Sunday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Sunday, June 21: the FIRST DAY OF SUMMER and the longest day of the year. Summer officially began at 3:24 a.m. Chicago time and, sadly, rain is predicted for our area. It’s also Father’s Day, so my ducks will be fêting me, I hope.  The unnamed pair of ducks is still at Botany Pond and the female is gone the first half of the day, perhaps because she’s laying eggs. I’m still hoping for a batch of ducklings, and now that only the aggressors (the pair we have) remain in the Pond, perhaps a new brood could survive. Here is Vashti, who has disappeared. Note the dent in her head, probably from being pecked:

There’s a Google Doodle (a gif) for Father’s Day. Click the screenshot below to see where it goes:

It’s also International Day of Yoga, National Peaches and Cream Day, National Smoothie Day, National Turkey Lovers’ Day, National Wagyu Day,  World Lambrusco Day, World Humanist Day, and World Giraffe Day. Here’s a photo I took of giraffes crossing the road in Kruger National Park in August, 2024:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 1 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

Footy news: Japan defeated Tunisia 4-0 in yesterday’s World Cup match: the 1000th match in the event’s history.

Japan moved one step closer to reaching the knockout stages of the World Cup for the fourth consecutive time after pummeling Tunisia 4-0 in Group F, securing a milestone victory in the tournament’s 1,000th men’s match.

Japan’s four goals were the most the Samurai Blue have ever scored in a World Cup game, as it comfortably dismantled a Tunisia side that became the first to ever fire its coach after the opening match.

Ayase Ueda scored twice, along with Daichi Kamada and Junya Itō to put Japan level with the Netherlands on four points. The Dutch are currently on top of the group due to having scored one more goal than Japan across its two matches.

Even after leading 2-0 just over half an hour into the match, Japan continued to apply pressure to a disjointed Tunisian defense.

Here are 12 minutes of highlights (goals at 1:43 and 4:14):

Even after leading 2-0 just over half an hour into the match, Japan continued to apply pressure to a disjointed Tunisian defense.

*Well, the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah is still going on, and because of that Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Iranian security officials said they had closed the Strait of Hormuz, citing a U.S. failure to stop the fighting in Lebanon as required under the agreement signed earlier this week by President Trump.

The announcement by Iran’s joint military command came as clashes between Israel and Hezbollah flared again in Lebanon on Saturday, just hours after the two sides agreed to a renewed ceasefire. It undid for now the main achievement of the deal, which was to set the stage for reopening a waterway vital to world energy markets.

The U.S. Central Command, which oversees forces in the Middle East, said Saturday that traffic continued to flow and that the military was monitoring to make sure that remained the case.

Even before Iran’s announcement, the recovery of traffic through the strait had been halting. Iran had imposed new procedures, including a demand that ships register to cross two days in advance, and wary shipowners were monitoring the still-uncertain environment in the waterway.

The flare-up in fighting comes as the U.S. and Iran work to get their next round of peace talks back on track. Iran said Saturday its delegation would attend talks in Switzerland after postponing plans to travel Friday, a hiccup that followed an earlier round of heavy Israeli strikes carried out in retaliation for a Hezbollah drone attack that killed four Israeli soldiers.

Iran said its delegation would include chief negotiator and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and oil officials. The U.S. was expected to send Vice President JD Vance, who said in an interview on Fox News that envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were already there engaging in technical discussions.

The memorandum of understanding that aims to reopen the strait and end the fighting, signed Wednesday by Trump, says at the outset that the war on the Lebanese front must end as well. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said Saturday the country’s negotiators would press the U.S. to meet those obligations.

Trump also said this, though I was under the impression that Iran would start charging tolls to transit the Strait after the so-called “negotiation period” of 60 days:

Trump said on Saturday no tolls could be imposed in the strait except by the U.S. “There will be NO TOLLS in the Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period, and there will be NO TOLLS after the 60 day period has expired, unless they are imposed by and for the United States of America,” he wrote on social media.

It was a mistake to tie the peace deal to the cessation of hostilities in Lebanon. That, as I’ve said, is a tacit admission by Iran that it wants Hezbollah’s terrorism to continue unimpeded. But of course Iran wants to hold onto the Strait as tightly as it can, so we can’t know the real reason for what’s going on. All we can guess is that the war will continue longer than we thought, and the two-month period of negotiations will probably drag on much longer.

*Washington Post op-ed columnist David Willick tells us “Three lessons from the failed war in Iran.”

That the costs of an all-out, preemptive war with Iran were likely to outweigh the benefits was foreseeable from the start. Yet the campaign’s unhappy conclusion — most of the war’s strongest supporters are appalled by the terms of the deal struck to end it — is an opportunity to review some of the reasons for the debacle. They need to be digested to put American strategy on a better footing.

The first is that regime change is a perilous war aim. It’s astonishing that this lesson had to be learned again, but here we are. After the war to topple Iraq’s government came to pieces for the George W. Bush administration in the 2000s — and after Donald Trump ran against that fiasco — it seemed unlikely the U.S. would pin its strategic hopes again on political transformation in the Middle East at the barrel of a gun.

Yet that’s exactly what Trump did, announcing at the war’s outset that “all I want is freedom for the people,” echoing Bush’s Operation Iraqi Freedom. There were more realistic objectives too, of course, but the march to war was precipitated by Iran’s brutal repression of widespread anti-regime protests in January. The opening salvos in the U.S.-Israeli assault killed Iran’s political leadership. The Israelis reportedly told Trump that regime change was a real possibility.

Trump did not emphasize freedom for the Iranian people in his formal address. He emphasized nukes and told the people that the “regime was theirs for the taking,” or something like that.  Regime change was not, and never has been, one of Trump’s main war aims.

The third lesson from the war’s disappointing conclusion is that it was not waged constitutionally. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war precisely because the president can’t assume the country’s political resolve is unlimited. As Ilya Somin wrote in Reason: “The constitutional requirement of congressional authorization helps ensure we don’t start a major conflict without having a commitment strong enough to prevail.”

The lack of debate among the American people’s elected representatives is one reason the obvious flaws in the plan — Who, exactly, is going to run Iran if its leaders are killed?

Well, there’s a point here, but remember that a simple majority in both Houses of Congress is all that’s required to declare a war. (That would likely have happened after acrimonious debate.) Also, wars not approved by Congress beyond Vietnam include the Korean War and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Willick is of course speaking in hindsight, and he could have made the list much longer. I could add three or four items. myself  But I’m getting tired of these recriminations, and of course Willick opposed the war from the start and now is making up reasons why it failed. In my view, it’s because Trump was mercurial and not willing to strike at really important military targets like Kharg Island. But what do I know? Maybe Bret Stephens knows more, and he said this:

I write this as someone who supported the war from the outset and hoped to see Trump carry it through to a decisive result: if not regime change, then at least a deal in which Iran would be forced to relinquish all of its enrichment capabilities and access to the Strait was unfettered. Those goals were well within the president’s reach, particularly if he had continued to attack Iran’s military-industrial infrastructure until it agreed to terms, rather than conducting most of the negotiations after the fighting had mostly stopped.

But Trump got spooked after the regime didn’t instantly crumble and energy prices shot up. He then effectively abandoned the war he had started after less than six weeks of sustained combat — combat in which the United States lost fewer service members than in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. He compounded the error with an almost comical succession of military threats and last-minute climb-downs, each of them signaling indecision and weakness to Iranian adversaries practiced in the study of weakness.

*The Lancet, perhaps the wokest journal in science and certainly the wokest in medicine (see my posts here, and remember the cover below?) has now come out with an editorial that one could interpret as favoring free migration between countries without restrictions, “Migration: A reality, not an emergency” (pdf here).

This gap [“between what the evidence shows and what governments do”] reflects how profoundly the world has changed since 2018. A pandemic, wars, and the retreat of development aid have transformed the migration landscape—and the political response has hardened. The EU’s new Migration and Asylum Pact, which took effect on June 12, 2026, is Europe’s most substantial asylum overhaul in more than a decade. Human Rights Watch warns that it will weaken the right to asylum, curtail safeguards, and expand detention. As 2026 marks the 75th anniversary of the Refugee Convention, the contradiction is stark: even as governments affirm migrants’ rights in their declarations, their policies do the opposite, narrowing protections in practice. The health community now operates in a far more contested environment.

From calls to “stop the boats” to even harsher asylum policies, migration is framed in the language of control, deterrence, and exclusion. Yet migrants are workers and taxpayers, carers and neighbours. In many countries, the very people portrayed as burdens are those staffing hospitals and caring for ageing populations—often the worst paid, in the highest-risk jobs, and with the least access to the care they provide for others. In England, around one in five National Health Service staff report a non-British nationality, rising to more than a third among doctors. As workforces age, societies will depend even more on the people they are currently trying to exclude. These are not arguments to be won but facts already woven into how societies function. The fact that they must still be defended shows how much fear sets the terms above evidence.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed that, with political will, migrant-inclusive policy is not only possible but effective. Governments expanded access to health care, vaccination, and legal protection. For example, Colombia regularised undocumented Venezuelan migrants, enabling access to COVID-19 vaccinations and care, while several European countries fast-tracked recognition of foreign health-care qualifications to shore up overstretched systems. At the height of the crisis, governments briefly grasped that protecting migrants was essential to protecting everyone. The question is not whether migrant-inclusive policies can work, but whether governments have the will to pursue them.

As more people are on the move, they cannot be left out of health-system planning. The Review’s renewed call is clear: embed health in every migration and displacement policy, strengthen data systems and support research, and confront the political determinants of who is protected and who is not. The health community must keep making the case for equity, inclusion, and the right to health—but in a debate ruled by fear, how it is made matters as much as the case itself. That will take courage and leadership. Good policy cannot turn back the clock; it can only meet the world as it is, and as it will be—one in which the health of migrants and the health of all are indivisible.

They couch this in the language of health-care equity, but no country must admit immigrants on the grounds that the health care in their natal lands is not as good as in the target country.  And of course the editorial totally  ignores the reasons why immigration restrictions are being put in place in Europe: protection of culture and Western values.  Richard Horton has been editor of the Lancet for 31 years, he instantiates performative wokeness (see here). It’s time for an editor who doesn’t impose his “progressive” ideology on medicine.

The Lancet’s infamous cover from 2023:

*There are multiple problems with Washington D.C.’s Reflecting Pool (reflecting the Washington Memorial) since Trump decided to give it a makeover. Not only is it full of algae now, but the chemicals they put in the pool to control the algae are peeling off the new blue paint job. It reminds me of Australia introducing cane toads to control native beetles damaging the sugarcane. And you know what happened with those toads.

First, the new paint job appeared uneven. Then, an algae bloom turned the water an acid green. Now, large chunks of coating are peeling off the basin, creating islands of “American flag blue” alongside patches of pea green in a dark, murky soup.

The Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial seems to be rejecting its makeover.

President Trump’s project to reseal and paint the concrete basin of the century-old pool that stretches between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington was finished nearly two weeks ago, in time for the country’s 250th birthday, as he demanded. But it has been nothing but a headache for the administration since.

The Interior Department said on social media this week that its workers had “killed the algae” that had been hastened on by the heat and humidity. The water, it boasted, was now “crystal clear.” The posts were accompanied by images of the Washington Monument reflected in deep blue waters, an apparent rebuttal to criticism from experts who say the pool’s waters will not appear a brilliant blue until the government tackles the underlying problems that have stumped previous presidential administrations.But on Friday afternoon, the murky water was stained by loose clumps of algae even where National Park Service staff members had scrubbed away the bright green blooms along the bottom of the basin. The new coating was also missing at least two large sections — one gap was about the size of a park bench, with a sheet several inches long flapping in the waves. Underneath appeared to be the original concrete basin.

Alex Hobe, 52, was standing at the pool’s edge, waving a small chip of paint. He had been making food deliveries in the area when he decided to see the pool renovations. When he spotted the chip floating in the water, he fished it out. It was semitransparent and rough to the touch.

Mr. Hobe called the pool renovation “a complete failure,” but expressed sympathy for 10 workers who were standing knee-deep in the green water and scrubbing away under the hot sun. “They’ve been out here for days,” he said.

On Friday night, Mr. Trump blamed at least some of the problems on “vandalism” by people who he said were out “to destroy and demean our beautiful work.”

UPDATE: Now Trump is crying “vandalism” even louder, and people have been arrested:

President Trump said on Saturday that “multiple individuals” had been arrested for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and that problems with a more than $14 million renovation project had become so severe that the pool would likely have to be at least partly drained for “necessary repairs.”

The president’s announcement late Saturday, made on social media, was his starkest acknowledgment of the pool’s rapid deterioration in recent days. The water this week became covered by clouds of blooming algae, which were obscuring a floor that had just been painted a shade that Mr. Trump has called “American flag blue.” The paint then began to peel off, making it a tourist destination for unusual reasons.

Among those accused of vandalism was David Carter Hearn, 67, a cyclist and three-time Olympian as a canoeist who says he stopped at the site on Friday just to have a look, then reached down to touch a strip of peeling blue paint mixed with the algae.

The U.S. Park Police arrested Mr. Hearn shortly after, accusing him of destroying government property, a crime that can carry up to a 10-year prison sentence. Mr. Hearn denies the charge.

The water is not crystal clear and even if there has been vandalism, that can’t account for the algae bloom.  They just screwed up the renovation and I suspect that pouring gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the pool (rendering it dangerous to birds like ducks). They need to start over.  Need I mention that the contractor in charge of renovating the pool was “tied to a longtime supporter of President Trump,” and that the contract was given without competitive bidding to a firm that had received only one previous federal contract?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is referring to the Hili dialogue, but he also sent me a photo of the cover of his new autobiographical book:

Hili: Sit on the sofa with a book.
Andrzej: Okay, just let me send a letter to Jerry.

In Polish:

Hili: Usiądź z książką na sofie.
Ja: Dobrze, tylko pozwól mi wysłać list do Jerrego.

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

From Laurie Ann; more wit at the London Underground (it’s hot there, which means above 80°F):

From Stacy:

From Mark; the last line is hilarious:

*Masih shows a woman being whipped by the Taliban for trying to exist as a human being. It looks painful. I couldn’t embed it, so click on the screenshot to go to the video.

From Luana: how transcripts should appear in this era of rampant grade inflation:

This is a brilliant idea:

“A student’s transcript would show two overall grade-point averages. Next to the traditional GPA will appear a second number that adjusts course grades based on the median grade in each class. A student who earns an A in a course where the median grade… https://t.co/Zwiix9LPgr

— Reihan Salam (@reihan) June 17, 2026

From Maarten Boudry (the short piece by Blakemore et al. is here):

“Free communication of information and ideas has historically been significant in the liberalization of autocratic regimes — for example, it was a factor leading to the end of totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe. Authoritarian governments try to suppress the flow of… pic.twitter.com/lYlFo6XjHH

— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) June 20, 2026

From “Captain Ella” (now a Lt. Col.), the Arabic spokeswoman for the IDF. Translation from her Arabic:

“Lebanon’s future begins the day Hezbollah stops holding the state hostage and gives Lebanon the chance to choose its own path.”

المتحدثة بلسان جيش الدفاع الإسرائيلي، اللفتينانت كولونيل إيلا واوية: “مستقبل لبنان يبدأ يوم يتوقف حزب الله عن احتجاز الدولة رهينة، ويمنح لبنان الفرصة لاختيار طريقه بنفسه”.

Khalas ba2a. El lebnene ma bado yedal rahinet 2ararat Hezbollah.

Men 7a2 kel walad, kel em, kel shab w kel… https://t.co/4R4Nq7mwV8 pic.twitter.com/xbEJ7xp6nc

— Lieutenant Colonel Ella Waweya | إيلا واوية (@CaptainElla1) June 20, 2026

Of all dog breeds that exist, my favorite is the border collie, and this video (sound up) show you why:

If “not f*cking around” was a dog pic.twitter.com/qihrfAAaKf

— Antidepressant Content (@depressionlesss) June 19, 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 thirteen years old. https://t.co/KSVxJmOU8J

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) June 21, 2026

And two from Dr. Cobb, now back in the UK. First, one from Arles, France:

The Alyscamp Roman/Christian necropolis at Arles. Quite extraordinary. Parts felt like something out of The Tombs of Atuan.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-06-18T09:22:39.492Z

And I love this one:

Life goal: Get a plaque this good

— Jonty Wareing (@jonty.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T15:10:05.493Z