Trump described earlier Sunday as a “total violation of our cease-fire.”
The fate of the strait is top of mind for American negotiators who Mr. Trump said would travel to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, this week for talks. The stakes for the negotiations, should they happen, are high: failure would risk reigniting the fighting and extending the global economic upheaval wrought by the war.
Here’s a tweet from Jay showing how it was done:
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) April 19, 2026
*From It’s Noon in Israel: a split in the Iranian regime:
It’s Sunday, April 19, and according to Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei, “The statements by American officials are filled with contradictions and lies”—a sign, he claims, of their “desperation and helplessness.” Israel and the U.S. must have eliminated all the adults in the Foreign Ministry, because Baghaei is effectively playing a geopolitical game of “I know you are, but what am I?”
Despite Foreign Affairs Minister Abbas Araghchi’s announcement on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open” to commercial traffic, the IRGC Navy attacked several commercial vessels the very next day, declaring that no vessel of “any type or nationality” is permitted passage. This jarring disconnect may be a sign of something more serious than desperation: a coup d’état.
It is quite the allegation, but let’s look at the evidence. Beyond the strait’s schizophrenic travel regulations, the Foreign Ministry confirmed that new talks will occur, even though a date has not yet been set. Meanwhile, IRGC-affiliated media simultaneously announced that Iran has refused to participate in another round of negotiations with the United States due to “excessive” U.S. demands.
Furthermore, the institutions of the Iranian state seem to be picking sides. The Khatam-al Anbiya Central Headquarters—roughly the equivalent of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff—has released a statement defending the IRGC attacks in the waterway. The Supreme National Security Council joined the chorus, declaring that Iran will control the strait until the war ends.
The split runs along a well-trodden divide: On one side, the political leadership, represented by President Masoud Pezeshkian, Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf; on the other, the men with the guns, led by an IRGC firmly under the control of Ahmad Vahidi.
. . . If there is a coup underway, its most immediate effect will be on the negotiations. Despite his denials, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf is the official on the phone with the Americans. But even if he agrees to terms, the current power struggle does not bode well for his ability to hand over regular Iranian dust, let alone the nuclear enriched powder.
I’m not a pundit, so all I can do is report this speculation.
*The NYT reports that Hamas is ready to hand over some of its weapons, but only a small allotment, and not near the total disarming demanded by the ceasefire:
Hamas is ready to relinquish thousands of automatic rifles and other weapons belonging to its police force and other internal security services in Gaza, according to two officials of the group.
Such a step would be a remarkable concession from Hamas, which until now has publicly resisted giving up any of its arms.
The officials said Hamas would be willing to turn over these weapons to the Palestinian administrative committee that has been set up to govern Gaza by the Board of Peace, the international organization led by President Trump to oversee the cease-fire.
Hamas has said previously it is willing to turn over the burden of providing public services in Gaza to the U.S.-backed committee. But the group has not disbanded its battalions of armed fighters, suggesting it wants to maintain influence in the territory despite Israeli and American opposition.
The proposal from the two officials falls well short of the full disarmament and demilitarization of Gaza — a core demand by Israel and a pillar of Mr. Trump’s peace plan for the territory. That plan would also remove Hamas from power and bar it from any role in governing.
Asked whether the committee would also be able to confiscate weapons belonging to Hamas’s military wing, the two officials did not provide a clear answer.
This is not nearly a “disarmament,” and Hamas remains firmly in command of southern Gaza. And it has expanded its influence into areas supposedly controlled by the Palestinian Authority, namely the West Bank. Remember that among all Palestinians, Hamas is far more popular than is the PA, which is one reason Israel is worried about the West Bank. If that area becomes a Hamas-run enclave, then we have another terrorist Gaza situation, but one embedded within Israeli territory.
*And another mass killing, this one especially bad because a man killed seven of his own children, and one not his own before he died in a shootout with the cops (it’s not clear whether he killed himself:
Later Sunday, police identified the gunman as Shamar Elkins. Public records show that Elkins was a 31-year-old Shreveport resident. Elkins served in the Louisiana Army National Guard from August 2013 to August 2020, according to an Army statement. He did not deploy while with the National Guard and left the Army as a private, an entry-level rank.Elkins’s brother-in-law, Troy Brown, who lived with him, said Elkins’s wife had recently sought a divorce. Brown said Elkins acted normally on Saturday, the last time they saw each other, but had been distraught in a recent conversation about his marriage breaking up.
“After the first argument about the divorce, he acted like he was losing his mind,” Brown said late Sunday after leaving a Shreveport hospital where he had visited Elkins’s wife and two of his own family members who were injured in the shooting. “He was upset about it. I would talk to him and he would tell me, ‘Bro, I don’t want to lose my wife.’”
Police said the gunman stole a car after the shootings, leading to a police chase into neighboring Bossier City that ended with his death.Louisiana State Police are investigating Elkins’s killing.
A whole family and their futures wiped out. Another day in America.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is playing Pinker, and Hili his critics:
Hili: I dream of the return of the past.
Szaron: I can smell the present.
In Polish:
Hili: Marzę o powrocie przeszłości.
Szaron: Czuję zapach czasu teraźniejszości.
*******************
From Stacy:
From The Dodo Pet:
From Masih: the regime killed an Iranian nurse who tried to help wounded protestors, and then tortured her husband, both psychologically and physically. He tried to kill himself:
After killing her, Iran’s security forces stormed the morgue, sexually abused, and sent the images to her husband as a weapon of terror.
Today in a deeply disturbing case, Ahmad Khodaei, husband of Salehe Akbari, an Iranian nurse who secretly helped wounded protester during the… pic.twitter.com/2g2djU8ctv
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 19, 2026
From Luana; I haven’t checked whether this “miracle drug” is really a cure for cystic fibrosis. It does appear to produce amazing results in 90% of patients–the ones with the right mutations.
Trikafta is one of the most inspiring medical advances in decades.
Approved in 2019, the drug at first makes cystic fibrosis patients vomit up mucus for a few days.
But while they lose those days, they gain a lifetime–a healthy, *normal length* lifetime.
It’s a miracle drug. https://t.co/2suefbewRP pic.twitter.com/W3CtTaZllU
— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) April 20, 2026
From Simon on the Strait of Hormuz:
They should change the name to “Strait of Schrödinger”. It’s both open and closed at the same time.
— Brian Willott Farms (@BrianWillott) April 18, 2026
From my feed: a nice man:
A woman transporting rescue cats to their new homes had no choice but to put some in cargo. When the plane landed in Athens, Greece, she watched nervously through the window as luggage came down the ramp. Then she saw a baggage handler pick up each cat carrier slowly, crouch… pic.twitter.com/U630tODJMY
— Dr. Lemma (@DoctorLemma) April 20, 2026
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This ten year old Dutch Jewish girl was sent to Auschwitz with her parents and older sister. None of them survived. https://t.co/v10LWQwaZ8
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 20, 2026
. . . and one from Matthew. Translation:
A soft little chirp, a gentle glide,
through waves that stretch the bounds of yesterday.
One brown heartbeat, eleven tiny hearts—
how beautiful pure existence can be.
Ein leises Pieps, ein sanftes Gleiten,durch Wellen, die das Gestern weiten.Ein Herzschlag braun, elf Herzen klein –so schön kann pures Dasein sein. 🤗
— Ellen (@ellenisback.eurosky.social) 2026-04-19T18:06:23.223Z
Sal Mercogliano did a 15-minute youtube last night on the US military seizure operation at the blockade line with some additional context given the limited video from the Navy/DoD. Url should be
Thanks for keeping WEIT going in the midst of your hols, Jerry!
I have always liked and occasionally used the word “energumen”. Archaically the word was synonymous with “demoniac”, i.e. a person possessed by or as if by a demon or evil spirit. But in recent centuries the word has been used to refer to someone who advocates and argues for dubious, logically and morally unsound positions with boundless energy and extraordinary fanatical zeal.
Will add “aretalogy” (also aretology) to the list, since I just used it during my lecture on the written legacy of the Ancient Near East: “a narrative of the miraculous deeds of a god or hero.”
I stumbled upon ‘fissiparous’ recently – “the fissiparous nature of Christianity has led to it splitting into thousands of cults.”
A word I have invented but never uttered, which I often use in my mind, is “fiascoesque” – a melding of fiasco and kafkaesqe. It describes a farcical situation with overtones of tragedy and chaos. Sort of like rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic while it is sinking, and playing musical chairs simultaneously.
I do like “energumen”.
Pharmaceutical chemist here. Early projections about the CF drug Trikafta (actually a 3-drug combo) show that it has definitely significantly improved quality of life, reduced hospitalizations, and increased life expectancy for those afflicted with the disease, but it is not a cure. The various CF mutations (there are over a 1000) cripple ion transport ability across cellular membranes and cause thickening of various bodily secretions (sweat, lung mucus, etc). This medication helps to thin out the secretions to more normal levels, but doesn’t reverse the original mutations or bring back 100% normal function. A CF patient will have to take this drug for life.
Bit early to know exactly how much it will improve life for afflicted people–it was only approved recently. Life expectancy with CF has been steadily improving due to a variety of therapies before this new drug combo came out. In the good ‘ol days (like when Jerry was born), an infant born with CF would die within a year, but improved treatments had already allowed many CF babies to make it into their 30s or 40s even before this new drug appeared. 66 yrs with the drug is an extrapolation based upon the early clinical results. So, definitely a dramatic improvement but still just another step in medical progress, but one only made possible by knowledge of the underlying genetics.
Of possible interest to you evolutionary biologists out there is the question of why the CF mutations are so common–about 1 in 25 of people with European descent are a carrier. Some ideas propose that carrying one mutated gene (which is not enough to cause CF itself) makes someone resistant to infections like tuberculosis.
That certainly seems like a plausible explanation for the persistence of the mutations. It’s reminiscent of how a single copy of the sickle gene provides resistance to malaria, so it persists.
There is a claim that partial Swedish immunity to HIV is a consequence of an epidemic thousands of years ago. The AI summary reads
“An estimated 1% of people with Northern European descent—particularly those with Swedish ancestry—are virtually immune to HIV-1 infection due to a genetic mutation, [CCR5-delta32]. This mutation prevents the development of the CCR5 receptor on white blood cells, which the HIV virus uses to enter cells.
Key Aspects of the “Swedish Immunity” Mutation:
The Mechanism: The resistance works by causing a genetic defect that removes the lock (CCR5 receptor) that HIV uses to enter immune cells.
Inheritance Requirements: To be fully immune, an individual must be a homozygote, inheriting the mutated gene from both parents.
Partial Protection: Individuals who inherit the mutation from only one parent (heterozygotes) have higher resistance to infection but are not entirely immune.
Prevalence: Roughly 10%–15% of people with Northern European descent have this lesser, partial protection.
Historical Origin: Research suggests this mutation developed in Scandinavia, potentially aiding survival against past plagues, and spread with Viking raider"
That’s VERY interesting. I was not familiar with that, thank you!
Thanks for this good summary on CF. So all CF patients are homozygous for a recessive mutant ion transporter gene, but not necessarily homozygous for the same mutation, correct?
And do some mutations / mutation combos lead to milder CF, or do they all more or less yield the same severity of symptoms?
At $300,000 a year for life, the cost of Trikafta in the U.S. far exceeds the economic benefit of the years of life expected to be gained by taking it over and above the improving standard treatments. No stranger’s life is worth $300,000 a year to me, is another way of saying this. If I had CF, sure, I would want to compel strangers to pony up the $300,000 for me as an entitlement. But if I had $3,000,000 of my own money, I hope I’d rather devote it to the care of my other healthy children and my eventual widow than spend that much on ten years of medicine for one sickly child. (Of course very few parents with a child with CF will have accumulated that kind of assets at the time in their lives where that is an actual choice. It’s going to be charity from somebody or do without.)
In this spirit, my big word is querimonious, “given to complaining and lamentation.”
This is not about CF.
Should CAIS persons be allowed into female sports? This (at least to me) a hard question. I lean towards yes, but I could be persuaded either way. The head of the IOC (Kirsty Coventry) says Yes. The case of Maria José Martínez Patiño needs to be considered. There is evidence that CAIS has some effect. Several Miss America’s are rumored to be CAIS. CAIS persons tend to be tall. See the NCBI/NIH articles on the subject.
I don’t know. If there is any testosterone advantage, then no. Being taller would have advantages, but that presumably falls into the range of biological females. If if this allowed, one must be diligent about different degrees of androgen insensitivity.
I’m inclined to say yes, if it’s truly Complete AIS. My understanding is that even their skeletons are female.
But can CAIS be reliably distinguished from Partial AIS? I don’t know.
I’ve read that a number of models and actresses also have CAIS. T causes hair thinning and skin problems; androgens also limit breast growth. So CAIS women tend to have great hair and skin, and voluptuous figures. (I learned this from Natalie Angier’s wonderful book, Woman: An Intimate Geography.)
Leslie, let’s make a deal. We’ll divert the compensation of school superintendents from failing districts in states like Illinois, California, and New York, and we’ll pass it on to the CF patients. We can scour the public payroll if more money is needed. It isn’t at all difficult to find public school administrators raking in $250k-$500k+ in annual compensation, despite little or no demonstrable public benefit.
We can call the latter the TRANSMOGRIFICATION of public service.
Not a bad idea but the numbers don’t work.
There are 4600 patients with cystic fibrosis in Canada, of whom at least 2500 were taking CFTR modulators (like Trikafta) in 2022. This number will increase as the patients live longer and start the drugs early due to newborn screening, as new drugs are developed to cope with the minority mutations that still exclude a lot of patients in aggregate, and as the end-stage patients not taking the drugs age out and die off. (There is no age cut-off officially, but I’m being conservative on costs by assuming some people who are now terminal will have opted out given the side effects.)
AI can’t tell me how many school superintendents work in Canada.
Ontario has 340 school superintendents and directors for 16 million people. For Canada of 42 million there might be 890 in proportion. Salaries for the position in Canada are closer to $150,000 (CDN) and the government gets about 33% of that back in income tax, so the net cost of of each one to the public purse is about $100-110k. When it pays for drugs to be dispensed free, it is a pure cash outlay of the full amount (less any volume discounts it can negotiate….but there’s not a lot of volume with a drug like this.)
Even if we got rid of every single school superintendent we couldn’t fund these drugs through transmogrification. We’re funding them through debt, as Modern Monetary Theory says we should.
Hah! I didn’t think the numbers would work!
Internal conflict in Iran is inevitable. It’s the IRGC (and possibly the military) vs. everyone else. Will the IRGC seize power? Quite possibly. Will they be able to keep it? Much less clear. They do have guns. However, they have no air power or navy.
There are several reports of internal disagreement between the IRGC and the Iranian political leadership.
Here are a few places I go for information:
Institute for the Study of War: Has a daily update on the Middle East. Here is today’s update: https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-update-special-report-april-19-2026/. Yesterday’s update describes the tensions between the IRGC and the Iranian political leadership, illustrating how there is little synchrony in the Iranian response to events. See that here: https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-update-special-report-april-18-2026/.
PressTV: English-language Iranian regime web site. It’s interesting to read the regime’s spin on the news. It’s all about Iran’s strength, and Iran’s wins against the Great and Little Satans. According to the site, the U.S. has succumbed to a Zionist takeover. Jeffrey Epstein is involved as well. https://www.presstv.ir/.
Iran International: English-language Iranian web site that appears to be in opposition to the regime, or at least not explicitly pro-regime. https://www.iranintl.com/en. This site appears to have pretty reliable information, but it’s hard to know what’s reliable and what is not.
Hope these are useful to readers.
Pretty sure Iran Intnl. is very anti-regime.
ISW is an outstanding source for news on the current conflict and others such as Ukraine. I highly recommend their updates as they present “just the facts, ma’am” and are very cautious about any conclusions they draw. Isn’t that what journalism used to be about? Or am I viewing the past thru rose-tinted glasses🙂?
Bison dressed as Mormon missionaries! Hilarious. Definitely keep people away.
They might want to be careful, they might wind up having multiple bison shot dead.
There’s an awesome story behind the dog: it’s not a mistake, it’s a working dog (I suspect).
Cheetahs are very nervous creatures and don’t always adapt well to captivity, but it can really help if you raise them with an emotional support dog that is demonstrably not scared of its environment.
One of my favorite words is “defenestration”.
Are we limited to big words only in English? My favourite big word in German, which I came across as an undergraduate student, is Umweltverschmutzungsprobleme.