Welcome to the First Friday in June: June 5, 2026 and National Doughnut Day, always on the first Friday in June. The doughnuts we know have their ancestors in Roman times, though the creation of the hole came later. There are now variants throughout the world; I like this Indian version called Makhan Bada, served a a dessert:. These are deep-fried in ghee (clarified butter) and dipped in sugar syrup.
It’s also National Fish and Chip Day (what? One chip?), National Gingerbread Day, National Ketchup Day (Heinz is the only acceptable one; if a restaurant serves another variety, it is stinting), National Veggie Burger Day, and Sausage Roll Day. Here is a video suggested to me by YouTube, and I watched a;; 40+ minutes, though Mark Wiens puts me off with his googly-eyed “yums.” But it does give four suggestions for good chippies in London, and I love a good chippy.
Finally, there’s a new Google Doodle announcing a Google Doodle contest for U.S. students. There are big prizes! Click to see where it goes. (The Doodle shown is the last prizewinner.)
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 5 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal explains how Iran is buying time, hoping the U.S. will lose resolve.
Yesterday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Hezbollah-affiliated media that Iran and Lebanon are “linked” and that the conflict with the United States and Israel will not end unless Israeli forces withdraw from southern Lebanon completely. It is a strange demand, given that the IDF’s presence wasn’t an insurmountable barrier to negotiations during the first two months of the process. Waiting for an unconditional withdrawal means waiting for the day Benjamin Netanyahu willingly commits political suicide and surrenders the premiership—which, in Israel, is just another way of saying it is never going to happen.
And that is precisely the point, buy time.
The two fronts are linked by more than just diplomacy; they are driven by the same playbook. Just as Hezbollah inflicts steady casualties to erode Israeli public support for the war, Iran is running its own parallel insurgency to break American resolve. By dragging out the conflict and inflicting mounting costs on the global economy, Tehran hopes to exhaust Washington’s patience.
Yet, there are key tactical differences. While Hezbollah knows it cannot convince Netanyahu to withdraw and therefore targets the Israeli population’s political will, Tehran believes it can bleed out Trump’s patience directly. By protracting the timeline, Iran aims to exhaust the president into lowering his demands on the nuclear file. Finally, where Hezbollah fights for territorial consolidation on the ground, Iran is using the delay to quietly cement de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz.
Much like a classic insurgency, Tehran’s goal is to turn local Gulf populations and governments against the American presence. By explicitly warning Gulf states, as it did this week after attacking Kuwait, that hosting U.S. forces makes their territory a target, Iran is using heavy-handed violence to drive a wedge between Washington and its regional allies.
The truth is, Iran has been running this exact playbook since the 1979 revolution: bolstering its proxy networks, inflicting mounting costs on the American military, and coercing regional acceptance of its hegemony. The current escalation in the Strait of Hormuz is just the latest, most aggressive phase of a decades-long strategy—all in service of a single, ultimate objective: expelling the United States from the Middle East.
. . .The Israeli security establishment holds a much higher assessment of Trump’s resolve than the Iranians do. They are deeply skeptical that he will simply throw his hands up in frustration and settle for the nuclear equivalent of a participation trophy—just to get a deal done.
All insurgent campaigns rely on one foundational premise: that the enemy’s political will must break first. If Trump’s reserves of patience are deeper than Tehran calculates, Iran’s entire strategy collapses. Its maritime insurgency is incurring a devastating economic cost. If Washington doesn’t blink, Tehran isn’t waiting Trump out—it is just bleeding itself dry.
Well, there you go. I have no idea what Trump will do, as he’s mercurial, though the House vote this week (and the Senate vote to come) might make him wary of continuing the war. As for expelling the U.S. from the Middle East, I don’t think that will work: we have bases there, and the Arab states have become more disenchanted with Iran than ever.
*The NYT gives a lot of possible answer to the question, “Where is Iran’s highly enriched uranium?” (article archived here).
President Trump has vowed to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon — and central to that pledge is the fate of its highly enriched uranium, which could be used to build at least 10 bombs.
Much of the uranium is believed to be stored so far underground that even powerful U.S. bunker-buster bombs may not be able to destroy it. A raid by U.S. forces to retrieve the uranium would carry enormous risks, including from the material itself, which could become highly toxic if it were to leak and be exposed to moisture.
The Trump administration is now focusing on diplomatic efforts by trying to convince Iran to turn over the material in return for incentives.
“Iran is being sanctioned because they have highly enriched uranium, Iran is being sanctioned because of their nuclear activities,” said U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, while testifying Tuesday at a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “If they agree to give up those things, there will be sanctions relief associated with their commitment and compliance with those agreements.”
Iran had a stockpile of about 970 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent as of June 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency, or I.A.E.A., said in February. The material is often stored in canisters about the size of scuba tanks, allowing the stockpile to be split among several locations.
It is impossible to know exactly where Iran’s nuclear material is stored without full I.A.E.A. inspections. Here’s a look at where experts believe it may be, and why it would be so difficult to retrieve.
Some alternatives (there are maps and photos; numbering is mine).
1.) Most of Iran’s enriched uranium likely remains stored underground, near the Isfahan nuclear complex, according to Rafael Grossi, who leads the I.A.E.A. The material would require only a few weeks of processing to be usable for a nuclear weapon.
2.) A smaller share of the highly enriched uranium may be at Natanz, Iran’s largest enrichment site, according to Mr. Grossi, the I.A.E.A. head.
3.) The underground Fordo site was effectively destroyed when U.S. forces struck it with a dozen bunker-buster bombs in June 2025. In recent weeks, satellite imagery has indicated that Iran has added obstacles on the roads leading to buried tunnel entrances, in what could be an effort to slow down a potential attack, according to the Institute for Science and International Security.
And here’s the rub:
Iran also has more uranium than just its stocks enriched to 60 percent. In total, the country has more than 19,930 pounds of enriched uranium, according to the I.A.E.A.’s latest assessment, including 405 pounds enriched up to 20 percent and 13,280 pounds enriched up to 5 percent.
While it would take time to convert that uranium to bomb grade, Iran would retain the ability to do so as long as it retains an operational enrichment site.
And that, my friends, brothers and sisters and comrades, is the rub. There should be no operational enrichment site, for that guarantees that the lying and mendacious country of Iran will keep pursuing nuclear weapons.
*Konstantin Kisin of Triggernometry has a provocative article in the Free Press called “How America’s racial politics poisoned Britain.” Its them is the death of Henry Nowak, killed by a Sikh and who died in handcuffs because the Sikhs claimed that Nowak uttered a racial slur at them (he didn’t).
Five years [after the killing of George Floye], last December, an 18-year-old student named Henry Nowak was stabbed five times on a Southampton street after an altercation with a British Sikh man. As he lay bleeding, he told police officers who arrived at the scene exactly what had happened: He had been stabbed. Vickrum Digwa, who was standing nearby, and his brother told the officers something else: that Digwa had been the victim of a racist attack.
On the call to police, Digwa’s brother, Gurpreet, said to the dispatcher, “We’ve just been attacked by . . .”, paused, then finished, “someone racially.”
Minutes later, as police arrived on the scene, bodycam footage released by police late last night shows officers approaching a clearly incapacitated Nowak, who is bent over, his skin pale and his breathing labored. The officers believed Digwa, and handcuffed Nowak.
The footage ends just as we hear Henry Nowak’s last words, “I can’t breathe.” He said them while handcuffed on the pavement, bleeding from five stab wounds, to officers who had decided that the man who put those wounds in him was the real victim, that sarcastically dismissed him when he told them he’d been stabbed.
. . .The shocking footage has been met with statements of anger and disgust from politicians, amid calls for events “not to divide us.” Britain’s home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, called the footage a “disturbing and tragic thing to see.” But you are not likely to see Henry’s words stenciled on a mural. No corporation will change its logo. The same establishment that made a few words immortal when spoken by a black man in Minneapolis has met the same words, spoken by a white boy dying on a British street, with what can only be described as a determined, institutional silence.
That silence is not neutral. It is a statement. It tells you exactly whose suffering the system has decided counts, and whose does not. And it was produced not by the old racism—not by skinheads and hooligans—but by the people who spent six years telling you they had abolished it.
. . .The answr [to the question of what six years of British anti-racism has produced], if you’re willing to look at it honestly, is this: a new form of racism. A bureaucratic racism perpetrated by the lanyard class. An actual institutionalized racism. A racism so thoroughly laundered through the language of progress and inclusion that the people enforcing it genuinely believe they are on the right side of history.
What else do you call a system in which a dying teenager’s word counts for less than his killer’s because of the color of their skin? Where that teenager, who did not pose a threat as he bled out, was handcuffed and mocked rather than helped?
. . .What is particularly striking about this case is the way it mirrors, almost exactly, the injustice that movement was supposedly designed to prevent. George Floyd died saying “I can’t breathe” while a police officer knelt on his neck. Henry Nowak died saying “I can’t breathe” while police officers, kneeling on his back, handcuffed him. The British establishment that wept for Floyd has been conspicuously quiet about Nowak. Politicians who marched through London’s streets in 2020 have not rushed to the cameras. The corporations that changed their logos and funded diversity initiatives have not issued statements.
They will say, as they always say, that the real problem is that we haven’t gone far enough.
This is not an accident, or even a surprise. It is the logical consequence of an ideology that simply reassigns racism to new acceptable targets.
. . .What is particularly striking about this case is the way it mirrors, almost exactly, the injustice that movement was supposedly designed to prevent. George Floyd died saying “I can’t breathe” while a police officer knelt on his neck. Henry Nowak died saying “I can’t breathe” while police officers, kneeling on his back, handcuffed him. The British establishment that wept for Floyd has been conspicuously quiet about Nowak. Politicians who marched through London’s streets in 2020 have not rushed to the cameras. The corporations that changed their logos and funded diversity initiatives have not issued statements.
They will say, as they always say, that the real problem is that we haven’t gone far enough.
This is not an accident, or even a surprise. It is the logical consequence of an ideology that simply reassigns racism to new acceptable targets.
I admire Kisin because he’s a straight shooter, saying things like the above which are taboo in the “progressive” dictionary. Ibram Kendri didn’t know how ironic his statement was: “If you’re not an antiracist, you’re a racist.”
*The Wall Street Journal reports that statues taken down in 2020 for being politically incorrect are in the process of being restored, or at least being rethought.
The statue wars that swept away monuments six years ago are back. This time, the battle is to restore them.
Traditionalists are suing and lobbying local governments to resurrect memorials to Confederate generals, Founding Fathers and European explorers. Many of the statues disappeared from town squares and other public places during the pandemic-era protests against police violence and racism following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
Ohio’s capital, named for Christopher Columbus, took down a 22-foot-high, 3-ton statue of its namesake from City Hall that year. Officials declared the 1955 gift from sister city Genoa, Italy, had come to represent “patriarchy, oppression and divisiveness.”
“We will no longer live in the shadow of our ugly past,” Mayor Andrew Ginther, a Democrat, said at the time. Columbus’s detractors tie the Italian explorer to the brutal subjugation of native civilizations in the Americas. His supporters say Columbus should be lauded for his discoveries, not blamed for what followed.
The city’s Columbus statue for now lies on its back inside a fenced storage facility, monitored by security cameras and adorned from head to toe with a strand of yellow caution tape. In April, a coalition of Italian-American groups filed a federal lawsuit claiming the statue’s removal was illegal and demanding its return.
“The silent majority is becoming vocal,” said Jack Conte, 67 years old, the lawsuit’s organizer. “You reach a point where this stuff is shoved down your throat, and you can only take so much of it.”
. . . The Trump administration is helping lead the charge ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary next month. In March, the administration erected a Columbus statue near the White House, a replica of one that protesters sank in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in 2020.
. . . The Interior Department recently installed a statue of Caesar Rodney, a Delaware signer of the Declaration of Independence and a slave owner, in Washington’s Freedom Plaza. The monument had been removed from its spot in Wilmington, Del., in 2020, and put into storage.
In December, a stone highway marker honoring Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, suddenly appeared in Marion Square, planted alongside a major thoroughfare in a hub of picnics, farmers markets and celebrations in Charleston, S.C.
. . .In March, the Texas Rangers baseball team announced on social media the return to public view of a “One Riot, One Ranger” statue at the ballpark. The 12-foot bronze sculpture of a Texas Ranger had been removed from Dallas Love Field airport in 2020 after claims that the officer who served as the model for the statue—a tribute to the law enforcement agency—sided with opponents to desegregation of a public high school in 1956.
There are other examples of such real or attempted restorations, but the big question is asked below:
. . . Nicole Moore said certain statues shouldn’t return to public spaces. She is president of the National Council on Public History, which represents historians and museum administrators. “Humans are complicated. But what’s not complicated is racism. What’s not complicated is genocide,” she said. “When we know the history, we have to ask ourselves, do we want to celebrate this person?”
I’ve given my views on whether statues or markers should be taken down. In general I lean on leaving them up, with qualifying material added when necessary. And it depends on having answers to these questions: First, was the person’s life on balance, helpful or hurtful to humanity? Second, if “helpful,” is the person being honored for that good stuff? If both answers are on the helpful side, leave the statue/memorial up, but qualify it by adding any educational bad stuff to provide balance. It is not an easy question, but some issues, like the Teddy Roosevelt statue removed from the American Museum of Natural History, were decided wrongly. And memorials to David Hume should stay up, too.(see this post and the included article).
*Finally, the reliable AP “oddities” section reports on an albino buffalo that is drawing crowds in Dhaka, Bangladesh because it looks like—Donald Trump!
With his shock of golden hair and trim 700-kilogram (1,500-pound) build, Donald Trump has been drawing crowds from across Bangladesh since he arrived at the national zoo last week.
The rare albino buffalo became a sensation when a farmer noticed that his blond tuft of hair resembled the distinctive locks of the U.S. president. After a video of the pale horned mammal went viral on social media, large numbers of people started showing up at the farm outside Dhaka to see him for themselves.
The animal was originally meant to be slaughtered for the Muslim festival of sacrifice. But citing security concerns, the government ordered him transferred to the zoo in the capital, where large crowds are now braving sweltering heat to see him.
On Tuesday, visitors pressed against the fence of the buffalo’s enclosure, filming with their phones as some fathers hoisted small children on their shoulders for a better view.
ADA zoo worker pampered the animal, brushing his hair to one side and hosing him down with water to keep him cool as fans blew on him.
“There is a resemblance to Donald Trump in its eyes, hairstyle, and skin color,” said Mohammed Nasim, a student in Dhaka. “And just as Donald Trump has a distinctive personality and lifestyle, this buffalo, after going viral, is now living a similar kind of life, enjoying a lot of attention and special treatment.”
And of course you’ll want to see it. (It also probably resembles Trump because its mode of communication is bellowing):
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, editor Hili is getting lazy:
Andrzej: Back to work.
Hili: I’d rather lie in the sun.
In Polish:
Ja: Wracamy do pracy.
Hili: Wolę poleżeć na słońcu.
*******************
From Stacy:
From Cheryl’s Amazingly Positive, No Politics Allowed, Interesting People Group:
From Things With Faces (someone put googly eyes on the letterbox!):
From Masih: a young woman killed for celebrating the Ayatollah Khamenei’s death. She was shot in the chest:
Shocking! This young Iranian woman killed for celebrating khamenei’s death.
Do you remember the night the news spread that Ali Khamenei was dead?
Many of us Iranians watched, almost instinctively, took to the streets. Some cried. Some laughed. Some celebrated. Not because we… https://t.co/e0BlWx3xHx pic.twitter.com/RcERXdN0No
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) June 4, 2026
I wonder if they’ve ever identified Tank Man, a very brave guy:
It’s June 4th in Hong Kong. 🕯️ pic.twitter.com/YOQoIkaEFp
— Luke de Pulford (@lukedepulford) June 3, 2026
From Luana: high school GPAs go up while reading and math scores go down. I wonder why?
Education policy is one very clear difference between liberalism and progressivism.
Liberalism seeks to educate people more.
Progressivism seeks to educate people LESS, so that everyone is equal in ignorance. (This doesn’t work) https://t.co/geSlW7drMF
— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@Noahpinion) June 3, 2026
From the Number Ten Cat:
There Is a Light That Never Goes Out https://t.co/AokFjY91m1
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) June 4, 2026
One from my feed; a machine that put somebody out of a job!
I can watch this video all day 😍🐕 pic.twitter.com/VQFSDpGfFX
— The Adorable Pups (@TheAdorablePups) June 3, 2026
And one I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. Hilde was just nine years old.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-06-05T10:07:59.409Z
Two from Dr. Cobb. First, some sarcasm, but don’t drink raw milk!
If only someone could figure out how to make milk safe to drink! It'd be such a big deal the process would be named after them.
— Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) 2026-06-04T03:12:08.265Z
And a Flota, a free-swimming polychaete worm:
This is the 1st time I've seen a Flota swimming with the little stick legs fanned out. Usually they're moving fast and have them pulled in like little spikes @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 929 #Doldrums #MarineLife
Larry the cat is quoting the Smiths!
The Times of Israel daily videocast interview today with Amanda Dan brings us a reserve lt col who lives in the North of Israel about 10km from the border with Lebanon. She gives a good interview (29 min) on life in the North, Hezballah and how they are fully integrated into Lebanon and how that impacts an Israel/Lebanon agreement. She also addresses the history of UNIFIL there. I have found Lebanon interesting in that they are 53% Islam (evenly divided Sunni/Shia), and significantly over 40% Christian, yet still get jerked around by jihadist faction. Url for ToI is
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ And scroll to youtube Daily Briefing window of Amanda.
Thanks Jim, I’ll listen to that as I’m interested in what is going on in – or rather falling from the sky in Northern Israel. Reason I’m so interested is the media are NOT interested – their fascination is limited to the return fire Israel sends north.
Maybe we’re old enough to remember “Fatahland” (Southern Lebanon statelet the PLO tried to establish once.) That was a secular sunni, rather than Shia project like today.
Jew killing is a cross sectarian hobby in Sth Lebanon.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
I think that it was in Benny Morris’s book, “1948”, that I read that Lebanon was a bit reluctant to join the Pan Arab piling on against Israel in May of 1948, because they got along reasonably well with the Jews, and in any case were much more afraid of the Palestinian Arab Jihadist faction than they were of the Jews.
I’ll watch, too. Her Daily Briefings are almost always very good.
Kisin : “They will say, as they always say, that the real problem is that we haven’t gone far enough.”
This makes a direct connection to the one “debate” between Konstantin Kisin and James Lindsay in Oxford Union.
Off the top of my head, the motion was something like has Woke gone too far.
And:
Not all Pasteurization is equal. They significantly modify the milk protein. This can be proven by making ricotta or mozzarella. I not yet convinced mozzarella is made with raw milk – but 100% convinced it has to be at least a low-temperature Pasteurization.
The Free Press article by Kisin is behind a paywall. But Kisin has a freely accessible substack article on the same topic:
https://www.konstantinkisin.com/p/henry-nowak-how-anti-racism-gave
Love the puppies/ tennis ball machine video. The video seems very familiar though thank goodness I only live with one puppy. Who takes up a VAST amount of my headspace, time, money, etc. Much of this is spent throwing little tennis balls around the apartment and pulling his favorite toxics and choking hazards out of his mouth.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
I saw a great meme, which I’ve now seen many times, saying that owning a dog is a lot of following each other around, watching each other go to the bathroom, and wondering what the other is eating.
A neighbor of mine got one of those tennis ball machines for her hyper little fluffy who has an obsession with tennis balls, thinking she’d get a break from the endless chuck-it throws. Instead, her pup brings HER the ball back each time and wants HER to put it in the machine. :-J
Awwww….
I am toppled.
hahah. I bet!
My throwing arm is exhausted, but little “David” never tires of the throw, catch, return treadmill of puppy happiness.
D.A.
NYC
I like to make rope balls for our dogs., and leave a tail so that the ball can be swung in a circle a few times and then released with a trajectory that achieves a greater distance than just throwing the ball. If you incorporate a smooth pebble, or a marble into the centre of the ball as you weave it, the added mass it gives to the ball translates to a greater distance when you throw it.
If you really want to ‘throw’ a ball a great distance, launch a (tail-less) rope ball with a sling! I was astounded at the distance achieved when I first gave that try. I gave that method up, though, after a few mis-releases sent the heavy ball onto a nearby road. But our border collies loved running that extra distance.
I am 100% a fan of googly eyes.
I assume any statues of confederate generals will be taken down because they were “beardos”, not because they fought against the US.
Retired army BGen and emeritus West Point history professor Ty Seidule wrote “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause”. As I recall from reading it several years ago, the author was born and raised a few blocks from Lee’s boyhood home in Alexandria, VA, graduated from Washington and Lee University and taught at West Point where Lee had been Superintendent before resigning his U.S. Army commission and joining the Confederate Army with Virginia’s secession. Thus Lee and other U.S. Army officers who similarly resigned commissions should be recognized as traitors who joined enemy forces rather than heroes to be honored with statues and portraits at the U.S. Military Academy. This behavior seems to me to be independent of the issue of the purpose of the U.S. Civil War.
Thank you Jim. That’s a key point — “Thus Lee and other U.S. Army officers who similarly resigned commissions should be recognized as traitors…”
They resigned from the commissions of the U.S. Army .. and then joined another army. This seems a key point of it all — them being traitors to the United States.
OTOH, if he had supported the remaining federation of states after his own state seceded then he would have been a traitor to it.
Barbara – re: “OTOH, if he had supported the remaining federation of states after his own state seceded then he would have been a traitor to it.” – correct, Lee would have been a traitor to Virginia.
But instead, Lee and other U.S. Army officers, chose to be a traitor to the United States, the Union, or “the federation of states” as some might describe it.
This is key point of what actually occurred with their decisions.
So you agree that a Lee statue in Virginia would be appropriate?
I listened to a recent and strange post on NPR about raw milk. Regulations differ state by state, and the farmer interviewed in this particular state explained that it can be sold ONLY for cats and dogs (wink wink). The interviewer tried to get him to divulge the REAL purpose, but the farmer knew quite well that this detail cannot be divulged.
All statues taken down should be put back up, for the simple reason that they were removed as an act of imperious pecksniffery driven by mobs of activists to rub the noses of the locals in their own deplorableness. The best way to discourage repeats of that behaviour is to nullify its action. I wouldn’t subscribe to a fund to erect a new statue of Louis Riel or Colton Boushie but if someone already had, that’s just what the public square is all about. Much time can be wasted arguing about whether some historical figure did net good. This is especially so for martyrs who didn’t do any good because they failed and were killed. One unsavoury act of sex seems to be enough for detractors of both Jefferson and Trump. People can ask all the questions they like in the here and now.
(I do think Egerton Ryerson, father of public education in Ontario, deserves a new statue though. The head of his previous one was cut off with an angle grinder in a riot during George Floyd mania and now sits mounted on a pike on an Indian Reserve somewhere. Canada prides itself that it will never consider doing any such thing, of course.)
If Nicole Moore thinks that any enstatuified figure in American history was guilty of genocide or any modern understanding of racism, she is simply not fit to opine on the matter and should be ignored.
Yes, leave the statues up (for the most part), and add explanatory material to denote whatever injustices they embody. (This explanatory material can be adjusted to comport with current fashion.) Erasing a statue erases the history in its entirety, removing the alleged injustice from view. Is erasure really what the proponents of removing the statue want? I thought they wanted to call out the injustice. Removing the statues would seem to be at cross purposes to what the activists intend, no?
War in Iran. Excellent analysis above. It’s hard to say who will blink first, and it’s also hard to decide which side benefits most from the delays. I am hoping that either the Iranian regime suffers financial collapse from within or that Trump decides that he’s tired of being pushed around and restarts widespread attacks. With Iran supposedly reanimating its bombed out launch sites and rebuilding its stockpiles, there are plenty of targets available even without attacking other Iranian infrastructure (which can also be targeted if needed).
I know that the mid-term elections loom—pressuring uncomfortable Republican candidates to have to state their positions regarding the war—but Trump himself is in office for two-and-a-half more years. He has time. Iran’s delay tactics may lead to their own demise. They’re pulling out their beards in Tehran.
Re. statues, what’s Monument Ave in Richmond like these days? I’ll always remember a friend giving directions to his place down there: “… and then turn R at the statue of AP Hill.”
A huge benefit of adding a plaque rather then removing a currently deplorable statue is that when moral fashions change (as of course they will) it’s very much easier to replace the current plaque than to replace or remove the current statue again, and again.
But of course the whole point of removing/replacing/plaque-ing/re-plaque-ing has nothing to do with history other than those particular aspects suitable for rubbing the noses of one’s opponents into and demonstrating one’s own virtue of being currently on the winning side of history.
Regarding statues:
I would say the primary reason for such memorials is to remember, not necessarily to celebrate. Germany does not have memorials to the fallen of the world wars to celebrate them, but to remember and hopefully not repeat those mistakes. I would see confederate generals in a similar manner.
Regarding Iran:
If the US leaves right now and Iran tales control of Hormus, the US can kiss their bases in the middle east goodbye. The moment Iran demonstrates control the neighbors need to appease and one of tje first items of appeasement will be US expulsion. Why should they keep the US if the US does protect them?
Yes, the situation in Iran is disturbing. Any hopes of getting rid of the Ayatollahs is pretty much gone.
And Iran will continue supporting Hezbollah against Israel.
“I wonder if they’ve ever identified Tank Man, a very brave guy”
There is a lot of speculation. Officially, China says they don’t know who he was, which is what they’d say if they caught and executed him, no? A mystery, to be sure. Maybe some day we’ll know. If he was still at large, would he ever admit to it? Probably not a good idea…death bed confession?
My Occam’s razor answer is he was caught and executed.
Plausibly after having his organs harvested without anaesthesia.
Canada’s current Prime Minister instructed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to enter a Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese security apparatus to share intelligence about Chinese nationals and ethnic Chinese in Canada whom the Chinese Communist Party considers troublemakers and enemies of the state. The contents of this MOU are secret. It no doubt includes efforts to crack down on ordinary corruption and money-laundering, which is rife at all levels in the CCP, but it also gives muscle to the CCP’s view that all dissent against the Party anywhere in the world by any ethnic Chinese regardless of citizenship will be suppressed. No matter where you are, you aren’t safe.
This cooperation between our Mounties and the Chinese commies is part of Canada’s pivot to China, or strengthened economic and diplomatic ties in officialese. Members of Canada’s Liberal Party’s business community are in China up to their eyeballs. National Post columnist and blogger Terry Glavin has covered this extensively.
So yeah, they probably got him ages ago.
Thanks for that interesting information, Leslie. I did not know about Canada’s complicity in China’s efforts to enforce their authoritarian policies abroad. To quote the kids: not cool.