Welcome to Friday, May 8, 2026, and National Have a Coke Day. That link explains the date:
John Stith Pemberton invented a cola syrup at his Eagle Drug and Chemical house in Columbus, Georgia. He brought it to Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta and mixed it with carbonated water to make the first cola drink, and it was introduced to the world on May 8, 1886. Both Columbus and Atlanta have since laid claim to the creation of the drink. It was originally sold as a health drink or medicine, for getting rid of hangovers and headaches.
I believe it was M. F. K. Fisher who said that if Coke and onions were things that were very rare and precious, people would pay very high prices to get them.
Have a coupon, which Wikipedia labels, “Believed to be the first coupon ever, this ticket for a free glass of Coca-Cola was first distributed in 1888 to help promote the drink. By 1913, the company had redeemed 8.5 million tickets.”
The German High Command will at once issue orders to all German military, naval and air authorities and to all forces under German control to cease active operations at 23.01 hours Central European time on 8 May 1945…
— German Instrument of Surrender, Article 2,
Here’s a two-minute video about VE Day:
Da Nooz:
*DAVID ATTENBOROUGH TURNS 100 TODAY! As reader Pyers emailed me, “Well, he made it! Probably the most influential person working in the natural history and biological fields since the war. Not a scientist himself, although IIRC his degree is in zoology, but so many current professors and academics in the UK and around the world acknowledge their debt to him in spawning their interest in the natural world through his pioneering and frankly astonishing TV shows.” There’s a celebratory article at the BBC, which includes this:
Sir David Attenborough has said he has been “completely overwhelmed” by the messages he has received ahead of his 100th birthday.
The veteran broadcaster and environmentalist celebrates the milestone on Friday, with a special concert planned in the evening at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
In an audio message released on Thursday, Sir David said: “I had rather thought that I would celebrate my 100th birthday quietly, but it seems that many of you have had other ideas.
“I have been completely overwhelmed by birthday greetings, from pre-school groups to care home residents, and countless individuals and families of all ages.”
He added: “I simply can’t reply to each of you separately, but I’d like to thank you all most sincerely for your kind messages, and wish those of you who have planned your own local events: Have a very happy day.”
Friday evening’s show at the Royal Albert Hall is the climax of a week of special events and broadcast programming in honour of Sir David, who was born in 1926 and joined the BBC in 1952.
Presenter Kirsty Young will host the special 90-minute concert celebrating Sir David’s life, which will air on BBC One and iPlayer from 20:30 BST on Friday.
Pyers says he’ll be raising a glass to Sir David, and so will I. As far as I can see, his life was an unalloyed good, and he simply inundated us with knowledge about the natural world. Happy Birthday, sir David!
*From the lead article in It’s Noon in Israel, “IDF vs. Mossad: how to defeat them.” The IDF’s goals differ from Mossad’s.
It’s Thursday, May 7, and a severe dispute has erupted—and still persists—between the army and the Mossad over the ultimate goal of the war in Iran. The IDF views the removal of uranium from Iranian territory as the ultimate achievement. The Mossad, however, believes the objective is toppling the regime. Even today, contrary to the retrospective cover-your-ass culture prevalent in our region, the Mossad insists on this. While the IDF settled for the amorphous definition of “creating the conditions to topple the regime,” the Mossad simply dropped the first four words.
From here, reality splits into two perspectives, sometimes entirely opposed. Senior IDF officials are intensely frustrated by the American decision not to seize the enriched uranium in a military operation. Thus, Operation Roaring Lion was halted with almost no improvement in the struggle against the Iranian nuclear program compared to Operation Rising Lion. Uranium, uranium, uranium, they chant. Take it, and you’ve erased the nuclear program.
The second approach argues: What good does it do to extract it via an operation or an agreement? If the regime stands, and even if tons of 3 percent enriched uranium remain, you’ve only set them back a few years—a blink of an eye in geopolitical terms. A regime without sanctions will be richer, more despicable, and will want to destroy Israel just as before. Only regime change will uproot the plans for Israel’s destruction from the source. This contrasts with senior defense establishment figures who would gladly welcome the liberation of tens of millions of Iranians from the yoke of dictatorship, but for whom the priority remains strictly Israel first.
The practical expression of this lies in a hypothetical question: What happens if President Trump tells Israel, “You have a green light for one operation”? Most of the defense establishment would say thank you and send the Air Force to raid the uranium stockpiles. The Mossad, one might guess, would support destroying energy plants and refineries, literally plunging Iran into total darkness. This would drastically accelerate the population’s rebellion process. Their anger threshold has already surpassed the levels recorded during the January riots, but simultaneously, the fear threshold has also spiked. When there is no electricity—and with starvation expected to begin in Iran in two months—that wall of fear will collapse.
Which goal is more ambitious? At first glance, toppling the regime seems like a monumental task, while destroying the uranium appears to be a localized, manageable event. But history suggests otherwise: regimes have fallen throughout history, but no country has ever willingly surrendered or lost its enriched nuclear material while the government survived. As the old Talmudic proverb goes, the dilemma is whether to take a “short path that is long”—a quick tactical strike that fails to solve the root problem—or a “long path that is short”—the arduous task of regime change that permanently removes the threat.
I’m for regime toppling, though that may require American “boots on the ground”, which won’t happen. The last paragraph above is telling: we won’t get permanent cessation of nuclear enrichment until there’s a new regime in Iran. If Trump is holding out for “no nukes,” he’s holding out for regime change (though he doesn’t seem to realize it).
*But if you’re feeling optimistic that Iran will be driven to its knees, read the WaPo exclusive, “U.S. intelligence says that Iran can outlast Trump’s Hormuz blockade for months” (article archived here).
The analysis by the U.S. intelligence community, whose secret assessments on Iran have often been more sober than the administration’s public statements, also found that Tehran retains significant ballistic missile capabilities despite weeks of intense U.S. and Israeli bombardment, three of the people familiar with it said.
Iran retainsabout 75 percent of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and about 70 percent of its prewar stockpiles of missiles, a U.S. official said. The official said there is evidence that the regime has been able to recover and reopen almost all of its underground storage facilities, repair some damaged missiles and even assemble some new missiles that were nearly complete when the war began.Trump painted a rosier picture in Oval Office remarks on Wednesday, saying of Iran: “Their missiles are mostly decimated, they have probably 18, 19 percent, but not a lot by comparison to what they had.”
Three current and one former U.S. official confirmed the outlines of the intelligence analysis, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
Asked for comment, a senior U.S. intelligence official emphasized the blockade’s impact. “The President’s blockade is inflicting real, compounding damage — severing trade, crushing revenue, and accelerating systemic economic collapse. Iran’s military has been badly degraded, its navy destroyed, and its leaders are in hiding,” the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said in a statement. “What’s left is the regime’s appetite for civilian suffering — starving its own people to prolong a war it has already lost.”
It looks as if Trump wouldn’t be able to wait out the three to four months required to inflict severe damage on Iran, for Americans are getting more and more tired of the war and are beefing at the gas pump. I can wait it out, of course, but I don’t drive much and don’t make my living burning fossil fuels. If the report is accurate, we are in for a long war, which Niall Ferguson has been predicting in The Free Press, and reiterated today.
*Trump has waffled again, suspending U.S. defense of ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. This coincides with a new American peace proposal that is being evaluated by Iran, while Iran’s own proposal is being evaluated by the U.S.
Iran said on Wednesday that it was reviewing an American proposal to end the war, a day after President Trump abruptly paused a new U.S. military effort to protect ships in the Strait of Hormuz, citing “great progress” in talks with Tehran.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, said that his government had not yet given its response to Pakistan, which has been acting as a mediator between Tehran and Washington. Neither he nor Mr. Trump said what the U.S. proposal contained.
“After finalizing its considerations, Iran will convey its views to the Pakistani side,” Mr. Baghaei told the semiofficial Iranian news agency ISNA.
Mr. Trump, speaking at a Mother’s Day event at the White House, said the Iranians “want to make a deal; they want to negotiate.”
“We’re not going to let Iran have a nuclear weapon, and we’re not going to let that happen, and we won’t let that happen,” Mr. Trump said. “So we’re dealing with people that want to make a deal very much, and we’ll see whether or not they can make a deal that’s satisfactory to us.”
Though Mr. Trump said he was pausing the effort to safeguard ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. military was continuing to enforce a blockade on Iranian ports aimed at strangling the Iranian economy.
From the second link:
The United States was waiting on Thursday for Iran to convey its response to the latest American proposal to end the war, after public messages from top-ranking officials on both sides suggested a burst of behind-the-scenes diplomatic activity.
Business leaders, consumers, politicians, shipping companies and many others around the world have also been watching closely for signs of a breakthrough. The conflict, which has dragged on into a third month and prompted Iran and the United States to implement rival blockades around the Strait of Hormuz, has choked off a major oil transit route, wreaking havoc on global supply chains and causing energy prices to spike.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, said late Wednesday that his government was reviewing an American response to a 14-point Iranian proposal to end the war and would give its response to Pakistan, a key mediator. Neither Tehran nor Washington has said what the U.S. response entails.
“The exchange of messages through the Pakistani intermediary is ongoing, and reviews of the exchanged texts are continuing,” Mr. Baghaei told IRIB, Iran’s state broadcaster.
Earlier in the day, another Iranian official had dismissed a reported proposal to end the war as a “list of American wishes.”
The NYT says that Trump’s reversal on escorting ships was attributable to Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who considered the project unfeasible and likely to exacerbat the war, denying U.S. warplanes access to Saudi airspace. Meanwhile, more U.S. troops are in the Middle East: 50,000 of them. The soap opera goes on, with hard-line Islamists on one side and a possibly demented authoritarian on the other.
*The Free Press has an article about detransitioning. It will anger many, but it’s time air stories like this rather than just go along with the gender activists. The article’s called “I de-transitioned. My body will never be the same,” and the author is Joni Skinner, a natal male who transitioned and then went back to his birth sex, but not without permanent injury.
I’m a gay man who testified last month against what has been called a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender-rights bill. I was there because I believe the proposed law could silence the one kind of help that could have saved me from years of anguish and a future permanently marked by what was done to me as a child.
. . . From my earliest awareness, I knew I was not like other kids—and certainly not like other boys. I moved and spoke in ways others called “girly.” I loved dress‑up games, butterflies, and anything pink. I was obsessed with The Princess and the Frog and looked up to Disney princesses more than any male character. I also knew, from a very young age, that I liked boys. I didn’t have words for it then, and in the world I grew up in, it was considered sinful and shameful. But the feeling existed long before I had any name for it.
. . .When I was 13, I told my mom I thought I might be transgender. Her reaction was one of confusion and fear. She had spent years working nonstop to keep us afloat and taking me to therapy appointments for my autism. She had watched me be bullied, and now my tutor, someone she trusted, told her there could be a medical explanation and treatment for me.
My tutor told us about the gender services program where she was receiving treatment and explained to my mom they were experts who could figure out what was really going on with me. It was four hours away, so my mom and I made the drive.
And this is what “affirmative therapy” does:
When we arrived, I sat down with the therapist who was the program manager for the hospital’s gender services program. She asked me to tell her everything, so I shared every worry I had about growing up gay in my community. I told her that I was afraid I would never make friends, because for as long as I could remember most kids wanted nothing to do with me. I told her I was terrified of God’s judgment and of spending my teenage years surrounded by people who hated who I was.
Rather than helping me work through any of it, she affirmed all of my fears. She said she could see why I was afraid of the discrimination I would face. She told me that nowhere would be a good place to be gay for someone like me, because I had a “feminine essence” and gay men wanted men, and that just wasn’t who I was. She said I could transition and fly under the radar as a woman in my hometown. And I could find a man to love me that way.
She then handed me a gender dysphoria checklist, which I filled out on my own. It asked me to rate how I felt about my body, gender expression, and puberty. One question asked about erections: I checked that I was “totally uncomfortable” with them, and then wrote in the margins “I don’t have any yet,” with a little smiley face. I felt embarrassed and out of my depth, pulled into a world of adult decisions I didn’t understand.y.
After that appointment, the therapist totaled my score. I got a 53 out of 60, which she described as an open-and-shut case. I was definitely transgender, she said.
She then told my mom that if I matured through male puberty, the prejudice and worsening mental health would be so crushing that around 60 percent of kids in my position would choose to kill themselves rather than live that way. Since then, my mom and I have discussed that appointment at length, and she still remembers that warning. It’s still so emotional for her that she rarely talks about it. My mom had watched me struggle for years—coming home from school in tears, and withdrawing more and more into myself. And here was a professional, in a clinical setting, telling her that the alternative to medical transition was her child’s death. My mom says she was so ultra-focused on the suicide risk that it became her top concern: She just wanted to keep me alive.
Yep, the suicide warning, which turns out to be completely erroneous. New studies show that there’s no more chance of someone in this state committing suicide than someone who doesn’t transition committing suicide. At any rate Joni got puberty blockers and then female hormones, and was apparently not told she’d lose her ability to have orgasms, which is almost always true in such cases. There were all kinds of debilitating side effects, and Joni decided to “detransition” to a male biology. Only then did he discover the doubts that doctors had about “affirmative care” (remember about 80+% of people with gender dysphoria who don’t “transition” turn out gay, with no medical side effects).
*How fast is the Universe expanding? We know that it is from several pieces of data, most notably the red shift of light, but a new paper in Astronomy and Astrophysics, discussed by the Wall Street Journal, details not only how fast it’s expanding, but how miniscule the expansion is. Don’t ask me to explain the paper, which is above my pay grade; I put a link above so those with the relevant expertise can read it. From the WSJ:
Scientists know our universe is expanding. Now they have a better idea how fast.
Cosmologists who study the universe know it began with the big bang and has been expanding from a single point ever since. Even about 14 billion years later, this expansion moves objects like galaxies in it farther away from us. Scientists try to determine the rate of expansion because it can help tell us how old the universe is.
An international gathering of experts last year in Switzerland confirmed that objects recede faster as they become more distant. For instance, a galaxy 3 million light-years away will move away from us by 46 miles per second, the scientists calculated. A galaxy at twice that distance would be moving away at about 90 miles per second.
I’ve seen this compared to blowing up a balloon. As it expands, the distance between two dots on the balloon will increase faster the farther they were apart initially, even at a constant rate of intlation. But look at this (bolding is mine):
The rate, detailed recently in a study published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, is the most precise ever calculated. It is also mind-bogglingly small: If you took an empty space the size of a football field, and it was expanding at the rate our universe is, it would take more than 1 million years to expand by a single centimeter, said study author Caroline Huang, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The calculation has called into question a major scientific theory. It is about 10% faster than what the standard model of cosmology—essentially our theory of how everything works in the universe—says the rate should be.
This means there is probably something missing from the standard model, or a force we don’t fully understand, said Stefano Casertano, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and study co-author. Dark matter, the invisible cosmic glue that holds galaxies together, and dark energy, which pushes them apart, are two likely culprits.
The discrepancy also raises questions about what experts thought they knew about the end times.
Currently, a prevailing theory is that the universe will keep expanding until it experiences “heat death”—stars will lose all their fuel and die in about 100 trillion years or so, leaving everything cold and dark, according to another study co-author, Dillon Brout, from Boston University.
“But now that we know there’s a crack in our theory of what is governing the universe at the largest scales, we can’t make any predictions at all for its fate,” Brout said. “It both keeps me up at night and wakes me up in the morning.”
I can’t quite wrap my head around the fat that distant galaxies are receding so quickly although the universe is expanding so slowly. It must be because the Universe is so big. As for what it’s expanding into, well, physicists say either that we don’t know, or the whole question is nonsensical.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is shy:
Sharon: A foreign car in the orchard.
Hili: I’m heading back home, I’m not up for talking to unfamiliar people today.
In Polish:
Szaron: Obcy samochód w sadzie.
Hili: Wracam do domu, nie jestem dziś w nastroju do rozmów z obcymi ludźmi.
*******************
From Meow Incorporated:
From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:
From David; which diretion are you driving?
From Masih; another Iranian protestor executed, this time for “spying for Israel”:
“Don’t ignore this. I don’t want to be killed. Don’t pass by the word ‘execution’ so easily, this may be the last time you hear my voice.”
And it was. No one listened.
Naser was only 25-year-old. Last week, one morning, right after the call to prayer, the interrogator, called… pic.twitter.com/IEGz1Jof6A
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) May 5, 2026
Here’s the latest toll of deaths in Gaza, and you can get constant updates by clicking here. Maarten Boudry tells me that, as best we know, Aizenberg’s figures are reliable:
🧵Gaza Fatality Update Jan 2026. The chart below summarizes the latest fatality estimate based on Hamas’ most recent reported numbers. Key points: natural deaths are included in the total count and thousands of combatant losses are excluded. Full explanation below. 1/ pic.twitter.com/YFGuA6RYaC
— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) January 26, 2026
The California arsonist admired Luigi Mangione, as many misguided blockheads do, and that may be why he set the fire. As Niall Ferguson wrote:
The militant left is on the march, with a shockingly high share (one in four) of young, “very liberal” voters saying political violence can sometimes be justified. Jonathan Rinderknecht, 30, who is accused of intentionally starting the Pacific Palisades fire, killing 12 people and destroying thousands of homes, was inspired by slogans such as “free Luigi Mangione” and “lets take down all the billionaires.” As he told investigators, “We’re basically being enslaved by [the rich].”
Accused Palisades firestaryer idolized Luigi Mangione, prosecutors say. He allegedly resented the rich and his anger was made worse due a shitty love life that him a loner on New Yea’s Eve. He videoed a fire station two days before in seeming nod. https://t.co/dfoyp9lTyF
— Richard Winton (@LAcrimes) May 4, 2026
From Barry: a sly horse with a sense of humor:
This horse has a one-of-a-kind sense of humor. Watch as it teases the cat and then puts on an innocent face when caught in the act.
— Digital Brain (@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social) 2026-05-06T13:24:03.000Z
One from my feed; cats!
Perfect example of how life with cats is 😂 pic.twitter.com/LGqJjbQiP4
— Cats with Aura 😺 (@catwithaura) May 6, 2026
One I reposted at The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed along with her mother when both arrived at Auschwitz. She was one year old and would be 85 today had she lived. https://t.co/rdQncKTnkp
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) May 8, 2026
Two from Dr. Cobb. First, the plant is really attacking the galls that harbor wasps:
Botanical parasitism of an insect by a parasitic plant: Current Biology http://www.cell.com/current-biol…
— Scott P. Egan (@scottpegan.bsky.social) 2026-05-07T11:36:30.436Z
Look at all those satellites!
Incredible video made using images taken by the Artemis II crew shows satellites in orbit around Earth. This is at 30x speed x.com/i/status/205…
Richard J. Durbin United States Senator
