Saturday: Hili dialogue

My, how the week has flown!  We had bad storms on Thursday—part of the tornado/storm system that hit the Midwest. Luckily we didn’t lose power, though I had to drive the wrong way down a one-way street on my way to work: a large tree had fallen, locking off the legal route.

Welcome to CaturSaturday, June 13, shabbos for Jewish cats, and also National Golf Cart Day.  Here’s an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” with the irascible Larry David, showing the sequelae of his using the famous “drop and tug” strategy in golf.  As usual, David is in a golf cart when on the links.

 

It’s also International Drink Chenin Blanc Day (not bad advice), National Cupcake Lover’s Day (who is the person singled out here?), National Rosé Day (for wine), and World Gin Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 13 Wikipedia page.

There’s a Google Doodle today about the up-and-coming players on the U.S. World Cup team. Click the screenshot below to see what’s up:

Da Nooz:

*At It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal presents Part II of why proposed U.S. ceasefire agreements with Iran are “bad deals.”

This week saw multiple cases of the trope. On Sunday, we were supposedly so close to a deal that Trump demanded Israel take a direct Iranian attack on the cheek. Then, at the last moment, a U.S. helicopter was downed by Iranian fire, and the president declared they’d been “playing us for suckers.” Deal’s off.

What followed was a night of strikes, plans for another, even a declaration that “in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island.” Then, at the last moment—crash. “Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved,” according to the White House, and Trump called off the strikes.

Charlie Brown isn’t the only one with a headache, and no one—except the Iranians—is laughing.

But much like the devil, the fate of this deal is in the details—and so far, the details look familiar. This MOU [Memorandum of Understanding]  appears nearly identical to the disastrous deal floated in late May, the one Trump abandoned after Republicans had an allergic reaction to it, while Iran reportedly concluded e was simply too desperate for a deal and they could wait him out.

Rather than a full agreement, what’s on the table is an MOU extending the ceasefire for 60 days while nuclear negotiations continue—and, despite the steep costs Israel recently paid to sever the two fronts, this one appears to fold Lebanon back in as well. On the nuclear file, the text lays out a framework for addressing Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, though any actual action would wait on a second, more detailed accord.

Worse is the financial relief: according to the report, after reopening the strait, Iran would be given temporary sanctions waivers allowing it to sell oil for 60 days, generating precious revenue for Tehran. That relief would expand if Iran complies with the initial agreement and shows “good faith” in subsequent negotiations—though, as one diplomat put it, “there is no set date for sanctions relief, and it will be tied to the implementation of the deal.”

Less clear is what happens to the billions in Iranian funds frozen overseas. Iran has insisted it must receive some money immediately upon signing any initial deal, while the U.S. has said release would come in tranches based on compliance. Separately, the U.S., Iran and Qatar have reportedly discussed a mechanism letting Iran access some of its frozen funds in Qatar for humanitarian purchases. I’m not sure if Qatar is simply trying to make its terrorism support tax-deductible, but these payments are humanitarian in name only—just ask Hamas. Money is fungible, and the regime still controls imports, so it can either redirect funds from what little it gives its own population now that it is being covered by Qatar, or simply sell the humanitarian goods to its own population and pocket the revenue.

This deal can be judged by a simple test: does it merely pause the regime—leaving Iran roughly where it’s been since the blockade began—or does it rewind the clock, leaving Tehran better off than before? If sanctions are eased and frozen assets unlocked, it’s definitely the latter.

As one very senior Israeli official put it to me this morning, the deal is “shit.”

. . . The good news is that nothing’s locked in—the gaps between the parties remain huge—and given how fond Trump has grown of yanking the football away at the last second, maybe this time it’s the Ayatollah who ends up flat on his back.

Every day things go back and forth here, but if Trump is going to make a deal, it has to be one that allows him to claim that the U.S. “won”.  And now the negotiations are extended for another two months, so Trump can’t really claim he “won” until the end of August at the earliest—and that’s getting close to the midterms.

*This NYT op-ed is clickbait for me, though when you click on the screenshot, you’ll see that the title has changed—whoops, it changed back again. (Thearticle is archived here). But of course the “winning issue” turns out to be screwy: it’s DATA CENTERS, Jake!

An excerpt (article is archived here):

Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them.

A Gallup poll from May found that 71 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their area. In rural communities in Utah and North Carolina, regular people are organizing to stop data center construction, speaking out at public hearings and pressuring politicians for bans. They are passionate enough to attend political education sessions about water rights, land use and thermodynamics. Cities like Tulsa, Okla.; Birmingham, Ala.; and New Orleans have recently passed temporary moratoriums on data center construction. Last week, lawmakers in New York passed a statewide pause on large-scale data centers; other states, including Maryland and Michigan, could be next.

According to polling by Heatmap News, more than half of all Americans support a national ban on data centers. The public seems to agree that data centers are giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture. In our virulently partisan country, this constitutes a rare show of consensus.

What Ms. Cottom doesn’t realize is that most Americans couldn’t even tell you what a data center is, that data centers are vitally important in today’s computer-infused world, and their impact could be minimized by putting them in remote areas. Yes, they have problems, but as far as I can see, we’re better off with them than without them. However, given the widespread ignorance about these matters, Cottom tells us Dems, “Hop on the issue pronto!”:

Democrats need organized voters. The political mobilization that the civil rights movement built and that has propelled Democrats to victories across the country is aging. The G.O.P. is racing to disorganize and dilute Black electoral power across the South and the Voting Rights Act is all but dead. Your guess about the Democratic Party’s plan to fill the gaps is as good as mine. The party seems to want some kind of economic populist message without embracing the demographic reality that a member of the working class is just as likely to be Black or a woman as a white dude in a Carhartt. Whether the data center resistance is a blip or a beginning of a new political imagination, it refutes the idea that you cannot have it all: populist energy, an economic message and a multiracial coalition that crosses class divides, in the South and beyond. Why aren’t Democrats jumping at the chance to get into the fight?

You know why. It’s not an important issue to most Americans, and data centers are not going to be pivotal in electing Democrats.

. . . . To win the future, Democrats have to survive the midterms. We have lived in Trump’s America for a decade now. Almost none of us are better off for it. The voters showing up to fight data centers demonstrate that a lot of us want something different. If the Democrats want to convince us that they are the party to get us there, they need a plan to rebuild institutions, rebalance the branches of power and restore faith in the system. They also need a national message equal to the righteous rage driving millions of Americans to look up from their enemy and finally see, instead, a neighbor and future worth fighting for. In the end, it’s simple.

We can win. That’s it. That’s the message.

There’s another message: Cotton has wasted 1,728 words conveying a message that, to me, is trivial and useless for winning elections. You be the judge.

*Yesrterday’s NYT’s morning newsletter announced that SpaceX was going public, and the sale of shares may make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire: that is one thousand billion dollars. Here are the details:

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket-building, satellite-launching and artificial intelligence company, is set to go public today at $135 a share. The company plans to sell 555 million of them. That means SpaceX would raise around $75 billion, putting its valuation at $1.77 trillion, the largest I.P.O. in history.

It could make Musk the world’s first trillionaire. Or it could tank. Some analysts have argued that SpaceX is significantly overvalued. The market could decide that Musk’s an overpromiser and pass on the stock’s high price. (Remember his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion in 2022? The company, now known as X, saw its ad revenue decline by 65 percent last year. Musk folded it into his A.I. company, xAI. Which is now part of SpaceX.)

“It really does feel very much a ‘don’t look at the man behind the curtain’ situation,” one career investor told The Times.

Plenty of people will get rich anyway. One launch engineer who worked at the company for 12 years told The Times he’d earned more than 100,000 shares during his tenure. At $135 a pop, his SpaceX stock would be worth at least $13.5 million at some point today. Even if the price drops by half, he’d still have millions on paper. “The magnitude of this has been ridiculous,” he said.

Or look to Antonio Gracias, one of Musk’s staunchest friends and business allies. He and his private equity firm, Valor Equity Partners, have a $65 billion stake in SpaceX at its target I.P.O. valuation. If the stock soars, Gracias will instantly become one of the world’s richest human beings.

The NYT tells us what we should know before investing in SpaceX, though by now it’s a bit too late. Here’s how you can buy it—even if you don’t intend to.

I ain’t buying any. One thing I’ve learned in investing (and I’ve been doing it for years, limiting myself largely to Vanguard mutual funds), is not to try to time the market, and not to buy individual stocks.  Following those rules has given me a comfortable retirement, and I ain’t about to change them now.

*Well, writing this on Friday afternoon, I see that Musk has indeed become the world’s first trillionaire, as SpaceX stock went sky-high. From the WSJ:

The stock opened trading at $150, 11% above the IPO price of $135. The initial climb gave it a market cap above $2.2 trillion, making it the sixth most valuable U.S.-listed company.

Elon Musk officially became the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX—trading under the ticker SPCX— went public. His stake in the rocket maker was valued at around $690 billion at the IPO price, while his Tesla stake makes up around $279 billion of his net worth.

Lead banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will take home the biggest share of the IPO fees, getting a combined 40% or around $100 million apiece.

Some users reported issues with Robinhood’s platform in the half hour or so after shares of SpaceX started trading, with reports dropping off after noon.

Some skeptics think SpaceX’s sky-high valuation is much too high.

And here’s how the stock jumped (from the WSJ):

Non, je ne regrette riens.

*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week, “We economists have done the maths.”

→ Insane amounts of money are about to be made: With the SpaceX IPO, it’s estimated that more than 4,000 people are about to become millionaires, with 400 projected to have fortunes over $100 million. And then there’s the upcoming Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs. Between space and LLMs, we’re looking at a new generation of wealth. And if I can climb back on my California soapbox for a moment, it’s always amazing to me that the East Coast produces none of this. The East Coast is the Europe of America. You go to New York when you decide it’s time to hire a dozen ADHD-identified individuals in Brooklyn who will sue you, not like, build stuff. For that, it’s all still the Bay Area or, thanks to SpaceX, Texas! And in the boom times, one group that’s thriving is (of course) prostitutes. Forbes has an amazing story about the nerdy escort boom. These ladies are charging upward of $2,000 an hour, even as much as $6,000 an hour—and you know they’re spending most of that hour talking about Moravec’s Paradox. One reports charging $23,000 a day. The absolute weirdest people in America have created artificial consciousness (probably Satanic) and despite all their efforts, they still exist in these pesky bodies that demand stupid things like [redacted], which the computer can’t quite do yet. Good for the prosties.

In other signs of new financial realities, women are hiring witches to help protect their weddings, or so Bloomberg tells us this week. Is it just me, or is heterosexuality getting weirder than being gay? Prostitutes and witches? Maybe you guys should take Pride this year, I think you need it.

→ Finally, data on how many girls were given testosterone: At the height of the movement to medically transition gender-dysphoric kids, it was always a little unclear how many kids were affected. Like, how riled up should we all get, really? Now we have data and a great write-up thanks to the brave journalist Benjamin Ryan. In Oregon, from 2016 to 2023, about 1 in 250 girls were taking testosterone by age 17. And that number was likely increasing every year in that time frame, so by 2023 it was probably a lot more than 1 in 250. That is objectively wild. That is a huge number of girls being put on testosterone, which alters them permanently, for life. Their voices, their bone structure. In retrospect, the reactions to this over the past few years were probably too muted! Here’s the chart Benjamin Ryan put together, based on a recent study of insurance data for 2016–2023:

Rarely do I look back on a moral panic and think, wow, we did exactly the right thing in response to it. Rarely do you say, it’s a good thing we panicked there or things could’ve gotten really bad! But in this case, it’s the truth. Doctors were drugging every gender-nonconforming girl they could get their paws on. Any girl going through puberty and feeling a little weird was offered. . . testosterone! An army of desexed girls was created. It’s really so dark. There is no way in hell I would have survived this maw. If I’d been born just a few years later, I would have been puberty-blocked and T’ed so fast, and then I’d never have children and have to shave my face forever. Equally terrible.

→ Now some good news: A number of pro-Hamas conspirators accused of haunting University of Michigan leaders have been indicted by a federal grand jury. Federal prosecutors say the conspirators, who were “associated with the University of Michigan,” did things like throwing “glass jars filled with butyric acid and dye into the homes” of their targets. Here’s a nice little excerpt from our activists’ messages (you bet one was a medical student!):

These are cries for liberation, don’t you see! Sweet poetry for stolen lands. If you think there’s not medical torture happening right now by this guy’s fellow ideologues, you’re fooling yourself. Stay healthy out there! Don’t end up in an emergency room! If Bari ever does, I’ll just say goodbye at the door because we all know she ain’t comin’ out.

Meanwhile, the Students for Justice in Palestine group at the University of Colorado Boulder issued a statement honoring a local terrorist for his murder of a local elderly Jewish woman. Remember the guy who firebombed that group who had gathered in honor of the Hamas hostages? That guy, who killed 82-year-old Karen Diamond and burned a bunch of other folks? “One year ago today, on June 1st, 2025, Mohamed Sabry Soliman took direct action against one manifestation of the Zionist death cult that we have allowed to fester in our city,” the student group posted, adding that the killer “chose the only sane response available to a rational human being.” Totally open blood lust. And to think, Colorado is so beautiful! They could be hiking and enjoying themselves, having a nice beer brewed right in town paired with some bison jerky and a burrito. Instead, they’re celebrating the death of an old Jewish woman. Odd.

They’re also celebrating the injuries sustained by more than a dozen other people in Soliman’s firebombing; see the NYT article here. And do look at the archived Students for Justice in Palestine site’s response to see how horrific that organization is.  Here’s a screenshot of part of it. Oy!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is hiding from Hili:

Szaron: I know you’re coming this way.
Hili: How do you know?
Sharon: The stones told me.

In Polish:

Szaron: Wiem, że tu idziesz.
Hili: Skąd wiesz?
Szaron: Kamienie mi powiedziały.

*******************

From Stacy:

From Addicted to Ducks, showing how they’re superior to chickens:

From Things With Faces: a horrifying and ghoulish yogurt:

I’ll give only two tweets today as yesterday I engaged in three duckling rescues yesterday (total of eight ducklings saved) and was busy much of the day. Photos follow, including one of a bald eagle taken to rehab (no, I did not find that one!).

Here is a video tweet from Masih showing a Taliban truck running over four women who dared to go to a seminar on education. For some reason they’ve made it un-embeddable, but if you click on the screenshot you’ll see it. (WARNING: women getting hit by a truck):

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he got to Auschwitz. He was one year old, and would be 85 today had he lived. https://t.co/4a2MKehu2r

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) June 13, 2026