Monday: Hili dialogue

Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s back to work we go; after at three-day holiday weekend in America (“Juneteenth”), it’s back to the grind today: Monday, June 22, 2026 and World Rainforest Day. Here’s a flower and a stick insect I photographed in the Parque Amistad in Costa Rica in 2012. I know neither species:

Look at that camouflage!

It’s also National Chocolate Éclair Day, National Onion Rings Day (much preferable to french fries), and National Take Your Cat to Work Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 22 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

Footy news:

• Cape Verde score their first World Cup goal in a 2-2 draw with Uruguay – highlights

• Mohamed Salah leads Egypt to their first-ever win at the tournament, beating New Zealand 3-1 – highlights

• Belgium suffer another setback drawing 0-0 with Iran in Group G – highlights

Los Angeles, where the last game was played, is full of Iranian exiles.  The crowd booed as the Iranian national anthem was played, but (contrary to FIFA rules), plenty of Iranian flags were displayed: the pre-revolution “lion flag”.  Props for the dissidents and exiles.

From The Guardian:

There was simply no debate over the moment of the match and it is one that Iran will cherish, even more so if they are to progress to the World Cup knockout stages for the first time. Every angle of Alireza Beiranvand’s preposterous save to prevent Belgium taking the lead approaching the hour added to the miraculousness of it all. Perhaps the most ludicrous element was that Beiranvand appeared to have been eliminated from the game when the ball dropped at the feet of Maxim De Cuyper inside the six-yard box, the goal gaping. Yet, while scrambling on the turf after seesawing to his left in an attempt to intercept Kevin De Bruyne’s rolled cross, Beiranvand stuck out a strong left hand to shut the door in the face of De Cuyper, before smothering the ball.

Here are 15 minutes of highlights of the Belgium-Iran game.  The “preposterous save” by Beiranvand is at 7:35.

Breaking news:

Facing widespread criticism, Britain’s Keir Starmer has resigned as Prime Minister.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain announced his resignation on Monday, bowing to a mutiny inside his party and a challenge to his leadership of the country.

Mr. Starmer said he would remain as prime minister until a new party leader is selected, by September, rather than fight to remain in the job he won almost two years ago. His decision clears the way for Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade, extending a period of political turmoil for the country since it voted to leave the European Union in 2016.

“The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election,” Mr. Starmer said in brief remarks in front of No. 10 Downing Street, his voice breaking with emotion at times.

“I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace,” he said. “That is why I will resign as leader of the Labour Party. I have spoken to His Majesty the King this morning to inform him of my decision.”

The most likely replacement for Mr. Starmer is Andy Burnham, whose resounding victory last week in a special election energized his bid to oust the prime minister. Mr. Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester and one of Labour’s most popular politicians, received almost 55 percent of the vote in the Makerfield district.

The UK has never recovered from the Brexit referendum. Also:

In the ceasefire negotiations, Iran took its ball and went home:

Talks between the US and Iran in Switzerland were abruptly called off on Friday, clouding prospects for a lasting truce as a major escalation in Lebanon sparked chaos in the Strait of Hormuz and threatened the tenuous agreement to end the war.

Switzerland’s foreign ministry told The Independent that talks at the mountaintop resort of Bürgenstock had been postponed, without further explanation. Insiders said Iran had refused to attend after Israel ramped up airstrikes in Lebanon, killing at least 47 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

*As Veep J. D. Vance is in Switzerland trying to lubricate the U.S./Iran talks, it still looks as if Trump is not only desperate to cut a deal (perhaps more desperate than is Iran), but the deal in the offing looks bad for the U.S.:

Ending the fighting addressed Trump’s immediate concerns about oil prices and the stock markets, but it left unresolved the question at the heart of the conflict: what limits, if any, Iran will accept on its nuclear program. Vice President JD Vance is meeting Sunday with senior Iranian leaders in hopes of keeping Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon in exchange for sanctions relief.

Trump may have less leverage than he did during talks in February before the war. Then, Iranian leaders feared a U.S. attack could topple the regime. Now the government has proved it can survive, even after the Feb. 28 killing of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Trump has made clear that a halt to oil shipping out of the Persian Gulf is a pressure point. And Tehran has shown that it can send shocks through global energy markets with just the threat of attacks on ships.

Vance and other senior U.S. officials seeking a breakthrough at the bargaining table must haggle over the many issues Trump deferred to halt the fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz — restoring what amounted to the status quo before the initial U.S. strikes on Feb. 28. The concessions the White House has already offered to get back to the bargaining table have become a central line of attack for Trump’s critics.

Trump is no longer demanding regime change, despite promising Iranians that help was on the way. He says he understands why the country needs ballistic missiles, upsetting U.S. allies who feel threatened by those weapons. And he has made clear he wants to avoid anything that would derail the stock market’s upward trajectory.

*Now that the cease-fire talks are messed up because of Lebanon and other things, Trump has once again threatened to attack Iran. See? He can at least threaten to go back, even if he doesn’t mean it:

President Trump warned the U.S. could strike Iran over its support for Hezbollah, as fighting between the militant group and Israel threatened to upend the preliminary peace deal he signed last week and close the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

Trump’s comments on social media came as Vice President JD Vance was in Switzerland for talks with Iran that had been diverted to focusing on last week’s flare-up in Lebanon instead of the discussion on Iran’s nuclear program that the administration had wanted.

Last week, Trump and Vance aired the administration’s frustration with Israel after what they called a heavy-handed retaliatory strike nearly derailed their deal with Iran. Israel has argued that it will keep fighting as long as Hezbollah does.

Trump’s new comments Sunday focused on Iran instead.

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble,” Trump said on social media Sunday. “If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”

Iranian state media said Trump’s comments violated the preliminary peace deal signed Wednesday, which bars the two sides from attacking or threatening each other.

The deal also opens the Strait of Hormuz, sets up talks on Iran’s nuclear program and calls for an end to the fighting in Lebanon—a key Iranian demand—in its opening paragraph. But fighting over the past two days led Iran to announce Saturday it had closed the strategic waterway and to say it would focus the talks on resolving the situation in Lebanon.

Fox News reported that Trump said in an interview that he had spoken with Iranian officials Saturday night and warned them not to close the strait.

“You close it, and you won’t have a country,” Fox said, quoting Trump. “You won’t even make it back to your f—ing country.”

Well, it’s not clear to me who started the lastest dust-up between Israel and Hezbollah, but I still can’t understand why the U.S. is demanding that Israel tolerate a terrorist group who will continue to go after northern Israel after the so-called cease-fire. Do note that Israel has discovered a huge Hezbollah base that is in, yes, tunnels in southern Lebanon. Will Hezbollah vacate it voluntarily? Of course not. The ceasefire agreement should actually specify that Hezbollah should disband and disarm itself within a short period of time. Here’s a video:

*It’s been half a century since The Selfish Gene was published by Richard Dawkins, a book that brought the gene-centered view of evolution, and its implications for competition and cooperation, to the public view, but also influenced evolutionary biologists themselves. Now, at the UK’s Freethinker site, evolutionary biologist Jamie C. Weir celebrates this anniversary with an essay called “Crystallizing Darwinism” (access is free).

The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, marks the end, or culmination, of a long scientific revolution that began with Darwin’s own book, On the Origin of Species, more than a century earlier in 1859.

And it did mark the end of reasoning that prevailed throughout the early 20th century, including ideas about the prevalence of group selection, and forms of Lamarckian inheritance (the latter still persists among evolutionary miscreants and overzealous advocates of epigenetics).

Most conspicuously, if evolution selects the fittest individuals, how could we explain the occurrence of unselfish, altruistic behaviour in nature? Why do some animals share resources within a group—like wolves or wild dogs sharing meat with the rest of their pack—when it would make sense for an individual to monopolise a resource for their own benefit? Why should a bee sting a predator in defence of its hive, when that act means certain death?

If natural selection is all about survival, why sacrifice anything that could increase your chances in the high-stakes game of life?

Perhaps, through so-called ‘group selection’, bands of individuals within a species competed against one another, propagating the attributes of successful groups into the future. A co-operating, unselfish group might well defeat a group of treacherous, back-stabbing individuals. The question became one of what natural selection was actually selecting. The individual or the group? Or something else?

Group selectionists were in good company. Even Darwin himself occasionally drifted into group-based reasoning—the subtitle of the Origin talks not about the survival of the fittest individuals, but the ‘preservation of favoured races in the struggle for existence’. But even as a group-level framework seemed to solve some evolutionary problems, it raised others.

. . . . The vulnerability of co-operating groups to invasion by cheats posed a major challenge to early group selection explanations. It is not enough to say individuals work ‘for the good of the group’, let alone, as some of the more extreme group selectionists argued, that they regulate their own population size ‘for the good of the species’. There must be something more.

The key to solving the problem of altruism came from looking within individuals, at the genetic information that acts as the recipe for building every organism.

. . .Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection, then, acts not at the level of species or groups, nor even, in truth, at the level of individual organisms, but on the invisible genetic units that are the building blocks of all life. Genes work together to build bodies: automata in which they ride, do battle, and engineer their own proliferation. Genes endure—the ‘immortal replicators’—passed down from individual to individual through the generations, and we are merely their ‘survival machines’.

In The Selfish Gene, that vision—the gene-centric view of evolution—is painted in vivid prose, and with such clarity of reasoning that it has become far more than a classic of popular science. Just as evolution did not begin with Darwin, the gene’s-eye view did not begin with Richard Dawkins. One finds it being painfully pieced together throughout the mid-twentieth century, by R. A. Fisher (The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, 1930), W. D. Hamilton (‘The evolution of altruistic behavior’, 1963), G. C. Williams (Adaptation and Natural Selection, 1966), and many others. Indeed, these names are among those most frequently cited in Dawkins’s oeuvre, particularly in The Selfish Gene.

And yet, more than any other single work, The Selfish Gene crystallises the synthesis of natural selection and genetics, making the most coherent extended explanation of the fundamental, gene-based mechanics underlying evolution. With a gift for crafting a turn of phrase, Dawkins coined expressions and concepts in the book that have since proven highly successful replicators of their own, spreading vigorously in the public imagination. Through clarity of reasoning and metaphor, Dawkins not only popularised evolutionary theory but also solidified a genuine shift in the conceptual paradigm of the field.

Remember that natural selection and genetics were precisely what the “modern synthesis”, begun by Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1937, combined.  So, by tying together how behaviors and other organismal traits not discussed in that era, The Selfish Gene didn’t really end the synthesis, but gave it a huge push forward. It’s a pity that this article didn’t mention the beginning of that synthesis, but it does call our attention to how well the gene-centered view of Dawkins’s book has held up in the last half-century.  I should add that while that is probably Dawkins’s most influential book, and deservedly so, my favorite Dawkins book—because of its beautiful writing and more popular style (The Selfish Gene is not easy going!)—is The Blind Watchmaker. ˆRichard’s own favorite is The Extended Phenotype, probably because it introduces a point of view that was original with him.

*I’ve mentioned quite a few times how much I fear that Zohran Mamdani’s combination of “democratic socialism,” performative wokeness, and anti-semitism will overtake the Democratic Party, and I’m pretty sure that this Islamist has ambitions beyond being mayor of New York City. Other Democrats fear that, too, as Mamdani, once again neglecting his job as Mayor, is out on the hustings for others like himself.

A year ago this week, Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in the Democratic primary for mayor upended New York politics.

Now, in the closing days of another primary season, he has thrown himself back onto the campaign trail, this time risking his political capital in a high-stakes bid to catapult fellow leftists to primary victories against the old Democratic guard.

Mr. Mamdani and allies are attempting to unseat two Democratic incumbents, Representatives Daniel Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, whom they view as too friendly to corporate donors and Israel. They want to lay claim to a third House seat. And down the ballot, they have designs on expanding the democratic socialist bloc in Albany.

If he prevails on Tuesday, Mr. Mamdani, 34, will go a long way toward establishing socialists as a major faction in New York City politics and himself as a kingmaker capable of vaulting relatively unknown candidates to victory and sidelining erstwhile power brokers.

But a string of losses could be disastrous, weakening the mayor’s political standing just six months into his term, empowering political opponents and creating new ones.

His involvement has already alienated Black and Latino progressives, powerful labor unions and the left-leaning Working Families Party, all of which helped him get to City Hall and partnered with him as mayor. Some, like Representative Nydia Velázquez, have taken the rare step of publicly declaring they have lost trust in him.

“I have a pit in my stomach because of secondhand anxiety,” said Michael Lange, an elections analyst and fellow democratic socialist who rose to prominence chronicling Mr. Mamdani’s ascent.

“This is a way to remake the Democratic Party,” he said. “But if he loses, the knives would be out. They would be really out. The risk is that they’ll say this is more man than movement.”

The mayor’s support goes further than mere endorsements. With his popularity never higher, Mr. Mamdani has personally involved himself in everything from candidate recruitment and fund-raising to ad shoots and private strategy sessions. A pair of his top political aides are helping run two of the campaigns. And the mayor attempted to push labor unions into backing at least one of his candidates.

I have a pit in my stomach, too, and it isn’t from eating cherries.  I hope he has that string of losses, as I want to see Mamdani marginalized within the Democratic Party. Note the bit where he’s against candidates that “are too friendly to Israel”.  That’s one symptom of his antisemitism, which of course he’d deny.

*The AP has more on the Reflecting Pool kerfuffle. Although people have been arrested for vandalism, which Trump claims is the reason the pool is full of algae and the new coat of blue paint is peeling off, details are sketchy. I think that the algal bloom and other problems are simply the result of lack of expertise and poor planning (there was some nepotism involved in the noncompetitive choice of a contractor), just like the algal bloom in Botany Pond.  We’ll see what evidence emerges in court.

President Donald Trump on Saturday announced that federal authorities had made “multiple arrests” of people he said were vandalizing the Reflecting Pool as he struggled to explain why the $14-million-plus rehabilitation project he launched for the nation’s 250th anniversary seemingly backfired.

An algae bloom has turned the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool green days after the completion of President Donald Trump’s renovation project that aimed for the shade “American flag blue.” (AP Video: Nathan Ellgren)

Trump said his predecessors had let the pool turn an algae-stained green and that he’d line it with “American flag blue” so it better reflected the Washington Monument. But after the new pool was unveiled, its blue tinge quickly became a familiar green. Workers treated it with chemicals to kill the algae, but then the painted blue lining on the bottom began to peel.

.  . . “We’ve had some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool,” [Trump] posted on his social media site Friday night. “Just like three days ago, they destroyed the grass outside of the Pool, they’ve also done everything possible to hurt the inside surface that was just installed.”

I suppose it’s possible, given the hatred that many harbor for Trump, that there was vandalism, but I also think that it would have been more obvious given that it involves the whole pool.

He offered no details to substantiate his claim.

Agencies responsible for law enforcement and upkeep on the National Mall — the U.S. Park Police, National Park Service and Interior Department — did not respond to requests for comment. Trump on Saturday followed up by posting that Park Police “have arrested multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll,” correcting his spelling to “Pool” later.

He went on: “Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail!”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili beefs that she has been overlooked:

Hili: I don’t want to meddle in your work, but there’s too little about me in that book.
Andrzej: Honey, don’t disturb us right now.

See more about the book later today.

In Polish:

Hili: Nie chcę się wtrącać do waszej pracy, ale w tej książce jest za mało o mnie.Ja: Kochanie, nie przeszkadzaj teraz.

(Photo: D.M.)

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

From Bill:

Another great medieval letter from TherionArms:

From Meow Incorporated:

Masih is working terrifically hard trying to get people interested in the oppression of women by Islamist regimes:

I asked American students why they don’t protest when women are whipped and shot in Iran and Afghanistan.

The answers expose a contradiction nobody wants to talk about.

We must change the narrative so the younger generation stops lending cover to Hamas, Hezbollah, Taliban and… pic.twitter.com/JOwFxSB3NM

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) June 18, 2026

Emma is puzzled by this thing. Go to the thread if you want to learn what it is:

What is this in my two-week old micropond?

It’s a few mm long, and darts around very quickly just under the surface, forward locomotion, short spurts in a zig zag. If you change the surface light, it dives down to the pebbles, then comes back up.

I just about managed to scoop… pic.twitter.com/dP8Pcbqjss

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) June 18, 2026

Two from my feed: This first one is so cool; it make me tear up. Translation from the Polish:

While the infertile owl was away from her nest, the caregivers replaced her dead eggs with orphaned chicks… the little owl nearly went mad with happiness…

Podczas gdy bezpłodna sowa była poza swoim gniazdem, opiekunowie zamienili jej martwe jaja na osierocone pisklęta…

sówka niemal oszalała ze szczęścia… ❤️ pic.twitter.com/gZjX39TK8H

— Tomek Niewęgłowski (@tomek525) June 20, 2026

Only in Turkey!  Translation from the Turkish:

“This student brought their cat along to the graduation ceremony as a gesture of gratitude and appreciation, because during exam days, they would stay up all night with it. I believe that people who possess such delicate sentiments are exemplary individuals with their conscience and compassion.”

“Bu öğrenci, mezuniyet törenine kedisini de yanında götürmüş, teşekkür ve minnettarlık olarak, çünkü sınav günlerinde onunla sabaha kadar uyanık kalıyormuş.
Ben bu ince duygulara sahip insanlar vicdan ve merhametleri ile örnek insanlardır.” pic.twitter.com/0qhK0GrY36

— Haydar Özkan (@haydarozkan06) June 21, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was four years old, and would have been 86 today had she lived. https://t.co/umyYcoo6oC

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) June 22, 2026

And two food tweets from Dr. Cobb, now safely ensconced in Old Blighty:

Tonight we ate at the Gueule du Loup in Arles. The best meal we have eaten in ages. Simple entrées (raw veg and anchouiade, polenta and chickpea chips with fromage blanc aioli), exquisite pollock with a subtle ginger sauce, Camargue black rice and a vegetable paté, with champagne and a local red.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-06-20T20:33:00.581Z

Desserts – nougat glacé and millefeuilles – were equally surprising and subtle. Not sweet, full of complex tastes. Delightful and reasonably priced €110 for two, incl drinks. We chatted to the chef, David Prugne, and his équipe. If you are in Arles, go there! http://www.restaurant-lagueuleduloup.fr

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-06-20T20:33:00.582Z