Welcome to shabbos for Jewish cats: it’s CaturSaturday, July 25, 2025, and also National Day of the Cowboy. Here’s a photo I took on a fly-collecting trip to Death Valley: a rare Jewish cowboy once on display at the Eastern California Museum in Independence, CA. The last time I went, the photo was gone and nobody knew about it or even remembered it. I’d kill to have it. He looks more like a yeshiva bochur than a cowboy.
And there’s a feature-length documentary on the subject, which I haven’t seen:
It’s also Culinarians Day, National Hot Fudge Sundae Day, and National Wine and Cheese Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 25 Wikipedia page.
I will have visitors for much of next week so posting will be light. Bear with me; I do my best.
Da Nooz:
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal describes “Three options for escalation” of the war with Iran. Segal thinks that the higher alert levels of the Israeli military, the new involvement of the Houthis, and Trump’s own words bespeak a coming escalation of the war. Segal gives three possibilities for how the escalation will take place—three target strategies:
The first is Iran’s energy infrastructure—the operation that was on the table before Trump declared a ceasefire. Israel had begun pursuing it during Operation Roaring Lion until Trump reportedly pulled the brakes, under pressure from Gulf states with a well-founded fear for their own energy industries. The target set is narrow and thoroughly understood. Kharg Island handles the overwhelming majority of Iranian crude exports; a few missiles in the right place and Tehran has no way to sell its oil. Choose this option and the Iranians are left cash-strapped and reeling—and overwhelmingly likely to retaliate against regional energy infrastructure, and perhaps against the desalination plants the Gulf depends on for its water.
The second is direct action against the nuclear program itself. That could mean targeting senior figures, seizing the enriched uranium, or some other step aimed at the core of the program. Pickaxe Mountain would likely be the primary target. The site is buried deep enough that it is widely assessed to lie beyond the reach of bunker busters, which is why “seizing” rather than “destroying” keeps surfacing in the discussion. The Iranian response to an attack on their nuclear facilities would be severe as well, though significantly less severe than an oil crisis.
The third is the Strait of Hormuz: a major offensive against the Iranian capabilities surrounding it—anti-ship missile batteries, the IRGC Navy’s fast-attack craft and mine stocks, and coastal radar and drone sites. Throughout the war, it was barely on Israel’s radar. It is now perhaps the single most important question in the global economy. But even such an operation still won’t open the strait. All it takes is one IRGC operator left alive with a drone or two to send war-risk premiums through the roof and shipping companies in the opposite direction. Regardless, Trump may simply declare the strait open and call it a day, with the best-case scen
What’s interesting is that some of these operations don’t require Israel’s involvement at all. Trump said so explicitly: “We don’t need anybody.” He also teased the opposite possibility, saying Israel “would join in two minutes if I ask them to,” and that there would be consequences if it did. Could the conflict intensify dramatically elsewhere while Israel largely stays out of it? At first glance, that seems unlikely. Israel is, after all, only the Little Satan. But even the Little Satan is still Satan.
On the other hand, the past few weeks have produced some confusion among the Israeli population. There are missiles and drones flying across the region, and they aren’t the target? While Kuwaiti vacation plans have been entirely put on hold, Israelis are still flying back and forth on a daily basis. It defies the historical pattern entirely. Israel has become a place of quiet in the middle of a hurricane sweeping across the Middle East.
Still, whether it remains so depends entirely on Trump. He has a ticking clock in the form of the midterm elections. As this war continues to plunge in popularity, Trump appears desperate to wrap it up, though I would caution the president that the only thing less popular than continuing an unpopular war is losing an unpopular war.
I’m not sure that if Trump “loses” the war he’d get more unpopular, as much of the American populace just wants gas prices to go down. And if Iran and Yemen keep blocking transit of oil, that won’t happen. Based on Trump’s verbiate, the second option seems the most likely, followed by the third. Infrastructure destruction would be less popular because the American people don’t like it, and some of it is a war crime. I am not a pundit, but one thing seems likely to me: Trump will escalate the war before he ratchets back.
*I can’t help but think that this NYT article, called “‘We’re trapped in hell’: Iranians say that life is put on hold by months of war” (article archived here), is meant not just as news, but also as part of the NYT’s regular criticism of our war with Iran. (The subtitle is “Devastated by cycles of violence and economic crisis, many are giving up on work and their futures as the United States batters Iran again.”)
Planning for the future seems an absurd luxury when impoverished friends can afford to buy rice only by the cup and when the United States and Iran are trading strikes on military sites, ports and water desalination plants around the region.
For more than a year, Iranians have been trapped in a constant cycle of airstrikes, domestic security crackdowns and economic devastation. A short-lived cease-fire reached last month with the United States brought some respite from falling bombs, though not from the plummeting economy.
The unraveling of the agreement in recent weeks tipped the country back into war. Many Iranians have been left feeling that their lives are on hold or are no longer their own.
. . .This cycle of crisis has plagued Iranians since the 12-day U.S.-Israeli war that battered the country in June last year. In its wake, the government placed the country under a monthslong internet blackout, citing national security concerns. That sent the already foundering economy into a nosedive.
Then, a currency crisis in December set off antigovernment protests that grew into a nationwide movement. Those were crushed in January in a crackdown fiercer than any Iran had experienced in decades, leaving thousands dead and the country bitterly divided.
Weeks later, Mr. Trump and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced their war against Iran, describing it as a once-in-a-generation chance to topple the country’s authoritarian rulers. American and Israeli warplanes pummeled Iran, destroying infrastructure and killing the supreme leader and thousands of civilians. But the country’s theocratic rule remained intact, emboldened by its survival.
Asal, a 20-year-old shopkeeper in a town near Tehran, was among the thousands who took part in the protests in January. Breaking into tears as she described the arrest and torture she said she and her friends experienced, Asal said she had once hoped the U.S.-Israeli intervention would help bring down the regime.
“Trump told us he wanted to save us, but that wasn’t true,” she said. “Whatever happens in the future doesn’t matter to me anymore.”
. . .Loyalists to the Islamic republic camp out nightly on the streets of most cities, demanding that the government pursue war instead of peace and fraying the nerves of those Iranians desperate for the crisis to end.
“Things have become so bad that everyone has completely lost it,” said Mohsen, a business owner in the central city of Isfahan. “We’re trapped in hell, and there’s no saving us.”
“I have no control over my life anymore,” Behnam said. “Our fate is in the hands of those who don’t think about ordinary people.”
The NYT clearly wants this war over, and it wants it over with Trump looking like the loser (i.e., no nuclear deal, which means “worse than Obama”, and with Israel, which the NYT detests, also looking like a loser. In fact, it also seems that the NYT is siding with supporters of the Iranian regime, though at least it mentions that the regime is oppressing many and has killed thousands (more than 30,000, it’s reported). The NYT has been captured by progressives, amply represented among their young employees.
Two U.S.-based mathematicians from China have won the Fields Medal, considered math’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, becoming the first Chinese nationals to earn the honor.
The International Mathematical Union awarded its Fields Medal on Thursday at a ceremony in Philadelphia to four people, including Yu Deng and Hong Wang, who both attended Peking University before earning doctorates in the U.S.
Deng, a professor at the University of Chicago, was honored for his work on one of a famous set of 23 problems proposed by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900, which are considered benchmarks of progress in the study of mathematics, the university said.
Deng and his collaborators solved a problem within broader attempts to mathematically connect equations governing the motion of gases from the smallest to the largest scales, according to the university. An avid player of the ancient board game Go, the 37-year-old was also honored for research that laid the foundations for this breakthrough.
Wang, a professor at New York University and France’s Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, was recognized for resolving the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions, a decades-old geometric problem that addresses the shape left behind by a needle moving in multiple directions, NYU said.
The 35-year-old Wang, who briefly pursued architecture during postgraduate studies in France before renewing her focus on math, is the third woman among the 68 people to receive the Fields Medal since it was first awarded in 1936.
The Fields Medal is conferred every four years upon up to four outstanding mathematicians under the age of 40. The other medalists this year were John Pardon of Stony Brook University and Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto.
. . .Pardon was honored for his work in determining “how to count curves on specific shapes in the field of symplectic geometry,” proving a two-decades-old conjecture that posited that two different ways of counting curves were in fact the same, according to Stony Brook.
The award for Tsimerman recognized his work, among other achievements, in helping to prove the André-Oort conjecture, a longstanding problem in geometry, the University of Toronto said. Tsimerman said Thursday he would be starting a role at OpenAI in its safety division.
I’m not sure what, if any, the practical consequences of these discoveries are, but that’s not as important to me as understanding what was actually done. Which I don’t. So be it. The Fields Medal is somewhat endangered in that AI is now solving these longstanding mathematical conundrums faster than humans can—if the humans can even solve them. It’s ironic that Tsimerman is going to work for an AI company.
*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column in The Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: Kids doing fireworks.”
→ Mao did nothing wrong: To deliver his special College Democrats of America 2026 Convention speech, progressive celebrity influencer Hasan Piker wore a frustratingly well-tailored Mao Zedong–style suit, buttoned to the top to show he means business
Soon after, a clip of Piker on Twitch praising Mao resurfaced. Referencing his trip to China in November 2025, Piker said, “I got stopped by a cop who thought I was, like, making fun of Mao Zedong, which I never would and never will. Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world, okay? A man who changed the entire universe, the entire planet. Okay? For real, for real. . . . There was a lot of fucking excesses, let’s be real, but the People’s Republic of China would not exist without Mao Zedong.” Anyway, this week Piker called the Great Chinese Famine—which killed tens of millions of people—“a famine due to mismanagement.” Mao’s only crime was basically an accounting error.
The news broke this week about Democratic politicians—including California Rep. Ro Khanna, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, former Missouri congresswoman and current candidate Cori Bush, and New York congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier—joining a livestream this past March where podcaster Kyle Kulinski compared the U.S. and Israeli governments to Hitler and Mussolini while defending Iran’s funding of groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. I think at this point we gotta believe these people. When someone wears a Mao suit, you pay attention. On the topic of Mao suits:
→ DSA releases their new platform: The Democratic Socialists of America, fresh off several big wins, have released their platform. And it’s extremely reasonable, normal, and achievable. All it calls for is expanding the House, abolishing the Senate, and giving felons and noncitizens full voting rights. It paints a beautiful vision of the future: “Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.” I’m gonna say it: The socialists have become full commies. All food, energy, medicine, and transportation is state-run, full communism.
The New York City DSA co-chair went on TV last week. When he was asked about bodega owners who might be upset over having to compete with new government grocery stores (which won’t have to pay property taxes or rent), here’s what he said: “Maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.” Oh, baby, they are heating up! The ponytails are tight for these DSA leaders, and they will tell the bodega owner to consider an alternative career in union-building. Let me cut to the chase: All private industry is evil. All private property is evil. Your bodega? Evil. Personally, I would love to be a communist, but I have access to the internet and have read 30 seconds of Wikipedia about all past communist efforts, including literal lesbian communes. It don’t work, kids. It never does.
→ Everything is Israel vs. Palestine, apparently: “Was Spain vs. Argentina a proxy for Palestine vs. Israel?” asks the interview description for the World Cup postgame live chat between Mehdi Hasan and Javier Bardem on Hasan’s far-left news site Zeteo. You’ll be shocked to hear Mehdi’s position: It was indeed! Spain is Palestine, by the way. Spain, the most ruthless colonizing power. When you’re so obsessed with Jews that it becomes your entire animating life force, you can only see any conflict—even a soccer game—through the prism of who’s the Jew.
In other news: Sixty percent of registered voters aged 18–24 support Hamas over Israel, according to the July Harvard CAPS-Harris poll. Just 40 percent selected Israel. And just to document where we are, for posterity, here’s a new viral video: “How Israelis Are Colonizing the World,” about how Israelis are colonists no matter where they go, even if they’re traveling to leave Israel because they think it’s a bad, irredeemable place. Quotes: “Israelis aren’t just settlers in Israel. They’re moving and colonizing the world,” the narrator opens, attempting a dramatic Attenborough-inspired nature documentary voice. “From backpacking trails in South and Southeast Asia to quiet European mountain towns, you’ll find Israelis. We’ve mostly seen them take two forms: the war criminals fresh from service, and the liberals fleeing what they claim is a failing democracy.” You’ll find them and We’ve mostly seen them—this is literally how safari guides describe the habits of wild orangutans. “On the surface, they couldn’t seem more different. But watch how they move through the world, and you can see how Zionism produces a particular relationship to land and other people—one that is exploitative and violent and that is not limited to Palestine.” Watch how they move through the world? Are we analyzing their gait? Curiously, because Jews are now described as colonizers in Israel and colonizers if they leave Israel, there is only one correct thing for them to do in this logic. One solution, if you will.
*The Seattle Times reports a new bipartisan federal proposal to kill seals to save salmon (h/t Wayne). Yes, that’s right. Native Americans need their lox, so the seals have to go.
Federal lawmakers are considering whether to expand the government’s authority to kill more sea lions and seals to bolster salmon recovery efforts in the Pacific Northwest.
The region’s critical salmon runs are on life support: Fourteen species and populations of salmon and steelhead trout in Washington are deemed at risk of extinction under the Endangered Species Act. The hurdles to their livelihood are numerous, spanning a worsening climate crisis, habitat loss, pollution and — as Congress members debated this week — proliferating predators.
The House Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries on Tuesday probed bipartisan legislation co-sponsored by Reps. Michael Baumgartner, R-Spokane, and Emily Randall, D-Bremerton, that would ease restrictions in the Marine Mammal Protection Act for killing sea lions and seals, renewing a decades-old conversation over whether humans should intervene to curb pinniped predation. It’s the second attempt this month by a Washington lawmaker to expand culling of the marine mammals.
The debate comes as marine wildlife officials investigate the shooting of a baby harbor seal found near Bellingham this month with a gunshot wound to its face. The pup, euthanized last week by medical professionals, is the third seal treated for a gunshot injury by SR3, a nonprofit sea life response, rehabilitation and research facility in Des Moines, in the past year, underscoring the tensions surrounding the animals even as Congress weighs broader lethal management.
Baumgartner in a statement before the hearing said his bill is a “common-sense” update that would allow Washington state and federally recognized tribes in Western Washington to explore new ways to responsibly manage booming pinniped populations. Randall told the committee that declining salmon runs also threaten tribal treaty-reserved fishing rights. “We have to find ecosystem balance,” she said. “Nonlethal methods of controlling the pinniped population haven’t worked for us.”
Both first-term members of Washington’s congressional delegation emphasized the bipartisan nature of the effort. Still, lawmakers representing the Pacific Northwest clashed on whether greater allowances to kill sea lions and seals is an effective — or prudent — solution.
Salmon recovery is widely viewed as vital to Washington state and the broader Pacific Northwest because salmon are a cornerstone of the region’s ecosystems and economy. They provide food for numerous species, including endangered southern resident orca whales, and are essential to sustaining Northwest commercial and recreational fisheries, as well as tribal treaty-protected fishing traditions.
Baumgartner and Randall’s Northwest Endangered Salmon Predation Prevention Act of 2026 would broaden where, and how, Washington state and Western Washington tribes with protected fishing rights can manage the growing sea lion and seal populations. In 2018, Congress authorized Washington state to expand a program to capture and euthanize sea lions in the Columbia River Basin due to concerns for salmon survival.
Their bill goes further, expanding the law from “sea lions” to all pinnipeds, including harbor seals, California sea lions and Steller’s sea lions. It would remove geographical restrictions limiting killings to portions of the Columbia River and eliminates the requirement that chemical euthanasia be the only approved killing method. It would take the effort beyond the Columbia River, too, establishing permits for tribes and state officials to kill pinnipeds in “each river and stream in the State of Washington that flows into the marine waters of the State.” The bill would also direct the development of nonlethal methods that prevent pinnipeds from traveling upstream into salmon habitats.
There are five species of pinnipeds that frequent Oregon and Washington (Pacific Harbor Seal, Northern Elephant Seal, California Sea Lion, Steller Sea Lion, and the Northern Fur Seal). As for regulating these populations, it seems that a major impetus is the need of indigenous people to harvest salmon. Unless we are somehow responsible for the growing pinniped populations (and I haven’t seen any data supporting that), I’d like to know how this happened. You don’t go killing seals and sea lions so you can support a salmon-based economy. It looks as if in fact humans are responsible for the decline of salmon, and we have no right to kill pinnipeds to rectify something that’s the fault of humanity. THERE WILL BE NO EUTHANIZING OF PINNIPEDS—not if I had any say in the matter.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s bossing Andrzej around:
Hili: It’s a good thing you swept the floor. It was getting pretty dirty.
Andrzej: Keep your comments to yourself.
In Polish:
Hili: Dobrze, że pozamiatałeś, bo było już bardzo brudno.
Ja: Zachowaj swoje uwagi dla siebie.
*******************
From Meow Incorporated:
From The Grammar Police (strictly speaking, this is not ungrammatical):
From Things with Faces, a happy loaf:
From Masih:
Since yesterday, people keep asking me the same question: How can someone be hanged for opening a door?
I want you to see the answer with your own eyes.
Two Iranian protesters. Both killed in front of cameras for showing compassion.
One opened a door when protesters came… pic.twitter.com/HEftBGJBDD
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) July 21, 2026
From Barry: Evolution wins!
A bio-inspired robot crosses paths with a real insect , 400 million years of evolution face to face with human engineering.
— Digital Brain (@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social) 2026-07-18T16:11:42.000Z
Carole Hooven vs. Agustín “Spectrum” Fuentes (click to go to original tweets):
The Number Ten Cat is looking for an assistant, but not one to turn the spotlight away from the Boss:
Job opportunity: I’m looking for a Manchester based cat to join the Chief Mouser department. Must be good at catching mice but not good at getting attention on social media (that’s covered) https://t.co/xlaCV58cNM
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) July 24, 2026
One from my feed; live and learn!
Today I learned rabbits can swim. Even better: their ears fold back into swim mode. I feel this information deserved to be shared pic.twitter.com/mmJdSoLNJO
— Nature Unedited (@NatureUnedited) July 23, 2026
And one I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was 12 years old. https://t.co/BaBzd5DuVJ
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) July 25, 2026
And two from Matthew. He said the first one will leave you weeping (sound up):
From the brink of death,not a moment too soon.👍💙😍
And of this one he says “lovely molluscs!”. Yep, squid are molluscs:
👽🦑🛸👽🦑🛸 #squidsquad #caribbeanreefsquid #cephalopodsofcoralcity #squid #coralcitycamera
— Coral City Camera (@coralcitycamera.bsky.social) 2026-07-19T16:06:10.532Z
The loaf looks like Polyphemus.
Prof’s Hooven’s “own” of Augustine Fuentes is hilarious. She follows me on X – it made my day! 🙂
Amit’s analysis is good but the “Return of the Houthis” is incredibly serious if you think of how disrupted the neighborhood is already. Its a BIG deal. And the Houthis, unlike Hezb, are unkillable.
Again, and sorry to harangue you guys, there’s a way of looking at the Iran war in opposition to my stupid woke hometown NYT we don’t hear enough: reposted herein:
https://democracychronicles.org/the-iran-war-reframed/
Wish I could write at Nellie’s level. Can one purchase snark points somewhere?
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Trump seems to want to get out of this war with as little effort as possible, which is not really the way to fight wars. There’s a good argument to be made for destroying the theocracy in Iran, although I haven’t heard him make it. He should be making it, loudly, and justifying the temporary rise in gas prices. At the same time, though, he should be doing everything he can to end the war fast.