Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats: It’s Sunday, April 12, 2026, and National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day, celebrating the perfect accompaniment to a bowl of good tomato soup. Wikipedia even has a page on this sandwich, showing the combo in this photo:

It’s also, appropriately, International Day of Human Space Flight and National Licorice Day. Licorice flavoring comes from the roots of a herbaceous perennial plant, Glycyrrhiza glabra.

Here: sections of licorice root:

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

Da Nooz:

*It’s no surprise that the U.S. and Iran have failed to reach a peace deal. The negotiations lasted 21 straight hours, but came up dry.

Vice President JD Vance said on Sunday that 21 hours of peace talks between the United States and Iran had failed to produce an agreement to end the war, leaving the fate of a fragile two-week cease-fire, and whether President Trump will resume major combat operations, uncertain.

“They have chosen not to accept our terms,” Mr. Vance said at a brief news conference in Islamabad, Pakistan, although he left open the possibility that terms could still be reached.

“We leave here with a very simple proposal: a method of understanding that is our final and best offer,” he added. “We’ll see if the Iranians accept it.”

Mr. Vance did not provide specifics, but said the United States needed an “affirmative commitment” that Iran would not seek a nuclear weapon or the tools with which to achieve one.

By early Sunday, reopening the Strait of Hormuz remained one of three main sticking points, according to two Iranian officials familiar with the talks. The United States had demanded that Iran immediately reopen the strait to all maritime traffic. But Iran refused to give up its leverage over the critical choke point for oil tankers, saying it would do so only after a final peace deal, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic negotiations.

The other two key issues were the fate of nearly 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium and Iran’s demand that about $27 billion in frozen revenues held abroad be released, the officials said.

Those are major sticking points!  In other news, the U.S. claimed that two American warships went into the Strait and began clearing mines. Iran, however, denied that U.S. Navy ships were in the Strait.  And Israel continued bombing Lebanon, in the south this time.  Right now, it looks like the war will go on.

Quote of the Day:

Earlier, President Trump played down the importance of the peace talks, which took place against the backdrop of a fragile cease-fire. “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me,” Trump said. “And the reason is because we’ve won.”

We did?

*Obituaries second: Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Mount Everest (in 1963), and latter the CEO of REI, died on April 7.  He was 97 years old.

Jim had an identical twin brother, Lou, who died in 2024. Lou was also a mountaineer.   Here’s a video about Whittaker’s legacy, including the famous photo of him atop Mount Everest, snapped by Gombu. You can see more photos of Whittaker on the 1963 Everest expedition on his website,  And don’t forget that two other Americans, Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, also reached the summit, but took a far more adventurous (and dangerous) route.

*As a result of the war with Iran, the WSJ predicts that “the era of free seas is unravleing—and now everyone’s going to pay” (page archived here).

In just six weeks, the Iran War has shattered a system of global trade that has enriched people and nations for more than a century: the freedom to sail the open seas.

The Strait of Hormuz long functioned as an artery for the world’s maritime economy. But that 30-mile-wide waterway is now a monument to a new global disorder. As some 20,000 sailors effectively held hostage at sea digested President Trump’s cease-fire announcement this week—contingent on the complete opening of the strait—Iranian officials stressed they would determine which ships could leave and at what price.

The “Tehran toll booth” was taking effect, as the U.S. Navy watched on, an admission that, at least here and now in the world’s oil corridor, America no longer rules the waves.

Captains, owners and managers of the more than 700 vessels stuck near Iran, carrying tens of billions of dollars in cargo, were messaging one another to try to make sense of Tehran’s shifting rules. After days of drones and missiles flying overhead, Iran’s navy broadcast a radio message clarifying their position: “If any vessel tries to transit without permission, [it] will be destroyed.”

. . .The Strait of Hormuz, sailors said, risks becoming a graveyard for a trading system so integral to the modern economy that most consumers, accustomed to cheap imports and three-day shipping, take it for granted. The price stands to be shouldered by consumers across the world, in inflation, scrambled delivery schedules and the snarls of a new arrangement in which Tehran can choose which countries access Middle Eastern oil.

If Iran continues to charge tankers for safe passage, the added cost will hardwire a higher price for a gallon of gasoline, economists said. Or its Revolutionary Guard Corps could choke the flow entirely, wreaking havoc on energy markets. Either way, shipowners, their insurers and crew remain wary of sailing back into a once-bustling strait that could spring like a trap on the slightest misunderstanding between an aggrieved Iranian regime and an American president who threatened to wipe out its entire civilization in a single night.

Whatever happens next, the precedent of a toll booth in open waters will reverberate across a world order the U.S. helped build. America’s allies worry other players could try to replicate Iran’s example, like empires of the 17th century, when China’s Qing dynasty, the Ottomans and Portuguese taxed passing vessels. Trump has floated his own wish for an American toll on the Persian Gulf, and his expenditure of naval power in the Middle East has given Beijing and its navy—the world’s largest—freer rein to expand control over the South China Sea.

. . . American thinking evolved after World War I to advocate free navigation for all countries, an idea that only came into widespread practice when the U.S. Navy became the global maritime police force after World War II.

I’m trying to think of what other areas of strategically important open ocean don’t already charge for sea transit but could be ripe for tolls. The only one I can think of is the Taiwan Strait, between China and Taiwan, which is 160 km wide at its narrowest point. Taiwan wouldn’t charge to traverse it, but I bet China would.  And the Beagle Channel through which Darwin (and I) traveled, could be controlled (it’s 5 km wide at its narrowest point), but it’s free and international (Chile and Argentina), and not of strategic importance.

*To top that, Iran now says it can’t find all the mines it laid in the Strait of Hormuz.  Even if the Strait gets opened in ceasefire talks, this will inhibit ships from wanting to pass through the narrows.

Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them, according to U.S. officials.

The development is one reason Iran has not been able to quickly comply with the Trump administration’s admonitions to let more traffic pass through the strait. It is also potentially a complicating factor as Iranian negotiators and a U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance meet in Pakistan this weekend for peace talks.

Iran used small boats to mine the strait last month, soon after the United States and Israel began their war against the country. The mines, plus the threat of Iranian drone and missile attacks, slowed the number of oil tankers and other vessels passing through the strait to a trickle, driving up energy prices and providing Iran with its best leverage in the war.

Iran left a path through the strait open, allowing ships that pay a toll to pass through.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has issued warnings that ships could collide with sea mines, and semiofficial news organizations have published charts showing safe routes.

Those routes are limited in large part because Iran mined the strait haphazardly, U.S. officials said. It is not clear that Iran recorded where it put every mine. And even when the location was recorded, some mines were placed in a way that allowed them to drift or move, according to the officials.

As with land mines, removing nautical mines is far more difficult than placing them. The U.S. military lacks robust mine removal capabilities, relying on littoral combat ships equipped with mine sweeping capabilities. Iran also does not have the capability of quickly removing mines, even the ones it planted.

I can see that this would be problematic for any peace agreement!

*John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor and U.S. ambassador to the UN, asserts in the Free Press that it was “a big mistake to have the ceasefire.” This is an interview conducted by Nicholas Clairmont:

Nicholas Clairmont: I’m just going to start by asking, what is going on with Iran and with the ceasefire? Have we lost? Have we won? And what do you predict is about to happen?

John Bolton: Well, I think it was a big mistake to have the ceasefire. I don’t think the Iranians have any intention of doing any of the things that Trump wants in terms of opening the Strait of Hormuz. I think they needed relief from the pounding they’ve been taking. We’ve been through this in various iterations with them before, and it’s very unclear to me what happens next. Because having basically backed down on the effort at regime change, if there ever was one, by acknowledging now that we can kind of negotiate our way out of the Strait of Hormuz closure, Trump is conceding the key, central point of leverage that we have. And I’m just very concerned that we’re going to be faced with a choice of which concessions we’re going to make that we don’t want to make. And the regime will skate free, basically.

It’s suffered enormous damage. But, from the regime’s point of view, if they survive that amounts to victory for them. And they will rebuild the nuclear program, rebuild the ballistic missile program, rebuild the terrorism program, and reconstitute in full their capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz. So this is what you get for mowing the lawn, as the Israelis call it. You can do a lot of damage, but you don’t resolve the underlying problem.

NC: So what would it take to resolve the underlying problem? What should we be doing differently?

JB: I think there are a lot of things that should have been done differently well before the military attack. Like, for example, coordinating and assisting the opposition. If you take Trump at his word that he wasn’t going to put boots on the ground—and I don’t see he has any inclination to do that, except for limited specific missions—then the role of the opposition internally becomes critical. Because the pounding that the regime has taken on their principal instruments of state power I do think has caused fractures in the top of the regime. Certainly, we’ve caused a lot of fractures by eliminating the top 400 or 500 people. This is how regimes like this can begin to come apart.

“Trump is conceding the key, central point of leverage that we have,” said Bolton.

And I think that’s happening. I think it’s a mistake to say the regime has survived. Pieces of it have survived, but we don’t know that there’s any central authority or that its capacity has very much longer to survive if it does. The Times of London reported on Monday that the Supreme Leader is in a coma being treated for severe wounds in the ayatollah’s city of Qom. If that’s true, and it’s purportedly based on intelligence that they’ve seen, it means that the Revolutionary Guard, the ayatollahs and whomever, are ruling through some kind of council mechanism, and they haven’t picked a new Supreme Leader. We can’t say for certain, but I think they have begun the process of seeing the regime disintegrate. So every time they get a break, which is what the ceasefire is, that’s time that they can come out from wherever they’re hiding and see if they can’t get their act back together.

. . . the logic is pretty straightforward: Unless you’re willing to live under a nuclear terrorist threat, and now a threat to the global economy, if you can’t change the regime behavior, changing the regime is the only alternative.

Bolton thinks the regime is actually beginning to fall apart, but given that whoever’s in charge has the weapons, and the civilian population doesn’t want to get shot during peaceful protests, how do we get regime change? Some have suggested arming civilians, but they are not an organized force, nor can the Kurds topple the regime itself.  Bolton sees regime change this way: “I think ultimately in Iran, you’ll get a military government that can restore order after the ayatollahs are overthrown. Hopefully it’ll have the sense to provide some kind of consultative mechanism so the Iranian people can pick whatever kind of government they want to come next. And then, basically, it’s up to them.”  But he thinks that Trump simply wants out, and sent Vance to Pakistan to do that.

*Both the NYT and the Washington Post are touting (with glee, I bet), the supposed increase in Catholicism in America. But their data is misleading, as the number of pious Catholics, as well as their church attendance, is declining. It’s just that young ‘uns are converting to Catholicism more often than before. As the WaPo notes, the rate of deconversion far outstripping conversions. From the NYT:

People are joining the Roman Catholic Church in surprising numbers.

This Easter the Archdiocese of Detroit will receive 1,428 new Catholics into the church, its highest number in 21 years. The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston will have its most in 15 years. In the Diocese of Des Moines, the count is jumping 51 percent from last year, from 265 people to 400.

The first year after the election of Pope Leo XIV, the first pontiff from the United States, many Catholic churches across America are welcoming their highest numbers of new Catholics in recent years. The newcomers are set to officially be received into the church during the Easter Vigil Mass, the night before Easter Sunday on April 5.

Bishops are buzzing about the surge, and confounded by what is behind it.

“Of course we think the Holy Spirit is,” Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington said. “But we are kind of stymied.”

From the WaPo:

In many places, the converts are disproportionately young. These reports have encouraged talk of a religious revival in Generation Z and generated controversy on social media. Discussion has centered around the sudden prominence of a few “hot” churches, such as St. Joseph’s in New York’s West Village and St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Nolita. At these spots, young professionals mingle at post-Mass wine receptions. Meanwhile, Catholic social media influencers have helped make an ancient faith seem trendy.

Is Catholicism undergoing a revival? Not in broad numerical terms. A Pew survey suggests that for every young adult who joins the Catholic Church, a dozen leave it. This year’s conversion wave doesn’t come close to offsetting the decades-long decline in Church membership, or solving the problem of ever fewer infant baptisms. Indeed, the recent wave of converts is best understood as a response to religious decline. In a secularizing world, becoming Catholic has a rebellious cachet.

Of course the papers don’t really concentrated on the data showing the extreme decline of religiosity in America. For example, the Pew survey reported in 2012 that the number of Catholics who consider themselves “strong” Catholics is at an all-time low, and church attendance is dropping rapidly, having fallen nearly 50% cince 1974.  Here are the facts, ma’am (note that the rate of Protestants claiming “strong religious identity” has gone up by about 11%.)

Why is the MSM so eager to report the rise in religion in America when it’s actually on the way out? Does the media have a God-shaped hole?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili had a good idea:

Andrzej: I don’t enjoy the taste of anything.
Hili: Eat from my bowl, and I’ll eat from your plate. You’ll see everything will taste different.

In Polish:

Ja: Nic mi nie smakuje.
Hili: Jedz z mojej miseczki, a ja mogę jeść z twojego talerza. Zobaczysz, że wszystko będzie ci smakowało inaczej.

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

From Give Me a Sign:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs or Notices:

Re the tweet below: The U.S. State Department is expelling Iranian non-citizens from the U.S. if they have ties to the theocratic regime. As they announced:

This week, three Iranian nationals with ties to the Iranian regime were arrested by federal agents following Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s termination of their lawful permanent resident (LPR) statuses.

Seyed Eissa Hashemi, Maryam Tahmasebi, and their son are now in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement pending their removal from the United States.

Eissa Hashemi is the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, also known as “Screaming Mary,” the infamous spokeswoman for the Islamist militants who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.

Ebtekar was notorious for her role as the leading propagandist for the violent Islamists who perpetrated the Iran hostage crisis.

. . . Last week, Secretary Rubio terminated the legal status of the niece and grandniece of deceased Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Major General Qasem Soleimani. Hamideh Afshar Soleimani and her daughter are now in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Masih, of course, is all for this.

Behind me is the luxury home belonging to the son of Islamic Republic Vice President @ebtekarm in Los Angeles.
The same Ebtekar who took American diplomats hostage in 1979. Children of top officials in Iran prefer to live in the US away from the hell their parents have created. pic.twitter.com/l8BftjNAkw

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 1, 2021

From Luana: chimp fingerprints!

Our evolutionary sibling, with whom we share more DNA than either of us do with gorillas or orangutans. pic.twitter.com/XSWRorDDOT

— Apatheia Ⓥ 🇺🇸 (@DanKellyFreedom) April 8, 2026

Also from Luana; the alphabet soup gets more voluminous:

This is done perfectly.

The MMIWG2LGBTQQIA+ is NOT inclusive ENOUGH pic.twitter.com/Oi6wWGRH1L

— Marc Nixon (@MarcNixon24) April 10, 2026

From Malcolm; a great cat artist:

Dudu Cat King is a Chinese artist who paints expressive cats with a few effortless sumi ink strokes.

pic.twitter.com/OJN2E0GaYZ

— Science girl (@sciencegirl) March 29, 2026

One from my feed—an ant bridge.

No other species on Earth has a teamwork system quite like ants.
This tiny creature pulls off missions far bigger than its size could ever suggest. pic.twitter.com/GVP799bGry

— The Figen (@TheFigen_) April 10, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would be 90 today had she lived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-04-12T09:56:50.310Z

And two from Dr. Cobb. Look at this deep-sea siphonophore! It was identified as Stephanomia amphytridis, which can apparently grow more than 10 meters long:

Bargmannia? I hope they see a bunch of siphonophores on the next SOI expedition b/c Dhugal is finally going to be on the ship for that one! I've been waiting years for this. This 1 is from @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 642 #sepacificseamounts #MarineLife

— Lisa (@tuexplorer1.bsky.social) 2026-04-09T23:32:08.975Z

I have no idea what’s going on here, and neither does Matthew:

Welcome to the end of a long week, though the troubles of the week won’t end tomorrow. It’s Friday, April 10, 2026, and National Siblings Day. Here’s the passport photo showing my mother, me, and my sister (2.5 years younger than I), taken before we went to Greece in the mid-Fifties. Look at my big ears!

It’s also National Dive Bar Day, National Farm Animals Day, and National Safety Pin Day, marking the day in 1849 when Walter Hunt got a patent for this device.  Hunt sold the patent for $400.

And Artemis II returns to Earth today, splashing down somewhere in the Pacific at 8:07 p.m. Eastern time. I will give a live feed. There are some concerns about the heat shield:

The Artemis II heat shield, NASA agrees, is flawed.

The heat shield is the critical layer at the bottom of a spacecraft that protects it — and the astronauts inside — from searing temperatures upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. If the shield fails, the underlying metallic structure could melt, rupture and disintegrate.

And there is no backup, and no way for the astronauts to escape.

NASA officials, however, are confident that despite the known shortcomings of the heat shield, the four Artemis II astronauts will remain alive and comfortable as they arrive at Earth on Friday evening at a speed of nearly 24,000 miles per hour, concluding a 10-day trip to the moon and back.

Extensive analysis and testing of the heat shield material “got us comfortable that we can undertake this mission with lots of margin to spare,” Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, said in an interview in January.

However, Charlie Camarda, a former NASA astronaut and an expert on heat shields, says NASA should never have launched Artemis II. The agency does not understand well enough the chances that the heat shield might fail, he says, and the mission, a success so far, could end with the deaths of the astronauts.

“I’m going to pray that nothing happens,” he said during an interview a few days before the launch of Artemis II.

His hunch is that there is a 95 percent chance that the astronauts will return safely. But that would mean a 1-in-20 odds of a disaster.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 10 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Now Israel is beginning cease-fire talks with Hezbollah, though I suspect that Israel will accept a cease fire only if Hezbollah disarms, which it’s already required to do under UN Security Council Resolution 1701. But it won’t, and Iran appears to be invested in keeping up Hezbollah terrorism. Israel is still striking Hezbollah, and PM Netanyahu refused to participate in a cease-fire and will not do so until Hezbollah is disarmed.

Hours after vowing to continue strikes targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appeared to make a concession on Thursday by saying his government would start talks with the Lebanese government on disarming the Iran-backed militant group.

Mr. Netanyahu’s announcement came as Israel’s attacks on Lebanon put immense strain on the shaky two-day-old cease-fire, as Iran has insisted the agreement covers Lebanon and the strikes violate the terms of the truce.

Israel’s attacks have also further strained and U.S. relations with Europe, where several leaders of NATO countries have been insisting that Lebanon be included in the truce.

While Lebanon has been pushing for talks with Israel since Hezbollah joined the war a month ago, the talks between Israel and Lebanon face enormous hurdles. It is far from clear how much buy-in the talks have from Hezbollah, which has long overshadowed the official Lebanese government. And while Lebanese leaders have voiced interest in disarming Hezbollah, Israel has voiced intense skepticism that they are willing or able to do so.

At the same time, the Israeli military warned civilians to evacuate parts of the country, including Beirut’s southern outskirts, suggesting another wave of strikes was imminent. People going north packed the roads.

It remained to be seen whether the Lebanon dispute would derail the cease-fire or affect talks between American and Iranian officials, which the Trump administration said were scheduled for the weekend in Pakistan.

There is more justification for Israel continuing its attacks on Hezbollah, which has been firing missiles and drones at Israel for a long time, and finally, violating the cease-fire sufficiently that Israel went after Hezbollah in Lebanon with boots on the ground (southern Lebanon only), as well as intensively bombing Hezbollah targets.  If Trump includes Lebanon in the cease-fire deal, he is endangering Israel and promoting the continuation of terrorism. But the Lebanese government does not speak for Hezbollah, so talks with Israel seem futile.

*Here’s a 30-minute video about the ceasefire discussed by Niall Ferguson and put up by the Free Press (h/t Bill) in an article called “Why Iran thinks it’s winning.” (the subtitle is a quote from Ferguson: “‘President Trump may have made a mistake by not deploying ground forces. Because without them, it’s simply not going to be possible to shut down the Iranian threat to the Strait”).  Ferguson discusses the Lebanon add-in to the deal, and argues that there’s no easy way to eliminate Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz save “deploying ground forces.” The U.S. has won militarily, he says, but not economically or strategically.

A quote from Ferguson: “One lesson of history is that negotiation when the two sides are this far apart is highly unlikely to deliver a result—certainly within a 14-day time frame.”

The video title is below, and it’s certainly provocative.

*The Washington Post adds that Iran is already trumpeting that it’s defeated the U.S.

Shortly after President Donald Trump threatened to erase the “whole civilization” of Iran, all 6,000 years of it, the crowds came out into the streets of Tehran waving flags — and not white ones. They bore the green, white and red banners of the still-standing Islamic Republic. Some set fire to the star-spangledones of the superpower that, according to state media, they had just “humiliated.”

Whatever the outcome of the unstabletwo-week ceasefire that the United States and Iran agreed to just before Trump’s apocalyptic deadline — whether it becomes an enduring truce or a return to the violence that has upended life from Israel to Azerbaijan — the pause in hostilities did not begin with images of an “unconditional surrender” that the president repeatedly demanded.

Exhausted Iranians may yet get a fortnight’s respite from airstrikes, but Trump’s central war objectives remain unmet, and hard questions are left unresolved. Each side is claiming victory, but neither is a clear winner.

Trump launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28 demanding unconditional surrender, the elimination of Iran’s nuclear program and the destruction of its ballistic missiles. He, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said they hoped the attacks would lead to regime change.

By those measures, Wednesday’s scorecard after nearly six weeks of bombing makes for sober reading.

Iran is battered but unbroken. The regime has not collapsed; it has hardened. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still has weapons to fire, including ballistic missiles shot at Israel and Persian Gulf states in the hours after the ceasefire was announced, injuring two teenagers in Beersheba, Israel. Somewhere in Iran, a few hundred kilograms of enriched uranium remains as prospective raw material for a nuclear weapon.

Yep, I think we all agree that this is correct. The Post calls the cease-fire a “rest stop” rather than an “off ramp”.  I am curious what is going to happen, but worried that we’ve gone to war and didn’t accomplish anything. But with Trump in charge, we don’t know what is going to happen, though I think he is quite reluctant to send in ground troops. Nothing creates more opposition to a war in the U.S. than the sight of body bags coming home containing the remains of U.S. fighters.

*Greg Mayer called my attention to another public dismantling of Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. The dismantling is at Current Affairs, conducted by Brian McLoone (!), and is called, “Ross Douthat’s shoddy arguments for religion“.

According to Pew’s most recent Religious Landscape Study, a growing share of Americans identify as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular.” These so-called “nones” made up 16 percent of the population in 2007, but 29 percent in the latest survey, from 2023-24. The trend among younger Americans is even more striking. In this latest survey, 43 percent of those born in the ’90s and early aughts identified as nones.

In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, hopes to stem the tide. Referring to the Gospel of Mark’s admonition to be awake when the “master of the house” (i.e., God) returns, Douthat warns the reader: “If you are this sleeper, I beg of you—awake.” But he doesn’t think there are only fear-based, prudential reasons for believing in God. He thinks there’s good evidence that God exists. “The religious perspective,” he explains, “has the better case by far for being true.”

At the start of Believe, Douthat says part of his job at the Times is “to make religious belief intelligible to irreligious readers.” Believe is an outgrowth of that project, and succeeds at the task; it is clear what Douthat takes his factual premises to be and how he thinks one can infer from those premises to a theistic conclusion. The problem is that many of those premises are false or suspect, and many of the inferences unwarranted. His conclusion, that we should all be religious, is a house built on sand.

Remember that Douthat thinks that science itself gives evidence for God. This view is dismantled:

Note that, while this scientific perspective doesn’t posit a God, it doesn’t strictly rule one out either. Of course, the perspective does raise some challenging questions for someone (like Douthat) who believes in the Judeo-Christian God. (In Believe, Douthat describes himself as “a conservative Catholic by the world’s standards.”) If we humans are special, why did God wait billions of years to create us? Why did He make many trillions of other solar systems? And, perhaps most pressing, why is none of this mentioned in the Bible? One possibility is that God wanted to speak metaphorically in Genesis about our origins. Another is that those stories were created by people who were trying their best to explain how the world around them came to be. If they had known how old and big the universe is, or that humans share a common ancestor with fish and olive trees, they would have incorporated those facts into their origin story. But they didn’t, so they didn’t.

The latter possibility, of course, is more parsimonious. But Douthat argues that science (e.g., the “fine tuning” argument) shows that the universe was “made for us.” Yet his method of arguing is inconsistent:

That argument [science shows that the Universe was “made for us”] sits uneasily with Douthat’s claim, elsewhere in the book, that we don’t understand some important bits of our existence, like consciousness. He says that “the immense progress we’ve made in figuring out how chemistry and biology interact in the pathways of the cerebellum has brought us no closer to answering the question of why these physical interactions yield both conscious self-awareness generally and the specific kind of experience we have.” Douthat takes science’s inability to explain consciousness to be evidence that the mind has a “supernatural character.” When we put these two arguments side by side, we see that together they make a rigged game: if science can render some natural phenomenon intelligible, then that’s evidence for God; and if science can’t render some natural phenomenon intelligible, then God must be the supernatural force pulling the strings. Heads theism wins, tails atheism loses.

The end of the piece, which is long but a very good review of Douthat’s execrable book, suggests that McLoone might be—gasp—a New Atheist:

How I wish that the issues Douthat discusses in Believe were of purely intellectual interest. But they’re not. Despite the decline in religiosity among Americans that I noted earlier, religion of course still has an enormous influence on U.S. culture and policy. To take a recent example, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who is almost certainly overseeing war crimes in Iran, clearly views that conflict from the perspective of Christian nationalism. One way to counter this trend is to amplify the commendable commitments to social justice that one finds in many religions, perhaps especially in Christianity and its strands that emphasize dedication to the poor (incidentally, the tradition in which I was raised). This is the rhetorical strategy that Texas politician James Talarico has adopted in his campaign for U.S. Senate. The problem is that adjudicating which politics better aligns with a given religion is a fool’s errand, since religious doctrine underdetermines how one ought to act. Some passages of the Bible seem to extol pacifism, others genocide. The better strategy is to show that the foundations for religious beliefs are very shaky. That skeptical project, spanning millenia and continents, has been slow but successful. Believe reminds us that the project is far from complete, and the current political moment reminds us that the project remains critical.

I should add that Greg wrote me, after the NYT hired Douthat, “Who, other than his close friends and family, could care at all what Ross Douthat thinks about anything?”

*According to the AP’s “oddities” page, New Yorkers are flocking to a NYC park to see American woodcocks (Scolopax minor), which are not that rare! But they have a weird walk.

American woodcocks came to New York City looking to strut their stuff, and New Yorkers fell in love.

The curious birds, known for their bobbing walks and kazoo-like calls, have drawn a crowd to Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan since arriving in late March. Dozens of spectators are gathering at the park every day to try to catch a glimpse of the grapefruit-sized birds as they poke their long bills in the ground for earthworms.

“It’s a very charismatic bird. I mean, it’s goofy-looking. It’s got eyes that are always looking at you no matter where you are. It does this nice little dance when it’s nervous,” said Bill Rankin, a Yale University professor who stopped by the park. “Having two of them together is a kind of nice little romantic story of spring.”

The woodcocks are known to stop at Bryant Park every year as they migrate north in early spring. They are strange-looking critters, seemingly assembled from the parts of other birds — a round body, enormous eyes and a long, thin bill. They’re also called “timberdoodles” or “bogsuckers” by some.

Here’s a woodcock photographed in, of all places, at Bryant Park in NYC.

Nobody knows why it walks like this, though there’s one explanation given in the video below:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is nosing about:

Hili: Do you have something you want to talk to me about?
Andrzej: No, I just wanted to make sure everything is alright.

In Polish:

Hili: Masz do mnie jakąś sprawę?
Ja: Nie, chciałem tylko zobaczyć, czy wszystko jest w porządku.

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

From The Language Nerds:

From CinEmma:

From Things With Faces; a distraught melon:

Masih is angry at loose talk about “regime change” in Iran:

My message to the U.S. government on CBS: stop talking about a fake “regime change” in Iran.

Any negotiation that says nothing about executions, political prisoners, mass repression, and internet blackouts is not about the Iranian people. It’s about saving a regime that is… pic.twitter.com/WdToTWiyik

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 9, 2026

From Jay, a video compilation of driverless cars stopping in the road to avoid hitting animals:

More than 350 million vertebrate animals are killed by human driven vehicles every year. In general, autonomous vehicles are much better than humans at dodging animals.

A compilation I made of @Tesla’s FSD stopping for animals, and often saving their lives: https://t.co/BL6LiryTdu pic.twitter.com/MC7QhcdwRG

— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) April 9, 2026

A mutation in goats from Sciencegirl. I’m not sure that breeding up a bunch of animals like this is an ethical thing to do:

The myotonic goat is a breed with a condition that makes it prone to stiffening or falling over in response to excitement or surprise. pic.twitter.com/EbsWAHESN5

— Science girl (@sciencegirl) April 8, 2026

From Malcolm, who says, “Cats always win.”

Cats always win.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/DjxaAJ6GVR

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) March 22, 2026

From my feed: interspecies love:

A male orangutan started bottle-feeding four orphaned tiger cubs after watching his human caretakers.

Suryia lived at Myrtle Beach Safari, a wildlife preserve in South Carolina in the United States. In 2015 the cubs were just one to two months old and had been rejected by their… pic.twitter.com/rUHxFYMi9c

— Dr. Lemma (@DoctorLemma) April 9, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This German Jewish boy was one of the 90% of people in his transport gassed to death when it arrived in Auschwitz. He was 12 years old. https://t.co/CDQcQVRpzs

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 10, 2026

And two from Matthew. First, the astronaut fixation with watches (see the thread to see what models of watches were issued by NASA:

WATCHES IN SPACE 🧵Ever notice how all of the astronauts are wearing a billion watches in every picture? Christina Koch is wearing three in this picture1/x 👇

— Steven Lucy (@slucy.bsky.social) 2026-04-09T17:04:40.609Z

And a video showing that the pharyngeal nervous system of this flatworm can by itself organize feeding behavior (I don’t like them cutting up flatworms):

One of the wildest things I learned about planarian flatworms: you can isolate their pharynx (throat) and it will autonomously engage in feeding behavior.www.science.org/doi/full/10….

— Sam Gershman (@gershbrain.bsky.social) 2026-04-08T18:59:12.843Z

Welcome to a hump day (“வாரத்தின் நடுநாள்” in Tamil): Wednesday, April 8, 2026, and National Empanada Day. Here’s one I bought on the street in Santiago, Chile in 2019, right before my first trip to the Antarctic:

It’s also Dog Farting Awareness Day (?), National Dog Fighting Awareness Day. and Zoo Lovers Day. I am not a fan of zoos or public aquariums, and recommend that you read H. L. Mencken’s 1918 essay “The Zoo“. It’s splenetic, of course, as is all Mencken, but there is some truth in it, like this:

But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned men to study this or that. Again the facts blast the theory. No scientific discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals themselves, has ever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology, and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not in the groves of actual learning, but in the yellow journals. He is to biology what the late Camille Flammarion was to astronomy, which is to say, its court jester and reductio ad absurdum. When he leaps into public notice with some new pearl of knowledge, it commonly turns out to be no more than the news that Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian lady walrus, has had her teeth plugged with zinc and is expecting twins. Or that Pishposh, the man-eating alligator, is down with locomotor ataxia. Or that Damon, the grizzly, has just finished his brother Pythias in the tenth round, chewing off his tail, nose and remaining ear.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 8 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Trump’s deadline for Iran opening the Strait of Hormuz expired at 8 p.m. yesterday. But instead of destroying Iranian civilization, he announced a two-week ceasefire that apparently will open the Strait of Hormuz.  Now both Iran and the U.S. are proclaiming victory.

The United States and Iran announced a two-week cease-fire and plans to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday evening, hours before President Trump had threatened that Iran would see its “whole civilization” destroyed if it did not allow free transit through the vital waterway.

The agreement that was brokered by Pakistan was hailed as a victory by both countries. Mr. Trump said a 10-point plan from Iran was a “workable basis on which to negotiate” a lasting end to the war after demanding Tehran’s “unconditional surrender” for weeks. Iranian officials were triumphant, with Mohammad Reza Aref, the country’s first vice president, saying on social media that “the era of Iran” had begun after Trump failed to destroy the Islamic republic’s government. Iran also said it would fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for oil and natural gas shipments, while negotiations take place to secure a permanent deal.

*Yesterday’s war news from It’s Noon in Israel.

It’s Tuesday, April 7, and the thirty-ninth day of Operation Roaring Lion. The global price of oil has reached $111, up 1 percent since yesterday. Here are the latest developments that occurred while you were asleep:

• As Trump’s ultimatum enters its final hours, unconfirmed reports have emerged of multiple explosions on Kharg Island, Iran’s critical oil export terminal. The strikes appear to be American, but it remains unclear if they are intended as a warning shot or the opening salvo of an invasion.
• The New York Times published Iran’s 10 conditions for ending the conflict: a permanent end to the war—not a temporary ceasefire—with a guarantee that Iran will not be attacked again by the U.S. or its allies; cessation of Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon; a halt to fighting against all Iranian-backed forces in the region; the lifting of all U.S. sanctions on Iran; and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under new rules of safe passage. Iran is also demanding that each vessel transiting the strait pay a toll of approximately $2 million, with revenues shared with Oman and used in part to fund reconstruction of war-damaged infrastructure.
• An exchange of fire near the Israeli consulate in Istanbul this morning left three people dead, two of whom were reportedly the assailants. According to the Turkish government, one of the attackers had ties to ISIS. The consulate itself is almost always closed due to the currently tense state of Israeli-Turkish relations, hence no Israelis were injured.
• Yesterday, the Israeli Air Force struck Iran’s largest petrochemical facility in Asaluyeh, at the South Pars gas field. Defense Minister Israel Katz said the strike, combined with last week’s hit on a second major facility, has eliminated the capacity to process roughly 85 percent of Iran’s petrochemical exports, inflicting what he called tens of billions of dollars in economic damage. Katz said the petrochemical industry is a key financier of the IRGC and warned that continued aggression against Israel would lead to the “collapse” of Iran’s capabilities.
• The Gaza Board of Peace has given Hamas until the end of the week to accept a new disarmament proposal. High Representative Nickolay Mladenov is set to meet Hamas officials in Cairo on Friday, and a follow-up meeting is scheduled for Tuesday.
• The IDF has completed its deployment along the “anti-tank line” in southern Lebanon this morning—Israeli forces now control the line of commanding ridges from which they can prevent anti-tank fire toward Israel’s northern towns.

Note the penultimate item about Hamas disarming.  The chances of that happening by the end of the week are about zero, and if they don’t disarm, what will the Board of Peace do about it? As far as I know, they have no enforcement powers.

*In an editorial board op-ed in the WSJ, that conservative paper takes Trump to task for threatening to punish the Iranian people in pursuing his war aims.

This directs all eyes to Mr. Trump’s Tuesday night deadline for Iran to reopen Hormuz. He could always delay it again, but at his news conference he laid out what he’d need to see. “We have to have a deal that’s acceptable to me,” Mr. Trump said, “and part of the deal’s going to be we want free traffic of oil and everything else.”

If not, “we have a plan,” the President said, “where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night. Where every power plant in Iran will be out of business.”

We will soon find out who’s calling whose bluff, but don’t expect Iran’s regime to care much about what strikes like those would do to its people. Taken literally, Mr. Trump is proposing to hit many targets that would harm Iranian civilians, which could spark a refugee crisis.

Striking indiscriminately at critical infrastructure would be wrong as well as unwise, punishing the Iranian people we need on our side. “They would be willing to suffer that in order to have freedom,” Mr. Trump said. Regime mismanagement has already left Iran’s grid in a permanent state of crisis, but such an attack could give Iranians all the suffering with none of the freedom. It could also erode support for the war at home and abroad.

The obvious solution is to discriminate between types of infrastructure. Bridges can be legitimate targets, but it depends if they have any military use of note. Otherwise, why punish the people?

Energy sources can also be legitimate targets if they have a particularly notable military nexus, such as providing fuel for missile launchers. But not every energy target will meet that standard, and the military benefit doesn’t justify plunging 90 million people into darkness.

One yardstick by which to judge any U.S. escalation is this: In addition to increasing “pressure,” which may never be enough to sway Iran’s regime, will it help prepare an operation to reopen Hormuz? The U.S. has a strong interest in causing chaos for Iran’s military, and targeting can allow it to do so without bombing every power plant in the country.

This is all good advice.  And of course bombing civilian targets, which is a war crime, will turn most people except for diehard MAGA-ites against the war.  My own priorities are regime change that frees Iranian citizens, and a guarantee (effected through complete dismantling of sites and surrending enriched uranium to the U.S.) that Iran will not pursue nuclear weapons.

*Jonathan Kay at Quillette reports on some mendacity in Canada: “The IOC is protecting female athletics. Canada’s Secretary of State for Sport isn’t happy about it.”

On 26 March, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced a new policy that ensures female Olympic sports categories will be reserved for actual female athletes, as opposed to trans-identified men. Under the new policy, women will be required to prove their eligibility with a cheek swab or blood test—a simple one-time procedure that’s less intrusive than the drug-testing regimens that Olympians have submitted to for decades.

The new policy will be warmly greeted by the substantial majority of ordinary people—on both sides of the political spectrum—who embrace the common-sense view that men should not be allowed to steal roster and podium spots from women. As the IOC notes in its new policy document, at high levels of competition,

there is a 10–12 percent male performance advantage in most running and swimming events… a 20+ percent male performance advantage in most throwing and jumping events, [and a] male performance advantage [that] can be greater than 100 percent in events that involve explosive power, e.g. in collision, lifting and punching sports.

Unfortunately, this common-sense majority view isn’t the fashionable one—at least not in Canada, where former prime minister Justin Trudeau turned the slogan “trans women are women” into state policy. Even now that Trudeau’s gone, his social-justice postures are still embraced by Canadian activists and academics; many of whom went apoplectic in recent months, following the decision of Alberta’s provincial government to finally step in and protect female sports categories—something Ottawa has refused to do.

Numerous researchers have tried to argue that the male competitive advantage in sports is a “myth.” Egale, a state-funded group mandated to support what Canada now calls “2SLGBTQI people,” suggested that excluding trans-identified men from female sports is really just a “grotesque” (and possibly even prurient) pretext to scrutinise young women’s bodies. Meanwhile, the CBC, Canada’s state-funded national broadcaster, has spent years instructing Canadians that the whole idea of separating humans into male and female categories is fuzzy to begin with—juxtaposing discussion of a “hermaphroditic ginger plant” and “sex-changing clownfish” with social-justice lectures from (human) “trans historians.”

. . .On Facebook, the Secretary of State for Sport went on something of a rant, accusing the IOC’s defenders of succumbing to the “notion that scary drag queens are winning women’s volleyball games”—an idea that he called “a stupid conservative pseudo fantasy.”

Van Koeverden also claimed that efforts to protect female sports categories are actually misogynistic, because they are about “policing women’s bodies.” And lest readers accuse him of mansplaining this whole issue, he said that he constantly meets female athletes who say they agree with him.

To quote the national anthem, O Canada!

*NASA has a gallery of images and videeos from Artemis 2. Here are a couple of shots (there’s also a flyby gallery).

Crescent Earth (April 3, 2026) – A sliver of Earth is illuminated against the blackness of space in this photo taken by an Artemis II crew member through an Orion spacecraft window on the third day of the mission.  Image Credit: NASA

Orientale on display (April 6, 2026) In this fully illuminated view of the Moon, the near side (the hemisphere we see from Earth), is visible on the right. It is identifiable by the dark splotches that cover its surface. These are ancient lava flows from a time early in the Moon’s history when it was volcanically active. The large crater west of the lava flows is Orientale basin, a nearly 600-mile-wide crater that straddles the Moon’s near and far sides. Orientale’s left half is not visible from Earth, but in this image we have a full view of the crater. Everything to the left of the crater is the far side, the hemisphere we don’t get to see from Earth because the Moon rotates on its axis at the same rate that it orbits round us.  Image Credit: NASA

Artemis 2 in eclipse. Captured by the Artemis II crew during their lunar flyby on April 6, 2026, this image shows the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun. From the crew’s perspective, the Moon appears large enough to completely block the Sun, creating nearly 54 minutes of totality and extending the view far beyond what is possible from Earth. The corona forms a glowing halo around the dark lunar disk, revealing details of the Sun’s outer atmosphere typically hidden by its brightness. Also visible are stars, typically too faint to see when imaging the Moon, but with the Moon in darkness stars are readily imaged. This unique vantage point provides both a striking visual and a valuable opportunity for astronauts to document and describe the corona during humanity’s return to deep space. The faint glow of the nearside of the Moon is visible in this image, having been illuminated by light reflected off the Earth. Image Credit: NASA

A setting Earth.

(April 6, 2026) – The lunar surface fills the frame in sharp detail, as seen during the Artemis II lunar flyby, while a distant Earth sets in the background. This image was captured at 6:41 p.m. EDT, on April 6, 2026, just three minutes before the Orion spacecraft and its crew went behind the Moon and lost contact with Earth for 40 minutes before emerging on the other side. In this image, the dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime, while on its day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater shows terraced edges and a relatively flat floor marked by central peaks — formed when the surface rebounded upward during the impact that created the crater. Image Credit: NASA

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili takes Andrzej’s words to heart:

Hili: What does life teach us?
Andrzej: That nothing is ever certain.
Hili: I’m not sure about that.

In Polish:

Hili: Czego uczy nas życie?
Ja: Że nic nie jest pewne.
Hili: Nie jestem tego pewna.

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

From Give Me a Sign:

From: Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Things With Faces, a most excellent catch:

Masih tells Trump not to destroy the civilization of Iran, which he threatened to do.

To President @realDonaldTrump,

Don’t do their job for them in one night. For 47 years, the Islamic Republic has tried, and failed, to destroy Iran’s civilization.

Tonight, millions are living in #DigitalBlackoutInIran, cut off from the world, not even knowing if our families… pic.twitter.com/3GbdhXxpil

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 7, 2026

A post from Maarten Boudry about a Jewish professor at Antwerp who is quitting because of antisemitism in her university. Read the whole thing:

I received this heartbreaking message from a Jewish professor at @UAntwerpen, who is leaving both the city and the university after four decades. I can hardly express how deeply this saddens and enrages me—especially in light of last week’s craven and disgraceful charade…

— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) April 7, 2026

From Colin Wright, a new paper showing that you should teach biology, even if it’s misguided, so long as it makes the students happy (you can find the original BioScience paper, which exemplifies the meaning of “tendentious,” here).

🚨NEW: A recent paper claims that an “accurate approach to teaching about the diversity of biological sex” makes “LGBTQIA+” students feel more included and enjoy their course more.

The only problem is that their supposedly “accurate approach” is actually sex pseudoscience.

The… pic.twitter.com/6l6XAgN6PH

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) April 7, 2026

From Luana, a result that will rile up progressives:

Biggest medical scandal of the 21st century – and Australia is still participating in it https://t.co/wU52PUljnV

— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) April 6, 2026

One from my feed; Science girl asks the inevitable question:

Just how does this species survive in the wild😜 pic.twitter.com/ZHU7Bm6Ejx

— Science girl (@sciencegirl) April 6, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Belgian Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he got to Auschwitz. He was nine years old. https://t.co/14aRepVkj2

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 8, 2026

Two from Matthew, both involving “Astro Christina”, Christina Koch, who’s still in space aboard Artemis 1. She’s a Wikipedia editor and corrected her own article!

this wikipedia editor is orbiting the moon right now!

— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2026-04-07T16:37:49.411Z

a few years ago she corrected a few details about her own spacewalk! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:As…

— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2026-04-07T16:37:49.412Z

Welcome to Monday, April 6, 2026 and National Carbonara Day, celebrating my favorite pasta aside from Fettuccine Alfredo. As Wikipedia notes,

Carbonara (Italian: [karboˈnaːra]) is a pasta dish made with fatty cured pork, hard cheese, eggs, salt, and black pepper. It is typical of the Lazio region of Italy. The dish took its modern form and name in the middle of the 20th century.

A photo of spaghetti carbonara:

It’s also Fresh Tomato Day, International Asexuality Day, National Açaí Bowl Day, National Caramel Popcorn Day (the best in America is Garrett’s right here in Chicago), National Egg Salad Sandwich Day (underrated, one of my favorites, and at its best in Japan), National Twinkie Day, Sweet Potato Day, New Beer’s Eve (celebrating the evening before the end of Prohibition in 1933), World Table Tennis Day (freatured in the new movie “Marty Supreme,” which was good but not great, and, finally, National Siamese Cat Day.

Siamese cats are LOUD. For example, listen to the racket this pair makes when their staff is taking a shower (turn sound up and watch your own cats go nuts—report their reaction in the comments):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 6 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Yesterday’s war news from It’s Noon in Israel. (Bolding is theirs.)

It’s Sunday, April 5, and the thirty-seventh day of Operation Roaring Lion. The global price of oil has reached $109, up seven percent since Friday. Here are the latest developments while you were asleep:

• Both crew members of the F-15 shot down over Iran on Friday have been rescued. President Donald Trump called the rescue of the second airman on Saturday night one of the “most daring” operations in U.S. military history, involving dozens of aircraft and hundreds of special forces troops. U.S. forces also destroyed at least one transport aircraft on the ground to prevent it from falling into Iranian hands after it became stranded at a remote site during the mission. They struck Iranian convoys heading toward the search area, and a firefight broke out between U.S. rescuers and Iranian search parties.
• The Telegraph reports that five Chinese shipments of sodium perchlorate—a key ingredient in solid missile fuel—have arrived in Iran. China has previously supplied the same chemical to support Iran’s ballistic missile program. The deliveries come even as U.S.-Israeli strikes have specifically targeted Iran’s missile production infrastructure, including fuel and propellant facilities.
• U.S.-Israeli forces struck the border crossing between Iran and Iraq for at least the second time since the war began, prompting Iraq to close the crossing. The crossing served as a transit point for at least 1,000 Iraqi proxy fighters now deployed to Basij bases inside Iran—a mobilization analysts believe is partly aimed at suppressing potential domestic unrest.

From the WSJ on the rescue:

. . . the president also shared new details about the dramatic rescue of two U.S. airmen whose F-15E was shot down over Iran. Trump said the Friday rescue of the first airman was kept quiet so a search could continue for the second pilot, who was wounded but climbed up to a mountain crevice where he was rescued.

“We didn’t play up the first one, because then they would have found out about the second one,” Trump said. “You know, normally this is not done. When airmen go down, you can’t get them in very tough countries.”

The two pilots were in the same plane but landed a long distance apart because of the speed at which the jet was flying when the airmen evacuated, Trump said.

“Even though they’re only separated by five or six seconds, five or six seconds when you’re going 1000 miles an hour, so that’s many miles, right?” he said.

And there are more details in the NYT article on the rescue (archived).

Here’s the device used by the airman to give US forces his location. (Click on screenshot or here to read more.)

Now, on to the details from INiI:.

Tomorrow, Iran’s extension on Donald Trump’s ultimatum will expire. Last night, Trump reiterated his threat initially made in March: within the next 48 hours, make a deal, open the Strait of Hormuz—or “all hell will rain down” on Iran. Trump’s version of hell, in this case, would look a lot like the real thing: flammable, as Iran’s energy infrastructure is likely in his crosshairs.

In Israel, the assessment is that the regime will allow the ultimatum to expire. So far, few positive signals have come out of Islamabad, where negotiations are supposed to take place. None have even reached the level of vague optimism of “good progress” that came out of the Geneva talks preceding the war. A senior official told Pakistan’s Dawn on Friday that “Tehran has so far not conveyed its readiness to take part in the dialogue.” Reports from The Wall Street Journal tell a similar story: Iran is “unwilling to meet U.S. officials in Islamabad in the coming days and considers U.S. demands unacceptable.”

On March 26, Trump extended Iran’s nuclear negotiation deadline to 10 days, partly because Tehran sent 10 Pakistani-flagged oil tankers as a goodwill gesture. Another delaying gesture is possible—but unlikely. . . .

*Trump has threatened to destroy every power plant in Iran if they don’t open the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday.

President Trump threatened to destroy all of Iran’s power plants if the country’s leaders don’t agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday evening, ratcheting up pressure on Tehran.

“If they don’t come through, if they want to keep it closed, they’re going to lose every power plant and every other plant they have in the whole country,” Trump said in an eight-minute interview with The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.

Pressed on when he thinks the war will end, Trump said, “I will let you know pretty soon.”

“But we are in a position that’s very strong, and that country will take 20 years to rebuild, if they’re lucky, if they have a country,” he said. “And if they don’t do something by Tuesday evening, they won’t have any power plants and they won’t have any bridges standing.”

. . . Asked if he is concerned the people of Iran, a country of 93 million people, could suffer if civilian infrastructure is hit, Trump said, “No, they want us to do it,” arguing that Iranian people are “living in hell.”

In a social-media post on Sunday morning, Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s power plants and bridges on Tuesday if the Strait of Hormuz isn’t reopened. But the post offered few details about how expansive the attacks might be.

Under international law, the military is allowed to strike civilian power plants and other key infrastructure only if it contributes to a military operation and civilian harm is minimized.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported that aides to Trump have said these types of narrowly focused strikes are allowable because they are meant to hamper Tehran’s ability to build missiles, drones and nuclear weapons. Widespread strikes on power plants and bridges, regardless of military value, raise legal and humanitarian questions.

Here’s his threat, with the gravitas and dignity we’re accustomed to from our leader:

Iran is not Gaza, not a country in which the military is deeply embedded in civilian structure, nor one in which the people support the theocracy. If we want regime change, we can’t simply take out all the civilian infrastructure for nothing more than revenge. And that is a war crime.

*In an article on his Substack site, “Washington is drowning the Iran war in noise“, Andrew Fox lays out the four viable options for Trump in the war (h/t Orli).

We cannot soft-soap the damage to the global economy. From that perspective, this war is a catastrophe. It is far more serious than simply an oil shock. Hormuz handled about one-fifth of the global LNG trade in 2025, with no alternative route for most Qatari and Emirati volumes. Conflict-related damage has reduced Qatar’s LNG capacity by 17% for up to five years. Qatar also produces nearly one-third of the world’s helium, and supply disruptions have already begun to impact semiconductor supply chains and significantly increase helium prices. Hormuz transports about 30% of globally traded fertilisers. Fertiliser prices are rising rapidly; FAO’s food price index increased by 2.4% in March, and the IMF warns that poorer countries could face higher food insecurity if the shock continues. J.P. Morgan suggests oil could reach $120 to $130 in the short term, and exceed $150 if disruptions persist into mid-May.

That leaves four plausible options for Trump moving forward (and, of course, Israel—but let us not forget who the junior partner is in this Coalition. Strategy for Israel here is easy: keep bombing things until told by Washington to stop.)

Option one: stop now and declare victory

Financially, this is the most affordable direct US option. It halts the expenditure on sorties, tankers, carriers, munitions, and reduces escalation risk. Politically, it is always accessible because the White House has already set the rhetorical groundwork, with official claims of “clear and unchanging objectives” and a televised assertion that the campaign is on track to conclude “very shortly.” Strategically, however, it leaves the core issue unresolved. The regime would still be in control in Tehran, and Hormuz would remain a point that Tehran can block, ration, or permit. The cost-benefit only makes sense if Washington decides that the domestic value of ending the war now outweighs the strategic humiliation of striking Iran hard without actually re-establishing free navigation.

Option two: keep the air war going at roughly the current level

This is the current situation. US forces have already targeted over 10,000 locations and, according to CENTCOM, destroyed 92% of Iran’s largest naval vessels while significantly reducing missile and drone launch rates. Since then, the pattern has not shifted towards de-escalation but towards coercive punishment. Trump has threatened bridges, power plants, and other infrastructure (even threatening desalination plants—essentially a threat to impose drought on 90 million people heading into a Middle East summer). A major bridge near Tehran-Karaj was hit this week. Financially, this involves ongoing direct military expenses, as well as continued macroeconomic damage from oil, insurance, and freight costs. Strategically, it can further weaken Iran and increase bargaining leverage. However, the benefits are diminishing. Bombing can punish and wear down, but it cannot, on its own, ensure a lasting reopening of Hormuz while Iran retains the capacity to control access and keep markets unsettled.

Option three: escalate with ground troops

This is the most expensive and riskiest option by far. It is the only route that might plausibly try to force Hormuz open, seize islands, or control key maritime points. It also has the highest risk of casualties, political backlash, and prolonged escalation. Current signals strongly oppose it. Rubio stated on 27^th March that US aims could be achieved without ground troops and that recent deployments were contingency measures, not plans for invasion. Reuters/Ipsos polling published on Friday shows that over three-quarters of Americans oppose sending American ground troops to Iran. At the UN, even a revised Bahrain-backed resolution on protecting commercial shipping faces Chinese opposition to authorising the use of force, with Russia and France also objecting. Regarding cost and benefits, a ground intervention offers the greatest strategic potential, but the cost would be extraordinary with no guarantee of success.

Option four: strike a deal with the regime

On paper, this represents the most advantageous economic deal. If a settlement genuinely restores shipping, stabilises energy flows, and imposes real limits on missiles or the nuclear programme, it would reduce macroeconomic costs more quickly than any military option. Washington has already submitted a 15-point proposal through intermediaries, and Iran has been reviewing it even as it publicly dismisses direct negotiations. Since then, selective ship passages and Iran’s discussions with Oman about a future Hormuz protocol demonstrate that negotiations over access are ongoing, even if formal talks remain stalled. Strategically, the cost is evident: Trump would need to engage with the very regime he continues to describe as defeated or nearly finished. The benefit is equally clear: a deal is the only feasible way to reopen the Strait without a much larger conflict.

And his assessment of the likelihood:

My analysis, based on the currently available signals, is this: the least likely option is a major ground escalation; the most probable immediate action is continued air strikes and infrastructure coercion; the most likely eventual outcome is a mediated deal that the White House will package as a complete victory. The emergency fallback, if markets and politics worsen more quickly than forecast, is a unilateral ceasefire-and-spin. In brief, the short-term path seems to be option two, with option four as the intended destination.

None of these guarantees, much less makes it likely, that the Iranian people will have a democratic government rather than an oppressive theocracy. And I don’t trust any deal that Iran will abandon its quest for nuclear weapons; it simply cannot be trusted without rigorous and unannounced inspections. This seems unlikely to happen, so yes, option two seems the most likely.

*I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column at the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: The truth of the conspiracy of the conspiracy.”

→ You’re getting drafted: Describing our approach to Iran, Pete Hegseth stood before the press and put his hand on a pretend throttle and said: “We’re keeping our hand on that throttle,” clenching the invisible throttle, “as long and as hard as is necessary.” Standing behind him was Trump, who never misses a penis joke, and who simply raised his eyebrows. Unusual self-control. Restraint. Quite presidential not to make a dick joke there, if you ask me.

Also this week, the Army raised the maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42. That’s right, 42! When the ground war with China begins, there will be a draft of middle-aged millennial men begging their platoon leader for the Wi-Fi password so that they can watch Breaking Bad on their iPads. I see this lasting about two weeks. See, 52-year-old Gen-X men would be better fighters than the millennials.

→ Just for a little taste of the streets: You should probably know what is being said in those fun progressive pro-peace protests happening all over the place. Here’s a great example from a protest in Philadelphia this week. A man stands in front of a boisterous crowd: “Until we have done everything in our power to bring the United States to its knees, let us not lose sight of the enemy!” Okay, me too, peace and love,man. He continues: “For every U.S. soldier who comes back in a casket, we cheer!” The crowd cheers.

He also says: “Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, all of the resistance forces we celebrate. These popular forces on the ground spend every waking moment in direct confrontation with Zionism and they rely on a strong Iranian state to maintain their fighting capacity.”

→ Wrong place, wrong headline: A Venezuelan migrant who was allegedly detained at the border in 2023 but released into the U.S. has been charged with murdering 18-year-old Loyola University Chicago freshman Sheridan Gorman. She was shot in the back along the lakefront. Hmm. That’s a little too perfect for the Republican narrative. Is there any way we can blame the student for being shot? Chicago electeds and local media are trying.

Chicago alderwoman Maria Hadden said it sounded like Gorman was in the “wrong place, wrong time,” and that the victim and her friends “might’ve startled this person,” i.e., the shooter. When I get startled I usually commit first-degree murder too. Wrong place, wrong time. Someone made a lot of mistakes, and it’s Sheridan Gorman, who is dead. No other mistakes here. No one else in the “wrong” anything.

In fact, the only mistake acknowledged was that of Loyola University Chicago’s student newspaper, which apologized for having called the accused killer of freshman Sheridan Gorman an “illegal immigrant” in a subsequently deleted Instagram post. I’m a lefty here, truly. Like, I believe in mass amnesty. But if someone shoots into a crowd and kills a girl, we do not blame the girl simply because she’s the citizen and he’s the immigrant. . .

I was amazed at how the local media tried to blame the victim for her own shooting. And that, of course, is that the alleged killer was an undocumented immigrant, a status considered sacred by progressives.

*And there’s good news today from the UPI’s “Odd News” section:

The San Diego Zoo Safari Park announced its four male cheetah cubs, born in January, now have names: Nyasi, Owadgi, Ohani and Nkala.

First-time mother Kelechi gave birth to the cubs on Jan. 24, becoming the first cheetah to give birth at the zoo since 2020.

Here are the cheetos:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili i referring to the d*g now owned by the upstairs lodgers:

Hili: These steps have lost their entire charm.
Andrzej: Maybe with time they will recover it once more.

In Polish:

Hili: Te schodki straciły cały urok.
Ja: Być może z czasem odzyskają go ponownie.

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

The cover of the University of Chicago magazine shows Botany Pond with ducks in it next to Erman Hall, where students who should be doing science are sitting at their computers. And the ducks are white Pekin ducks, not wild mallards. Well, you can’t have everything.  There’s an article on the renovated pond that mentions the ducks, but leaves out the Duckmeister because Facilities doesn’t like him. Eventually that story will be up here.

From Stacy:

From Now That’s Wild. Don’t butter the moggy!

Masih criticizzes Trump for hurting the people of Iran by threatening to bomb them into the Stone Age and falsely promising help.

We are going to send Iran back to the Stone Age?

President @realDonaldTrump! Stop targeting ordinary Iranians and Iran’s infrastructure, the Islamic regime’s officials you call “less radical leaders” in Iran, the ones you are willing to negotiate with are exactly the ones with a… pic.twitter.com/xVSFwyzhHP

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 4, 2026

From Luana; the article with the data (from Finland) are in the link:

“Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender re-assignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment.”
Ruuska 2026 https://t.co/iJ6gBLwrgA

— James Cantor (@JamesCantorPhD) April 4, 2026

From Brian, a “math clock” (there are others in the thread:

One of the best tests of an AI is the “Clock Test” prompt I developed. Below are results from Grok (left) and from ChatGPT (right). Can your AI do better?

Prompt: “Draw a math clock. It looks like a traditional clock with hands; however, instead of 12 numbers on the clock… pic.twitter.com/IBkLZ8pTsj

— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) April 3, 2026

From Barry, a buff cat:

One from my feed. Larry just turned 19, and he is still spry, having recently caught his first mouse!

Happy 19th birthday Larry the cat at Downing Street!
🎉 pic.twitter.com/te4dZjbx1B

— Sara Mary ⭐❤️ (@saniyafatma1278) April 5, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Yugoslavian Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was three years old, and would be 85 today if he had lived. https://t.co/KJRosA52tT

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 6, 2026

And two from Dr. Cobb: First, more explanation of that famous Earth photo taken by Artemis II:

You'll have seen this – Earth from #Artemis II en-route to the Moon.But look again – it's Earth's *nightside*, lit by the near-full Moon, not the Sun 🌕️The aurorae, airglow, stars, & city lights in Europe, Africa, & the Americas give the game away. Cool.NASA/Reid Wiseman#Space #Photography

— Mark McCaughrean (@markmccaughrean.bsky.social) 2026-04-03T19:13:10.768Z

Who remember’s Bob Paine’s pathbreaking ecology work? I do!  Here’s a short video post:

A nice video about how Bob Paine's work on starfish influenced modern ecology #pisaster youtu.be/rN5KzBVxNl4?…

— Chris Mah (@echinoblog.bsky.social) 2026-04-02T16:09:11.414Z

Welcome to CaturSaturday,  April 4, 2026, Passover (until April 9) and shabbos for Jewish cats.

It’s also Holy Saturday, International Carrot Day, National Cordon Bleu Day, National Vitamin C Day, World Rat Day, and Ramen Noodle Day.

This isn’t really ramen, but it’s close: a bowl of Hong Kong’s famous beef noodle soup that I ate on my first visit there in 2016:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

First, two lovely views of Earth from Artemis II posted by NASA: Surprise: it’s round! And it’s round from all angles, which means it’s not flat. I’m not quite sure what continents we’re looking at. Can you help?

From inside the capsule:

A headline from today’s NYT (click to read):

*Friday’s war summary from It’s Noon in Israel (their bolding):

It’s Friday, April 3, and the thirty-fifth day of Operation Roaring Lion. The global price of oil has reached $111, up eleven percent since yesterday. Here are the latest developments while you were asleep:

• Donald Trump’s primetime address Wednesday night marked no significant shift in the war’s trajectory—as I predicted. The president reiterated four familiar positions: the war is necessary, it has effectively already been won, it must continue, and it will end soon. As of today, the original four-to-five week timeline has elapsed. Based on an IDF statement from March 15 indicating that up to three additional weeks of strikes were under consideration, the current estimate now points to a total campaign lasting seven to eight weeks.
• Yesterday, the U.S. struck Iran’s largest bridge, collapsing the center of a newly built B! suspension bridge—a 136-meter-high, $400 million structure connecting Tehran and Karaj. According to a security source speaking to i24NEWS, the destruction was intended to cut off supply routes that bring drone parts and missiles to Iranian firing units that launch them at U.S. and Israeli forces. Trump shared footage of the strike on Truth Social, declaring, “The biggest bridge in Iran comes tumbling down, never to be used again,” and warning of “much more to follow” if a settlement is not reached.
• Iranian media reported this morning that a second F-35 stealth fighter had been shot down over central Iran—echoing a March 23 claim previously denied by United States Central Command. As with the earlier report, there is no independent verification.

And a bit of analysis:

More than almost any of the generals and military figures, there is one man whose elimination might truly cause the regime to topple. The man could have been a Silicon Valley billionaire; instead, he joined the Revolutionary Guards: Babak Zanjani, the architect of Iran’s crypto-based sanctions-evasion system.

Zanjani’s is a fascinating story: the son of a railway worker with no higher education who became a businessman and built a global empire of dozens of companies across Turkey, the UAE, Malaysia and Tajikistan—designed specifically to bypass sanctions. In 2013, he was arrested for allegedly embezzling $2.7 billion from state oil revenues and sentenced to death—but the sentence was never carried out. It turned out the architect of its shadow economy was more valuable to the regime alive than dead. Before and during his arrest he was a media fascination, and was the most famous prisoner in the history of the Islamic Republic. After his gamble on the explosion of crypto netted major returns for the regime, Zanjani was released under supervision in 2025.

According to Makor Rishon’s Pazit Rabina, Israel has declared the first crypto war, and Zanjani is the enemy. He has been identified as the “beating heart” of Iran’s shadow economy—the man who converted oil revenues and financial assets into digital assets, enabling the Revolutionary Guards to continue funding terror even under the heaviest sanctions.

Earlier this week, Defense Minister Israel Katz, in cooperation with the U.S. treasure department, signed an administrative order designating Zanjani’s crypto wallets and oil tankers as terror assets. The order grants Israel and the U.S. legal authority to freeze and seize billions of dollars across global trading arenas. Yet well-informed sources warned that the effort is “too little, too late.”

*Definite clickbait from the WSJ: “Iran beefs up defenses, recruits children as it prepares for ground war.”

Iran is responding to the threat of a ground operation on its soil by stepping up defenses around its biggest oil port, while threatening to attack a wider array of targets around the Gulf and launching a mass recruitment drive reminiscent of its 1980s war with Iraq.

The steps come as President Trump has ordered thousands of Marines and Airborne troops to the Middle East. While the president hasn’t said he plans to put boots on the ground, the deployments would give the U.S. more options for ground assaults or raids, and they have set off preparations and a wave of new threats from Iran.

Analysts and people familiar with Iranian military tactics say the country is gearing up for a fierce fight that could give it the chance to inflict more casualties than it can against the U.S. and Israel’s dominant air forces.

Tehran is also mobilizing its population in ways that seek to harness the spirit of the 1980s war with Iraq. They include drives to recruit millions of Iranians, including children—a fixture of the tributes to martyrs via street signs and posters that are still a part of Iran’s daily life.

Iran is hardening defenses on Kharg Island, Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the parliament’s National Security Commission, told the legislature’s news agency this week following a visit to the oil export hub and possible focus of any ground operation. Steps include boosting guided-missile systems, laying mines along the coastline and booby-trapping facilities, an Iranian official said.

Military analysts say tunnels have likely been carved into many of the islands, which Iran is preparing to defend with missiles and other munitions. Iranian-backed militias in Iraq have demonstrated the use of wire-guided first-person-view drones, which are possessed in greater numbers by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, posing a potent threat to any U.S. troops.

The Times of Israel reports that Amnesty International has condemned Iran’s use of child soldiers as a war crime:

Amnesty International on Thursday issued a statement warning that Iran’s recruitment of children as young as 12 for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ all-volunteer Basij force amounts to a war crime.

According to Amnesty, the IRGC put out a recruitment call on March 26, dubbed the “Homeland-Defending Combatants for Iran,” which it said was “open to volunteers” aged 12 and up. The call came as the Basij found its checkpoints under attack during the war with the United States and Israel.

Citing eyewitness accounts and its own analysis of video footage, Amnesty said that evidence shows “child soldiers having been deployed” to checkpoints and patrols, some armed with weapons including AK47-style assault rifles.

Iran is not dumb: they know that even a small number of American casualties on the ground will turn America against the war far more than any rise in the price of oil. Iran is surely willing to sacrifice any number of “martyrs” to stop the war.

*Despite Trump’s claim that there is “regime change” in Iran since there’s a new leadership, these new leaders are still hard-liners, and are, according to the WaPo, are pushing a hard bargain on Trump.

The assassinations of Iran’s senior leaders by Israel and the United States have triggered unprecedented churn within Tehran’s political and military establishment, eliminating the supreme leader and some of the most powerful men in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but have left in place a hard-line government and little hope of a diplomatic breakthrough, according to regional and Western officials.

Rather than usher in what President Donald Trump has called “more reasonable” leadership, the surviving Iranian regime is newly emboldened to inflict economic pain, pushing Tehran and Washington further apart in negotiations, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details.

 . . . officials in the region say they see little hope of a negotiated breakthrough in the next few weeks, even as Israel continues to pursue its assassination campaign against senior Iranian leadership. In public comments, Iran’s leaders have played down talks with the United States and laid out steep demands to end the war, including reparations and formalized control over the Strait of Hormuz, with a right to collect tolls.

. . . The regime has signaled its defense will also involve spreading more pain around the region to substantially raise the price of any attack. Tehran, which has successfully shut off most Gulf oil exports and hit facilities and airports, has told its neighbors it would expand its targets to offshore oil platforms if its islands are invaded, Iranian and Arab officials said. It has also threatened to hit vital infrastructure like power plants and desalination facilities.

“Iran intends to make any U.S. landing as costly and politically unsustainable as possible,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a London-based think tank. “I expect Iran will try to swarm and inflict pain through drones first and then widening its retaliation to its neighbors.”

Does that make you nervous? Yes, me too.

*In January an unidentified astronaut took ill aboard the International Space Station, forcing a medical evacuation of the ailing one and two companions back to Earth. Now the astronaut has been identified as Mike Fincke, and his condition described, though he seems to be okay now and doctors still don’t know what happened.

The astronaut who prompted NASA’s first medical evacuation earlier this year said Friday that doctors still don’t know why he suddenly fell sick at the International Space Station.

Four-time space flier Mike Fincke said he was eating dinner on Jan. 7 after prepping for a spacewalk the next day when it happened. He couldn’t talk and remembers no pain, but his anxious crewmates jumped into action after seeing him in distress and requested help from flight surgeons on the ground.

“It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press from Houston’s Johnson Space Center.

Fincke, 59, a retired Air Force colonel, said the episode lasted roughly 20 minutes and he felt fine afterward. He said he still does. He never experienced anything like that before or since.

Doctors have ruled out a heart attack and Fincke said he wasn’t choking, but everything else is still on the table and could be related to his 549 days of weightlessness. He was 5 ½ months into his latest space station stay when the problem struck like “a very, very fast lightning bolt.”

. . . Fincke said he can’t provide any more details about his medical episode. The space agency wants to make sure that other astronauts do not feel that their medical privacy will be compromised if something happens to them, he said.

One wonders why he was brought back home if the episode lasted only 20 minutes. But doctors couldn’t be sure that something serious didn’t happen (even a mild heart attack), and it was the right thing to do to bring him back to Earth to have him checked out. Remember, the safety of astronauts takes priority over the goals of a mission.

*Yup, the Free Press is still touting religion, and never touting the advantages of nonbelief. Here’s there new article, whose title speaks for itself, “Guys, try church“, by FP senior editor Will Rahn, He first dispels the idea of going to church to embrace “hypermasculine” Christianity, which I didn’t know was a thing. It’s the crazy idea that Christianity goes along with getting fit and buff. Instead, Rahn says that we males should go to church for the right reasons. Curiously, that means making Pascal’s wager!

I’m not saying men should stay away from faith generally. In fact, I’m writing this to encourage you to go to church—not necessarily because it will get you fit, or be fun. Pretending to be a crusader is probably more exciting than just sitting in a pew. But going to church will probably make you a bit happier, and perhaps a slightly better human. Normie Catholicism is, to my mind, a lot more attractive than the “Deus Vult” version.

Don’t get me wrong—as a kid I found it all exceptionally dull. Sit, stand, kneel, stand. The organ music. The well-coiffed priest in his robes going on about who knows what. It all struck me as a silly waste of time that would be better spent watching cartoons.

. . .I’m not making the case that you should adopt my strain of mainstream Catholicism, or even Catholicism at all. I’m not even here to sell you on Christianity. If you’re looking for that, check out C.S. Lewis or Søren Kierkegaard or Thomas Aquinas. A lot of that stuff, particularly Kierkegaard, has a way of sailing right over my skull. But I will say that the most practical argument for fostering a faith in the deity comes from the 17th-century French polymath Blaise Pascal.

In vulgar terms, it’s essentially a risk-reward hypothesis: You lose very little by deciding to live a faithful life, and if all that dogma is essentially correct, you might get to spend eternity in paradise. If there is no God, you just die like everyone else, having lived at least a little more lovingly, peacefully, and forgivingly than you might have otherwise.

The only people with something to lose here are those who stick with atheism: The hard bet that there is no God has atheists dying like everyone else at best, and at worst costs them never-ending joy. Life, in my humble opinion, is a hard enough slog without the weight of atheistic certainty.

. . . Pascal’s wager has been decried as cynical, but it worked for him. He talked himself into sincere religious faith. Go through the motions, act as if it’s true, and you might just wind up a true believer. What’s funny about the wager is that believing in God, in the promise of heaven, is really its own reward. Bet on a God who loves you, and you’ll find there are rewards for you in this world regardless of what’s next.

And another reason men should go to church: to find women!

I heard recently of a now-married couple who locked eyes for the first time at the moment in Mass when everyone wishes peace on those around them. And this was not in one of those fancy downtown Manhattan churches for hot Zoomers on the make, but rather in the sleepy, family-oriented Upper East Side neighborhood of Yorkville. Going to church indicates to women that you’re a halfway functional human being.

This is absolutely insane; I was stunned to see such stupidity. What kind of God wouldn’t know whether you were believing solely to get to heaven—or faking your belief.  Maybe Pascal talked himself into sincere belief, but how many of us unbelievers could do the same thing?  And aren’t there good reasons for being a good human being: living a decent life rather than a “faithful” life? Does it matter which “faith” you live? Finally, “atheistic certainty” is an oxymoron.  Most atheists simply see no reason to believe in God, and are not certain about Gods. No atheist I know feels that their atheism is any kind of “weight”. Atheism is no more a “weight” than is disbelieve in leprechauns, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy.

I have to say that this is the dumbest article I’ve seen lately touting religion, which seems to be a goal of the Free Press. It’s incoherent, misguided, and out of place on a serious news website.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej compares people unfavorably to cats:

Hili: People like to talk behind each other’s backs.
Andrzej: Yes, cats are better—they kill, but they don’t hold grudges.

In Polish:

Hili: Ludzie lubią się wzajemnie obmawiać.
Ja: Tak, koty są lepsze, zagryzają, ale nie żywią urazy.

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

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From somewhere on Facebook (I forgot); the caption is “This is how we’ll get to Mars.”

From My Cat is an Asshole:

Masih reposted this video of an Iranian civil-rights activist describing her horrifying interrogation in prison. She must be out of Iran now, but think of all the jailed protestors that don’t have a voice—or never leave prison alive. The Farsi is translated into English subtitles.

BREAKING:
A firsthand witness from Iran’s prisons is speaking out about torture, forced confessions, mock executions, and the crimes committed against prisoners by the IRGC.
Mojgan Keshavarz, a brave civil rights activist who fought for years in Iran, was imprisoned, and endured… pic.twitter.com/rd3dzKbm1o

— United Against Gender Apartheid (@UAGApartheid) April 3, 2026

And I had to add this one I found on my feed:

Mohammadreza Ghorbani, 18, was executed by mullah Basij forces.
His mother clutches his clothes, searching for the scent of her child. @araghchi @drpezeshkian @mb_ghalibaf will face justice. #IranRevolution2026‌
pic.twitter.com/oNJBjCQMLC

— Avi Kaner ابراهيم אבי (@AviKaner) April 3, 2026

From Simon: Cats on a plane!

“Unhand me; I’m the co-pilot!” https://t.co/n4gsGNr3mg

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) April 2, 2026

From Luana:

In equating the colonization of space with the colonization of the New World, the author here seems not to have considered how rocks are not the same as people. https://t.co/F2TIeAku9n

— Leigh Phillips (@Leigh_Phillips) April 2, 2026

From Emma. Read the description of that poor guy’s life by clicking on Sama Hoole’s tweet:

It is definitely better to keep chickens for eggs than it is to eat the chickens. https://t.co/1VGHGps1ck

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) April 3, 2026

Two from my feed:

The Gardiner Brothers and Keeva Corry brought the thunder to Dolly Parton’s Jolene! They’re powerful, precise, and that footwork is INSANE! One of the coolest crossovers I’ve seen. Watch till the end! 😻😅 pic.twitter.com/2YvTxEBN0L

— Catarina Senora Gatita (@WyattCatarina) April 1, 2026

Clever cat!

My cat thought if he just pretended to be asleep, I wouldn’t notice pic.twitter.com/h8xbJ0QmoP

— We don’t deserve cats 😺 (@catsareblessing) April 2, 2026

One I reposted at The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived at Auschwitz. She was four years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-04-04T10:13:08.628Z

Three from Dr. Cobb, whose hols ended yesterday. First, a treehopper disguised as a duck! Not really, but there coiuld be multiple functions for these shapes, including the new one given in the article below the photo.

Inspiration for scifi. #Bugs #Bugsky http://www.science.org/content/arti…

— 🟪 Core Traditions | 1.5°C > Normal?! 🌎 (@porcelainteacup04.bsky.social) 2026-04-03T06:33:22.701Z

A pair of osprey vids. This one was from three days ago:

Resident female Telyn (3J) arrived at Dyfi today (30th) at 14:19. Just need resident male Idris to arrive(c)DOP#UKOspreys

— Welsh_Nature_Lady 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@welshnaturelady.bsky.social) 2026-03-30T14:04:51.551Z

And this one was yesterday:

Dyfi Ospreys resident male Idris returns at 18:23 2nd April, great to see him back with Telyn (3J)#UKOspreys(c)DOP (c)MWT

— Welsh_Nature_Lady 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@welshnaturelady.bsky.social) 2026-04-02T19:23:01.006Z