Thursday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Thursday, July 6, 2026, and it’s Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the day in 1945 when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima.

On August 6, 1945, at 2:45 a.m., the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber, took off from Tinian Island in the Mariana Islands. It was flown by Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets—who had named the plane after his mother—and carried an atomic bomb called “Little Boy.” At 8:16 a.m., the bomb was dropped over the city of Hiroshima. It exploded at an altitude of 1,900 feet, above a hospital. It released the equivalent of 12,500 tons of TNT and destroyed over four square miles of the city, leveling about 62,000 of Hiroshima’s 90,000 buildings. Around 80,000 to 90,000 people were killed on impact, and another 60,000 died by the end of the year on account of radiation sickness and other injuries sustained from the blast.

Here’s a BBC dramatization (for an excellent historical documentary with contemporary filming, see here). Save for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later, this was the last nuclear weapon used in a war. Fingers crossed that it won’t happen again (we’re looking at you, Iran):

It’s also National IPA Day (i dislike the spread of this beer’s popularity, as it has no flavor save that of hops), and National Root Beer Float Day (a much better tipple).

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

Da Nooz:

*Well, “progressive” candidate Abu Al-Sayed won the Democratic Senatorial primary election in Michigan, by about one percentage point.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive and a vocal critic of Israel, edged Representative Haley Stevens, a moderate, early Wednesday to narrowly win the Michigan Senate Democratic primary, according to The Associated Press.

It was a high-profile victory for the ascendant political left — though the rancorous race was ultimately far closer than polls had suggested, with Dr. El-Sayed leading by less than a percentage point Wednesday morning. Dr. El-Sayed will face former Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican, in a general election clash for an open battleground seat that could determine control of the Senate.

On Wednesday morning, Dr. El-Sayed and Democrats from across the ideological spectrum moved quickly to project party unity after a remarkably bitter and expensive primary campaign.

Speaking at a rally, Dr. El-Sayed hailed Ms. Stevens as “one of the most committed public servants” and said there was far more that united them than divided them. Seeking to appeal to both Republicans and Democrats, he also urged voters to support him if “you believe like me that you ought to be able to afford your groceries.”

Ms. Stevens called Dr. El-Sayed on Wednesday morning to concede the race, a spokesman for her campaign said.

Dr. El-Sayed and his allies argued that his populist rhetoric would energize voters across the political spectrum who are unhappy with the status quo, and he plainly tapped into simmering Democratic fury with the party establishment, and with President Trump.

But many Democratic leaders had rallied around Ms. Stevens, a centrist, fearful that the left-wing views espoused by Dr. El-Sayed, a former public health official and proponent of universal health care, could imperil the party’s chances of defending an crucial open seat.

The Michigan Senate primary now marks the most significant triumph for the political left this year — and the general election there could pose the movement’s biggest test yet, measuring whether left-wing candidates can energize enough voters to beat Republicans in swing terrain.

The Senate primary was defined by fierce debates over Israel. Dr. El-Sayed overcame $60 million in outside money supporting Ms. Stevens, including about $32 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a major pro-Israel group whose involvement became a source of frequent conflict in the contest.

I see this campaign as somewhat as a referendum on Israel, with supporters of Israel losing.  To me, El-Sayed is the Senate equivalent of Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar, but, if elected, he’ll have more power than either of them. What are the Democratic voters thinking—to elect a guy like this over a moderate Democrat? It’s very depressing. I’d put a black border  of mourning around this item if I could.

*I am surprised that the U.S. is using the Oman/Iranian negotiations over the Strait of Hormuz as a way to settle our own dispute, but the WSJ notes that “Iran stakes everything on controlling the Strait of Hormuz.”

Iran and Oman have agreed on the geographical coordinates of a proposed safe shipping route for commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said Wednesday.

The two countries have held talks over the past two months covering the technical, legal, security and environmental aspects of the proposed route, Baghaei said in response to questions about the talks.

Baghaei described the negotiations as “professional” and “progressing,” adding that a joint statement setting out the main points of agreement is being reviewed and finalized.

“Provided that certain third parties do not obstruct the process, the joint statement of the two countries, including the principal considerations and points of agreement, is also in the final stage of review and drafting,” he said.

Baghaei blamed the closure of the strait on the US and Israeli attack on Iran. He said an agreement between Iran and Oman alone could not guarantee safe passage while a US naval blockade and “other aggressive and threatening actions” remain in place.

From the WSJ:

Iran’s leadership has made a high-stakes calculation in its showdown with President Trump: maintaining control over the Strait of Hormuz is a nonnegotiable red line.

By asserting authority over a critical waterway for global crude-oil flows, Tehran is betting that its ability to inflict pain on the American economy is its best leverage to avoid future military action from the U.S. and Israel. With gasoline prices and inflation elevated, Tehran believes Trump will ultimately accept its terms ahead of fast-approaching midterm elections that could determine the future of his presidency.

Centering strategy on controlling the Strait of Hormuz is an extraordinary gamble. It assumes Trump will prefer a messy, volatile stalemate over an all-out war. In playing this card so aggressively, Tehran risks miscalculating Washington’s breaking point and threatening its own economic survival.

“Their maximalism will contribute to their isolation in the long run,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy organization that opposes Iran’s rulers.

There are fissures from within Iran’s government on control of the strait.

The hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sees the control of Hormuz as its most important tool to exert pressure on the West following the degradation of its nuclear program and its militia proxies over the past few years, said Iranian and Arab officials and a Revolutionary Guard adviser. The Iranian military has suffered major losses since the U.S. and Israel launched a surprise attack on Feb. 28, but it has been able to bog Washington down by harrying shipping in the strait and targeting U.S. assets in the Persian Gulf.

If any ships have to pay one red cent in tolls (disguised as “monitoring costs” or something else) to Oman or Iran, the Strait will not have reverted to its pre-war condition, and Trump’s big demand will have failed. Iran is committed to having some control over the Strait, just as its committed to making nuclear weapons. Trump needs to understand this. He might already, but be ready to just withdraw and proclaim victory.

*Ukraine is in trouble as Russia has shifted from a war largely on the ground to a war almost entirely in the air, and Ukraine is running out of interceptor missiles.

Ukrainian forces failed to shoot down a single Russian missile early Wednesday during Moscow’s latest aerial bombardment of Kyiv and the surrounding region — a consequence that President Volodymyr Zelensky blamed on a plunge in anti-ballistic systems supplied by its partners, including the United States.

Zelensky wrote on X that 17 people were killed and 44 injured, adding: “Ballistic missile interceptors could have saved the lives of those killed today. It is very important that our partners understand that delays in supplying them, or an unwillingness to provide anti-ballistic systems, lead directly to such horrific casualties and destruction.” In a separate post Wednesday, he said that the number of air defense missiles supplied by partners “has dropped threefold compared with 2025.”

“Our partners do have the missiles,” Zelensky wrote. “It is important that the necessary political decisions on supplies and the acceleration of production processes are ultimately made.”

It was the third major ballistic attack on Kyiv in a week, and came only days after Zelensky warned that his country had run out of air defense interceptors. Russia launched 24 ballistic and four hypersonic cruise missiles overnight, along with 115 attack drones, most of which targeted the area outside of Kyiv, Ukraine’s Air Force said on social media. All of the missiles and 17 drones struck targets.

Russian forces also appear to be expanding their list of civilian targets to include Ukraine’s major supermarket chains.

In a statement posted on social media, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it carried out a “massive strike” that resulted “in the destruction of transportation, logistics, and distribution centers in the city of Kyiv and the Kyiv region.”

Ukraine relies on the U.S.-designed Patriot air defense systems as its only means to shoot down Russian ballistic missiles, and until recently, a large number were intercepted. However, the system’s interceptor missiles are in short supply, in part because of the large number used during the Iran war.

EU countries have some Patriots, but they don’t want to give them to Ukraine because they don’t want to weaken their own defenses. This is misguided; no other country in Europe is imperiled, and Ukraine is clearly the subject of a new Russian strategy to target civilians. That’s a war crime, of course, but do you hear people calling it out? I don’t think so.  As I see it, we have a moral obligation to help Ukraine, an ally, as much as we can, even if we have to sacrifice something to do so. Putin will be heartened at the lack of U.S. and European help for Ukraine, and I wouldn’t put it past him to try invading more countries.

*At the Free Press, Yuan Yi Zhu discussed the Cambridge University fabulist in “Who had to lose for Jason Arday to win?” (Note previous post reporting that Arday resigned after this was published.)

There had been suspicions concerning Arday’s research for many years, but journalists and scholars who tried to investigate the issue were scared off by letters from one of England’s most fearsome libel law firms (who paid the firm is unknown), and some were reported to the police for harassment.

As the furor began, Arday and his allies initially accused his critics of racism and tried to portray him as the victim of a “lynch mob,” but he has admitted that he had made “mistakes” in his work, blaming it in part on his autism. An open letter in his support (which, contra Arday’s own words, claimed that his work was entirely beyond reproach) attracted thousands of signatures, including those of at least nine British legislators and that of acclaimed autism researcher Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, who accused Arday’s critics of potentially pushing him into suicide.

. . . Last week, as the uproar built and more and more outlets covered the story, The Guardian, which one might expect to be sympathetic to Cambridge’s argument that this was a race-based witch hunt, subtly took apart these claims one by one. The reporting led to an anguished complaint from Arday that “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.”

How did Arday get away with it for so long? There are many fantasists and cheats out there, but most do not reach the top of their profession. Academia, which prides itself on the rigor of our selection process (a process that is, in many ways, ritualized hazing), should have prevented him from achieving his exalted rank. In a context where a temporary entry-level job can attract as many as 800 applications, any flaw can be used to disqualify a candidate.

But the system failed. At every stage, Arday was waved through and showered with praise. His PhD supervisor allegedly held one formal supervision only with him during his course, which did not prevent him from hiring Arday for his first academic job. The University of Glasgow appointed him to his first chair in 2021, when he was 36 (Stephen Hawking got his first chair at the age of 35).

Then, after stints at several universities of increasing repute, he ended up at Cambridge. Normally, elections to Cambridge chairs are announced with a notice pinned to a notice board in the center of the city, followed by a note in the university’s internal newspaper. In Arday’s case, news of his appointment was splashed on front pages and homepages across the world. The story was simply too good to pass up, especially in the post-2020 racial reckoning.

The breathless release put out by Cambridge’s education department described him as “a leading scholar in his field” who “publish[ed] extensively,” both standard requirements for any senior academic post. But it also spoke of his role as “a platform he intends to use to inspire more people from underrepresented backgrounds into higher education, building on the university’s many initiatives in this area.”

It is hard to escape the impression that Cambridge wanted him as a visible symbol of its commitment to diversity, overlooking in the process his suitability for the job. He was, in blunter terms, hired to be the face of Cambridge’s diversity drive. Whether his work was any good or not was beside the point. He represented something that Cambridge wanted to show the world, and that was that.

It’s considered offensive to say that someone is a “DEI hire”, but that’s exactly what Zhu is saying here, and that’s what it looks like more and more every day. I wonder if Cambridge will fire the guy for plagiarism (his Ph.D. school exculpated him), and for serial lying (they can hardly fire him for poor scholarship, but if some of that is stolen, then yes, it’s unethical). I think he needs to be let go because he’s already painted a past that’s grossly wrong, I doubt he’s a substantial resource at Cambridge, and the whole story above is a slap in the face to serious scholars of color—at Cambridge and elsewhere.

*The NYT reports on the latest fad diet: “steak and sauerkraut”, really beefy meat and fermented foods. It’s not as unhealthy as it sounds!

I was a little less than 30 minutes into a video call with Sean O’Mara, the trim and handsome 63-year-old doctor who has reportedly been giving dietary advice to several members of the Trump cabinet, when he pulled up an image of two liquids the color of radiator fluid. This vibrant yellow-green, O’Mara explained, occupies a specific attention-getting wavelength. “Soda companies use that color to get people to buy,” he said, gesturing to the first liquid, which was Mountain Dew. “Your brain kind of lights up. You’re like, Wow, that’s cool stuff.” He directed my attention to the other liquid, roughly the same color, and in a jar.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“That’s urine,” he said. “That’s urine from a human being.”

The strong implication was that it was his. Passing urine this color is a good thing, O’Mara said, and it started happening to him six years ago: a byproduct of his diet, which comprises almost exclusively steak and fermented foods. The Wall Street Journal reported in June that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., JD Vance, Howard Lutnick and Sean Duffy had all taken up the O’Mara program. Kennedy has credited it with reducing his visceral fat load by 40 percent; the president has reportedly taken notice of Vance’s slimming figure.

. . .So I joined the cabinet — for a week, anyway.

O’Mara calls it the Living Diet: You eat nothing but the flesh of grass-fed ruminants — cows, yes, but also bison, elk and venison — and as many different fermented foods as possible, because their bacteria help repopulate your gut, which he says improves your metabolism, leading to weight loss. Wild-caught seafood is cool, too, but ruminants are best, O’Mara says, because they ferment what they eat in their many stomachs.

He wanted me eating fermented beets, carrots and radishes; Roquefort and Parmesan; yogurt, kefir and kvass. He showed me a picture of his typical plate of food: It looked as if a steak had been dropped on a painter’s easel, studded as it was with multihued hillocks of fermented vegetables. “I have a refrigerator that has about 20 to 30 ferments, and I just get little bits of each one,” he explained. “I’m just rubbing this meat around in all that bacteria.”

. . . I ran the basics of the diet by Marion Nestle of New York University, whose views on nutrition are more mainstream than O’Mara’s. While she questioned his claims about fermented foods improving metabolism, Nestle agreed the diet would be effective as a temporary route to weight loss, provided you kept your caloric intake below maintenance. “I can’t think of any nutrients that would be missing from this,” she said. “But it just sounds boring to me.”

. . .To O’Mara, the diet is not just a temporary means of losing weight but a way to eat for good. He has been doing it for 10 years, and credits it with turning his life around. At one point in our conversation he pulled up the Bristol Stool Chart, which ranges from Type 1 (“separate, hard pellets”) to Type 7 (“watery, no solid pieces”). O’Mara is consistently delivering Type 4 (“smooth, soft, like a snake”), with pointed ends, indicative of healthy rectal function, he told me. “When you start eating healthy, you don’t need toilet paper,” he claimed. “Animals in the wild have no residual stool on their anus.” He described a proper bowel movement to me this way: odorless, wipe-free, over in three to seven seconds and “nearly orgasmic.”

“I could have a bowel movement behind a sheet at a dinner party in the corner of the room,” he said, “and nobody would know.”

Oy gewalt! I was surprised to learn that this diet won’t kill you, but is it that different from the diet of our ancestors? (Presumably their herbal and dairy stuff may have been somewhat fermented.) But we keep learning that what we “knew” about diets has been wrong.  I probably eat a bit more ruminant meat (steak) than most readers here, and I do eat yogurt, but I don’t have access to venison or bison, and there’s a dearth of fermented food in the rest of my diet? Will I change it in light of this article? Probably not—it’s boring.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej and Hili discuss the origin of a very important species.

Hili: When did cats domesticate humans?
Andrzej: According to archaeologists, about nine and a half thousand years ago.
Hili: That’s only a theory. The beginnings of civilization are certainly older.

In Polish:

Hili: Kiedy koty udomowiły ludzi?
Ja: Zdaniem archeologów około dziewięć i pół tysiąca lat temu.
Hili: To tylko teoria, początki cywilizacji z pewnością są starsze.

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

From Marlene Burns:

From Meow Incorporated:

From FuFu’s Cat House:

From Masih. Read the whole thing; she’s absolutely correct about how to construe “choice”. And what a way to swim!

To those who say “it’s her choice” I used to say the same thing about my own Hijab.

I was covered head to toe. Even on the beach. Even with my male relatives. And when people challenged me, I said: this is my choice. You know why? Because the other option was burning in hell,… pic.twitter.com/Apa9EpjreC

— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) August 5, 2026

The Number Ten Cat is the acting Prime Minister of the UK!:

I got this. https://t.co/PiHo4RCZ0b

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) August 4, 2026

From Malcolm, a very trusting moggy:

0 survival instinct pic.twitter.com/RwqDHQYo2e

— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) August 27, 2024

More on Jason Arday (via Luana). His deeds involved more than plagiarism, this person says, but also outright fraud. Click screenshot to go to tweets:

Two from my feed. First, a bovine mountain:

Baby goats finding somewhere to play. pic.twitter.com/zexU5Pya0c

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) August 5, 2026

Crikey, my feed is filled with stuff about Jason Arday. Here’s one more; you might want to read the original article about how Arday used the cops to defend himself against  academic and journalistic inquiries:

Cambridge University’s embattled “academic superstar”, Professor Jason Arday, reported fellow academic Dr David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, to the police after being challenged over apparent inconsistencies, errors and possible plagiarism in his…

— Committee for Academic Freedom (@ComAcFreedom) August 5, 2026

And one I reposted at The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Norwegian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was eight years old. https://t.co/cQiq1zt93I

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) August 6, 2026

From Dr. Cobb, who’s writing about the history of heredity. This is a real find. English translation:

Prelate Cyrill Napp briefly summarizes the course of the debate thus far and concurs with the view expressed by Director Liehr, pointing out that the discussion has strayed entirely from the actual subject—heritability; the issue at hand is not the theory of the breeding process, but rather the question: What is inherited, and how?

One of the most important questions in the history of biology, posed during an 1837 discussion of agricultural breeding in Brnö by Abbé Cyrill Napp, the man who recruited Mendel: "What is inherited and how?" (Transliteration, translation, reference and source in Alt)

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-08-05T13:55:01.926Z